Civil war
American Studies 211 Spring 2019
First Essay Assignment
The Lost Cause: Drawing Meaning from the Unavoidable Conflict
For the first assignment, please write a four (or more) page paper, choosing one of the topic suggestions listed below. The paper should be typed double space with page numbers.
This is a formal assignment. Your paper should have a title and should be organized around a thesis or point of view. Take your time, gather your information and organize your thinking, write, and rewrite. Take the assignment as a kind of challenge to develop your own thinking and then to enjoy the chance to exercise your powers. You must cite at least three of the readings in your paper to support, develop, and illustrate your claims. One of them must be Blight.
The assignment is due February 28.
If you need any advice or assistance, or need to talk things through, email or speak with me. If you want me to look at a draft of your essay, email it to me as a Word document and I will get back to you within 24 hours. If you are unhappy with the grade you receive, I will allow you to rewrite your paper after you speak with me about it.
The topic suggestions all center around the ways Americans tried to make sense of the slaughter of the Civil War, both the victorious North and the defeated South, to draw some meaning and some purpose from it all. At the center of this is the notion of the Lost Cause and how that notion came to have such influence throughout the nation, especially the cherished myth of white supremacy. So, the Lost Cause should be central to your essay.
Topic Suggestions
As casualties mounted, Americans felt an increasingly desperate need for a coherent narrative to justify the horror. Preachers, politicians, and journalists on both sides deployed narratives of triumphant nationhood to meet that need. Still, nationalism by itself was an abstraction; what mattered was how it entered the viscera of the people, how it became part of a narrative that made sense of mass killing (Lears 17).
The ideology of reunion was millennial nationalism , celebrating blood sacrifice but adding a racial component of Anglo-Saxon supremacy (Lears 21).
. . . that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth (Lincoln, Gettysburg Address).
The dying and killing in the Civil War had an enormous effect on all segments of American society, what Lears has called the long shadow of Appomattox. How did that dying and killing change life in America during and after the war? What were some of these effects? How did people respond to the carnage and draw some sense out of it? How did soldiers views of slavery on both sides change or develop as a result of the slaughter? How did views of blacks develop and change? How was the killing and dying used to support the Lost Cause?
Throughout the spread of the Lost Cause, at least three elements obtained overriding significance: the movements effort to write and control the history of the war and its aftermath; its use of white supremacy as both means and ends; and the place of women in its development (Blight 259).
‘Dyar!’ says I, ‘fo’ Gord! I ‘specks dey done kill Marse Chan, an’ I promised to tek care on him’ (Page, Marse Chan).
As the Lost Cause found its new, forward-looking voice of reconciliation, the Southern terms on which it flourished included the demeaning of black people as helpless, sentimental children and the crushing of their adult rights to political and civil liberty under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (Blight 272).
The occasion of that conflict was what the Yankees called by one of their convenient libels in political nomenclature slavery; but what was in fact nothing more than a system of Negro servitude in the South. . . one of the mildest and most beneficent systems of servitude in the world (Pollard, qtd in Gates 19).
Using at least two of the three stories, identify and discuss elements of the Lost Cause that appear in the stories and discuss how they reinforced the ideology of the Lost Cause.
Just as reminiscence reflects essentially the need to tell our own stories, so too crusades to control history demonstrate the desire to transmit to the next generation a protective and revitalizing story. An almost desperate need for sectional and racial justification compelled Lost Cause history crusaders to equate virtually any form of southern defense with truth (Blight 291-2).
As Lears makes clear, in the North the slaughter of the war had enormous effects on how many people came to understand its meaning and the future of their nation. He speaks of a hardening in the American outlook as a result of the Civil War, especially among Northern intellectuals, even if it was at times accompanied by sentimentality. Gates describes the joy blacks felt after Emancipation, and their response to and growing fear over the return of racism and white supremacy. He and Blight speak of how the southern Lost Cause succeeded at the expense of blacks. Discuss some aspects of this sudden and dramatic change in the intellectual landscape and their implications for the development of our society, especially as concerns the Lost Cause and racial issues, how they may have operated together to justify the sacrifice of black rights in the name of reconciliation.
Side not please do not use any other reading than the attached ones. the professor said that Ill get an immediate F if I did, and I cant afford to get cought or get an F.
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