| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Book History 1.1 (1998) 107-139 In December 1864 the popular historian John S. C. Abbott, hard at work on the second volume of his History of the Civil War in America, defended writing a history of the war even as it was still being fought. As he explained to his editor and publisher, Ledyard Bill, "It is frequently supposed that a really reliable history of this war can not be written now. I think, on the contrary, that now is the very best time to write it." For instance, the causes of the war are more closely discussed now than they will be when all the present living actors have passed away. The time will never come in future years when one can write of the capture of New Orleans, of the campaign of the Chickahominy, of the battle of Gettysburg, better than now. In making this argument for wartime history on the grounds of immediacy, Abbott offered a striking contrast to writers who thought histories of the war should at least wait until the end of the conflict. In early 1862, for instance, John Lothrop Motley, one of the preeminent historians of antebellum America, turned down an invitation from Philadelphia publisher George W. Childs to write a history of the war. Motley was "much inclined to doubt whether the time to write such a history" would "soon arrive," he said in his letter of refusal. It was "impossible -- while no man is yet wise enough to know when, how & where this momentous episode in our national history is to end -- for any man to describe it thoroughly." While Abbott certainly disagreed with this assessment -- indeed he hoped that his own history would be "so full and reliable that no one shall hereafter be able to write a better"--he was not therefore immune to a host of practical, even absurd problems that arose out of trying to write the history of a war still in progress. When he started work on his manuscript in 1862, for instance, a major concern was that the war might end so quickly as to disrupt his publishing plans: "Present appearances do not indicate a sudden closing of the war," he wrote to his publisher with a measure of relief in May of that year. "We shall have time enough to read carefully our proof sheets." By 1864, however, Abbott was worried about the opposite possibility -- that the continuation of the war might pose a serious publishing problem: "I still hope," he wrote in December, "that the war will close so that we can get the whole History in two volumes." Far from being merely a frivolous concern, the question of whether to publish in two or three volumes went to the heart of mid-nineteenth-century publishing convention, involving a critical calculation of what the market would bear. It is precisely this connection between the war and the perceived demands of the literary marketplace that makes Abbott, one of a group of popular war historians who published histories during the war, so important to analyze for an understanding of how meanings of the war were shaped in wartime for a broad Northern reading public. Popular war histories were a vital part of an outpouring of popular war literature that made the conflict, quite literally, legible for Northern readers. During the war, publishers not only issued war histories but also war novels, war memoirs, war romances, war humor, children's war novels, war poetry, and sensational and sentimental war stories -- all of which helped to shape a cultural politics of the war. Such popular war literature standardized the representation of battles; it gendered the war for men and women as well as for boys and girls; it conventionalized Northern attitudes toward slavery; and it articulated and renegotiated the relationship between the individual and the nation. Explicitly concerned with constructing a lasting print memory of the war, war histories occupied a special place within the literary marketplace of war. Although their authors often drew directly from the columns of newspapers for their content, popular histories were situated quite differently from newspapers within wartime print culture: while newspapers were presented as immediate, urgent, and...
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