World Unity 29
In the 1830s and 1840s, Herman Melville was writing about a mad New England sea captain who felt at home only with his feet on the deck of a ship sailing the oceans of the world crazy to soothe the rage in his soul by killing a white whale. Henry Thoreau was writing about how he lived alone in the woods creating for himself his own world. Edgar Poe’s poetry sent him wandering like an ancient ship on waves of despair searching for ideal beauty. Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing about evil men with maniacal passions dominating times long past. And Ralph Emerson was giving his American Scholar lecture at Harvard College declaring that a man should conform to nothing except the universal designs of nature that send rhythms of a powerful poetry to the soul of a man bold enough to rely only on himself. Where was there even a hint of some kind of national ambiance encircling and nourishing the imaginings of such men? Yet what an unique culture grew out of the strange ambiguities of antebellum America! If only we had had honest historians and honest critics, we might have been indoctrinated in our schools by a native literature and philosophy not bound any longer by the intellectual and spiritual borders that enclosed writers in nation-states. We did not have any nation. No blooming national will added extra heartbeats to the imaginative pulse of our writers. Instead, the history of the time inspired anti national feelings. The Federal Government was supporting land speculators and slave owners eager to drive Indians from their lands and to use the new territories for slave plantations. Under President Van Buren, a treaty was approved with the Cherokees which amounted to nothing less than their forced removal from their lands in Georgia to the plains west of the Mississippi River. In April 1838, Ralph Emerson wrote an open letter to the President in which he said, “…a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country anymore?” Abraham Lincoln declared in his Gettysburg speech of 1863 that the Declaration of Independence in 1776 had created “a new nation". Subservient historians have since blinded our eyes to the real meaning of our history. Most Americas of antebellum times did not feel a political sentiment within them that united them to a nation. They lived in a union of sovereign states and the union’s glory resided in the simple fact that it could not be united culturally or politically into a single national block. The New England novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about “the anomaly of two allegiances of which that of the State comes nearest home to a man's feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the General Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law and has no symbol but a flag.” Addressing national sentiment, he wrote, “I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one’s native state.” In 1857 Henry Thoreau, the author of Walden, listened to a lecture by the anti-slavery abolitionist radical, John Brown, and said that it was the first time in his life that he ever felt he lived in a nation. Abolitionism was partly a substitute for national feeling. When an Abolitionist spoke at a meeting with moral inspiration against the evils of slavery, he was speaking against a foul condition of human beings that was legal according the laws he lived under but outlawed by the laws of the nation that he so ardently desired might exist but in fact did not exist. Ironically, Abraham Lincoln by starting the Civil War did give all Americans a nation, but he could not create by his machiavellian machinations one nation for all of them. By forcing Americans to fight one another, he created while the war lasted two nations, one north and one south.
The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall
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