Becoming successful, rich, popular, or high status. These are some of the answers you would receive from somebody if asked what they thought the American Dream is. But what is truly the American Dream? The dream to the McCaslins would have been ownership and wealth. Slaves in America simply had the dream of freedom. In the book of Go Down, Moses we see Ike McCaslin live in the dream, question the dream, and attempt to get rid of the dream that was being handed down to him through a couple of generations. This leads us to believe that the American Dream is not something that is a set idea but instead a feeling within your heart that makes you happy. William Faulkner, author of Go Down, Moses, leads us to believe that the dream of wealth and ownership is a failure and that happiness and your finding of your destiny is your paradise.
Lucius Quintos Carothers McCaslin, born in Carolina in 1772, migrated to Mississippi, in 1807, to search for his dream of becoming wealthy with lots of property. He bought his plantation from Ikkemotubbe, an Indian Chief. This selling of the land is what Faulkner considers the original sin of the land. This is what starts all the slavery and ownership of land, which Faulkner believes, should not be owned. " the yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink by the hand first of his grandfather and then of his father and uncle, bachelors up to and past fifty and then sixty, the one who ran the plantation and the farming of it and the other who did the housework and the cooking and continued to do it even after his twin married and the boy himself was born." This passage is describing how the passing of the land from Lucius to his two sons kept the sin going."(Faulkner, 250) But is this sin really that wrong. Who are we to say that Carothers McCaslin's dream, of owning a plantation, is a sin. Ikkemotubbe was a ruthless man but not because he sold the land to McCaslin.