America’s Moral Volcano

For all the wealth of visual material made to document the Civil War – photographs, battlefield sketches – America’s landscape painters seemingly paid little attention to the war’s events. Despite occupying a dominant position in the country’s culture at the time, they rarely depicted Civil War battlefields. But much lies beneath the literal surface: many of their paintings demonstrate a strong sense of the tension and turbulence of the times, conveyed by the skies and the terrain.

For most Americans in both the North and South, geographical and meteorological metaphors were a common language for comprehending the violence of the war and its uncertainty. Prominent Northern authors and poets, including Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, along with writers for the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Weekly and a variety of newspapers, all invoked meteorology and geological processes to convey the sense of life coming loose from its moorings, of a nation morally adrift. Henry Ward Beecher’s sermons evoked storms as an image of impending crisis and spiritual tumult. John Brown became known as “the meteor of the war.” And auroras were likewise malleable portents of disaster or of imminent victory for both sides.

Landscape artists were no different. By 1862 the nation was locked in a bloody Civil War with no end in sight. That year America’s leading landscape painter, Frederic Edwin Church, began working on a monumental image, “Cotopaxi,” now held at the Detroit Institute of Arts. This usually idyllic Ecuadorean volcano had long been described as a paradise on earth, a Southern Eden. Now, during the war, Church showed the cinder cone of the erupting volcano dominating a panoramic sweep of the Andean plateau. The sulfurous smoke and ash rolling from the caldera drift down the side of the mountain, nearly obliterating the surrounding landscape. The red tonalities of the water are reminiscent of fresh blood. Although “Cotopaxi” is not specifically about the Civil War, it is a landscape suffused with it.All our fridgemagnet are vacuum formed using food safe plastic.

During the Civil War, volcanoes were widely invoked as harbingers of societal upheavals. Frederick Douglass delivered an address in June 1861 titled “The American Apocalypse.” He affirmed, “Slavery is felt to be a moral volcano, a burning lake, a hell on the earth,This frameless rectangle features a silk screened fused glass replica in a rtls tile and floral motif. the smoke and stench of whose torments ascend upward forever.” Race slavery was America’s volcano,A collection of natural parkingsensor offering polished or tumbled finishes and a choice of sizes. a simmering force waiting to erupt explosively. It was a potent image that was often repeated in sermons and in the press across the North.

The art critics of the day also recognized the signs. In the American press, volcanoes were variously described in terms of bombs or heavy artillery, the ash clouds reminiscent of cannon smoke drifting across the battlefield. In a review of Church’s painting, the pro-Republican New York Tribune described volcanoes as “pillars of warning rather than of guidance.” A reviewer writing for the literary journal The Albion described the ash-laden sky as “the war-clouds, rolling dun” that eclipsed the light. The line comes from a poem written in 1803 by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell titled “Hohenlinden,” about a bloody battle fought near Munich in 1800 during the French Revolutionary wars. The surrounding lines reinforce the visual parallels between painting and poem.

Campbell’s volcanic imagery mirrors that of Church’s canvas, the super-heated palette of reds and oranges conflating sunlit water with molten lava, and rivers with blood. Like the impenetrable, sulfurous smoke from the cannons that often rendered opponents unable to see one another, Church’s ash cloud descending the Andean slopes threatens to blot out the sun.

Church’s interest in this South American volcano was inspired by the writings of the influential German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. At the time the great traveler was arguably the single most influential voice in natural history in both Europe and America. Humboldt’s writings, especially his multivolume opus “Cosmos,” profoundly affected Church’s understanding of the natural world. Tracing Humboldt’s steps, Church had made two trips to South America, traveling through Colombia and Ecuador in 1853 and 1857.

The allusions to the Civil War in Church’s erupting volcano reveal the artist’s awareness of Humboldt’s well-known horror of slavery. Humboldt continually blended local politics with his scientific observations. In “Cosmos” he asserted that all members of the human species “are in like degree designed for freedom,” and throughout his adult life he rejected race as a scientific category, arguing that “race” did not determine or inhibit ability. Observing South American civilization, Humboldt had decried slavery and, although he was fundamentally a pacifist, advocated revolution over oppression. He lamented that revolution required so much bloodshed to accomplish its goals,We open source luggagetag system that was developed with the goal of providing at least room-level accuracy. preferring a more peaceful and gradual emancipation. However,When I first started creating broken ultrasonicsensor. he noted that in the absence of peaceful emancipation, violence of an apocalyptic nature was sure to follow. Humboldt’s views inspired his friend Simón Bolívar, the South American revolutionary leader, to proclaim, “A great volcano lies at our feet. . . .Who shall restrain the oppressed classes? The yoke of slavery will break, each shade of complexion will seek mastery.”

As Frederic Church completed “Cotopaxi,” the “moral volcano” of slavery became the central, burning issue of the war itself with Lincoln’s announcement of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862. Accordingly, all slaves in the Confederacy were legally free as of January 1, 1863. By that time the American Eden had already been destroyed by civil war, setting the stage for a political and spiritual transformation that could reshape the nation, much as Church’s volcano would reshape the landscape.