Civil War, Guerre de Plume

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-90
Author(s):  
Chelsea Stieber

This chapter is the first of two that trace the distinctive cultures of writing in the North and South that emerged during this civil war period. The chapter analyzes the print culture of the civil war by comparing each government’s press operations, then focuses on a particularly fraught moment in the North/South civil war with the French Restoration government’s threat to retake the former colony. The chapter makes the case for a specific Christophean form that emerged during this period, the “refutation pamphlet,” based in the disassembling, unweaving, or piercing through of a political opponent’s text—deployed first against the French Restoration government, and then against Pétion’s southern republic. This Christophean writing stands in stark contrast to the southern liberal republican writing discussed in chapter 3, which celebrated literary writing as a direct expression of the liberal mind and heart, and was central to the task of illustrating and performing the successes of the liberal republican model. Taken together, these two chapters reveal Haitian writing during the civil war to be mutually constituted—in tension and in opposition—between a performative, polemical notion of writing in the Christophean sphere, and the emergent “literary” sense of writing in Pétion’s republican sphere.

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-127
Author(s):  
Chelsea Stieber

This chapter analyzes the emergence of a decidedly modern “literary” sensibility in southern writing during the latter half of the civil war period (1814–1820) that reflects the transformations of the republican state in Haiti under Pétion. A first part establishes the contours of Pétion’s “new” republicanism, which he elaborated within the Atlantic world transformations of the mid-1810s. Next, it analyzes the new republican publications that resulted from the North/South paper war, paying specific attention to southern writers’ efforts to define their intellectual production according to the emergent concepts of literature and criticism. In a second part, the chapter traces how this nascent notion of literary writing, forged in the crucible of civil war, gained hegemony under Jean-Pierre Boyer’s reunified republican state after the fall of Henry Christophe in 1820. Here, it performs a close analysis of the southern republican writer Hérard Dumesle’s Voyage dans le Nord d’Hayti, ou Révélations des lieux et des monuments historiques (1824), arguing that his piece of early domestic Haitian travel writing fixes the terms of the previous paper war between North and South from the position of southern republican hegemony.


Author(s):  
Eduardo Robles

<p>The concept of Plantation conjures an image that identifies the North Florida / South Georgia region of the U. S. Leon County attracted many cotton planters from Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina in the 1820’s to the 1850’s. Up to the beginning of the Civil War, Leon County was the 5th largest producer of cotton counting all counties from Florida and Georgia. The Civil War brought the plantation culture to a standstill.</p><p>The plantations transformed the environment based on their need for open fields in which to cultivate different crops, or raise a variety of animals with the help of slaves. From the 1900’s many plantations abandoned their land to nature producing a deep change in the local landscape. Today plantations are not used as much for planting crops but more for hunting or as tree farms. The hunting plantations do not grow crops but provide good conditions for the hunting of animals and birds. Other plantations were torn apart, sold and now are part of the Tallahassee urban fabric. In other words, they disappeared.</p><p>The transformation of the plantations has been slow and steady, and has become the image of the area, even the region. The paper shows five plantations that represent five different evolutions of these traditional landscapes. The landscapes have evolved to accommodate the very local but fluid definition of place. It is this transformation, this evolving identity which helped preserve some of the traditional landscapes and the traditional architecture on them.</p><p>The most prominent feature of the plantation is the “Big House” or plantation house. The house embodies all aspects of the plantation life style. The construction materials and methods reflected the times, the technologies and the available resources.</p><p>The research has been done mainly in the archives of the Tallahassee Trust for Historic Preservation. The results, still pending, explain the land typology as it evolved from the golden decades of the plantation culture to the present day land use.</p>


Author(s):  
O. I. Nuzhdin ◽  

The article is devoted to the study of the collapse of the unity of France in the first third of the 15th century. During the civil war, Duke Jean the Fearless and Queen Isabella of Bavaria in 1417–1418. began to form alternative governing bodies to weaken the influence of their opponents in Paris. This led to the territorial disintegration of the country and the emergence of competing governments in the north and south of the kingdom.


Author(s):  
Michael R. Cohen

Chapter 2 focuses on the Civil War years. In the early years of the war, a Union blockade brought legal trade to a standstill, and for merchants who relied on trade networks between the North and the South, the blockade was catastrophic. But with soaring demand for cotton around the globe, economic opportunities abounded. Some merchants stockpiled cotton, and some wisely avoided Confederate currency, which would turn out to be worthless after the war. But once Ulysses S. Grant’s troops declared victory after the bloody battle of Vicksburg, which opened the Mississippi River for commerce, the landscape changed, and new opportunities emerged. With New Orleans and the Mississippi River in Union hands, legal cotton trade resumed between the North and South, and merchants flocked to the interior towns that facilitated this commerce. They also established or reestablished trade networks that closely resembled those that had emerged in the antebellum years. While the resumption of trade was slowed by a plethora of factors, by the end of the Civil War, firms that had saved capital, reestablished North-South networks, or both, were on sound footing, prepared to face head on the vicissitudes of the postbellum economy.


C. Vann Woodward’s lecture compares two commemorations of the Civil War fifty years apart, one in 1911 and the other in 1961. The first one reflected sectional reunification predicated on a shared understanding of the tragic nature of war but also a sense that the conflict had solved the problem of sectional animosity. In so doing Woodward notes that whites in the North and South could only accomplish this by excluding meaningful African-American participation. The lecture then outlines the cycles of Reconstruction historiography, and looks at the dual psychological traumas the North and South experienced in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Woodward maintains that after the North emerged victorious from the war it failed to live up to its ideals, leaving wracked guilt, self-criticism, and remorse. The South emerged with a predilection for extortion, indignation, and extreme bellicosity, consistently blaming its own weaknesses on Reconstruction. Woodward suggests that historians should act as therapists, enabling the nation to come to terms with the psychological traumas triggered by the past.


Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp

Several antebellum conservatives sought to dismantle the Lockean foundations of American political thinking in favor of a political vision that affirmed the divine origins of government. Evangelical conservatives such as Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen were among the first to advance the “America as a Christian nation” argument that became a favorite of conservatives in the latter part of the twentieth century. By the 1830s, New England evangelicals, such as Connecticut Congregationalist pastor Lyman Beecher, came reluctantly to accept church disestablishment at the state level as best for both Christianity and society. During the Civil War, conservatives North and South built upon the work of their antebellum forerunners and stressed the essential place and role of Christianity. Two examples of this movement in the North were the campaigns to amend the Federal Constitution with an explicit reference to Christ and the addition of “In God We Trust” to the nation’s coinage.


Prospects ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 107-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Fanuzzi

The political agenda of William Lloyd Garrison and his adherents within the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) can be reconstructed with the rhetoric and practices of print culture, starting with its assumption that the prospects for the slaves' emancipation waxed and waned with the proliferation of writing. In the mid-1830s, the MASS mailed antislavery publications in mass quantities to civic leaders, newspaper editors, and post offices in both the North and South. In 1837 alone, it issued 711, 277 publications, which Garrison noted were falling “thicker than raindrops … nourishing the soil of freedom.” Although their publicity campaign elicited a hostile reaction from political officials, newspaper editors, and most infamously, violent mobs, the abolitionists persisted. A typical budget for the MASS allotted far more money to printing and distribution than any other expenditure, including the remuneration of their often imperiled traveling agents.


2021 ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Janice I. Robbins ◽  
Carol L. Tieso
Keyword(s):  

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