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Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetic treatment of the Civil War and its legacies explores heroism, patriotism, citizenship, death, mourning, and trauma. In reflecting on the war, considered a worthy and elevated national theme, the author found an acceptable yet powerful way to set black suffering alongside white, to testify to African American contributions and sacrifices, to figure a form of haunting bound up with the sin of racial slavery, and to pass comment on the disappointments and abuses of the post-Reconstruction era. Through readings of the poems, "When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers," "The Colored Soldiers," "The Unsung Heroes," "Robert Gould Shaw," and "The Haunted Oak," with particular attention to gender construction and imagery of violence, this analysis will demonstrate how Dunbar gives extraordinary voice to African American experiences, positions, and protests.1
The preoccupation of the Civil War may seem a strange one for an African American poet writing in the North in the 1890s and early 1900s. Yet, this topic enables Dunbar to enter into dialogue with prior literary representations and, with varying degrees of success, to form a critique of contemporary racial injustices. Composed against a backdrop of rising anti-black violence and the widespread collapse and reversal of political and legal gains made by African Americans during the post-war period, Dunbar's poetry might be considered alongside the turn of the century prose interventions of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois.2 In different ways, these works address questions of black identity, uplift, and self-determination in light of the legacies of slavery and the Civil War. Yet in his revisitation of the national conflict, Dunbar, too, looks to earlier European American poetic engagements with war to shape his own voicing.3 Whether in dialect or standard English, the verse under consideration here works to reaffirm the Civil War as inextricably tied up with racial oppression, thus distancing itself from nostalgic reflections on the Lost Cause of the South, and to build a case for the equal claim of African Americans to belonging and liberty in the here and now.
The subjects of slavery and the Civil War are treated explicitly in the dialect poem "When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers" (Dunbar, Collected 182-84). Here Dunbar creates the powerful first-person voice of an enslaved...