Nationalism and Romanticism in American Painting

• When Sydney Smith asked in 1820 who looked at an American painting, he was expressing the belief among European artists that they—and they alone—stood at the center of the world of art

• The most important and popular American paintings of the first half of the nineteenth century set out to evoke the wonder of the nation’s landscape

• Unlike their European counterparts, American painters did not favor gentle scenes of carefully cultivated countryside.

• They sought instead to capture the undiluted power of nature by portraying some of the nation’s wildest and most spectacular areas

Literature and the Quest for Liberation

• American readers in the first decades of the nineteenth century were relatively indifferent to the work of their nation’s own writers.

• The most popular novelist in America in these years was the British writer Sir Walter Scott

• The new literary concern with the unleashing of human emotions did not always produce such optimistic works, as the work of Herman Melville suggests.

Literature in the Antebellum South

• White southerners produced very different images of what that society was and should be

• One group of southern writers, however, produced works that were more broadly American and less committed to a glorification of the peculiarities of southern life.

• These southern realists established a tradition of American regional humor that was ultimately to find its most powerful voice in Mark Twain.

The Transcendentalists

• One of the outstanding expressions of the romantic impulse in America came from a group of New England writers and philosophers known as the transcendentalists.

• Borrowing heavily from German philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, and Schelling, and from the English writers Coleridge and Carlyle, the transcendentalists embraced a theory of the individual that rested on a distinction (first suggested by Kant) between what they called “reason” and “understanding”—words they used in ways that seem unfamiliar, even strange, to modern ears

• Transcendentalist philosophy emerged first among a small group of intellectuals centered in Concord, Massachusetts.

• Their leader and most eloquent voice was Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Living simply, Thoreau believed, was a desirable alternative to the rapidly modernizing world around him—a world, he believed, that the disruptive and intrusive railroad unhappily symbolized.

The Defense of Nature

• The transcendentalists, and others, feared the impact of the new capitalist enthusiasms on the integrity of the natural world

• Nature was not just a setting for economic activity, as many farmers, miners, and others believed; and it was not simply a body of data to be catalogued and studied, as many scientists thought.

• It was the source of human inspiration—the vehicle through which individuals could best realize the truth within their own souls

Visions of Utopia

• Although transcendentalism was above all an individualistic philosophy, it helped spawn the most famous of all nineteenth-century experiments in communal living

Redefining Gender Roles

• One of the principal concerns of many of the new utopian communities (and of the new social philosophies on which they rested) was the relationship between men and women.

• Transcendentalism and other movements of this period fostered expressions of a kind of feminism that would not gain a secure foothold in American society until the late twentieth century.

• One of those most responsible for raising issues of gender was Margaret Fuller

• A redefinition of gender roles was crucial to one of the most enduring utopian colonies of the nineteenth century

• The Oneida “Perfectionists,” as residents of the community called themselves, rejected traditional notions of family and marriage

• The Shakers, even more than the Oneidans, made a redefi - nition of traditional sexuality and gender roles central to their society

• The most distinctive feature of Shakerism, however, was its commitment to complete celibacy—which meant, of course, that no one could be born to Shakerism; all Shakers had to choose the faith voluntarily

The Mormons

• Among the most important efforts to create a new and more ordered society within the old was that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—the Mormons.

• Mormonism began in upstate New York as a result of the efforts of Joseph Smith, a young, energetic, but economically unsuccessful man, who had spent most of his twenty-four years moving restlessly through New England and the Northeast.

• Then, in 1830, he published a remarkable document— the Book of Mormon, named for the ancient prophet who he claimed had written it.

• In 1831, gathering a small group of believers around him, Smith began searching for a sanctuary for his new community of “saints,” an effort that would continue unhappily for more than twenty years.

• Time and again, the Mormons attempted to establish their “New Jerusalem.”

• Time and again, they met with persecution from surrounding communities suspicious of their radical religious doctrines—which included polygamy (the right of men to take several wives), a rigid form of social organization, and, particularly damaging to their image, an intense secrecy, which gave rise to wild rumors among their critics of conspiracy and depravity

• In one of the largest single group migrations in American history—and established a new community in Utah, the present Salt Lake City.

• There, at last, the Mormons were able to create a lasting settlement.

• Like other experiments in social organization of the era, Mormonism refl ected a belief in human perfectibility.

• God had once been a man, the church taught, and thus every man or woman could aspire to become—as Joseph Smith had become—a saint.

• But unlike other new communities, such as the Oneidans, the Mormons did not embrace the doctrine of individual liberty.

• Instead, they created a highly organized, centrally directed, almost militarized social structure, a refuge against the disorder and uncertainty of the secular world.

• They placed particular emphasis on the structure of the family.

• Mormon religious rituals even included a process by which men and women went through baptism ceremonies in the name of deceased ancestors; as a result, they believed, they would be reunited with those ancestors in heaven

• The original Mormons were, for the most part, men and women who felt displaced in their rapidly changing society— people left behind or troubled by the material growth and social progress of their era.

• In the new religion, they found genuine faith. In the society Mormonism created, they found security and order.

12.1: Remaking Society

Revivalism, Morality, and Order

• A second, and in many respects more important, the source was Protestant revivalism—the movement that had begun with the Second Great Awakening early in the century and had, by the 1820s, evolved into a powerful force for social reform

• Each person, he preached, contained within himself or herself the capacity to experience spiritual rebirth and achieve salvation.

• A revival of faith need not depend on a miracle from God; it could be created by individual effort.

• Revivalism became not only a means of personal salvation but also a mandate for the reform (and control) of their society

The Temperance Crusade

• Evangelical Protestantism added major strength to one of the most influential reform movements of the era: the crusade against drunkenness

• Women, who were particularly active in the temperance movement, claimed that alcoholism placed a special burden on wives: men spent money on alcohol that their families needed for basic necessities, and drunken husbands often abused their wives and children.

• In fact, alcoholism was an even more serious problem in antebellum America than it has been in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

• The supply of alcohol was growing rapidly, particularly in the West; farmers there grew more grain than they could sell in the still-limited markets in this pre railroad era, so they distilled much of it into whiskey.

• But in the East, too, commercial distilleries and private stills were widespread.

• The appetite for alcohol was growing along with the supply: in isolated western areas, where drinking provided a social pastime in small towns and helped ease the loneliness and isolation on farms; in pubs and saloons in eastern cities, where drinking was the principal leisure activity for many workers.

• The average male in the 1830s drank nearly three times as much alcohol as the average person does today

• Many people drank habitually and excessively, with bitter consequences for themselves and others.

• Among the many supporters of the temperance movement were people who saw it as a way to overcome their own problems with alcoholism.

• Although advocates of temperance had been active since the late eighteenth century, the new reformers gave the movement an energy and infl uence it had never previously known

• The search for social discipline was particularly clear in the battle over prohibition laws, which pitted established Protestants against new Catholic immigrants, to many of whom drinking was an important social ritual and an integral part of the life of their communities.

• The arrival of the immigrants was profoundly disturbing to established residents of many communities, and the restriction of alcohol seemed to them a way to curb the disorder they believed the new population was creating

Health Fads and Phrenology

• For some Americans, the search for individual and social perfection led to an interest in new theories of health and knowledge.

• Threats to public health were critical to the sense of insecurity that underlay many reform movements, especially after the terrible cholera epidemics of the 1830s and 1840s.

• Cholera is a severe bacterial infection of the intestines, usually a result of consuming contaminated food or water.

• In the nineteenth century, long before the discovery of antibiotics, less than half of those who contracted the disease survived.

• Thousands of people died of cholera during its occasional outbreaks, and in certain cities

• But the medical profession of the time, unaware of the nature of bacterial infections, had no answers; and the boards therefore found little to do.

• Instead, many Americans turned to non-scientific theories for improving health.

• Affluent men and, especially, women flocked to health spas for the celebrated “water cure,” which purported to improve health through immersing people in hot or cold baths or wrapping them in wet sheets.

• Although the water cure delivered few of the benefits its promoters promised, it did have some therapeutic value; some forms of hydrotherapy are still in use today.

• Other people adopted new dietary theories.

• Perhaps strangest of all to modern sensibilities was the widespread belief in the new “science” of phrenology, which appeared first in Germany and became popular in the United States beginning in the 1830s through the efforts of Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, publishers of the Phrenology Almanac.

• Phrenologists argued that the shape of an individual’s skull was an important indicator of his or her character and intelligence.

Medical Science

• In an age of rapid technological and scientific advances, the science of medicine sometimes seemed to lag behind

• The biggest problem facing American medicine, however, was the absence of basic knowledge about disease.

• The great medical achievement of the eighteenth century—the development of a vaccination against smallpox by the English Physician Edward Jenner—came from no broad theory of infection, but from a brilliant adaptation of folk practices among country people.

• The development of anesthetics came not from medical doctors at first, but from a New England dentist, William Morton, who was looking for ways to help his patients endure the extraction of teeth.

• Others rejected scientific advances because of unorthodox, and untested “medical” techniques popularized by entrepreneurs, many of them charlatans.

• In the absence of any broad acceptance of scientific methods and experimental practice in medicine, it was very diffi - cult for even the most talented doctors to succeed in treating disease.

• Even so, halting progress toward the discovery of the germ theory did occur in antebellum America.

• Physician Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that the infection seemed to be spread by medical students who had been working with corpses.

• Once he began requiring students to wash their hands and disinfect their instruments, the infections virtually disappeared.

Reforming Education

• One of the outstanding reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century was the effort to produce a system of universal public education

• The greatest educational reformer was Horace Mann, the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, which was established in 1837.

• To Mann and his followers, education was the only way to “counterwork this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor.”

• The only way to protect democracy, Mann believed, was to create an educated electorate.

• He reorganized the Massachusetts school system, lengthened the academic year (to six months), doubled teachers’ salaries (although he did nothing to eliminate the large disparities between the salaries of male and female teachers), enriched the curriculum, and introduced new methods of professional training for teachers.

• Other states experienced similar expansion and development.

• They built new schools, created teachers’ colleges, and offered large new groups of children access to education.

• Yet the quality of the new education continued to vary widely. In some places—Massachusetts, for example, where Mann established the first American state-supported teachers’ college in 1839 and where the first professional association of teachers was created in 1845—educators were usually capable men and women, often highly trained, and with an emerging sense of themselves as career professionals.

• In other areas, however, teachers were often barely literate, and limited funding for education restricted opportunities severely.

• In the newly settled regions of the West, where the white population was highly dispersed, many children had no access to schools.

• In the South, the entire black population was barred from formal education (although approximately 10 percent of the slaves achieved literacy anyway), and only about a third of all white children of school age actually enrolled in schools in 1860.

• In the North the percentage was 72 percent, but even there, many students attended classes only briefly and casually.

• The interest in education was visible too in the growing movement to educate American Indians in the antebellum period

• Despite limitations and inequities, the achievements of the school reformers were impressive by any standard.

• By the beginning of the Civil War, the United States had one of the highest literacy rates of any nation: 94 percent of the population of the North and 83 percent of the white population of the South (58 percent of the total southern population).

• The conflicting impulses underlying the movement for school reform were visible in some of the different educational institutions that emerged.

• Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, the first such school in America.

• Nothing better exemplified the romantic impulse of the era than the belief of those who founded Perkins that even society’s supposedly least favored members—the blind and otherwise handicapped—could be helped to discover inner strength and wisdom.

• More typical of educational reform, however, were efforts to use schools to impose a set of social values on children—the values that reformers believed were appropriate for their new, industrializing society.

Rehabilitation

• Similar impulses helped create another powerful movement of reform: the creation of “asylums” (as they now were called) for criminals and for the mentally ill.

• On the one hand, in advocating prison and hospital reform, Americans were reacting to one of society’s most glaring ills.

• But the creation of “asylums” for social deviants was not simply an effort to curb the abuses of the old system.

• It was also an attempt to reform and rehabilitate the inmates

• Some reformers argued that the discipline of the asylum could serve as a model for other potentially disordered environments—for example, factories and schools.

• But penitentiaries and mental hospitals often fell victim to overcrowding, and the original reform ideal gradually faded.

• Many prisons ultimately degenerated into little more than warehouses for criminals, with scant emphasis on rehabilitation, which was far from the original, optimistic vision.

• The “asylum” movement was not, however, restricted to criminals and people otherwise considered “unfit.”

• There were also new facilities for the poor: almshouses and workhouses, which created closely supervised environments for those who had failed to work their way up in society.

• Such an environment, reformers believed, would train them to live more productive lives.

The Indian Reservation

• Some of these same beliefs underlay the emergence in the 1840s and 1850s of a new “reform” approach to the problems of Native Americans: the idea of the reservation

• The principal motive behind relocation had always been a simple one: getting the tribes out of the way of white civilization.

• But among some whites there had also been another, if secondary, intent: to move the Indians to a place where they would be protected from whites and allowed to develop to a point where assimilation might be possible.

• Even Andrew Jackson, whose animus toward Indians was legendary, once described the removals as part of the nation’s “moral duty . . . to protect and if possible to preserve and perpetuate the scattered remnants of the Indian race.”

• It was a small step from the idea of relocation to the idea of the reservation: the idea of creating an enclosed region in which Indians would live in isolation from white society.

• The reservations served white economic purposes above all— moving Native Americans out of good lands that white settlers wanted.

The Emergence of Feminism

• The reform ferment of the antebellum period had a particular meaning for American women.

• They played central roles in a wide range of reform movements and a particularly important role in the movements on behalf of temperance and the abolition of slavery

• The result was the creation of the fi rst important American feminist movement, one that laid the groundwork for more than a century of agitation for women’s rights.

• Women in the 1830s and 1840s faced not only all the traditional restrictions imposed on members of their sex by society, but also a new set of barriers that had emerged from the doctrine of “separate spheres” and the transformation of the family.

• Many women who began to involve themselves in reform movements in the 1820s and 1830s came to look on such restrictions with rising resentment.

• “They are both moral and accountable beings, and whatever is right for man to do, is right for women to do.” - Grimke sisters

• Other reformers—Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (her sister), Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Dorothea Dix—also chafing at the restrictions placed on them by men, similarly pressed at the boundaries of “acceptable” female behavior.

• Women in 1848, organized a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss the question of women’s rights.

• Out of the meeting emerged a “Declaration of Sentiments” (patterned on the 1776 Declaration of Independence), which stated that “all men and women are created equal,” that women no less than men have certain inalienable rights.

• Their most prominent demand was for the right to vote, thus launching a movement for woman suffrage that would continue until 1920

• It should not be surprising, perhaps, that many of the women involved in these feminist efforts were Quakers.

• Quakerism had long embraced the ideal of sexual equality and had tolerated, indeed encouraged, the emergence of women as preachers and community leaders.

• Women taught to expect the absence of gender-based restrictions in their own communities naturally resented the restrictions they encountered when they moved outside them.

• Quakers had also been among the leaders of the antislavery movement, and Quaker women played a leading role within those efforts.

• Of the women who drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, all but Elizabeth Cady Stanton were Quakers.

• Progress toward feminist goals was limited in the antebellum years, but individual women did manage to break the social barriers to advancement

• There was an irony in this rise of interest in the rights of women. Feminists benefited greatly from their association with other reform movements, most notably abolitionism; but they also suffered from them.

• For the demands of women were usually assigned—even by some women themselves—a secondary position to what many considered the far greater issue of the rights of slaves.

12.2: The Crusade Against Slavery