Notes

1. "On Picket Duty" is attributed to "Mrs. W. T. Johnson" in the table of contents for volume 13 of the Atlantic Monthly. The poem appeared in the April 1864 issue of the magazine. (According to the magazine's convention, poems were typically unattributed in the body of the magazine, but tables of contents attributed the works.) Laura Winthrop Johnson (1824–1889) was the sister of Major Theodore Winthrop, an Atlantic Monthly contributor and one of the Union's first martyrs. In 1862, after Winthrop's death, Laura became good friends with Annie Fields, wife of Atlantic editor James T. Fields. They discussed literature, and Laura showed Annie some of her verses. Annie gave one of them, "On Picket Duty," to her husband (Rita K. Gollin, Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002], 150–51).
    
   "On Picket Duty" also appeared in the May 14, 1864 issue of the Anglo-African.
   
2. The blood of slaves. The Union declaration—at once an acknowledgment of the national sin of slavery and a pledge to fight for abolition—causes the tide of battle to turn in the Union's favor. Johnson suggests that, because God willed slavery's destruction, Union armies would only meet with success once the government attacked slavery as a matter of moral necessity.
3. A Columbiad was an "American cannon invented by Colonel Bomford, of very large calibre, used for throwing solid shot or shells" (Colonel H. L. Scott, Military Dictionary [New York: Van Nostrand, 1863], 164). Civil War Columbiads weighed between 9,000 and nearly 49,000 pounds. Captain Thomas Rodman's innovative casting technique was used to make the largest guns for coastal defenses (see Scott).
4. The miasma over the Shiloh battlefield. Approximately 20,000 soldiers were killed or wounded during the Battle of Shiloh (April 6–7, 1862). The battle introduced mid-nineteenth-century Americans to warfare on a new and terrible scale. On the battle's second day, advancing Union soldiers were confronted with the previous day's dead and wounded (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The American Civil War [London: Penguin, 1991], 413).
5. Reports of the horrific conditions in Richmond's military prisons caused outrage in the North, and provided Union editors with ammunition in the ongoing propaganda war. In early December 1863, Harper's Weekly published a double-page illustration of skeletal Union prisoners at Richmond's Belle Isle, heavily guarded by well-fed, smiling men. More shocking illustrations followed in the latter half of the war. Focused on the enemy's crimes, Johnson does not consider the brutal conditions in Union prisons. As Benjamin Cloyd points out, "grim statistics" show that each side failed "to care appropriately for prisoners of war" (Benjamin G. Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010], 11).
6. See the parable of the lost or prodigal son, Luke 15:11–32. Johnson casts the South as the lost son, and the North as his righteous elder brother. In the biblical parable, the "kind Father" is God. However, readers who encountered "On Picket Duty" in the spring of 1864 may have interpreted Johnson's figure as a forgiving Lincoln. The president had issued his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction on December 8, 1863. For more on the Proclamation, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 35.