Transcript 1-Civil War - Realism

The Civil War – Realism - Naturalism
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Photographs from the American Memory Collection
Library of Congress
How did the conflict over slavery
increase tensions between the
North and the South?
Whitehall Street Auction and
Slave Sales
•Fugitive Slave Act (1850) required all citizens to
help catch runaway slaves. This act rekindles
slavery controversy.
•Voices in North declare slavery barbaric
•South sees antislavery movement as threat to
economy
•Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel vividly depicting the
cruelty of slavery became a powerful antislavery
weapon and adds to the tension
•Abolitionist, John Brown, attempts to start a
slave revolt
•Lincoln and the Republicans were elected and
dedicated to fighting slavery. As a result, South
Carolina and six other states seceded from the
union.
Poster for runaway
slaves.
$200 reward for husband,
wife, and 3 children
Certificate of Freedom for
forty-two year-old Harriet
Bolling, freed by James Bolling
in 1842.
Abraham Lincoln
Union President
Jefferson Davis
Confederate President
General Ulysses S. Grant
Union Leader
General Robert E. Lee
Confederate Leader
When did the Civil War begin?
•The first guns were fired on April 12,
1861.
•South Carolina opened fire on a U.S. fort
in Charleston harbor.
•After Fort Sumter fell, President Lincoln
called for 75,000 troops to put down the
rebellion.
•The Civil War had begun.
Charleston, S.C., Fort Sumter,
from the sand-bar
•Families were divided
•Friends found themselves facing each
other on the battlefield
•Four of Lincoln’s brothers-in-law served
the Confederate cause
Were women allowed to serve
during the Civil War?
Women in doorway of office of U.S. Christian
Commission, Washington, D.C.
•Only men could enlist as soldiers.
•Women had to disguise as men in order to serve.
•An estimated 400 women fought in the war disguised
as men.
•Other women used various disguises and risked their
lives to spy for the cause.
•18,200 women were employed in Union hospitals as
matrons, nurses laundresses, and cooks.
•The Confederates employed 3,300 women in similar
roles.
Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Confederate spy, was
imprisoned in Washington’s Old Capitol building.
Nurses and officers
Walt Whitman’s
Hospital Notebook
Barn converted to hospital for wounded at Antietam
Were there African American
regiments in the Civil War?
•The first black regiment recruited in the
North was the 54th Massachusetts
Volunteers.
•By the end of the war, 1 out of every 8
Union soldiers was African American.
•About 200,000 African Americans
served in the Union army; 37,000 died
•Slaves who fled to Union lines were
called “contrabands”.
Christian
Fleetwood
Recipient of the
Congressional
Medal of Honor
Company E
How many were killed during the
United States Civil War?
Dead soldiers in a wheat field, Gettysburg, PA
•One out of every five soldiers was killed
in battle or died in camp.
•There were more Americans killed in the
Civil War than in World War I or World
War II combined.
•At least 600,000 lives were lost.
Soldiers’ Cemetery, Alexandria, VA
Graves of Confederate soldiers, Richmond, VA
When did the war end?
•April 9, 1865 Lee surrenders to
Grant. The war is over.
•Five days later, on April 14, 1865,
President Lincoln is assassinated.
•Known as the Great Emancipator,
Lincoln is the last great casualty of
the war.
What were the results
of the Civil War?
•Tragic loss of life
•Paid economic price,
especially the South
•Bitterness between North & South
•Changed the way of waging war
•End of Slavery
•Preservation of the Union
POST-CIVIL WAR:
WESTWARD MOVEMENT
Homestead Act of 1862 promised 160
acres of land to anyone who would farm it
for five years.
• half a million farmers, including tens of
thousands of emancipated AfricanAmericans, staked claims on the Great
Plains.
POST-CIVIL WAR:
WESTWARD MOVEMENT
•Miners went west by the thousands,
lured by the prospect of striking it
rich in gold.
•Others moved west to become cattle
ranchers.
POST-CIVIL WAR:
WESTWARD MOVEMENT
•Expansion was boosted by the completion
of the first transcontinental railroad in
1868.
• the railroad replaced the covered
wagon, the symbol of the American
pioneer.
POST-CIVIL WAR:
WESTWARD MOVEMENT
By 1890, the frontier as Americans had
known it for centuries had ceased to exist
(“the disappearing frontier”).
Gone were
• herds of buffalo
• open range
• Indian nations
POST-CIVIL WAR:
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
• Began with introduction of electricity
(1880’s)
• Many inventions began to appear:
o the electric light
o the telephone
o the automobile
o motion pictures/movies
o the phonograph
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION –
LIFESTYLE CHANGES
• skyscrapers
• department stores
• mass transportation
Problems appeared as well.
•
•
•
•
•
noise
traffic jams
air pollution
crime
slums
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION –
SOCIAL CHANGES
• disparity between wealthy and poor
• wages of workers were so low that one, or even two,
could not support a family.
• child labor was the norm
• immigrant families lived in small, dark, unventilated
apartments with no toilet/plumbing
• disease was rampant
• a handful of men, however, made fortunes and lived
like royalty (Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.)
DISCONTENT
• Women: did not have the vote
(suffrage=right to vote)
• African-Americans: no longer slaves, but
still suffering prejudice
• Workers: in need of labor reforms
Literature of the Period:
Wartime Voices
– Wartime voices recorded the
experiences of the war in…
• diaries
• letters
• journals
• speeches
• Lincoln was one of the greatest masters of the
language at mid-century
Literature of the Period:
Wartime Voices
• Antislavery Writings:
For instance, The
Liberator or Uncle
Tom’s Cabin
• Harper’s Weekly: A
collection of political
cartoons
Literature of the Period:
Frontier Voices
• Writers
– Bret Harte (born in New York but moved to
California as a young man)
– Willa Cather (moved from Virginia to Nebraska
as a child)
– Mark Twain: pseudonym of Samuel Clemens
(grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, but traveled
widely and settled in a Nevada mining town
during the Civil War)
Literature of the Period:
Realism
• began after the Civil War
• opposed Romanticism; paralleled
Impressionism in Europe
• focused on portraying real life as ordinary
people lived it
• attempted to show characters and events in an
honest, objective, almost factual way.
Literature of the Period:
Naturalism
• also depicted real people in real situations, but
they believed that forces larger than the
individual—fate, heredity, nature—shaped
individual destiny.
• Leader—Stephen Crane
• Jack London is a famous naturalist writer.
• Both movements signal a shift in American
literature from idealism to practicality
Literature of Discontent
• The social ills that grew out of industrialization became
a subject for many writers of the day.
• Kate Chopin—explored women’s desire for equality
and independence.
• The Naturalists saw industrialization as a force again
which individuals were powerless.
• Stephen Crane’s novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
depicted life in New York City’s slums.
• Poets also captured a growing sense of dissatisfaction.
• Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask”
revealed the alienation of African Americans who
smile in white society to mask despair.