Uncle Tom's Army: Literary New England and the American Civil War

“Uncle Tom’s Army” will explore the difference the American Civil War—and the Abolitionist struggle that preceded it—made in the lives and work of several well-known New England authors. But it will also imagine the New England of the late 1840s, 50s and 60s a little broadly in order to include the indispensable Walt Whitman—from Brooklyn, New York. For Whitman and many of these writers, an early “transcendental” vision was tempered by experience of war and social conflict and transformed into something darker and more fully informed by a sense of human frailty and fragility. In this Seminar, we will explore that transformation by comparing literary texts from early and late in our authors’ lives. This is primarily a literature course, but care will be taken to place each work we read in its historical context and to examine the impact of social struggle and war on its author. We’ll begin with selections from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe then turn to the circle of writers around Ralph Waldo Emerson—including Henry David Thoreau and others—and explore their relationship to John Brown, the fiery militant who seized the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Emily Dickinson and her poems will be viewed through the eyes of her puzzled but devoted correspondent Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who not only wrote for the Atlantic Monthly but also commanded a regiment of African American troops during the war. Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, will contribute “Benito Cereno,” a story about a mysterious encounter with a slave ship in the Pacific in the early nineteenth century, and a number of sometimes powerful poems from Battle-Pieces, his book of poems on the war. Finally, we’ll return to 1855 and the poetry of Whitman’s earliest Leaves of Grass and compare it with his Civil War poetry and his great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”