Henry Timrod, Confederate Poet
“Timrod could not carry a musket for the land he loved, but he did something better and far more valuable.
He filled a part which few men in the grand army of the South could have filled.
He was the trumpet of the Confederacy….”
With this flattery a Southerner recounted the war record of Henry Timrod. An ardent Southern patriot and wholehearted Confederate, he never went to war himself, but he aided the cause in the best way he could— with his pen. His efforts to celebrate the Southern struggle, and to inspire his people in time of war, have earned for Timrod unchallenged renown as the poet laureate of the Confederacy.
As a youngster, “Harry” probably acquired an affinity for writing from his learned father, whose bookbinding shop drew the literati of Charleston. The elder Timrod even wrote a short poem to his son. But these fatherly influences ended in 1838 when William Timrod died, leaving a widow with little money and a son not yet ten years old. Nevertheless, Henry continued his education at the city’s finest school. In class seated next to him was another young Charlestonian with literary gifts; Paul Hamilton Hayne would be Timrod’s lifelong friend.
The lads spent much time composing and comparing poetry—so much time, in fact, that their labors once earned them a whacking on the backside from their schoolmaster. Hayne later recalled young Timrod’s energy and vibrant passion, but he also saw him as shy and something of a bookworm. Another friend remembered Timrod as a loner who liked to take long walks in the woods.
There was little time for naturestudy, however, after Timrod began taking courses in 1845 at the state university in Athens, Georgia. The young student apparently took little interest in his classes, though he showed a genuine flair for Latin. From the tedium of the lectern Timrod found escape in the company of young women and (as rumor had it) in the company of the bottle. His contempt for academics, his remorse for intemperance, and his fondness for the ladies he made evident in “What Athens Dull,” an unpublished verse presumably addressed to himself. If ten honest men could have saved Sodom, the young poet reasoned, then three modest maidens should be enough to remind a sentimental sot (or, as he put it, “thou maudlin rake”) of the proper course in life.
In the end Timrod found college life unsatisfying, and he left after a year and a half. Later he told Hayne that much of his time at school was spent “in the composition of love verses, frantic or tender.” Some of these harmless rhymes were later sent to Charleston newspapers, and their publication was Timrod’s first printed work. But the poet’s professional career actually commenced in 1849, when the Southern Literary Messenger began accepting his verse.
Payments for these occasional contributions provided a sadly insufficient income. Prodded by financial necessity, young Timrod tried reading law in the office of the esteemed James L. Pettigru (the unabashed Unionist who once declared, “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.”) Timrod learned soon that he had not the makings of an attorney. On one occasion, Petigru sent him across town to deliver a verbal message. Halfway to his destination Timrod realized he had forgotten his communication, and was forced to return humbly. “Why Harry, you are a fool!” Petigru thundered. Timrod took the hint and sought employment elsewhere.
Soon he began tutoring for Carolina planters. “He was very absentminded,” recalled a student, “and was often so absorbed in poetical fancies that he would appear peculiar.” In the midst of instruction Timrod might drift off into reverie, then catch himself and cry out, “Now begin!” Despite such bungling the young poet managed to earn a meager income throughout the 1850s. During this time he published a quantity of verse that was collected and printed as a book in 1859. The volume gained some good notices but poor sales.
By the start of the war, Timrod’s reputation as a poet had spread, but it remained strongest in Charleston, where he enjoyed the company of Hayne, William Gilmore Simms, and other men of letters. Like his colleagues, Timrod was an ardent Southern nationalist and an avowed secessionist. When delegates from the seceded states met at Montgomery to form the Confederacy in February 1861, the poet celebrated the event by composing “Ethnogenesis.”
A nation among nations; and the world
Shall soon behold in many a distant port
War with the North was as yet undeclared, but…
“What if, both mad and blinded in their rage,
Our foes should fling us down their mortal gage,
And with a hostile step profane our sod!
We shall not shrink, my brothers, but go forth
To meet them, marshaled by the Lord of Hosts….”
As did other Southerners, Timrod confidently proclaimed that cotton, “the snow of Southern summers,” would be the bulwark of the new nation’s independence. This conviction he expressed in “The Cotton Boll,” which ranks with “Ethnogenesis” among his best war poems. Writing in the summer of 1861, Timrod was certain of victory, as he affirmed
June 2022
In 1901, a monument with a bronze bust of Timrod was dedicated in Charleston, S.C., as one of the Dead Poets’ Society Memorials. Perhaps a greater honor was given to him when the state’s General Assembly passed a resolution in 1911 instituting the verses of his poem “Carolina” as the lyrics of the official state anthem. in his poem’s concluding lines:
Oh, help us, Lord! to roll the crimson flood
Back on its course, and, while our banners wing
Northward, strike with us! till the Goth shall cling
To his own blasted altar-stones, and crave
Mercy; and we shall grant it, and dictate The lenient future of his fate
There, where some rotting ships and crumbling quays
Shall one day mark the Port which ruled the Western seas.
Is he speaking of Boston, or New York?
Poems (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin 1899) Laura Fontaine M. Davidson, comp., Confederacy Rufus H. Darby Printing Co., 1903) F. V. M. Painter, Poets of the of Henry Timrod
Cullings from the (Washington: •
Editor’s note: Steve drew this piece from his article, “Henry Timrod: Poet Laureate of the Confederacy,” published in Civil War Times Illustrated, February 1983. HISTORYNET has kindly given its permission for us to republish from it.
Steve has also dawn on his two recent works on General Hood (Mercer University Press, 2018, 2019). Together they have won book awards from the New York CWRT, the Atlanta CWRT and the Military Order of the Stars and Bars.
Ulysses S. Grant
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South (New York: American Book Company, 1903) Esther Park Ellinger, The Southern War Poetry of the Civil War (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970 [1918]) Francis Trevelyan Miller, ed. The Photographic History of The Civil War in Ten Volumes. Volume nine: Poetry and Eloquence of Blue and Gray, (New York: Review of Reviews Co., 1911), 32.