The Declaration of Independence
The document in which the thirteen colonies declared that they were independent of Britain and stated the principles of the new government. One of its most famous sentences is this: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' The document was mostly written by Thomas Jefferson and received the approval of the Continental Congress on 4 July 1776. Those signing it included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Hancock. -> Independence Day.
The Stamp Act - a British *Act of Parliament in 1765. It stated that all publications and legal documents in British colonies (= parts of the empire) in America must have official stamps, sold by the British government. Many people in America thought that this was an unfair tax. They refused to use the stamps and prevented British ships from entering or leaving their ports. The Stamp Act was removed in 1766 but the tax, and the people's protests against it, are among the important events that led to the *American Revolution.
The Sons of Liberty - a number of secret organizations formed in the American colonies in 1765 to protest against the *Stamp Act. They were strongest in Boston and New York, where a group of them attacked British soldiers in 1770, one of the first serious actions that led to the *American Revolution.
Boston Massacre - an incident on 5 March 1770 when British soldiers shot at American colonists and killed five of them. It was called a massacre (= the killing of many people) to increase hatred for the British, and was one of the events that led to the *American Revolution.
The Boston Tea Party - an incident in American history. It occurred on 16 December 1773, two years before the *American Revolution. In order to protest about the British tax on tea, a group of Americans dressed as Indians went onto three British ships in *Boston harbour and threw 342 large boxes of tea into the sea.
Minuteman - a member of a group of American citizens during the *American Revolution who fought when they were needed. They said they were ready to fight with only a minute's warning. Minutemen from *Massachusetts fought at the battles of *Lexington and Concord at the start of the war, and similar groups were also formed in *Connecticut, *New Hampshire and *Maryland.
The Declaration of Independence - the document in which the *thirteen colonies declared that they were independent of Britain and stated the principles of the new government. One of its most famous sentences is this: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' The document was mostly written by Thomas *Jefferson and received the approval of the *Continental Congress on 4 July 1776. Those signing it included Benjamin *Franklin, John *Adams and John *Hancock.
The Continental Congress - the first governing body (1774-89) of the *thirteen colonies which later became the US. It met in *Philadelphia. The First Continental Congress was in 1774 and made demands for more rights from Britain. The Second Continental Congress began in 1775 and passed the *Declaration of Independence and the *Articles of Confederation.
Lesson 57. Test
1. What were the causes of the War of Independence?
2. What is “the Boston Tea Party”?
3. When did the War of Independence start? How ling did it last?
4. Who was led the country through the War of Independence?
5. What were the advantages and disadvantages of the British and the Colonists?
6. How many states fought for their independence?
7. Who participated in the war?
8. Who was king of Britain at the time of the American Revolution?
9. Who was the author of the Declaration of Independence? When was it signed?
10. When did the USA finally get its independence?
11. Where is the declaration kept nowadays?
12. What were the ideas of the Declaration?
Lesson 58 - 59
Romanticism in Britain
 Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe and strengthened in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. lt was embodied most strongly in the visual arte, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and natural history. The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and anc'rent custom to something noble, made spontaneity a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage. Romanticism in British literature developed in a different form slightly later, mostly associated with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose co-authored book Lyrical Ballads (1798) sought to reject Augustan poetry in favour of more direct speech derived from folk traditions. Both poets were also involved in utopian social thought in the wake of the French Revolution. The poet and painter William Blake is the most extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in Britain, epitomised by his claim "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." Blake's artistic work is also strongly influenced by Medieval illuminated books. The painters J. M. W. Turner and John Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats and John Clare constitute another phase of Romanticism in Britain. In predominantly Roman Catholic countries Romanticism was less pronounced than in Germany and Britain, and tended to develop later, after the rise of Napoleon. François-René de Chateaubriand is often called the "Father of French Romanticism". In France, the movement is associated with the 19th century, particularly in the paintings of Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, the plays, poems and novels of Victor Hugo (such as Les Misérables and Ninety- Three)(also, Victor Hugo, in the preface to "Cromwell" states that " there are no rules» or models" in Romanticism), and the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Stendhal. In the United States, romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully in Nathaniel Hawthorne's atmosphere and melodrama. Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson—nearly unread in her own time—and Herman Melville's novel Moby- Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism was competing with romanticism in the nowL Bptt of European Romanticism on American writers |
| The European Romantic movement reached America in the early 19th century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans, the American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the assumption that the natural world was inherently good, while human society was filled with corruption. |
Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism, which includes the belief that the destiny of each individual is preordained.
Robert Burns
During the 18th century writers came to the metropolis of Britain from the provinces, and from Ireland and Scotland. The second President of the United States, John Adams, came to England for a classical education. Edinburgh and Dublin had their own Enlightenments, feeding their own national literatures, but also making an impression on English literature through Edgeworth, Burns, Scott and others. Scottish enlighteners were mostly academics who mostly wrote prose. Poetry written in Scots was unknown in England, as Gaelic writing was in Edinburgh. The Reformation and the Unions of crowns and parliaments had not helped Scotland's imaginative vernacular literature.
This came to English notice for the first time with Robert Burns (1759-96). On the title page of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786), Burns presents himself as ‘The Simple Bard, unbroke by Rules of Art’. An Edinburgh reviewer distilled this into ‘a heaven-taught ploughman’. Burns did plough a poor tenant farm, but had been taught his letters, and the English Augustans, French and some Latin, by a graduate employed by his father, also a poor tenant-farmer. He wrote in English until in his twenties he discovered that the Scots he spoke had been revived as a literary medium by Allan Ramsay and especially Robert Fergusson.
He had intended this Kilmarnock publication to pay for his emigration to Jamaica. His satires on Calvinism had given offence, and he and his pregnant Jean Armour had had to do public penance in the kirk. But in Edinburgh, Henry Mackenzie, author of The Man of Feeling (1771), commended these Scottish dialect poems in The Lounger. The loungers toasted the ploughman poet, who drank in Edinburgh’s taverns. The farm failing, Burns took a post in the Excise, collecting taxes for the Crown. Expanded Poems were published in Edinburgh in 1787, and expanded again in 1794 to include Tam o’Shanter. The Scots Musical Museum, a collection of all extant Scottish songs, now took up most of Burns’s creative energy. He contributed hundreds of poems to it, often amended or rewritten.
Burns wrote variously in English and Scots, and instant fame led to some myths. Very rarely had he ‘walked in glory and in joy,/Following his plough along the mountainside’, as Wordsworth was to imagine, and he gave up farming with relief. He is famous as a democrat - against rank, kirk and state, and for whisky, liberty and the French Revolution - but joined the Dumfries Volunteers before his death in 1796. His versatility is seen in his exceptionally gifted songs. Not all are as beautiful and touching as ‘My love is like a red, red rose’, ‘Ye banks and braes o’ bonny Doon’ or ‘Ae fond kiss’. With the songs of love, patriotism and sentiment are erotic, comic, sardonic and bawdy songs. Burns embraced folk bawdy with zest, as in his subversive The Jolly Beggars.
Burns found his voices in the vernacular, and his Scots poems eclipse those in English. Yet he has a general debt to neoclassical tradition, and to the 18th century’s reductive comic irony. He created for himself a social voice in which soliloquy sounds natural, as for example in his justly famous ‘To a Mouse On Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785,’ ending
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane atone
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley, often go amiss
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, leave
For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e, eye
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
These and many other of his famous lines express sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. This is an Augustan quality. Contemporary readers would have recognized his ‘Simple bard’ epigraph as from Pope, and ‘The Jolly Beggars’ as a miniature Beggar’s Opera; it was also published as ‘Love and Liberty. A Cantata’. He wrote satirical verse letters, and in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ joyfully converted heroi-comical techniques to the mockery of hypocritical piety. Tam o’ Shanter itself is a mock-heroic Augustan poem in the rogue-realism tradition. This 18th-century irony is subdued in Sir Walter Scott, but bares its edge in later Anglo-Scots such as Byron, Macaulay and J. S. Mill.
The energy of the wonderful Tam o’ Shanter allows its audience not to notice its complexity. Burns knew it was his most finished piece, and, since it is ideal for convivial social recitation, it is a suitable testament. According to Emerson, Burns offers ‘the only example in history of a language made classic through the genius of a single man’. At times, however, Burns teams up his Scots with English words, as in the fourth word in the first line of ‘To a Mouse’: ‘Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie\ One of Burns’s models was
James Beanie, not for his Scoticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing, but for The Minstrel (1774). Burns was not a simple bard but a canny minstrel.
6.The Romantics: 1790 1837
Overview
English Romantic literature is overwhelmingly a poetic one, with six major poets writing in the first quarter of the 19th century, transforming the literary climate. Blake was unknown; Wordsworth and Coleridge won partial acceptance in the first decade; Scott and Byron became popular. The flowering of the younger Romantics, Byron, Shelley and Keats, came after 1817, but by 1824 all were dead. The other great literary artist of the period is Jane Austen, whose six novels appeared anonymously between 1811 and 1818.
Other books appearing without an author’s name were Lyrical Ballads (Bristol, 1798) and Waverley (Edinburgh, 1814). The novels of ‘the author of Waverley', Sir Walter Scott, were wildly popular. There was original fiction from Maria Edgeworth and Mary Shelley, and non-fiction from Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt.
The Romantic poets Early Romantics William Blake
William Blake (1757-1827) was Burns's contemporary but had none of his success. He grew up poor in London, went to art school, was apprenticed to an engraver at 14, and lived by engraving. His fine teenage Poetical Sketches were printed but not published.
He engraved his later poems by his own laborious method, hand-colouring each copy of the little books in which he published them. Eventually, his art gained him a few admirers, notably the painter Samuel Palmer (1805-81).
Blake had begun his Songs of Experience with ‘Hark to the voice of the Bard!’ - but the age did not hearken to this truly ‘heaven-taught’ genius. Self-educated and misunderstood, he opposed the ruling intellectual orthodoxies, political, social, sexual and ecclesiastical, with a marked contempt for Deist materialists, censorious priests and the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. A revolutionary who briefly shared Milton’s hope that paradise might be restored by politics, he came to regard the political radicals, his allies, as blind rational materialists: ‘Mock on, mock on,
Voltaire, Rousseau;/Mock on, mock on, ’tis all in vain./You throw the sand against the wind,/And the wind throws it back again.’ For Blake, human reality was political, spiritual and divine. A material ideal of advancement showed ‘Single vision, and Newton’s sleep’ (Isaac Newton’s prophetic writings were then unknown). A religious visionary driven by Deism to unorthodox extremes, Blake was also, unlike most mystics, a satirical ironist and a master of savage aphorisms, as in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794) contain what have become his most celebrated poems, such as ‘The Sick Rose’, ‘The Tyger’ and ‘London’, which begins:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
Blake uses the rhythmical quatrains of Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs for Children (1715), repeating and twisting words and sounds to make a discord with the childhood vision of his earlier Songs of Innocence. Concentration lends his images a surreal intensity: ‘the hapless Soldier’s sigh/Runs in blood down Palace walls’ and ‘the youthful Harlot’s curse ... blasts with plagues the Marriage hearse’.
When read, he was not understood. Wordsworth said later: ‘There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.’ In the time of the French Revolution there were many who saw signs that the Judgement of the Apocalypse was at hand, but Blake was isolated and his thought was esoteric. He drew on unfamiliar theological traditions of biblical prophecy. Blake’s thought evolved in his later prophetic books, often inverting conventional religious values in a way deriving from 18th-century satirical traditions of reversed perspective. Thus, Milton’s God the Father is parodied as ‘Old Nobodaddy aloft’ who ‘farted and belched and coughed’. He invented new and complex myths with allegorical strands of meaning, as in the Vision of the Daughters of Albion, featuring Oothoon, Theotormon and Bromion. Scholarship has made the later Blake less obscure, but it will never communicate as other Romantic poetry does. If keys can never fully unlock these prophetic myths of political and sexual liberation, yet lightning can strike from their most impenetrable clouds. A brief History cannot do justice to Blake’s later work, which is a study in itself.
Blake illustrated a book by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), the indomitable author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), who married the radical social philosopher William Godwin (1756-1836), author of an Inquiry concerning
Political Injustice (1793) and a programmatic Gothic novel, Caleb Williams (1794).
| William Wordsworth (17701850) Son of steward of the Lonsdale estate, Westmorland. 1778 mother dies, Wordsworth becomes a boarder at Hawkshead School. 1790 walks 2000 miles through France and Alps in the Cambridge Long Vacation. 1791 in France. 1792 a daughter born to Annette Vallon. Wordsworth returns home for funds; war prevents a reunion. 1794 the Terror (mass executions) cools Wordsworth’s enthusiasm for French Revolution; he ‘yielded up moral questions in despair’. 1795 a bequest allows him to live in Dorset; meets Coleridge, and moves to live near him, with his sister Dorothy. 1798 Lyrical Ballads. 1799 returns to the Lakes for good. 1802 inherits money Lord Lonsdale owed his father. Marries Mary Hutchinson. 1807 Poems in Two Volumes. 1810 estranged from Coleridge. 1813 appointed Stamp Distributor (tax collector) for Westmorland. 1843 appointed Poet Laureate. 1850 Prelude published. |
Subjectivity
The ingredients of Romantic sensibility had existed before 1798, but the new poets found for it an authentic voice, touch and intensity. The novel elements in the Lyrical Ballads were defined and given impetus by the Preface Wordsworth added in 1800 (without mention of Coleridge). The quality and impact of the best poems were such that lyric poetry and imaginative literature were permanently altered, especially by the new emphasis on subjective experience. This subjectivity is exemplified in a famous Wordsworth lyric:
She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.
5 A violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the eye! - Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know 10 When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh!
The difference to me.
The ending illustrates a principle of the Preface that in these poems ‘the feeling therein developed gives importance to the ... situation, and not the ... situation to the feeling.’
This inverts the Augustan idea that literature’s object is ‘just representations of general nature’, or general truth. The comic impulse of the 18th century also recedes. Had Pope written lines 3-4 or 7-8 above, irony might have been suspected; but social irony has no place in Wordsworth’s graveside manner. Lines from Gray’s Elegy approach Wordsworth’s position: ‘Full many a flower is born to bloom unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’ Gray’s churchyard lies between London and the Lakes, whence the half-hidden violet and the first star (the planet Venus) can be seen. Yet it takes a poet’s eye to see a Lucy, and a poetic reader to respond. The poet is becoming a special interpreter of special truths to a special reader, not of general truths to common readers. This relationship is more personal, and can be deeper and more intense than what it replaced, but - as the rhyme on ‘oh!’ illustrates - it can also be more risky.
As poetry became more subjective, literature began to be defined as imaginative. Thus the post-Romantic prose of Carlyle, and of Ruskin, Newman and Pater is more ‘literary’ than the rational prose of J. S. Mill, which relies less on rhythm and imagery. In fiction, too, the keynote is often set by imaginative natural description, as in the novels of the Brontes.
Romanticism and Revolution
There had been a European Romanticism or pre-Romanticism since the ‘Ossian’ craze of the 1760s. Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761) and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) added passionate love to the ingredients of sensibility sketched in the last chapter. Thus it was that Robert Southey (1774-1843), expelled from Westminster School, could say that he went up to Oxford with ‘a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon.’ He makes out here that he was a typical student of the generation that shared Wordsworth’s reaction to the French Revolution: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven.’ Southey became very popular, and eventually a strong Tory.
The idea of the American Revolution excited European intellectuals. French Romantics were radical and liberal, but English Romantics divided. Early 18th-century French thinkers had admired the English for having already curbed the royal power; mid-18th-century French thinkers identified repression with king, nobles and clergy. Things were not so clear in England, where the French Revolution had a mixed and changing reception. Youthful rapture was modified by the Terror, when thousands were killed. Tom Paine (1737-1809), a hero of the American Revolution and radical author of The Rights of Man (1791), was welcomed in France. Yet his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI put him in prison and near the guillotine. In 1793 France declared war on England, whose government as a result became more repressive - and had much to repress. Napoleon set about his ‘liberating’ conquest of Europe; Britain resisted and at length succeeded. But her own reforms had to wait until after 1824, when Byron, Shelley and Keats, young radicals at the end of a long and severe period of national reaction against the Revolution and Napoleon, were dead. Blake was the only Romantic to stay true to his vision in middle age. Coleridge and Wordsworth lost faith in utopian solutions, and by 1815 had turned to the Church of England.
Younger Romantics Lord Byron
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) had a wild ancestry, a Calvinist childhood, handsome looks and a club foot. Inheriting his title unexpectedly, he lived noisily at Harrow and Cambridge, creating an image by athletic and libertine exploits. The ‘craving for extraordinary incident’ noted by Wordsworth could be ‘hourly gratified’ in the Regency by spoilt noblemen, among them the Prince Regent. The Romantic Poet, spontaneously producing poems as a tree does leaves or a thundercloud lightning, was more intriguing to journalists and to society than mere poems. A composite image of poet-as- flawed-genius took elements from the opium addiction of Coleridge; from Byron and Shelley scattering wives, lovers, children and debts across Europe; and from the younger Romantics' early deaths. Rousseau and Napoleon preceded Byron, but he was the first British poet to become the hero-villain of a publicity cult.
On leaving Cambridge, Byron pursued adventure in Iberia, Malta and the Turkish empire. These travels contributed to the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, published in 1812:
Whilome in Albion’s isle there dwelt a youth, Britain once upon a time
Who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight; not at all
But spent his days in riot most uncouth,
And vex’d with mirth the drowsy ear of Night.
Ah, me! in sooth he was a shameless wight creature
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;
Few earthly things found favour in his sight Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.
Childe Harold was he hight. called
Childe is a medieval title of chivalry, and Byron (for it is transparently himself ) claims a lineage stained with ancestral crime. The revels he boasts of took place at Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, his inherited seat. He takes his Spenserian stanzas from Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748), in which Indolence seems a venial sin. Childe Harold is unrepentant:
Apart he stalk’d in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolv’d to go,
And visit scorching lands beyond the sea;
With pleasure almost drugg’d he almost long’d for woe,
And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below.
‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ Byron wrote, but the fame was no accident. He never stopped writing, nor being guilty, unrepentant and famous. The poetic autobiographer mentions his love for his daughter and his half-sister, but chiefly displays his sensibility via a travelogue. ‘Europe he saw,’ wrote Pope of an earlier milord on his Grand Tour, ‘and Europe saw him too.’ The later Cantos 3 and 4 have set-pieces reflecting at Waterloo or in Venice. In Switzerland, Byron writes:
I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me, and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture ...
This is Wordsworth on a brass instrument. Harold writes in his farewell:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more ...
Wordsworth internalized the external topics of 18th-century sensibility into a new personal poetry; Byron processed the result for export. Comparison makes clear the broadness of Byron’s attitudinizing. ‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean — roll!’, he declaims. Rhetoric, the persuasive rational discourse of Burke and Gibbon, was now amplified by emotional emphasis, simplification and repetition, in writers as various as Sheridan, Mary Shelley and Macaulay, and in parliamentary oratory. Winston Churchill was the last in this style.
Byron worked the crowd with romances and dramatic poems in fluent verse, posing as himself. Only his liberalism, egotism and scepticism were sincere. Notable among his doomed self-projections is Manfred (1817), in which the superman refuses a deathbed repentance, telling the Abbot, ‘Old man! ’tis not too difficult to die.’ Byron’s sensational romances continued with Cain in 1821. But his verse journalism also had a more intimate and epistolary side, glimpsed above in ‘Save concubines and carnal companie’ and the irony of ‘E’en for change of scene would seek the shades below’ - a prophecy of Don
Juan.
Having woken up famous, Byron became more than famous. After flinging herself at him, Lady Caroline Lamb described him as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. In 1814 his half-sister gave birth to a child said to be his. In 1815 he married a rich, serious and unlucky wife. Ostracized for incest, he left England for good in 1816, travelled to Lake Geneva, stayed with the Shelleys, and then moved to Italy. Most days Byron was a drawing-room milord, but he had wild periods: his debauches in Venice involved two hundred women; he was also bisexual. He sealed his European reputation as a rebel by his death while supporting the Greek revolt against the Turks.
Byron’s distinction and originality is found in his anti-romantic Don Juan. He tired of his own poses and of ‘cant’, the sanctimonious expression of sentiment. His new irony is much closer to the self he reveals in his sparkling letters. Like Scott, Edgeworth, Peacock, Landor and Austen, Byron did not think that the Romantic revolution invalidated rational criticism. Pope he thought far better than any of the Romantics. His mature voice is first heard in Beppo and The Vision of Judgement. Don Juan (1818) begins
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,
We all have seen him in the pantomime Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time.
Byron’s Don Juan (pronounced in the English way), the legendary womanizer who ends in hell, the Don Giovanni of Mozart’s 1787 opera, is, among other things, a humorous self-portrait: a passive youngster who falls in with the amorous wishes of a series of beautiful women in Seville, Greece, St Petersburg and England. But Don Juan, like Tristram Shandy, is not read for the Life but for the Opinions, which include: ‘What men call gallantry, and the gods adultery,/Is much more common where the climate’s sultry’ and ‘Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;/Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;/Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,/The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey ...’. Although it rises to satire, most of Don Juan is a long-running joke. Insofar as it is self-display, the mature milord is more interesting than the self-regarding Childe. ‘It may be profligate,’ Byron wrote to a friend, ‘but is it not life, is it not the thing?’ He exposes hypocrisy with a wonderfully varied use of anticlimax which disarms as it unmasks.
Some have accused me of a strange design Against the creed and morals of the land,
And trace it in this poem every line:
I don’t pretend that I quite understand My own meaning when I would be very fine,
But the fact is that I have nothing plann’d,
Unless it were to be a moment merry,
A novel word in my vocabulary.
Jane Austen
Jane Austen (1775-1817) grew up in the quiet country parish of her father, the Rev,
George Austen, in a family where literature was the chief amusement. One of her five elder brothers became her father’s curate and successor. She wrote for pleasure in childhood, and as an adult chose to work on ‘3 or 4 families in a country village’: the world she knew. Her wit, workmanship and background are not Romantic but Augustan and 18th-century Anglican, like the ideals of the older country gentry she depicts.
Despite its sudden spring in the mid-18th century, the novel became a major form again only after 1800. Before Austen, there were Gothic tales, novels of sensibility like Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, the social entertainments of Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith, and Godwin’s experiments of ideas, but the novel reached perfection with Jane Austen. It went on to popularity, periodical publication, and bigger things.
‘And what are you reading Miss —?’ ‘Oh, it is only a novel’, replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. - ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusion of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
Thus Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. (Cecilia and Camilla are novels by Fanny Burney; Belinda, a novel by Maria Edgeworth.)
In her brilliant fragment, Love and Friendship, the 14-year-old Austen mocks the novel of feminine sensibility, and in Northanger Abbey, begun in 1798, the silliness of Gothic. Catherine Morland reflects: ‘Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked [Figure omitted: ‘Tales of Wonder’ (1802), by James Gillray, a print caricaturing the Gothic craze. Tales of Wonder was the title of a collection of verse tales of horror published by M. G. Lewis in 1801. The ladies listen to Lewis’s The Monk.]for.' She learned from Fanny Burney, but preferred Cowper, Crabbe and the moral essays of Johnson to the fiction of wish- fulfilment.
After juvenilia written to entertain her family, she dedicated herself to the novel. Her novels are cast in the form of the comedy of manners: accuracy of social behaviour and dialogue, moral realism, elegance of style, and ingenuity of plot. For all her penetration and intelligence, Austen is distinctly a moral idealist. The mistress of irony unfolds a Cinderella tale ending in an engagement. The heroine, typically of good family but with little money, has no recognized prospect but marriage; no wish to marry without love; and no suitable man in sight. After trials and moral discoveries, virtue wins. Of the few professional
novelists before her, none is so consistent. Formally, Austen’s fiction has the drastic selectivity of drama, and, like Racine, gains thereby. The moral life of her time is clear in her pages, although the history is social not national. Two of her brothers, however, became admirals; and in Persuasion, amid the vanities of Bath, she rejoices in the challenge of naval officers to the old social hierarchy. Her comedy of manners accepts the presence or absence of rank, wealth, brains, beauty and masculinity as facts, and as factors in society, while placing goodness, rationality and love above them. Such comedy is not trivial, unless a woman’s choice of husband is trivial. For all her fun and sharp-edged wit, Austen’s central concern is with the integrity of a woman’s affections. Her novels become increasingly moving.
The bright Northanger Abbey and the dark Sense and Sensibility are preparatory to the well-managed gaiety of Pride and Prejudice, which the author came to find ‘too light, bright and sparkling’. It is certainly simpler than the serious Mansfield Park, the classical Emma and the autumnal Persuasion. It is hard to choose between these. Mansfield Park is not about the education of its heroine: her example educates others. Amidst complex social comedy, the plain and simple Fanny Price, a poor niece brought up at Mansfield in its splendid park but not sophisticated by it, resists the predatory charm of visitors from London. Edmund, her admired cousin, eventually realizes the beauty of her nature.
Moral worth is recommended less directly in Emma, a work of art designed with economical symmetry. ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to dis-
Jane Austen aged c.35. A pencil and watercolour sketch made by her sister Cassandra in c.1810, the only likeness to show Jane Austen’s face.
tress or vex her.’ Emma, the queen of the village, prides herself on her perceptiveness, and decides that Harriet Smith, a pretty seventeen-year-old of unknown birth whom she takes up, is too good to marry a local farmer. Emma invites her to the house to meet the new parson, who misinterprets the encouragement and proposes to Emma. This is only the first, however, of Emma’s mistaken efforts to marry off Harriet. Austen so manages appearances that the reader shares Emma’s dangerous delusions. Virtually everybody in the book is misled by their imagination. In this sense, Austen is squarely anti-Romantic.
Emma, doted upon by her old father, believes that she herself will not marry. ‘But still, you will be an old maid!’ says Harriet, ‘and that’s so dreadful!’ ‘Never mind, Harriet,’ Emma replies, ‘I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public!’ Both may be thinking of a garrulous old spinster in the village, the good-hearted Miss Bates, an old friend of the family who is neither handsome, clever nor rich. The normally considerate Emma is later carried away by the playfulness of Frank Churchill at a picnic, and in a chance remark publicly ridicules the dullness of Miss Bates. For this cruelty she is rebuked by Mr Knightley, a worthy family friend who has the judgement Emma’s father lacks. Further misunderstandings ensue: Harriet Smith fancies that Mr Knightley is interested in her; Knightley
thinks that Emma is taken with Frank Churchill. But Mr Churchill suddenly reveals that he has been secretly engaged to the mysterious Jane Fairfax.
Emma is walking in the garden when Knightley calls. ‘They walked together. He was silent. She thought he was often looking at her, and trying for a fuller view of her face than it suited her to give.’ In Jane Austen’s tightly-governed world, this is intimacy and drama. After Knightley has chivalrously consoled Emma for the pain caused her by Mr Churchill’s engagement, and has been undeceived, he declares his love and entreats her to speak. Miss Austen now teases her reader: ‘What did she say? - Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.’ Reticence resumes. Yet Knightley comments on Mr Churchill’s secret engagement: ‘Mystery; Finesse - how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and
[p. 243]
more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?’ Although Miss Austen smiles at the man’s vehemence, she too admires truth, sincerity and plain-dealing. This is both Augustan, Romantic and romantic.
Persuasion is for devotees her most touching and interesting novel. Eight years before the novel begins, the 19-year-old Anne Elliott was persuaded by Lady Russell, a friend of her dead mother, to break off her engagement with Wentworth, a man whom she loved, accepting Lady Russell’s view that he was: ‘a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession [the navy], and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in that profession ...’. Captain Wentworth returns rich, and, he tells his sister, ‘ready to make a foolish match. Any body between fifteen and thirty may have me for asking. A little beauty, and a few smiles, and a few compliments to the navy, and I am a lost man.’ Nevertheless, ‘Anne Elliot was not out of his thoughts, when he more seriously described the woman he should wish to meet with. “A strong mind, with sweetness of manner,” made the first and last of the description.’
Wentworth is persuaded that a woman who broke her engagement does not have a strong mind; and Anne is persuaded that Wentworth cannot think of her. He is soon involved with Louisa Musgrove, but when Louisa has a fall, it is Anne who is calm and useful. Earlier, Wentworth had silently relieved Anne of the attentions of a troublesome two-year-old while she is engaged in looking after the child's sick brother. In a letter to a friend, Maria Edgeworth comments on this passage: ‘Don’t you see Captain Wentworth, or rather, don’t you in her place feel him, taking the boisterous child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa?’
In this short novel - concluded as the author became very ill - gesture and silence develop emotional expressiveness. At the climax, Anne takes her opportunity to make it clear to Wentworth - indirectly, but persuasively - that she loves him still. Wentworth is sitting writing at a table in a room full of people as Anne is engaged in debate by a naval officer who claims that men’s love is more constant than women’s love. Wentworth listens to her reply, which ends: ‘All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.’ When compared with the plot of Emma, that of Persuasion is theatrically conventional, especially on its ‘wicked’ side; but the central relationship is magically managed.
No 19th-century successor in the novel or the theatre approaches the economy in dialogue and action Austen developed by formal discipline and concentration of theme. (Her novels offered ‘an admirable copy of life’, but lacked imagination, according to Wordsworth, who lacked the kind of imagination she relied on in a reader.) She also seems to be the first English prose writer since Julian of Norwich who is clearly superior to male contemporaries in the same field. A finer novelist than Scott, she confirmed the novel as a genre belonging significantly to women writers as well as women readers.
Metropolitan Police. Stephenson’s Rocket runs on Liverpool-Manchester railway.
1828 George IV dies. William IV reigns to 1837.
1832
| 1S32 |
1833
| Keble, Newman, (-1S41); Robert |
| 1S33 1S34 1S35 1S37 |
1834 New Poor Law Act is passed. The ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’. The Houses of Parliament burn down.
1836 Barry and Pugin design new Houses of Parliament.
1837 William IV dies. Victoria reigns (to 1901).
William Cobbett, Rural Rides; Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State; Alfred Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.
Alfred Tennyson, Poems.
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; et al. Tracts for the Times Browning, Pauline.
George Crabbe (d.1832), Poetical Works.
Coleridge (d.1834), Table Talk; Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz; Capt. Marryat, Mr Midshipman Easy, R. H. Froude, Keble, John Henry Newman and others, Lyra Apostolica.
Carlyle, French Revolution; Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers; William Makepeace Thackeray, The Professor, John Gibson Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott.
Lesson 60 - 62
Romanticism in America
Lesson 63. Test
TEST.
1. When did the literary trend of Romanticisn appear in America? What social events lead to it?
2. What was the creative method of the writers of Romanticism?
3. Charecterize the principal features of Romanticism.
4. What were the new themes intorduced by the writers of Romanticism?
5. When did Cooper start writing?
6. What principal ideas are developed in the Leather-Stocking cycle?
7. What was Cooper’s contribution to American national literature?
The last of the Mohicans.
1. Who are the main heroes?
2. When does the events take place?
3. Who is the last of the Mohicans? Why is he called ‘the last’?
4. Why does Chingachgook call Natty his son?
5. Why were the sisters Monro chased by Magua?
6. Write film review.
Lesson 64 – 65
Abolitionism - the American campaign in the 1800s to free the slaves in the southern states. At the beginning of the 19th century a law was enacted in Congress which prohibited further importation of Negroes into the US. Negroes were continued to be smuggled into the country through Cuba and Jamaica. The abolitionists wanted to make people understand how much was the economic development of the country kept back by slavery and how disgusting it was at least from the moral point of view. The members of abolitionism were called abolitionists, and many hid slaves who were escaping on the *Underground Railroad. Famous abolitionists included the poet John Greenleaf Whittier and the author Harriet Beecher Stowe.
The Underground Railroad - a secret system used in the US before the Civil War for helping thousands of slaves to escape to the free northern states or Canada. The slaves were called 'passengers', the people who helped them were 'conductors', and the slaves hid in 'stations' (safe houses) along the way.
The abolition literature was very pathetic in style. It expressed a desperate state of mind. It’s considered part of Romantic literature. At the same time this literature developed the American social novel by introducing many realistic details about laws and customs of that time.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96) -a US writer whose best-known work, Uncle Tom's Cabin, increased support in the northern states for the movement to free the slaves in the South. She wrote 16 books, including several about life in *New England, such as The Minister's Wooing (1859) and Old Town Folks (1869).
Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield in the state of Connecticut where her father was a pastor. She was 4 when her mother died. She was under the influence of her elder sister, who had started a school and both sisters took to teaching. In 1836 she married professor Calvin Stowe, who was a fried of of her father’s. mrs. Stowe having several children didn’t much time for writing. But being for the poor slaves she started the novel “Uncle Tom's Cabin”
Uncle Tom's Cabin -a novel (1852) by the US writer Harriet Beecher *Stowe which increased support for the movement to free slaves. It is about a kind slave called Tom who is badly treated and finally killed by Simon Legree. Tom's daughter Little Eva also dies, and another well-known character in the novel is the slave child Topsy. The name 'Uncle Tom' is sometimes used as an insult to describe an African American who has too much respect for white people.
Lesson 66 – 68
The Civil War.
Causes of the war. The American Civil War was fought between the northern and southern states from 1861 to 1865. There were two main causes of the war. The first was the issue of slavery: should Africans who had been brought by force to the US be used as slaves. The second was the issue of states' rights: should the US federal government be more powerful than the governments of individual states.
The North and South were very different in character. The economy of the South was based on agriculture, especially cotton. Picking cotton was hard work, and the South depended on slaves for this. The North was more industrial, with a larger population and greater wealth. Slavery, and opposition to it, had existed since before independence (1776) but, in the 19th century, the abolitionists, people who wanted to make slavery illegal, gradually increased in number. The South's attitude was that each state had the right to make any law it wanted, and if southern states wanted slavery, the US government could not prevent it. Many southerners became secessionists, believing that southern states should secede from the Union (= become independent from the US).
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President. He and his party, the *Republicans, were against slavery, but said that they would not end it. The southern states did not believe this, and began to leave the Union. In 1860 there were 34 states in the US. Eleven of them (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina) left the Union and formed the Confederate States of America, often called the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis became its President, and for most of the war Richmond, Virginia, was the capital.
Four years of fighting. The US government did not want a war but, on 12 April 1861, the Confederate Army attacked Fort Sumter, which was in the Confederate state of South Carolina but still occupied by the Union army. President Lincoln could not ignore the attack and so the Civil War began.
Over the next four years the Union army tried to take control of the South. The battles that followed, Shiloh, Antietam, Bull Run and Chicamauga, have become part of America's national memory. After the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, in a speech known as the Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln said that the North was fighting the war to keep the Union together so that '...government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth'. In the same year he issued the Emancipation Proclamation which made slavery illegal, but only in the Confederacy.
Slaves and former slaves played an important part in the war. Some gave information to Union soldiers, because they knew that their best chance of freedom was for the North to win the war. Many former slaves wanted to become Union soldiers, but this was not very popular among white northerners. In spite of this opposition about 185000 former slaves served in the Union army.
Women on both sides worked as spies, taking information, and sometimes even people, across borders by hiding them under their large skirts.
In the South especially, people suffered greatly and had little to eat. On 9 April 1865, when the South could fight no more, General Robert E Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. A total of 620000 people had been killed and many more wounded.
The war was over but feelings of hostility against the North remained strong. John Wilkes *Booth, an actor who supported the South, decided to kill President Lincoln. On 14 April 1865 he approached the President in Ford's Theatre in Washington and shot him. Lincoln died the next morning.
The killing of President Lincoln showed how bitter many people felt. The South had been beaten, but its people had not changed their opinions about slavery or about states' rights. During the war, the differences between North and South had become even greater. The North had become richer. In the South, cities had been destroyed and the economy ruined.
Reconstruction. After the war the South became part of the United States again. This long, difficult period was called Reconstruction. The issues that had caused the war, slavery and states' rights, still had to be dealt with. The issue of slavery was difficult, because many people even in the North had prejudices against Blacks. The new state governments in the South wanted to make laws limiting the rights of Blacks, and the US government tried to stop them. Between 1865 and 1870 the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were passed, giving Blacks freedom, making them citizens of the US and the state where they lived, and giving them, in theory, the same rights as white Americans.
Many northern politicians went to the South where they thought they could get power easily. These northerners were called carpet-baggers. Both carpet-baggers and southern politicians were dishonest and stole money from the new governments, which hurt the South even more.
In 1870 the last three southern states were admitted to the Union again, and in 1877 the northern army finally left the South. The war lasted four years, but efforts to reunite the country took three times as long.
Effects of the Civil War. Differences between North and South are still strong. In the South the Confederate flag is still often used, and the state flags of Georgia and Mississippi were made to look similar to it. The state motto is Audemus jura nostra defendere, which is Latin for 'We dare to defend our rights'. The Civil War helped to end slavery, but long afterwards Blacks were still being treated badly, and race relations continue to be a problem. The South was so angry with the Republicans, the party of Lincoln and Reconstruction, that southerners voted Democratic for a century. The war showed strong differences between parts of the US, but many people believe that the most important thing it did was to prove that the US is one country.
Slavery. A slave is considered to be the property of another person and to have no rights of their own. Slavery has been practised in many countries, but played a particularly important role in the history of the US.
The development of slavery. The first slaves were taken to North America from Africa by the Dutch in 1619. By the time of the American Revolution (1775) there were 500 000 slaves, mostly in the South. After the Revolution the northern states made slavery illegal but the South needed cheap labour for the cotton plantations. Gradually, the South's economy became dependent on slaves and by 1860, the year before the Civil War, there were about 4 million.
Conditions on ships bringing slaves from Africa were very bad. People were packed in tightly and there was little to eat and drink. Many died during the trip. Those who reached America were put up for sale and buyers had a chance to look at them and feel them as if they were animals. In 1808 it became illegal to bring slaves into the US, but by then many were being born there, so the slave markets continued.
The quality of life for slaves depended on the treatment they received from their master and on the kind of work they did. Those working on the cotton plantations of the Deep South suffered most. Families were regularly broken up and sent to different plantations. The worst situation was to be sold further down the Mississippi River. The expression to sell somebody down the river means to betray their trust and leave them in difficulties.
Opposition to slavery. It is hard to understand how slavery was allowed to continue in a country that thought of itself as the 'land of the free'. But people found ways to explain it. They said, for example, that Blacks were lazy and needed discipline. Some people pointed out the benefits for slaves who had a good master: housing, food and clothing were provided, and they did not have to worry about getting money to buy these things as poor Whites did. Many people believed that the two races were different, and so treatment that would not be good for Whites was all right for Blacks.
Not everyone shared these beliefs, and in the 1830s opposition to slavery grew. Leaders of the abolition movement included William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of an anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel about a slave who was badly treated. Former slaves Frederick Douglass and Sojourner *Truth described the evils of slavery from their own experience.
Some abolitionists took direct action. In 1831 a former slave, Nat Turner, organized an uprising of slaves in Virginia. In 1859 a white man, John Brown, tried to free some slaves. The work of the Underground Railroad, a group of people who helped slaves to escape to the North, had more impact. One of its most famous workers was Harriet Tubman. Other people hoped to end slavery by sending Blacks back to Africa and in 1822 created the new country of Liberia.
Laws were made to restrict the growth of slavery. In 1787 the North-West Ordinance said that slavery would not be allowed in newly developed regions in the west. But the South wanted slavery to expand westward, and politicians found it increasingly difficult to reach agreement. In 1820 the Missouri Compromise said that Missouri would be admitted to the US as a slave state (= one where slavery was allowed) and Maine as a free state (= one where it was not). The Compromise of 1850 made California a free state and let the people in New Mexico and *Utah make their own choice. The Kansas-Nebraska Act also let the people decide.
Some laws made conditions worse for slaves. A few states made it illegal for people to manumit (= free) their slaves. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made it illegal to help slaves escape.
Conflict between the North and South increased, and it became clear that supporters and opponents of slavery could not continue to be part of the same country. In 1861 the slave states left the US and formed their own government. This was the beginning of the Civil War.
The end of slavery. After the North won the Civil War and brought the southern states back into the US, slavery was ended. But little changed for former slaves. Some moved to the North but there were not enough jobs there and many suffered prejudice from Whites. Those that stayed in the South often worked on the plantations where they had been slaves. They were paid for their work, but had to buy food and clothes. Wages were low and they got into debt, which meant they had to stay there trying to pay off debts which became larger each year.
The North hoped quickly to forget the Civil War but did little to help the Blacks. The effects of this are still felt today, and black Americans have fewer advantages than Whites. On average they get less education, earn less money, have less respect and die younger. Blacks and Whites often find it difficult to trust each other, and many people think that this problem is getting worse rather than better.
The British and slavery. During the 17th century many slaves were taken from Africa to British colonies in the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations. Many businessmen made fortunes from the triangular trade that grew up between Britain, Africa and the West Indies. They transported cloth and iron goods to West Africa. These were exchanged for slaves which were then taken to the West Indies and exchanged for sugar. The sugar was taken back to Bristol and other British ports for sale in Europe.
The Quakers were among the first people in Britain to demand an end to slavery and it was declared illegal in Britain as early as 1772. The campaign for total abolition grew with the formation of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, whose members included the politician William Wilberforce, but it was not until 1807 that Parliament passed an act making it illegal for British ships to carry slaves and for British colonies to import them. Slavery was not finally abolished in the British Empire until 1833, when all slaves were set free and their owners compensated.
Confederate States (also the Confederacy)
The 11 southern states that left the US in 1861 to form a new nation. This caused the American Civil War. The President of the Confederate States was Jefferson Davis and their capital city was first Montgomery, Alabama and later Richmond, Virginia. The Confederate States, in their order of leaving the Union, were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)
The 16th US President (1861-5). He is regarded by many people as America's greatest president, because he served during the Civil War, preserved the Union and freed the slaves. He is also often referred to as 'Honest Abe'. He was a lawyer who was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1846 and then elected President as a Republican. Lincoln led the Union in the Civil War and in 1864 appointed Ulysses S Grant to lead the Union armies. He announced his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to free the slaves in the South. Lincoln was shot and killed by the actor John Wilkes Booth.
Emancipation Proclamation. The statement made by President Abraham *Lincoln on 1 January 1863 that all slaves in the Confederate States were 'forever free'. It had no actual power to make them free, but people talk about Lincoln 'freeing the slaves' because of this proclamation (= announcement). It helped the North in the American Civil War as well, by allowing black people to serve in the army and navy, and by changing the war into a fight against slavery, which caused many people in England and France to gave their support to the North. The Proclamation led in 1865 to the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution, which officially ended slavery in all parts of the US.
Lesson 69. Test
1. What were the causes of the Civil War?
2. When where and how did the Civil War begin?
3. How and why did slavery begin in America?
4. How many slaves were there in the South in 1860?
5. How many blacks fought in the Union Army?
6. Who was the chief general of the Union Army?
7. Who commanded the troops of the Confederate Army?
8. What were the advantages and disadvantages of the Northerners and Southerners?
9. How many states were there in the USA in 1860?
10. Why did 11 states separate from the Union?
11. Who was elected president of the USA in 1860?
12. What was “the Underground Railroad”?
13. What is Gettysburg known for?
14. What is “Emancipation Proclamation”?
15. When was