May 4th, 1998

Notes for Lecture on Abraham Lincoln and the End of Early America

 

AL's fitness as the subject to conclude our experiment in I/A Early American Culture??

AL -- The greatest and deadest of "Great White Men"

AL -- Beneficiary of the traditional emphasis on national politics and within it the "presidential synthesis" Heads list of best presidents…

AL -- A warrior/killer -- responsible for a war than killed 600,000 Americans; devastated a region -- the South -- that would not recover until the 1950s -- [Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore -- compared Lincoln to Hitler]

AL -- A problematic husband and father -- indulgent in both roles??

AL -- An indifferent churchgoer;

AL -- A take-no-prisoners. Anything-to-win-over-a-jury attorney

AL -- a leader who end was a most violent one and precedent-setting (1881/Garfield// 1901/McKinley//1963/JFK)

AL -- A president who was not prepared to concede/offer full citizenship to freedmen;
Lincoln-Douglas Debates 1858 -- "a man but not my brother"
Failed the integrationist/ liberal test of the 1950s

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Why he might deserve to be our last topic (the stuff the American Dream is made of??)

His mythic significance… Lincoln Memorial and Nixon in 1973??

An American of the post-Revolutionary moving west -- Kentucky/Indiana/Illinois
As against the rooted East -- North and South
The Lincoln Wanderings -- http://www.sos.state.il.us/special/lincoln/map.html

Never went to Europe --
Did he ever see the Atlantic Ocean??
New Orleans in 1828; Philadelphia in 1844; NYC in 1860 (Cooper Union)

Lincoln timeline -- http://www.sos.state.il.us/special/lincoln/bio.html

Self-educated -- No schooling beyond 10? Home-taught mostly -- one of few presidents to his day with no college// commoner after him

Self-made -- Farmer/boatman/storkeeper/country lawyer -- ready expenditure of his physical strength -- no other capital to hand

No straight and easy path to the top -- skirting bankruptcy as family man -- political career seemed to have self-destructed after promising start

A failed Whig -- one-term congressman during Mexican War

Political career revived by emergence of a third party

In mid 1850s -- but even then, could not win in his own state of Illinois --

Helped define the moderate/centrist/evolving/Republican position on slavery and its expansion into the territories;

-- Unacceptable to the Southern exponents of the infinite extention of slavery;

-- But also to those who placed the ending of slavery ahead of the preservation of the Union

His position in August 1862 -- more than a year into the war http://www.netins.net/showcase/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm

Emancipation Proclamation already in draft form?? -- waiting for the right spot/victory/

Made Antietam sound like a victory -- Sept 1862 -- Matthew Brady on the dead at Antietam
http://www.history.upenn.edu/hist21/CW/CWantietam2.html

September 1862 -- Antietam.

On September 17, Confederate forces under General Lee were caught by General McClellan
near Sharpsburg, Maryland. This battle proved to be the bloodiest day of the war; 2,108
Union soldiers were killed and 9,549 wounded -- 2,700 Confederates were killed and 9,029
wounded. The battle had no clear winner, but because General Lee withdrew to Virginia,
McClellan was considered the victor. The battle convinced the British and French -- who
were contemplating official recognition of the Confederacy -- to reserve action, and gave
Lincoln the opportunity to announce his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (September
22), which would free all slaves in areas rebelling against the United States, effective January
1, 1863.

delivered January 1, 1863 -- to understood as a war-induced measure -- to use black troops/to satisfy Abolitionist supporters
http://www.netins.net/showcase/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm

Library of Congress November 1863 Gettysburg Address Site--http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/G.Address/ga.html

The final justification for Lincoln -- He was centrally engaged in the struggle that was both the climax and the terminus of that part of American culture largely beyond our reach -- He freed the slaves, saved the Union and provided the necessary leadership for the North/the Union to win the bloodiest and most costly of all American wars

Also, the first war where the citizenry could participate vicariously through battlescene photography
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/cwphome.html

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cwp/4a39000/4a39500/4a39576r.jpg

Not the colonial culture --

The accelerating westward-tilted culture to come out of the Revolution

And the Civil War… Letter to Hooker…

Lincoln's generation --
Contained slavery and Calvinism and other vestiges of an identification with fixed positions in society -- Winthrop's Sermon, "A Model of Xian Charity," on the Arbella (1630)

"God almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission."

And yet simultaneous claims to unchecked freedom/apotheosis of the individual -- Emerson's "Nature" (1834)

"Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?"
His admonition -- "Build therefore your own world..."

The American Quandary
How much is ours to contrive?? How much is ours a hand to play out?
Are we special? How so? Specially blessed? Specially challenged?

Melville in M/Dick

Ch 2 -- "The universe is finished; the copestone is on."

Ch. 8 -- "Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete"

As a nation, we made some choices -- and there are consequences and we must pay for them

Nature/Wilderness our better selves??

RWE -- "In landscape the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know."

Thomas Cole -- The wilderness is yet a fitting place in which to speak to God."

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cwp/4a39000/4a39500/4a39576r.jpg

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cwp/4a39000/4a39500/4a39591r.jpg

Lincoln's summing up of how we got here -- March 4, 1865

http://www.netins.net/showcase/creative/lincoln/speeches/inaug2.htm

 

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Lincoln could speak to /and in some ways physically and other ways rhetoricallythese

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