Wars can bring out so many emotions. National pride, sadness, pain, suffering, happiness, loneliness, fright, strength; hopefulness and hopelessness. Most people can't find a way to express themselves in such dark times; but the people that wrote it all down, the people that set down the memories and the emotions and the pain into words for people to read hundreds of years later helped preserve history in it's purest form; records from firsthand experience. Some people who expressed emotion through their writings or opinions are Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and Robert E. Lee.
Frederick Douglass, a former slave who had escaped to freedom in his early twenties. His desire for freedom came early to him. He was a literate man who read a lot and expanded his mind. He became a huge part in the abolitionist and black civil rights movement. Douglas believed that "the American people must stand each for all and all for each, without respect for color or race."
Walt Whitman's use of free verse became appreciate...
Frederick Douglass portrait
English: Manuscript handwritten by Walt Whitman, A...He spent most of his life trying to portray his passionate emotions to the rest of the world. He established a black newspaper entitled the North Star. He also held lectures, published autobiographies from his days of slavery. His most famous writings were Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas and My Bondage and My Freedom. His feelings about slavery are very clear, "My feelings were not the result of any marked cruelty in the treatment I received; they sprung from the consideration of my being a slave at all. It was slavery - not mere incidents that I hated." Douglas served as a role model for black and white Americans; a very important piece in the abolitionist movement.
Joining the abolitionist movement was Walt Whitman, a poet who's writings stemmed in transcendentalism. He...