Object Lesson
When Lord Byron sat down at his desk to write to Anabella Milbanke on September 6, 1813, he had already once proposed and been lengthily rejected. Nevertheless a certain attraction persisted: “I see nothing that ‘could hurt my feelings’ in your correspondence,” he writes, “you told me you declined me as a lover but wished to retain me as a friend…”[1]. By all accounts, including her own, the two make a poor pairing, but when Byron proposes again the next year Annabella accepts, and in short time welcomes a daughter.

It is hardly a year later that she takes the child and leaves him forever. During their separation emerge lurid accounts of Byron’s behavior—tales of adultery, pederasty, sodomy, marital violence—the cross-dressing “Lady Caro,” the countless women “tooled” in carriages and post-chaises—and, most salacious of all, the incestual relations he had carried on with his own half-sister, his great passion, Augusta. She too had just given birth to a daughter. So it is that Lord Byron sails across the Channel in April 1816, never to set foot in England again.

When he arrives exiled in Switzerland that summer he is joined by fellow expatriates Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and, with them, a scorned paramour, Mary’s younger sister, Claire Clairmont, whom Byron had tried to abandon in England—she, too, pregnant with his child. Though at first he manages to resist her advances, even he, Byron writes, must eventually relent: “I never loved her nor pretended to love her—but a man is a man—& if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night—there is but one way…”[2].

Alas, as he had written in his letter to Annabella on the 6th, “the great object in life is sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain”[3].

*

Indeed, since the day we first awoke to ourselves as subjects in the world, it seems a great, melancholic object has come with it. It has taken many shapes, passed through many hands. It has vexed many spirits. “The great object in all cases should be to evacuate the uterine contents,” reported the Obstetrical Journal of Great Britain and Ireland[4]. In 1863 it had been “the purification of the river Thames from those evils occasioned by the sewage”; in 1873 “to Kill a Sioux and take his scalp”[5,6]. The history of the West is a shimmering catalog of objectification. For some the “great object” has been “to promote the life of God in each other’s soul,” to rear “a crop of trees on land otherwise unfit for use,” to “kill the tuberculosis germ”[7,8,9]. For others “Indian Territory is the great object,” “Nebraska is the great object,” “a ‘Philadelphia three-storey brick’ is the great object,” “pleasure, instead of health and morals, is the great object”[10,11,12,13]. “When crimes are committed, punishment is the great object”[14]. “If the great object is to have the corn exposed as fully as possible to the drying influences of wind and sun-heat, the more loosely it is put up the better”[15]. According to George Drysdale, however, the greatest object of all, for the covetous I, “is to bring the genital organs into such a state, that they shall be able to enjoy and profit by sufficient and normal exercise”[16]. He dedicated his Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion, appropriately, to “THE POOR AND THE SUFFERING.”

O POOR AND SUFFERING subject, condemned to be ‘a thinking thing’ in an extended and unthinking world. This is the implacable breach we have opened between subject and object, the aching distance we attempt desperately to master. “The great object of all microscope-makers,” after all, “is to construct glasses that shall enable the observer to get his eye as near as possible to the object”: to take it in, to eat it, to assimilate its mute threat[17]. André Breton cautioned against our misunderstanding, imploring us to realize that “nothing that surrounds us is object to us, all is subject,” but the violent need to feel we exist, even though in pain, is the grand etiology of the human condition[18]. In 1788, Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia, provided a more succinct solution: “The great object,” he told the Virginia Federal Convention, “is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun”[19].

*

Yet the gun is only an instrument, an index of the so-called force of will that brings the “I” into being. As Patrick Henry underscored, that forceful subjectivity is the subject of history—in our case, the American hero. See Judge William Cooper, 1810, who “began with the disadvantage of a small capital, and the encumbrance of a large family,” and yet still, he boasted, “settled more acres than any man in America”[20].

“In 1785 I visited the rough and hilly country of Otsego, where there existed not an inhabitant, nor any trace of a road,” he writes. “I was alone, three hundred miles from home, without bread, meat, or food or any kind; fire and fishing tackle were my only means of subsistence. I caught trout in the brook and roasted them on the ashes. My horse fed on the grass that grew by the edge of the waters. I laid me down to sleep in my watch coat, nothing but the melancholy Wilderness around me”[21].

Yet in his desolation Cooper meditated upon his ambition—considering plans for a future settlement, weighing “where a place of trade or a village” could go—and when he returned to civilization he purchased 10,000 acres of that wilderness which had bested him. Into the very heart of its melancholy he carved his name, outlining a small village at the edge of Lake Otsego, “Coopers-town,” just as he had envisioned. Within sixteen days the patents sold to the “poorest order of men” and the small settlement of “thirty-three persons and two slaves”[22] grew into what is today the avowed “Home of Baseball & America’s Perfect Mainstreet.”

“The great primary object,” Cooper exhorted, is “to cause the Wilderness to bloom and fructify”[23].

*

On the eve of the opening of the west, in April 1803, Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin wrote a letter to President Jefferson reminding him of just this. “Dear Sir,” he implored, “the future destinies of the Missouri country are of vast importance to the United States, it being perhaps the only large tract of country, and certainly the first which lying out of the boundaries of the Union will be settled by the people of the U. States”[24]. He imagines the entire continent made to bloom, Perfect Mainstreets sown across the plains like seeds, sprouting a nation from the dust like sagebrush. “The great object to ascertain,” he continued, “is whether from its extent & fertility that country is Susceptible of a large population”[25].

This task, he proposed, concerned none other than Capts. Lewis and Clark, roaming the wide, billowing plains where swarms of terrific new objects “darkened the horizon.” Yet among the boundless novelties of the West—the great “gangues” of bison and pronghorn, “prickly piars” and “barking squirrels”—sparkled one whose capture the Corps could not so easily effect.

“Ocian in view!” exclaimed Clark. “Musquetoes” wrote Lewis. In their journals the two men attempted Sacagawea’s name more than a dozen times and half a dozen ways: Sah cah-gar-we-ah, Sah-cah-gar-weah, Sah ca gah we a, Sah-car-gar-we-ah, Sah-cah-gar Wea, and Sahcargarmeah, Lewis struggled; Sah-kah-gar we â, Sah car gah we â, Sah-cah gah-weah, Sar car gah we â, and Sah cah gah, we â, tried Clark. It was no use. The “great object,” he reported, “was to make every letter sound”[26].

*

And in time sound the same. “You are now becoming like the white people,” John C. Calhoun informed the Cherokee delegation in 1819[27]. “Your great object,” he continued, “ought to be to hold your land separate among yourselves, as your white neighbors; and to live and bring up your children in the same way they do, and gradually adopt their laws and manners.” In a short time this “ought” became the force of will, when the U.S. government launched an “outing system” to seize native children and embed them with good, caring, white families—“the great object in view” being “their absorption into the body politic”[28].

Yet in the end, it seems, the national telos of ruthless self-preservation could not be overcome. The very Superintendent of Kansas’s Haskell school had to concede his disappointment in 1893, when he appraised the miserable results. The “great object in sending pupils on the outing system,” he admitted, had been to “bring them into good white families where all will have an interest in doing what is for the best good of the Indian ward,” but ultimately such good white families simply could not be found[29]. Put plainly, he reported, there was “not on the part of the people as deep an interest in the welfare of the pupil as there should be….”

*

That there has not been a deep interest in communal welfare on the part of the people is no accident—indeed, as the politicians say, one’s freedom ends where the neighbor’s begins; and for the American subject, this has been exactly the problem.

“It is no time for minute criticism of Lincoln, Republicanism, or even other parties now that they are fusing for a death-grapple with the Southern slave oligarchy” entreated William Lloyd Garrison: the scattered shards of the national subject had to be picked up and pieced back together[30]. According to General McClellan “the great object” was the “crushing defeat of the Rebel Army” at Manassas[31]. General Burnside proposed Richmond “the great object of the Campaign”[32]; Halleck that “the Great Object” was “to open and hold the Mississippi”[33]—but it was General Sherman who hunted them across the South most resolutely, scorching his way through Georgia in “perfect contempt for cotton and everything else in comparison to the great object of the war—the restoration of the Union…”[34].

Yet unlike the Union, the great object of the Confederacy was not the restoration of the past; theirs was, instead, the creation of a future: “we must transmit a heritage of rankling and undying hate to our children,” Southern newspapers reported as Fort Sumter burned[35].

*

So this is how it goes: on and on--the “great object” flushed from one hole and rushed to find another--as the comes searching; until, piece by piece, the whole world has been conquered and made identical. That is the game of subjectivity--the heritage transmitted generation to generation--to make an object; the heritage what.

As General Lee brandished his dish towel in surrender on the morning of April 9th, however, a curious thing began to happen. It seems that the vast, glittering inventory of objects which had for so long haunted the mind of the subject begins to deplete, its clarion call to wane, as though the grand stores of the national imaginary had been all spent out reaching the moment. “This is the great object of my life—to aid in crushing this monstrous rebellion,” one Union soldier had written his wife—but what now?[36] The subject has been recollected, made whole, made, at last, American; he has won, in other words: the “great object gained, on that April Sabbath,” and started on the long road to obsolescence[37]. In a century the “great object” will be an anachronism, hardly written, and “only the spirits of the slain who watched from the upper air, and who guard forever that fateful field, can tell the tale” of a world that remembers its agency[38].

Indeed, while the North won the Court House, it did not win the war. Under the very optic of subjectivity a heritage of rankling and undying hate subsists: the rank and undying hate of difference. Today, nothing remains that the subject cannot eat.

*

It is not until the next century that the phrase disappears at last, slipping out of the pocket of an anonymous epistolarian called Yours. I discover his postcard in an antique shop outside Peoria, postmarked in 1938. It shows the young Empire State building glistening in the sunlight—“two million feet of floor space.” Yours would have bought the whole thing, he jokes on the back, but for being a small sum short: “the great object must have slipped out on the way here,” he puns—and at last the great object is revealed, once and for all.

It is the dollar, the quarter—the heritage of hate we accept civilly each day, passing it hand to hand, pocket to pocket, comporting us to one another as objects and making of ourselves the same. That gradual fading of the “great object” from the American heart did not mark defeat but consolidation: where once myriad objects shone out like stars on the horizon now burns only the dollar, the beating heart of the American subject. “Wealth is the great object of American desire,” Theodore Parker wrote, and covetousness “the American passion”[39]; how else to feel that we exist, though in pain?

From Yours’ pocket this great object has slipped, down into a gutter or under a grate, but even still, he makes clear, it has not disappointed the legacy of objectification that guarantees its currency: “Summ lucky ho-boe will smell it,” he writes back home to his beloved.

Notes

1. George Gordon Byron to Anabella Milbanke, September 6, 1813, in Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (United Kingdom: Belknap Press, 1982), 65-66.

2. George Gordon Byron to Douglas Kinnaird, January 20, 1817, in Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, 155.

3. Ibid, 66.

4. Alexander Russell Simpson, “Meeting, March 8th, 1879,” The Obstetrical Journal of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. IV (London: J & A. Churchill 1877), 186.

5. “Proposed Establishment of Deodorising Works at Fulham—Pollution of the Thames.,” January 3, 1863, The Medical times and Gazette: a Journal of Medical Science, Literature, Criticism, and News, vol. I (London: John Churchill and Sons, 1863), 14.

6. Sir William Francis Butler, The Great Lone Land: A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-west of America (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1872), 176

7. Rev. J.H. Evans, “The Duty of the Christian Husband: A Sermon,” The Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. XI, 1844, 146.

8. James D. Brown, The Forester: A Practical Treatise on the Planting, Rearing, and General Management of Forest-trees (United Kingdom: William Blackwood and Sons, 1861), 16.

9. “Third Day, Morning Session,” Report of a Conference of Dairy Instructors and Experts at the Department of Agriculture Ottawa, November 4, 5 and 6, 1903 (Canada: Government Printing Bureau, 1904), 91.

10. Samuel Perkins, Historical Sketches of the United States: From the Peace of 1815 to 1830 (New York: S. Converse, 1850), 317.

11. William Appleton, Selections from the Diaries of William Appleton, 1786-1862 (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1922), 169.

12. “The American Railway System.—No. XXII,” March 17, 1866, The Railway News and Joint-Stock Journal, vol. IV, June 1866 (London: N.P., 1866), 295.
13. B.G. Jefferis and J.L. Nichols, Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners a Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood, Advice to Maiden, Wife, and Mother, Love, Courtship, and Marriage (Toronto: J.L. Nichols & Co., 1904), 255.

14. United States Congress, The Congressional Globe: The Debates, Proceedings, Laws, etc. of the First and Second Sessions, Thirty-Fourth Congress, vol. 109 (Washington: John C. Rives, 1856), 749.

15. The Country Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. I (London: S. Marshall & Co.,) 239.

16. George Drysdale, The Elements of Social Science; or Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion, (London: E. Truelove, 1867), 104.

17. The Athenaeum: Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, January to June, 1864 (London: J. Francis, 1864), 341.

18. André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Pub, 2002), 35.

19. David Robertson, Debates and Other Proceedings of the Convention of Virginia, Convened at Richmond, on Monday the Second Day of June, 1788, for the Purpose of Deliberating on the Constitution Recommended by the Grand Federal Convention. To which is Prefixed the Federal Constitution (Richmond: Ritchie & Worsley and Augustine Davis, 1805), 275.
20. William Cooper, A Guide in the Wilderness; or the History of the First Settlement in the Western Counties of New York, with useful Instructions to Future Settlers. In a series of letters addressed by Judge Cooper, of Coopers-town, to William Sampson, Barrister, of New York (Rochester, NY: G. P. Humphrey, 1897), 7.

21. Ibid, 8.

22. Ibid, ii.

23. Ibid, 6.

24. Albert Gallatin to Thomas Jefferson, 1803, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 40: 4 March to 10 July 1803, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (United States: Princeton University Press, 2018), 173.

25. Ibid, 174.

26. Donald Jackson ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: with Related Documents, 1783-1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 503.

27. John C. Calhoun, Message from the President of the United States, communicating documents touching the Treaty with the Cherokee Indians, ratified in 1819. January 3, 1826. Read, and laid upon the table (Washington: Gales & Eaton, 1826), 8.
28. Warren King Moorehead, The American Indian in the United States, Period 1850-1914 (United States: Andover Press, 1914), 427.

29. Charles Francis Meserve, “Report of Haskell Institute, Lawrence, Kans.,” Sixty Second Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1893), 420.

30. Archibald H. Grimké, William Lloyd Garrison, The Abolitionist (New York; London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1891), 375.

31. George B. McClellan to Simon Cameron, October 31, 1861, in The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860-1865, ed. Stephen W. Sears (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989), 118.

32. Augustus Woodbury, Major General Ambrose E. Burnside and the Ninth Army Corps: A Narrative of Campaigns in North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, During the War for the Preservation of the Republic (Providence: Sidney S. Rider & Brother, 1867), 179.

33. Gen. H.W. Halleck to Major-General Samuel Curtis, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series I, vol. XIII (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1885) 759.

34. William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman, ed. Charles Royster (United States: Library of America, 1990), 745.

35. The Confederate Reader: How the South Saw the War, ed. Richard B. Harwell (New York: Dover, 1989), 14-15.

36. Charles N. Maxwell, Letter CXXIV. Battle of Gettysburg. July 5th, 1863, Soldiers’ Letters, from Camp, Battlefield and Prison, ed. Lydia Minturn Post (New York: Bunce & Huntington, 1865), 262-263.

37. Col. Stuart Taylor, “Oration,” Society of the Army of the Potomac, The Society of the Army of the Potomac. Report of the Seventeenth Annual Re-Union, at San Francisco, CAL., August 2 and 4, 1886 (New York: MacGowan. & Slipper, 1886), 35.

38. Ibid, 35.

39. Theodore Parker, “Thoughts on the Nebraska Question,” The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, vol. V., Discourses of Slavery, vol. I, ed. Francis Power Cobbe (London: Trübner & Co., 1863), 264.

Selected Works

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Atlantic, Iowa
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