ABSTRACT
A cartoon published by Harper’s Weekly in April 1865 depicts a white soldier and a black soldier shaking hands, each using a crutch due to a missing leg; the cartoon is titled “A Man Knows a Man” (see Figure 4.1). This image is indicative of the impulse in Civil War literature to fi nd commonality among different people – and to understand that commonality as a result of the war’s reshaping of identities. Because the war was conceived as pitting like against like, it changed the way authors conceptualized the relationship between the objects they were comparing. Furthermore, because this set of “objects” included men and women on the cusp between slavery and freedom, the fi gure of the former slave was central to authors’ meditations on comparison and their anxieties about who was deemed comparable to whom.
