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 290 Poets of the Civil War II thundered splendidly in the impassioned appeals of orators to the people, it whistled through the streets, it stole into the firesides, it clinked glasses in bar-rooms, it lifted the gray hairs of our wise men in conventions, it thrilled through the lectures in college halls, it rustle4 the thumbed book leaves of the schoolrooms, it arrayed the sanctity of a righteous cause in the brilliant trappings of military display, it offered tests to all allegiances and loyalties, — of church, of state; of private loves, public devotions; of personal consanguini- ties, of social ties. Of this solidarity of Southern opinion and feeling no better evidence couJd be given than the fact that practically all those who wrote poetry during the Civil War were either partici- pants in the actual struggle or were intimately connected with those who were. Theodore O'Hara, who had been in active service during the Mexican War and had written The Bivouac of the Dead in honour of those who died in that war, was colonel of an Alabama regiment and later a staff officer in the Con- federate Army. Henry Rqotes Jackson, who had also fought in the Mexican War and had written My Wife and Child and The Red Old Hills of Georgia, served under Hood in the battles around Atlanta, commanded a brigade in the Army of Tennessee, and was captured in the battle of Nashville. Their poems of the Mexican War were frequently quoted, and in fact were printed in nearly all the Southern anthologies of the Civil War. James Barron Hope, who had been Virginia's official poet at the Jamestown celebration and the unveiling of the Washington monument in Richmond (1858), was quartermaster and captain in the Army of Virginia, and came out of the struggle broken in fortune and in health. Albert Pike,' bom in Massachusetts and author of Hymns to the Gods (1839), was Confederate Commissioner to the Indians and afterwards a brigadier-general. Margaret Junkin Preston, bom in Philadel- phia, revealed in Beechenbrook — a poetical transcript of her experiences and impressions of the war — what the war meant to a woman who was the wife of one of the most distinguished colonels of Lee's army, the sister-in-law of Stonewall Jack- son, and the friend of Lee. John R. Thompson, successor to Poe as the editor of The Southern Literary Messenger, became assistant secretary to the Commonwealth of Virginia and was " See also Book II, Chap. vii.