Dickinson College / Gilder Lehrman Institute

Category: Primary Sources

From John Brown to Abraham Lincoln: Distilling a National Consciousness out of the Civil War

Professor Pinsker’s close reading of John Brown’s public statement at his trial for treason touched a nerve in me as I struggle to give a cogent narrative to this turning point in American history.  By showing the ideological DNA of that statement in Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, he implies a common thread of awareness between the failed raid at Harper’s Ferry and the commander-in-chief of the Union Army’s attempt to frame the final phase of the nation’s armed struggle.

In our New York-centric curriculum, we’ve worked hard to demonstrate that antebellum and wartime New York City represented a microcosm of the political, racial, and economic state of the nation.  It will be my task to pull apart and analyze Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of February 27, 1860.  The speech was reformatted by Lincoln the night before to accommodate the different and disparate factions of the expected audience that would attend the next day (now that the venue was changed from Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, to the more accessible Cooper Union Hall on Manhattan Island due to icy weather).  The speech was hailed and acknowledged variously by those who attended (including members of the press and a large number of southern newspaper correspondents).

If we were to take four speeches as part of a rhetorical timeline of the conflict, with John Brown’s speech being one, then we must have the second inaugural address as another.  One of the tragedies of our task with students is to reduce history into class period-sized units, so the idea that we could show an evolution of national consciousness across several public speeches might be too reductionist.  However, Professor Pinsker said that the nation (both northern and southern regions) were impressed by his actions and his rhetorical skill.  In a time when public speeches were expected to last hours, and Lincoln and Douglas debated across the state of Illinois, it might not be farfetched to follow this path with my students.

Remember, this is before the media happened upon the idea of opinion polls.  In fact, the reading public valued opinions in the press as articulated in the editorial pages.  Though they were not given by-lines, they were unabashedly partisan because that was the motivation for investing in and running a newspaper.  Readers aligned themselves with newspapers based upon bias, rather than objective news gathering (a 20th century concept).  So, too, would they cotton to speeches in the same way that they sought inspiration through editorials.

I will research how the Cooper Union speech was received by the press at the time and report back.  In the past, I’ve assigned “roles” or viewpoints to my students who act as audience members hearing Lincoln’s speech.  Then I have them report to the class how the speech resonates with their assigned point of view.  Ultimately, they discuss the electability of Lincoln as president in 1860’s election.

Looking for Harriet

Ready for the adventure to begin! I typed “Harriet Robinson Scott” into the rectangle marked “search” and nothing. Really, it said “zero”. How could that be? I know she’s in the G L database somewhere. Hmm, well, let’s try “women black history” and see what that yields. Okay, more like it. Lots of choices, but Harriet is not among the them. There are lots of goodies though. I’m like a small child wanting to grab the shiny images and click on the weblinks. Even though my mind is chanting history, history, I have to steady my hand away from the mouse. Regroup. Focus. I know Harriet is in here. But she’s not, even when I type in “Adam Arenson” the author of Freeing Dred Scott. The search still says “zero”. I am going to do like my students. Google. Sure enough. There is the article I saw Professor Pinsker discuss twice (I watched the video of the recap session.) Where is the “web guide” he put together for us? Oh, well, time to focus on Harriet. Here’s what I learned from the Arenson essay:

Harriet Robinson Scott (I like referring to people with their whole names–especially those enslaved!) was born in PA, was illiterate, she was Dred Scott’s second wife (interesting!!) she was proud of making a living separate from her husband (early feminist–I like her already) and when a reporter asked her to encourage her husband to go on a speaking tour after the trial, she replied, “Why don’t white man ‘tend his business, and let dat n—– ‘lone?”

She was quite the power house! But, there’s a mystery in Arenson’s article. He mentioned when Harriet died in Missouri on June 17, 1876, she was buried, next to her famous husband, in Greenwood Cemetery’s unmarked grave section.

Huh? Didn’t I have an image of her gorgeous tombstone in my last post? It seems in 1957, the 100th year anniversary of the Dred Scott, the granddaughter of Scott’s owner, donated the monies for a gravestone for Mr. Scott, but nothing was mentioned about Mrs.’s maker. Did the tombstone appear during the 150th anniversary in 2007? Google to the rescue again. Seems the grave yard was abandoned land by 1994, but a group of historically minded folks pitched in time and money to revitalize it. “Harriet’s Hill” complete with the tombstone and pavillion was dedicated in 2010.

Funny how the scavener hunt to find Harriet yielded the most information on her grave, but doggone it, not her. Still looking for Harriet.

 

John Brown + F. Douglass

In today’s lecture, we learned that Brown met Douglass in Detroit after the successful Missouri excursion(freeing some 11 slaves into Canada) that was “without the snapping of a gun on either side”. Earlier in their careers, the men met in November of 1847, in Springfield Massachusetts, wherein Brown explained his plans for the southern invasion and the Subterranean Pass Way.   The plan was to utilize an armed force of blacks based in the mountains to attack slavery with Douglass.  “My plan then is to take at first about twenty-five picked men, and begin on a small scale; supply them arms and ammunition, post them in squads of fives on a line of twenty-five miles, the most persuasive and judicious of whom shall go down to the fields from time to time, as opportunity offers, and induce the slaves to join them, seeking and selecting the most restless and daring.”

Query: What do we know about Douglass’ response to the plan between 1847-1959? He seems to have responded negatively just prior to the Harpers Valley fiasco…

Blogging the Civil War Era

Abraham Lincoln with son, Tad

It is possible that no war in American history has been as well preserved in the words of its participants as the Civil War.  The soldiers and their families were products of a society where literacy was highly valued and where communication technology had not yet developed to the point where ordinary participants could easily dispense with paper.   The result has been a war richly documented with letters, diaries, newspapers, speeches and all types of written artifacts.   By contrast, today’s conflicts threaten to prove far less transparent to future historians because it’s so much easier for us to talk, Skype, tweet and communicate in so many ways other than in long, expressive written sentences.  It will prove hard to answer the question of “why they fought?” by relying on sources that kept within a 140-character limit.

However, there is at least one digital format that offers some hope for the future historian.  Blogging is a convenient but also a reflective media.  To demonstrate this proposition, we are asking participants in the Civil War & Reconstruction online graduate course to blog about their learning experiences over the five-day session.  There is no minimum or maximum requirement, nor any particular format required, but we are hoping that every participant will at least experiment with blogging on this WordPress platform to see if it offers value as a educational tool.  Our hope is that everyone will benefit to a degree and that some of you might become devoted and regular educational bloggers.

There are a number of models to consider.  First, please check out the Blog Divided from the House Divided Project at Dickinson.  It is not a typical blog, but it is a resource created for teachers about the Civil War era.  The New York Times has sponsored a beautifully written and important blog series on the war called, Disunion, that should be featured in every high school and undergraduate course on the Civil War.  Civil Warriors is another excellent and well written blog series on the conflict with a focus on military history.  Teachers might especially enjoy Civil War Memory from former high school instructor Kevin Levin because it deconstructs various efforts at remembering the conflict.  Another blog that might prove particularly useful to teachers is Civil War Emancipation from Donald R. Shaffer, since he focuses on a topic that nearly everybody teaches at every level.

Page 3 of 3

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén