Drawing on her border-state experiences, Rebecca Harding Davis explored the meaning of the Civil War and its complicated legacy throughout her career. Her insistence on realism in her writing about the conflict as it unfolded prefigured her later skepticism about the emerging memory of the war as a Lost Cause. Her early Atlantic Monthly stories, such as “John Lamar” and “David Gaunt,” frame political justifications for a war of competing rights and anticipate her use of the trial metaphor to suggest justice deferred at the end of Waiting for the Verdict. Her postbellum work, such as “The Rose of Carolina” and “How the Widow Crossed the Lines,” acknowledges the force of cultural memory, itself an adversarial contest of competing claims in late nineteenth-century America. Davis invites her readers to revisit the lessons of the war, its cultural legacy, and its impact on a verdict too long deferred.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Civil War and Reconstruction had become sites of significant narrative contests that were carried out in scores of novels and in hundreds of stories published in popular magazines. These writings are arguably central to any understanding of American literary history but usually are represented by only a few canonical Civil War novels, such as Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895), Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock (1898), and Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). Well before the moonlight and magnolia school of Civil War fiction exerted its death grip on the postwar literary imagination, however, an earlier contest waged that sought to set the terms of the debate. Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, William Wells Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper each sought a narrative capable of accounting for the uncertainties and possibilities of this political moment. This essay traces their attempts to imagine a different future, one that broke with the nation’s history of continued abrogation of the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence.