The publication of “Life in the Iron-Mills” in 1861 established Rebecca Harding Davis’s reputation as a leading author in the movement toward literary realism. Published on the eve of the Civil War, “Life” serves as a prelude to the significant body of Davis’s Civil War writings that followed. “War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums,” she wrote in her 1904 reminiscences,¹ reflecting on the realities of combat rather than the popular romanticized depictions of war. During the Civil War, Davis gained firsthand experience of the conflict between the North...

The guard-house was, in fact, nothing but a shed in the middle of a stubble-field. It had been built for a cider-press last summer; but since Captain Dorr had gone into the army, his regiment had camped over half his plantation, and the shed was boarded up, with heavy wickets at either end, to hold whatever prisoners might fall into their hands from Floyd’s forces.¹ It was a strong point for the Federal troops, his farm,—a sort of wedge in the Rebel Cheat counties of Western Virginia.² Only one prisoner was in the guard-house now. The sentry, a raw...

What kind of sword, do you think, was that which old Christian had in that famous fight of his with Apollyon, long ago? He cut the fiend to the marrow with it, you remember, at last; though the battle went hardly with him, too, for a time. Some of his blood, Bunyan says, is on the stones of the valley to this day.¹ That is a vague record of the combat between the man and the dragon in that strange little valley, with its perpetual evening twilight and calm, its meadows crusted with lilies, its herdboy with his quiet song,...

Sometime in the year 1850, a tobacco-planter in Southern Georgia (Perry H. Oliver by name) bought a likely negro woman with some other field-hands. She was stout, tough-muscled, willing, promised to be a remunerative servant; her baby, however, a boy a few months old, was only thrown in as a makeweight to the bargain, or rather because Mr. Oliver would not consent to separate mother and child. Charity only could have induced him to take the picaninny,¹ in fact, for he was but a lump of black flesh, born blind, and with the vacant grin of idiocy, they thought, already...

A winter’s evening. Do you know how that comes here among the edges of the mountains that fence in the great Mississippi valley? The sea-breath in the New-England States thins the air and bleaches the sky, sucks the vitality out of Nature, I fancy, to put it into the brains of the people: but here, the earth every day in the year pulses out through hill or prairie or creek a full, untamed animal life,—shakes off the snow too early in spring, in order to put forth untimed and useless blossoms, wasteful of her infinite strength. So when this...

A thorough American, who comprehends what America has to do, and means to help on with it, ought to choose to be born in New England, for the vitalized brain, finely-chorded nerves, steely self-control,—then to go West, for more live, muscular passion, succulent manhood, naked-handed grip of his work. But when he wants to die, by all means let him hunt out a town in the valley of Pennsylvania or Virginia: Nature and man there are so ineffably self-contained, content with that which is, shut in from the outer surge, putting forth their little peculiarities, as tranquil and glad...

When would you recommend the funeral, doctor?” Mrs. Mickle sniffed and wiped her eye.

“To-morrow. If Joe comes, he can be here before that. And, I say, Mrs. Mickle,” pulling the girth on his horse tighter, and straightening his saddle bags, “if the girl—you know—has the old trouble in her brain—you understand?—put cold water to her head, and lose no time sending for me. I don’t like the look in her eyes. They’re asleep.”

He trotted off, his horse’s hoofs falling dull on the sandy beach.

The little wooden house stood at the end of a...

A raw, gusty afternoon: one of the last dragging breaths of a nor’easter, which swept, in the beginning of November, from the Atlantic coast to the base of the Alleghanies. It lasted a week, and brought the winter,—for autumn had lingered unusually late that year; the fat bottom-lands of Pennsylvania, yet green, deadened into swamps, as it passed over them: summery, gay bits of lakes among the hills glazed over with muddy ice; the forests had been kept warm between the western mountains, and held thus late even their summer’s strength and darker autumn tints, but the fierce ploughing...

My brother Josiah I call a successful man,—very successful, though only an attorney in a manufacturing town. But he fixed his goal, and reached it. He belongs to the ruling class,—men with slow, measuring eyes and bull-dog jaws,—men who know their own capacity to an atom’s weight, and who go through life with moderate, inflexible, unrepenting steps. He looks askance at me when I cross his path; he is in the great market making his way: I learned long ago that there was no place there for me. Yet I like to look in, out of the...

I remember a story which I would like to tell to young girls—girls, especially, who belong to that miserable border land between wealth and poverty, whose citizens struggle to meet the demands of the one state out of the necessities of the other. I hope that none but the class for whom it is written may read it. I think I remember enough of their guild language to make it intelligible to them; but to others it would, perhaps, be worse than meaningless. I have a man’s reverence for them; I dower them with all the beauty of both...

The village of Tarrytown, in which I have been for forty years an instructor of youth, (indeed, the only instructor), lies among the closest ranges of the West Virginia hills.

The man whose history I propose to give you has, since his boyhood, been acknowledged by the citizens of Tarrytown as an exceptionable character; they have come (sure test of a hero) to be proud of him, in that he is of a different type from themselves, to humor his little oddities, I sometimes fear, in an unwholesome degree; they point him out to new comers, as soon as they...