A Cultural DivideBased on trade and

industryBased on agriculture

and slavery

Slavery Divides the Nation

Northern opposition to slavery grew as expansion into the West continued. The question of whether a state would be a slave state or not occupied minds such as Kansas with violence there and in Congress.

Charles Sumner spoke 2 days against slavery and Preston Brooks attacking Sumner with his cane (making Sumner unconscious)

Dred Scott

1857 – Supreme Court case

Slave owner took a slae to live in free state for several years, so Scott argued he should be free.

Ruled against and said “had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”

Civil WarThe literary ideal of the brave, dashing Romantic hero

at the beginning of the war was a call to glory that soon found harsh reality in war.

Civil war changed not only American society but literary culture. Following the war, American readers and writers lost taste for the romanticism of gallant heroism, meditations on nature, and worth of the individual & moves to more honest, unsentimental, and ironic

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson Rule Breakers in Literature

Both seen as transitional poets

• Whitman outspoken and gregarious

• Free verse to write about everything American

• Dickinson shy and reclusive

• Compressed lines and complex imagery to explore personal themes

Literature of the Civil War

Slave Narratives

• Stories of suffering• Testimonies that

slaves were not happy and well-treated

• Helped readers care that slaves suffered and wanted freedom

Civil War stories focus on human tragedy of war that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives even as it

freed many.

Diaries and Letters gave personal responses to historical events

• Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s diary 1862

Public Documents influenced a large audience

Later fiction moved to realism