H105, American History I

Our last class might seem like a long time ago, before what I hope was a revitalizing Thanksgiving break for each and all of you.  We ended that week before Thanksgiving break with a special class which I personally always enjoy.  Before that, in the Tuesday class, we focused on what has long with false innocence been called “western expansion” but is more accurately termed “imperial expansion” as it involved a massive dispossession of Native American nations from their homelands.  In less abstract terms, this meant the destruction of individuals, families, communities, and cultures ... while making room for cotton plantations, homesteads, small towns, mining companies, and railroad companies.  This continental-scale process meant deep structural advantage and privilege for white Americans over non-white Americans, continuing to the present day in which we now live.  History is very much alive today.

One element of this structural advantage and privilege would become seriously contested in the 1850s, and that was the status of slavery in American life.  Southerners were becoming very aware and very concerned that the United States was one of the very last slave nations in the world, and Southern politicians in important positions of power in the national government, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, worked extremely hard to preserve and even to strengthen slavery.  Abolitionists with very limited political power, such as Frederick Douglass, worked extremely hard to challenge and abolish slavery.  Amid the escalating contestation, nobody expected the severity of what would ultimately be required to overthrow slavery:  a cataclysmic civil war.

Approximately 620,000 Northern and Southern soldiers — 2.5% of the U.S. population — died in the four years of the American Civil War, an index of the war’s awful brutality.  This is only part of the story, as it is impossible now to determine how many civilians were killed as well.  What caused so much human brutality and bloodshed in such a short span of time?  By 1861, the political, economic, social, and cultural differences between the American North and the American South had become irreconciliable, and those differences centered upon the status of slavery in American life.  Which is to say, the life circumstances of nearly 4,000,000 enslaved black men, women, and children.  Enslaved human beings, on such an enormous scale, across so many generations — one can think of few greater evils in human history.  Perhaps that is why it has long been and continues to be so difficult for many (?) Americans to face the history of slavery, especially as it has coincided with a surreal self-congratulatory narrative associating the United States in some supposedly exceptional way with “freedom” even during the long era of slavery itself, never mind the long era of white supremacy and racism since 1865.  Historians I know sometimes feel lonely in their willingness to grapple with historical reality, which is one small part of a larger fight for the sake of principles of freedom, equality, and justice.

Through much bloodshed and horror, the American Civil War did ostensibly manage to vanquish slavery.  Enslaved people were emancipated.  Yet, like the War of American Independence, the American Civil War was tragically limited in its immediate outcomes, never mind in its long-term legacies.  It certainly did not manage to vanquish racism and white supremacy — which, if anything, have become increasingly virulent in the present day — i.e., in your moment of American history.  Just as Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech foreshadowed, overcoming that human tragedy and that human shame still constitutes a terrible, unfinished, ever-pressing task.  For my generation, for your generation, and for generations into the unseen future....

Tuesday

Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863):  Lincoln’s speech remains famous for its pithy eloquence upon a wrenching occasion:  the commemoration of a terrible battle, before the American Civil War had attained definitive resolution.  In but a few words, Lincoln managed to invoke past, present and future.  How did he invoke the past?  The present?  The future?  Much of the nineteenth century had been characterized by a sense of fragility concerning the American nation, less from external threats, and more from internal ones.  Did Lincoln feel this sense of fragility still?  What remained to be done in the future, in his mind, after the slaughter of the American Civil War might be over?

Thursday

Jourdon Anderson letter (1865):  Both earnest and sarcastic, this letter was published by abolitionists to dramatize the contrasts between “freedom” and slavery.  What elements of his family’s new life did Anderson associate with freedom?  How did he calculate the back-pay owed him by his former owner?

Douglass, “What the Black Man Wants” (1865):  Douglass’s speech considered the many tasks of “reconstruction” in the aftermath of the American Civil War.  Why did Douglass insist upon the right to vote for freed slaves?  Why did he think the right to vote especially crucial in the American system of government and citizenship?  Why did he differentiate between a “privilege” and a “right”?  What did Douglass say about women’s suffrage?  Why did that matter to him?