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.