The Early Eighteenth Century: American Romanticism 18201865

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The Early Eighteenth Century American
Romanticism (1820-1865)
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America and Utopia from its very beginning the
language of utopia has been used to describe the
American experiment.

• 1603 For we must consider that we shall be as a
  city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon
  us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God
  in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him
  to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be
  made a story and a by-word through the world
  (Winthrop).
• 1776 We hold these truths to be self-evident,
  that all men are created equal, that they are
  endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
  Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
  the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these
  rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
  deriving their just powers from the consent of
  the governed, (Jefferson 11).
• 1963 This is our hope. With this faith we
  will be able to transform the jangling discords
  of our nation into a beautiful symphony of
  brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to
  work together, to pray together, to struggle
  together, to go to jail together, to stand up for
  freedom together, knowing that we will be free
  one day (King).
• 2008 Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a
  hall that still stands across the street, a group
  of men gathered and, with these simple words,
  launched America's improbable experiment in
  democracy. Farmers and scholars statesmen and
  patriots who had traveled across an ocean to
  escape tyranny and persecution finally made real
  their declaration of independence at a
  Philadelphia convention that lasted through the
  spring of 1787 (Obama).

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Key Events that Shaped 1820-1865

• 1820 Missouri Compromise (No slavery in
  Louisiana north of 36 30 except in Missouri)
• 1823 Monroe Doctrine (Warns all European nations
  not to colonize America)
• 1830 Indian Removal Act
• 1831 Trail of Tears
• 1837 Financial panic and failures of numerous
  banks lead to severe unemployment, which persists
  until the 1840s.
• 1844 Telegraph invented by Samuel Morse
• 1846-8 Mexican American War
• 1848 Seneca Falls Convention (Inaugurates
  campaign for womens rights)
• 1848-9 California Gold Rush
• 1857 Dread Scott v Sanford decision (Supreme
  Court denies African Americans Citizenship)
• 1861-65 Civil War
• 1863 Emancipation Proclamation

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Cultural Issues that Shaped American in the Early
18th Century

• American Romanticism
• Industrialization
• Manifest Destiny
• Slavery and the Civil War
• The Woman Question

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American Romanticism

• Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt
  nearer to those parts of the universe and to
  those eras in history which had most attracted
  me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region
  viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to
  imagine rare and delectable places in some remote
  and more celestial corner of the system, behind
  the constellation of Cassiopeias Chair, far from
  noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house
  actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but
  forever new and unprofaned part of the universe
  (Thoreau 59).

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Some Characteristics of American Romanticism

• Romantic thinkers emphasize the importance of
  imagination and feeling in reaction to the
  premium placed on reason during the 18th century.
  They believed that the particular and specific
  individual was more important than universal
  laws.
• Many Romantics represented the primitive and
  untrammeled over the artificial or developed as
  an aesthetic ideal in their paintings, writing,
  and social theory.
• The Romantic period is marked by Protestantism in
  political action-stressing above all the Rights
  of Man
• In Europe and America, Romantic philosophy
  included radical assault on virtually all social
  institutions. Fundamental hierarchies of
  government, notions of sovereignty, once emblems
  of social and literary stability, now exemplified
  the dead hand of the past. (Harpers Ferry is a
  useful example)
• Many Romantics stressed a hope for the future and
  belief in innate goodness of man and were wary of
  the danger of institutional restraint.
• Because the Romantic movement included many women
  and former slaves, it stressed a development of
  theory of political rights for those previously
  excluded.

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Key Terms in American Romanticism

• Transcendentalism
• Pastoral
• Sublime

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Pastoral

• According to theorist Lawrence Buell the pastoral
  is, in the loose sense of being preoccupied with
  nature and rurality as setting, theme and value
  in contradistinction from society and the
  urbanthe pastoral refers not to the specific
  set of obsolescent conventions of the eclogue
  tradition, but to all literature-poetry or prose,
  fiction or non-fiction-that celebrates the ethos
  of nature/rurality over against the ethos of town
  city. This domain includes for present purposes
  all degrees of rusticity from farm to wilderness
  (463).

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Transcendentalism

• A New England movement which flourished from
  1835-60. It had its roots in Romanticism and in
  post-Kantian idealism by which Coleridge was
  influenced. It had a considerable influence on
  American art and literature, Basically religious,
  it emphasized the role and importance of the
  individual conscience, and the value of intuition
  in matters of moral guidance and inspiration. The
  actual terms was coined by opponents of the
  movement but accepted by its members (Ralph Waldo
  Emersion is one of the leaders, published The
  Transcendentalists in 1841). The group were also
  social reformers. Some members, besides Emerson,
  were famous and include Bronson Alcott, Henry
  David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne (DLLT
  936).

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Sublime

• According to Romantic writers, the sublime
  caused the reader to experience elestasis
  ("transport"). Edmund Burke developed this line
  of thought further in his influential essay, The
  Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Here, he
  distinguished the sublime from the beautiful by
  suggesting that the sublime was not a stylistic
  quality but the powerful depiction of subjects
  that were vast, obscure, and powerful. These
  sublime topics or subjects evoked "delightful
  horror" in the viewer or reader, a combination of
  terror and amazed pleasure. (DLLT 874).

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Industrialization

• In its most basic form, the Industrial
  Revolution can be defined as the shift in
  manufacturing that resulted from the invention of
  power-driven machinery to replace hand labor.
  Although its origins are hard to pin down
  exactly, the shift in manufacture covers roughly
  1770 to 1840 in both Europe and America.

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Characteristics and Implications of the
Industrial Revolution

• No attempt was made to regulate the shift from
  the old economic world like that of the
  Pilgrims (Mercantile Capitalism) to the new,
  since even liberal reformers were committed to
  the philosophy of Laissez-faire-let do or let
  alone out lined in Adam Smiths Wealth of
  Nations.
• Under the theory of Laissez-faire, general
  welfare can be ensure only through free operation
  of economic laws, and government should maintain
  a strict policy of noninterference to leave
  manufacturers to pursue, unfettered, their
  private interests
• For the great majority of the laboring class, the
  results of laissez-faire and the freedom of
  contract it secured were inadequate wages and
  long hours of work under harsh discipline in
  sordid conditions-insurance, laws restricting
  child labor, minimum wage, environmental
  concerns, insurance, etc. did not exist.
• While conditions for the poor worsened, the
  landed and mercantile class enjoyed prosperity
  owning to the market success.

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Manifest Destiny

• According to the Oxford English Dictionary
  manifest destiny n. (also with capital initials)
  orig. U.S. (now hist.) is the doctrine or belief
  that the expansion of the United States
  throughout the American continents was both
  justified and inevitable. For example John
  OSullivin commented in 1845, Our manifest
  destiny is to overspread the continent allotted
  by Providence for the free development of our
  yearly multiplying millions (OED).

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Characteristics and Implications of Manifest
Destiny

• The period from 1820 to 1865 saw a dizzying
  growth in the nations population and territorial
  reach increasing urbanization and the expansion
  of railroads, canals, and other forms of
  transportation that allowed for more extensive
  economical forms of distribution.
• The nations population of approximately four
  million in 1790 jumped to thirty million by 1860,
  in part because of the massive emigration from
  Ireland and elsewhere in Europe that occurred
  during the 1840s and 1850s.
• Territorial space available to this burgeoning
  population dramatically increased following the
  war with Mexico (1846-48), which added 1.2
  million square miles of land to the 1.8 million
  square miles that the nation held before the war
  this is the area that would become Texas,
  California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and parts of
  New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.
• In 1838 the Cherokees were forcibly removed by
  federal troops under General Winfred Scott. They
  were sent on what would be called the Trail of
  Tears to present day Oklahoma. During the winter
  march an estimated 4,000 people of 13,000 died.

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Slavery and the Civil War

• A politics of antislavery has an important place
  in the careers of a number of the American
  Romantic writers. For example, when the Fugitive
  Slave Law of 1850 was enforced in Boston in 1851
  Thoreau publicly delivered the followingSlavery
  and servility have produced no sweet-scented
  flower annually, to charm the senses of men, for
  they have no real life they are merely a
  decaying and a death, offensive to all healthy
  nostrils. We do not complain that they live, but
  that they do not get buried. Let the living bury
  them even they are good for manure (Thoreau).

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Characteristics and Implications of Slavery and
the Civil War

• In 1859 John Browns violent raid on Harpers
  Ferry failed to initiate a slave rebellion in the
  South, but his action was later used during the
  civil war as an example of the holy war against
  slavery that would fulfill the promise of
  freedom guaranteed in the Declaration.
• While some Romantic Abolitionists advocated the
  need for the Civil War, many, like Ralph Waldo
  Emerson, had little notion of the suffering and
  destruction involved in the conflict that would
  eventually kill over 600,000 Americans before
  Grants surrender to Lee in 1865.
• While the fourteenth amendment granted former
  slaves the right to Due Process and Equal
  Protection, laws like Dread Scott v. Sanford
  (1857) kept former slaves from being recognized
  as citizens. Instead of a rise in education and
  standard of living for former slaves, the
  post-Civil War era was marked by the resurgence
  of segregationist practices and anti-black
  violence, most notably lynching.

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The Woman Question

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton stated in Declaration of
  Sentiments and Resolutions We hold these truths
  to be self-evident that all men and women are
  created equal that they are endowed by their
  Creator with certain inalienable rights that
  among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
  happiness that to secure these rights
  governments are instituted, deriving their just
  powers from the consent of the governed (Stanton
  687).

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Characteristics and Implications 19th century
Womens Rights

• The fact that women had such a significant place
  in urban reform movements is not surprising,
  given that urban reform centered on creating
  homelike, domestically attractive conditions for
  the poor, and that another major reform effort of
  the pre-civil war period centered on womens
  rights.
• In 1848, at the first womens rights convention
  in Seneca Falls, New York, Elizabeth Cady
  Stantons resounding Declaration of Sentiments
  invoked Jeffersons Declaration, substituting
  male for British tyrannical authority to show how
  the nations social institutions and legal codes
  mainly severed the interests of Americas white
  male citizenry.
• That same year , the New York State Legislature,
  in response to critics like Stanton, passed the
  nations most liberalized married womens
  property act, which made it legal for women to
  maintain control over the property they brought
  to the marriage.
• Although Cady Stanton and Suzan B. Anthony began
  the struggle for national suffrage in the United
  States, national voting rights for American women
  did not exist until the nineteenth amendment was
  ratified in 1920.

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Henry David Thoreau

• His interest in the flower or the bird lay very
  deep in his mind, and was connected with Nature,
  -- and the meaning of Nature was never attempted
  to be defined by him. ... His power of
  observation seemed to indicate additional senses.
  He saw as with a microscope, heard as with an
  ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic
  register of all he saw and heard (Emerson).

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Characteristics/Background Henry David Thoreau

• Henry David Thoreau aspired to write great
  literature by adventuring at home, traveling as
  he put it, a good deal in Concord, Massachusetts.
  As travelers tgo around the world and report
  natural objects and phenomena, so let another
  stay at home and report the phenomena of his own
  life (Norton Anthology 825).
• In 1843, Thoreaus brother John died of lockjaw
  in his arms. His brothers death inspired the
  elegiac A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
  Rivers that he wrote during his stay at Walden
  Pond, and which was initially poorly received.
• Between 1847 and 1854 Thoreau produced as many as
  seven full revisions of Walden, which was finally
  published in 1854.
• Thoreau died of Tuberculosis in 1862 at the age
  of 44.
• Recognition of Thoreau as an important writer was
  slow in coming, but by 1906 he was becoming
  widely recognized as a social philosopher,
  naturalist, and an the author of one of the
  masterpieces of American fiction.
• In 1906 Mahatma Gandhi read Civil Disobedience,
  and later acknowledged its important influence on
  his thinking about how best to achieve Indian
  independence. Later in the century, Martin Luther
  Luther King Jr. would similarly attest to the
  crucial influence of Thoreau on his adoption of
  nonviolent civil disobedience as a key to the
  Civil Rights Movement in the Untied States.

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Walden Pond

• "Walden Pond Past and Present"