American Civil War

The American Civil War (1861–1865) is the distant but decisive historical ground on which the Trask family drama is built. It is not a war that characters fight in any sustained way, but one they endlessly reinterpret, lie about, and react against. Cyrus Trask, the patriarch, turns a six-week wounding into a lifetime of fraudulent glory; his son Adam carries the war's moral weight into his own life as a soldier; and the secret of Cyrus's deception becomes the central inheritance the brothers must reckon with. The war is less a remembered event than a shaping absence—a story that was never true but that made everything else true or false in its wake.

Cyrus Trask's Fabricated War Record

Cyrus Trask entered the Union Army in June 1862, received three months of training in Connecticut, and marched south in September. On October 12, 1862, in his first and only encounter with the enemy, he was hit in the right leg by a heavy slug that shattered the bone beyond repair. He was sent to a field hospital, where surgeons cut away the shreds, sawed the bone off square, and burned the open flesh; the lead bullet he bit during the amputation was kept as a souvenir. By January 1863 he was home, discharged, with a crude beechwood leg he had carved himself. He was not at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Richmond, or Appomattox—none of the great battles he later claimed to have witnessed. His discharge papers, discovered among his effects after his death, proved he had never been anywhere near those fields. Yet over the decades Cyrus built a towering public reputation as a military authority. He bought every book about war, studied maps, learned the units and their colonels, and began to write letters and articles about the conduct of the war. His criticisms were intelligent and convincing, and he became a spokesman for the Grand Army of the Republic, consulted by the War Department on army organization. He never promoted himself beyond private—Private Trask he began, and Private Trask he remained—which made his ubiquity at every major action all the more remarkable. He managed to convey, without ever saying it directly, that he had been one of Lincoln's closest, warmest, and most trusted friends. The lie was so complete that even his sons believed it until after his death.

The War's Impact on Adam Trask

Adam Trask served five years in the cavalry during the Indian Wars, but his experience of soldiering was shaped by his father's Civil War mythology. Cyrus had drilled his sons in the manual of arms from the time they could walk, forced them to march for miles carrying knapsacks loaded with stones, and lectured them nightly on the nature of a soldier. He told Adam that a soldier is the most holy of all humans because he is the most tested, and that the army would strip off a man's dignity, make him live and eat and sleep close to other men, and then dress him up so he could not tell himself from the others. Adam absorbed these lessons with horror. He did not want to fight, and far from learning to love it, he felt an increasing revulsion for violence. He fired his carbine to miss, committing treason against his unit, and was commended three times and decorated for bravery—not for killing but for venturing his life to bring in wounded men and volunteering for field hospital work. The emotion of nonviolence built in him until it became a prejudice. When he thought back to the piled and burning bodies of the Indian campaigns, he saw not the future farms but only the torn bellies of fine humans. The Civil War, refracted through his father's lies, had given him a father he could not trust and a military career he did not want.

The Revelation of the Fraud

After Cyrus's death, his attorneys informed Charles and Adam that he had left over ninety-three thousand dollars in the bank and ten thousand dollars in good securities—a fortune that seemed impossible for a man whose G.A.R. salary was a hundred and thirty-five dollars a month. Charles, who had loved his father with a fierce and jealous love, was tormented by the question of where the money had come from. He found Cyrus's discharge papers and realized that his father had never been at any of the battles he had described. "He was not at Chancellorsville. He was not at Gettysburg or the Wilderness or Richmond or Appomattox," Charles told Adam. The discovery that Cyrus had lied about the war led Charles to believe he had stolen the money as well. Adam, by contrast, refused to believe it. "I don't believe he stole any money," he said. "I believe in the war he did just what he said he did and was just where he said he was." When Charles pointed to the discharge papers, Adam replied, "They could be wrong. I believe they are wrong. I believe in my father." The brothers' different responses to the same evidence—Charles's agonized suspicion, Adam's willed faith—became the template for their entire relationship. The Civil War, which Cyrus had never really fought, became the thing that finally divided his sons.

The War as Moral and Narrative Touchstone

The Civil War haunts East of Eden not as a series of battles but as a test of truth and a source of guilt. Adam's revulsion against violence, his inability to find good enough reasons for killing, is a direct consequence of his father's glorification of a war he never fought. Charles's obsessive love for Cyrus is poisoned by the knowledge that the father he worshipped was a liar. And the money Cyrus left—the fortune that enables Adam to buy the Salinas Valley ranch and later to lose it in the lettuce venture—is tainted by the suspicion that it was stolen from the G.A.R., the organization built on the memory of the war. The novel's central moral question—whether a person can choose his own path or is bound by inheritance—is first posed by the Civil War. Cyrus's lie about his service is the original sin of the Trask family, and the brothers' attempts to reckon with it prefigure the larger struggles of the next generation. The war is the story that was never true, but it made everything else true or false in its wake.