Newsletter, January, 2010

Blue & Grey of Silver Creek Civil War Roundtable January, 2010

THOUGHTS FROM YOUR PRESIDENT New Year greetings to all of you!

I hope you had a special holiday season and are ready now to get back Meeting an 28 in gear with our normal y, J Thursda routines. One of those 7:00 pm al routines is our monthly gation e r g n o C CWRT meetings. Our First Church next meeting will be on Thursday, January 28th at First Congregational Church here in Highland. We will meet at 7:00 p.m. in the Social Hall. Our guest speaker will be Dr. Jason Stacy from SIUE. His biography and program information can be found elsewhere in this issue of the newsletter. I think it will be a great start to a new year of meetings.

I would like to remind you of a couple things before you come. First, don’t forget that dues are now payable for the 2010 calendar year. It is $30 for an individual member and $45 for a family membership. If you have attended in the past on a number of occasions and never joined, I want to encourage you to make a membership commitment this year. Checks can be made payable to the “Blue and Gray of Silver Creek CWRT.”

Also, if you would be willing to bring some refreshments to our meeting, please let me know. I would like to avoid duplications if at all possible. And we will also continue to have our regular raffle, so please consider making a book or magazine donation. The income we generate from this helps keep our treasury solid, which allows us to bring in quality speakers.

Finally, we now have a lending library available. So check out some of the books that are here. If you have some titles that you would be willing to donate to our library, please contact myself or Kim Palmer, our librarian.

I look forward to seeing all of you on the 28th.

Blessings,

Mauri Smith

Volume III, Number 1

JANUARY 28, 2010 GUEST SPEAKER

DR. JASON STACY

We are pleased to present Dr. Jason Stacy, professor of history at SIUE, as the guest speaker at our upcoming meeting on January 28, 2010. His program will be entitled “The Poet and the President: Whitman and Lincoln as Allies Across the Political Divide.”

In the decade before the Civil War, Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln — one a Democrat, the other a Republican — struggled with the existence of slavery and the overwhelming racism of their audiences.

Although both have become icons of freedom, and though both thought slavery evil and Emancipation good, they justified these in terms more palatable to their audiences: in Lincoln’s case, the farmers and independent businessmen of Illinois and the leadership of the new Republican Party; in Whitman’s case, the white, working class residents of New York who read his newspaper editorials and, he hoped, his new and strange book of poetry, Leaves of Grass.

In this presentation, Professor Stacy will analyze the ways in which both Lincoln and Whitman sought to make African American freedom palatable to a suspicious white population. It will also suggest that their definition of freedom is still useful in modern American.

Dr. Stacy holds a PhD in American History and teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He is the author of Containing Multitudes: Walt Whitman’s Three Personas in the New Market Economy and editor of Leaves of Grass, 1860: the 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition.

Annual Dues January thru December Individual $30.00 Family $45.00 (Family category includes immediate family members)

Please make checks payable to: Blue & Grey of Silver Creek Civil War Roundtable Checks may be brought to the meeting or mailed to Donald Carnley, Treasurer P.O. Box 551 • Highland, IL 62249

sent him “purses” of money so that he could get by.

WALT WHITMAN Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman was the second son of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor. The family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the 1820s and 1830s.

At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade, and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career.

He founded a weekly newspaper, Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent. It was in New Orleans that he experienced at first hand the viciousness of slavery in the slave markets of that city. On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a “free soil” newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, and continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems, a letter from Emerson praising the

In the early 1870s, Whitman settled in Camden, NJ, where he had come to visit his dying mother at his brother’s house. However, after suffering a stroke, Whitman found it impossible to return to Washington.

He stayed with his brother until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass gave Whitman enough money to buy a home in Camden. first edition, and a long open letter

by Whitman in response. During his subsequent career, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of the book.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a “purged” and “cleansed” life. He wrote freelance journalism and visited the wounded at New York-area hospitals.

He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in the war.

Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals and stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive.

Harlan fired the poet.

Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. In Washington, he lived on a clerk’s salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the patients he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid brother. From time to time writers both in the states and in England

In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to a new edition of the book and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye, My Fancy (1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.

(Editors Note: reprinted from http://www. poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/126)

Quotes of Walt Whitman “The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.” v “If you done it, it ain’t bragging.” v “There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.” v

(Editors Note: quotes reprinted from http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ authors/w/walt_whitman.html)