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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Longfellow’s Great Liberators: Abraham Lincoln and Dante Alighieri

By Guy Raffa

“We breathe freer. The country will be saved.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s response to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is a timely reminder of how, while they all matter, some presidential elections matter much more than others.

Five years earlier Longfellow was one of many who believed the time for peace had passed with John Brown’s execution for attempting to arm slaves with weapons from the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. “This will be a great day in our history,” he wrote on Dec. 2, 1859, the day of the hanging, “the date of a new Revolution” needed to move the nation farther toward the Constitution’s goal of “a more perfect Union.” Even “Paul Revere’s Ride,” his famous poem on the Revolutionary War, was “less about liberty and Paul Revere, and more about slavery and John Brown,” writes historian Jill Lepore, “a calls to arms, rousing northerners to action.” This rallying cry serendipitously appeared on newsstands on Dec. 20, 1860, the day South Carolina seceded from the Union.

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (via Wikimedia Commons).

Longfellow had voted early on Nov. 6, 1860 and was overjoyed by the news of Lincoln’s “great victory,” calling it “the redemption of the country.” His diary marks steps toward fulfilling the promise of this victory, from enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863 (“A great day”) and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, formally abolishing slavery, on January 31, 1865 (“the grand event of the century”) to General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865: “So ends the Rebellion of the slave-owners!”

Longfellow had gained notice in abolitionist circles two decades earlier with publication of his Poems on Slavery. He judged his verses “so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast,” but still they triggered a “long and violent tirade” in a South Carolina newspaper and were left out of an 1845 edition of the author’s collected works to avoid offending readers in the south and west.

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First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, 1864 (via Wikimedia Commons).

In 1863, New York’s Evening Post cast Longfellow as the nation’s prophet. Crediting the poet’s “discerning eye” for foreseeing “the inevitable result of that institution of American slavery which was the black spot on the escutcheon of our republican government,” the paper lamented that his words had gone “unheeded, until the black spot spread into a cloud of portentous dimensions, and broke over the land in a storm of blood and desolation.”

1863 also saw Longfellow complete a draft of his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Working closely with Dante’s poem helped him cope with the traumatic loss of his beloved wife. On July 9, 1861, Fanny had suffered fatal injuries when her dress caught fire as she melted wax to seal a lock of her daughter’s hair. The translation provided “refuge” from an ordeal “almost too much for any man to bear,” he wrote to a friend.

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Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, a detail of a painting by Domenico di Michelino, Florence 1465 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Living with Dante’s vision of the afterlife also gave Longfellow some perspective on the war. On May 8, 1862, soon after translating Paradiso, he reflected, “Of the civil war I say only this. It is not a revolution, but a Catalinian conspiracy. It is Slavery against Freedom; the north against the southern pestilence.” The reality of this moral disease hit home when he visited a local jeweler’s shop. There he saw “a slave’s collar of iron, with an iron tongue as large as a spoon, to go into the mouth.” “Every drop of blood in me quivered,” he wrote, “the world forgets what Slavery really is!”

The war to eradicate slavery by suppressing this “conspiracy” brought its own set of horrors. Longfellow was acutely aware of the high toll of death and mutilation on both sides, the destruction extending far beyond the war zone. “Every shell from the cannon’s mouth bursts not only on the battle-field,” he lamented, “but in faraway homes, North or South, carrying dismay and death. What an infernal thing war is!”

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Charles Longfellow in Uniform (1st Massachusetts Artillery), March 1863. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

The hell of war weighed heavily on Longfellow’s mind when he finally turned to translating Dante’s Inferno—he saved this first part of the Divine Comedy for last—on March 14, 1863. He began during an especially “sad week”: Charles, his eighteen-year-old son, had left home, unannounced, to join the Army of the Potomac in Washington. Initially attaching himself to an artillery regiment, “Charley” benefited from family connections to receive a commission as second lieutenant in the cavalry. “He is where he wants to be, in the midst of it all,” wrote the worried father. During this first month of Charley’s military service, Longfellow translated a canto of Inferno each day. Amid “many interruptions and anxieties,” he completed all thirty-four cantos by April 16, 1863. Two weeks later Charles Norton, Longfellow’s friend and fellow Dante expert, urged him to hold back publication of the translation until 1865 so it could be presented during Italy’s celebration of the poet’s six-hundredth birthday in Florence.

On December 1, 1863, Longfellow received a telegram from Washington saying his son had been “severely wounded.” He immediately left Cambridge with his younger son Ernest and headed south to find Charley and learn the extent of his injuries. The soldier, who had already survived a bout of the ever-dangerous “camp fever” the previous summer, made another “wonderful escape,” as his relieved father put it. Fighting near the front lines in the Mine Run Campaign, Charley took a Confederate soldier’s bullet in the shoulder. He returned home in one piece and slowly recovered from his wounds, but his fighting days were over.

As the war continued and congress worked to repeal the fugitive slave acts of 1793 and 1850, Longfellow resumed editing his translation in preparation for the Dante anniversary. He admired Charles Sumner’s speech on the proposed amendment to abolish slavery: “So long as a single slave continues anywhere under the flag of the Republic I am unwilling to rest.” Longfellow shared his friend’s relatively expansive view of liberty, observing on April 20, 1864: “Until the black man is put upon the same footing as the white, in the recognition of his rights, we shall not succeed, and what is worse, we shall not deserve success.” The following year Longfellow asked Sumner for assistance in having a privately printed edition of the first volume of his translation delivered to Italy in time for the Dante festivities. In the same letter of February 10, 1865, he thanked the senator for his role in abolishing slavery, proclaiming that “this year will always be the Year of Jubilee in our history.”

Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Inferno took its place among the works by eminent foreigners on display in Florence to honor the poet’s birth. Three days of festivities in 1865 doubled as a celebration of Italy’s independence while the nation awaited the additions of Venice (1866) and Rome (1870) to complete the unification begun in 1859-61. At a banquet for foreign dignitaries, an American speaker drew rousing applause from his Italian hosts and their guests when he toasted the “Re-United States”—a poignant reminder that Italy was taking its first steps as an independent and (mostly) unified nation just as America emerged from the greatest test of its own unity and promise of freedom.

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The statue of Dante Alighieri that today stands in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence was unveiled in 1865 during the festival (via Wikimedia Commons).

Dante’s prominence in these parallel national struggles was clear to Longfellow, as it was to the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, the poet H. Cordelia Ray, and other black “freedom readers,” the title of Dennis Looney’s book on the African American reception of Dante and his poem. Longfellow wrote six sonnets on Dante to accompany the commercial publication of his translation of the Divine Comedy in 1867. The final sonnet, composed on March 7, 1866, glorifies Dante as the “star of morning and of liberty,” his message of freedom reaching “all the nations” as his “fame is blown abroad from all the heights.”

“Hideous news.” This was Longfellow’s reaction to Abraham Lincoln’s death on the morning of April 15, 1865, from the bullet fired by John Wilkes Booth the night before at Ford’s Theatre. Star of morning and of liberty: Longfellow’s epithet for Dante would have sounded like a fine description of Abraham Lincoln to millions of Americans who mourned the slain president.
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Featured Image: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his study, 1868. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.
Sources: “Complete Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”; “Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” ed. Samuel Longfellow; “Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, ed. Andrew Hilen; “Poet’s Warning,” The Evening Post Jan. 20, 1863; Henry Clark Barlow, “The Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante Allighieri in Florence and at Ravenna”; Dennis Looney, “Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy”
For more information on Dante and Longfellow, see the special edition of Dante Studies on this topic (vol. 128 in 2010), edited by Arielle Saiber and Giuseppe Mazzotta.

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Check out Guy Raffa’s multi-media journey through the three realms of Dante’s afterlife, via Thinking in Public.
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Our History Mixtape: Embracing Music in the Classroom

By Eyal Weinberg and Blake Scott

It’s midway through the semester and you’ve slogged through one of the infamous central Texas morning monsoons to make it to class. You’re soaked and so are the students starting to arrive. And you’re all a bit stressed from the commute and all the other work still floating in your head. You organize your lecture notes. More students start to come in. Some sit quietly. Some stare at you. Some are glued to their mobile devices. There are still about 10 minutes before class begins. We call it the awkward pre-lesson moment. You could warm up the wet early birds with some tough words of inspiration, or you could do what we tried this semester: lure the students into history with the power of music.

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Today’s subject is the Great Depression and the New Deal. In the time that ticks off before class, as your clothes dry and you review your notes, Bing Crosby sings “Brother can you spare me a dime?” The song is a sad anthem of the early 1930s. It’s as if Crosby were singing not only to an earlier generation, but also to your rain-drenched grumpy students. In between lyrics, you remind the class to also review their notes.

Next is a more upbeat song by Louis Armstrong, “WPA,” released in 1940. Armstrong sings, “The WPA, WPA…. Three letters that make life OKAY, the WPA.” When the song ends, you start class, asking “so what exactly was the WPA and how did it fit into the New Deal’s efforts to relieve the stresses of the Great Depression?” Discussion has begun and, with melody replacing drudgery, you’re ready to tackle some difficult historical topics – the melancholy of depression and the changing role of the federal government. Music has set the mood.

The Works Progress Administration's music project employed musicians as instrumentalists, singers, concert performers, and music teachers during the Great Depression. Via Library of Congress.

The Works Progress Administration’s music project employed
musicians as instrumentalists, singers, concert performers, and music teachers during the Great Depression. Via Library of Congress.

We are not specialists in music history, but we value what music can do in the classroom. Every Friday last Fall semester, we facilitated discussion sections with approximately 30 students each. As teaching assistants, we offered supplemental instruction for Dr. Megan Seaholm’s 300-person lecture on the history of the United States from 1865 to the present. On Fridays, in smaller groups, we discussed course material and, in particular, encouraged students to think about questions of ethics in relationship to historical events. The seminar meetings fulfilled UT’s “Ethics and Leadership Flag,” which is designed to equip students with “the tools necessary for making ethical decisions in your adult and professional life.” When discussing the period of Reconstruction, for example, we examined differing visions of “freedom.” We analyzed primary source documents written by newly freed slaves, white southerners, and northern Republicans. How did different social groups conceive of freedom, and how did their values clash and in turn, shape post-war U.S. society?

Music, we soon realized, could be an effective prompt for encouraging students to think creatively and critically about material that at times felt historically distant. Playing and then thinking about music had a broad classroom appeal. It allowed us to consider experiences from an earlier era in a very direct and affective way. Getting students to listen closely, and reflect on historical attitudes, was smoother and even enjoyable. This was certainly useful when teaching history to students from different majors who admittedly took the course only because it was a requirement. At the beginning of the semester, we heard more than enough talk about how “I’ve never been very good at history.” That only motivated us more…

To remind students that the issue of race was central to the era of Reconstruction (1865 to 1876), we paused discussion and played Pete Seeger’s version of “John Brown’s Body.” It was a chance to consider the causes and effects of the Civil War and its continuing affect on U.S. society. The song led to an anecdote: After Union Troops burned Atlanta in November 1864, they marched out of the city singing, “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave… but his soul goes marching on.” It became a favorite song among General Sherman’s troops as they marched to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. The song also encouraged us to explore the controversial legacy of the abolitionist John Brown. Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that “[John Brown] will make the gallows glorious like the Cross.” Thoreau also wrote a eulogy for Brown, explaining that in death: “He is more alive than ever he was.” The point of this brief genealogical thread about a man and a song was to acknowledge that the Civil War was fundamentally about slavery. After the war, the legacy of racism would continue to shape the debate about the meaning of freedom.

Later in the semester, to guide a discussion about the Civil Rights Movement, we played Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” Hearing Simone sing, with anger and passion, “Alabama’s gotten me so upset, Tennessee’s made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi goddam,” reminded students to seriously contemplate the violence that occurred in the U.S. South in the 1960s. The song opened a discussion about the KKK’s terrorist bombing in Birmingham, which Simone refers to, and in contrast, the early Civil Rights Movement’s commitment to nonviolent protest.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights activists singing Freedom songs on the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965. Via Jacobin magazine.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights activists singing Freedom
songs on the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965. Via Jacobin magazine.

Music served as primary source material to think about the time and to feel something of the era. We asked students to imagine the power of John Brown’s song being sung by Union soldiers marching through Georgia, and later, to reflect on the violence and injustice swirling around civil rights activists marching from Selma to Montgomery. These are powerful images to consider with an equally powerful soundtrack to hear and feel. With story and song together, students were forced to reckon with the material and its importance to U.S. history.

As we soon learned, however, not all classroom experiences have to be so tightly scripted. Music as pedagogical tool can take on a more implicit role as well. It can literally “set the mood” for the class and help foster a space for dialogue. As our experience this semester taught us, music can be a way to hear and feel history, to jump start conversation or frame a question, and most importantly, to bring people together. Even if students are not asked to analyze a song’s lyrics or the story of its production, music can still affect a student’s reception of history. Songs can also work in mysterious ways.

Woody Guthrie's famous guitar slogan, "This machine kills fascists.". Via Wikipedia

Woody Guthrie’s famous guitar slogan, “This machine kills
fascists.”. Via Wikipedia

If you appreciate music and recognize that songs can also serve as an important resource for teaching history, we encourage you to share your own musical selection down below in the comments. What songs would you play in a post-civil war US survey? Here is our own highly subjective “History Mixtape” to start the exchange. We hope to hear and learn from your recommendations. Keep the music playing…

Our History Mixtape:

  1. John Brown’s Body by Peter Seeger
  2. The Battle is Over (But the War Goes On) by Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry
  3. This Land is Your Land by Woody Guthrie
  4. Fire in the Hole by Hazel Dickens
  5. Brother can you spare me a dime? by Bing Crosby
  6. WPA by Louis Armstrong
  7. Everyday by Buddy Holly
  8. Mississippi Goddamn by Nina Simone
  9. Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival
  10. I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag by Country Joe McDonald

We are always keen to build our playlist so please send us your recommendations via the comments section on our facebook page.

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You may also like:

  • Lomax Family Collections at the American Folklife Center
  • The Library of Congress, American Memory Collection
  • The University of Houston’s Digital history music database
  • University of Pittsburgh’s Voices Across Time database, divided into periodic and thematic categories

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