JOHN ANTHONY CASEY, JR.
Searching for a War of One’s Own: Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage , and the Glorious
Burden of the Civil War Veteran
“No one, not even our sons, can appreciate the memories of camp and march, of bivouac and battle, as those who were participants therein; the scenes of the great struggle can never be to them what they were to us.”
The passage above was part of an address delivered by Grand Army of the Republic commander
George Merrill at the organization’s national convention in 1882. His remarks were made in response to debates within the Grand Army’s membership concerning whether the sons of Union veterans should be allowed a more active role in the organization. Merrill argued, and the majority of those in attendance at the convention agreed with him, that it was better for the
Grand Army to cease to exist rather than dilute veteran identity by allowing their sons the right to full participation. Instead, Merrill believed that the male descendents of veterans should strive to promote the legacy of their fathers through such organizations as the Sons of Veterans.
1
Southern veterans’ groups like the United Confederate Veterans were less exclusive than the
Grand Army in the roles they offered to their sons, but still maintained a firm distinction between those who had actually experienced Civil War combat and those whose knowledge came from reading or listening to the tales of old soldiers. As Southern veteran Duke Goodman noted with some concern in a letter to the Confederate Veteran magazine, “I find in many portions of the state that the UCV camps are amalgamating with the masses and holding reunions; the masses are fast overshadowing these camps. The day is not far distant when, if this is kept up, these camps will lose their identity.” 2

Veteran fears that their identity would be “amalgamated” with that of the general population and gradually become lost were a recurring theme in the literature associated with their reunions.
3
This was especially true in the 1890s as increasingly larger numbers of civilians flocked to see the extensive military-like camps erected for these gatherings, which presented something of a refuge for civilians from the discontents of life in the Gilded Age. At the same time that these crowds of civilians grew in number, the ranks of Civil War veterans in the North and South had begun to thin. This led remaining veterans to become ever more protective of
“their war.” For, not only had the war given them a new sense of self but it also gave them the privileged social status they enjoyed in the nation. The defensiveness of these aging veterans posed a serious problem for the men of the younger generation, whether they were sons of veterans or not. Like Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage , the men coming of age in the decades after the Civil War had been taught from birth that “war makes men.” Consequently, they longed for a chance to prove their own manhood on the battlefield. The aspirations of this rising generation, however, butted against veteran claims that they had fought the last “real” war in American history. Men like Stephen Crane, who grew up long after the war had ended, felt a sense of belatedness when confronted by veterans’ claims to cultural superiority and uniqueness.
To the younger generation these claims suggested that true manhood was no longer available even though society argued that it was necessary for full citizenship. This contradictory message placed the nation’s young men in an untenable situation, one in which they were asked to live out their own manhood as mere custodians of the legacy of the previous generation.
As a result of this contradictory message, a significant tension developed between the veterans of the Civil War and the younger generation, and yet this tension has received little critical interest from scholars studying gender relations in the late nineteenth century. Kristin

Hoganson is one of the few scholars to come close. She examines the conflicted role of Civil
War veterans in the jingoist movement that sparked the wars in Cuba and the Philippines, but overemphasizes the amity between those in the younger generation who clamored for war and the nation’s aging war veterans.
4
The majority of studies on the topic of manhood in the Gilded
Age, however, focus not on the conflicts within the white male ideal. Instead, they examine the
“others” who provoked the perceived “crisis” in masculinity that marked the last decades of the nineteenth century. These outsiders included black men, immigrants (often considered in these studies alongside the working class), and white women, all of whom supposedly threatened white middle-class male dominance through their demands for equal rights.
5
The myriad ways in which middle-class white men attempted to regain their eroding power by addressing the
“effects” of social change is an even more common subject of study than the crisis itself. As
Matthew Hannah notes, “The root issues confronting men in the late nineteenth century concerned the effects of loss of control.” Hannah examines the role that the census bureau exerted, as part of what he (borrowing from Foucault) calls the rise of “governmentality,” in managing the threats to white middle-class men by what appeared to be an increasingly unruly nation.
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Mark Carnes and Ann Clawson share Hannah’s interest in how white middle-class men attempted to manage the effects of these social threats, but have turned their attention instead to the role of fraternal groups like the Grand Army of the Republic. They examine fraternal groups as instances of a grass-roots reaction to the massive social changes of corporate organization, financial panics, and on-going labor unrest. Carnes in particular argues that fraternal organizations sought to “accommodate middle-class men to a new social order that was largely of their own making” but that seemed to be spinning out of control.
7 These fraternal groups

created an image of themselves as both a refuge and a final line of defense for the American ideal, a rhetoric that David Leverenz describes as that of “the last real men in America.” 8
The focus of these diverse studies on the external “others” that supposedly provoked the gender crisis of the 1890s and on how white middle-class men sought to address those provocations sometimes obscures the fact that each scholar is less interested in the effects of the perceived gender crisis in the late nineteenth century than they are in its social and economic causes—particularly the shift from proprietary to corporate capitalism. Furthermore, although those causes certainly had external elements for which white women, black men, and immigrants served as convenient scapegoats, these critics overlook a matter of especial concern that existed within the white male ideal itself. This was the imminent transfer of power that loomed between generations. Without another war, young men on the path to adulthood would not be able to
“demand political rights based on [military] service.” 9 This posed a serious problem since the
Civil War veteran, on the basis of his military service, had occupied for more than thirty years positions of actual and symbolic male authority in the nation. Of the seven U.S. presidents between the years 1869 and 1901, only one, Grover Cleveland, had not served in the Union army. To men lacking that sense of authority, it was not at all clear who would assume power when the last of the Civil War generation had passed away.
In what follows, I examine Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage as a commentary on this vexed transfer of power. Civil War veterans, both in the novel and in the larger culture, seemed wholly unwilling to relinquish their authority, thereby blocking the path to adult manhood for the rising generation. I argue that the narrative of The Red Badge of Courage represents an agon between the members of this rising generation and the aging population of Civil War veterans in the 1890s.
10
Faced with the burden of the veteran-saturated cultural climate of that decade, in

which veterans argued both for the compensation of literal pension “debts” as well as the debt of gratitude they felt the younger generation owed them, Crane initiated in his writing a battle royal for possession of the title of “real” American man. When we place the novel back within this context of its production, it provides us a new way of reading the narrative that goes beyond seeing it as either a precursor to the modern war fiction spawned by the Great War or as homage to the Civil War generation. Instead, we can see the novel as the contradictory product of a transitional age, a work that exhaustively recreates the experience of Civil War combat and the
Civil War battlefield only to undercut it.
Criticism on the novel has long struggled with precisely this aforementioned contradiction. Perry Lentz’s Private Fleming at Chancellorsville first contends that “ The Red
Badge of Courage is set firmly within the American Civil War. Its men are dressed, organized, arrayed, commanded, maneuvered, and above all armed as soldiers in the American Civil War were dressed, organized, arrayed, commanded, maneuvered, and armed.” Then, after eight chapters of proving that Crane did extensive historical research to show us what Civil War combat was like, Lentz concludes that Crane’s ultimate message to the reader is the quintessentially modernist one that “in a malevolent universe ‘ideals’ are ridiculous.”
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For
Lentz, Crane’s status as a proto-modernist writer (inadvertently ahead of his time) ultimately explains the inconsistencies of the work. In contrast, Craig Warren’s book Scars to Prove It sees the incongruities of The Red Badge of Courage as signs of an irreverent reverence felt by the author towards the aging Civil War generation. He argues that, as a civilian writer offering up to a youthful reading audience the “realistic” details of the war, Crane hoped to “encourage those who knew nothing of the war to participate in the conflict.” He acknowledges the “formidable obstacle” presented to the “nonveteran wishing to write about the war,” but argues that Crane

successfully wrested from veterans their authority over the battlefield. In doing so, Warren asserts, Crane “changed the very nature of Civil War literature.” Now it became licit (according to Warren) for civilians far removed from the war in both space and time to write about and relive the legacy of the Civil War combat experience.
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Because each critic places the novel in an inappropriate context, they miss the ways in which it registers the tensions, uncertainties, and paradoxes of the last decade of the nineteenth century, which was neither modern nor Victorian. On the cusp of a great shift between generations and worldviews in the 1890s, the contradictions of Crane’s novel are those of a world transformed by (among other things) the emergence of the corporation, ever expanding government bureaucracy, and rapid population growth.
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Civil War veterans represented in this period a ponderous past whose value was far from certain in a modernizing age. This world of contradictions and mixed messages was the one that Crane inhabited and it provided him with the experiences he needed to write the novel.
Without overstating the role of the author’s biography in the composition of the novel, we know that during the time that Crane was shuttling back and forth between the homes of his brothers William in Port Jervis, New York, and
Townley in the Asbury Park/Ocean Grove region of New Jersey, there were (according to the census) over 109,748 Union veterans living in the region and 997 Confederate veterans. Grand
Army of the Republic records also indicate a strong member presence in both states for the year
1892 with a total of 113 chapters in New Jersey and 634 in New York.
14
The literal presence of these veterans circulating in the population must have influenced his perspective on the relationship between the Civil War and ideals of manhood. Just as influential, however, was his brief residence at the quasi-military academy Claverack College. Crane was enrolled there in
January 1888, presumably with the intention of eventually going to West Point. Class photos

show a young Crane as a member of the school drill team, dressed in a blue Civil War style uniform and carrying a musket. He stayed at Claverack until the spring of 1890, when he was persuaded by his brother William to withdraw. William argued that since “the United States was unlikely to fight a war during Stephen’s lifetime” the army would be a dead-end career and that it made more sense “to attend a civilian college rather than West Point.” 15
Crane’s admiration for a soldier’s life (suggested by his enrollment at Claverack) and
William’s comments on its impossibility are both emblematic of the situation faced by many of the young men of his generation. Told that war made men, they were at the same time advised that the last “real” war had concluded decades ago. At least one Union veteran was aware of the impact that these mixed messages had upon the rising generation. In a speech given during the
Grand Army of the Republic’s thirty-first national convention (1897), former Union General
Lew Wallace addressed complaints from veterans about the young men coming of age in the
1890s. He declared that “I have heard men say that the coming generation is not equal to the generation which is passing away. I have heard say they were too much given to bicycling and foot-ball and golf, and the like.” Responding to these fears that the new American man was obsessed with amusement rather than the grave responsibilities of citizenship such as military service, Wallace argued that sports “are the exercises that make men. I see a game of football and the thought, in my mind, is not as to the result of the game, but as to the courage and the muscle that is called out. That is the making of the man.”
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With his reference to the physical attributes of maleness such as “muscle,” Wallace draws attention to the shift, noted by Anthony
Rotundo, between the self-restrained manhood of the antebellum United States and the
“passionate” manhood that increasingly came to define the “masculine” ideal in the late nineteenth century.
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Sports, in Wallace’s view, were also the perfect substitute for war as they

offered an outlet for the aggressiveness encouraged as part of the new masculine ideal in the
1890s while at the same time leaving the authority of Civil War veterans essentially unchallenged. For even though Crane referred to football in the 1895 edition of The Red Badge of Courage
—in one scene of the novel Fleming “duck[s] his head low like a football player”— its presence in the novel is more a symptom of the problem than a viable solution.
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Sports like football, with their association to life on the college campus, were simply another aspect of the prolonged adolescence that the rising generation felt American society was imposing upon it.
19
Their frustration at being denied full manhood naturally turned upon veterans like Wallace whose lives seemed to define the masculine ideal. They vented this angst in a number of areas including newspaper articles addressing the expansion of veteran pensions. One such article, published not long after the passage of the Dependent Pension Act in 1890, parodied the Civil War era song “We Are Coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 More!” turning this famous refrain into “We Are Coming, Father Benjamin, 300,000 More!” 20
Often paired with these articles criticizing the cost of enlarging eligibility for veteran pensions were those that claimed veterans were dying off at an alarmingly rapid rate.
21
Even though on the surface these two rhetorical claims would seem to have nothing in common, statements regarding veteran mortality represented an instance of wishful thinking in relation to the literal and figurative “debts” that one generation supposedly owed to the other. After all, civilians could not help but notice the large number of veterans living in their communities. Census data shows that there were still over a million Civil War veterans living in the United States in 1890, with approximately
180,000 of them being under the age of forty-five.
22
These aging war veterans clearly represented an obstacle the younger generation desperately wanted to surmount.

Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage and its sequel the short story “The Veteran” engage the white elephant the Civil War veteran had become in the last decades of the nineteenth century. His writings illustrate that any attempt to alleviate the growing tension between generations would be difficult if not impossible. This difficulty becomes apparent in the complex relationship between the author and his main character, the Civil War veteran Henry Fleming.
In The Real Thing , Miles Orvell notes that in The Red Badge of Courage Crane “seems to identify effortlessly with the point of view of his main character, a youth enamored of war.”
Crane, like Fleming, may in fact be “enamored of war,” but “effortlessly” is precisely the wrong word to describe their relationship. In fact, throughout much of the narrative, Crane and Fleming seem engaged in competition, as Crane tries to interrogate and to force out of the veteran his secrets about war and true manhood. Constantly undercutting Fleming’s flimsy explanations,
Crane hopes to get at the truth of the veterans’ experience, which he imaginatively recreates but nonetheless struggles to comprehend. Crane is especially interested in the transformative power of war on male identity, which is the subject of an often overlooked passage from chapter three of the novel. As Fleming is waiting for his unit to move forward into battle, the narrator tells us that “The youth had been taught that a man became another thing in battle. He saw his salvation in such a change.” 23
John Clendenning examines Crane’s fascination with war’s transformative effect on manhood in “Visions of War and Versions of Manhood.” Through a psychoanalytic reading of the text, Clendenning concludes that Crane discovers “when the father is dead, absent, or otherwise unavailable, sons tend to develop a sense of manhood based on fantasy.”
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Yet, despite the fact that what Crane discovers is indeed a “fantasy” or idyllic image of manhood associated with war, the father is not absent in the novel. By substituting the concept of the agon for the

more traditional Oedipus complex, we are able to see the father-like role played by the Civil War veterans’ legacy in the narrative. It also becomes possible to see that Crane’s analysis is not as disinterested and abstract as Clendenning implies. The author’s “salvation” is not to prove whether or not the phenomenon of war makes men. Instead, he hopes to discover through his study of the veteran Fleming how the previous generation achieved its current social status. With this knowledge, Crane then hopes to displace veterans from their position of social authority, assuming it for himself.
Because Civil War veterans were still a powerful force in American life during the 1890s,
Crane must have known that he had to move carefully in his attempt to dethrone the heroes of what was then America’s “greatest generation.” This is where the author’s experience in journalism proved invaluable, supplying him with the language needed to adequately address his theme: a double-voiced form of narration. “Double-voiced” language had allowed newspaper writers and editors to criticize the cultural monopoly of the Civil War and its veterans without appearing unduly critical.
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It provided a tonal guide that allowed them to embed their frustration, exhaustion, and boredom within the established ways of speaking about veterans and the war. One example of double-voiced narration operating in the newspapers of the late nineteenth century can be found in an editorial from the Philadelphia Times published 21 March
1891, which debated the propriety of expanding veteran pension eligibility. The editorial begins by stating with some force that “the time is past when self proclaimed demagogic leaders of the
Grand Army can command the confidence of the public to shield robbery in the name of the soldier or the soldier’s orphan, and a thief must be stamped as a thief regardless of the uniform he has worn.” To use the word “thief” in the same sentence as the word “soldier” would seem to be an instance of editorial suicide. Yet the writer of the article skillfully deflects potential

criticism through the title of the article: “Robbing the Soldiers: How the Demagogues Plunder in the Name of the Civil War Veteran.” It is not the former soldiers who are to blame for the escalating costs of pensions but lobbyist groups such as the Grand Army. This authorial misdirection differs from more traditional narrative techniques such as irony or satire in that it does not place the author above that which he describes. He claims solidarity with both veterans and civilian readers, both of whom he calls to action in order to save the nation from grasping
“demagogues.” 26
A connection between Crane and the language of late nineteenth-century newspapers should come as no surprise, given his experience as a journalist. However, in contrast to Maggie and Crane’s other Bowery tales, it is rare to see
The Red Badge of Courage considered alongside nineteenth-century newspaper writing, much less the author’s own journalism.
27
Part of the reason for this omission is that the bulk of Crane’s war reporting was not done until well after the novel’s publication. If we expand our notion of “war reporting” to include Decoration Day articles, however, we can see the ways in which The Red Badge of Courage benefited from the indirect manner of speaking developed by late nineteenth-century newspaper writers in order to address the legacy of the Civil War. In a letter written to Hamlin Garland on 9 May 1894, Crane observes that “I wrote a decoration day [sic] thing for the Press which aroused them [Crane’s editors at the newspaper] to enthusiasm. They said, in about a minute though, [sic] that I was firing over the heads of the soldiers.”
28
Thomas Gullason and Daniel Hoffman both claimed in the 1950s to have uncovered the Decoration Day piece Crane refers to in this letter. Gullason argued that it was an article published in the New York Press in May 1894 titled “Veterans’
Ranks Thinner by a Year.” The other possible candidate for this Decoration Day piece was a

manuscript titled “The Gratitude of a Nation,” unpublished during Crane’s life, which was discovered by Hoffman in a book in Columbia University’s Crane collection.
The first of these two articles fits the timeframe of publication and the newspaper suggested by Crane in his letter to Garland. The author begins this article by reminding the reader how social position affects point of view:
As a holiday, Decoration Day was probably never so joyously observed. As a day of memories, it was probably never so fraught with sadness. To the rising generation it meant a revel of sports and pastimes; to the fading generation it was a sharp reminder that the fires of the last bivouac were growing bright in the deepening twilight; to the lusty generation that stands between, it was a mixture of both.
29
Although the adverb “probably” creates a degree of uncertainty about the author’s pronouncements, the following lines resolve some of that uncertainty by showing that the meaning of this Decoration Day parade is different depending upon the generation of men who were asked. In contrast to the festive atmosphere and present-focused games of the “rising generation” are the somber “bivouacs” of the “fading generation,” which recall the trouble and sacrifice of the past. Complicating this traditional portrait of a conflict between the old and the young, however, is the presence of the group that the author calls the “lusty generation that stands between.” The author seems to identify with this group, presumably young men as opposed to boys or the elderly. This in-between generation feels a mixture of sadness and joy as these aged veterans take part in a march not only dedicated to the “memory of the dead” but also towards death itself. They covet the social power and prestige of these real American men, but at the same time they are mesmerized by the stark contrast between the veteran as an ideal and the reality they see marching before them.

Saddened by this reminder of human mortality, they are also struck by the incredible irony of being held back from adulthood by these withered old men. The Decoration Day parade thus leaves the viewer of the in-between generation with a lingering taste of bitterness. That bitterness emerges near the end of the article where the author says, “This particular Old Guard not only never surrenders, but apparently never grows old.”
30
We know from the earlier description of the parade as a procession of the elderly on their way to the grave that the word
“apparently” is meant to sound false to the reader. It expresses the viewer’s frustration with the situation in which he is placed. The in-between generation’s desire for social success seems to be at odds in this moment with a sense of filial piety. Since the men who dominate the norms of masculinity in the American imagination are in reality pitiable old men, the viewer of the inbetween generation feels compelled to watch this slow march with no apparent end in sight and contemplates the one just like it that will take place at the same time next year. At the end of this article, the reader is consequently left to consider the limits of gratitude. When will the debt to the older generation have been sufficiently paid, and when can the adolescent spectators of the in-between generation be allowed to take their proper place at the head of American society?
This question provides the starting point for the other Decoration Day piece
(unpublished) that has been attributed to Crane, “The Gratitude of a Nation.” Here the focus of the article is a concept rather than a parade. The writer begins by asserting that
Gratitude, the sense of obligation, often comes very late to the mind of the world. It is the habit of humanity to forget her heroes, her well-doers, until they have passed on beyond the sound of earthly voices. . . . It has almost become a great truth that the man who achieves an extraordinary benefit for the race shall go to death without the particular appreciation of his fellows.

The author seems to present in this opening passage a fairly straightforward critique of the younger generation’s lack of a proper sense of obligation to its forefathers, the veterans who “are disappearing” each day, and also to the particular past which those heroes represent.
Furthermore, the author’s exhortations appear to call upon his youthful readers to change the error of their ways and “struggle to defeat this ironical law of fate” whereby the younger generation forgets the deeds of its elders and thus loses sight of its obligation to the past. The highly exaggerated tone of the piece, however, suggests less the classic jeremiad than the veiled accusation that the older generation has somehow failed the younger. In phrases such as “stars shot from guns would not hinder their devotion to the flag,” the tenor of the language hints that the older generation’s excessive calls for devotion to the legacy of the fathers have condemned the sons to a state of perpetual youth.
31
In both of these articles, the highly charged message of the author is skillfully masked by the indirection of double-voiced language, which causes the reader to consistently ask not only the meaning of each pronouncement but also who is speaking it. Crane will take a similar narrative approach in The Red Badge of Courage . Through a subtle blending of voices, he explores the conflicted relationship between himself and Henry Fleming. As the author examines in the novel how war makes men, the careful reader becomes aware of slippages in the text, moments when Crane begins to express his own frustrations through the words of his protagonist. One such moment appears in the 1895 text when Fleming looks upon the dead and dying on the battlefield and expresses his envy of them. He calls their supposed marks of honor
“stolen” crowns and “sham” “robes of glorious memories.” 32
Envy towards the dead and dying, who are described as members of an elite club similar to the fraternal orders examined by
Clawson and Carnes, makes Fleming seem petty and small-minded. This in turn creates a

disjunction in the reader’s mind between the image of the Civil War veteran as a cultural icon and the actual men who fought in the war. The author then seizes upon that moment of disjunction to insinuate the leading question—what makes the young men back then superior to the ones living now ? They too, Crane suggests, coveted a place in the pantheon of real American men and did not necessarily follow rules of social decorum in order to achieve it. These thoughts, however, initially appear to come from the protagonist rather than the author. Consequently,
Fleming alone is viewed in a negative light. This indirection thus allows the author to speak his mind with impunity.
The slippages that reveal the author speaking through his main character appear in both the 1895 text, which remains the standard edition of the novel, as well as the manuscript edited and published by Henry Binder in 1982.
33
Not surprisingly, however, the 1895 text exhibits a higher degree of indirection and subtlety than the manuscript, making these moments in the text harder to identify. The stark contrast between the blunt straightforwardness of the manuscript and the more polished indirection of the first published edition is clearly evident in a passage that appears in the discarded version of chapter twelve. In this passage, Henry contemplates his failure to rationalize his actions on the battlefield. He thinks to himself that when he had erected a vindicating structure of great principles, it was the calm toes of tradition that kicked it all down about his ears. He immediately antagonized then this devotion to the by-gone; this universal adoration of the past. From the bitter pinnacle of his wisdom he saw that mankind not only worshipped the gods of the ashes but that the gods of the ashes were worshipped because they were the gods of the ashes. He perceived with anger the present state of affairs in its bearing upon his case. And he resolved to reform it all.
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Fleming concludes that the burdens of tradition and the reverence of the past, what he calls “the gods of the ashes,” are blocking his passage from being a “youth” to being a “man.” Yet in the context of this scene, it is not at all clear that there are any traditions holding him down. The only way this passage gains significance is if we consider that Crane, not Fleming, is speaking here.
The author reveals fairly openly in this passage his frustration with the bombastic claims of the previous generation, the by-gone “gods of the ashes” who stand in the way of his achieving martial glory. Only by sweeping them away can the final steps towards maturation be achieved and the youth, at last, become a man.
Crane, however, in his eagerness to wrest away from the Civil War veteran his cultural status and power, has seriously underestimated his opponent. Just as the veteran will not reveal the secrets of his manhood without a struggle, so too will he refuse to simply vanish like ashes in the wind. In a passage from chapter five of the 1895 text, the seeming ubiquity of the veterans’ power becomes apparent. This scene, while far more muted in tone and subtle in its indirection than the earlier one cited from the manuscript, nonetheless exhibits much of the same ferocity and frustration towards the Civil War veterans’ legacy. As Fleming is waiting in this scene for the Confederate advance he thinks of the village street at home before the arrival of the circus parade on a day in the spring.
He remembered how he had stood, a small, thrillful boy, prepared to follow the dingy lady upon the white horse, or the band in its faded chariot. He saw the yellow road, the lines of expectant people, and the sober houses. He particularly remembered an old fellow who used to sit upon a cracker box in front of the store and feign to despise such exhibition. A thousand details of color and form surged in his mind. The old fellow upon the cracker box appeared in middle prominence.
35

Crane’s placing of this scene before the beginning of the battle is an instance of foreshadowing.
Fleming’s progress through the narrative will mimic his experience of viewing the circus as a child. Initial excitement at “going to see the elephant” (a standard phrase used during the Civil
War to refer to experiencing combat) will give way to disillusion, which the youth will ultimately attempt to purge from his consciousness by novel’s end. Neither Fleming nor the elephant, however, are key figures in this scene. That honor belongs to the old man on the cracker box, who is described as sitting in “middle prominence” pretending to despise the events unfolding before him. The prominence of this old man represents the additional level of foreshadowing contained in this passage as his dominating presence serves to deflate the youth’s moment of anticipation. Even as he awaits the approach of his first battle and his chance to become a man, his memories are overshadowed by those of an elder generation.
This seemingly negligible scene marks the failure of the author’s attempt to transcend the
Civil War veteran’s legacy through the process of imaginatively reconstructing the experience of combat. It would seem that in the on-going struggle between the author and his creation, Fleming has won. The younger generation will not be allowed membership in the elite fraternity of
American warriors. Responses from the nineteenth-century readership of the novel confirm this view, as, with a few exceptions, The Red Badge of Courage was understood as a fairly straightforward encomium to the Civil War veteran by a youth who knew nothing of war.
Crane’s publishers encouraged this interpretation and used the author’s status as something of a prodigy to market the book. We know from Crane’s letters that, although he appreciated the publicity The Red Badge of Courage generated for him, he came to resent the way it overshadowed the rest of his work.
Crane voiced some of this frustration in a letter to Curtis
Brown, saying that, “I hear the damned book ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ is doing very well in

England.”
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He must also have experienced a certain amount of chagrin at seeing his book praised for the wrong reasons. Instead of opening the doors to the fraternal club occupied by
Civil War veterans, Crane had seemingly illustrated that they were (as the Grand Army asserted) forever locked to the members of the younger generation.
Binder argued that misreadings of the novel were solely a function of the text, which had been corrupted by overly zealous editors. Although the manuscript version of the novel does offer us a window into the negotiations made by the author in order to see his book published, it is the context of the 1890s that holds the answer to the work’s consistent misinterpretation. Crane was negotiating not simply with a book publisher or editor but with his cultural milieu.
Hoganson notes that young men in America had been “seduced by more than thirty years of claims that Civil War veterans were model citizens and men.”
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Yet the more they clamored for war, the more resistance they faced from the aging warriors who saw the ascendance of these young upstarts as a threat to their legacy. What this scenario meant for Crane’s novel is that it would either be misunderstood or that those readers who understood its message would keep that knowledge to themselves, fearful they might offend still-living veterans of the Civil War. One veteran who was seriously offended by Crane’s novel was the former Union general and Chicago publishing executive Alexander C. McClurg. In a review published in the 11 April 1896 issue of
The Dial
, McClurg calls the book “the vain imaginings of a young man born long since that war, a piece of intended realism based entirely on unreality.” He recognized that the book was meant to be critical of Civil War veterans, saying that it is “a vicious satire.” He also noticed that Henry is essentially an anti-hero, condescendingly referring to the protagonist (as a veteran might an upstart young man clamoring for membership in his elite club) as “an ignorant and stupid country lad, who, without a spark of patriotic feeling, or even of soldierly ambition, has enlisted

in the army from no definite motive that the reader can discover, unless it be that other boys are doing so.” 38 In a social climate in which Civil War veterans still appeared as god-like figures,
Crane must have counted himself lucky that McClurg was one of the few veterans to take offense at the novel. The fact that McClurg was something of an anomaly among the nineteenth-century readers of The Red Badge of Courage also stands as a testament to the skill of Crane’s revision.
Crane left few comments on the revision of The Red Badge of Courage , and those he did leave are enigmatic. The publication history of the novel, however, offers us some clues. In
1894, unable to find a publisher for his manuscript, Crane sold an abridged version of the novel to Irving Bacheller for syndicated publication in the newspapers.
39
Encouraged by the responses of newspaper readers to the story, Crane brought clippings from the novel’s syndicated version to Appleton’s acquisitions editor, Ripley Hitchcock. These clippings convinced Hitchcock to consider the novel for publication, but what he saw was not innovation. It was the continuation of an already successful narrative strategy. The version of The Red Badge of Courage that appeared in the newspapers was, in fact, close to the “Battles and Leaders” tales Crane had once criticized for their prescribed focus on valor and heroism instead of the political causes of the war or the personal feelings of the soldiers themselves.
40
Crane focuses upon what Fleming does in battle rather than his thoughts and emotions. This change in itself is significant, but perhaps the greatest change between the syndicated version of the story and the published novel is the addition of the theme of camaraderie. Unlike the novel, in which Fleming remains isolated from the other men in his regiment, in the newspaper version he becomes pals with Wilson and together they experience the exhilaration of battle. Both of them feel elated at the end of the story as they bask in the praise of their officers who supposedly claim that Fleming and Wilson
“deserve t’ be major generals.” 41
Additionally, the word “they” is continually repeated at the end

of the newspaper version of the story to remind the reader that they are an integral part of their unit. “They” become men together, and the consequence is a narrative that is far more conventional and considerably less critical of Civil War veterans than the one that the author initially envisioned.
That Crane was not happy with the syndicated version of his war story, which was cut to meet the space demands of the newspaper editors to whom it was sent, is evident in the letter that accompanied the newspaper clippings he sent Hitchcock: “Dear Mr. Hitchcock: This is the war story in its syndicate form—that is to say, much smaller and to my mind much worse than its original form.”
42
Although we do not know Hitchcock’s response after reading the complete narrative, it is possible to surmise through a comparison of the manuscript and the first booklength edition that both Crane and his editor recognized that the lack of subtlety in the former would prove a liability to its popular success. Crane made cuts to the manuscript for the same reason he allowed them to be made to the newspaper version of the story: he wanted his work to be published. Equally important, however, was his realization that there was little reason at this point to reveal his hand. By the time his book saw widespread publication, Crane still believed that war made men. Yet he had given up on the notion that this transformative process could be imaginatively recreated. Actual participation in the experience of war was the initiation needed to belong to the warrior’s fraternity. Furthermore, he felt that it was time for his generation to find not only a war of its own but also to start building the membership of their own exclusive band of brothers. Instead of continuing to struggle so that they might join the elite society of men represented by Civil War veterans, a new order (albeit one founded on many of the same essential rituals) needed to be created for the new generation.

This change in perspective is evident in the sequel to the novel, Crane’s short story “The
Veteran,” which was originally published in August 1896 in McClure’s magazine and reprinted in the collection The Little Regiment . “The Veteran” marks the end of Crane’s contest with
Henry Fleming for entry into the older generation’s exclusive fraternal order and serves as a rejoinder to the public’s misguided reception of the novel. The story opens with a scene that, as
Randall Allred notes, appears close to the kind of postwar life that the youthful Fleming had imagined in The Red Badge of Courage . At that time, Fleming “could see himself in a room of warm tints telling tales to listeners. He could exhibit laurels. They were insignificant; still, in a district where laurels were infrequent, they might shine. He saw his gaping audience picturing him as the central figure in blazing scenes.” Now an old man, Henry sits in the grocery store of his hometown sharing his “gilded images of memory” with his neighbors. But there is an interesting twist to Fleming’s behavior in “The Veteran” that makes it hard to read the story (as
Allred does) as “a daydream from within the context of the novel.”
43
He decides in “The
Veteran” to tell the truth. As he describes in this story events that are already familiar to readers of the novel, he admits that he ran in his first battle. He says, “I thought they were all shooting at me . . . and it seemed so damned unreasonable, you know. I wanted to explain to ‘em what an almighty good fellow I was . . . but I couldn’t explain. . . . So I run!”
For the reader of The Red Badge who is frustrated by Fleming’s rationalizations of his behavior, his honesty in old age must seem like vindication—a sign that he has finally matured.
That is what makes the scenes that follow so odd, appearing like punishment rather than appreciation of the old man’s honesty. After Fleming has finished telling his story, his grandson,
Little Jim, walks up to him and asks, “Grandpa—now—was that true what you was telling those men . . . about your running?” Henry replies, “Why, yes, that was true enough, Jimmie. It was

my first fight, and there was an awful lot of noise, you know.” Following this reply, the boy walks away in disgust. We are told that “His stout boyish idealism was injured.” From the above scene, the story then abruptly jumps to nighttime at the Fleming farm. The entire family is asleep when they are suddenly awakened by cries of “fire, fire!” The old man quickly dresses and goes outside to find his barn ablaze. Rushing into the barn to save the animals a total of seven times, he fails in his final mission to rescue two colts. The roof collapses and kills him. To die in a barn fire would seem to be an incredibly prosaic ending for a war hero. It also seems a bit heavy handed to have the elderly Henry Fleming die saving the type of animal that he and Little Jim argue over in the last moments of the story’s opening scene. Before Little Jim storms off in a huff, he asks his grandson, “Sickle’s colt is going for a drink. Don’t you wish you owned
Sickle’s colt, Jimmy?” Jimmy’s sullen reply to his grandfather’s question is “He ain’t as nice as our’n.” 44
The presence of a colt, a young male horse, in both scenes suggests the importance of male maturation to the story.
In the earlier scene involving Fleming and his grandson, the colt represents both the amorphous space of youth or adolescence (straddling the line between boyhood and manhood) as well as the new physically oriented manhood described by Rotundo and Bederman that dominated the last decades of the nineteenth century. Moreover, Crane’s use of the name Sickles to refer to that colt, a name that he must have known would conjure up for his readers a vision of the Civil War general Dan Sickles, links the issue of moving from youth to manhood with the Civil War generation.
45
Jimmy’s response, therefore, can be construed as the younger generation’s rejection of what its elders have to offer, settling for what is “our’n” rather than what belongs to men like Sickles. The subsequent death of this same type of horse in the later scene along with the veteran hints at the consequences of the older generation’s

stranglehold on the life of its “colts.” One side must give way in this struggle or both will ultimately die. Henry Fleming has, as the story insinuates, lived past his moment. It is time for him to leave the stage and make room for youth to achieve it majority. This reading is supported by Crane’s description of the moment of Fleming’s death: “When the roof fell in, a great funnel of smoke swarmed toward the sky, as if the old man’s mighty spirit, released from its body—a little bottle—had swelled like the genie of a fable. The smoke was tinted rose-hue from the flames, and perhaps the unutterable midnights of the universe will have no power to daunt the color of this soul.” Although Crane’s use of the genie-in-a-bottle imagery here conjures up a romantic and highly conventional death scene, the “rose-hued” smoke only distracts us from what is left in the wake of the barn fire: ashes. Regardless of the fate of his soul or, as Crane refers to it, its “color,” Fleming’s body is now dust and ashes. He has become in this scene, in fact, the very “god of the ashes” that the young Fleming was raging against in the manuscript version of the novel. The difference is that here, after the old man’s honesty, his god-like status has been undermined. As the story tells us, what most astounds Little Jim is that “this idol, of its own will, should so totter.” Since the god-like veteran has tottered from his pedestal, there seems little chance that this “god of the ashes” will rise again.
46
Once the past has been put aside in this story, burying once and for all the veteran Henry
Fleming, the author embraces the lesson that Fleming once considered as he awaited his first battle. Accepting that he could not “mathematically prove” through his intellect what combat would be like, he was forced to concede that “he would again be obliged to experiment as he had in early youth.”
47
Only experience could give the author what he was looking for—an answer to the question of how war makes men. In newspaper articles like “Marines Signaling Under Fire at
Guantanamo” and “The Red Badge of Courage was his Wig-Wag Flag,” Crane reshaped the role

of the newspaper reporter into that of the war correspondent or as we might call it today the embedded journalist. In doing so, he positioned himself somewhere in social status between the professional writer and the soldier. This change allowed him to both observe and experience combat without enlisting, something that his chronically poor health made impossible. Crane illustrated the unique position of the war correspondent in a scene from his article “Marines
Signaling under Fire.” After describing the actions of these marines, Crane wrote that “a fight at close range is absorbing as a spectacle. No man wants to take his eyes from it until that time comes when he makes up his mind to run away. To deliberately stand up and turn your back to a battle is in itself hard work.”
48
In contrast to the hard work of cowardice, we find Crane as a war correspondent placing himself in a role similar to that of the marine signalman. The only difference (in his mind) is that whereas the signalman communicates with the warships in the bay for artillery support, Crane “signals” his readers back home about what the war in Cuba is really like. The substance of what Crane communicates to those readers, however, and what he seems to discover about the nature of war remain distinct.
Bill Brown has argued that in scenes such as that above the author has become “both spectator and spectacle . . . [while he] witnesses a war in motion.” To be sure, Crane demonstrates in “Marines Signaling Under Fire” that, as Brown notes, “observation itself can be intoxicating.” Still, Crane sees himself not as a “spectacle” or a “witness” in this scene but a participant. He tells us that “It was great joy to lie in the trench with the four signalmen.” He shares with them the danger of their assignment as “the bullets began to snap, snap, snap . . .
[and] the woods began to crackle like burning straw.” The war correspondent feels strongly connected to these signalmen, and, regardless of whether the feeling is mutual, it affects his language. In phrases such as “one felt like a leaf in this booming chaos,” Crane captures the

sensory experience of war, which goes beyond merely seeing the events of battle. He also illustrates in his theatrical descriptions his growing love for the experience of combat, which includes not only being fired on by the enemy but fraternal bonding over shared adversity:
“Grimy yellow face looked into grimy yellow face, and grinned with weary satisfaction.
Coffee!” 49
This shift from the language of The Red Badge of Courage to that of Crane’s war correspondence and later war novels such as Active Service (1899) has been shocking to generations of critics accustomed to seeing Crane as ambivalent towards war. Whereas his earlier writing seemed to capture the unheroic and unlovely nature of combat, the author in “Marines
Signaling Under Fire” is enamored with the battlefield experience. Yet this shift in tone, far from unusual, follows naturally from Crane’s initial questions regarding Civil War veterans. All along
Crane has not objected to war, but rather to the previous generations’ monopoly of it—and with that monopoly their stranglehold over the cultural conceptions of American manhood.
Consequently, we can see here, in the amorous language of Crane’s war reporting, the transcendence the author had hoped for in his earlier fiction. The “gods of the ashes” have finally been laid to rest on a battlefield in Cuba. Crane was not the only member of the rising generation to have had this “transcendent” experience. Nonetheless, the battlefields of Cuba did not represent (as Hoganson claims) an instance of bonding between the generations. Instead, they were a burial ground for the legacy of the Civil War and its veterans, ending an intergenerational struggle over true manhood and cultural authority. Through this struggle, Stephen
Crane gained his fame as a writer, but it was bought at a high cost: the overshadowing of the rest of his career by the legacy of The Red Badge of Courage .
--University of Illinois at Chicago

Notes
1. Grand Army of the Republic, Journal of the 16th Annual National Encampment
(Lawrence, Mass.: Daily American Job Printing Establishment, 1882), p. 869. Stuart McConnell examines the sometimes tense relationship between the Grand Army of the Republic and the
Sons of Veterans organization in Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-
1900 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 202-05. Minutes taken at the Grand
Army’s yearly national conventions (referred to by members as “encampments”), which can be found near the back of the souvenir programs, also provide a revealing window into the strain existing between the Union veterans’ group and its affiliated organizations.
2. Duke Goodman, “Report of the Inspector General: United Confederate Veterans,
Texas Division,”
Confederate Veteran , 11 (1903), 435.
3. “Amalgamate” is clearly a loaded word, bearing within it Southern connotations of racial impurity. In the context of veteran camps, however, it had more to do with issues of civilian participation in what was essentially a reunion of former soldiers.
4. See in particular chapter one of Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood:
How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998). There Hoganson claims the Spanish-American War served as a bonding experience between the men of the younger generation and veterans of the Civil War.
My reading of Crane’s war writing makes this perspective problematic, showing that a significant portion of the younger generation saw the Spanish-American war as a chance to surpass their elders and leave the legacy of the Civil War behind. For a graphic illustration of this fantasy of supersession, see the engraving that accompanies the article “The Union’s New
Decoration Day” in the 28 May 1899 issue of the
New Orleans Picayune . The image shows an

elderly veteran in Civil War uniform passing off a young lady wrapped in the American flag
(presumably serving as a metaphor for the nation) to a young man dressed in the modern uniform of the Spanish-American war soldier.
5. Gail Bederman addresses all three of these issues in the opening chapter of Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), but her main focus is the threat posed by black men and white women as middle-class men sought to create a new model of white male identity, one that attempted to reconcile a belief in progress and civilization with a new fascination with the primitive “inner male.” For a thorough examination of the class issues involved in the late nineteenth-century crisis in male identity see Judy Hilkey’s Character is Capital: Success
Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press,
1997) and chapter three of Michael Kimmel’s book Manhood in America: A Cultural History,
2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), which illustrate the corrosive effect of corporate life on the concept of the self-made man.
6. Matthew Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), p. 85. For Hannah’s discussion of the
“disciplinary” function of the U.S. census refer specifically to chapter two.
7. Mark Carnes, “Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual,” in Meanings for
Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1990), p. 52. Carnes’ argument is similar to that of Mary Ann Clawson in Constructing
Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989) but, in contrast to Clawson, Carnes focuses primarily on the role of fraternal groups in the post-Civil
War period.

8. See David Leverenz, “The Last Real Man in America: From Natty Bumppo to
Batman,” in Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities , ed. Peter F.
Murphy (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 21-53.
9. Hoganson, p. 26.
10. I borrow the term agon from Harold Bloom’s book The Anxiety of Influence: A
Theory of Poetry , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997) because it captures the nature of the inter-generation struggle that I examine in my reading of Crane much better than the more psychologically oriented Oedipus complex. In part this is the result of the element of choice inherent in the concept of the agon . A developing poet (the ephebe) can choose (in Bloom’s analysis) the “strong poet” (typically a predecessor one or two generations removed) they contend with whereas one cannot choose their biological father.
11. Perry Lentz, Private Fleming at Chancellorsville (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press,
2006), pp. 2, 257.
12. Craig Warren, Scars to Prove It: The Civil War Soldier and American Fiction (Kent
State: Kent State Univ. Press, 2009), p. 10, 22, 29.
13. There are promising signs that this critical impasse may finally be breaking as late last year Matthew J. Bolton contributed an essay to the Salem Press Critical Insights edition of
The Red Badge of Courage that focuses on the “context of the 1890s” in relation to the novel.
His interest in this context, however, revolves around the effects of industrialization and urbanization upon the psyche rather than the impact of Civil War veterans upon the ideal of
American manhood during that decade. See Matthew J. Bolton, “ The Red Badge of Courage in the Context of the 1890s,” in The Red Badge of Courage , ed. Eric Carl Link (Pasadena, CA:
Salem Press, 2010), pp. 23-38.

14. Special Enumeration of Civil War Veterans and Their Widows: Eleventh Census of the United States, 1880-1890 , (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1890), tables 123, 124;
Grand Army of the Republic, Journal of the 26th National Encampment (Albany: Wentworth,
1892), pp. 128, 130.
47.
15. Christopher Benfey, The Double-Life of Stephen Crane (New York: Knopf, 1992), p.
16. Grand Army of the Republic, Journal of the 31st Annual Session of the National
Encampment (Lincoln: State Journal Company, 1897), p. 230.
17. See chapter 10 of Anthony Rotundo’s book American Manhood: Transformations in
Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
18. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage , ed. Donald Pizer, 3rd ed. (1895; rpt. New
York: Norton, 1994), p. 80. I primarily cite the standard edition of The Red Badge of Courage , first published in 1895 and reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of the novel. As I note elsewhere, however, I also cite an alternate edition of the novel published in 1982 that follows
Crane’s original handwritten manuscript and the syndicated version of the story that appeared in newspapers throughout the United States in 1894.
Bill Brown offers an alternate reading of the football imagery in The Red Badge of Courage in The Material Unconscious: American
Amusement, Stephen Crane and the Economics of Play (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 125-42. Brown suggests a connection between football and war in the novel that ties both activities to the emerging late nineteenth-century culture of spectatorship.
19. For an overview of the history of American football and its role on college campuses in the nineteenth century see chapter seven of Ronald Smith’s book Sports and Freedom: The
Rise of Big Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988). Kim Townsend

provides a more intimate portrait of college athletics at Harvard University in the 1890s and early 1900s in Manhood at Harvard : William James and Others (New York: Norton, 1996), pp.
97-120.
20. “The Uprising for Pensions,” New York Times , 19 August 1890, p. 4. The Benjamin referred to in the quote above is President Benjamin Harrison, a Union veteran who was elected president on the Republican ticket based in part on his support of the Dependent Pension act.
One of the significant changes made possible by the Dependent Pension act (in contrast to earlier pension legislation) was the awarding of monthly compensation to Union veterans unable to work regardless of whether their disability was directly caused by a combat related injury.
Doctors appointed by the U.S. government, however, were still required to certify that the disability was not the result of “vicious habits” such as drinking. The full text of the act is quoted in both the Journal of the Grand Army’s 24th National Encampment (1890) as well as on the front page of the 29 June 29 1890 edition of the New York Tribune .
21. Numerous articles addressing the supposedly rapid rate of mortality of Civil War veterans were published in the 1890s. Among the more memorable examples are “More Than
Half Are Dead” in the 30 May 1897 edition of the
Galveston Daily News and “Patriotism
Recognized at Last” in the 24 December 1893 issue of the New York Times.
22. Bureau of the Census, tables 125, 126.
23. Miles Orvell, The Real Thing-Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-
1940 (Chapel Hill : Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), 130; Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
(1895), p. 20.
24. John Clendenning, “Visions of War and Versions of Manhood,” Stephen Crane in
War and Peace: A Special Edition of War, Literature and the Arts (1999), 27.

25. The concept of “double-voicing” appears in chapter five of Mikhail Bakhtin’s book
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984). Even though
Bakhtin conceives of “double-voicing” as a literary technique that includes irony, parody, and satire within it, here I use the term as an alternative to these more established approaches to narrative indirection.
26. “Robbing the Soldiers: How the Demagogues Plunder in the Name of the Veterans of the Civil War,” rpt. in Milwaukee Daily Journal , 23 March 1891, p. 1.
27. One notable exception is Charles Johanningsmeier’s “The 1894 Syndicated
Newspaper Appearances of The Red Badge of Courage,” American Literary Realism 40, no. 3
(Spring 2008), 226-247, which examines the layout of the serial edition of the novel as it appeared in a variety of newspapers and how that layout may have affected the reader’s response to both the story and its author.
28. The Correspondence of Stephen Crane , ed. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), p. 69.
29.
“Veterans’ Ranks Thinner by a Year,” rpt. in Thomas A. Gullason, “Additions to the
Canon of Stephen Crane,” Nineteenth Century Fiction , 12 (September 1957), 158.
30. Gullason, p. 159.
31. Stephen Crane, “The Gratitude of a Nation,” The New York City Sketches , ed. R. W.
Stallman and E. R. Hagemann, (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 57, 58, 59.
32. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), p. 51.
33. It is impossible to discuss Henry Binder and the manuscript version of The Red Badge of Courage without addressing the controversy associated with it. Binder, supported by Hershel
Parker, claimed that Crane’s editor at Appleton, Ripley Hitchcock, prevented Crane from

publishing the novel he originally intended. He argued that Hitchcock compelled the author to remove offensive passages from the novel, thereby “maiming” the text. Binder edited and had published the handwritten manuscript, which he believed to be the authoritative text of the novel.
Although I will be referring to the manuscript edition of the novel as well as the syndicated newspaper version of the story, I do not believe that either of these texts holds a privileged position over the standard edition Appleton text. They are cited as evidence of the linguistic compromises Crane needed to make in order to meet and (hopefully) shape the “horizon of expectations” of his audience. For the most recent examination of this textual controversy see
Michael Guemple’s “A Case for the Appleton
Red Badge of Courage
,”
Resources for American
Literary Study , 21, no. 1 (1995), 43-57.
34. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (Manuscript Text), ed. Henry Binder (New York:
Norton, 1982), p. 55.
35. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), p. 25.
36. Correspondence , p. 161.
37. Hoganson, p. 201.
38. Alexander McClurg, “The Red Badge of Hysteria,” rpt. in The Crane Log: A
Documentary Life of Stephen Crane , ed. Paul Sorrentino and Stanley Wertheim (New York:
Hall, 1994), pp. 178, 179.
39. In late 1894, Irving Bacheller sold an abbreviated version of The Red Badge of
Courage (around 15,000 words) to a number of newspapers in the U.S., including the
Philadelphia Press , the New York Press , the San Francisco Examiner , and the Nebraska State-
Journal , where a young Willa Cather helped set the type for the press.

40. The series of war stories referred to as “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” first appeared in the Century magazine during the years 1884-87. Corwin Knapp Linson recalled that, sometime during March 1893, Crane was reading articles from this series while visiting him at his studio. Linson says, “He (i.e. Crane) was squatting like an Indian among the magazines when he gave one a toss of exhausted patience and stood up. ‘I wonder that some of those fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps! They spout eternally of what they did, but they are as emotionless as rocks.” See Corwin Knapp Linson, My Stephen Crane , ed. Edwin H. Cady
(Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1958), p. 37.
41. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage as it Appeared in the New York Press on
December 9, 1894 , ed. Joseph Katz (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967), p.
117.
42. Correspondence , p. 81.
43. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage , (1895), p, 66; Randall W. Allred, “The Gilded
Images of Memory’:
The Red Badge of Courage and ‘The Veteran,” War, Literature and the
Arts (1999), 100.
44. Crane, “The Veteran,” rpt. in The Red Badge of Courage, ed. Donald Pizer, 3rd ed.
(New York: Norton, 1994), p. 172.
45. General Dan Sickles was in fact present at the battle of Chancellorsville, the battle where the fictional Private Henry Fleming claims to have run away. Sickles was also a resident of the state of New York after the war, the state to which Fleming, a member of the fictional
304th New York Volunteers, would have presumably returned.
46. Crane, “The Veteran,” pp. 172, 174.
47. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), p. 8.

48. Crane, “Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo,” The War Dispatches , ed. R.
W. Stallman and E. R. Hagemann (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), p. 154.
49. Brown, pp. 160, 164; Crane, “Marines Signaling under Fire,” pp. 150, 151.