In her "Clad in Victory," Virginia Dickinson Reynolds reveals that both her father, Loren, and grandfather, Emily Dickinson's uncle Samuel Fowler Dickinson Jr., Emily's father Edward's youngest brother, "espoused the cause of the Secessionists" in the War between the States and that her father fought for the Confederacy. According to her, "the passionate strain in the Dickinsons which produced the white heat of Puritanical virtues in New England, made of my father an enthusiastic and unreconstructed 'rebel' in the Confederate States." In this statement, she highlights the fact that this upper-class family felt acutely a sense of social responsibility, at least in the mid-nineteenth century. The members went their separate ways in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, the sons of Samuel Fowler Dickinson Sr. forced to recoup the fortune he had squandered on public works, most famously Amherst College. The sense of social responsibility that had bankrupted one generation led Emily Dickinson's father to serve in Congress and the Massachusetts Legislature, and his brother to argue for and nephew to fight for the Confederacy. Though readers might be surprised by this fact, to be against slavery was not necessarily to be an abolitionist, and the Dickinsons who were Southern landed gentry perhaps had more in common with the conservative Whig Edward Dickinson than has previously been explored (Reynolds' comment about her "great uncles... advertising a reward for my father's capture, alive or dead,'" notwithstanding).

· What are the implications of class status for understanding the Dickinsons' various political stances and social assumptions? Edward Dickinson was responsible for bringing two mail deliveries per day to Amherst (Leyda, YH 2:32) and was instrumental in bringing the railroad to Western Massachusetts. These facts of his life tell us something about class status and power and are worth taking into account when analyzing the Dickinsons' political positions.

· What's significant, e.g., about Austin Dickinson paying $500 so that a poor Irishman would serve in his stead for the Union cause while his Georgia cousin, just as wealthy or wealthier than the Amherst Dickinsons, actually fought for the Confederate cause?

· Do Emily Dickinson's poetic responses to the Civil War extend beyond her poems appearing in Union publications to raise money for the Sanitary Commission? E.g., does the manuscript book, or fascicle 24 (R. W. Franklin's numbering), constitute extended poetic reflections on the bitter conflict?

· What about class status and attitudes toward war? What are the various roles of geography, of the location of the war, of territory? If the Amherst Dickinsons are somewhat "southern" in that they are landed gentry, then what begins to account for the differences in their responses to the Civil War?

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