Cynthia Wachtell, author of War No More: the Antiwar Impulse in American Literature 1861-1914, discusses how Romantic literature, which tended to sanitize and idealize war, was unsuitable for portraying the mechanization of modern warfare and the brutal reality of the Civil War; how Julia Ward Howe, writer of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, eventually rejected the glorification of war and called for a worldwide woman’s movement to advocate for disarmament; how Mark Twain’s brief informal Confederate service shaped his lifelong antiwar beliefs; and why the modern media’s refusal to show images of dead soldiers is similar to Romantic-era self-censorship.
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