Professor David Blight:
Okay, there's an outline up
here.
I'm going to try to write a
little bigger from now on,
and it's been already suggested
I use capital letters and maybe
practice my printing a little
better.
I will do that too.
I'm not very high-tech.
I will occasionally use some
visuals, slides here and there,
a painting here and there,
an image now and then,
and certainly maps,
especially in dealing with the
1850s and the coming of the
Civil War.
But every lecture will have an
outline in front of you,
and the intention in every case
is to get to the fifth part of
that outline.
I almost always do.
Almost.
But at least you'll have a
sense of the structure of the
topics or the themes that this
lecture is supposed to work its
way through.
I do welcome your questions.
I'll ask at times if you have
any questions.
This is obviously a terribly
formal situation,
me up here on this stage and
you out there,
looking into your laptops in
some cases, doing whatever
you're doing on your laptops.
Just don't do what one student
did a year ago,
though.
He was right back there in that
aisle-way, halfway back.
He came in--it was the day I
was lecturing on the Dred Scott
decision, for some reason I've
never forgotten that--and he
whipped out the Yale Daily
News,
and he just was enjoying the
Yale Daily News.
I didn't know there was that
much to read in it for that
long, most of the time.
But he's just reading the
Yale Daily News in front
of him.
And at one point I stopped,
rather loudly,
and I said, "The Dred Scott
decision is not covered in
today's Yale Daily News."
And he didn't hear me.
So I shouted it again,
and by that time the whole
class was beginning to laugh,
uncomfortably,
and he finally realized what
was going on.
The poor guy crumpled up his
newspaper and walked out the
back and he never came back.
I felt a little badly about it
but--Just don't make it so
obvious.
All right, does everybody have
a syllabus, anyone lacking a
syllabus, everyone's got a copy?
We may need some more,
the balcony people need
syllabi.
They're hiding up there.
David, do you have any extras?
Professor David Blight:
None left.
Okay, we'll have more on
Thursday.
And I should put it on the Web.
Dumb.
I will put it up,
this afternoon we'll get it up
on the Web, through the
Registrar's site or however.
Today I'm going to take up the
topic primarily of why the
American Civil War period has
had,
still has, such a hold on the
American, and for that matter
international,
historical imagination.
That's what I want to talk
about primarily.
But I want to say a word or two
about the structure of the
course and what you need to do,
as quickly as possible.
First of all every lecture,
if you look at the syllabus,
has a topic,
a title of a kind.
I will not get behind,
in spite of what it may feel
like.
The readings are listed each
week.
We are using,
among other things--there's a
combination of readings,
in fact,
a rich combination of
historical monograph,
historical kind of syntheses,
two works of fiction.
Two novels, one by Louisa May
Alcott, a famous short,
classic little book called
Hospital Sketches,
which was based on Alcott's
personal experience as a nurse
in Civil War hospitals,
an experience that all but
overwhelmed her,
emotionally,
psychologically,
and she in some ways could not
stop thinking about it.
We also are reading--using two
readers;
that is, collections of
documents.
One is a collection of
documents by,
mostly by and somewhat about,
Abraham Lincoln,
a reader edited by Michael
Johnson.
There's Nicole Ivy,
entering as we speak,
the eighth teaching assistant.
Sorry Nicole,
we just did intros.
Anyway, one of the readers is
Lincoln, the great speeches,
the great public letters.
We won't use every document in
the book but the great Lincoln
stuff is all there and well
introduced.
The other reader,
which we'll use virtually every
week in the course,
and teaching assistants will be
free with this to assign
whichever documents they so
choose,
any given week.
I'm still taking the plastic
off this one.
It's edited by Bill Gienapp,
a great Civil War historian,
recently deceased.
It's a collection of documents
from essentially the Mexican War
right on through Reconstruction,
many of them very brief and
short documents,
allowing us at times to teach
with a document.
It's possible you'll have an
entire discussion section that
centers around a single
document, as well as the other
reading you did as background.
The other novel I neglected to
mention is a very new novel.
And I'm taking a risk in this
course.
For years and years,
and I won't admit how many,
I've always taught Michael
Shaara's great Civil War novel,
The Killer Angels,
which I would venture a quarter
of you have probably already
read.
All right, how many of you have
already read Killer
Angels?
Ah-ha.
We're not reading it this time.
You can't take that week off.
We're reading E.L.
Doctorow's new novel called
The March,
which has only been out about a
year, just into paperback.
It's Doctorow,
the great modern novelist of,
well, urban America,
of race in America,
of so many things.
He has actually a brilliant
short story in the current
New Yorker,
if you haven't read it.
It may not appeal to all of you.
It's really about middle-age
men in the suburbs.
I got it.
Any rate, Doctorow's
March is about Sherman's
march to the sea.
It's about Sherman but it's
also about all the people around
him.
And I think Doctorow
accomplished something
extraordinary in that novel,
which so few American writers
of fiction have ever quite been
able to imagine--he's not alone
but not many have--and that is
fully realize slave characters.
Those he invents.
A lot of real people in that
book, and much of it--like so
many other of Doctorow's great
works,
like Ragtime,
if you've read Ragtime,
or others--much of the
language,
the dialog, is verbatim out of
historical sources.
You might even want to read
Sherman's memoirs in tandem with
it, if you have the time.
Whole portions of it come
directly out of Sherman's
memoirs, and then there are
characters invented around it.
Anyway, it's that last,
horrible, devastating,
destructive,
evil, but sometimes good,
year and a half of the Civil
War in Georgia and South
Carolina when the Civil War
became a truly kind of total
modern affair.
It's a novel about this beast
of war itself but it's very much
a novel about what this war was
about.
Anyway.
I don't want to go into all the
readings.
I divide this course in three
parts which may or may not be
obvious the first time you
glance at the syllabus.
But essentially the first third
of the course is the coming of
the Civil War,
it's the story from roughly the
mid-1840s through Fort Sumter.
And the second third of the
course is essentially the war
itself, where we tackle not only
how the Civil War was fought,
but we tackle what it was
about, and we tackle the
question of Confederate defeat
and Union victory.
How do we explain that?
And we especially tackle
questions of meaning.
If a war of such devastation
can have meaning in the end,
what are those meanings?
It's, I think,
arguably the most important
take-home set of questions and
answers you might take out of
this course.
And of course that means we
dwell a good deal on
emancipation,
the single most revolutionary
result of the Civil War,
and arguably the single most
revolutionary historical moment
in American history.
The liberation of 4.2 million
slaves to some kind of freedom
and some kind of citizenship,
at least for awhile.
And the third third of the
course is, of course,
Reconstruction.
That "brief shining moment" as
Du Bois once called it,
of about eleven years from the
end of the Civil--from
Appomattox to the disputed
election of 1876 and '77.
Twelve years.
One of the most vexing,
topsy-turvy,
turbulent, embittered periods
of American history that
historians still fight over,
to say the least.
It is there where we'll try to
understand the consequences of
the Civil War.
This is a course at the end of
the day about the causes and
consequences,
as well as the course,
of this event.
Now--but today is January
15^(th), it is Martin Luther
King's birthday.
Now I'll start with a very
famous passage.
It's not usually the passage
you hear from the "I Have A
Dream" speech.
Almost always when the Dream
speech is quoted--and now it's
quoted in commercials,
right?
Numerous times,
or on radio spots,
background.
King's voice,
as though it's some kind of
American chorus for whatever-
when,
at any moment we need to feel
better about ourselves and about
race relations.
We often just skip right over
the first two or three
paragraphs of the speech where
the central metaphor he sets up
in the speech is what he called
"the promissory note,"
in the "bank of justice."
"I am happy to join with you
today in what will go down in
history as the greatest
demonstration for freedom in the
history of our nation.
And so we have come here."
Excuse me.
"Five score years ago"--and
here he is drawing directly off
Lincoln--"five score years ago a
great American in whose symbolic
shadow we stand today signed the
Emancipation Proclamation."
This was of course August 1963.
A hot, a brutally hot August
day, King on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial.
"This momentous decree came as
a great beacon,
light of hope to millions of
Negro slaves who had been seared
in the flames of withering
injustice.
It came as a joyous daybreak,"
he says, "to end the long night
of their captivity."
That sentence is almost
directly from the Bible.
"But one hundred years later
the Negro still is not free.
One hundred years later the
life of the Negro is still sadly
crippled by the manacles of
segregation and the chains of
discrimination.
One hundred years later the
Negro lives on a lonely island
of poverty, in the midst of a
vast ocean of material
prosperity.
One hundred years later the
Negro is still languished in the
corners of American society and
finds himself an exile in his
own land.
And so we've come here today to
dramatize a shameful condition.
In a sense we've come here,
we've come to our nation's
capital, to cash a check.
When the architects of our
Republic wrote the magnificent
words of the Constitution and
the Declaration of Independence,
they were signing a promissory
note to which every American was
to fall heir.
This note was a promise that
all men, yes,
black men as well as white men,
would be guaranteed the
unalienable rights of life,
liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.
It is obvious today that
America has defaulted on this
promissory note insofar as her
citizens of color are concerned.
Instead of honoring this sacred
obligation America has given the
Negro people a bad check,
a check which has come back
marked 'insufficient funds.'
But we refuse to believe that
the bank of justice is bankrupt,
we refuse to believe that there
are insufficient funds in the
great vaults of opportunity of
this nation.
And so we've come to cash this
check, a check that will give
us, upon demand,
the riches of freedom and the
security of justice."
I would be thrilled if you
walked out of this course and
were able to explain to somebody
why King made the promissory
note the central metaphor of his
"I Have a Dream" speech,
and you could somehow explain
why it hadn't been cashed by
1963, and could then begin to
discuss whether it's fully
cashed yet.
Now--that was just my homage to
King.
Now, I like to do a little
ritual at the beginning of every
class.
If you'll forgive me,
it only takes me about ten
seconds.
But you know we live in a world
where all of us in this room
take books for granted.
We throw books on the floor,
we throw books at people,
we load them in and out of our
backpacks,
we drop them here and drop them
there, we lose them,
we rip them up,
we write all over them--I write
all over mine.
It's only a few generations ago
when there really weren't any
bookstores to go to.
Your great-great-grandparents
couldn't meander a bookstore,
to speak of,
unless they lived in a special
section of a special city.
Books are precious things.
A lot of them are assigned in
this course.
There's short ones,
little ones,
big ones, syntheses,
novels, monographs.
Think of a book,
just for a moment,
and then you can forget this if
you want.
But think of a book, any book.
It's hard to think of a really
bad book this way,
but think of a good book,
one of your favorite books
ever,
as like a newborn child,
a newborn child brought into
the world.
A book.
Probably a lot more planning
and thought and design and
construction,
at least intellectually,
goes into that book than goes
into most babies.
Books have a cover.
They have beginnings,
middles and ends.
They're somebody's dream,
they're somebody's creation.
They never satisfy--just like
people--but they're in some ways
the greatest things we have,
and sometimes it's nice to
remind ourselves of that,
in the places where we take
them most for granted.
And I want to quote for you,
to you, from the oldest history
book in Western civilization.
Not just because it's a book,
but I think this is a point one
can make about any history
course, it doesn't matter what
the subject is.
It can be Social History,
Political History,
Intellectual History,
any history.
It can be the History of
Ancient Rome,
it could be Post-1945 United
States, it could be any history.
But any history course ought to
do the two things that Herodotus
named in the opening sentence of
the oldest history book we have.
This is Herodotus,
The History.
Isn't it great when you're
writing the first book,
what are you going to call it?
The History;
no subtitles,
nothing fancy,
just--"I, Herodotus of
Halicarnassus,
am here setting forth my
history,
that time may not draw the
color from what man has brought
into being, nor those great and
wonderful deeds manifested by
both the Greeks and the
barbarians,
fail of their report,
and together,
with all of this,
the reason why they fought one
another."
I don't know how closely you
listened to that,
but what has Herodotus just
said?
He's basically said history is
two things.
It's the story,
it's the color,
it's the great deeds,
it's the narrative that takes
you somewhere;
but it's also the reason why,
it's also the explanations.
That's what history does.
It's supposed to do both of
those things.
Some of us are more into the
analysis, and we're not so fond
of story.
Some of us just love stories
and don't care about the
analysis--"oh,
stop giving me all that
interpretation,
just tell me the good story
again."
This is what goes on,
of course, out in public
history all the time:
"just tell us the old stories
and just sing us the old songs,
make us feel good again.
Stop interpreting,
you historians,
and worst of all,
stop revising."
You notice how that word
'revision' has crept into our
political culture?
When politicians don't like the
arguments of people who disagree
with them they accuse them of
being revisionist historians.
It was even a poll-tested word
for a while when Condoleezza
Rice was using it.
"Revisionist, revisionist."
As though all history isn't
revisionist.
My favorite story about
revisionism is my buddy,
Eric Foner, was on a talk show
once.
About 1992.
He was on one of those shouting
talk shows with Lynne Cheney,
who at that--Dick Cheney's
wife--who was then head of the
NEH.
And this was a time--you won't
remember this--we were having
this national brouhaha over what
were called National History
Standards.
And Lynne Cheney,
if you remember,
a real critic of these National
History Standards.
She didn't particularly like
some of the ideas that the
historians were coming up with.
So on this talk show--it was
Firing Line where you get
two people on and they just
shout at each other for an hour,
or a half hour,
and the producers love it.
And Foner is pretty good at
rapid fire coming back,
he's pretty good at it.
Anyway they had this set-to and
she kept accusing him and other
historians of being
"revisionist."
And Eric says the next morning
he got a phone call from a
reporter at Newsweek and
she said,
"Professor Foner,
when did all this revisionism
begin?"
And Foner said,
"Probably with Herodotus."
And the Newsweek
reporter said,
"Do you have his phone number?"
Never underestimate the
ignorance--H.L.
Mencken said this,
I didn't--never underestimate
the ignorance of the American
people.
Or of journalists, or of--.
Now, as to this question of why
the Civil War has a hold on us,
or a hold on historical
imagination in this country.
There are many,
many ways to think about that.
I'm going to take you through
seven or eight possible answers
to that in just a moment,
almost like a list.
But again, sometimes if you go
back to the oldest explanations
you find things that we haven't
even thought about.
In Thucydides' The
Peloponnesian War,
the first great modern text,
in Western Civilization at any
rate,
about a Civil War,
the great Greek Civil War.
In Thucydides' great work he
has this little sentence where
he actually captures a good deal
about why civil wars are such
vexing,
difficult problems in nations'
memories once they've had them.
So Thucydides said,
"The people made their
recollections fit in with their
sufferings."
They began to tell a story that
reflected their own suffering.
Now the 'they' here might be
white southerners.
They suffered.
They lost.
They were truly defeated,
conquered.
That suffering might be
African-Americans.
Emancipation wasn't a day of
jubilee;
it was an agonizing,
horrible, terrible,
sometimes wonderful,
set of experiences into the
unknown.
And the suffering might be
northern Unionists.
About 300,000 Yankee soldiers
died in the Civil War and about
650 to 700,000 were wounded.
People made their memories fit
their sufferings.
I also like this little
passage, to just put into your
craw, about any History course,
about any interpretation.
And of course I'm going to have
a point of view at times in this
course;
all historians do.
Don't even listen to a
historian if he or she doesn't
have a point of view.
None of us are blank slates.
None of us can just tell it
like it was--"stop interpreting,
please."
But I always try to remember
William James' passage in one of
his Pragmatism essays,
an essay I think that should be
required for U.S.
citizenship.
If I ruled the world you'd have
to read this for U.S.
citizenship.
In it, James says,
"The greatest enemy of any one
of my truths is the rest of my
truths."
It's as though James is saying,
"damn, every time I think I
really know something--that's
the truth--along comes some
other possible truth and it
screws it up."
Why can't history just be
settled?
Enough already.
If it was, it wouldn't be any
fun;
if it was it wouldn't be
interesting;
if it was it wouldn't be good
for business either.
Now, why does the Civil War
have a hold?
Why are you here?
There's 280 of you here for a
course on the Civil War.
I know it fits--10:30 on
Tuesday, Thursday--a hundred
other reasons--you want a
lecture course.
Lots of possible answers to all
that kind of question.
But why does this event hold
people?
There are now approximately
65,000 books that have been
written on the American Civil
War--this doesn't even really
include the books on
Reconstruction--that have been
written since Appomattox.
Now, I realized recently when I
was giving a public talk that
you can't always say "since
Appomattox" and people know what
you mean.
I'm going to assume Yale
students do.
But that's actually where the
surrender was signed that ended
the Civil.
I was giving a talk recently
and I said, "Before Appomattox
and after Appomattox"--and I
must have said that four of five
times.
One of the first questions in Q
& A is this woman innocently
asked, "Well what is
Appomattox?"
Oh dear.
"Well you see ma'amâ€¦"
Anyway.
Since Appomattox 65--you know
what that is?
That's more than one per
day--have been published in this
country on this event.
Why?
What does Robert Penn Warren
mean when he said,
"The Civil War draws us as an
oracle,
darkly unriddled and portentous
of our personal and our national
fate"?
That's pretty grandiose
language, but what did Warren
mean?
What did Gertrude Stein mean
when she said,
"There never will be anything
more interesting than that
American Civil War"?
Of all people,
Gertrude Stein was hopelessly
interested in this event.
"There never will be anything
more interesting than that
American Civil War," she said.
Why are so many people into
this?
Why do people want to read
about it, re-enact it,
go play it, go visit it?
Is it just heritage tourism?
Is it just the attraction of
military history?
What is it that compels us to
remember the most divisive,
the most bloody,
the most tragic event in our
national history?
And how do we remember it?
Have we sometimes cleaned it up
with such pleasing mythology
that we've just made it fun?
Why is the Confederate flag a
problem?
Why doesn't it just go away?
It's the second most ubiquitous
American symbol across the
world, especially since Michael
Jordan quit playing.
Other than the U.S.
flag, the Confederate flag is
the most ubiquitous symbol of
the United--maybe Coca Cola,
okay, but Coca Cola's an
international symbol now.
You can find the Confederate
flag everywhere in this world.
I spent a year in Germany and
I've traveled a lot in Eastern
Europe.
I saw it all over the place.
I was in Prague,
the Czech Republic,
in 1993.
Jim McPherson's Battle Cry
of Freedom,
a book you're assigned largely
as background,
the largest selling book on the
American Civil War published in
the last twenty-five years.
International bestseller,
sixteen weeks on the New York
Times Bestseller List,
was translated into Czech.
I mean, nobody reads Czech.
Except the Czechs,
and even them,
even they tend to read fiction
in German.
Anyway, I was at a bookstore,
they had a big display of Jim
McPherson's Battle Cry of
Freedom, the whole bookstore
window.
I couldn't believe it.
But how did they display it?
With Confederate flags.
And they missed the point of
the title of the book,
but never mind.
How do you portray the American
symbol less symbolically?
Oh it's that Confederate flag
that will tell us right away
what this is about.
Why?
Why doesn't the Confederate
flag just go away?
Or put another way,
why do you love the Civil War?
I can't tell you how many
thousands of times in public
lectures, et cetera,
et cetera,
et cetera in my--and all Civil
War historians face this--people
will come up afterward.
Usually they want to show you
their grandfather's letters,
but they'll say,
"I just love the Civil War."
And you want to just stop them
for a moment and say,
"You need a shrink."
Or, "What is it you love?
Is it the aftermath at Antietam?
Is it the trenches of
Spotsylvania?
Is it the latrines at
Andersonville?
Is it Booth killing Lincoln?
What is it you love?"
Is it because we love epics?
Is it because a lot of people
really are kind of hardwired
maybe?
We may even be
hardwired--biologically--for
story.
I can't prove that but there's
a lot of research on this.
Are we hardwired for story,
and therefore,
to some degree,
for epic stories that have
heroes and villains and
beginnings and ends and great
collisions?
Maybe.
Is it because Americans love
redemption?
And people around the world
love to think that about us
sometimes too.
Is it because we like to see or
we've converted this terribly
divisive experience into a great
unifier?
Do we go back and look at the
Civil War not only to see the
beginnings of our own modern
time,
in a modern American nation,
a second American Republic,
born out of the death of the
first and so on and so forth?
But do we actually go back to
this most dividing experience to
figure out how we became
unified?
Or as William Dean Howells put
it in 1900 in a lovely line,
he said, "What the American
people always like is a tragedy
as long as they can give it a
happy ending."
Is it because we see the
American Civil War,
or have learned to see it,
as American's first great
racial reckoning?
Where the nation's national sin
of slavery, as some like to put
it, had to finally be remitted
in some way, purged,
cleansed?
In the language used by both
sides in this war,
of purgings and cleansings.
The war that brought a
reckoning from 250 years of
slavery, destroyed a slave
society,
brought the end of the First
American Republic,
and the revolution of
emancipation.
I think there's a lot to argue
that Americans have begun,
at least, they've just begun
this, to love the Civil War
because they love emancipation.
They want to live in the nation
that freed its slaves.
My favorite line in George Bush
the first's Inaugural Address in
1989--and I'm probably the only
one that ever bothers to
remember this line or maybe the
only one who cares.
But Peggy Noonan wrote him a
sentence.
It's classic inaugural rhetoric
and it comes right after the
section in Bush One's inaugural
where he's saying we must put
the war in Vietnam behind us,
it is too divisive and so on.
And then there's a line where
he says, "We must remember,
we are the nation that sent
600,000 of its sons to die
rather than have slavery."
Now, who wouldn't want to live
in that country?
That's a great line in an
inaugural address.
Of course it's ignoring the
fact that at least half of those
people died to preserve slavery.
But never mind,
I mean--Do we love the Civil
War because sometimes there's a
lot of guilty pleasure,
or not so guilty pleasure,
in just loving the details of
military history?
And if you're one of those,
fine, that's great.
I had that stage, too.
I will confess, if you make me.
But what is all that nostalgia
about for those battlefields?
Or is it because this
experience in American history
is ultimately about loss?
Are we attracted to loss?
Is loss more interesting
sometimes than victory?
And by loss I mean defeat but
also loss in terms of human
life, treasure,
proportions of civilizations
that died.
Take loss for just a moment.
If you took the 620,000-odd
Americans who died in the Civil
War, you moved it ahead to the
Vietnam era in roughly the
twelve years the United States
fought in Vietnam,
per
capita--okay?--approximately
four million Americans would've
died in Vietnam.
That's the scale of death and
loss in the Civil War -- four
million.
Now Americans will never
sustain four million casualties
in a war, I would argue.
I can't prove that.
Unless Osama bin Laden is
coming through that window.
Who knows, maybe he will one
day.
Wouldn't that be cool?
You wouldn't sleep through that
lecture.
But I don't think Americans
will ever sustain that kind--but
four million--if you came,
per capita from the Civil
War-era population to the era of
Vietnam.
Every year at Antietam,
in rural Maryland,
on the anniversary of the
battle,
17^(th) of September,
they put out illuminati,
or the illuminaria,
excuse me--no,
no, whoa, that's a
slip--illuminaria,
or the little candle lamps,
all over the battlefield.
They put 23,000 of them out,
which was the number of
casualties in eight hours at
Antietam.
And when the sun goes down you
can look at the battlefield and
get a sense of this kind of
powerful, almost artistic sense
of the loss.
Every one of those little
candle lights was a human life.
Related to that,
is the American imagination for
this event still stimulated in
part because sometimes we just
like lost causes?
We are attracted to defeat
sometimes more than we are
attracted to victory.
Loss in war is sometimes more
interesting.
Lost causes somehow represent
the rebel spirit,
a rebellious spirit,
an insurrectionary spirit,
an insurgent spirit.
Some people may be attracted in
that way.
And maybe last but not least,
and this list could go on and
on, there is I think an interest
in the Civil War,
among serious readers in
particular because it does
somehow satisfy that search we
often all have for origins.
The origins of the modern
nation state,
the origins of big government,
the origins of centralized
power,
the origins of what seemed to
be the death of state's rights;
but it surely didn't die,
did it?
We have a state's rights
Supreme Court now,
in case you didn't notice.
The birth of a kind of
modernity in America,
in many forms,
comes out of this era.
It doesn't just come out of the
Battle of Gettysburg but it
surely comes out of the era.
There's also this sense in
which, somehow,
in that experience of the Civil
War in the middle of the
nineteen century--fought for the
existence of an American nation
and for the new definition of
that nation,
and just how free and equal the
people in it would be--is where
we may somehow see that
transformation from a pre-modern
to a more modern world.
And sometimes I suspect that's
what attracts us.
Now, the watch says I only have
about two minutes.
So let me leave you here.
I do think sometimes we're
attracted because war is just so
beguilingly fascinating.
And Drew Faust,
a wonderful historian whom you
now know is the President of
Harvard University,
has just published a brand new
book, it's literally just out
this week.
I read it in manuscript,
I have a blurb on the back.
It's called The Republic of
Suffering.
And she has much to say in that
book, which I highly recommend,
about why death is so
interesting.
Let me leave you with this.
Thursday, I'm going to take up
the Old South and begin this
comparison of the Old South to
the growing capitalist--well,
both sides were highly
capitalist--northern society.
But in 1850 or 1840s America
you could find both extremes of,
on the one hand,
a tremendous seemingly
unfathomable optimism about
America.
It seemed to be limitless and
boundless, and nobody captured
it, ever, any better than Walt
Whitman.
But you can also find
expressions all over the
culture, especially from
African-Americans and
abolitionists and some
slaveholders of a great dread
about the direction of the
country.
In Whitman's first line of his
Drum-Taps,
his famous collection of Civil
War poetry,
comes that phrase,
which is up here:
"First O Songs for a Prelude."
And that first poem in
Drum-Taps is Whitman
trying to capture just how
exciting war can be.
But he'd also written a poem
like "Democracy."
And I'll leave you with this,
and I'll start with a response
to it on Thursday.
In Whitman's "Democracy," as
well as several other Whitman
poems, you can find this
limitless sense of optimism.
Just listen to his words:
"Sail, sail thy best ship of
Democracy.
Of value is thy freight,
'tis not the Present only,
the Past is also stored in
thee."
This America,
this thing called America to
him is the whole world's new
beginning.
"Thou holdest not the venture
of thyself alone,
not the Western continent
alone.
Earth's résumé
entire floats on thy keel!
O ship is steadied by thy spars.
With thee Time voyages in trust.
The antecedent nations sink or
swim with thee."
America is everything,
according to Whitman.
"With all their ancient
struggles, martyrs,
heroes, epics,
wars though bearest the other
continents.
Theirs, theirs as much as
thine, the destination-port
triumphant.
Steer then with good strong
hand and wary eye.
O helmsmen, though carriest
great companions.
How can I pierce the
impenetrable blank of your
future?
I feel thy ominous greatness,
evil as well as good.
I watch thee advancing,
absorbing the present,
transcending the past.
I see thy light lighting and
thy shadow shadowing as if the
entire globe.
But I do not undertake to
define thee, hardly can I
comprehend thee."
Well that's Whitman saying,
as we all do at times,
"America is an idea."
This course is the story of
what that idea was and what
happened to it,
and the chance it had coming
out of it.
