Behold the America of 1850
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Feb. 5, 2025 – In 2025, we Americans are virtual aliens in our own land. These items present a virtual portrait of our American ancestors, as they appeared in 1850:
- Abraham Lincoln was every railroad tycoons preferred attorney, while Harriett Tubman becomes the first conductor on the Underground Railroad;
- New Hampshire Senator Damiel Webster makes a deal with the devil to assure passage of a compromise that makes every American complicit in the evil, legal right of people in Southern states to own people, and to profit from their their labor;
- Harriet Beecher Stowe builds a cabin for Uncle Tom from the filaments and heartstrings of hope, raising the consciousness of the people in time for Lincoln’s army of emancipation and national redemption;
- Emily Dickinson invokes all Nine Muses and records the sounds of bees and tones of bluebells in Amherst;
- Nathaniel Hawthorne absolves Hester Prynne, having already condemned Puritan witch hunters and told tales of wonder to boys and girls;
- Herman Melville responds to a November dreariness in his soul and sets Captain Ahab afloat with a soul more dreary than a million Novembers could ever produce;
- Walt Whitman turns poetry’s laser gaze upon himself and gives readers a glimpse of the shining solidity of their own wayfaring souls;
- in Concord, MA, Ralph Waldo Emerson disappoints close friends and unmet strangers by refusing to allow them to transform his divine ideas into a church;
- in Utah Territory, Brigham Young orders the extermination of the Timpanogo people to make room for the erection of the Mormon Tabernacle.