As some of you may be aware, the civil war era is for some reason a rather popular time period for vampires to be from. I have a plan to address and explain why so many vampires seem to have been sired during the civil war, and one of them is at some point going to either have a POV flashback sequence or tell the story of how they got turned, and a question came to my mind: what would someone living in that time understand a vampire to be? The war predates Bram Stoker's famous book by several decades, which leaves me with basically no frame of reference for what sorts of assumptions an average Joe in that time period would have upon discovering they're dealing with a real live vampire. I know full well that myths about vampires looooong predate that book, but I'm not sure what form they would have predominantly taken in that time period.
I think that whole thing is to conflate the two aesthetics: vampires and the Civil War. They're two cool things that are fun to put together. As for what it would look like? Who knows, but the vampires would have no shortage of victims or easy to explain disappearances. You could give them some period politics as motivation if you want. I picture the vampires being slaveholders in the South for some reason.
No, I'm talking about what the average Civil War Era American would understand a vampire to be, what they'd think they're like based on the stories they'd heard about them at the time. The Civil War Era equivalent of that thing when every fictional character in the post-twilight years who discovers a vampire just had to wonder if they sparkled.
Got it. Still no idea. Nearly everyone was illiterate then, so probably whatever they were likely to glean from ghost stories and folklore. There's probably a book somewhere about the historical depiction of vampires. Or how they've been portrayed over time. They have one for nearly everything else.
"Everyone was illiterate then"? I beg to differ. I've seen the textbooks of the day and the kids had to master more difficult material by the end of 8th grade than seniors in high school have to cope with now. That said, @WritingInTheDark, you could read Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire novel Carmilla. It was published in 1872, closer to your period. Le Fanu was Irish and the novella is set in Austria so you get aristocrats and so on, but it might give you an idea of beliefs at the time. Or check out this video from Caitlin Doughty. (Come to think of it, one of the "vampire" incidents she speaks of took place in Rhode Island . . . )
Penny Dreadfuls existed in the U.K. a few decades before the war, so if you allow some immigration that may affect some people's perceptions of vampires. Not sure if there was anything similar in the U.S. at the time 'Varney the Vampire', for example, was published in 1845.
assuming they were in school .. many poor kids weren’t … so you get a split literacy where it is reasonably high for the rich but very poor for the poor on point vampire myths have been around for a long time so I suspect the common appreciation would be that based on folk tales ie more or less human but with fangs
Between the publication of Polidori's The Vampyre in 1819 and Dracula in 1897, the classic romantic gothic fiction depiction of vampires didn't change much, but there were also traditional stories of vampires particularly amongst those from Germanic and Eastern European countries. Depends whether the person was from the "old country" or not, I suspect.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26062071 Paraphrased: In 1850, the South had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, exceeded only by the free states, Scotland, and Prussia, which had the highest literacy rates in Europe. 80% of free whites were literate as well as were 10% of slaves and free black people. The censuses back then asked for whether citizens were literate or not, so at least for the white population, statistics are verifiable.
Hey, my people were all upper Southern and Northerners. They went to school. Some even became teachers. What can I say?
It seems there were several cases of "vampire panic" in rural New England in the 19th century, probably caused by folks observing the effects of tuberculosis outbreaks. If rural New Englanders believed, then I don't think it's a stretch to think that maybe people in the South might too. But I think probably more of a Nosferatu image than Dracula. And of course in the South, you've got a melange of beliefs from France, Spain, Africa and the Caribbean regarding blood sucking shapeshifters that you can draw from.
I think this is it. If they were literate and well-read, they might have read The Vampyre. Otherwise, they might not even have much of a concept of vampires. Vampires were an old world concept not many people believed in by the nineteenth century. I've never heard of American vampire lore predating Dracula, though @Jlivy3 might be on to something with the panic in New England. That might be worth looking up. I haven't read The Vampyre, so I can't speak to that lore, but if the character had a concept of vampires at all, it would very likely be from the old stories of the dead turning to mist to escape from the grave and torment or kill people, especially their own family. (Details varied by region.)
What others have said, "Popular culture" was nothing like it is today, and I don't even mean the things popular but how the information travelled. Short story: I remember in my youth (late 80s) I visited my cousins down south, and somehow the conversation of cartoons came up, and I was mortified to learn they did not know who the Bionic Six were, at the time the Bionic Six were the biggest names in cartoons at least where I lived. I bring that up just as an example of something from recent times, A time when everyone had a phone, TV, and radio. Today with the internet a fad in NYC people know about it in the most remote cave in Africa within minutes. But in the 1860s information travelled dramatically slower, especially between the poor population. I would suspect the average American durning the civil war had no idea what a Vampire was. It wasn't a universal concept, there was no mass media related to it. I would assume the average American would view any non-human scary creature as a general "monster" or "demon." (and even those concepts would be different viewed different based on the region) I don't think many would call them vampires but when they reach for the blood they would assume it some kind of devil creature.
I imagine it would have a lot to do with what part of Europe their ancestry came from, and how in touch they were with it through family traditions. Maybe they remember their grandparents telling them folk tales about vampires. The old folk ideas about them were very different from what we're used to today, which has filtered through Dracula and from there been refined and modified through movies and mass media culture. Hit up wikipedia or elsewhere and look for old Romanian or eastern european myths about vampires. Lots of strange ideas—like they need to be buried upright at a crossroads, and that they gorge on blood until the body swells up like a tick. I think that one comes from the way a dead body swells with gas and also bleeds from the mouth and nose sometimes.
Think "folk beliefs" rather than "pop culture". As always, I would steer you to the works of Manly Wade Wellman for a good feel for rural attitudes towards the supernatural.
Mine lived in Arkansas and South Carolina. Most were educated even though they weren't rich slave owners. Have you looked into legends about the loup garou? Not a vampire, but werewolves are kinda cool, too.
Eastern European tales of vampires go back much farther than Dracula. So most knowledge would be folk tales from the old country. So the knowledge would likely be limited to the areas those immigrants settled.
