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.
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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 Lette
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 XXXXXXXXXXand The Deerslayer (1841)—examined the experience of
ugged 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
omanticism. Walt Whitman’s book of poems Leaves of Grass XXXXXXXXXXcele-
ated 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 maca
e. His first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827),
eceived 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 na
ow confines of intellect and exploring the deeper—and
often painful and ho
ifying—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
egion’s men of letters was William Gilmore Simms. For a time, his work expressed a
oad nationalism that transcended his regional background; but by the 1840s, he too
ecame 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
oadly
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. Bo
owing
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
ole of women in society. (© Co
is)
276 • CHAPTER 12
intellect in the na
ow, 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 XXXXXXXXXXStanding on the
are ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all
mean egotism vanishes XXXXXXXXXXI 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
efusal 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
etween 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,