Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

At the height of the holiday shopping season of 1860, a bookseller in Richmond, Va., placed a telling advertisement in The Daily Dispatch promoting a selection of “Elegant Books for Christmas and New Year’s Presents.” Notably, the list of two dozen “choice books, suitable for Holiday Gifts” included five works by the late Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott in “various beautiful bindings.”

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Sir Walter Scott not only dominated gift book lists on the eve of the Civil War but also dominated Southern literary taste throughout the conflict. His highly idealized depiction of the age of chivalry allowed Southern readers and writers to find positive meaning in war’s horrors, hardships and innumerable deaths. And his works inspired countless wartime imitators, who drew upon his romantic conception of combat.

In 1814 Scott had begun his ascension to the heights of literary stardom with the publication of the historical romance “Waverley,” which was soon followed by other novels in the so-called Waverley series. The works were an immediate and immense success in Great Britain and America. Over the course of many volumes, Scott glamorized the Middle Ages, at once shaping and popularizing what we now consider the classic tale of chivalry. As one enamored 19th-century reader explained, each of Scott’s romances focused upon the “manners and habits of the most interesting and chivalrous periods of Scottish [and] British history.”

Among Scott’s most famous works was “Ivanhoe,” published in 1820. The romance, set in the 12th century, presents a tale of intrigue, love and valor. The plot traces the fortunes of young Wilfred of Ivanhoe as he strives, despite his father’s opposition, to gain the hand of the beautiful Lady Rowena. In the course of Ivanhoe’s adventures, Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood appear, and Ivanhoe performs many a remarkable feat. He travels to Palestine, gains fame in the Crusades, returns home in disguise, bravely distinguishes himself in a two-day jousting tournament, and last but surely not least, single-handedly rescues a raven-haired Jewess named Rebecca, who has been abducted and is in grave peril.

In the first half of the 19th century, America caught a highly infectious case of what Mark Twain would later diagnose as “the Sir Walter disease.” Northerners and Southerners alike were smitten. The more far-fetched the plot and remote the setting of Scott’s works, the more pleased his American readers seemed to be. In less than a decade, from 1814-1823, more than half a million volumes of Scott’s novels and poems were sold in the United States, and even after Scott’s death in 1832, his books remained extremely popular.

Henry Adams, the great-grandson of President John Adams and grandson of President John Quincy Adams, would recall that the “happiest hours” of his boyhood in the late 1840s and early 1850s “were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents” in his grandfather’s farmhouse reading “Ivanhoe” and other of Scott’s historical romances. John Hay, who served as President Lincoln’s assistant secretary during the Civil War, would explain decades later, “The books a boy reads are those most ardently admired and longest remembered. . . . Through all [the] important formative days of the Republic, Scott was the favourite author of Americans. . . . [The influence of his books] was enormous upon the taste and sentiments of a people peculiarly sensitive to such influences.”

If anything, Scott’s romances were even more popular on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line. Some southern families even went so far as to name their estates and children after places and characters in Scott’s stories. As Mark Twain would later write, “Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.”

In 1850, a year commonly recalled for the fierce sectional debate that culminated in the Compromise of 1850 (which included the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act), one admirer of Scott’s works wrote in The Southern Literary Messenger, “Scott’s purpose was not to give an analytic account of man in general, but to present a bold and glowing picture of the men of a particular age, and the age selected by him was that when knighthood was the profession of every gentleman, and war the principal occupation of almost every monarch.”

Even the outbreak of fighting — and the nation’s rude initiation into the pain and suffering of an extended fratricidal war — did not diminish the popularity of Scott’s works. As one soldier wrote home from his military camp, “I have read all of Sir Walter Scott’s novels within the last month.” Indeed, Scott provided both readers and writers with the very tools that allowed them to overlook the hardships and brutality of the ongoing war.

The lofty language, lofty sentiments and lofty deeds popularized by Scott imbued nearly all Southern wartime poetry with the fragrant smell of romanticism. And poetry enjoyed a degree of near-universal popularity during the Civil War years that is hard for modern readers to imagine. Newspapers and magazines throughout the Confederacy published an abundance of war poems written by both amateur and accomplished poets. Indeed, Southerners bombarded newspapers with such a quantity of unsolicited poetry on war-related topics that one publication apparently threatened to charge aspiring poets the same rate to print their verses as it charged to print obituaries.

Even as writers experienced the raw reality of the Civil War, the days and ways of chivalry held imaginative sway in the verses they drafted. “The Virginians of the Valley” is a fine example. The work was written in late 1861 by Francis Orray Ticknor, a physician who would later run the war hospitals in the area of Columbus, Ga.

However, it was not the weaponry or the wreckage of the unfolding war that Ticknor chose for poetic material. Instead, Ticknor celebrated the men and women of his wife’s home state, Virginia. He begins his poem by describing Virginians as:

The knightliest of the knightly race,

Who, since the days of old,

Have kept the lamp of chivalry

Alight in hearts of gold …

After recounting the great accomplishments of Virginians of the past, Ticknor pays tribute to the sons of Virginia of the present. These “Golden Horse-shoe knights” do not slumber as danger looms. Instead, they band together and prove themselves worthy of their “noble sires.”

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A poem titled “Ashby” by the popular Southern poet John Reuben Thompson offers another example of Scott’s powerful influence on wartime writers. General Turner Ashby, a Virginia gentleman and Confederate cavalry officer, was killed while fighting a rear-guard action under General Stonewall Jackson’s command in early June 1862.

Thompson, who served as editor of The Southern Literary Messenger from 1847 to 1860 and of The Richmond Record and The Southern Illustrated News during the war, was one of many Southern writers who memorialized the man who had been called the “Knight of the Confederacy.”

His poem begins:

To the brave all homage render,

Weep, ye skies of June!

With a radiance pure and tender,

Shine, oh saddened moon!

“Dead upon the field of glory,”

Hero fit for song and story,

Lies our bold dragoon.

General Ashby was shot in the chest in a skirmish that took place more than a year into an unremitting, full-scale war in a still rustic America. But Thompson’s poem, full of romantic flourish, all but omits these fundamental facts.

Instead, Thompson focuses upon Ashby’s knightly fortitude and compares Ashby to warriors of bygone days and faraway lands. In the second stanza he writes:

Well they learned, whose hands have slain him,

Braver, knightlier foe

Never fought with Moor nor [Pagan],

Rode at Templestowe,

With a mien how high and joyous,

‘Gainst the hordes that would destroy us

Went he forth we know.

Later in the poem, Thompson refers to Ashby’s “saber,” “crest” and “manly breast.” Indeed, in Thompson’s adoring portrait, Ashby seems better outfitted for a medieval joust than for mid-19th-century armed combat.

Perhaps most interestingly, Thompson makes reference to Templestowe, the mythical place from which Ivanhoe rescues Rebecca. He clearly trusted that his readers would recognize the reference and would likewise remember that an important jousting tournament in Ivanhoe occurs in the town of Ashby.

General Turner Ashby was the son of Colonel Turner Ashby, who fought in the War of 1812, and the grandson of Captain Jack Ashby, who fought in the Revolutionary War, yet Thompson makes no mention of Ashby’s actual martial lineage. Thompson’s emphasis on Ashby’s knightly qualities and Ashby’s nickname, “the Knight of the Confederacy,” point to the literary preferences and references of the Civil War generation.

Sir Walter Scott, more than any other writer, shaped Americans’ conception of manliness, bravery and combat in the period leading up to the Civil War. And his influence did not end once the fighting began.

If the lived reality of four years of suffering and slaughter did not neatly conform to Scott’s knightly norms, the war as presented in romantic Southern poetry very often did.

In 1866 a contributor to DeBow’s Review, published in New Orleans, wrote:

Without question, [Scott] opened new paths

of thought and feeling. He was a benefactor

to his race, for he lit up the common life

of man with the beautiful lights of a vivid

imagination; and with the radiancy of a fine humor he flashed an honest glow into the

hearts of thousands.

The Confederacy had died, but the cult of Scott remained robust. Not until the rise of realism in the late 19th century — with the publication of such works as Stephen Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage” — would Scott and his imitators fall out of favor.

Sources: Daily Dispatch, Dec. 18, 1860; Charles Rogers, “The Modern Scottish Minstrel”; Sir Walter Scott, “Ivanhoe”; Mark Twain, “Life on the Mississippi”; Henry Adams, “The Education of Henry Adams”; Richard Holt Hutton, “The Life of Sir Walter Scott”; S.L.C., “Thoughts upon English Poetry,” in The Southern Literary Messenger; David Kaser, “Books and Libraries in Camp and Battle”; Frank Moore, “Rebel Rhymes and Rhapsodies”; Walter Burgwyn Jones, “Confederate War Poems”; Charles Bohun, “Immortal Fictions,” in DeBow’s Review.

Cynthia Wachtell is a research associate professor of American Studies and director of the S. Daniel Abraham Honors Program at Yeshiva University in New York City. Her book “War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914” is now available in paperback.