4.9

Much of America’s early culture reflected that of Britain and the other European countries from which settlers had come. With their independence assured by the early 19th century, Americans increasingly developed a culture of their own, often one with a strong nationalistic tone. However, Americans continued to be influenced by their European heritage and to look to Europe for new ideas. Furthermore, the growing national culture emerged at the same time regional variations of it became increasingly evident.

Cultural Nationalism

The generation of Americans that became adults in the first decades of the 19th century had concerns that differed from those of the nation’s founders. The young were excited about the prospects of the new nation expanding westward and had little interest in European politics now that the Napoleonic wars (as well as the War of 1812) were in the past. As fervent nationalists, they believed their young country was entering an era of unlimited prosperity. Patriotic themes infused every aspect of American society, from art to schoolbooks.

Revolutionary Heroes and Patriotic Education

Heroes of the Revolution were enshrined in the paintings by Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale, and John Trumbull. A fictionalized biography extolling the virtues of George Washington, written by Parson Mason Weems, was widely read. The expanding public schools embraced Noah Webster’s bluebacked speller, which promoted patriotism long before his famous dictionary was published. The basic ideas and ideals of nationalism and patriotism would dominate most of the 19th century.

Changing Culture: Ideas, the Arts, and Literature

In Europe, during the early years of the 19th century, artists and writers shifted away from the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, order, and balance and toward intuition, feelings, individual acts of heroism, and the study of nature. This new movement, known as romanticism, was most clearly expressed in the United States by the transcendentalists, a small group of New England thinkers.

The Transcendentalists

Writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau questioned the doctrines of established churches and the business practices of the merchant class. They argued for a mystical and intuitive way of thinking as a means for discovering one’s inner self and looking for the essence of God in nature. Their views challenged the materialism of American society by suggesting that artistic expression was more important than the pursuit of wealth. Although the transcendentalists valued individualism highly and downplayed the importance of organized institutions, they supported a variety of reforms, especially the antislavery movement.

Key Transcendentalist Figures

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
    The best-known transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a very popular American writer and speaker. His essays and lectures expressed the individualistic and nationalistic spirit of Americans by urging them not to imitate European culture but to create a distinctive American culture. He argued for self-reliance, independent thinking, and the primacy of spiritual matters over material ones. A northerner who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, Emerson became a leading critic of slavery in the 1850s and then an ardent supporter of the Union during the Civil War.

  • Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
    Also living in Concord and a close friend of Emerson was Henry David Thoreau. To test his transcendentalist philosophy, Thoreau conducted a two-year experiment of living simply in a cabin in the woods outside town. He used observations of nature to help him search for essential truths about life and the universe. Thoreau’s writings from these years were published in the book for which he is best known, Walden (1854). Because of this book, Thoreau is remembered today as a pioneer ecologist and conservationist. Though often detached from politics, Thoreau felt strongly that the U.S. war against Mexico (1846–1848) was immoral. To express his opposition, he refused to pay a tax that would support the war. For breaking the tax law, Thoreau was arrested and jailed. He stayed only one night—an unknown person paid his tax for him. Thoreau’s reflections on the necessity for disobeying unjust laws and accepting the penalty in his essay known as “On Civil Disobedience” added to his lasting fame. In the 20th century, Thoreau’s ideas and actions would inspire the nonviolent movements of both Mohandas Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States.

Communal Experiments

The idea of withdrawing from conventional society to create an ideal community, or utopia, in a fresh setting was not a new idea. But never before were social experiments so numerous as during the antebellum years. The open lands of the United States proved fertile ground for more than a hundred experimental communities.

Humanistic/Secular Experiments

  • Brook Farm
    In 1841, George Ripley, a Protestant minister, launched a communal experiment at Brook Farm in Massachusetts. His goal was to achieve “a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor.” Living at Brook Farm at times were some of the leading intellectuals of the period. Emerson went, as did Margaret Fuller, a feminist (advocate of women’s rights) writer and editor; Theodore Parker, a theologian and radical reformer; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novelist. A bad fire and heavy debts forced the end of the experiment in 1849. But Brook Farm was remembered for its atmosphere of artistic creativity, its innovative school, and its appeal to New England’s intellectual elite and their children.

  • New Harmony
    The secular (nonreligious) experiment in New Harmony, Indiana, was the work of the Welsh industrialist and reformer Robert Owen. Owen hoped his utopian socialist community would provide an answer to the problems of inequity and alienation caused by the Industrial Revolution. The experiment failed, however, as a result of both financial problems and disagreements among members of the community.

  • Fourier Phalanxes
    In the 1840s, the theories of the French socialist Charles Fourier attracted the interest of many Americans. In response to the problems of a fiercely competitive society, Fourier advocated that people share work and housing in communities known as Fourier Phalanxes. This movement died out quickly as Americans proved too individualistic to live communally.

Religious Communal Movements

The early members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints undertook one type of a religious communal effort (see Topic 4.10).

  • Shakers
    One of the earliest religious communal movements, the Shakers had about 6,000 members in various communities by the 1840s. Shakers held property in common and kept women and men strictly separate (forbidding marriage and sexual relations). For lack of new recruits, the Shaker communities virtually died out by the mid-1900s.

  • Amana Colonies
    The settlers of the Amana Colonies in Iowa were Germans who belonged to the religious reform movement known as Pietism. Like the Shakers, they emphasized simple, communal living. However, they allowed for marriage. Their communities continue to prosper, although they no longer practice their communal ways of living.

  • Oneida Community
    After undergoing a religious conversion, John Humphrey Noyes started a cooperative community in Oneida, New York, in 1848. Dedicated to an ideal of perfect social and economic equality, community members shared property and, later, marriage partners. Critics attacked the Oneida system of planned reproduction and communal child-rearing as a sinful experiment in “free love.” Despite the controversy, the community managed to prosper economically by producing and selling silverware of excellent quality.

Arts and Literature

The democratic and reforming impulses of the Age of Jackson expressed themselves in painting, architecture, and literature.

Painting

Genre painting—portraying the everyday life of ordinary people doing ordinary things such as riding riverboats and voting on election day— became popular among artists in the 1830s. For example, George Caleb Bingham depicted common people in various settings and carrying out domestic chores. William S. Mount won popularity for his lively rural compositions. Thomas Cole and Frederick Church emphasized the heroic beauty of American landscapes, especially in dramatic scenes along the Hudson River in New York state and the western frontier wilderness. The Hudson River School, as it was called, expressed the Romantic Age’s fascination with the natural world.

Architecture

Inspired by the democracy of classical Athens, American architects adapted Greek styles to glorify the democratic spirit of the republic. Columned facades like those of ancient Greek temples graced the entryways to public buildings, banks, hotels, and even some private homes.

Literature

In addition to the transcendentalist authors (notably Emerson and Thoreau), other writers helped to create a literature that was both Romantic and yet distinctively American. Partly as a result of the War of 1812, the American people became more nationalistic and eager to read works about American themes by American writers. Most prominent writers came from New England or the Mid-Atlantic states:

  • Washington Irving wrote fiction, such as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” using American settings.

  • James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales were a series of novels written from 1824 to 1841 that glorified the nobility of scouts and settlers on the American frontier.

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne questioned the intolerance and conformity in American life in short stories and novels, including The Scarlet Letter (1850).

  • Herman Melville’s innovative novel Moby-Dick (1855) reflected the theological and cultural conflicts of the era as it told the story of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of a white whale.

  • Edgar Allan Poe, like many Romantic writers, focused on irrational aspects of human behavior. His poems such as “The Raven” and short stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” portrayed mysterious or even horrifying events.