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12 ANTEBELLUM CULTURE AND REFORM THE ROMANTIC IMPULSE REMAKING SOCIETY THE CRUSADE AGAINST SLAVERY 272 • L O O K I N G A H E A D 1. How did an American national culture of art, literature, philosophy, and communal living develop in the nineteenth century? 2. What were the issues on which social and moral reformers tried to “remake the nation”? How successful were their efforts? 3. Why did the crusade against slavery become the preeminent issue of the reform movement? THE UNITED STATES IN THE mid-nineteenth century was growing rapidly in size, population, and economic complexity. Most Americans were excited by the new possibilities these changes produced. But many people were also painfully aware of the problems that accompanied them. One result of these conflicting attitudes was the emergence of movements to “reform” the nation. Some reforms rested on an optimistic faith in human nature, a belief that within every individual resided a spirit that was basically good and that society should attempt to unleash. A second impulse was a desire for order and control. With their traditional values and institutions being challenged and eroded, many Americans yearned above all for stability and discipline. By the end of the 1840s, however, one issue—slavery—had come to overshadow all others. And one group of reformers—the abolitionists—had become the most influential of all. • 273 TIME LINETHE ROMANTIC IMPULSE “In the four quarters of the globe,” wrote the English wit Sydney Smith in 1820, “who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?” The answer, he assumed, was obvious: no one. American intellectuals were painfully aware of the low regard in which Europeans held their culture, and they tried to create an artistic life that would express their own nation’s special virtues. At the same time, many of the nation’s cultural leaders were striving for another kind of liberation, which was—ironically—largely an import from Europe: the spirit of romanticism. In literature, in philosophy, in art, even in politics and economics, American intellec- tuals were committing themselves to the liberation of the human spirit. Nationalism and Romanticism in American Painting Despite Sydney Smith’s contemptuous question, a great many people in the United States were, in fact, looking at American paintings—and they were doing so because they believed Americans were creating important new artistic traditions of their own. American painters sought to capture the power of nature by portraying some of the nation’s most spectacular and undeveloped areas. The first great school of American painters—known as the Hudson River school—emerged in New York. Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, Asher Durand, and others painted the spec- tacular vistas of the rugged and still largely untamed Hudson Valley. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, whom many of the painters read and admired, they considered nature—far more than civilization—the best source of wisdom and fulfillment. In portraying the Hudson Valley, they seemed to announce that in 1821 New York constructs first penitentiary 1840 Liberty Party formed 1845 Frederick Douglass’s autobiography 1850 Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 1852 Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin 1855 Whitman’s Leaves of Grass 1831 The Liberator begins publication 1837 Horace Mann appointed secretary of Massachusetts Board of Education 1841 Brook Farm founded 1848 Women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y. Oneida Community founded 1851 Melville’s Moby Dick 1854 Thoreau’s Walden 1826 Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans 1833 American Antislavery Society founded 1830 Joseph Smith publishes the Book of Mormon 274 • CHAPTER 12 America, unlike in Europe, “wild nature” still existed; and that America, therefore, was a nation of greater promise than the overdeveloped lands of the Old World. In later years, some of the Hudson River painters traveled farther west. Their enormous canvases of great natural wonders—the Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone, the Rocky Mountains—touched a passionate chord among the public. Some of the most famous of their paintings—particularly the works of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran—traveled around the country attracting enormous crowds. An American Literature The effort to create a distinctively American literature made considerable progress in the 1820s through the work of the first great American novelist: James Fenimore Cooper. What most distinguished his work was its evocation of the American West. Cooper had a lifelong fascination with the human relationship to nature and with the challenges (and dangers) of America’s expansion westward. His most important novels—among them The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1841)—examined the experience of rugged white frontiersmen with Indians, pioneers, violence, and the law. Cooper evoked the ideal of the independent individual with a natural inner goodness—an ideal that many Americans feared was in jeopardy. Another, later group of American writers displayed more clearly the influence of romanticism. Walt Whitman’s book of poems Leaves of Grass (1855) cele- brated democracy, the liberation of the individual spirit, and the pleasures of the flesh. In helping free verse from traditional, restrictive conventions, he also expressed a yearning for emotional and physical release and personal fulfillment—a yearning perhaps rooted in part in his own experience as a homosexual living in a society profoundly intolerant of unconventional sexuality. Less exuberant was Herman Melville, perhaps the greatest American writer of his era. Moby Dick, published in 1851, is Melville’s most important—although not, in his lifetime, his most popular—novel. It tells the story of Ahab, the powerful, driven captain of a whaling vessel, and his obsessive search for Moby Dick, the great white whale that had once maimed him. It is a story of courage and of the strength of human will. But it is also a tragedy of pride and revenge. In some ways it is an uncom- fortable metaphor for the harsh, individualistic, achievement-driven culture of ninetee nth- century America. Literature in the Antebellum South The South experienced a literary flowering of its own in the mid-nineteenth century, and it produced writers and artists who were, like their northern counterparts, concerned with defining the nature of America. But white southerners tended to produce very different images of what society was and should be. The southern writer Edgar Allan Poe produced stories and poems that were primarily sad and macabre. His first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), received little recognition. But later works, including his most famous poem, “The Raven” (1845), established him as a major, if controversial, literary figure. Poe evoked images of individuals rising above the narrow confines of intellect and exploring the deeper—and often painful and horrifying—world of the spirit and emotions. Other southern novelists of the 1830s (among them Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, William Alexander Caruthers, and John Pendleton Kennedy) produced historical romances and Walt Whitman Herman Melville Edgar Allan Poe ANTEBELLUM CULTURE AND REFORM • 275 eulogies for the plantation system of the upper South. The most distinguished of the region’s men of letters was William Gilmore Simms. For a time, his work expressed a broad nationalism that transcended his regional background; but by the 1840s, he too became a strong defender of southern institutions—especially slavery—against the encroachments of the North. There was, he believed, a unique quality to southern life that fell to intellectuals to defend. One group of southern writers, however, produced works that were more broadly American. These writers from the fringes of plantation society—Augustus B. Longstreet, Joseph G. Baldwin, Johnson J. Hooper, and others—depicted the world of the backwoods south and focused on ordinary people and poor whites. Instead of romanticizing their subjects, they were deliberately and sometimes painfully realistic, seasoning their sketches with a robust, vulgar humor that was new to American literature. These southern realists established a tradition of American regional humor that was ultimately to find its most powerful voice in Mark Twain. The Transcendentalists One of the outstanding expressions of the romantic impulse in America came from a group of New England writers and philosophers known as the transcendentalists. Borrowing heavily from German and English writers and philosophers, the transcendentalists pro- moted a theory of the individual that rested on a distinction between what they called “reason” and “understanding.” Reason, as they defined it, had little to do with rationality. It was, rather, the individual’s innate capacity to grasp beauty and truth by giving full expression to the instincts and emotions. Understanding, by contrast, was the use of MARGARET FULLER As a leading transcendentalist, Fuller argued for the important relationship between the discovery of the “self” and the questioning of the prevailing gender roles of her era. In her famous feminist work Women in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller wrote, “Many women are considering within themselves what they need and what they have not.” She encouraged her readers, especially women, to set aside conventional thinking about the role of women in society. (© Corbis) 276 • CHAPTER 12 intellect in the narrow, artificial ways imposed by society; it involved the repression of instinct and the victory of externally imposed learning. Every person’s goal, therefore, should be the cultivation of “reason”—and, thus, liberation from “understanding.” Each individual should strive to “transcend” the limits of the intellect and allow the emotions, the “soul,” to create an “original relation to the Universe.” Transcendentalist philosophy emerged first in America among a small group of intellectuals centered in Concord, Massachusetts, and led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. A Unitarian minister in his youth, Emerson left the clergy in 1832 to devote himself to writing, teaching, and lecturing. In “Nature” (1836), Emerson wrote that in the quest for self-fulfillment, individuals should work for a communion with the natural world: “in the woods, we return to reason and faith. . . . Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. . . . I am part and particle of God.” In other essays, he was even more explicit in advocating a commitment to individuality and the full exploration of inner capacities. Equally influential was Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau went even further in repudiating the repressive forces of society, which produced, he said, “lives of quiet desperation.” Each individual should work for self-realization by resisting pressures to con- form to society’s expectations and responding instead to his or her own instincts. Thoreau’s own effort to free himself—immortalized in Walden (1854)—led him to build a small cabin in the Concord woods on the edge of Walden Pond, where he lived alone for two years as simply as he could, attempting to liberate himself from what he considered society’s exces- sive interest in material comforts. In his 1849 essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” he extended his critique of artificial constraints in society to government, arguing that when government required an individual to violate his or her own morality, it had no legitimate authority. The proper response was “civil disobedience,” or “passive resistance”—a public refusal to obey unjust laws. It was a belief that would undergird some antislavery reforms and, much later in the mid-twentieth century, attacks on racial segregation. The Defense of Nature As Emerson’s and Thoreau’s tributes to nature suggest, a small but influential group of Americans in the nineteenth century feared the impact of capitalism on the integrity of the natural world. “The mountains and cataracts, which were to have made poets and painters,” wrote the essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, “have been mined for anthracite and dammed for water power.” To the transcendentalists and others, nature was not just a setting for economic activity, as many farmers, miners, and others believed. It was the source of deep, personal human inspiration—the vehicle through which individuals could best realize the truth within their own souls. Genuine spirituality, they argued, did not come from formal religion but through communion with the natural world. In making such claims, the transcendentalists were among the first Americans to antic- ipate the environmental movement of the twentieth century. They had no scientific basis for their defense of the wilderness and little sense of the twentieth-century notion of the interconnectedness of species. But they did believe in, and articulate, an essential unity between humanity and nature—a spiritual unity, they believed, without which civilization would be impoverished. They looked at nature, they said, “with new eyes,” and with those eyes they saw that “behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present.” Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau Roots of Environmentalism ANTEBELLUM CULTURE AND REFORM • 277 Visions of Utopia Although transcendentalism was at its heart an individualistic philosophy, it helped spawn one of the most famous nineteenth-century experiments in communal living: Brook Farm. The dream of the Boston transcendentalist George Ripley,