America’s Great Civil War

Some interesting tid-bits for those of you out there who consider yourselves U.S. Civil War buffs.
by Charlie Leck

This will be a brief blog even though it’s tempting to go into a long dissertation about America’s civil war and its roots.

Last fall I took an extraordinary on-line course from Yale University. I did it because I have an intense interest in that period of America history. Yale makes a great contribution to society by allowing anyone to take these video courses just as if they were a student in the classroom. I personally really appreciate this remarkable gift. So, I approached the class with great commitment and discipline and did all the readings on time, wrote papers and took exceedingly thorough lecture notes. A great advantage in taking a class like this is that you can rewind! Miss a little something – or the professor is going a little too quickly – or you just need time to think about something – and you can hit the pause button and even back-up to go over something again.

David W. Blight, PhD., taught the class I took (Civil War & Reconstruction, History 119). He was remarkably good.

The syllabus was extensive and led me along to some books I would never have otherwise read. I’ll include it at the end of the blog for any of you who might be interested.

The course concentrated heavily on the institution of slavery as the economic engine that drove the South and the expansion of the great Southwest.

Frederick Douglas
The course also led me into a new appreciation for Frederick Douglas and I’ve gone far beyond the course requirements now in reading and learning so very much about his life and contribution to America. He was an extraordinary man.

In this morning’s New York Time there is a very good Opinionator post about Frederick Douglas that is written by Dr. Blight. I really recommend it to you. In two paragraphs buried within this piece, Blight paints a graphic picture of the conundrum the nation faced on the eve of the brutal and divisive war.

“Douglass minced no words in announcing his own definition of the secessionists: They were ‘traitors and rebels’ who had ‘robbed, plundered, insulted, spit upon, and defiled’ the United States government, he angrily wrote in February. ‘Treason’ and ‘Armed Rebellion,’ he complained, were ‘now simply the sovereign right of Secession, and the execution of the Laws is now called ‘Coercion.’’ To Douglass, the secessionists were the mortal enemies of the ‘Government’ (which he began to capitalize), as well as of his cause of abolition. Traitors merited no quarter, and he repeatedly insisted on his own label for their movement – the ‘treasonable, Slaveholding Confederacy.

“But secessionist treason was ‘exceeded’ by Northern acquiescence, Douglass contended, in ‘the sneaking cowardice and pitiful imbecility of the Government [the Buchanan administration], and the Northern people, who are mobbing down freedom of speech, crying ‘no coercion,’ and whining for compromise.’ Douglass had been practicing this kind of rhetoric about slaveholders for years; by 1861, it was as if the secessionists had flipped his switch into overdrive.”

Abraham Lincoln
Douglas had plenty of doubts about Abraham Lincoln on the eve of his inauguration. So many rumors circulated about the in-coming President that Douglas didn’t know which to believe. Of course, we know that Douglas ended up very much in favor of Lincoln’s approach to the war, though somewhat disappointed in the President’s lack of planning for the reconstruction of the South and the introduction of the slaves into citizenship. He did, during the war, pay three personal and friendly visits to the President within the White House.

Blight’s on-line course sent me scurrying to find a host of books about Lincoln that I have consumed joyfully in the last few months.

The New York Times is doing us a great service now by running a massive series on the U.S. Civil War. It is an extraordinary educational opportunity for all of us. The entries are written as if reported from the field by the reporters of the time. Here, for instance, is last October’s entry that carries the dateline Oct 31, 1860. From it, you can be led into all the current dispatches.

The Complete Civil War
The New York Times has also published a very thorough account of the civil war as it was made by its reporters directly from the field – well over 100,000 eye witness accounts and dispatches – that includes a companion DVD. You can find out about the publication here. I’ve ordered mine and can’t wait for its arrival.

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As promised, here’s the syllabus from the Yale on-line course I mention above:

Description:

This course will explore the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. We will especially examine four broad themes: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction. The course attempts, in several ways, to understand the interrelationships between regional, national, and African-American history. And finally, we hope to probe the depths of why the Civil War era has a unique hold on the American historical imagination.

Texts:

Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War. Hill and Wang.

David Blight, Why the Civil War Came. New York: Oxford University.

Charles R. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. University of Virginia Press.

Drew G. Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. University of North Carolina Press.

E. L. Doctorow, The March. Random House.

Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. Harper & Row.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. by David W. Blight. Bedford Books.

Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat.Harvard University Press.

James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom. Oxford University Press.

Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, ed. by Alice Fahs. Bedford Books.

Michael P. Johnson, ed., Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War. Bedford Books.

Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Farrar Strauss Giroux.

William Gienapp, ed., Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection. Norton.

We are using two anthologies of documents (Gienapp and Johnson). Teaching Assistants will have discretion in assigning particular documents for each week's sections, and many such documents will be especially important for use in paper assignments. James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era is provided largely as background reading. For further background reading on the post-war period you may want to consult David W. Blight,Race and Reunion: The Civil War In American Memory.

Films:

Films will be scheduled during the course: especially several episodes of the PBS series, "The Civil War." The film, "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Civil War," will also be assigned. Selections of Civil War era poetry may also be provided at times during the course.

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A Craving Too Late in Life? That's a Question!

Why now, in this sunset portion of my life, has the intense desire to learn so overwhelmed me?
by Charlie Leck

I’m talking to myself in this blog; but the problem is that I'm not answering me, so you get mainly questions and, between them, long pauses marked by riveting silence.

I’m rushing toward my 70^th year. The years pass swiftly and there is nothing one can do to slow them, even as much as one would like. Time’s haste gets incrementally faster with each fleeting year. All now seems so ephemeral.

Why do I now feel so compelled to read so much, and to learn so many things that I should have absorbed years and years ago?

Why am I only now reading the Frederick Douglass autobiographic work? Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave should have been required reading in high school, or certainly in college. It wasn’t! I read it today and fell captive to it. It answered a few questions, but raised so many more. It’s simple reading. High school kids could easily handle it and it would mean so much – especially to African-Americans. No black kid in America should fail to read Frederick Douglass.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” [Frederick Douglass]

“The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! That very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.” [Frederick Douglass]

I hope black kids are being taught about Frederick Douglass.

Why have I read so little Faulkner? I build a sizeable stack of his works and put them on a small table near my desk, to remind me.

“A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once. [William Faulkner]

I’ve rushed lately through all the short stories of Eudora Welty. What a powerful writer! Such mysteries bound in spectacular sentences. Her characters come to life and you feel you are close to them, near enough to reach out to them. Why did it take me so long to find her? Perhaps I would not have appreciated her in my youth.

“Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.” [Eudora Welty]

Why does a rather new and complex friend of mine not like the work of the essayist, Patricia Hampl? (“I wouldn’t care what Hampl ever said!") Is it important? Have I time to understand. I pull one of Hampl’s works from the shelf and read a chapter. How can you not appreciate her? I should read her again.

“She managed to generate several microseasons in that garden out of the single rushed one Minnesota makes of spring and summer. Each of her seasons had its crop of flowers that gave way to another, different breed and then to another – from tulips to lilies to asters and petunias, through roses and more roses (which always required a scissors for cutting, though in general hands were the instrument in that garden) until only things as sturdy as the mums and the dry red flames of the salvia were left in the shadowy corners by the shed. Finally even those were cut back or taken indoors, and she was back again on her knees burying the bulbs that would start it all over again next year.” [Patricia Hampl]

I’m tempted to pull a Jane Smiley (13 Ways of Looking at the Novel). She determined to read 101 novels in the period of three years. She made a list and began. She did it without rushing. It's about one novel every 10 or 11 days. A few times she couldn’t handle a particular book. She scratched it and added another to her list. I could make a list of 100 books I should have read. It might be a good exercise.

“If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness. This was true of me. I took up each of my novels with unwavering commitment. I did not begin them by thinking I had a good subject for a novel. I began them by thinking that I had discovered important truths about the world that required communication…. But at the end of each novel, I would more or less throw down that lens along with that subject. My curiosity was always about how the world worked, what the patterns were, and what they meant. I was secular to the core, and I investigated moral issues with the dedication only someone who is literally and entirely agnostic would do – my philosophical stance was one of not knowing any answers and not believing that there were any answers.” [Jane Smiley]

Get hold of yourself! Don’t be so frantic! You’ve learned what you’re going to learn! Just enjoy now whatever comes along. See a bunch of great movies you should have seen. Read some books you should have read. Play some golf courses you should have played. Take better care of your body! Exercise! Eat better! Surprise everyone by living another 10 years.

“Float like a butterfly! Sting like a bee!” [Mohammed Ali]

I’ve got a game plan for all these things. Fate, give me but the time!