“I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1885 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Daily Times, and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herals and the Cincinnati Enquirer.”
And it occurs to me that everything I know about slavery or the time that slavery existed is through contemporary eyes, contemporary retellings. Nothing beats going to primary sources, and there are clearly plenty. Something I oughtta remedy.
“There were news items about reform movements, antigambling leagues, rising crime, child labor, temperance, slave-wage factories, loyalty oaths and religious revivals. You get the feeling that the newspapers could explode and lightning will burn and everybody will perish. Everybody uses the same God, quotes the same bible and law and literature.”
From Bob Dylan's CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE.
“Plantation slavecrats of Virginia are accused of breeding and selling their own children. In the Northern cities, there's a lot of discontent and debt is piled high and seems out of control.”
This is the great thing about this book. Dylan doesn't only relay what he was up to and who he met, but every so often he'll go on a tangent about things he'd been reading and conversations he was having and how it affected his state of mind.
“There are riots in Memphis and in New Orleans. There's a riot in New York where two hundred people are killed outside of the Metropolitan Opera House because an English actor has taken the place of an American one. Anti-slave labor advocates inflaming crowds in Cincinnati, Buffalo and Cleveland, that if the Southern states are allowed to rule, the Northern factory owners would then be forced to use slaves as free laborers. This causes riots too.”
Having lived in both the south and northeast, it's easy to see how similar population divides still very much stand today. The crux of the divide may be different, no longer really about want for subjugating others as much as it's a schism between “the faithful” and “the godless”. Not enough reason to go to war against one another, you need starkly different economic systems for that kind of ignition. Although the rhetoric that might fan the flames would most certainly lean on varying versions of righteousness, with “believers” of the South not taking too kindly upon the infidels of the North, and vice versa for sure.
“Lincoln comes into the picture in the late 1850s. He is referred to in the Northern press as a baboon or giraffe, and there were a lot of caricatures of him. Nobody takes him seriously. It's impossible to conceive that he would become the father figure that he is today. You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It's all one long funeral song, but there's a certain imperfection in the themes, an ideology of high abstraction, a lot of epic, bearded characters, exalted men who are not necessarily good. No one single idea keeps you contented for too long. It's hard to find any neoclassical virtues either. All that rhetoric about chivalry and honor—that must have been added later. Even the Southern womanhood thing. It's a shame what happened to the women. Most of them abandoned to starve on farms with their children, unprotected and left to fend for themselves as victims of the elements. The suffering is endless, and the punishment is going to be forever. It's all so unrealistic, grandiose and sanctimonious at the same time. There was a difference in the concept of time too. In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sunset, spring, summer. In the North, people lived by the clock. The factory stroke, whistles and bells. Northerners had to 'be on time.' In some ways the Civil War would be a battle between two kinds of time. Abolition of slavery didn't even seem to be an issue when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.”
And a few lines later:
“Back there, America was put on the cross, died and resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I could write.
“I crammed my head full of as much as this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later.”
Picked it up used for 5 bucks, and boy am I glad I did. The bits above worth the price of admission alone.
