BiblioVault - Books about 19th Century

Loyal Subjects

Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America

Duquette, Elizabeth

Rutgers University Press, 2010

When one nation becomes two, or when two nations become one, what does national affiliation mean or require? Elizabeth Duquette answers this question by demonstrating how loyalty was used during the U.S. Civil War to define proper allegiance to the Union. For Northerners during the war, and individuals throughout the nation after Appomattox, loyalty affected the construction of national identity, moral authority, and racial characteristics.

Loyal Subjects considers how the Civil War complicated the cultural value of emotion, especially the ideal of sympathy. Through an analysis of literary works written during and after the conflict-from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Chiefly About War Matters" through Henry James's The Bostonians and Charles Chestnutt's "The Wife of His Youth," to the Pledge of Allegiance and W.E.B. Du Bois's John Brown, among many others-Duquette reveals that although American literary criticism has tended to dismiss the Civil War's impact, postwar literature was profoundly shaped by loyalty.

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The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry

M. Wynn Thomas

Harvard University Press, 1987

Walt Whitman stands freshly illuminated in this powerful portrait of the poet responding to his times.

Whitman’s idealistic expectations of democracy were painfully eroded by the rapidly expanding urban capitalism that, before the Civil War, increasingly threatened the economic and political power of the ordinary American. His poetry during this, his most fruitful period, became the indispensable medium allowing him to adjust to these developments. He succeeded in portraying this modern society as an invigorating natural extension of the artisanal order. After the war, however, American capitalism advanced at a pace that made it impossible for Whitman to redeem it through his poetry. His imagination defeated by realities, he invested more and more in dreams of the future, while his poetry turned to the past, Memory emerging as a central figure.

In this many-sided analysis M. Wynn Thomas relates Whitman’s work to American painting of the period; examines the poet’s evocation of nature, which he sometimes saw as a challenge to man’s confidence in himself; documents the revisions and additions Whitman made to Leaves of Grass in order to demonstrate that “my Book and the War are One”; and pays sympathetic attention to the postwar poetry, usually slighted.

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Lynching in the New South

Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930

W. Fitzhugh Brundage

University of Illinois Press, 1993

Lynching was a national crime. But it obsessed the South. W. Fitzhugh Brundage's multidisciplinary approach to the complex nature of lynching delves into the such extrajudicial murders in two states: Virginia, the southern state with the fewest lynchings; and Georgia, where 460 lynchings made the state a measure of race relations in the Deep South. Brundage's analysis addresses three central questions: How can we explain variations in lynching over regions and time periods? To what extent was lynching a social ritual that affirmed traditional white values and white supremacy? And, what were the causes of the decline of lynching at the end of the 1920s?

A groundbreaking study, Lynching in the New South is a classic portrait of the tradition of violence that poisoned American life.

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Lyrics and Borrowed Tunes of the American Temperance Movement

Edited & Compiled by Paul D. Sanders

University of Missouri Press, 2006

Cold water is the drink for me / Of all the drinks the best, sir; / Your grog, of whate’er name it be, / I dare not for to taste, sir.

Such a lyric, sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” was typical ammunition in the temperance movement’s battle against alcohol. By the 1830s, Americans drank an average of 9.5 gallons of hard liquor each year. From the 1840s until the beginning of Prohibition, well over one hundred temperance songbooks were published in which inspirational lyrics were set to mostly borrowed tunes in the hope of persuading citizens to put down the bottle.

Despite the prominent place of music in the temperance movement, little has been written about the large volume of lyrics it produced. This book, the most extensive on the subject in nearly thirty years, presents more than four hundred of those lyrics and the thirty-two melodies most often employed, from “Auld Lang Syne” to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Paul D. Sanders has assembled the various songs the movement used into five thematic chapters: patriotic songs, hymns, traditional Scottish songs, popular songs, and Civil War songs. In each, he offers an introductory commentary, provides the music for the original song to remind readers of the tune, and then presents the temperance versions chronologically with the lyricists’ names where known.

The songs reflect the efforts of the four major temperance organizations: the Washingtonians, the Independent Order of Good Templars, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Anti-Saloon League. And although today’s image of temperance reformers is generally that of controlling puritans, these songs show that it was a multifaceted movement with a diverse influence on American society.

While many of these songs might seem naive or even comical to modern readers, temperance workers in their day understood that music was a powerful force that could be used to sway the masses. These crusaders were sincere in their wish to eradicate the alcohol problem. Sanders’s book is a lively collection, punctuated with temperance cartoons, that shows that these persuasive songs have stories to tell us today, bringing the evolution of the movement into clearer focus than ever before.

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