JANUARY 1, 1865:
Wartime pulp fiction was
a relatively late development of the Civil War.
Authors, both Northern and Southern, churned
out penny novels that ran the gamut from swashbuckling retellings of the (fictional,
quasi-fictional, and non-fictional) adventures of (fictional, quasi-fictional
and non-fictional) war heroes, to romance novels, to pornographic stories that
were either titillating or merely crass (cheap photobooks of nude and semi-nude
women were also available, often through sutlers in the army camps). Most of the pulp fiction available on the home
front, however, was directed toward women (there was also a thriving children’s
literature about heroic youngsters defending their respective causes). Due to their
very cheap production values, few of these publications have survived the years.
Southern Field and
Fireside,
a monthly Georgia publication, specialized in serialized romantic tales about
damsels in distress of being ravished by leering Yankees. Rescued at the last
moment by noble, handsome Southern men who defended their honor, the women were
inevitably taken away on horseback to a better life, and just as inevitably, irresistibly
seduced under a full moon at the end of the story. They lived happily ever
after, and very few women made it into combat in Confederate pulp fiction.
Not
so their Federal sisters. Unionist women were portrayed as more assertive and
proactive by far. Northern authors presented their readership with tales of
cross-dressing women who undertook men’s tasks always with greater success than
their male counterparts (in fact, some 400 women served both sides of the Civil
War in drag, unrecognized by their fellow male compatriots). Charles Wesley
Alexander (writing as Wesley Bradshaw), the dean of the wartime pulp novelists,
wrote stories such as Pauline of The
Potomac: Or, General McClellan’s Spy, loosely (very loosely) based on the
reported adventures of the real Major Pauline Cushman. Another Bradshaw novel, Maud of The Mississippi: General Grant’s
Daring Spy, was about a Unionist woman living among the enemy while
supporting the North’s cause at grave danger to herself. General Sherman’s Indian Scout was a similar tale of feminine elan
and derring-do.
Bradshaw
also wrote The Picket Slayer about a “demonic”
Englishwoman (described from the outset as “a child of sin”) who told Jefferson
Davis, “My mission hither, President Davis, is to render your cause assistance,
not because it is holy, as you hypocritically say, but because it is the most
diabolical that could be conceived.”
The
women in Bradshaw’s and other writers’ stories were frequently possessed of
magical powers or were of foreign, exotic birth or mixed race. The
Picket Slayer, who could become invisible and pass through walls to kill
men, may have influenced Sheridan
LeFanu’s female vampire story, Carmilla (1871),
which in turn influenced Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula.
