NP, more Misc...

[Mark Kohut]

Regarding that great unwritten dark shadow in(side) TRP's work: On the Civil 
War.

In a chapter of a book called The Inner Civil War, the author writes of the way 
many writers 
and intellectuals responded after Fort Sumter happened. 

First, generally spontaneous northern unity for keeping it [the Union] all 
together....Many
reasserting, writing on, the original values of the Founding Fathers....and many 
happy that
the materialistic Americans--as they say them--now had a cause way beyond 
materialism.

Emerson, that founding thinker to so many American writers is described this way 
and with
this interesting trope-thematic quote: 

"Emerson, who only a few days earlier had been willing to see the Union go to 
pieces in the hope
that 'adult individualism' could now replace formal institutions of government, 
rejoiced in the post--Sumter
'whirlwind of patriotism' which was magnetizing all discordant masses.."
 
More Emerson: "and now a sentiment mightier than logic, wide as light, strong as 
gravity, reaches into
the college, the bank, the farm-house, and the church."