We have a tendency to treat the past as some sort of ideal world where historical actors played out their ideal scenarios under ideal conditions. We grant Lincoln the superhuman powers of creating the war all by himself and being responsible for everything done in the Union’s name. We go to some wild efforts to place historical agency in the hands of particular people or groups to avoid blaming the historical actors with whom we identify personally. There was a time when historians found it both easy and convenient to present the Confederacy as an exercise in Jeffersonian liberalism.

Was Lincoln both the Great Emancipator and the shredder of the Magna Carta? How did the Civil War have libertarian underpinnings? How did Frances Whipple use poetry to describe the Civil War as a movement?

Further Reading:

Sarah O’Dowd, A Rhode Island Original: Frances Harriet Whipple Green McDougall, 2004.

“Elleanor Eldridge: Folk Hero of African American Feminism”

“Let Usurpers Tremble: The Unrepublican Anomaly”

Related Content:

The Possession of Frances Whipple, Liberty Chronicles Podcast

Liberty Chimes: Free Speech, the Tyrant-Slayer, written by Frances Whipple

Liberty Chimes: The Slave Mother, written by Frances Whipple

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