Tuesday, 21th October (Term 1, week 4)5pm, S0.20Dr Jenny Barrett (Edge Hill University):‘The Man Who Knows War: American Civil War Westerns and Masculinity at the Frontier’

The king has “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither […] determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce”

“With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are even seen to labour. Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep fore ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probably by supernatural inference”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed […]

Monticello, Jefferson’s plantation

“Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep fore ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probably by supernatural inference”

“I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random”

h

“The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe.” (198)

Observations should not be limited to the game, but rather he must look at “things external to the game. He examines his partner, his opponent, he looks at the cards, he analyzes everyone’s behavior through a couple of rounds and then, he is able to read the situation and make his move” (198)

Manual of Human Anatomy Dr. Knox, London, 1843(Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1841)

“I wish to impress upon your understanding the very extraordinary – the almost praeternatural character of that agility which could have accomplished it” (218) “the peculiar voice, that unusual agility, and that startling absence of motive in a murder so singularly atrocious as this – let us glance at the butchery itself. Here is a woman strangled to death by manual strength, and thrust up a chimney head downward […] In the manner of thrusting the corpse up the chimney, you will admit that there was something excessible outré – something altogether irreconcilable with our common notions of human action, even when we suppose the actors the most depraved of men” (219) “‘Dupin!’ I said, completely unnerved; ‘this hair is most unusual-this is no human hair […] This,’ I said, ‘is the mark of no human hand’” (221)

* 

“It was a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands. The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known to all” (221)

“if we are not ready to receive and assimilate the new material which will be brought to mingle with our pure Anglo-Saxon stream, we should call a halt in our expansion policy”

“We may make laws, but laws are but straws in the hands of Omnipotence [….] And no man may combat fate. Given a man, propinquity, opportunity, fascinating femininity, and there you are. Black, white, green, yellow – nothing will prevent intermarriage. Position, wealth, family, friends – all sink into significance before the God-implanted instinct that made Adam awakening from a deep sleep and finding the woman beside him, accept Eve as bone of his bone; he cared not nor questioned whence she came. So it is with the sons of Adam ever since, through the law of heredity which makes us all one common family. And so it will be with us in our reformation of this old Republic” (882) 

“I am an East Indian, but my name does not matter, Cameron is as good as any. There is many a soul crying in heaven and hell for vengeance on Jonathan Gordon. Gold was his idol; and many a good man walked the plank, and many a gallant ship was stripped of her treasure to satisfy his lust for gold. His blackest crime was the murder of my father, who was his friend, and had sailed with him for many a year as mate. One night these two went ashore together to bury their treasure. My father never returned from that expedition. His body was afterward found with a bullet through the heart on the shore where the vessel stopped that night. It was the custom then among pirates for the captain to kill the men who helped bury their treasure. Captain Gordon was no better than a pirate” (890)