Reinhold’s ‘‘Silver Age’’ ends in 1830 as the self-made men of the frontier led by Andrew Jackson came to Washington. The democratic movement accomplished its goals without any appeal to classical models and never imagined enfranchising women or blacks. George Kennedy has deemed the period from 1828 (the year of the Yale Report) to the end of the Civil War as the Bronze Age of American classics (Reinhold 1984: 325). Some northern men trained in the classics went on to public service: Everett became a senator from Massachusetts, George Bancroft became a minister to Great Britain, Prussia, and the German Empire, and even a former professor of classics at Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College), James A. Garfield, became President of the United States. However, many of the prominent voices in the South, Henry Clay, Jackson, Calhoun, Sam Houston and Jefferson Davis on the political side, and William Gilmore Simms, Henry Timrod, and Edgar Allan Poe on the literary side, came from the middle class, and most did not enjoy classical educations (though Calhoun and Houston had fine appreciations of authors they read in translation). Americans who condemned European decadence joined religious evangelicals in shuddering at the admiration of paganism and the misadaptation of Greek style to American values embodied in the monumental statue of Washington that Horatio Greenough made for the Capitol.
No deep classical education is required to enjoy the predominant classical presence in American cultural life, that of Classic Revival architecture. British interest in Roman architecture had been stimulated by the rediscovery of Pompeii (1748) and Herculaneum (1750-1) and by the publication of Antiquities of Athens (1751) by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. Though the first classical revival structure was Stuart’s Doric garden temple in Hagley, England (1758), a taste for Roman architecture predominated in the last half of the eighteenth century both in Europe and America. Thus Jefferson’s Virginia State Capitol (1785) in Richmond imitated the Roman temple at Nimes, and both Monticello and the Colonnade at the University of Virginia were based on Roman designs. As the century turned, Benjamin Latrobe’s Bank of Pennsylvania (1799), modeled on an Ionic temple, began the interest in Greek architecture. Latrobe, like Jefferson, believed that architecture should make a political statement, and they both proclaimed the continuity of democratic traditions in their public buildings. The Greek style is also notably represented in the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia (1824) by William Strickland, while the Roman element persisted in Jefferson’s University and T. U. Walter’s Capitol dome in Washington.
Though some private buildings in the North presented fafades with columns, pediments, and clapboard exteriors, the true models of private Classic Revival were the great plantation homes of the South (‘‘Southern Colonial’’ style), encouraged by the illustrations in Grecian Remains in Italy (1812), by John Izard Middleton of South Carolina.
As the debate on the slavery question heated up in the 1840s, southerners found that the Abolitionists (led by clerics) had coopted the Bible as an authority on the sanctity and equality of the individual, black and white. Beginning with Professor Thomas Dew of William and Mary and followed by intellectuals like James D. B. De Bow, George Frederick Holmes, and George Fitzhugh, Greek views of a natural hierarchy of humanity were called into play. Herodotus was summoned by both sides on the matter of Negro inferiority (Wiesen 1980), but the most repeated source was Aristotle’s Politics and his clearest proponent was a former Vice President of the United States.
John C. Calhoun of South Carolina had so despised the ‘‘Tariff of Abominations’’ passed in 1828 that he resigned as Vice President to return to the Senate and fight for the rights of his state. In the decade before his death in 1850, he composed two tracts on government, both of which drew heavily from Aristotle, who ‘‘took a place in his trinity of the Constitution, the Bible, and Aristotle’’ (Eaton 1964a: 144). The key passage begins, ‘‘Nature has clearly designed some men for freedom and others for slavery; - and with respect to the latter, slavery is both just and beneficial’’ (Politics 1.5). Most Greeks denied rights to those they felt were inferior (women, foreigners), and Aristotle’s view that slaves should be barbarians justified for some the enslavement of Africans. Upon reading Calhoun, George Fitzhugh of Virginia, author of Sociology for the South or, The Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters (1857), said, ‘‘All these things I thought original in me, I find in Aristotle’’ (Wish 1948: 263). Other Aristotelians included two men at the University of Virginia, the English and history professor Holmes and Albert Bledsoe, a pro-slavery mathematician.
The most notable use of classical models in the Civil War, and the last time such models were employed in a major political event, occurred at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. Edward Everett, PhD in classics from Gottingen, former US Senator, and President of Harvard, chose to become a modern-day Pericles to deliver the definitive historical account and analysis ofthe battle (as Pericles did in Thucydides’ history). He followed the classical model for two hours. Abraham Lincoln spoke for less than two minutes, but as Garry Wills (1984) has shown, his far more effective address far more efficiently followed the rhetoric of the Greek Revival and the epainesis/ parainesis (thanks to and counsel of the dead) model set by ancient rhetoricians, though whether Lincoln had ever heard of such as Gorgias cannot be determined.
World History
