mod1-lec2

8/6/2019 Mod1-Lec2

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mod1-lec2 1/4

Module 1, Lecture 2

Themes of the Course

First, a Word about the Organization of the Course

The literature that makes up the bulk of the reading in this course can be classified as two broad

types:

1. As long as it is qualified as an oversimplification, one can say with some degree of safety

that the readings in Modules 3-5 are primarily interested in trying to capture and conveyrealistically the experience of the Civil War from the participants’ point of view.

a. Stephen Crane is concerned almost wholly with the psychological conflicts andquirks of the soldier. In many cases, the Civil War setting seems almost incidental.

Crane’s stories are about the internal struggles of warriors, regardless of the war or historical period.

b. Ambrose Bierce’s principal interest is also psychological. Some stories feature hisawareness of the then new concept of the subconscious. Others differ from Crane’s

storied in that they are more interconnected and dependent upon the specificcircumstances of the Civil War than are Crane’s stories. Instead of struggles with

impersonal death and faceless enemies, some of Bierce’s characters endure the deeply personal conflicts that were frequent in the American Civil War—waging war against

fathers and sons and brothers and close comrades.

c. As a work of historical fiction, Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels is a different beast

than the works of Crane and Bierce; yet, it, too, is a work that attempts to capture the“trial of fire,” the reality of war—albeit, from a different perspective and with

different authorial intentions.

To say that these works (and the poems of Whitman) are realistic is not the same as

saying they objective. Each author has a subjective point of view—either moral or amoral—from which he writes. Bierce is clearly anti-war, Whitman somewhat less so.

Crane and Shaara, on the other hand, perhaps see war more as a crucible in which heroiccharacter and self-knowledge are forged.

2.

The literature and films in Modules 6-8 are concerned with interpreting and controlling the way the Civil War is remembered and understood rather than the battlefieldexperiences of those who participated in it. It is these works— The Clansman, Birth of a

Nation, Gone with the Wind , Jubilee, and Glory —that engage us directly with the themesof the course.

8/6/2019 Mod1-Lec2


2

Themes of the Course

1. As Shelby Foote has said, the Civil War is “the crossroads of our being.”

a. The origins of the Civil War stem from the different values of the two different typesof British immigrants who first populated the colonies (blue-collar Puritans and other

religious dissenters in New England; secular aristocrats and landed gentry in Virginiaand the Carolinas.

b. These different values and lifestyles—not to mention geographical and climaticdifferences, which led to different agricultural and industrial economies—gradually

led to increasingly divergent attitudes about slavery. Among these value differences isthe evolving egalitarian view of human nature. The democratic principle that all men

[sic] are created equal grows and takes hold in the more diverse North while the morehomogeneous white South, along with its system of slavery, reinforces the

hierarchical view of human nature; that is, some families, some races, are naturallysuperior to others. To suggest otherwise was to reject the God-ordained order of

creation.

c. The political philosophies so intensely debated during the states’ ratification of the

Constitution converge again on the issue of secession and states’ rights.

2. The old axiom that history is written by the victors did not hold true for the first 100

years after the Civil War .

a. History and memory are not distinct but indelibly intertwined. As Phyllis Trible has

said (about the ancient Hebrew people, but which is quite relevant here), “What‘actually happened’ and what a people thought happened belong to a single historical

process” (Goldfield 2-3).

b. To justify the war and the reason they fought it, to justify their great sacrifices, and to

transform the loss of the war into a noble fight for honorable principles, whitesoutherners set about “remembering” the war in ways that were often at odds with

what “actually happened.” Almost immediately, the uniquely Southern way of remembering the war came to be known as the Lost Cause (see major interpretive

traditions below).

c. Because white northerners harbored their own racial prejudices, which rendered them

largely indifferent to the plight of the freed blacks; because white Americans were preoccupied with reconciling regional differences and healing scars of war; and

because southern leaders and historians were strident in their promulgation of theLost Cause, the southern interpretation dominated the nation’s understanding of Civil

War history for more than a hundred years.

3. There are four major interpretive traditions of the Civil War: the Lost Cause tradition,

the Union tradition, the Emancipation tradition, and the Reconciliation tradition. Thereis some overlap in aspects of the traditions, but according to Gary Gallagher, “each of the

four can be examined as a quite distinct attempt to explain and understand the war” (2).

a. The Lost Cause (a full handout will be distributed later in the course)

i. Romanticizes the antebellum South as an idyllic, well-ordered civilization with peaceful race relationships.

8/6/2019 Mod1-Lec2


3

ii. Defends the Southern implementation of slavery as benign. Masters loved their slaves and took good care of them; slaves loved their masters in return and

provided loyal service. (A contemporary extension of this argument is the claimamong many Southern apologists that thousands of blacks fought on the

battlefield as loyal Confederates defending their homeland against the Northern

invaders.)iii. Argues that Confederate states did not secede, nor did Confederate soldiers fight,

to preserve slavery. Rather, the South seceded and fought in defense of

constitutional principles: Confederates were the true inheritors of therevolutionary spirit of the Declaration of Independence.

iv. Highlights the undeniable wartime suffering and hardships endured byConfederate soldiers and civilians on the homefront. The “war crimes” Wm. T.

Sherman, in particular, are emphasized.

v. Insists that defeat in the face of impossible odds entailed no loss of honor.

vi. Elevates the character and military genius of Confederate generals and officers tonear sainthood.

vii. Portrays Reconstruction as the forceful attempt of a military conqueror to turn theorder of the South’s once- benevolent and well-ordered civilization on its head;

that is, to put the bottom rung—the inferior black race—on the top, and to stripaway all political power from the only ones who rightfully deserved it—white

men.

b. The Union Cause

i. American republican government was a beacon to the rest of world. It was a test of whether a nation built on democratic principles could long stand. It must not fail or

the concepts of liberty and equality would be set back hundreds of years.ii. The Constitution was adopted to create “a more perfect Union.” It must be

perpetual. To acknowledge the right to secession of those admitted to Union was toguarantee the Union’s failure: A government built on democratic principles and

majority rule that permitted secession of those who became disenchanted as soonas things didn’t go their way guaranteed its own hasty demise.

iii. The U.S. military forces were a mighty agent that crushed what might have been afatal rebellion and ensured the republic’s future. After the martyred Lincoln,

Ulysses S. Grant stood as the preeminent Union idol.

c. The Emancipation Cause

i. The most important outcome of the war was not the preservation of the Union butthe emancipation of more than 4 million slaves.

ii. The Southern rebellion was the result of a slave power conspiracy. Wealthy and powerful slaveholders—a very small number actually—pushed secession and war

upon the sometimes-reluctant, non-slaveholding population.

8/6/2019 Mod1-Lec2


4

iii. Emancipation was the critical first step that had to precede restoration of theUnion. With emancipation, the war might have been lost and, certainly, the issue

that caused the war would remain unresolved without it.

iv. The 180,000 black soldiers who fought for the U. S. government in the last two

years of the war hold a place of special esteem: they fought to demonstrate their

equality to any white soldier—to prove that they were men—as well as to freetheir families in bondage.

v. Reconstruction was based upon the noble premises of helping the South rebuild

economically and protecting the civil liberties of freed blacks.

vi. Emancipationists resisted the ascendancy of the Lost Cause narrative and resented

northerners complicity in allowing it to attain ascendance (see ReconciliationCause); the white supremacist Rebels should not be forgiven so easily.

d. The Reconciliation Cause

i. Advocated a memory of the war that muted the divisive issue of slavery and race.

As such, the contributions of the 180,000 black federal soldiers was ignored andforgotten.

ii. Avoided value judgments about the righteousness of either cause and celebratedthe valor and loyalty of white soldiers in both Union and Confederate armies.

iii. What the Civil War demonstrated was the traits of Americans, not northerners or southerners. It was these American qualities and characteristics that had

transformed into the powerful economic force it had become by the end of the 19th century.

iv. Reconciliationists often pointed to Appomatox, where Grant and Lee behaved in away that promoted peaceful reunion, as the beginning of a healing process that

reminded all Americans of their shared history and traditions.

v. The Reconciliationist Cause gains ascendancy not by countering the Lost Cause

but by capitulating to it and to the rising segregation and oppression of free blacksin the former Confederate states.

These four major interpretive traditions are central to what we will be tracing in the literatureand films we are studying in this course. You should make yourself conversant on the

principal aspects of these traditions. An objective of this course is that you will be able toidentify characteristics of these traditions as you read the assigned works and watch the

assigned movies.

-------

Sources I rely on heavily in this document:

Gallagher, Gary W. Causes Won, Lost, & Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape

What We Know about the Civil War . Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008.Goldfield, David. Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History.

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002.McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2010.

mod1-lec2

Documents