Political and Social Milestones 1800–1860
Westward Ho! The Louisiana Purchase, 1803
The biggest land deal in history, the Louisiana Purchase, was settled between France and the United States in 1803. President Thomas Jefferson negotiated the purchase of all the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Mexico and Canada for fifteen million dollars. At a cost of about four cents an acre, the area of the United States was immediately doubled, and a century of westward expansion was launched
The Gold Rush, 1849
In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California. By 1849, tens of thousands of Americans traveled west, hoping to strike it rich. Gold rushes continued through the rest of the century, from Colorado to Alaska. The rush for gold left many prospectors with broken lives and dreams, but it also led to the founding of new towns and cities all across the country and to the building of the first transcontinental railroads.
Education and Reform
New England was long known for its interest in self-improvement and intellectual inquiry. In 1826, the lyceum movement began in Millbury, Massachusetts. Lyceum organizations had a number of goals, including educating adults, training teachers, establishing museums, and instituting social reforms. A typical part of a lyceum program was a course of winter lectures. One of the most popular speakers was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The reform movement was also centered in New England. Horace Mann fought to improve public education. Dorothea Dix sought to relieve the horrible conditions in institutions for the mentally ill. William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists struggled to put an end to slavery. Feminists like Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, and Emma Willard campaigned for women’s rights.
The abounding interest in social causes stirred up ideas both reasonable and crackpot. Numerous utopian projects—plans for creating a more perfect society—were developed.
The journey—there is probably no pattern so common in all of narrative literature, from the Bible to Homer’s Odyssey to films like The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars. Very early in The Autobiography (page 69), Benjamin Franklin describes an important American journey: a personal quest in which the young Ben leaves his home in Boston and travels to Philadelphia. The significance of Franklin’s journey is clear: It is a declaration of independence, a move away from his family, toward a new city where he might prosper. It is, in other words, a quest for opportunity. Without stretching the metaphor greatly, we can see in Franklin’s journey an expression of both his personal goals and the goals of eighteenth-century America: a reaching out for independence, prosperity, and commerce.
Franklin wrote about his journey to Philadelphia in 1771. In 1799, the American writer Charles Brockden Brown described a very different journey to Philadelphia in his Romantic novel Arthur Mervyn. In this tale the hero, a young farm boy, leaves his home in the country for Philadelphia. Instead of finding a place of promise where he can make his dreams come true, the boy is plunged into a plague-ridden urban world of decay, corruption, and evil. The Philadelphia of this novel is no city of promise; it is an industrial hell.
These journeys described in Franklin’s autobiography and Brown’s Arthur Mervyn make clear the differences between the views of the rationalists and those of the Romantics. To Franklin and other rationalists the city was a place to find success and self-realization. To the Romantic writers who came after Franklin, the city was far from the seat of civilization; it was often a place of shifting morals and, worse, corruption and death.
The characteristic Romantic journey is to the countryside, which Romantics associated with independence, moral clarity, and healthful living. Sometimes, as shown in the works of writers like Edgar Allan Poe (page 277), the Romantic journey is a psychological voyage to the country of the imagination. Whatever the destination of the Romantic journey, it is a flight both from something and to something.
The Romantic Sensibility: Celebrating Imagination
In general, Romanticism is the name given to those schools of thought that value feeling and intuition over reason. The first rumblings of Romanticism were felt in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. Romanticism had a strong influence on literature, music, and painting in Europe and England well into the nineteenth century. But Romanticism came relatively late to America, and as you will see in this chapter, it took different forms.
Romanticism, especially in Europe, developed in part as a reaction against rationalism. In the sooty wake of the Industrial Revolution, with its squalid cities and wretched working conditions, people had come to realize the limits of reason. The Romantics believed that the imagination was able to discover truths that the rational mind could not reach. These truths were usually accompanied by powerful emotion and associated with natural, unspoiled beauty. To the Romantics, imagination, individual feelings, and wild nature were of greater value than reason, logic, and cultivation. The Romantics did not flatly reject logical thought as invalid for all purposes; but for the purpose of art, they placed a new premium on intuitive, “felt” experience.
To the Romantic mind, poetry was the highest embodiment of the imagination. Romantic artists often contrasted poetry with science, which they saw as destroying the very truth it claimed to seek. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, called science a “vulture” with wings of “dull realities,” preying on the hearts of poets
The City, Grim and Gray
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the largest American cities were Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and, largest of all, New York. Between 1820 and 1840, the population of New York more than doubled, from 124,000 to 312,000 people. In the 1830s, the first tenements were built—buildings where a bathtub might be shared by four hundred people and eight or more people might live in a single room without furniture. The soundtrack to this scene might be provided by the bloodcurdling screeches of chickens being slaughtered indoors for the night’s meal.
The city streets were fouled with droppings from the main source of transportation: horses. When a horse collapsed or was injured, it was left to die on the curbside. Its body might remain on the street for days or weeks at a time. Given such conditions, it’s no surprise that disease was rampant. In Manhattan during the summer of 1832, one third of the city’s population—those who could afford to leave—left the city to escape a cholera epidemic that killed an average of one hundred people a day.
There were twenty thousand homeless children on the streets of New York. Some worked in sweatshops, some sold toothpicks or newspapers, and others turned to petty crime. If the children lived to be twenty, they were lucky; disease, accidents, exposure, violence, and starvation took most of them long before that time.
Crime and violence were no strangers to the city. Waterfront gangs often included “pirates” who would kill for next to nothing. On the infamous Cherry Street, fifteen thousand sailors were robbed in a single year. There were even riots on the streets: In 1834, men opposed to the abolition of slavery burned down homes, churches, and a school, trying to destroy free African Americans and their supporters.
There was one bright spot in this picture of squalor and degradation, though: talk in the 1840s of constructing a huge city park for “health and recreation.” It was the poet William Cullen Bryant’s idea—a dream of bringing the countryside to a city wracked with poverty, illness, and crime. New Yorkers would have to wait until after the Civil War for their oasis: Central Park would not become a completed reality until 1876.
The American Novel and the Wilderness Experience
During the Romantic period, the big question about American literature was: Would American writers continue to imitate the English and European models, or would they finally develop a distinctive literature of their own? While the Romantic poets of the period were still staying close to traditional forms, American novelists were discovering that the subject matter available to them was very different from the subjects available to European writers. America provided a sense of limitless frontiers that Europe, so long settled, simply did not possess. Thus, the development of the American novel coincided with westward expansion, with the growth of a nationalist spirit, and with the rapid spread of cities. All these factors tended to reinforce the idealization of frontier life. A geography of the imagination developed, in which town, country, and frontier would play a powerful role in American life and literature—as they continue to do today.
We can see how the novel developed in America by looking at the career of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851). Cooper explored uniquely American settings and characters: frontier communities, American Indians, backwoodsmen, and the wilderness of western New York and Pennsylvania. Most of all he created the first American heroic figure: Natty Bumppo (also known as Hawkeye, Deerslayer, and Leather-stocking). Natty was a heroic, virtuous, skillful frontiersman whose simple morality, love of nature, distrust of town life, and almost superhuman resourcefulness mark him as a true Romantic hero.
We can see how the novel developed in America by looking at the career of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851). Cooper explored uniquely American settings and characters: frontier communities, American Indians, backwoodsmen, and the wilderness of western New York and Pennsylvania. Most of all he created the first American heroic figure: Natty Bumppo (also known as Hawkeye, Deerslayer, and Leather-stocking). Natty was a heroic, virtuous, skillful frontiersman whose simple morality, love of nature, distrust of town life, and almost superhuman resourcefulness mark him as a true Romantic hero.
■ A New Kind of Hero
Most Europeans had an image of the American as unsophisticated and uncivilized. This was a stereotype that Ben Franklin, when he lived in France, took great pains to demonstrate was unfair and untrue. Cooper and other Romantic novelists who followed him, though, took no such pains. Instead, by creating such heroes as Natty Bumppo they turned the insult on its head. Virtue, the Romantics implied, was in American innocence, not in European sophistication. Eternal truths were waiting to be discovered not in dusty libraries, crowded cities, or glittering court life, but in the American wilderness that was unknown and unavailable to Europeans.
Cooper’s Natty Bumppo is a triumph of American innocence and an example of one of the most important outgrowths of the early American novel: the American Romantic hero. Here was a new kind of heroic figure, one quite different from the hero of the Age of Reason. The rationalist hero—exemplified by a real-life figure such as Ben Franklin—was worldly, educated, sophisticated, and bent on making a place for himself in civilization. The typical hero of American Romantic fiction, on the other hand, was youthful, innocent, intuitive, and close to nature. By today’s standards the hero was also hopelessly uneasy with women, who were usually seen (by male writers, at least) to represent civilization and the impulse to “domesticate.”
Today Americans still create Romantic heroes; the twentieth-and twenty-first-century descendants of Natty Bumppo are all around us. They can be found in dozens of pop-culture heroes—the Lone Ranger, Superman, Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones—and any number of other western, detective, and fantasy heroes.
American Romantic Poetry: Read at Every Fireside
The American Romantic novelists looked for new subject matter and new themes, but the opposite tendency appears in the works of the Romantic poets. Like Franklin, these Romantic poets wanted to prove that Americans were not unsophisticated hicks. They attempted to prove this by working solidly within European literary traditions rather than by crafting a unique American voice. Even when they constructed poems with American settings and subject matter, the American Romantic poets used typically English themes, meter, and imagery. In a sense they wrote in a style that a cultivated person from England who had recently immigrated to America might be expected to use.
In fact, the Fireside Poets—as the Boston group of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (page 194), John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell was called—were, in their own time and for many decades afterward, the most popular poets America had ever produced. They were called Fireside Poets because their poems were read aloud at the fireside as family entertainment. They were also sometimes called Schoolroom Poets, because their poems were for many years memorized in every American classroom.
The Dark Romantics
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe valued intuition over logic and reason. Like the Puritans before them, saw signs and symbols in all events, as Anne Bradstreet found spiritual significance in the fire that destroyed her house.
The Dark Romantics didn’t disagree with Emerson’s belief that spiritual facts lie behind the appearances of nature; they just did not think that those facts are necessarily good or harmless. Others, they felt, had taken the ecstatic, mystical elements of Puritan thought and ignored its dark side—its emphasis on Original Sin, its sense of the innate wickedness of human beings, and its notions of predestination. The Dark Romantics came along to correct the balance. Their view of existence developed from both the mystical and the melancholy aspects of Puritan thought. In their works they explored the conflict between good and evil, the psychological effects of guilt and sin, and even madness in the human psyche. Behind the pasteboard masks of social respectability, the Dark Romantics saw the blankness and the horror of evil. From this imaginative, unflinching vision they shaped a uniquely American literature.
Westward Ho! The Louisiana Purchase, 1803
The biggest land deal in history, the Louisiana Purchase, was settled between France and the United States in 1803. President Thomas Jefferson negotiated the purchase of all the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Mexico and Canada for fifteen million dollars. At a cost of about four cents an acre, the area of the United States was immediately doubled, and a century of westward expansion was launched
The Gold Rush, 1849
In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California. By 1849, tens of thousands of Americans traveled west, hoping to strike it rich. Gold rushes continued through the rest of the century, from Colorado to Alaska. The rush for gold left many prospectors with broken lives and dreams, but it also led to the founding of new towns and cities all across the country and to the building of the first transcontinental railroads.
Education and Reform
New England was long known for its interest in self-improvement and intellectual inquiry. In 1826, the lyceum movement began in Millbury, Massachusetts. Lyceum organizations had a number of goals, including educating adults, training teachers, establishing museums, and instituting social reforms. A typical part of a lyceum program was a course of winter lectures. One of the most popular speakers was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The reform movement was also centered in New England. Horace Mann fought to improve public education. Dorothea Dix sought to relieve the horrible conditions in institutions for the mentally ill. William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists struggled to put an end to slavery. Feminists like Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, and Emma Willard campaigned for women’s rights.
The abounding interest in social causes stirred up ideas both reasonable and crackpot. Numerous utopian projects—plans for creating a more perfect society—were developed.
The journey—there is probably no pattern so common in all of narrative literature, from the Bible to Homer’s Odyssey to films like The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars. Very early in The Autobiography (page 69), Benjamin Franklin describes an important American journey: a personal quest in which the young Ben leaves his home in Boston and travels to Philadelphia. The significance of Franklin’s journey is clear: It is a declaration of independence, a move away from his family, toward a new city where he might prosper. It is, in other words, a quest for opportunity. Without stretching the metaphor greatly, we can see in Franklin’s journey an expression of both his personal goals and the goals of eighteenth-century America: a reaching out for independence, prosperity, and commerce.
Franklin wrote about his journey to Philadelphia in 1771. In 1799, the American writer Charles Brockden Brown described a very different journey to Philadelphia in his Romantic novel Arthur Mervyn. In this tale the hero, a young farm boy, leaves his home in the country for Philadelphia. Instead of finding a place of promise where he can make his dreams come true, the boy is plunged into a plague-ridden urban world of decay, corruption, and evil. The Philadelphia of this novel is no city of promise; it is an industrial hell.
These journeys described in Franklin’s autobiography and Brown’s Arthur Mervyn make clear the differences between the views of the rationalists and those of the Romantics. To Franklin and other rationalists the city was a place to find success and self-realization. To the Romantic writers who came after Franklin, the city was far from the seat of civilization; it was often a place of shifting morals and, worse, corruption and death.
The characteristic Romantic journey is to the countryside, which Romantics associated with independence, moral clarity, and healthful living. Sometimes, as shown in the works of writers like Edgar Allan Poe (page 277), the Romantic journey is a psychological voyage to the country of the imagination. Whatever the destination of the Romantic journey, it is a flight both from something and to something.
The Romantic Sensibility: Celebrating Imagination
In general, Romanticism is the name given to those schools of thought that value feeling and intuition over reason. The first rumblings of Romanticism were felt in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. Romanticism had a strong influence on literature, music, and painting in Europe and England well into the nineteenth century. But Romanticism came relatively late to America, and as you will see in this chapter, it took different forms.
Romanticism, especially in Europe, developed in part as a reaction against rationalism. In the sooty wake of the Industrial Revolution, with its squalid cities and wretched working conditions, people had come to realize the limits of reason. The Romantics believed that the imagination was able to discover truths that the rational mind could not reach. These truths were usually accompanied by powerful emotion and associated with natural, unspoiled beauty. To the Romantics, imagination, individual feelings, and wild nature were of greater value than reason, logic, and cultivation. The Romantics did not flatly reject logical thought as invalid for all purposes; but for the purpose of art, they placed a new premium on intuitive, “felt” experience.
To the Romantic mind, poetry was the highest embodiment of the imagination. Romantic artists often contrasted poetry with science, which they saw as destroying the very truth it claimed to seek. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, called science a “vulture” with wings of “dull realities,” preying on the hearts of poets
The City, Grim and Gray
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the largest American cities were Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and, largest of all, New York. Between 1820 and 1840, the population of New York more than doubled, from 124,000 to 312,000 people. In the 1830s, the first tenements were built—buildings where a bathtub might be shared by four hundred people and eight or more people might live in a single room without furniture. The soundtrack to this scene might be provided by the bloodcurdling screeches of chickens being slaughtered indoors for the night’s meal.
The city streets were fouled with droppings from the main source of transportation: horses. When a horse collapsed or was injured, it was left to die on the curbside. Its body might remain on the street for days or weeks at a time. Given such conditions, it’s no surprise that disease was rampant. In Manhattan during the summer of 1832, one third of the city’s population—those who could afford to leave—left the city to escape a cholera epidemic that killed an average of one hundred people a day.
There were twenty thousand homeless children on the streets of New York. Some worked in sweatshops, some sold toothpicks or newspapers, and others turned to petty crime. If the children lived to be twenty, they were lucky; disease, accidents, exposure, violence, and starvation took most of them long before that time.
Crime and violence were no strangers to the city. Waterfront gangs often included “pirates” who would kill for next to nothing. On the infamous Cherry Street, fifteen thousand sailors were robbed in a single year. There were even riots on the streets: In 1834, men opposed to the abolition of slavery burned down homes, churches, and a school, trying to destroy free African Americans and their supporters.
There was one bright spot in this picture of squalor and degradation, though: talk in the 1840s of constructing a huge city park for “health and recreation.” It was the poet William Cullen Bryant’s idea—a dream of bringing the countryside to a city wracked with poverty, illness, and crime. New Yorkers would have to wait until after the Civil War for their oasis: Central Park would not become a completed reality until 1876.
The American Novel and the Wilderness Experience
During the Romantic period, the big question about American literature was: Would American writers continue to imitate the English and European models, or would they finally develop a distinctive literature of their own? While the Romantic poets of the period were still staying close to traditional forms, American novelists were discovering that the subject matter available to them was very different from the subjects available to European writers. America provided a sense of limitless frontiers that Europe, so long settled, simply did not possess. Thus, the development of the American novel coincided with westward expansion, with the growth of a nationalist spirit, and with the rapid spread of cities. All these factors tended to reinforce the idealization of frontier life. A geography of the imagination developed, in which town, country, and frontier would play a powerful role in American life and literature—as they continue to do today.
We can see how the novel developed in America by looking at the career of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851). Cooper explored uniquely American settings and characters: frontier communities, American Indians, backwoodsmen, and the wilderness of western New York and Pennsylvania. Most of all he created the first American heroic figure: Natty Bumppo (also known as Hawkeye, Deerslayer, and Leather-stocking). Natty was a heroic, virtuous, skillful frontiersman whose simple morality, love of nature, distrust of town life, and almost superhuman resourcefulness mark him as a true Romantic hero.
We can see how the novel developed in America by looking at the career of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851). Cooper explored uniquely American settings and characters: frontier communities, American Indians, backwoodsmen, and the wilderness of western New York and Pennsylvania. Most of all he created the first American heroic figure: Natty Bumppo (also known as Hawkeye, Deerslayer, and Leather-stocking). Natty was a heroic, virtuous, skillful frontiersman whose simple morality, love of nature, distrust of town life, and almost superhuman resourcefulness mark him as a true Romantic hero.
■ A New Kind of Hero
Most Europeans had an image of the American as unsophisticated and uncivilized. This was a stereotype that Ben Franklin, when he lived in France, took great pains to demonstrate was unfair and untrue. Cooper and other Romantic novelists who followed him, though, took no such pains. Instead, by creating such heroes as Natty Bumppo they turned the insult on its head. Virtue, the Romantics implied, was in American innocence, not in European sophistication. Eternal truths were waiting to be discovered not in dusty libraries, crowded cities, or glittering court life, but in the American wilderness that was unknown and unavailable to Europeans.
Cooper’s Natty Bumppo is a triumph of American innocence and an example of one of the most important outgrowths of the early American novel: the American Romantic hero. Here was a new kind of heroic figure, one quite different from the hero of the Age of Reason. The rationalist hero—exemplified by a real-life figure such as Ben Franklin—was worldly, educated, sophisticated, and bent on making a place for himself in civilization. The typical hero of American Romantic fiction, on the other hand, was youthful, innocent, intuitive, and close to nature. By today’s standards the hero was also hopelessly uneasy with women, who were usually seen (by male writers, at least) to represent civilization and the impulse to “domesticate.”
Today Americans still create Romantic heroes; the twentieth-and twenty-first-century descendants of Natty Bumppo are all around us. They can be found in dozens of pop-culture heroes—the Lone Ranger, Superman, Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones—and any number of other western, detective, and fantasy heroes.
American Romantic Poetry: Read at Every Fireside
The American Romantic novelists looked for new subject matter and new themes, but the opposite tendency appears in the works of the Romantic poets. Like Franklin, these Romantic poets wanted to prove that Americans were not unsophisticated hicks. They attempted to prove this by working solidly within European literary traditions rather than by crafting a unique American voice. Even when they constructed poems with American settings and subject matter, the American Romantic poets used typically English themes, meter, and imagery. In a sense they wrote in a style that a cultivated person from England who had recently immigrated to America might be expected to use.
In fact, the Fireside Poets—as the Boston group of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (page 194), John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell was called—were, in their own time and for many decades afterward, the most popular poets America had ever produced. They were called Fireside Poets because their poems were read aloud at the fireside as family entertainment. They were also sometimes called Schoolroom Poets, because their poems were for many years memorized in every American classroom.
The Dark Romantics
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe valued intuition over logic and reason. Like the Puritans before them, saw signs and symbols in all events, as Anne Bradstreet found spiritual significance in the fire that destroyed her house.
The Dark Romantics didn’t disagree with Emerson’s belief that spiritual facts lie behind the appearances of nature; they just did not think that those facts are necessarily good or harmless. Others, they felt, had taken the ecstatic, mystical elements of Puritan thought and ignored its dark side—its emphasis on Original Sin, its sense of the innate wickedness of human beings, and its notions of predestination. The Dark Romantics came along to correct the balance. Their view of existence developed from both the mystical and the melancholy aspects of Puritan thought. In their works they explored the conflict between good and evil, the psychological effects of guilt and sin, and even madness in the human psyche. Behind the pasteboard masks of social respectability, the Dark Romantics saw the blankness and the horror of evil. From this imaginative, unflinching vision they shaped a uniquely American literature.