Limiting each speech to 25 words, we get the following:
John Brown’s Statement to the Court 1859
Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Speech 1860
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation 1863
Abraham’s Second Inaugural Address 1865
Author: isaacbrooks
John Brown’s public statement 1859
Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address 1860
Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address 1865
Are we on the path to distilling the arc of national consciousness through these speeches as presented through the lens of wordle.net?
As a culmination field trip to our year and a half study of American history through the lens of New York City history, we travel to various parts of the city to ascertain the legacy of that history. One of the stops we make is Greenwood Cemetery, located in Brooklyn. We explore five monuments/grave sites and place our observations in the context of the arc of history we’ve studied. One of the sites we visit is the 1869 Civil War Soldiers’ Monument, erected in memory of the dead and the almost 150,000 enlisted servicemen on Battle Hill (where Washington faced the British in the Battle of Long Island at the start of the Revolutionary War).
The monument is complex in construction and offers a wide variety of symbols (military and otherwise), figures, and apparently allegorical bas relief scenes.
http://www.green-wood.com/2010/civil-war-soldiers-monument-saved/
Reading Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, of all places, I came upon excerpts from the second inaugural address that reminded me of the scenes depicted on the bas reliefs between full-sized sculptures representing the various branches of the Union Army.
According to the website from Green-Wood Cemetery (link above), these reliefs had text associated with them (but that text is currently missing). The monument was erected in Brooklyn in 1869, less than five years after the second inaugural address (Lincoln’s last great public speech on the conflict of the Civil War). Would these bas relief scenes be attempts at illustrating the final lines of that address?
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
-Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865
What do you think? And, is this a valid place to end the search for a national consciousness surrounding the Civil War conflict as a direct line from the public statements of John Brown?
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.