Unit III

The Civil War Era

Part 1

“Resistance to Slavery”

Spirituals Terms to know: symbol and refrain

With the Negro spirituals there was an oral tradition. These songs were often formed from African melodies and Biblical lyrics. Many had a double meaning – a spiritual one, as well as an earthly one (the desire for freedom). The slave overseer often commanded the slaves working in the fields to “make a noise,” in order to avoid their communicating with each other.

Some spirituals became signal or code songs with hidden messages that circumvented the overseer’s purpose.

Frederick Douglass My Bondage and My Freedom

• Born into slavery, Douglass escaped via the Underground Railroad and became an ardent speaker for abolitionists. He edited the newspaper the North Star, wrote two autobiographies, and became U. S. consul to Haiti after the Civil War. As a child in slavery, his owner’s wife Mrs. Auld taught Douglass to read. She planted a seed that would grow into Douglass’s constant hunger for learning. Mr. Auld insisted that his wife stop teaching Douglass, regardless of her sympathies. Hence, Douglass wrote in his autobiography that slavery is an evil institution that harms both the slave and the slaveholder.

Sojourner Truth And Ain’t I a Woman?

• Term: oratory• Truth refutes arguments

against women’s rights through logic and personal experience. Her experience as a slave shows that men and women are equal. She effectively uses repetition in the speech.

Part 2

Civil War selections

Mary Chesnut Mary Chesnut’s Civil War

• In her Civil War journal, Charleston native Mary chestnut, whose husband James held a position with Jefferson Davis, gave an account of events from the war. She had the benefits both of being an eyewitness and of having some insider’s information.

• In the excerpts included in the text, Chesnut described the anticipation of the war’s beginning and the excitement of the Union’s surrender of Fort Sumter to the Confederates.

Robert E.Lee “Letter to His Son”• Though Lincoln asked him to lead

Union forces, Robert E. Lee felt a stronger responsibility to his home state of Virginia. In this letter to his son, Lee wrote that he did not agree with secession but felt that the South had been victim to Northern aggression and that war was inevitable. His diction showed great admiration for George Washington and the Union. However, he remained committed to Virginia.

Ambrose Bierce “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

• Terms: point of view and flashback• Peyton Farquhar, Southern planter and spy, is

lured by a Union spy to attempt to sabotage a bridge. As he is hanged for this war crime, he imagines an incredible escape.

• One theme: “All is fair in love and war.”

Abraham Lincoln The Gettysburg Address

• Terms: parallelism and diction• The speech made word plays with the word

“dedicated”

-set aside for a particular use

-committed to work together for a common goal

-set aside for God (+ “consecrated”

and “hallowed” – declared holy)• Tone – dignified, somber, humble

Part 3 – New American Poetry

The poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman can be described as Romantic because both writers deal with the subjects of death and nature much the way earlier New England poets do. However, their styles are markedly different from those of previous poets and from each other. While Whitman takes a sometimes Romantic approach to some subjects, he also includes some truthful, often disturbing, images that are characteristics of the movement that would follow Romanticism in America: Realism.

Because his poetry serves as a bridge between the two movements and because his and Miss Dickinson’s styles are unique, their poetry is often considered the most important in American literature. It certainly makes readers more willing to welcome the experimental poetry of the 20th century.

Whitman’s style has a certain cadence that imitates natural speech. His poetry usually lacks both rhyme and meter. This type of poetry is called free verse. He often catalogs, or lists, people or things and refers to music in his titles and poems. Whitman attempts to give voice to the common man (woman, and child) and is nicknamed “Poet of Democracy” and the “Good Gray Poet.” Both his writing style and his lifestyle are shocking and unwelcome in his lifetime.

He is a great admirer of President Lincoln and is deeply touched by events of the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln, whom he would praise in several elegies, such as “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” His most famous work is a collection of free verse entitled Leaves of Grass (1855), and the most famous of the poems in the collection is Song of Myself. He spent much of his career revising and republishing this book.

Dickinson’s style includes irregular capitalization and punctuation, the absence of titles, approximate rhyme (also called slant or off rhyme), brief images, and frequent figures of speech. Themes include death, the immortality of the soul (afterlife), isolation, and nature’s beauty. Her most famous poem is “Because I could not stop for Death.” Most of her poems—1, 775 of them—are discovered and published posthumously by her sister.

Selections from Whitman

 

“I Hear America Singing”

The speaker catalogs “songs” of workers who create with their hands. These manual laborers are an integral part of the fabric of America. At the end they sing not their work songs but songs of leisure.

Song of Myself• Section 1• The speaker believes an individual human heart can

embrace the entire universe. The “I” of the poem is the representative voice to all Americans, not Mr. Whitman. He writes this section early in his career.

 • Section 52• No longer the 37-year-old looking forward to finding all

Americans, the speaker of this much later section refers to himself as having “white locks” and anticipating death. He is still connected with nature and with mankind. His death will unite him with the dirt and with the grass that continues to grow (similar to ideas in the verse of Native Americans and Romantic poets.)

Selections from Dickinson

Terms: rhyme (exact and slant/approximate/off rhyme), alliteration, assonance, domestication, simile, metaphor, personification, paradox, enjambment, irony, onomatopoeia, and analogy

• “If you were coming in the fall”• The speaker longs for the return of an absent loved

one. The uncertainty of the length of the separation pains the speaker most. Knowing when the reunion would return, or if there will be a reunion in eternity, would ease the pain of separation.

• “The Soul selects her own Society”• The soul is personified as a woman who carefully

chooses her companions, refusing even powerful individuals. She shuts the door/closes the valves of her hard heart.

• “Success is counted sweetest”• In a paradox the speaker says that success is valued

most by those who fail.

• “I heard a Fly buzz when I died”• The speaker, surrounded by family, anticipates seeing

God at the moment of death. Instead of viewing God’s or a loved one’s face as her last impression of earthly life, she actually sees an annoying fly. The poem uses numerous symbols.

• “The Bustle in a House”• The speaker describes the busy chores that consume

families after a death. The analogy compares cleaning the house to the process of grieving. Most humans need activity and order if they are to recover from grief, and they need time to heal before they will love again (if ever).

• “This is my letter to the World”• The speaker—perhaps Dickinson herself—describes a

sort of isolation. She asks that the world judge her verse leniently because in it she attempted to convey truthfully what she has learned from nature.

“Because I could not stop for Death”• *In this, Miss Dickinson’s most famous poem, dying is

compared to a carriage ride, and death is personified as a gentleman caller. The speaker and Death pass scenes representing various stages of life and arrive at a house below the ground—the grave. The speaker says she has been dead for centuries, though it feels like only a day.

• Note common elements of Dickinson’s style: unusual capitalization and punctuation, slant rhyme (“chill and tulle”), domestication of universal ideas, images of nature, figures of speech, and themes of death and isolation.