Patriotic Gore was published by Oxford University Press in 1962, the product of fifteen years of reading and research that Wilson had undertaken in parallel with his other critical work. At nearly 800 pages, it is his longest book and, by common critical consensus, his masterpiece — a work that combines literary criticism, biography, political history, and moral philosophy into a unified meditation on the American Civil War and its literature.
The title comes from the state song of Maryland — “The despot’s heel is on thy shore, / Maryland! My Maryland! / His torch is at thy temple door, / Maryland! My Maryland! / Avenge the patriotic gore / That flecked the streets of Baltimore” — and it sets the tone for Wilson’s savage introductory essay, in which he compares the behavior of nations to the behavior of sea slugs: organisms that expand by consuming their neighbors, rationalizing aggression with moral rhetoric. This introduction, which outraged patriotic readers when the book was published, frames the entire study as an investigation of what happens to language and thought when a nation goes to war.
The book proceeds through a series of biographical-critical essays on the writers who lived through the Civil War and shaped its meaning. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which Wilson treats as a more complex and interesting novel than its reputation suggests). Abraham Lincoln, whose prose Wilson considers the finest produced by any American president. The Southern diarists — Mary Chesnut, whose wartime journal Wilson calls “a masterpiece,” and the Confederate intellectuals who constructed the ideology of the Lost Cause. Ulysses S. Grant, whose Personal Memoirs Wilson ranks as one of the great American autobiographies. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose war experience transformed him from a young idealist into the pragmatist and skeptic who would reshape American law.
Wilson reads each of these figures not just as a writer but as a consciousness shaped by the war — registering the conflict’s violence, its moral confusion, and its aftermath. The essays on Lincoln’s prose are among the finest pieces of literary criticism ever written about American English, showing how Lincoln moved from the florid rhetoric of his early speeches to the compressed, biblical cadences of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. The chapter on Mary Chesnut rescued her journal from historical obscurity and established it as a central document of American literature.
The controversial introduction aside, the book is remarkably even-handed about North and South. Wilson refuses to treat the war as a simple morality play — he acknowledges the evil of slavery while also recognizing the genuine traditions, loyalties, and intellectual culture that the Confederacy destroyed. This refusal to moralize infuriated critics on both sides, but it gives the book a moral complexity that propaganda, whether of the right or the left, cannot achieve.
Collecting Patriotic Gore
First edition (Oxford University Press, New York, 1962): Red cloth, dust jacket. A large, heavy book.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $20–$50
- Later paperback editions: $10–$20
Wilson’s masterpiece and one of the greatest works of American literary criticism. First editions in good dust jackets are increasingly scarce.