It was one of the great challenges for the tenuously reunited nation: how to turn soldiers back into citizens, how to make the warring armies of a fractured country a single unified army dedicated to building a civilization, how to turn bloody fields of battle into productive and fertile fields of crops. Whitman, like many in the wounded and divided nation at the time, worried a great deal about what would happen when hundreds of thousands of soldiers, Union and Confederate, returned home, carrying with them their rifles, their experiences of bloodshed, and their lingering enmity. In the context of the Civil War, though, the poem might be viewed a little more sympathetically. The painting could almost be an illustration for Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!,” a hymn which seems to be an equally spirited paean to the American domination of the continent: “We primeval forests felling, / We the rivers stemming, vexing we, and piercing deep the mines within / We the surface broad surveying, and the virgin soil upheaving, / Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Today, many of us hear such rousing language as a kind of ecological/genocidal nightmare, the optimistic and unexamined cheering on of a postwar capitalistic fervor raping the “virgin” land and claiming Indian territory-all presented to us in a strong, relentless (and uncharacteristic) Whitman trochaic beat, a marching song calling America’s pioneers to action. Gast’s painting, which was quickly reproduced in a series of popular lithographs, portrayed a giant image of Columbia or Freedom (or maybe America herself) leading the western advance of civilization, bringing Eastern light to the Western darkness as American Indians and the buffalo vanished into the darkness, while the evolving lines of American technology, including trains and telegraph lines, followed the horses, covered wagons, and carriages into the expansive and expanding frontier.
In 1872, a little-known Prussian-born artist named John Gast, then living in Brooklyn, painted an image that became famous in the following decades in the United States, as the destructive energies of the Civil War were funneled into what was then considered the much more constructive efforts of Manifest Destiny-America’s westward movement and its determination to occupy and dominate the entire breadth of the continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This week's text is “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”
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