Chapter 7 - Land of Hope (PDF)

CHAPTER SEVEN THE CULTURE OF DEMOCRACY IN DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, TOCQUEVILLE WAS NOT MERELY interested in studying democracy as a political form. He argued that a democratic regime would manifest itself in every facet of human life: not merely in public institutions but also in family life, in l...

CHAPTER SEVEN THE CULTURE OF DEMOCRACY IN DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, TOCQUEVILLE WAS NOT MERELY interested in studying democracy as a political form. He argued that a democratic regime would manifest itself in every facet of human life: not merely in public institutions but also in family life, in literature, in philosophy, in manners, in language usage, in marriage, in mores, in male–female relations, in ambition, in friendship, in love, and in attitudes toward war and peace. He grasped the fact that a society’s political arrangements, far from being matters that merely skate on the surface of life, are in fact influences that reach deep down into the very souls of its inhabitants. Democracy is not just about politics; it is also a matter of culture, of a people’s sensibility and way of life: their habits, convictions, morals, tastes, and spiritual life. What, then, did this emerging culture of democracy look like? Since religion lies at the very roots of culture, an examination of this question should begin with a look at the path of religion’s development in the years after the Revolution. The first thing to notice is that the remarkable partnership of Protestantism and Enlightenment rationalism, that easy harmony of potential antagonists that had been such a notable feature of the latter years of the eighteenth century, was beginning to fray in the nineteenth, as the former partners began to go their separate ways – although, as we shall see, it is also notable that there remained important points of similarity, even as the separation was occurring. On the elite level, more and more of those in the established churches of the North found the Calvinist belief in innate human depravity to be too dour and negative and, moreover, out of phase with the steadily improving world that they saw emerging around them. They were increasingly drawn to more rational and Enlightened offshoots of Christianity, such as Deism and Unitarianism, both of which declined to affirm the divinity of Christ and other supernatural elements of Christian orthodoxy and stressed instead the unity of God, the intelligibility of the universe, and the innate goodness of human beings, along with their ability to improve their own lot in life by the exercise of their reason and by taking greater care in the nurture of the young. Some of the most important leaders of the revolutionary generation, such as Jefferson and Franklin, had already been drawn in that direction, and in the early years of the new nation, rationalist religion grew, although it always remained largely an upper-class taste. By the 1820s, Unitarianism had become the overwhelmingly predominant faith of the elite classes in Massachusetts and dominated the outlook at bastions like Harvard College. But there was far more intense and interesting activity happening on the other side of the religious divide – the revivalist side. A Second Great Awakening had already begun in the years around 1800, led by men like Yale’s president Timothy Dwight, a Jonathan Edwards–like figure who attempted to return that campus, which had declined into a “hotbed of infidelity,” to something closer to its uber- Puritan beginnings. A brilliant and charismatic speaker, Dwight led campus revivals that inspired a significant cohort of young Yale men to become evangelists. Meanwhile, revivals on the southern and western frontier were far greater in number and far less decorous. In fact, they tended to be wildly enthusiastic, to an extent that was somewhat frightening to observers like Tocqueville, who referred to the Americans’ penchant for “an exalted and almost fierce spiritualism.” One such revival, a legendary camp meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in summer 1801, came to be known as the Second Pentecost; it was a kind of evangelical Woodstock, a fervent gathering of souls featuring ecstatic and emotional outpourings from the many lonely and unchurched individuals who lived in poverty and isolation and yearned for spiritual uplift and a sense of belonging. Events like Cane Ridge, too, played a crucial role in the launching of the Second Great Awakening.  The ministers who worked the frontier had adapted their message to the circumstances; instead of preaching sophisticated Calvinism, they offered a simple and direct message of personal salvation, easily grasped by anyone. Traveling revivals became a fixture of frontier life, and tireless Methodist “circuit riders” such as Francis Asbury and Peter Cartwright provided a moveable evangelism in which the church came to the people themselves. Cartwright, a man of astonishing stamina, delivered a sermon a day for more than twenty years, all the while riding a circuit that took in several states and presented all the rugged challenges and perils of frontier travel. The heroic efforts of him and others like him soon built Methodism into the largest Christian denomination in America. By the 1820s, the currents of revivalism spread to upstate New York, in the region between Lake Ontario and the Adirondack Mountains, from Buffalo to Albany. It was the very region traversed by the Erie Canal, an area in which swift economic development had brought with it rapid and disorienting changes in the pattern of life, raising anew questions about the maintenance of virtue, which was seen as so essential to the survival of a republic. Perhaps that anxiety is why the region showed such an unusual openness to spiritual things, becoming known as the Burned-Over District because of the frequency with which the flames of revival had swept through it. It was there in upstate New York, in 1821, that a young lawyer named Charles Grandison Finney underwent a “mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost” that enveloped him in “waves and waves of liquid love” and came out of the experience with the clear conviction that he was to become an evangelist: “I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ,” he announced, ever the lawyer, “to plead his case.” He immediately began to study to become a Presbyterian minister and, by 1823, was ordained and began pleading the case in his inimitable prosecutorial way, combining unabashed showmanship with a rather flexible form of Christian theology to produce confessions and conversions aplenty among those in his audiences. Finney would become the greatest revivalist of his day, and in his style, he could be seen as the prototype of the modern American evangelical preacher, in the mold of Billy Graham and his stadium- sized open-air revivals. Yet Finney’s theological convictions were very far from the Calvinism in which figures like Graham would be educated. Finney believed that the saving of souls did not have to wait upon a miraculous infusion of grace; nor was it a question of a proper theological education. Instead, it was possible to induce conversion of everyone, black and white, male and female, young and old, by the careful use of “new methods” designed to elicit the proper emotional state and receptivity. Indeed, Finney was a master of the art, and using such innovations as the “anxious bench,” where those called forward would publicly confess their sins and seek forgiveness, while surrounded by family and friends, he was able to transform his revivals into spectacular and cathartic emotional experiences. When accused of manipulation, Finney bluntly replied that “the results justify my method.” Certainly Finney’s theology and practices were a clear departure from Christian orthodoxy. Lost, too, was any notion of the historic church and an authoritative clergy as essential elements in the life of the Christian. But such changes were an accommodation not only to the frontier but to a new democratic age and faithfully reflected the can-do optimism and expansive individualism of the Jacksonian moment. In an odd sense, Finney’s transformation of Christianity into a positive creed of salvation that could be achieved through human exertion, for all its obvious differences from the highly intellectualized rational faith of the Unitarians, had a lot in common with it. In both cases, the Calvinist doctrine of human depravity, with its insistence upon the inability of the individual person caught in the snares of sin to free himself without divine grace, was being set aside as something outdated and out of phase with the rising spirit of optimism about human capabilities that pervaded the age. In certain respects, then, the two sides of America’s religious divide were not as different as they might have seemed. Finney’s innovations were not the only ones to arise in the Burned- Over District and were far from being the most innovative. Indeed, this rapidly changing region proved to be exceptionally fertile ground for the growth of inventive, adventurous, and often quite heretical ideas, arising out of the collision between the weakening inherited faiths and the expansive spirit of the age. There were millennial cults like the Millerites, who preached the end of the world in 1844 and the imminent establishment of God’s Kingdom. There was the spiritualism of the Fox sisters, who claimed the ability to communicate with the dead. There were utopian experiments in communal and perfectionist living. There were redoubled efforts to restore the purity of the apostolic church. Probably the most enduringly important of these innovations was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormons. Today, some two centuries after the founding of Mormonism, we are unlikely to see this sturdy and conservative church as an expression of Burned-Over-District religious radicalism in its origins. But it was. It all began with a teenaged boy named Joseph Smith Jr., whose family had moved from Vermont to the small town of Palmyra, New York. Smith had experienced a series of compelling supernatural visions, the eventual result of which was his production of the Book of Mormon, a narrative account of ancient Hebrews who were said to have inhabited the New World and had an encounter with Jesus Christ. This six-hundred-page tome was represented as an addition to the canon of Christian holy scripture – Smith regarded it as a lost section of the Bible – connecting the world of the Hebrew Bible with the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, and the current ones as well. In 1830, Smith began to form his own church, attracting converts by the dozens, and then by the hundreds, who were drawn to the church’s novel theology and its strong sense of community. Like so many strains of Protestant Christianity, Mormonism reflected a desire to recover the purity of the primitive church as it had been established by Jesus and the first apostles. But its theological differences from the mainstream of Protestantism were striking. It understood God as a personal being, Jesus as his literal son, and the church was headed by a Prophet who administered a lay male priesthood. While it accepted the Old and New Testaments of the Bible as sacred scriptures, it gave equal weight to the Book of Mormon and the revelations of the Prophet. It envisioned human beings as ultimately aspiring not merely to eternal life but to the status of gods. Above all else, Mormonism demanded of its members a very tightly organized community life, emphasizing a strong dedication to family, hard work, and personal discipline, including abstention from alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. It was perhaps the remarkable cohesiveness of Mormon community life, the strong sense of being a people apart, a “chosen” people who had rejected the practices of the “gentiles” around them, that most deeply characterized them – and most deeply irritated and alarmed their neighbors. If Mormonism could be said to be a product of the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the Jacksonian era, it might with equal justice be said to be a reaction against the era’s sometimes chaotic individualism. In the longer run, Mormonism showed the staying power to survive and thrive, when so many of the other religious innovations of its era faded away or transformed themselves into something else. And yet its insistence upon strong and exclusive group solidarity made it certain that its adherents would always clash with their neighbors. Matters were made far worse by Joseph Smith’s adoption of the practice of “plural marriage,” or polygamy, in which men were permitted to have more than one wife. That no doubt helped the sect grow more quickly, but it made the Mormons notorious, even reviled, and probably ensured that the subsequent history of Mormonism in American history for much of the century would be one of nearly uninterrupted persecution. The Mormons moved from New York to Ohio to Illinois, but violence and hostility followed them wherever they went. Finally, in 1844, after an anti-Mormon mob killed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, they made a decision to leave the country for land in Utah, which was then part of Mexico. Led by Brigham Young, who would make a strong and highly intelligent successor to Smith, the entire community of fifteen thousand made the great trek to the Great Salt Lake basin, the “Promised Land,” beginning in 1846. They arrived to find an unpromising desert, friendly to nothing but crickets and snakes. But they wasted no time in developing an irrigation system, which was in place by 1848. And then, putting their customary industriousness to work, they proceeded to make the desert bloom. Mormonism was more than a religion. It also was an experimental community – and far from being the only important communitarian experiment going on in America during the antebellum years. “We are all a little mad here with numberless projects of social reform,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1840. “Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his pocket.” He exaggerated only slightly, for there were more than a hundred identifiable utopian communities launched in the United States during the nineteenth century. It stands to reason that this would be so. It was an optimistic and prosperous age, full of expectancy that the millennium, the long- prophesied return of Christ to rule the earth, was coming soon – or perhaps had already begun. What better time for such experiments in living to flourish? Nor is it surprising that, in an age of individualism, the pursuit of an intensified communitarian ethos would have great appeal. We are social beings, and the disintegration or loosening of traditional sources of authority is not only liberating for us. It may also be disorienting, even frightening, as it clearly was for many inhabitants of the Burned-Over District and others who were experiencing the rapid changes of a dynamic and growing economy. Many of the earliest Mormons were New England farmers who were attracted to the faith precisely because it served as a clear alternative to the rootless materialism and self-seeking that the dramatic economic changes seemed to be bringing along with them. Both the Finneyite brand of evangelical Protestantism and the elite Unitarianism of Boston had in common a belief that the reform of institutions could lead to the reform of the person and the amelioration of his or her tendency toward sin. If human beings now had it in their power to effect comprehensive reform of those institutions, then the way was open for transformative change, for those with the boldness to seek it. Some of those communities were short-lived, like the quixotic Brook Farm experiment in Massachusetts, promoted by Unitarian minister George Ripley; New Harmony, Indiana, started by the British industrialist Robert Owen; and the “phalanxes” of the French socialist Charles Fourier, which sought, and quickly failed, to overcome the force of competition in society. But others proved surprisingly durable, and the most durable ones generally had a strong religious dimension, as the Mormons had. The Rappites, a group of German Lutherans who fled persecution and settled in Butler County, Pennsylvania, lasted until the end of the century, holding their possessions in common, advocating celibacy, and waiting for the imminent second coming of Christ. Similarly, the Shakers, who believed God to be a dual personality, and believed their leader, Ann Lee Stanley, to be the second coming of Christ, lived lives of communal simplicity and kept celibate, joyfully anticipating that the consummation of the universe was near; their movement flourished in the 1830s and 1840s and lasted into the twentieth century. The Oneida Community, led by John Humphrey Noyes, went in the opposite direction, instituting the doctrine of “complex marriage,” which meant that every man was married to every woman and the goal of community life should be the achievement of perfect release from sin. It lasted until the 1880s, when Noyes abruptly left the country to avoid prosecution for statutory rape; the community became a flatware and cutlery business, which still exists under the Oneida name today. These utopian communities that sprang up, mainly in the North, like mushrooms across the American landscape, were only one sign of a much more general tendency of the time: it was a culture that exalted the idea of reform and the boundless possibilities for moral and spiritual reformation. As Emerson declared, writing in 1841, “in the history of the world the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour … and not a kingdom, town, statute, rite, calling, man, or woman, but is threatened by the new spirit.” There was not only an embrace of the reshaping of society through disciplined communal living but also a strengthened commitment to the idea of a free public education for all young people, and a keener awareness of and concern for society’s forgotten or unrepresented, such as blacks, Native Americans, the laboring classes, women, children, and the disabled. Behind this rising humanitarian sensibility was the concept of human perfectibility and the confidence that the place and the moment for its full-bore pursuit had arrived in America, then and there.  Perhaps the most visible and popular of all these causes was the temperance movement, which grew out of a belief in the possibility of moral perfectionism but also addressed itself to a very real problem: the many deleterious effects of alcohol consumption on workers, families, and children. It has been estimated that in 1830, the average American over the age of fifteen consumed the equivalent of 7.1 gallons of pure alcohol per year, about three times what we consume today. It is not hard to imagine the ill effects of such mammoth consumption on worker safety and productivity and on diminished standard of living. Drink, said a temperance pamphlet, was an enslaver, “the prolific source (directly or indirectly) of nearly all the ills that afflict the human family.” It was not an implausible claim. Small wonder that a group of Boston ministers organized the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, to campaign for pledges of “total abstinence” – those who took the pledge had a T by their names and were therefore called “teetotalers” – and ultimately for the restriction or prohibition of the sale of alcoholic beverages. There were other humanitarian causes aplenty. Women’s rights were another area of growing concern, as women’s roles in the workplace and in public life expanded beyond the strictly domestic sphere, and as women active in reform movements like temperance and antislavery became anxious to play a more equal role in policy decision-making and governance. Public education for all, with a strong admixture of moral instruction, was the goal of Horace Mann, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Higher education began to flourish too, as a bevy of small colleges were founded beginning in the 1830s by churches and religious groups. The cruel and careless treatment of the mentally ill drew the attention of Dorothea Dix, a former schoolteacher who mounted a national campaign to publicize the problem and press for more humane treatment and facilities. Thomas Gallaudet opened a school for the deaf in Connecticut and Samuel Gridley Howe a school for the blind in Massachusetts. Reform was buzzing and blooming everywhere. But the greatest of all reform causes, and the one that eventually enveloped all the others in the North, was the cause of antislavery. Opposition to slavery had grown steadily since the 1780s and had surfaced again in the controversy over Missouri; by the 1830s, when the movement finally began to coalesce, it was being pursued largely as a religious cause rather than a secular one – a grave and soul- imperiling national sin rather than a mere withholding of rights. The great revivals of the Second Great Awakening, while encouraging the reform of slavery in the South, had awakened in the North an uncompromising desire to eliminate it as soon as possible. That moral sharpening of the issue made gradual emancipation, or any other compromise with the defenders of slavery extremely difficult. The leading abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the abolitionist newspaper called the Liberator and a fervent Quaker, were nearly all evangelical Protestants of some sort; they included among their numbers Theodore Dwight Weld (a protégé of Finney), Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Elizur Wright Jr. Few were as radical as Garrison, however, a forceful and steel-spined man who demanded “immediate” emancipation and publicly burned a copy of the Constitution and condemned it as a “proslavery” document, a “Covenant with Death,” and “an Agreement with Hell.” Others were willing to work for gradual emancipation, carried out through existing political institutions; the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, supported that position. Conflicts among antislavery proponents as to both means and ends had the effect of undermining the movement’s practical effectiveness by the 1840s. Garrison in particular became convinced that slavery had so completely corrupted all of American society that only a revolutionary change could effect emancipation. His position was too extreme for most and precipitated a split in the movement, leaving it too weakened to have much political influence when the nation’s sectional crisis heated up in the 1850s. By then it was clear that even the mild meliorist policies of figures like Abraham Lincoln would be unlikely to reverse the drift toward polarization and war between the North and the South. So how are we to evaluate their success? Some scholars have argued that the antislavery movement, particularly in its Garrisonian abolitionist form, made things worse rather than better, by amplifying southern fears and alienating northern allies. Others argue that, without their having taken a strong and intransigent position challenging the practice of slavery, and insisting upon its incompatibility with American and Christian convictions, nothing would have changed, and the nation would have drifted forward indefinitely, with the moral blot of slavery still unaddressed well into the twentieth century. This is a debate worth having, since it connects in some way to the perplexities in almost every great moral cause in human history. Which voices are more deserving of our honor and our emulation? Something that might be useful to introduce here is a distinction that the German sociologist Max Weber made between the ethic of moral conviction and the ethic of responsibility, two different ways of thinking about how leaders address moral problems in politics. The ethic of moral conviction was what propelled Garrison; it is the point of view that says one must be true to one’s principles and do the right thing, at whatever cost. It has a purity about it that is admirable. The ethic of responsibility takes a different view. It guides moderates (and, as we shall see, Lincoln himself) to the belief that leaders must take responsibility for the totality of effects arising out of their actions. It takes into account the tragic character of history, the fact that one can easily do the right thing at the wrong time, in the wrong way, and do an immense amount of damage to good and innocent parties in the process. Such a distinction does not decide the question, but it does clarify it. But one more thing remains to be pointed out. One of the chief forces that shifted northern antebellum American public opinion about slavery was not a treatise or a sermon or a speech or a work of political theory. It was a work of fiction: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly, published in 1852, which became the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century. Stowe herself was an evangelical and a member of one of the leading evangelical families in the nation, and she used the novel to depict the life of its title character, a slave who was sold by his owner and torn from his family, but who retained his loving spirit and Christian decency through a horrendous sequence of cruel and violent acts eventuating in his death. It left an indelible mark on all who read it.  The book succeeded in people’s minds not because of its cogent preaching on questions of abstract individual rights or abolitionism but because it appealed, vividly and emotionally, to antebellum Americans’ sense that no institution could be defended if it so brutally and pitilessly violated the sanctity of the family. It succeeded because it endowed its black characters with undeniable dignity and brought the reader to identify with their suffering, and to feel the injustice of bondage as a denial of personal freedom, one of the central features of the American experiment. And it succeeded all the more because it showed that one of the worst aspects of slavery was its degrading effect upon the master class itself. In other words, it demonstrated the comprehensive wrongness of the institution by showing, in a powerful and plausible way, its awful consequences to everyone involved in it. This observation about slavery’s reciprocal effects was one that many others, including Thomas Jefferson himself, had already made about slavery in the past, and a point that Lincoln was fond of making also. But it was the vividness of Mrs. Stowe’s novel that gave the point enough moral weight to change people’s minds. This is to say that her contribution was not to argument but to vision, and its vividness moved its readers, not forward from abstract premises, but backward from visible consequences. It brought slaves inside the affective circle of its readers’ minds, and it did so not with harsh sermons or shrewd political maneuvering but with an appeal to the moral imagination. The influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was undeniable – and that influence may well have been greater than the influence of all the Garrisons and Tappans combined. Its success testifies to the power of imaginative literature to alter the moral horizons and humanitarian sympathies of readers and to enlarge their sense of the possible. Curiously, however, Stowe’s great novel has never been accorded high status for its literary qualities. That fact leads us back to consider what might have been happening in post-Jacksonian America in the other sense of the word culture – not popular culture, but high culture, such as literature, arts, and drama.  For anxious questions still lingered in the thoughts of many Americans, questions that had begun being posed at the very beginning of the American experiment and had never gone away for long. Yes, America had produced political institutions that, for all their faults, were the freest and most democratic in the world. But could that success be replicated in the sphere of culture? Could America ever shed its colonial mentality and generate a culture – a high culture – that was as fresh, distinctive, and admirable as its novel political institutions? Could it produce art, literature, music, drama, architecture, and so on, that could stand comparison to the similar products of Europe, while at the same time bearing the distinguishing marks of a genuine American originality? Tocqueville saw little immediate evidence that it could. Looking at the literary culture of the country, he was decidedly unimpressed. He noticed that Americans seemed only to read English books, rather than books by their own authors, and speculated that the longer-run effect of democracy on literature would be to foster mediocrity, a great many small-scale works, hastily scribbled with the marketplace in mind, often gimmicky or sensational, tailored toward the sensibility of a busy, impatient, practical-minded people. His attitude was a milder version of the famous disdain expressed by the British literary critic Sidney Smith, writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1820, when he posed the rhetorical questions, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?” As harsh as such words may sound, they carried a sting of truth in them. The progress of American culture had in fact trailed far behind the progress of American politics. Some of this deficiency was surely attributable to the nation’s youth and rawness and the absence in America of the long historical memories and deep cultural roots upon which European writers could draw in their own work. The freshness of America, such an advantage in the creation of its political institutions, was a disadvantage for its artists and writers, who had few reserves of tradition and allusion to draw from in nourishing their imaginations. As the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne would later complain, an American writer had to make his way writing about a new country, one too new to have accumulated the rich loam of a long and complex history. “No author, without a trial,” Hawthorne said, “can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.” There had been a handful of talented minor writers in the early American years, such as the novelists Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving, but they produced little of enduring consequence and were not successful in placing the form and texture of American life at the center of their work. In the years before 1830, only James Fenimore Cooper managed to find a literary vein to work in his Leatherstocking tales, which reflected (albeit in highly romanticized terms) the distinctive drama of life on the American frontier. And only the melancholy southern mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe, whose macabre tales, detective fiction, and literary criticism were far ahead of his time, would be read with respect overseas. But some of the problem began with Columbus: America can be hard to see, especially when one sees only what one has been looking for. It was hard to make out the distinctive and new American thing if one was burdened with a wrong set of expectations and was too preoccupied with the imitation and emulation of others. By the 1830s, that was beginning to change, as American writers started to find their voice, and as the elements of a distinctive national culture began to come into being. By the 1850s, an incontestable breakthrough had taken place. How and why did that happen? We have seen that the flood of energy and innovation animating American religion in the early nineteenth century reflected the rising sense of American uniqueness and possibility, and it did so in a way that was thoroughly democratic – sometimes, perhaps, dismayingly so. But what about the realm of the arts and literature? Did that realm share in this larger cultural surge and show a similar inclination toward democracy? Were American writers and thinkers able at last to realize their dream of an American culture that was worthy of comparison to the products of Europe, while standing proudly as something new, something freshly and distinctively and inimitably American? The usual starting point for thinking about American literature and art in this time is to stress the tremendous influence of the European romantic movement in the realm of ideas, literature, and the arts. That starting point is useful, even if romanticism is a complex term, very hard to define, and containing contrary and even contradictory impulses within it. That is perhaps why it is always easier to say what romanticism is against rather than what it is for. But one can observe at the outset that romanticism played a similar role among the intellectual classes in America that the growing role of piety and emotionalism played in more popular evangelical religious practice. That similarity might be said to derive from a shared suspicion of, or weariness with, the intellectualism of the Enlightenment – if the Enlightenment is understood as a tidy and sterile view of the world that emphasizes logic and rationality over intuition and sentiment, prudence and utility over passion and fancy, a view of the world that makes no room for mystery, spontaneity, imagination, fantasy, creativity, or the deepest and most inexpressible needs of the soul. “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know,” wrote the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, a distant precursor whose words could well have served as a romantic manifesto a century and a half after he penned them. Romanticism was established in Europe by the 1780s and was later in coming to America, but once it arrived, it found a very welcoming environment. Indeed, so many of the key ideas associated with romanticism – the exaltation of the individual person, the love of nature, the distrust of sophistication and the love of the primitive, the preference of the organic over the mechanical, the extolling of folk cultures, the glorification of the ordinary and everyday – sound like many elements of the Jacksonian-era persuasion. But romantic ideas made their greatest impact through the works of a few very specific thinkers, a circle of writers and thinkers who were very much a product of the religious and intellectual culture of New England, at a particular moment, in a particular place.  A century and half ago, bucolic little Concord, Massachusetts, was a hub of the American literary and cultural universe. One could hardly think of a more illustrious circle of American writers than Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller. All of them knew one another, lived in or near Concord at roughly the same time, and wrote many of their most important works there. Indeed, all of them (with the exception of Fuller, who died in a shipwreck) are also buried there today. There is perhaps no single location in all of American literary history weightier in literary lore and more alive with the sense of possibility – precisely the sense of possibility that has always been one of the chief glories of American life. These writers shared a fascination with the cluster of ideas and ideals that go under the rubric of Transcendentalism, a romantic variant that stressed the glories of the vast, the mysterious, and the intuitive. It sought to replace the sin-soaked supernaturalist dogma of orthodox Christianity and the tidy rationality of Unitarianism with a sprawling romantic and eclectic form of natural piety that bordered on pantheism. It placed the ideal of the majestic, isolated, and inviolable Self at the center of its thought, and at the center of Nature itself. Indeed, Nature and the Self were two expressions of the same thing. “Nature is the opposite of the soul,” Emerson wrote in 1837, “answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind.” The vastness of Nature’s external panorama was exactly matched by the vastness of the soul’s interior estate. Both were part and parcel of the Universal Soul that superintended all things. Such a view of both Nature and subjective experience accorded little or no respect to older sources of commanding human authority and wisdom. The past was only raw material to be fed upon selectively, with only the needs of the moment (and of the feeding individual) in view. It also was rather sketchy on details of political and social thought. Emerson himself was notoriously contemptuous of “society,” which he disparaged as a “conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” and was distrustful of all social movements, even those for undeniably good causes.  Instead, the Transcendental Self enjoyed an absolute liberty, free of any external restraint or law other than that of its own nature. In the Transcendental vision, individuals perfected themselves in unfettered liberty, in order that they might form a community that thrives without authority or traditions. Transcendentalism promoted a social and ethical theory that amounted to little more than the principle of self-trust. Transcendentalism would have been unthinkable without its many transatlantic additives, including a nice helping of German romanticism. But it also was a movement as American, and New England, as apple pie, a movement marking a distinct phase in the strange career of American Puritanism. In Transcendentalism, the mysticism of Jonathan Edwards was turned loose in an un- Edwardsian universe, one in which Nature took the place of God and the sense of sin itself had begun to evaporate. This sounds very much like a highbrow version of Finney’s theology. The comparison is apt. Transcendentalism was, in effect, the evangelicalism of the New England intellectuals. Like mainstream evangelicalism, it sought to overthrow the established authority of denominational hierarchies and social elites and to ground religious affirmations in the authority of individual experience. To be sure, in taking such a position, it subtracted such inconvenient evangelical distinctives as, say, a belief in the divinity of Christ, in born-again conversion, in the sacred and binding authority of the Bible, and in the imperative to work actively for social reform. It was too free-floating, skeptical, and self-satisfied for any of that. But still, the Transcendentalist movement needs to be understood as part of the expansive, hopeful, experimental, and sometimes utterly cockamamie spirit of antebellum American reform – a moment when America seemed ready to reconsider all existing social arrangements and precedents. The specific establishment against which Transcendentalism was rebelling was Unitarianism, which was itself an intellectually liberal (though politically conservative) rebellion against the old-line official Calvinism of the Congregational church, and as idiosyncratic a New England institution as one could ever hope to find. Emerson’s own family had faithfully traced the path of this portion of religious history. Emerson himself was the offspring of a long line of ministers in that tradition, including his Unitarian-minister father William, whom Emerson followed into the Unitarian ministry after first attending Unitarian-controlled Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School. Not long after moving into the pulpit, however, Emerson found himself restless and discontented with the airless rationalism and empty formalism of “corpse-cold” Unitarian theology and worship. Unitarianism, which itself started out as an insurgency, had with amazing speed become a byword for smug complacency and conformity. “Nothing,” remarked the acerbic historian Henry Adams, who knew that old Bostonian world well, “quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy…. They had solved the universe, or had offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was worked out.” They were too self-satisfied for their own good, too obsessed with outward form, too inattentive to the spark of inner life. Unitarianism had come to power with the promise of a greater theological freedom than what hard-shell Calvinism offered, but by defaulting to outward form, it failed to deliver on the expectations it had aroused. It would quickly be devoured by the very revolution it had started. Emerson’s discontent with this state of affairs finally led him, in 1832, to resign his clerical position at Boston’s prestigious Second Church, even without any clear notion of what was to come next. But a substantial legacy left him by his recently deceased wife, Ellen, gave him breathing room and a chance to reorder his life. After a period of travel in Europe, in which he met Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, and some of his other intellectual idols, Emerson resolved to set himself up as an independent writer and speaker, whose efforts would gain support and sustenance from the widening public interest in self-improvement and unconventional religious and spiritual explorations. He was America’s first freelance intellectual. A critical moment in his development was his delivery in 1837 of the annual Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, a challenging, occasionally taunting speech which would become known as “The American Scholar” and which would finally launch him in his newly conceived role. A memorable plea for American cultural independence and originality, a blunt challenge to the sodden academicism of Harvard, and a life plan for passionately independent minds like his own, “The American Scholar” would in due course become one of the most celebrated academic lectures in American history. “Mr. President and Gentlemen,” it concludes, this confidence in the unsearched might of man, belongs by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame…. Not so, brothers and friends, please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds…. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men. It helps to imagine that the leading lights of the Unitarian elite were staring back at him from the audience, an audience that included such establishment dignitaries as Supreme Court justice Joseph Story and Massachusetts governor Edward Everett. The bold act of delivering such a speech before such an august group was a brave assertion of what Emerson would soon call “self-reliance,” a deed of self-definition that validated Emerson’s new role in the very act of presenting it to the world. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the father of the famous Supreme Court judge, referred to “The American Scholar” as America’s intellectual Declaration of Independence, and the comparison was very apt. Emerson saw the American Revolution as a beacon to all of humanity and believed that the embattled farmers of his beloved Concord had indeed fired “the shot heard round the world,” in the words of his own patriotic poem called “Concord Hymn” – probably the best-known words Emerson ever wrote. Hence, when he called for Americans to cease taking their cues from “the courtly muses of Europe,” he was not advocating a withdrawal into provincialism. He was urging that America find its distinctive voice at last. He thought that America was uniquely situated, by virtue of its history and current circumstances, to achieve something new under the sun – politically, socially, intellectually – and to do so for the sake not only of itself but of all humanity. But it would fulfill its mission to humanity precisely by being most fully itself – a principle that Emerson also saw reflected in individual life, where he sought to promote the ideal of expansive, unfettered liberty. See, for example, the swaggering energy of these words extracted from his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance”: Whoso would be a man, must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. The great man is he who in the midst of a crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool’s word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. If there is brag and bluster in these words, they also are very American words. So too, though, were Emerson’s entirely different words in the Harvard speech, calling for a new understanding of ordinary life, one that reflected unprecedentedly democratic and capacious norms. “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic,” he wrote. “I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.” Instead of the elite European emphasis upon the doings of heroes and kings and queens and aristocrats, he pleaded for something new: a literature that exalts the people and things that the courtly muses had never deigned to take notice of, a literature “of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life.” It was the thrilling paradox of Emerson’s idea of democratic culture that it could include both the grandeur of the uncoerced and nonconforming mind and a tender respect for the ordinary details of everyday existence, admitting no contradiction between the two. Others in the Concord circle who felt Emerson’s influence also became influential in their own right. Henry David Thoreau, who was Emerson’s neighbor and something of a protégé, tried to put Emerson’s ideas of self-reliance to the test and spent over two years living alone in a cabin on Walden Pond, spending most of his time in reflection and writing. Out of that experience of enforced simplicity and economy came one of the finest books in the American literary tradition, his Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), a wondrous blend of spiritual reflection, hard-edged social criticism, and keen naturalistic observation. Thoreau announced his intentions with these opening words: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Nathaniel Hawthorne was also a product of the same circle, even if in some ways a contrarian participant. Ever since his student days at Bowdoin College, where he had become friendly with classmate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and after hearing Longfellow’s 1825 commencement address, “Our Native Writers,” he had been afire with the idea of realizing the dream of creating a truly American literature. And indeed Hawthorne was arguably the first to achieve it; his 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter was a great breakthrough, the first great American novel, a work that would be read and respected world over. He shared an enthusiasm for many aspects of the romantic rebellion, questioning the scientific worldview and delighting in stories that were replete with supernatural and uncanny elements. But Hawthorne dissented from the optimism of the others. Instead he stalked the era’s official optimism like a shadowy apparition, propelled by a spirit of inherited Puritan skepticism, and he did so all the way up to the cataclysm of the Civil War. His early stories, collected as Twice-Told Tales (1837), made use of the New England past to explore issues of sin and guilt, the issue to which he brought a master’s touch in The Scarlet Letter, a penetrating analysis of a Puritan community’s sinfully cruel treatment of an adulterous woman. He wrote his novel Blithedale Romance (1852) as a wry put-down of the utopian delusions behind the Brook Farm experiment in communal living, in which he participated. His entire oeuvre can be thought of as a stern and consistent rebuke to the giddy optimism of his age and the false hopes and hidden terrors it failed to recognize. And yet he, too, was quintessentially American: as American as Emerson, as American as the Puritans. And then there was Herman Melville. Although a New Yorker by birth and only occasionally a member of the Concord circle, Melville was a friend and an enormous admirer, to the point of adulation, of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was under the influence of Hawthorne that he took the fateful turn in his writing that led him to produce Moby- Dick (1851), arguably the greatest of all American novels. That sprawling, melodramatic, rollicking, and searingly tragic drama of the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod in search of the Great White Whale under the direction of the mad and relentless Captain Ahab was based upon Melville’s experience. He had gone to sea as a young man – “a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” he said – and learned much about the extremities of life. On one voyage to the South Sea islands, he jumped ship, had many adventures, was captured by cannibals, participated in a mutiny, and came home with a huge treasury of stories and experiences. He drew on this treasury for a series of novels that were commercial successes but not especially memorable or enduring. Then, after meeting Hawthorne, he changed his objectives, and the result was Moby-Dick, a masterpiece of psychological insight and metaphysical ambiguity, in which everything from the anatomy of whales to the existence of God is up for discussion. Unfortunately, Melville drove off his sea-yarn-loving audience; Moby-Dick became a commercial failure, and it sank like a stone, remaining forgotten for the next seventy years, until it was rediscovered by scholars. Melville too sank into obscurity, although writing some excellent poetry about the Civil War and a posthumously published novella called Billy Budd, in which he returned to the subject of shipboard life and studied, to profound effect, how a ship captain very different from Ahab – he is named Vere, the “truth” – handled the ethic of responsibility, with all its tensions and terrors. Finally, the 1850s sees the emergence of the poet Walt Whitman, who is the most Jacksonian American writer of all. Unlike the Concord circle, he was a man of the city who adored the jagged contours and bustling crowds of the modern Brooklyn and Manhattan and wrote poetry about riding the ferry between them. There was not an ounce of snobbery in him, and he enjoyed mingling with all kinds of people, from the roughest street toughs to the habitués of grand opera houses. He worked for years as a journeyman editor for newspapers in Brooklyn, New York, and New Orleans, signing his material as “Walter” Whitman and showing little of the astonishingly original literary flair that would become his trademark. He had, however, read and digested Emerson, and when his first book, Leaves of Grass, appeared in 1855, he sent it to Emerson, who hailed it as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that American has yet contributed.” The book featured a frontispiece with a picture of Whitman, dressed in worker’s garb, with his undershirt visible and his hat cocked provocatively at a rakish angle. He was, he went on, “not a bit tamed – I too am untranslatable; / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Writing in free unrhymed verse, using uncustomary and even startling images – the odors and passions of the body, the occupations of bricklayers and prostitutes – he presented all of reality as equally worthy of his attention, the ultimate democracy of the mind and heart and spirit. At times, it could all seem like an undifferentiated mess, and Whitman, too, took many years to find his proper audience. He was, and is, easy to mock. But the British writer and critic D.H.Lawrence recognized in Whitman an achievement going beyond the literary, expressing the emerging culture of democracy, not only as it was but as it could be, better than anyone else had yet done: Whitman’s essential message was the Open Road. The leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and to the loom of the open road. Which is the bravest doctrine man has  ever proposed to himself…. The true democracy, where soul meets soul, in the open road. It is finally a doctrine of human dignity, of the infinite worth of the single and individual soul – the deepest aspiration of the age it represented.