3 (page 37)p. 37From republican to Romantic: 1800–1850

In the early years of the republic, as Americans built a new nation, the Enlightenment’s intellectual commitments were neither fully realized nor forgotten. “Reason” and “virtue” still gripped the imagination of American political figures, clergy, writers, and their publics. But rapid population growth, westward expansion, urbanization, and industrialization, along with political experiments (and failures) in democracy abroad, put intense pressure on American Enlightenment ideas. The desire for the enlightened republican vision of a government of independent landowners ensured that white freedom would continue to be predicated on Black exploitation and Native Americans’ dispossession of their ancestral lands and their ways of life.

While few professed to be able to read the mind of God, many vocal proponents of westward expansion were convinced that his desire for white Christendom’s transcontinental destiny was manifest. Improvements to technology and the market revolution helped provide critical infrastructure for the new nation, but they also caused many observers to worry that technological and economic advances were outpacing human development and threatening individual autonomy. Nevertheless, those same critics made use of the communications revolution to spread their Romantic visions of alternative paths. Republican ideals fused (page 38)p. 38with new Romantic sensibilities in response to the changing political and social conditions of the early republic.

All of these dramatic changes transformed the ways Americans thought. Antebellum Americans learned from the Revolutionary War that human beings did indeed have it within their power to make, remake, or even destroy worlds. What persisted was a frame of mind with an emboldened sense of human agency and power but also one frightfully aware of the impermanence and instability of their new nation. The desire to remake worlds can be seen in the flurry of evangelical revivals of the Second Great Awakening; utopian experiments including Brook Farm, Oneida, and Ceresco; and reform movements, such as antislavery, prison reform, temperance, and women’s rights. But the discomfort with too dramatic a change in customary ways of life helps explain the limits of their influence and, in some cases, their failures.

The most reliable commentators on a period are often those who lived through its changes, and this is especially true when that commentator is Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was as if Emerson had a divining rod to the inner yearnings, worries, and inconsistencies of antebellum Americans’ “modern mind.” He noted that Americans “believed that the nation existed for the individual. … This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision.” America produced a “mind [that] had become aware of itself.” Emerson, his Transcendentalist coconspirators, and many other critical thinkers of the day showed just what was possible—but also what was not—when enough Americans put this novel self-awareness to work to make a new world consonant with its founding ideals.

The notion of a new nation founded on ideals of its own choosing inspired the French-born American writer J. Hector St. John de (page 39)p. 39Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). In it he posed the memorable question, “What then is the American, this new man?” Crèvecœur thought the answer was both clear and compelling: “He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” In the decades to come, however, American commentators would wrestle with what it meant to leave behind all of their inheritances from Europe and continue to question just what exactly being American even meant.

Well into the nineteenth century it was clear that the Revolutionary War had ruptured America’s political ties to the king but not its cultural bonds with England and Continental Europe. Even with the considerable expansion of domestic manufacturing in the early republic, Americans who could afford imported consumer goods typically preferred them over those made in America. But of all the foreign goods in circulation, books were by far the most treasured. South Carolinians, for example, were more likely to read Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell (1804), which used the Swiss struggle for independence from the Habsburg Empire as a parable for the American Revolution, than The History of the American Revolution (1789), written by their native son David Ramsay. Few educated Americans in the early republic questioned the axiom that cultivation (what by the 1840s would be called culture) came from Europe. Even fewer noticed the inconsonance between their criticisms of European decadence and degeneracy and their own heavy reliance on Europe’s cultural and intellectual wares.

During the early republic, Americans’ consternation over the perceived absence of a native culture fostered efforts to build new intellectual institutions that could cultivate a liberated intellect and habits befitting a politically liberated people. One of the most important initiatives was spearheaded by the Connecticut educator Noah Webster, who had started his career as a (page 40)p. 40schoolteacher in 1778, witnessing firsthand the impediments to educating a citizenry for a republic. His experiences led him to the conclusion that language was as essential for shaping a distinct American identity as was literacy for supporting a fledgling democracy. Troubled that Americans’ language was wholly derivative of the English spoken and written in Britain, Webster set out to give Americans an English of their own. “Language,” he declared, “as well as government should be national. … America should have her own distinct from all the world.”

With this urgency in mind, Webster produced his “blue-backed” Spelling Book in 1783, which phonetically simplified and standardized spellings, quickly becoming the authority on American English. With the success of his speller (which was reprinted fifty times between 1783 and 1801 alone), he set out to further his cause by compiling the first dictionary of American English, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), to both give new authority to everyday words and set limits on the language of the new nation.

Throughout the early republic and well into the nineteenth century, there were continued efforts to foster a national culture that was more befitting a democracy while also marking the boundaries of a distinctly American identity. As the case of Prussian expatriate Francis Lieber shows, this urgent work fell even to recent American immigrants. Lieber had arrived in Boston in 1827 after having been persecuted for participating in liberal movements in Prussia, and he saw no better testament of his fidelity to the cause of liberal freedoms than to help provide Americans with an intellectual record of their own. He thus gave his new adopted homeland its very own Encyclopedia Americana (1829–33) as a way of documenting and cataloging knowledge necessary for a national body. Drawing on the rich tradition of German scholarship, he applied his knowledge and expertise to this Enlightenment enterprise, attempting to catalog, classify, and organize everything about the known (American) world. Thus, (page 41)p. 41Lieber, like so many immigrants to America before and after him, played a vital role in the making of an American national culture.

But despite all of these efforts, educated Americans still sought to keep abreast of intellectual developments in Europe. One of them was German Romanticism, which exalted the idea of a Volk (folk). The philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder provided the most bracing version of this notion when he mingled ideas about Kultur (culture) and Geist (spirit) to imagine a people knitted together by a common history, language, tradition, and sensibility. Propelled by the rudimentary nations taking shape in France and America, Herder’s Romantic impulse emphasized that only an organic Volksgeist—not social contracts, not laws, not leaders—could be the basis of a true Vaterland (fatherland), which was his preferred term for the modern “nation-state.”

Herder’s Romantic nationalism was an intoxicating brew. The only problem for his American readers was that their America did not have a Volk nurtured by a common Kultur, which was expressive of a singular Geist. And it certainly was no Fatherland—it was nothing other than a contractual arrangement. America was populated with peoples, but not a people, who, with the exception of the Indians, were all transplants from different parts of Europe, each with their own mother tongues, faith traditions, and cultural sensibilities. In fact, there was no substantive American anything prior to the creation of a nation by that name and solidified in the drafting of its Declaration of Independence, its early laws, and its formal Constitution. Indeed, that is precisely what made the American experiment seem so extraordinary and filled with promise just a few decades earlier.

With the influx of early Romantic ideas, this notion of national belonging as something one inherits rather than becomes would give some of Herder’s early nineteenth-century American readers pause. Without roots in collective memory and tribal bonds knitting the people to each other and to a homeland, was it even (page 42)p. 42possible to be a nation? And if so, what could legitimately serve as the basis for that nation’s collective imagination and affections? These were some of the questions that both vexed and energized many American thinkers for decades to come.

Beginning in the early 1830s, the desire to cultivate an intellectual life more expressive of American experience energized a loose circle of thinkers in and around Boston who came to be known as Transcendentalists. This diverse group of liberal theologians, Romantic writers, and social reformers included, among many others, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Bronson Alcott. They were a vibrant and unruly group of restless seekers hungry for novelty, eager to break out of their intellectually cramped religious inheritances, desperate to tap into the resplendent particularity of every individual soul, and ever struggling to find the balance between individual protest and social commitment.

Many Transcendentalists shared concerns that grew out of their backgrounds in Unitarianism. Though they affirmed the Unitarian belief in the human capacity for good, they regarded its heavy emphasis on reason over spirit as a “corpse-cold” way of being in the world. Trained as Unitarian ministers, Emerson, Parker, and Ripley took a different tack than the Congregationalist minister and leading light of nineteenth-century liberal theology Horace Bushnell. Though they read the same Bible, biblical criticism, and European Romanticism, the Unitarians typically took these intellectual influences to abandon theology as the prime realm of their intellectual work. Bushnell, however, used them to radically reinvent theology, thereby becoming a unique bridge figure between the Transcendentalists’ Romanticism and naturalism on the one hand and Calvinist supernaturalism and acceptance of original sin on the other.

(page 43)p. 43The Transcendentalists welcomed the notion of a transcendent realm of nature, but not a supernatural one, and therefore repudiated even the remaining traces of supernatural explanations in their own Unitarianism. They rejected the Unitarian belief that the miracles in the New Testament were proof of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Instead, they held that Christian doctrine was true and deserved assent not because it was proven by a few divine parlor tricks eighteen hundred years before, but because it was true self-evidently, universally, and timelessly. Likewise, the Transcendentalist ministers downplayed the unique divinity of Christ, arguing that all people were equally divine. This notion inspired Emerson in 1838 to “admonish” Harvard Divinity School graduates “first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.”

Though the central ideas of Transcendentalism come out of Unitarianism, much of its inspiration also comes from trends in European thought. The Transcendentalists gravitated to the British and German Romanticism and French communitarian ideals. Like their European counterparts, they also mined translated sources of Eastern philosophy and mysticism for the qualities they sought in themselves: awe, a sense of wholeness, and enchantment. They were cosmopolitan and ecumenical in their yearning for intellectual sources to guide the American democratic experiment and to inspire a new, liberated personality.

Emerson played a central role in this transnational whirl of Romantic texts and ideas. Though celebrated as the thinker who gave form to a distinctly American intellectual tradition, Emerson spent his career drawing attention to its shortcomings. He affirmed that the life of the mind was not only a life well lived but also essential to a vibrant democracy. And yet he worried that the democratic, capitalist forces in American antebellum life worked against the cultivation of the intellectual wealth of the commonwealth so vital to its own well-being. “The American (page 44)p. 44Scholar” (1837), his most concise meditation on the American mind, and one that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. exalted as the nation’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence,” nevertheless contains some of his most potent terms for describing an American mind indifferent to or incapable of sustained, rigorous intellectual engagement. Emerson expressed concern about a “people too busy [for] letters,” a society that thinks of human life in averages and aggregates, showing regard only for “exertions of mechanical skill” and no esteem for the reason and revelation wrought by philosophical inquiry and speculation. He describes Americans as caught up in the immediacy of making a living while forgetting what makes life worth living.

Emerson believed that the democratic mind could aim higher only by learning to express itself in terms of its own making. In his estimation, that enterprise meant a new style of thinking organic to and uniquely expressive of the American experience. He longed for an American intellect free from the bullying thoughts of foreign traditions: piety should be reserved for the process of one’s own thinking, not the product of another culture’s thought. He believed that this achievement was possible only when American intellect ended its “long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands” and stopped feeding on the “remains of foreign harvests.” All truths are achieved, not inherited; they are prospective, never retrospective.

Emerson’s vision of life in “Self-Reliance”—not as being, but as ever creatively becoming—retains the power to knock the wind out of its readers as much today as when it first appeared in 1841: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.” Emerson called his American intellectual (page 45)p. 45(page 46)p. 46ideal “Man Thinking,” and he considered him to be a figure capable of embodying this aboriginal power. He was the “plain old Adam, the simple genuine Self” with no history at his back who enjoys an original relationship with the universe.

All of the Transcendentalists developed their own terms for describing the direct, unmediated, radiant divinity of the self. For William Ellery Channing that was “likeness to God”; for Emerson it was “Over-soul”; Walt Whitman called it the “Song of Myself”; and Peabody described it as something for her male colleagues to avoid: “egotheism.” Two other favorites common to them all were “Genius” and “conscience.” Their paths to that higher self were as diverse as they were. For Lydia Maria Child, the trail led her to campaign for the rights of slaves, Native Americans, and women, while experimenting with different literary forms to make her case. For Ripley, following the economic depression of the 1840s, it led to the founding of the socialistic community of Brook Farm, based on a model of organic collectivization and flat labor hierarchies, as a corrective to the exploitation in the emergent capitalist economy. And for Thoreau, tapping into one’s higher self meant trying to figure out what a principled life in harmony with nature could look like at Walden Pond. That effort involved resisting a government that sanctions the moral abomination of slavery and finding various strategies (such as withholding one’s poll tax) to protest against unjust wars.

Altogether, the Transcendentalists took a variety of intellectual, social, and political paths to release the self from outworn beliefs, to free supplicants from exploitation, and to bring American culture into its own. Though they were exceptionally cosmopolitan in their reading and their appreciation of other cultures and ideas, the Transcendentalists were deeply committed to their New England heritage and to a vibrant future for the American republic. The path to this better future, they believed, followed the course of new thinking about the relationship between the individual and God and between independence and obligation.(page 47)p. 47

The movement of ideas rarely respects national borders. In the eighteenth century, the republic of letters fostered a transnational exchange of Enlightenment thought. A century before that, information about the New World and its inhabitants had a profound impact on European thinking and influenced the worldviews of those Europeans who crossed the Atlantic to build new lives there. The same is true with nineteenth-century Romanticism. The texts of its major poets, philosophers, and social theorists traversed the English Channel to and from Britain and the countries of northern Europe, across to America, and back again. But over the course of much of the nineteenth century, the traffic of intellectual exchanges did manage to respect one border: the 36°30´ parallel of the United States, set out by the Missouri Compromise in 1820 to demarcate free Northern from Southern slave states.

This is not to say that there were no cross-border intellectual transactions (indeed, white Northerners and white Southerners were reading many of the same texts), but rather that their mental and moral worlds grew steadily apart during the first half of the nineteenth century and that their competing economic systems had everything to do with it. Between 1774 and 1804, all Northern states gradually abolished slavery as they moved toward an industrialized economy, though the actual emancipation of slaves would prove slow and fitful. In the South, however, slavery increased exponentially (from roughly seven hundred thousand in 1790 to almost four million by the start of the Civil War). The hideous irony of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin of 1793 was that instead of decreasing the burdens of human labor on Southern plantations, it unleashed a rapacious demand for slaves as cotton became the nation’s most valuable commercial crop during the first half of the nineteenth century and America’s largest foreign export.

(page 48)p. 48As the North and South developed two very different (though interdependent) economic systems, so too did they develop two very different ways of viewing the world. The North had to wrestle with the question of free labor, with some observers dodging and others confronting the growing inequities in their emergent wage economy. But in the South, thinking about the slave economy was a very complicated affair because theirs was not simply a society with slavery but also a slave society whose whole political, social, and moral economies were built to justify the presence of a permanent labor force based on race. Chattel slavery animated the entire lived experience of the South, as well as white Southerners’ habits of mind to make sense of those experiences.

For the Virginia lawyer and slavery apologist George Fitzhugh, thinking in the South meant thinking about the Southern way of life and its superiority to that of the North. Rather than dodge the issue of slavery, he took it head-on. In Sociology for the South (1854), Fitzhugh noted that slavery was a more natural, organic way of organizing society than free labor, for it better preserved the mutual interdependence of one group with another. The master–slave relationship, much like feudal relationships in the past, recognized that the powerful group has both the ability and the responsibility to protect its subjects. He presented paternalist arguments for slavery as more humane than the “free” labor system emerging in the North: “[The slave economy] makes [our] society a band of brothers, working for the common good, instead of a bag of cats biting and worrying each other. The competitive system is a system of antagonism and war; ours of peace and fraternity. The first is the system of free society; the other that of slave society.”

Southern intellectual life and defenses of the “peculiar institution” went hand in glove, but never more so than in the writings of Louisa S. McCord. A highly educated South Carolinian mistress of a cotton plantation with more than two hundred slaves, McCord wrote ardent defenses of Southern slave society. In “Negro-Mania” (page 49)p. 49(1852), one of her many essays on the necessity and moral superiority of slavery, she put it plainly: “Is the negro made for slavery? God in heaven! What are we that, because we cannot understand the mystery of this Thy will, we should dare in rebellion and call it wrong, unjust, and cruel? The kindness of nature fits each creature to fulfill its destiny. The very virtues of the negro fit him for slavery, and his vices cry aloud for the checks of bondage.” She sought to make it clear to her readers that slavery was in perfect harmony with nature and God’s will and that any threat to eradicating it would upset the Southerners’ entire way of life, which was precisely as their Maker wanted it to be.

The vast majority of slaves in America were legally forbidden to learn to read (and write), so it was nearly impossible for them to come in contact with elaborate intellectual justifications for their servitude and suffering like Fitzhugh’s and McCord’s. But by necessity they had to learn to “read” their masters’, mistresses’, and overseers’ minds for sheer survival. Forced illiteracy did not mean that they had no elaborate mental and moral lives of their own. They did. Their mindscapes were created from the religious beliefs they brought with them from Africa, folk tales they told and remade in each telling to speak to the conditions of their enslavement, biblical songs or stories they learned from their owners, and their experience as human beings, albeit in the most inhumane of circumstances. Their greatest mental challenge lay not in constructing their own beliefs and viewpoints, but in jealously guarding them from their masters. As one African American folk song went, “Got one mind for white folks to see,/ ’Nother for what I know is me;/ He don’t know, he don’t know my mind.” There was nothing more threatening to a master than to admit to owning slaves who thought for themselves. Slaves knew that even thinking for themselves could be a punishable offense, and yet they persisted. Thus, when trying to access the intellectual worlds of the antebellum South, we find not only a split screen between white masters and their Black slaves but also one within the slaves’ minds, keeping their innermost thoughts to (page 50)p. 50themselves and projecting whatever acceptable thoughts could keep them from further torment, or even death.

Even slave narratives composed by former slaves fortunate enough to have been taught to read and write, or ingenious enough to figure out how to do so on their own, had to perform their own doublespeak. They strove to be forthcoming with their firsthand experiences of enslavement while risking nothing that could jeopardize the millions still held in captivity to the Southern way of life. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1798), Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) are the three most prominent examples of the form. Authors toggled between religious assertions and political arguments, fierce logic and emotional petition, and ethnographic detail and broad generalizations as they brought their readers as close to their pain as they could without making it pornographic.

Each of them, in their own way, expressed the very Romantic sensibilities and republican assumptions articulated by white authors. The main difference is that white authors had the luxury of coming to these ideas by way of books and polite conversation. The Black authors of slave narratives, by contrast, had to come to them by way of a daily struggle for survival.

Though the gulfs between the worldviews of Southerners and Northerners and Blacks and whites were deep and wide, all were, nevertheless, entangled in a struggle for control over their destinies in America, as Americans.

No single author can stand for an age. But if there was one figure who helps identify some of the central preoccupations of the (page 51)p. 51republican Romanticism of antebellum America, it would be Margaret Fuller.

Even if we split Fuller’s résumé in half, and then split those halves in half, just one of the cropped and quartered segments of her intellectual record has the power to astonish us. Fuller pioneered a dialogical mode of pedagogy called conversations. She served as editor of the Transcendentalists’ main organ, The Dial. She was widely recognized as a formidable interlocutor and the source of ideas for many of the major writers in the orbit of Boston and Concord. She was the one thinker Emerson knew personally whom he marveled at (perhaps with the exception of Thoreau), even if with a little discomfort at the imposing rigor and erudition of her mind. Fuller wrote the most important feminist manifesto of her day, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which has since become a classic of feminist philosophy. She served as a foreign correspondent in Europe, writing important dispatches about social and political developments there for readers back home. She was not content to be a witness to the democratic revolutions rocking Europe and the northern transatlantic world more broadly, so she participated in the Italian Risorgimento in Rome before dying at sea off the coast of Fire Island, New York, in 1849. And those are just the highlights. Most remarkable of all is that she pulled off this intellectual productivity in a culture that thought she should be seen (though not too much in public) and not heard.

But what makes Fuller such a compelling thinker not only of her age but also for ours is that she harmonized the warring intellectual and moral imperatives that vexed so many others of her day. She was the very model of antebellum “self-culture”: an average day for her involved studying French, Greek, and Italian; attending lectures on philosophy; practicing the piano and singing; taking long walks; conducting conversations; and writing in her journal. Egotheism was never her motivation; rather, her aim was to perfect herself so she could help perfect her society. (page 52)p. 52Likewise, she cultivated a cosmopolitan orientation to establish as large a moral and intellectual frame of reference as possible to help her readers hear themselves think over the din of a clamoring materialism. And though she longed for a kind of Emersonian self-sovereignty, she could not do so from the perspective of his “transparent eyeball,” nor did she seem to have any desire to do so. Balancing intellectual autonomy with the bounded perspective of dispossessed Native Americans, enslaved African Americans, and privileged white women who were nevertheless second-class citizens was good enough for her. Where Emerson called out to his reader to “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” and “Insist on yourself; never imitate,” Fuller wondered quietly instead, “Where can I hide till I am given to myself?” She thus had all of the Transcendentalist ambition to step outside the limitations of one’s culture and circumstance, while understanding intimately the structural constraints making that possible for some and impossible for others.

Emerson dared in 1837 to imagine a time when America would produce its own Man Thinking. He scanned the horizon far and wide, eager for signs of his advent. In this regard, Emerson was both a visionary and a man of his day. By searching yonder, he failed to notice that right there next to him in the Dial office, editing one of his essays or debating with him a finer point of his argument, was his Man Thinking, in the shape of a woman.