In his book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War, the literary critic Edmund Wilson explained the most important consequence of that war in a single profound paragraph: The impulse to unification was strong in the nineteenth century . . . and if we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in …In his book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War, the literary critic Edmund Wilson explained the most important consequence of that war in a single profound paragraph: The impulse to unification was strong in the nineteenth century . . . and if we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in …