UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA
A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor in Philosophy
by Michael E. DeGruccio
_________________________________
Gail Bederman, Director
Graduate Program in History
Notre Dame, Indiana
July 2007
Abstract by Michael E. DeGruccio
This dissertation is ultimately a story about men trying to tell stories about themselves.
The central character driving the narrative is a relatively obscure officer, George W. Cole, who gained modest fame in central New York for leading a regiment of black soldiers under the controversial General Benjamin Butler, and, later, for killing his attorney after returning home from the war.
By weaving Cole into overlapping micro-narratives about violence between white officers and black troops, hidden war injuries, the personal struggles of fellow officers, the unbounded ambition of his highest commander, Benjamin Butler, and the melancholy life of his wife Mary Barto Cole, this dissertation fleshes out the essence of the emergent myth of self-made manhood and its relationship to the war era.
It also provides connective tissue between the top-down war histories of generals and epic battles and the many social histories about the “common soldier” that have been written consciously to push the historiography away from military brass and Lincoln’s administration.
Throughout this dissertation, mediating figures like Cole and those who surrounded him — all of lesser ranks like major, colonel, sergeant, or captain — hem together what has previously seemed like the disconnected experiences of the Union military leaders, and lowly privates in the field, especially African American troops.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME
One can hardly walk into a bookstore or watch public television without being whipsawed by self-help prophets selling us the secret of how to take control of our lives.
We are promised that we can parlay a mortgage payment into a fortune, become masters of our bodies, overcome aging, beat cancer, have multiple, mutual orgasms, and raise sensitive children with enough ambition to get into the Ivies.
In his most recent ultranationalistic work “What’s So Great about America,” Dinesh D’Souza assures his readers that more than any place on the planet, Americans “get to write the script” of their lives.
What they become depends on the story they compose.1
If D’Souza can be accused of raking in a fortune by peddling old wine in new bottles, his readers don’t seem to mind.
He is, after all, merely the latest in a long lineage of American stump speakers who have preached the gospel of self-help.
In this big-tent gospel, adherents give obeisance to the individual’s power to master fate and cash out talent for success, fulfillment, and status.
And as in any storefront evangelical church, backsliding is a symptom of anemic faith (in oneself instead of Jesus).
This belief that through focused planning and hard-boiled will individuals can fashion their own destinies is what many vaguely mean by “the American Dream.”2
While the “dream” is often evoked to address a loose set of common hopes and beliefs about anything from the purpose of life to the justification for government, it is something that, as Jim Cullen has put it, “seems to envelop us as unmistakably as the air we breathe.”
Though Cullen’s claim sounds a bit inflated it actually squares with what most of us have come to barely notice.
If Americans filter out the bromides during political conventions, post-game interviews, and almost any debate about American education, they do so because they know beforehand what’s going to be said, and because they have already been at least partially converted to the creed.
That is, many Americans believe that an open, democratic society exists primarily for the purpose of producing self-actuated beings.
As they might imagine it, thanks to individuals like Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Abe Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., more and more Americans, through micromanagement of the self, can be masters of their destinies.3
1 Dinesh D'Souza, What's so Great about America (Washington, DC; Lanham, MD: Regnery Publishing; Distributed to the trade by National Book Network, 2002), 83,131.
2 Jim Cullen points out that the “American Dream” has consisted of various tenets: freedom to worship; upward mobility, home ownership, land ownership, quest for equality, and personal fulfillment (fame, fortune, sexual pleasure, peace of mind, etc.). Cullen of course makes no claim that these categories are exhaustive. Clearly many of these overlap and sometimes collapse into each other: The upwardly mobile American may be motivated in the pews from the church of his choosing, make a fortune through real estate, and expect his original fortune to bring more fulfilling sex, fame and even better returns in the market. See: Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8-9.
3 I do not mean to disparage this hope in creating a world where station reflects merit, but instead to argue how profoundly this hope has taken hold in our culture. Of course, the American Dream, or meritocracy does not sufficiently describe the larger visions held by any of these individuals. But, at the same time, one cannot talk long about their legacies without touching upon the ways in which ideals like freedom, democracy, and equality overlap with meritocratic ends. To the extent that Americans disagree about the American Dream it is over the degree to which it has been fulfilled or aborted, more than its central tenets. For example, as Christopher Lasch has pointed out, when Americans dispute affirmative action all sides seem to take merit as the central issue. “Both sides argue on the same grounds. Both see careers open to talent as the be-all and end-all of democracy, when in fact, careerism tends to undermine democracy by divorcing knowledge from practical experience, devaluing the kind of knowledge that is gained from experience, and generating social conditions in which ordinary people are not expected to know anything at all.” See: Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 78-9. While the American political right and left are going about it in different ways, both sides place meritocracy as one of the highest goals. Conservatives may look to individuated selves overcoming systemic obstacles; while their political counterparts place faith in public education and the taming of public and private mechanisms. Both sides, though, by and large are trying to chase down a society that creates a deserving elite — a society which will reflect the individual’s talents more than bloodline, race, or privilege (either from systemic prejudice, or government intervention).
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME
One can hardly walk into a bookstore or watch public television without being whipsawed by self-help prophets selling us the secret of how to take control of our lives.
We are promised that we can parlay a mortgage payment into a fortune, become masters of our bodies, overcome aging, beat cancer, have multiple, mutual orgasms, and raise sensitive children with enough ambition to get into the Ivies.
In his most recent ultranationalistic work “What’s So Great about America,” Dinesh D’Souza assures his readers that more than any place on the planet, Americans “get to write the script” of their lives.
What they become depends on the story they compose.1
If D’Souza can be accused of raking in a fortune by peddling old wine in new bottles, his readers don’t seem to mind.
He is, after all, merely the latest in a long lineage of American stump speakers who have preached the gospel of self-help.
In this big-tent gospel, adherents give obeisance to the individual’s power to master fate and cash out talent for success, fulfillment, and status.
And as in any storefront evangelical church, backsliding is a symptom of anemic faith (in oneself instead of Jesus).
This belief that through focused planning and hard-boiled will individuals can fashion their own destinies is what many vaguely mean by “the American Dream.”2
While the “dream” is often evoked to address a loose set of common hopes and beliefs about anything from the purpose of life to the justification for government, it is something that, as Jim Cullen has put it, “seems to envelop us as unmistakably as the air we breathe.”
Though Cullen’s claim sounds a bit inflated it actually squares with what most of us have come to barely notice.
If Americans filter out the bromides during political conventions, post-game interviews, and almost any debate about American education, they do so because they know beforehand what’s going to be said, and because they have already been at least partially converted to the creed.
That is, many Americans believe that an open, democratic society exists primarily for the purpose of producing self-actuated beings.
As they might imagine it, thanks to individuals like Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Abe Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., more and more Americans, through micromanagement of the self, can be masters of their destinies.3
1 Dinesh D'Souza, What's so Great about America (Washington, DC; Lanham, MD: Regnery Publishing; Distributed to the trade by National Book Network, 2002), 83,131.
2 Jim Cullen points out that the “American Dream” has consisted of various tenets: freedom to worship; upward mobility, home ownership, land ownership, quest for equality, and personal fulfillment (fame, fortune, sexual pleasure, peace of mind, etc.). Cullen of course makes no claim that these categories are exhaustive. Clearly many of these overlap and sometimes collapse into each other: The upwardly mobile American may be motivated in the pews from the church of his choosing, make a fortune through real estate, and expect his original fortune to bring more fulfilling sex, fame and even better returns in the market. See: Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8-9.
3 I do not mean to disparage this hope in creating a world where station reflects merit, but instead to argue how profoundly this hope has taken hold in our culture. Of course, the American Dream, or meritocracy does not sufficiently describe the larger visions held by any of these individuals. But, at the same time, one cannot talk long about their legacies without touching upon the ways in which ideals like freedom, democracy, and equality overlap with meritocratic ends. To the extent that Americans disagree about the American Dream it is over the degree to which it has been fulfilled or aborted, more than its central tenets. For example, as Christopher Lasch has pointed out, when Americans dispute affirmative action all sides seem to take merit as the central issue. “Both sides argue on the same grounds. Both see careers open to talent as the be-all and end-all of democracy, when in fact, careerism tends to undermine democracy by divorcing knowledge from practical experience, devaluing the kind of knowledge that is gained from experience, and generating social conditions in which ordinary people are not expected to know anything at all.” See: Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 78-9. While the American political right and left are going about it in different ways, both sides place meritocracy as one of the highest goals. Conservatives may look to individuated selves overcoming systemic obstacles; while their political counterparts place faith in public education and the taming of public and private mechanisms. Both sides, though, by and large are trying to chase down a society that creates a deserving elite — a society which will reflect the individual’s talents more than bloodline, race, or privilege (either from systemic prejudice, or government intervention).
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
If meritocracy or what Abraham Lincoln called the “race of life” could be blamed for merely creating ambitious men lusting for rank, it would be disconcerting enough.
But it does this and worse.
Meritocracy can stigmatize those who have countervailing commitments to community, family, craft, nation, or God.
Scott Sandage has shown how in the making of meritocratic America, financial collapse or even mild setbacks took on moral meaning.
In his study of business failure in the nineteenth century, Sandage demonstrates how the very meaning of the word “failure” in America shifted from an isolated misstep in business calculations to a description of a person’s soul.
Failure went from something that happened to businessmen, to a character trait that defined them.
Losing became an indictment of the soul; it had never been so psychologically disturbing to stall or plod.
Medieval peasants, unlike their impoverished counterparts today, for all their suffering, maintained a modicum of dignity as they, at least, could trace their lowliness to someone else’s actions (God’s) while believing they were an essential part of a divinely ordered society.
If French peasants could blame it all on the mysterious orderings of Jesus, Sandage’s work reminds us that Gilded Age “losers” needed only look within.4
While meritocracy breeds plenty of ambitious individuals, it condemns and confuses those who are only half on board — and of course those left standing on the platform.
Jennifer Hochschild makes the convincing case that today’s American poor, and in particular, indigent blacks, have fallen “under the spell” of the meritocratic American Dream.
The belief in unfettered agency and in the power of merit, she contends, serves to mask the complex structures that keep certain folks in certain places.
In what scholars call “racial uplift,” we find that this spell particularly divides and compromises the African American community.
And it is not just capitalists and racial minorities who have bought into it.
In his parting diatribe the late Christopher Lasch called academics and professionals onto the carpet for participating in what masks as an egalitarian system of meritocracy, but which, he argued, merely recruits fresh blood into the American elite.
Because our own nocturnal dreams often plumb the very things that can destroy us, large portions of Americans, from second-graders to the aged, experience the “meritocrat’s nightmare.”
In these dreams we have slept in, or forgotten about a final test.
An otherwise ho-hum image of sleeping in is so unsettling precisely because of the fear of slipping up in a system that is supposed to measure our real value.5
From the boardroom, to the admissions office, to the boudoir, to the welfare line — this is an abiding American mindset that seems to come naturally to most of us.6
4 Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 189-225.; Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), esp.45-71.
5 Samuel G. Freedman, “Dreamed You Never Studied? Be Proud” in New York Times, September 8, 2004.
6 Jennifer L. Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 412.; Lani Guinier, "From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown V. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma," Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (2004), 92-118.; Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). A professor once half-jokingly confessed to me that he contemplated purchasing his own book during the Super Bowl just for the rush of watching his neglected work break into Amazon’s top 100,000. Based on hourly sales, Amazon.com regularly ranks its most sought after books from first down to the millions; the rank of “none” is like reading your book’s obituary.) I envisioned thousands of scholars hunched before their monitors, licking their wounds, stuffing their electronic shopping carts to the brim. This pitiful scene only seemed possible of course, because for several hours every winter, over a hundred million Americans gather to take part in a major ritual of our national sports obsession — an obsession where lasers, instant replays, elaborate ranking systems and asterisk marks are implemented to maintain hallowed lists of record holders and undisputed champions. From the gridiron to the classroom we are egalitarians, seduced by rank.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
If meritocracy or what Abraham Lincoln called the “race of life” could be blamed for merely creating ambitious men lusting for rank, it would be disconcerting enough.
But it does this and worse.
Meritocracy can stigmatize those who have countervailing commitments to community, family, craft, nation, or God.
Scott Sandage has shown how in the making of meritocratic America, financial collapse or even mild setbacks took on moral meaning.
In his study of business failure in the nineteenth century, Sandage demonstrates how the very meaning of the word “failure” in America shifted from an isolated misstep in business calculations to a description of a person’s soul.
Failure went from something that happened to businessmen, to a character trait that defined them.
Losing became an indictment of the soul; it had never been so psychologically disturbing to stall or plod.
Medieval peasants, unlike their impoverished counterparts today, for all their suffering, maintained a modicum of dignity as they, at least, could trace their lowliness to someone else’s actions (God’s) while believing they were an essential part of a divinely ordered society.
If French peasants could blame it all on the mysterious orderings of Jesus, Sandage’s work reminds us that Gilded Age “losers” needed only look within.4
While meritocracy breeds plenty of ambitious individuals, it condemns and confuses those who are only half on board — and of course those left standing on the platform.
Jennifer Hochschild makes the convincing case that today’s American poor, and in particular, indigent blacks, have fallen “under the spell” of the meritocratic American Dream.
The belief in unfettered agency and in the power of merit, she contends, serves to mask the complex structures that keep certain folks in certain places.
In what scholars call “racial uplift,” we find that this spell particularly divides and compromises the African American community.
And it is not just capitalists and racial minorities who have bought into it.
In his parting diatribe the late Christopher Lasch called academics and professionals onto the carpet for participating in what masks as an egalitarian system of meritocracy, but which, he argued, merely recruits fresh blood into the American elite.
Because our own nocturnal dreams often plumb the very things that can destroy us, large portions of Americans, from second-graders to the aged, experience the “meritocrat’s nightmare.”
In these dreams we have slept in, or forgotten about a final test.
An otherwise ho-hum image of sleeping in is so unsettling precisely because of the fear of slipping up in a system that is supposed to measure our real value.5
From the boardroom, to the admissions office, to the boudoir, to the welfare line — this is an abiding American mindset that seems to come naturally to most of us.6
4 Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 189-225.; Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), esp.45-71.
5 Samuel G. Freedman, “Dreamed You Never Studied? Be Proud” in New York Times, September 8, 2004.
6 Jennifer L. Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 412.; Lani Guinier, "From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown V. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma," Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (2004), 92-118.; Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). A professor once half-jokingly confessed to me that he contemplated purchasing his own book during the Super Bowl just for the rush of watching his neglected work break into Amazon’s top 100,000. Based on hourly sales, Amazon.com regularly ranks its most sought after books from first down to the millions; the rank of “none” is like reading your book’s obituary.) I envisioned thousands of scholars hunched before their monitors, licking their wounds, stuffing their electronic shopping carts to the brim. This pitiful scene only seemed possible of course, because for several hours every winter, over a hundred million Americans gather to take part in a major ritual of our national sports obsession — an obsession where lasers, instant replays, elaborate ranking systems and asterisk marks are implemented to maintain hallowed lists of record holders and undisputed champions. From the gridiron to the classroom we are egalitarians, seduced by rank.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
Tracing the origins of self-making, or the “culture of control,” brings one into a thicket of tangled beginnings found in religion, science, emerging conceptions of the self, the gradual conflation of work with morality, and the rise of the market.7
The transformation of religious sensibilities in the nineteenth century were particularly important in all of this.
The “embourgeoisement” of evangelicalism supplied the final gutting of the once mysterious, passive miracle of grace, and transformed it into a gradual process of self-mastery where humans controlled their own salvation.8
While the logic of Calvinist grace and salvation may have helped create a society of eager and industrious money gatherers, the sweated money proved more alluring than the Puritan God.9
This theological shift injected moral meaning into one’s station and cleared the way for the ubiquitous “self-made man.”
As the story goes, the nineteenth century was a sort of prolonged climax of confidence in the individual’s ability to assure his own salvation, remake the world, establish Zion, and move upward in purpose and influence.
It was surely no coincidence that many Americans believed not only that they could earn their way into heaven, but also that with enough planning and good behavior, they could hasten the return of Christ to earth, making him come to them.10
The work that follows is not intended to be a genealogy of the American Dream; nor does it seek to give a definitive interpretation of “self-made men.”11
Instead it will provide the background of a world in flux — when Americans grappled with the concept of self-made manhood during a war that promised to spawn a nation of self-makers.
As Eric Foner has shown us in his work on free labor ideology and the making of the Republican Party, scads of men, like the central figures in this narrative, came to believe that the primary purpose of society and government was to guarantee certain limited rights before the law — not for the sake of equality —but instead for the promise that talents would correlate with status.12
In other words, Lincoln and his party earnestly set out to create what the Revolutionary generation called “a natural aristocracy” — a world where merit trumped bloodline and talent reflected station.
By and large the men who rushed to Lincoln’s party before the war did not dream of a world of social equality: Instead, they aimed to provide all men certain limited equalities before the law and, in turn, level the playing field and create a society of the deserving — with both winners and losers who only had themselves to thank or blame.
In short, the party that controlled national politics for the remaining half of the nineteenth century, the one that freed four million slaves and secured certain constitutional equalities for freedmen, was also committed to creating a society made up of unimpeachable social ranks.13
7 This mounting hope that through technology, science, or focused faith we can control our lives might best be described what Jackson Lears has called the “managerial culture of control.” T. J. Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003), 21. Charles Taylor’s massive work moves through past centuries to the present showing sources of modern thought. It particularly stresses the emergence of finding meaning by turning inward and the accompanying celebration of the ordinary life. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). James Block argues for a significant shift in the meaning of agency and the forming of the American modern self. See: James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). Of course Weber’s work remains critical for understanding how conceptions of grace and salvation informed Protestants’ relationship to work, materialism, and perfectionism: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des
Kapitalismus.], 2nd Roxbury ed. (Los Angeles: Roxbury Pub., 1998).
8 Lears, "Something for Nothing: Luck in America", 1-24, 135-40
9 Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
10 Any student of antebellum American is familiar with the hothouse of perfectionism, utopian communities, radical reform, body reform movements, geographic and familial expansionism (polygamy, complex marriage), and the troubled endeavors to build confidence in anything from money to newspapers. See: Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860, Rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).; Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).; James H. Moorhead, "Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800-1880," Journal of American History 71, no. 3 (1984), 524-542.
11 There really is no work that thoroughly sifts out the various origins of meritocracy. The term was actually coined in the mid-twentieth century by the writer Michael Young, who depicted a futuristic dystopian England, tyrannized by academic and professional merit testing as a way to create secure classes. See: Michael Dunlop Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033: The New Elite of our Social Revolution (New York: Random House, 1959). While the word is usually coupled with higher education, its emphasis on creating a just society where individuals get what they deserve would have resonated with champions of free labor in the nineteenth century. For the best work on its transformation from colonial New England to Hollywood’s cultural colonizers, see: Cullen, "The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation"; Calvin C. Jillson, Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity and Exclusion Over Four Centuries (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
12 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 353.
13 ibid.; Cullen, "The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation", 59-102 The thing about Republicans is that while they admitted there was a bottom and top rung, they insisted that these rungs were always in motion — usually upward. A farmhand today would be a landowner and employer tomorrow. This gave many northerners the ability to at once admit to the existence of marked poverty, especially in the cities, while at the same time reduce it to an ephemeral problem that all must shoulder for a season.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
Tracing the origins of self-making, or the “culture of control,” brings one into a thicket of tangled beginnings found in religion, science, emerging conceptions of the self, the gradual conflation of work with morality, and the rise of the market.7
The transformation of religious sensibilities in the nineteenth century were particularly important in all of this.
The “embourgeoisement” of evangelicalism supplied the final gutting of the once mysterious, passive miracle of grace, and transformed it into a gradual process of self-mastery where humans controlled their own salvation.8
While the logic of Calvinist grace and salvation may have helped create a society of eager and industrious money gatherers, the sweated money proved more alluring than the Puritan God.9
This theological shift injected moral meaning into one’s station and cleared the way for the ubiquitous “self-made man.”
As the story goes, the nineteenth century was a sort of prolonged climax of confidence in the individual’s ability to assure his own salvation, remake the world, establish Zion, and move upward in purpose and influence.
It was surely no coincidence that many Americans believed not only that they could earn their way into heaven, but also that with enough planning and good behavior, they could hasten the return of Christ to earth, making him come to them.10
The work that follows is not intended to be a genealogy of the American Dream; nor does it seek to give a definitive interpretation of “self-made men.”11
Instead it will provide the background of a world in flux — when Americans grappled with the concept of self-made manhood during a war that promised to spawn a nation of self-makers.
As Eric Foner has shown us in his work on free labor ideology and the making of the Republican Party, scads of men, like the central figures in this narrative, came to believe that the primary purpose of society and government was to guarantee certain limited rights before the law — not for the sake of equality —but instead for the promise that talents would correlate with status.12
In other words, Lincoln and his party earnestly set out to create what the Revolutionary generation called “a natural aristocracy” — a world where merit trumped bloodline and talent reflected station.
By and large the men who rushed to Lincoln’s party before the war did not dream of a world of social equality: Instead, they aimed to provide all men certain limited equalities before the law and, in turn, level the playing field and create a society of the deserving — with both winners and losers who only had themselves to thank or blame.
In short, the party that controlled national politics for the remaining half of the nineteenth century, the one that freed four million slaves and secured certain constitutional equalities for freedmen, was also committed to creating a society made up of unimpeachable social ranks.13
7 This mounting hope that through technology, science, or focused faith we can control our lives might best be described what Jackson Lears has called the “managerial culture of control.” T. J. Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003), 21. Charles Taylor’s massive work moves through past centuries to the present showing sources of modern thought. It particularly stresses the emergence of finding meaning by turning inward and the accompanying celebration of the ordinary life. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). James Block argues for a significant shift in the meaning of agency and the forming of the American modern self. See: James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). Of course Weber’s work remains critical for understanding how conceptions of grace and salvation informed Protestants’ relationship to work, materialism, and perfectionism: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des
Kapitalismus.], 2nd Roxbury ed. (Los Angeles: Roxbury Pub., 1998).
8 Lears, "Something for Nothing: Luck in America", 1-24, 135-40
9 Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
10 Any student of antebellum American is familiar with the hothouse of perfectionism, utopian communities, radical reform, body reform movements, geographic and familial expansionism (polygamy, complex marriage), and the troubled endeavors to build confidence in anything from money to newspapers. See: Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860, Rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).; Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).; James H. Moorhead, "Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800-1880," Journal of American History 71, no. 3 (1984), 524-542.
11 There really is no work that thoroughly sifts out the various origins of meritocracy. The term was actually coined in the mid-twentieth century by the writer Michael Young, who depicted a futuristic dystopian England, tyrannized by academic and professional merit testing as a way to create secure classes. See: Michael Dunlop Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033: The New Elite of our Social Revolution (New York: Random House, 1959). While the word is usually coupled with higher education, its emphasis on creating a just society where individuals get what they deserve would have resonated with champions of free labor in the nineteenth century. For the best work on its transformation from colonial New England to Hollywood’s cultural colonizers, see: Cullen, "The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation"; Calvin C. Jillson, Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity and Exclusion Over Four Centuries (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
12 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 353.
13 ibid.; Cullen, "The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation", 59-102 The thing about Republicans is that while they admitted there was a bottom and top rung, they insisted that these rungs were always in motion — usually upward. A farmhand today would be a landowner and employer tomorrow. This gave many northerners the ability to at once admit to the existence of marked poverty, especially in the cities, while at the same time reduce it to an ephemeral problem that all must shoulder for a season.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
While the history of American meritocracy and self-making seems to originate in antebellum American, the story stretches back and beyond even Jefferson’s age and his venerated soil.
The increasingly internalized meaning of station was not created ex-nihilo in the American Revolution or the ensuing century.
Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century a sizable number of Americans casually spoke of controlling their own destinies in ways that would have baffled, if not horrified, their great grandfathers.14
Indeed, a consistent trait in American self-making was the conscious effort to distance oneself, both psychologically and geographically, from one’s father and kin.15
Just as grandfathers would have been startled by the open ambitions of their descendents, they would have been equally disturbed by the ways in which young men in antebellum America used the lives of forefathers as benchmarks to surpass.
One of the paradoxes of the American Civil War was that so many northerners viewed it as a chance for men to make the ultimate sacrifice for community and family, while at the same time the war allured a growing population of ambitious men willing to leave their families so they could outpace their fathers.16
For this and other reasons, the Civil War Era (when Americans grappled with and took up arms over unfinished business from the Revolution) is an apt place to begin digging into the complexities and paradoxes of this enduring American creed.
There are compelling reasons, after all, to see the Civil War as a four-year rite of passage that anointed and galvanized emergent sympathies for meritocracy, self-making, and upward mobility.
The ambitious individualism that was already in motion, that indeed one could trace back to the Revolution or the Reformation, the war seems to have kicked into high gear.17
14 Earlier generations would have been shocked, not just by the extent to which their descendents wished to control their own destinies, but the things they deemed fulfilling.
15 Kenneth J. Winkle, "Abraham Lincoln: Self-made Man," Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 21, no. 2 (2000), 1-16.
16 Mark E. Neely and Harold Holzer, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 83-108.; Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 201. As will be seen, Charles Francis Adam Jr., consciously set out to do what his own father and others could not do in fulfilling the promises of the Revolution. Wanting to outpace one’s father does not necessarily translate into animosity or latent patricidal urges; instead it is manifested in the way one measure’s one’s own success, using a father’s accomplishments as a threshold for gauging one’s life performance, especially in the marketplace.
17 If political and entrepreneurial ambitions were high in the 1850s they only got worse by the 1870s. While the 1850s are often depicted as the height of political corruption, the work of Mark Summers shows us how little things changed after the war. Mark W. Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849-1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 362.; Mark W. Summers, "The Spoils of War," North & South 6, no. 2 (2003), 82-89.; Mark W. Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 390.; Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid Under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 361.; ibid.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
While the history of American meritocracy and self-making seems to originate in antebellum American, the story stretches back and beyond even Jefferson’s age and his venerated soil.
The increasingly internalized meaning of station was not created ex-nihilo in the American Revolution or the ensuing century.
Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century a sizable number of Americans casually spoke of controlling their own destinies in ways that would have baffled, if not horrified, their great grandfathers.14
Indeed, a consistent trait in American self-making was the conscious effort to distance oneself, both psychologically and geographically, from one’s father and kin.15
Just as grandfathers would have been startled by the open ambitions of their descendents, they would have been equally disturbed by the ways in which young men in antebellum America used the lives of forefathers as benchmarks to surpass.
One of the paradoxes of the American Civil War was that so many northerners viewed it as a chance for men to make the ultimate sacrifice for community and family, while at the same time the war allured a growing population of ambitious men willing to leave their families so they could outpace their fathers.16
For this and other reasons, the Civil War Era (when Americans grappled with and took up arms over unfinished business from the Revolution) is an apt place to begin digging into the complexities and paradoxes of this enduring American creed.
There are compelling reasons, after all, to see the Civil War as a four-year rite of passage that anointed and galvanized emergent sympathies for meritocracy, self-making, and upward mobility.
The ambitious individualism that was already in motion, that indeed one could trace back to the Revolution or the Reformation, the war seems to have kicked into high gear.17
14 Earlier generations would have been shocked, not just by the extent to which their descendents wished to control their own destinies, but the things they deemed fulfilling.
15 Kenneth J. Winkle, "Abraham Lincoln: Self-made Man," Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 21, no. 2 (2000), 1-16.
16 Mark E. Neely and Harold Holzer, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 83-108.; Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 201. As will be seen, Charles Francis Adam Jr., consciously set out to do what his own father and others could not do in fulfilling the promises of the Revolution. Wanting to outpace one’s father does not necessarily translate into animosity or latent patricidal urges; instead it is manifested in the way one measure’s one’s own success, using a father’s accomplishments as a threshold for gauging one’s life performance, especially in the marketplace.
17 If political and entrepreneurial ambitions were high in the 1850s they only got worse by the 1870s. While the 1850s are often depicted as the height of political corruption, the work of Mark Summers shows us how little things changed after the war. Mark W. Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849-1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 362.; Mark W. Summers, "The Spoils of War," North & South 6, no. 2 (2003), 82-89.; Mark W. Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 390.; Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid Under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 361.; ibid.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
It was in the Civil War that Americans first began systematically identifying soldiers’ corpses and paying tribute to fallen individuals with discrete identities.18
In New York, the home state of George Cole — the central figure in this narrative — wartime legislation was passed into law “making it a duty” of the Bureau of Military Statistics to “collect and preserve in a permanent form an authentic sketch of every volunteer from this State.”
Cole’s hometown newspaper announced that a circular was making its way around “calling for biographical sketches of the living and the dead, as well as photographic and other likenesses."
"Every person having a friend in the army is requested to send at once to the Bureau and account of his life or services, and especially if he has died in the field or camp.”19
During the war, the dead soldier’s body would decreasingly be reduced to an anonymous sacrifice, rolled into a mass grave without marker and subsumed into the state’s war effort.
The Union administration felt increasing pressure to create a system to gather personal effects, report the names of the dead, and either provide an individually marked grave or allow family to retrieve bodies and carry them home.20
Even as the war emphasized the individual, the Republican Party somewhat unwittingly flipped the American mental map on its side — changing the orientation of conceptions like “opportunity” and “mobility” from horizontal to the vertical.
In his jeremiad against American meritocracy (in which he strains to let Lincoln and his party off the hook) Christopher Lasch admits that the Morrill College Land Grant Act of 1862, passed by an unconstrained Republican Congress and signed by Lincoln, was a watershed moment.21
Though its backers hoped the Act would encourage stable farm communities and dignify manual labor, it did more to “exalt the professional status,” fulfilling the Jeffersonian yeoman ideal even as it choked it to death.22
18 Drew Gilpin Faust and Kristin Ann Hass both argue that an emerging emphasis on the individual soldier and his identity took root during the Civil War. See: Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).; Drew Gilpin Faust, "'the Dread Void of Uncertainty': Naming the Dead in the American Civil War," Southern Cultures 11, no. 2 (2005), 7-32. Hass argues that, “until the 1860s, memorial traditions had remained relatively constant since the time of the ancient Egyptians. European and, later, American memorializers, drawing on a limited range of symbolic forms, remembered wars as triumphs of state or divine power, without paying particular attention to ordinary soldiers.” During the war and virtually all wars before it soldiers did not carry personal IDs, as it was not thought of as essential to have ones body pulled out, identified, and separately buried. In the Civil War as the army began to try to identify bodies and make separate graves, they pilfered pockets to make connections to names---some soldiers wrote messages and put them in their pockets, or pinned their name to their uniforms before going into combat. Gettysburg marked the first time during the war the Union made earnest and systematic efforts to give each body a grave and a name. It is interesting that Mary Ryan argues that during this same period just before the war, the reproduction of the Middle-Class correlated with modes of child rearing where parents no longer looked to crush the wills of children, but to foster and persuade them, and cultivate a benignly ambitious personal will. See: Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, Eng. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 158-9.
19 Syracuse Journal, July 27, 1863; The announcement goes on to say that “These objects are too important to be neglected. Every soldier deserves and should have his name thus inscribed in the archives of the State.” It isn’t clear if the public ever responded with like enthusiasm. The Bureau did publish some books on military statistics but nothing like one would expect to find given the legislation.
20 Hass, "Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial"; Faust, "'the Dread Void of Uncertainty': Naming the Dead in the American Civil War", 7-32; Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying," Journal of Southern History 67, no. 1 (2001), 3-38.
21 The Morrill Land Act was first passed by congress in 1859, but was vetoed by the Democratic president, James Buchanan. When the amended Morrill Act was passed again Abraham Lincoln signed it into law. The Act essentially gifted large tracts of land to individual states which could then be sold or used for the creation of learning institutions, primarily colleges and universities. These institutions would be required to teach agriculture, military or engineering sciences. See: Lasch, "The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy", 77-9; Phillip S. Paludan, A People's Contest: The Union and Civil War 1861-1865, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 129-30.
22 See: Christopher Lasch, "Social Mobility" In A Companion to American Thought, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Oxford ; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 631-34.; Lasch, "The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy", 70-9
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
It was in the Civil War that Americans first began systematically identifying soldiers’ corpses and paying tribute to fallen individuals with discrete identities.18
In New York, the home state of George Cole — the central figure in this narrative — wartime legislation was passed into law “making it a duty” of the Bureau of Military Statistics to “collect and preserve in a permanent form an authentic sketch of every volunteer from this State.”
Cole’s hometown newspaper announced that a circular was making its way around “calling for biographical sketches of the living and the dead, as well as photographic and other likenesses."
"Every person having a friend in the army is requested to send at once to the Bureau and account of his life or services, and especially if he has died in the field or camp.”19
During the war, the dead soldier’s body would decreasingly be reduced to an anonymous sacrifice, rolled into a mass grave without marker and subsumed into the state’s war effort.
The Union administration felt increasing pressure to create a system to gather personal effects, report the names of the dead, and either provide an individually marked grave or allow family to retrieve bodies and carry them home.20
Even as the war emphasized the individual, the Republican Party somewhat unwittingly flipped the American mental map on its side — changing the orientation of conceptions like “opportunity” and “mobility” from horizontal to the vertical.
In his jeremiad against American meritocracy (in which he strains to let Lincoln and his party off the hook) Christopher Lasch admits that the Morrill College Land Grant Act of 1862, passed by an unconstrained Republican Congress and signed by Lincoln, was a watershed moment.21
Though its backers hoped the Act would encourage stable farm communities and dignify manual labor, it did more to “exalt the professional status,” fulfilling the Jeffersonian yeoman ideal even as it choked it to death.22
18 Drew Gilpin Faust and Kristin Ann Hass both argue that an emerging emphasis on the individual soldier and his identity took root during the Civil War. See: Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).; Drew Gilpin Faust, "'the Dread Void of Uncertainty': Naming the Dead in the American Civil War," Southern Cultures 11, no. 2 (2005), 7-32. Hass argues that, “until the 1860s, memorial traditions had remained relatively constant since the time of the ancient Egyptians. European and, later, American memorializers, drawing on a limited range of symbolic forms, remembered wars as triumphs of state or divine power, without paying particular attention to ordinary soldiers.” During the war and virtually all wars before it soldiers did not carry personal IDs, as it was not thought of as essential to have ones body pulled out, identified, and separately buried. In the Civil War as the army began to try to identify bodies and make separate graves, they pilfered pockets to make connections to names---some soldiers wrote messages and put them in their pockets, or pinned their name to their uniforms before going into combat. Gettysburg marked the first time during the war the Union made earnest and systematic efforts to give each body a grave and a name. It is interesting that Mary Ryan argues that during this same period just before the war, the reproduction of the Middle-Class correlated with modes of child rearing where parents no longer looked to crush the wills of children, but to foster and persuade them, and cultivate a benignly ambitious personal will. See: Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, Eng. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 158-9.
19 Syracuse Journal, July 27, 1863; The announcement goes on to say that “These objects are too important to be neglected. Every soldier deserves and should have his name thus inscribed in the archives of the State.” It isn’t clear if the public ever responded with like enthusiasm. The Bureau did publish some books on military statistics but nothing like one would expect to find given the legislation.
20 Hass, "Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial"; Faust, "'the Dread Void of Uncertainty': Naming the Dead in the American Civil War", 7-32; Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying," Journal of Southern History 67, no. 1 (2001), 3-38.
21 The Morrill Land Act was first passed by congress in 1859, but was vetoed by the Democratic president, James Buchanan. When the amended Morrill Act was passed again Abraham Lincoln signed it into law. The Act essentially gifted large tracts of land to individual states which could then be sold or used for the creation of learning institutions, primarily colleges and universities. These institutions would be required to teach agriculture, military or engineering sciences. See: Lasch, "The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy", 77-9; Phillip S. Paludan, A People's Contest: The Union and Civil War 1861-1865, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 129-30.
22 See: Christopher Lasch, "Social Mobility" In A Companion to American Thought, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Oxford ; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 631-34.; Lasch, "The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy", 70-9
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
But when Lasch struggled to push back the origins of Americans’ lust for upward mobility and wealth to the Gilded Age, he was nearly going it alone.
The works of Joyce Appleby, Gordon Wood and Stephen Watts convincingly show a steady rise of status-mad, self-made men casting about for ways to get ahead in the early Republic.23
In fact, as George Forgie argued in his much forgotten classic, it was Lincoln and his generation that came to see the Civil War as a seductive outlet for pent-up ambitions.
As Forgie told it, the Civil War provided a release from the collective sense of shame for not having lived up to the heroic deeds of the revolutionary generation.
Parents from the “post-heroic generation” endowed (and saddled) their children with names of revolutionary notables.
A deluge of contemporary advice manuals encouraged parents to read to their children moralistic narratives taken from the hallowed lives of the revolutionaries.
Before infants learned to call for mother or father, their “first lisps,” parents were instructed, should be the name of George Washington, the national father.
According to Forgie this prescriptive literature took hold of young minds.
The flood of hagiographic juvenile literature went to the heads of young readers and by mid-nineteenth century a nation of young and middle-aged men groped in the shadows of an earlier generation.
With a grave and seemingly imminent sectional war on the wings, northern men would back Lincoln and soon take up muskets so they could, among other things, escape the ghost of General Washington.24
While southern boys, too, cut their teeth on patriotic books by Mason Weems, men below the Mason-Dixon Line developed substantially different ideas about manhood, and how to make good on the promises of the Founding Fathers.25
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the war was fought over two incompatible ideas about manhood and merit, inherited from a common revolutionary past.
By Lincoln’s election many southern apologists boasted how no southern white man could ever occupy the lowest rung and that in this way all southern white men were capable of rising to higher ranks.
Slavery provided the bedrock below which no white man could ever be buried.
Slavery, it was argued, made good on the Revolution’s promises of equality by erasing class distinctions.
It created a world where all white men could become masters of themselves by first collectively enslaving others.26
While the cult of self-making was not the preserve of Northerners, as the two regions squared off over the spread of slavery, heated debate pushed self-making into the cultural bailiwick of Yankees.
23 Joyce Appleby, "New Cultural Heroes in the Early National Period" In The Culture of the Market: Historical Esays, eds. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber (Cambridge England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 163-88.; Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2000).; Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).; Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820, Johns Hopkins Paperbacks ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
24 George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1979), 3-122.
25 Mason Locke Weems published Life of Washington, one of the most widely read books in antebellum America, from which almost all legends about Washington originated. For two of the most important works on manhood in white antebellum South, see: Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1996).; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). For a healthy dose of the complexities of antebellum manhood (north and south) see the classic articles: Elliott J. Gorn, "'Good-Bye Boys, I Die a True American': Homicide, Nativism, and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum New York City," Journal of American History 74, no. 2 (1987), 388-410.; Elliott J. Gorn, "'Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch': The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (1985), 18-43. Gorn’s work reminds us how violent and fractious manhood could be among backwood southerners or males who walked the same streets and frequented the same bars in New York City.
26 The degree to which the South was a “herrenvolk democracy”—a place where a master race of white men experienced significant equality — is still debated by scholars. See: George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). For our purposes though, there were many prominent spokesmen for the South who made claims that slavery opened up careers for the talented. While doing so, these men usually railed against the class divisions in northern cities, where so called free-labor pitted classes of white men against one another, relegating an entire class of white men to slave status (without the cradle-to-grave social care that southerners disingenuously attributed to slavery). The defense of slavery often claimed the moral highroad by emphasizing the ways in which southerners did not compete against one another but instead were united by slavery which benefited all white men. Emphasizing that deserving white men never had to scrape like hirelings in northern factories, George Fitzhugh claimed: “Actual liberty and equality with our white population has been approached much nearer than in the free States. Few of our whites ever work as day laborers, none as cooks, scullions, ostlers, body servants, or in other menial capacities.” See: George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South Or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, Va: A. Morris, 1854), 253-5.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
But when Lasch struggled to push back the origins of Americans’ lust for upward mobility and wealth to the Gilded Age, he was nearly going it alone.
The works of Joyce Appleby, Gordon Wood and Stephen Watts convincingly show a steady rise of status-mad, self-made men casting about for ways to get ahead in the early Republic.23
In fact, as George Forgie argued in his much forgotten classic, it was Lincoln and his generation that came to see the Civil War as a seductive outlet for pent-up ambitions.
As Forgie told it, the Civil War provided a release from the collective sense of shame for not having lived up to the heroic deeds of the revolutionary generation.
Parents from the “post-heroic generation” endowed (and saddled) their children with names of revolutionary notables.
A deluge of contemporary advice manuals encouraged parents to read to their children moralistic narratives taken from the hallowed lives of the revolutionaries.
Before infants learned to call for mother or father, their “first lisps,” parents were instructed, should be the name of George Washington, the national father.
According to Forgie this prescriptive literature took hold of young minds.
The flood of hagiographic juvenile literature went to the heads of young readers and by mid-nineteenth century a nation of young and middle-aged men groped in the shadows of an earlier generation.
With a grave and seemingly imminent sectional war on the wings, northern men would back Lincoln and soon take up muskets so they could, among other things, escape the ghost of General Washington.24
While southern boys, too, cut their teeth on patriotic books by Mason Weems, men below the Mason-Dixon Line developed substantially different ideas about manhood, and how to make good on the promises of the Founding Fathers.25
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the war was fought over two incompatible ideas about manhood and merit, inherited from a common revolutionary past.
By Lincoln’s election many southern apologists boasted how no southern white man could ever occupy the lowest rung and that in this way all southern white men were capable of rising to higher ranks.
Slavery provided the bedrock below which no white man could ever be buried.
Slavery, it was argued, made good on the Revolution’s promises of equality by erasing class distinctions.
It created a world where all white men could become masters of themselves by first collectively enslaving others.26
While the cult of self-making was not the preserve of Northerners, as the two regions squared off over the spread of slavery, heated debate pushed self-making into the cultural bailiwick of Yankees.
23 Joyce Appleby, "New Cultural Heroes in the Early National Period" In The Culture of the Market: Historical Esays, eds. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber (Cambridge England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 163-88.; Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2000).; Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).; Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820, Johns Hopkins Paperbacks ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
24 George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1979), 3-122.
25 Mason Locke Weems published Life of Washington, one of the most widely read books in antebellum America, from which almost all legends about Washington originated. For two of the most important works on manhood in white antebellum South, see: Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1996).; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). For a healthy dose of the complexities of antebellum manhood (north and south) see the classic articles: Elliott J. Gorn, "'Good-Bye Boys, I Die a True American': Homicide, Nativism, and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum New York City," Journal of American History 74, no. 2 (1987), 388-410.; Elliott J. Gorn, "'Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch': The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (1985), 18-43. Gorn’s work reminds us how violent and fractious manhood could be among backwood southerners or males who walked the same streets and frequented the same bars in New York City.
26 The degree to which the South was a “herrenvolk democracy”—a place where a master race of white men experienced significant equality — is still debated by scholars. See: George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). For our purposes though, there were many prominent spokesmen for the South who made claims that slavery opened up careers for the talented. While doing so, these men usually railed against the class divisions in northern cities, where so called free-labor pitted classes of white men against one another, relegating an entire class of white men to slave status (without the cradle-to-grave social care that southerners disingenuously attributed to slavery). The defense of slavery often claimed the moral highroad by emphasizing the ways in which southerners did not compete against one another but instead were united by slavery which benefited all white men. Emphasizing that deserving white men never had to scrape like hirelings in northern factories, George Fitzhugh claimed: “Actual liberty and equality with our white population has been approached much nearer than in the free States. Few of our whites ever work as day laborers, none as cooks, scullions, ostlers, body servants, or in other menial capacities.” See: George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South Or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, Va: A. Morris, 1854), 253-5.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
Over the second third of the nineteenth century the respective regions contracted into increasingly hostile domains with incompatible visions of how white men could best get ahead.27
For many southerners the lash kept the world aright.
For a wide variety of northerners, though, an imagined world free from coercion (from father or master), and open territories unsullied by competing slave drivers, promised the truest equality.28
As these cultural contractions took place, antebellum men, particularly in northern towns and cities, navigated a shifting meaning of manliness — one that was more competitive, individualistic, muscular, yet self-controlled.
27 Ironically, it was a southern Whig from Kentucky, Henry Clay, who first coined the phrase “self-made man” in his defense of the “American System” in congress 1832. Clay argued that internal improvements and strict tariffs would create a robust, interdependent economy in the North, South and West. His crusade for internal improvements and industrial strength did not win over President Jackson or his party; but it made him a darling among many Whigs and proto-Republicans. Lincoln idolized Clay, referring to him as his “beau ideal of a statesman,” in a eulogy for the deceased “Harry of the West” delivered in 1852. Of course, the South also produced the iconic self-made man, Andrew Jackson. But while Jackson had enormous traction in both the North and South, the vitriolic split between Clay and Jackson augured their respective cultural legacies. While Lee Benson has dismantled the idea that Jackson represented the masses, and Whigs like Clay, the classes, Benson also pointed to deeper divisions based on religion and ethnicity. His broad categories of “Puritan Whigs” versus non-puritan Democrats may shed light on the diverging conception of how white men defined success and getting ahead, especially if we think of Puritanism as code for a certain sensibility about work and leisure. Charles Sellers, on the other hand sees class tensions, and in particular “subsistence folkways” versus entrepreneurial “money power,” as central to understanding Jacksonian America. Interestingly, Sellers divides the populace between “arminian” capitalists and the “antinomian countryside.” Sellers loosely applies these religious modes (the first denoting that one can earn one’s salvation through development and doing all the right things, and the latter, a sensibility more given to familial allegiance, loyalty, and undeserved bounties) as a way to understand political affiliation in the age of Jackson. The use of “arminian” suggests a religiously informed sympathy for the self-created individual. Finally both Clay and Jackson were from the West, an area particularly important to Republican ideology as a sort of safety valve, a critical space for cramped urban white men to obtain the dreams of mobility and independence that eluded them in the East. See: Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961).; Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).; Harry L. Watson, Andrew Jackson Vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998).; Foner, "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War", 14, 26-8
28 Jim Cullen argues that slavery and self-making existed only with great tension among southerners; “being ‘self-made’ through slave labor was a wobblier construct.” Cullen, "The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation", 73-4 But it is what slavery did to party politics that seems to have played a crucial role in the migration of self-making into northern circles. Both Whigs and Democrats, because they were national parties, muted their respective critiques of northern mobility and slavepower’s version of white equality. When the Whig party gave up the ghost, and when Bleeding Kansas and Stephen Douglas helped sever the Democrat Party into two, the northern political remnants (the embryonic Republican Party) and the southern wing of the Democrats sharpened their already pointed criticisms of one another’s labor system. The emergence of an entirely northern party (Republicans) led to an unrestrained critique of slavery which contrasted bondage with the free market. It is in this simultaneous celebration and demonizing of respective systems that the image of the independent, ever-rising self-made man achieved its grip on many northerners’ minds, especially in Lincoln’s party. For more on the ramifications of the break down of the Whig Party, see: Don Edward Fehrenbacher and Don Edward Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism [South and three sectional crises], Louisiana pbk. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 45-65.; Foner, "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War", xx-xxii
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
Over the second third of the nineteenth century the respective regions contracted into increasingly hostile domains with incompatible visions of how white men could best get ahead.27
For many southerners the lash kept the world aright.
For a wide variety of northerners, though, an imagined world free from coercion (from father or master), and open territories unsullied by competing slave drivers, promised the truest equality.28
As these cultural contractions took place, antebellum men, particularly in northern towns and cities, navigated a shifting meaning of manliness — one that was more competitive, individualistic, muscular, yet self-controlled.
27 Ironically, it was a southern Whig from Kentucky, Henry Clay, who first coined the phrase “self-made man” in his defense of the “American System” in congress 1832. Clay argued that internal improvements and strict tariffs would create a robust, interdependent economy in the North, South and West. His crusade for internal improvements and industrial strength did not win over President Jackson or his party; but it made him a darling among many Whigs and proto-Republicans. Lincoln idolized Clay, referring to him as his “beau ideal of a statesman,” in a eulogy for the deceased “Harry of the West” delivered in 1852. Of course, the South also produced the iconic self-made man, Andrew Jackson. But while Jackson had enormous traction in both the North and South, the vitriolic split between Clay and Jackson augured their respective cultural legacies. While Lee Benson has dismantled the idea that Jackson represented the masses, and Whigs like Clay, the classes, Benson also pointed to deeper divisions based on religion and ethnicity. His broad categories of “Puritan Whigs” versus non-puritan Democrats may shed light on the diverging conception of how white men defined success and getting ahead, especially if we think of Puritanism as code for a certain sensibility about work and leisure. Charles Sellers, on the other hand sees class tensions, and in particular “subsistence folkways” versus entrepreneurial “money power,” as central to understanding Jacksonian America. Interestingly, Sellers divides the populace between “arminian” capitalists and the “antinomian countryside.” Sellers loosely applies these religious modes (the first denoting that one can earn one’s salvation through development and doing all the right things, and the latter, a sensibility more given to familial allegiance, loyalty, and undeserved bounties) as a way to understand political affiliation in the age of Jackson. The use of “arminian” suggests a religiously informed sympathy for the self-created individual. Finally both Clay and Jackson were from the West, an area particularly important to Republican ideology as a sort of safety valve, a critical space for cramped urban white men to obtain the dreams of mobility and independence that eluded them in the East. See: Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961).; Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).; Harry L. Watson, Andrew Jackson Vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998).; Foner, "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War", 14, 26-8
28 Jim Cullen argues that slavery and self-making existed only with great tension among southerners; “being ‘self-made’ through slave labor was a wobblier construct.” Cullen, "The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation", 73-4 But it is what slavery did to party politics that seems to have played a crucial role in the migration of self-making into northern circles. Both Whigs and Democrats, because they were national parties, muted their respective critiques of northern mobility and slavepower’s version of white equality. When the Whig party gave up the ghost, and when Bleeding Kansas and Stephen Douglas helped sever the Democrat Party into two, the northern political remnants (the embryonic Republican Party) and the southern wing of the Democrats sharpened their already pointed criticisms of one another’s labor system. The emergence of an entirely northern party (Republicans) led to an unrestrained critique of slavery which contrasted bondage with the free market. It is in this simultaneous celebration and demonizing of respective systems that the image of the independent, ever-rising self-made man achieved its grip on many northerners’ minds, especially in Lincoln’s party. For more on the ramifications of the break down of the Whig Party, see: Don Edward Fehrenbacher and Don Edward Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism [South and three sectional crises], Louisiana pbk. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 45-65.; Foner, "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War", xx-xxii
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
David Leverenz describes this shift as going from patrician and artisan models to an aggressive entrepreneurial type he calls “men of force.”29
Even as northern men envisioned themselves in vertical motion, their ideal of manhood evolved into one with indispensable attributes for making the climb: aggressiveness, grit, and outward ambitiousness.
Men of force willingly wagered their savings and familial intimacies in the hopes of outpacing competitors.30
But competitive entrepreneurs, and white men looking for work, could hardly hope to compete with a slave system that paid nothing to a permanent work supply that reproduced itself.
When the crisis over slavery threatened to disrupt this new vision of manliness, throngs of these “men of force” rushed to war — not merely to safeguard the myth of unrestrained mobility, but to obtain within the army the elusive ascent they could not find without.31
It was the master of the Union war, Abraham Lincoln, who after the bloodiest summer of the conflict stood before returning troops to remind them of the “nature of the struggle.”
“Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality."
"To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions."
"The present moment finds me at the White House,” continued Lincoln, “yet there is as good a chance for your children as there was for my father’s.”32
Earlier in that month Lincoln addressed two others regiments bound for home.
“I wish it might be more generally and universally understood what the country is now engaged in,” Lincoln told the soldiers, “We have, as all will agree, a free Government, where every man has a right to be equal with every other man.”
And again, four days later Lincoln stood before more uniformed men, and trod down the same rhetorical path.
I beg you to remember this, not merely for my sake, but for yours. I happen temporarily to occupy the big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright….The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.33
Lincoln produced these distillations of the American Dream in the wake of Grant’s bloody offensive in late spring of 1864.
Between May and mid-June General Grant’s army alone suffered over 60,000 casualties.
Americans gasped at the butchery.
When Grant’s deadly campaign devolved into a stalemate in the fields around Petersburg and Richmond, even Lincoln’s staunch supporters began to wonder.34
Lincoln, no doubt, had his improbable reelection in mind when he begged the soldiers to remember all that was at stake.
But Lincoln wasn’t pandering so much as repeating what he always believed was the best justification for the horror.
Amid confusion, and in the preceding calm, Lincoln believed this to be the brightest ideological North Star, the single common ideal that attached men to the Union.
In 1859, roughly a year before being elected, Lincoln held forth before a humongous crowd in Cincinnati, assuring them that free labor promised that no man would ever have to “remain through life in a dependent condition.”
Unless given to “vicious habits,” or “singularly unfortunate,” every American could rise as Lincoln had.
The “great principle” for which the government had “really” been formed, Lincoln assured the crowd, was to protect “The progress by which the poor, honest, industrious, and resolute man raises himself….”35
29 David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 372.; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 10-30.
30 Winkle, "Abraham Lincoln: Self-made Man", 6 Winkle argues that the myth of the self-made man “smoothed the potentially acrimonious transition from families as the basis of American society to the new economic order based on individual achievement.”
31 Many others, for similar reasons, stayed home. Earnest soldiers in both the North and South addressed the prospects for gain in entering the war. They might openly admit the chances for promotion, or ensure loved ones that they stood less to gain by enlisting: See a southern soldier’s letter to his father in: Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006), 84.
32 Lincoln, Abraham. Fehrenbacher,Don Edward and Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana (Library of Congress), Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865 (New York, N.Y: Literary Classics of the United States : Distributed by Viking Press, 1989), 626-7.
33 ibid., 623-4
34 Paludan, "A People's Contest: The Union and Civil War 1861-1865", 307-8
35 Lincoln, Abraham. Fehrenbacher,Don Edward and Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana (Library of Congress), "Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865", 84-5
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
David Leverenz describes this shift as going from patrician and artisan models to an aggressive entrepreneurial type he calls “men of force.”29
Even as northern men envisioned themselves in vertical motion, their ideal of manhood evolved into one with indispensable attributes for making the climb: aggressiveness, grit, and outward ambitiousness.
Men of force willingly wagered their savings and familial intimacies in the hopes of outpacing competitors.30
But competitive entrepreneurs, and white men looking for work, could hardly hope to compete with a slave system that paid nothing to a permanent work supply that reproduced itself.
When the crisis over slavery threatened to disrupt this new vision of manliness, throngs of these “men of force” rushed to war — not merely to safeguard the myth of unrestrained mobility, but to obtain within the army the elusive ascent they could not find without.31
It was the master of the Union war, Abraham Lincoln, who after the bloodiest summer of the conflict stood before returning troops to remind them of the “nature of the struggle.”
“Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality."
"To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions."
"The present moment finds me at the White House,” continued Lincoln, “yet there is as good a chance for your children as there was for my father’s.”32
Earlier in that month Lincoln addressed two others regiments bound for home.
“I wish it might be more generally and universally understood what the country is now engaged in,” Lincoln told the soldiers, “We have, as all will agree, a free Government, where every man has a right to be equal with every other man.”
And again, four days later Lincoln stood before more uniformed men, and trod down the same rhetorical path.
I beg you to remember this, not merely for my sake, but for yours. I happen temporarily to occupy the big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright….The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.33
Lincoln produced these distillations of the American Dream in the wake of Grant’s bloody offensive in late spring of 1864.
Between May and mid-June General Grant’s army alone suffered over 60,000 casualties.
Americans gasped at the butchery.
When Grant’s deadly campaign devolved into a stalemate in the fields around Petersburg and Richmond, even Lincoln’s staunch supporters began to wonder.34
Lincoln, no doubt, had his improbable reelection in mind when he begged the soldiers to remember all that was at stake.
But Lincoln wasn’t pandering so much as repeating what he always believed was the best justification for the horror.
Amid confusion, and in the preceding calm, Lincoln believed this to be the brightest ideological North Star, the single common ideal that attached men to the Union.
In 1859, roughly a year before being elected, Lincoln held forth before a humongous crowd in Cincinnati, assuring them that free labor promised that no man would ever have to “remain through life in a dependent condition.”
Unless given to “vicious habits,” or “singularly unfortunate,” every American could rise as Lincoln had.
The “great principle” for which the government had “really” been formed, Lincoln assured the crowd, was to protect “The progress by which the poor, honest, industrious, and resolute man raises himself….”35
29 David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 372.; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 10-30.
30 Winkle, "Abraham Lincoln: Self-made Man", 6 Winkle argues that the myth of the self-made man “smoothed the potentially acrimonious transition from families as the basis of American society to the new economic order based on individual achievement.”
31 Many others, for similar reasons, stayed home. Earnest soldiers in both the North and South addressed the prospects for gain in entering the war. They might openly admit the chances for promotion, or ensure loved ones that they stood less to gain by enlisting: See a southern soldier’s letter to his father in: Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006), 84.
32 Lincoln, Abraham. Fehrenbacher,Don Edward and Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana (Library of Congress), Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865 (New York, N.Y: Literary Classics of the United States : Distributed by Viking Press, 1989), 626-7.
33 ibid., 623-4
34 Paludan, "A People's Contest: The Union and Civil War 1861-1865", 307-8
35 Lincoln, Abraham. Fehrenbacher,Don Edward and Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana (Library of Congress), "Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865", 84-5
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
With the war just underway, and the bloody costs only half-imagined,36 Lincoln addressed Congress in the summer of 1861 and dilated the war into a grand struggle for nothing less than “maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object it is, to elevate the condition of men — to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all — to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”
While it is striking what Lincoln is arguing here — that mass annihilation would be a fair price for self creation, a death wish for what Lincoln called the “race of life” — his following comments are equally important.
“I am most happy to believe,” he continued, “that the plain people understand and appreciate this.”
That is, this was not some ethereal defense of the war.
Common folks, Lincoln seemed to suggest, understood that Union soldiers would be killing their southern counterparts so that men would have a “fair chance” to channel private ambition into careers and social rank.
And to prove it, Lincoln then went on to make what now seems like an absurd claim — that up to that point, July 4, 1861 not a single common soldier had deserted the ranks of the Union army.37
But even if Lincoln generally had it right at this early hour, the Union would soon receive its first licking at Bull Run and from that point on increasingly become what one scholar has called “a deserter nation.”38
Within a year and a half Lincoln would grow frustrated with the massive numbers of stragglers, sick, and missing soldiers.
In December of 1862 he admitted to an associate, “It would astonish you to know the extent of the evil of ‘absenteeism.’"
"We scarcely have more than half the men we are paying on the spot for service anywhere.”
In a pressing letter to General McClellan he questioned how the Army of the Potomac, which had been sent 160,000 soldiers, could report only 86,000 remaining.
Even if the death tolls and hospital reports were taken into account, there were still some 45,000 soldiers still alive who slipped from the ranks.
Lincoln queried impatiently to McClellan “Have you any more perfect knowledge of this than I have?”39
Lincoln, then, revealed his significant confusion about the dedication of his “selfmade” soldiers.
As his dismay suggests, as the Civil War anointed the American creed of self-making and meritocracy, it simultaneously exposed the myth’s explanatory weakness — and its fragility.
The war was a time of flux which, on one hand seemed to ratify the pervasive northern faith in mastery over national and personal identity, while on the other, displayed before millions stark examples of how the innocent (or meritorious) pointlessly suffer — how through dysentery or gangrene the body can turn on the self, how a single minie ball can turn a trained craftsman into an invalid, or how depression and confusion close in on young soldiers’ minds.
“The chaotic violence of war,” Jackson Lears reminds us, “has always put schemes of cosmic order to the supreme test, and the Civil War may well have been the most violent, the most destructive armed conflict the world had ever seen.”
Yet, ironically, the carnage that challenged individual soldiers’ belief in a partly controllable providence, piled so high that many Americans insisted God had created the mayhem for a reason — and that this reason could be deciphered.40
The decipherable universe that was undone in a million private experiences, ironically led to a renewed belief in a bolstered providentialism that was both transparent and patriotic.
Only God could have ripped such a great nation to shreds.
And he would not have troubled himself in such a way for a backwater republic.
And surely words of wisdom fell from his lips as he tore the Union limb to limb.
36 Roughly 600,000 soldiers died in the war; Yet such an estimate does not take into account the tens of thousands of deaths precipitated in southern society due to disease, dislocation, malnutrition and gunfire. See: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63. n.53.
37 Lincoln, Abraham. Fehrenbacher,Don Edward and Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana (Library of Congress), "Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865", 259-60
38 Joan E. Cashin, "Civilians and Draft Resistance in the North" In The War was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War, ed. Joan E. Cashin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 263-285.The U.S. Provost Marshall did not begin collecting numbers of desertions until 1863. After the war he estimated that there were over 200,000 deserters from the Union Army living in the country, Canada and the territories.
39 Lincoln, Abraham. Fehrenbacher,Don Edward and Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana (Library of Congress), "Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865", 342,418
40 Jackson Lears argues that the antebellum alliance between religion and rationalists -- the “noontide of providence” — “ushered in the era of self-mad manhood.” At no time before or since has this alliance been unquestioned or left alone from the margins. But during the decades before the Civil War mainstream Protestants developed faith in the common cause of religion and the sciences. For them God no longer worked through “special providences” to secure his ends. In other words all of God's doings fit within a system of rationally understood rules of the universe. Even Emerson seemed to backtrack on his earlier denunciations of rational religion when in his essay “Self-reliance” (1841) he celebrated the victory of will over chance: “In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit here after out of fear from her rotations.” In 1852 he argued that the “instinctive and heroic races” were “proud” acolytes of destiny. But this is because they themselves made destiny work in their hands. “They conspire with it” wrote Emerson. For other races or peoples destiny was an opiate: “But the dogma makes a different impression when it is held by the weak and lazy." "Tis weak and vicious people who cast blame on fate.” In a suggestive passage Lears writes that although the war pushed common soldiers to the brink of disbelief in rational providence, “…the soldiers festooned themselves with charms, turned to the stars for clues about the future, and took to gambling obsessively.” Lears, "Something for Nothing: Luck in America", 140-5; Mark Noll has referred to this alliance as the “evangelical-Enlightenment synthesis,” though Noll argues that it came under significant attack in the decades preceding the war. See: Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 90-4.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
INTRODUCTION: THE WAR THAT MADE YOU AND ME, continued ...
With the war just underway, and the bloody costs only half-imagined,36 Lincoln addressed Congress in the summer of 1861 and dilated the war into a grand struggle for nothing less than “maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object it is, to elevate the condition of men — to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all — to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”
While it is striking what Lincoln is arguing here — that mass annihilation would be a fair price for self creation, a death wish for what Lincoln called the “race of life” — his following comments are equally important.
“I am most happy to believe,” he continued, “that the plain people understand and appreciate this.”
That is, this was not some ethereal defense of the war.
Common folks, Lincoln seemed to suggest, understood that Union soldiers would be killing their southern counterparts so that men would have a “fair chance” to channel private ambition into careers and social rank.
And to prove it, Lincoln then went on to make what now seems like an absurd claim — that up to that point, July 4, 1861 not a single common soldier had deserted the ranks of the Union army.37
But even if Lincoln generally had it right at this early hour, the Union would soon receive its first licking at Bull Run and from that point on increasingly become what one scholar has called “a deserter nation.”38
Within a year and a half Lincoln would grow frustrated with the massive numbers of stragglers, sick, and missing soldiers.
In December of 1862 he admitted to an associate, “It would astonish you to know the extent of the evil of ‘absenteeism.’"
"We scarcely have more than half the men we are paying on the spot for service anywhere.”
In a pressing letter to General McClellan he questioned how the Army of the Potomac, which had been sent 160,000 soldiers, could report only 86,000 remaining.
Even if the death tolls and hospital reports were taken into account, there were still some 45,000 soldiers still alive who slipped from the ranks.
Lincoln queried impatiently to McClellan “Have you any more perfect knowledge of this than I have?”39
Lincoln, then, revealed his significant confusion about the dedication of his “selfmade” soldiers.
As his dismay suggests, as the Civil War anointed the American creed of self-making and meritocracy, it simultaneously exposed the myth’s explanatory weakness — and its fragility.
The war was a time of flux which, on one hand seemed to ratify the pervasive northern faith in mastery over national and personal identity, while on the other, displayed before millions stark examples of how the innocent (or meritorious) pointlessly suffer — how through dysentery or gangrene the body can turn on the self, how a single minie ball can turn a trained craftsman into an invalid, or how depression and confusion close in on young soldiers’ minds.
“The chaotic violence of war,” Jackson Lears reminds us, “has always put schemes of cosmic order to the supreme test, and the Civil War may well have been the most violent, the most destructive armed conflict the world had ever seen.”
Yet, ironically, the carnage that challenged individual soldiers’ belief in a partly controllable providence, piled so high that many Americans insisted God had created the mayhem for a reason — and that this reason could be deciphered.40
The decipherable universe that was undone in a million private experiences, ironically led to a renewed belief in a bolstered providentialism that was both transparent and patriotic.
Only God could have ripped such a great nation to shreds.
And he would not have troubled himself in such a way for a backwater republic.
And surely words of wisdom fell from his lips as he tore the Union limb to limb.
36 Roughly 600,000 soldiers died in the war; Yet such an estimate does not take into account the tens of thousands of deaths precipitated in southern society due to disease, dislocation, malnutrition and gunfire. See: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63. n.53.
37 Lincoln, Abraham. Fehrenbacher,Don Edward and Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana (Library of Congress), "Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865", 259-60
38 Joan E. Cashin, "Civilians and Draft Resistance in the North" In The War was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War, ed. Joan E. Cashin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 263-285.The U.S. Provost Marshall did not begin collecting numbers of desertions until 1863. After the war he estimated that there were over 200,000 deserters from the Union Army living in the country, Canada and the territories.
39 Lincoln, Abraham. Fehrenbacher,Don Edward and Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana (Library of Congress), "Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865", 342,418
40 Jackson Lears argues that the antebellum alliance between religion and rationalists -- the “noontide of providence” — “ushered in the era of self-mad manhood.” At no time before or since has this alliance been unquestioned or left alone from the margins. But during the decades before the Civil War mainstream Protestants developed faith in the common cause of religion and the sciences. For them God no longer worked through “special providences” to secure his ends. In other words all of God's doings fit within a system of rationally understood rules of the universe. Even Emerson seemed to backtrack on his earlier denunciations of rational religion when in his essay “Self-reliance” (1841) he celebrated the victory of will over chance: “In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit here after out of fear from her rotations.” In 1852 he argued that the “instinctive and heroic races” were “proud” acolytes of destiny. But this is because they themselves made destiny work in their hands. “They conspire with it” wrote Emerson. For other races or peoples destiny was an opiate: “But the dogma makes a different impression when it is held by the weak and lazy." "Tis weak and vicious people who cast blame on fate.” In a suggestive passage Lears writes that although the war pushed common soldiers to the brink of disbelief in rational providence, “…the soldiers festooned themselves with charms, turned to the stars for clues about the future, and took to gambling obsessively.” Lears, "Something for Nothing: Luck in America", 140-5; Mark Noll has referred to this alliance as the “evangelical-Enlightenment synthesis,” though Noll argues that it came under significant attack in the decades preceding the war. See: Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 90-4.
TO BE CONTINUED ...