America's History Chapter 12

Individualism I. Emerson’s vision of individual freedom influenced thousands of ordinary Americans and a generation of important artists and writers. Emerson and Transcendentalism I. The first advocates of Transcendentalism were spiritually inclined young men, often Unitarian ministers from well-to-do NE families, who questioned the constraints imposed by their Puritan heritage. For inspiration they turned to Europe, drawing on a new conception of self and society known as Romanticism. A. Romantic thinkers rejected the ordered, rational world of the 18thc Enlightenment. Instead they tried to capture the passionate character of the human spirit and sought deeper insights into the mysteries of existence. B. Drawing on the ideas of the English philosopher Immanuel Kant, English Romantics and their American followers believed that behind the concrete world of the senses was the ideal world. To reach this deeper reality, people had to go beyond the ways in which they normally comprehended the world around them. C. Unitarians held that God was a single, unified being and not a trinity. II. Emerson believed that people were trapped in their inherited customs and institutions. He believed that people needed to shed antiquated values and practices. A. He valued personal insight and believed that the ideal setting for self discovery was in solitude and in nature. B. Emerson’s success was in his capacity to translate abstract ideas into examples that made sense to ordinary middle-class Americans. He also succeeded in tempering the radical implications of these concepts, thus extending their appeal to a wider audience. III. Emerson’s attitude towards the industrial society was ambiguous. He condemned the routine of factory life that stifled people’s creativity and worried that preoccupation w/work, profits, and consumption would drain the nation’s spiritual energy. He also applauded human innovations in technology IV. The Lyceum movement—named after the American Lyceum in MA—took firm hold, especially in the North. V. Emerson’s celebration of the liberated individual tapped currents already present in middle-class audiences. Emerson’s Literary Influence I. Emerson took as one of his tasks the remaking of American literature. He urged American writers to celebrate democracy and individual freedom and find inspiration in normal people. Thoreau and Fuller I. Thoreau looked to the American environment for inspiration. He embraced self reliance in the natural world, building a cabin at the edge of Walden pond in Concord. A. Thoreau wanted to urge his readers to probe the deeper spiritual meanings of their lives. B. He became an advocate for social noncomformity and a philosopher of civil disobedience—arguing that it was morally acceptable to refuse to obey just laws. II. Margaret Fuller explored the possibilities of freedom for women. Her philosophy began w/the transcendental belief that women, like men, had a mystical relationship w/God that gave them identity and dignity. A. It followed that every woman deserved psychological and social independence. Whitman I. Whitman described his attempt to pass a number of “invisible boundaries” between solitude and community, b/w prose and poetry, and being living and dead in his poem Leaves of Grass. A. B/c he has what he calls an “original relation” w/nature, Whitman claims not solitude but perfect communication with others. B. He celebrated democracy as well as himself, arguing that a poet could claim a profoundly intimate, mystical relationship w/a mass audience. C. For Whitman the individual had expanded to become divine, and democracy assumed a sacred character. II. Despite their hopes for Americans, the transcendentalists were not native optimists. Still, such dark murmurings were muted in their work, woven into triumphant and expansive assertions that nothing was impossible for an individual who could break free from tradition, law, and other social restraints. Darker Visions

I.

Emerson’s influence also reached Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, writers, and Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe, all of whom had more pessimistic visions. A. In their novels Hawthorne and Melville addressed the opposition b/w individual transcendence and the legitimate requirements of social order, discipline, and responsibility. B. They sounded powerful warnings that unfettered egotism could destroy individuals and the fragile bonds of social life. They embraced the idea of individual freedom but at the same time urged the acceptance of an inner discipline. C. Melville explored the limits of individualism in extreme and tragic terms and emerged as a scathing critic of transcendentalism. II. Those who expressed doubt, and even more optimistic works, failed to grasp a large audience. American readers had little enthusiasm for Thoreau’s advocacy of social disobedience and Whitman’s claims for a mythical union b/w individual of genius and the democratic mass. They preferred the more modest examples of individualism offered by Emerson and Hawthorne—self-improvement through work and personal discipline. The Brook Farm Experiment I. To escape the constraints of life in industrial America, transcendentalists and other radical reformers created ideal communities, or utopias. A. They hoped that these planned societies, which organized community life in new ways, would allow members to realize their full spiritual and moral potential. B. The most important experiment was Brook Farm, founded in MA in 1841. Freed from the tension and degradation of urban competitive society, its members hoped to develop their minds and souls and uplift society through their example. C. Although Brook Farm provided intellectual fulfillment, it faltered in achieving economic self-sufficiency. To succeed it needed practical men and women. D. In 1844 a reorganization attracted more farmers and artisans but yielded only marginal economic gains. And these changes resulted in a more disciplined routine that suppressed its original spirit. II. After the failure of Brook Farm, the transcendentalists abandoned their attempts to fashion a new system of social organization. Most accepted the brutal reality of industrial society but continued to try to reform it, especially through education of workers. Communalism I. Thousands of Americans joined other communal settlements during the 1840s, primarily in the northeast and Midwest. Most were ordinary people seeking refuge and security from the economic depression that had begun w/the Panic of 1837. A. These rural utopias were symbols of social protest, explicitly challenging the values of the larger society by organizing themselves along socialist lines w/common ownership of property, or by experimenting w/unconventional forms of marriage and family life. B. In questioning acquisitive capitalist values and traditional gender roles, the communalists pointed to major cultural strains in American society. The Shakers I. They valued celibacy as a way to restore people to Paradise. They decided to withdraw from the evils of the world into strictly run communities of believers. A. Members had to declare themselves “sick of sin” and follow a program of confession. To the Shakers, sin was wholly the product of a society that put obstacles in the way of a chaste and self-denying life. B. Shaker communities embraced the common ownership of property and vowed to abstain from politics and war. Over time Shaker doctrine also included a ban on tobacco and alcohol. They eliminated marriage and made a commitment to celibacy. II. They believed that God was a “dual person, male and female,” and that Mother Ann, the founder, preserved his female element. These doctrines provided the underpinning for their attempt to banish distinctions b/w the sexes. A. In practice, they maintained the division of labor b/w men and women, but they vested authority for governing each community—in both the religious and economic spheres—in men and women alike. B. They welcomed blacks and whites. III. Their agriculture and crafts, especially furniture making, acquired a reputation for quality that enabled most Shaker communities to be selfsustaining and comfortable. A. B/c Shakers had no children of themselves, they had to rely on conversions and adoption of young orphans to replenish their numbers.

As these sources dried up in the 1840s and 50s, the communities stopped growing and eventually began to decline. B/c of their celibacy, Shaker communities could never provide a model for society as a whole; at best, they could serve as a place for refuge for those fleeing life in an individualistic, industrial world. The Fourierist Movement I. The rise of the American Fourieriest Movement in the 1840s was one cause of the Shaker’s decline. Charles Fourier was a French utopian reformer who devised an 8-stage theory of social evolution and predicted the imminent decline of the present stage of individualism and capitalism. II. In the place of capitalist wage-labor, Fourierists would work and live cooperatively in groups called phalanxes. A. The members of a phalanx would be its share-holders; they would own all its property in common, including stores and a bank as well as a school and a library. B. Fourier and Brisbane, his disciple, saw the phalanx as a practical, more humane alternative to the emerging capitalist society and one that would liberate women as well as men. C. Their ideas found an audience among educated farmers and craftsmen, some of whom had joined the socialists community of Robert Owen in New Harmony, Indiana, and who now yearned for economic stability and communal solidarity in the wake of the Panic of 1837. III. In the 1840s Brisbane and his followers started nearly 100 cooperative communities from MA to MI, but almost all were unable to support themselves and soon collapsed. A. Despite its failure to establish viable communities, the Fourierist movement underscored the extent of social discontent caused by economic depression. It also revealed the difficulty of establishing a utopian community in the absence of a charismatic leader or a compelling religious vision. Noyes and the Oneida Community I. The minister John Humphrey Noyes believed that the Fourierists had failed b/c their communities lacked the strong religious ethic required for sustained altruism and cooperation. A. He praised the Shakers b/c they questioned men’s control of property and women. He was attracted to their marriageless society and set about creating a community that defined sexuality and gender roles as well as property rights in new ways. II. Perfectionism was a Christian evangelical movement that gathered thousands of followers during the 1830s, primarily among religiously minded NE’s who had settled in NY. A. Perfectionists believed that the 2nd Coming of Christ had already occurred and that people could therefore aspire to perfection in their earthly lives, attaining complete freedom from sin. B. Unlike most perfectionists, Noyes believed that the main barrier to achieving this ideal state was marriage, which did not exist in heaven and should not exist on earth. He wanted to reform marriage to liberate individuals from sin, as had the Shakers, but his solution was different: Noyes and his followers embraced complex marriage—all the members of his community were married to one another. III. Complex marriage was a complex doctrine designed to attain various social goals. A. Noyes rejected monogamy partly b/c he wished to free women from being regarded as property by their husbands. To give women more freedom to develop their talents, he advocated birth control. B. For children that were born, Noyes established community nurseries. By freeing women from endless childbirth and child raising, Noyes helped make them full members of the community. IV. The importance of this experiment lies in its determined effort to create alternative communities that repudiated the class divisions and sexual norms of American society. The Mormons I. Despite their challenge to marriage and family life, neither the Shakers nor the Oneidians aroused fierce hostility to their social experiments. To most outsides the Shakers seemed pathetic eccentrics, and the followers of Noyes were too small. The case was different w/the Mormons. Joseph Smith I. The Mormons emerged from the religious ferment that arose among families of Puritan descent who settled along the Erie Canal. B.

II.

In a series of religious experiences that began in 1820, Smith came to believe that God had singled him out to receive a special revelation of divine truth. He would carry a message that would redeem a society fatally flawed by excessive individualism. A. Smith organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which claimed control over many aspects of member’s lives and reaffirmed the primacy of the husband within the family. B. Smith encouraged his followers to adopt practices central to success in the age of capitalist markets and factories: hard work, saving, and risk taking. C. The rigid discipline and secrecy of the Mormons, along w/their prosperity, hostility to other sects, and bloc voting fueled resentment among their neighbors. This resentment became overt hostility when Smith refused to accept any Illinois law that he did not approve of personally, asked Congress to turn Nauvoo into a federal territory, and in 1844 declared himself a candidate for president of the US. III. Smith followed polygamy, which a few Mormon leaders began to practice, dividing the community from within, while economic and political issues encouraged assaults from without. Brigham Young and Utah I. The Mormon elders sought religious independence by leaving the US to create a new settlement in the western wilderness. In 1846 Brigham Young began a phased migration of more than 10,000 people across the Great Plains. A. Using communal labor and an elaborate irrigation system based on communal water rights, the Mormon pioneers transformed the desert. B. Preoccupation with the Civil War and Reconstruction prevent Republicans from paying much attention to Utah. Consequently, the national government did not succeed in pressuring the Utah Mormons to abolish polygamy until 1890. II. The Mormon Church in Utah and the Reorganized Church in Missouri had succeeded where other social experiments and utopian communities failed. They endorsed the private ownership of property and encouraged individualistic economic enterprise, accepting the entrepreneurial spirit of market society. A. Mormon leaders used strict religious controls to create disciplined communities and patriarchal families, reaffirming values inherited from the 18th century. The Women’s Movement I. The prominence of gender issues was the product of a broad shift in American culture, particularly in the North. A. After the revolution women played an increasingly prominent role in public life, joining religious revivals and reform movements. B. Slavery was among the targets of women reformers, and their abolitionist activities created controversy and caused some of them to become advocates for women’s rights. New Social Roles for Women I. During the American Revolution, upper-class women had demanded increased legal rights for married women and more educational opportunities for their daughters, but had been given only slightly enhanced status. II. The economic revolution presented young farm women w/new opportunities for outwork and factory labor; at the same time, it helped to regulate middle-class married women to a “separate” domestic sphere. A. Rather than working as household producers, middle class women became full-time providers of household services. B. Many of these women achieved greater authority within their families by joining religious revivals and becoming guardians of morality. Such activities bolstered their self-esteem and encouraged them to expand their influence over decisions in all areas of family life. Women Authors I. The most popular women writers wrote fiction. The sentimental melodramas composed by these women authors were often punctuated by tearful domestic scenes and suggested that women could achieve their potential only from within the sphere of marriage and family. A. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first and foremost antislavery tract, but was also an argument for the superior morality of women and the importance of family. B. There was an ironic twist to this celebration of the private sphere of family, home, and marriage b/c these women writers were engaged in very public and commercial enterprise. They were among the 1st successful professional women in the US. C. They erased the contradiction b/w “domestic” and “public” life and justified the concept of the independent woman. They did this by promoting morality and thereby assuming the role of the minister.

Reformers and Teachers I. For most middle-class women, a greater influence over family life was enough, but some women used their new religious authority to expand their involvement outside of the home. Moral reform was among the first of their efforts in the public arena. A. In 1834 a group of middle-class women in NYC launched an aggressive campaign to end prostitution and protect single women from predatory men. Within 3 years it had grown to a national organization—the American Female Moral Reform Society. B. The society attempted to provide moral government to working class women. They also founded homes for refuge prostitutes or homeless women, and won the passage of laws regulating sexual behavior. II. Women also turned their energies to the reform of social institutions. They worked to improve conditions in traditional settings. III. Both as reformers and teachers, northern women played a significant role in education. Women vigorously supported the movement led by Horace Mann to expand public elementary schools. A. Mann lengthened the school year, established teaching standards, and improved instruction by recruiting well-educated women teachers. B. The intellectual leader of the new corps of women educators was Catherine Beecher, who founded academies for young women in Hartford and Cincinnati and whose writings inspired many women teachers. The Influence of Abolitionism I. The public accomplishments of moral reformers such as Dix and Beecher inspired other women to assume public roles, and many of them found a cause in the movement to end slavery. II. Influenced by abolitionist ideas and their own experience of discrimination, a few women challenged the subordinate status of their sex. A. Some of the more radical demands alarmed many abolitionist men. They feared that allowing women to exercise power would offend many Americans and damage the political fortunes of the antislavery movement. B. William Lloyd Garrison jumped to the defense of women activists, demanding that the abolitionist movement support a broad social reform platform that included women’s rights. When his stance split the abolitionist movement, women activists remained w/Garrison. They recruited new women agents to proclaim the common interests of enslaved blacks and free women. III. In the 1840s and 50s women increasingly used abolitionist ideas and organizations to underline the special horrors of slavery for women. A. Abolitionist women now pointed out that the reality of plantation life was much more complex and contradictory, underlining the fact that many masters slept w/their slaves and fathered children by them. B. Drawn into public life by abolitionism, thousands of northern women had become firm advocates of greater rights for both themselves and enslaved African American women. The Program of Seneca Falls I. The commitment to full civil equality for women emerged during the 1840s as activists devised a pragmatic program of reform. While championing the rights of women, they did not challenge the institution of marriage or even the conventional division of labor within the family. A. Instead, harking back to the efforts of Abigail Adams and other Revolutionary Era women, they tried to strengthen the legal rights of married women, especially w/respect to property. This initiative won crucial support from affluent men, who wanted to protect their wives’ assets in case their own businesses went into bankruptcy. B. By giving property rights to married women, they also hoped to guard against irresponsible sons-in-law who might waste their daughter’s inheritance. C. Mississippi, Maine, and MA enacted Women’s Property Acts b/w 1839 and 1845. In NY, women activists entered the campaign and won a more comprehensive statute that gave women full legal control over the property she brought into marriage, and became the model for similar laws in 14 states. II. To push forward the women’s movement, Elisabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott called a convention in Seneca Falls in upstate NY in 1848. A. It outlined a coherent program for women’s equality. It issued a “Declaration of Sentiments” affirming that all men and women are created equal. B. By stating out claims for equality for women in public life, the Seneca Falls convention repudiated the idea that the assignment of separate spheres for men and women was the natural order of society.

III.

Although most men dismissed the Seneca Falls Declaration, it drew women into the movement. A. During the 1850s conventions of women hammered out a diverse reform program. They called on churches to revise concepts of women’s inferiority in their theology. They also worked for legal changes that would give married women control over their property and earnings, guarantee a mother’s custody over her children, and ensure women’s rights to sue and testify in court. B. They began a concerted campaign to win the vote for women. In 1851 a national convention of women declared that suffrage was the corner stone of enterprise. C. The struggle for legislation required new tactics and new leaders who had talents as organizers rather than lecturers. The most prominent was Susan B. Anthony. She created a network of special “captains” in every county in NY state. Her efforts resulted in the passage of a NY law granting women the right to collect and spend their own wages, bring suit in court, and acquire ownership of property if widowed.

Abolitionism I. The drive to end slavery became the dominant American reform movement. In part the increasing focus on slavery stemmed from the success of other initiatives: by the 1840s the Second Great Awakening had drawn millions of Americans into churches, temperance was on the rise, hospitals for the sick and mentally ill had been created, and prisons had been reformed. A. Beginning in the 1830s abolitionists condemned slavery as a sin and saw it as their moral duty to end this violation of God’s law. African Colonization I. The new antislavery crusade had a strong sectional character. By 1820 republican-minded reformers had persuaded northern legislatures to abolish slavery and provide for general emancipation in those states. They had also convinced congress to outlaw the importation of slaves and, in the Missouri Compromise, to prohibit slavery in most of the Louisiana Purchase. II. The founders of the American Colonization Society, which was created in 1817, thought they had the answer to the problem of southern slavery. Slaveowners would gradually emancipate their slaves and the society would arrange for their resettlement in Africa. A. This plan was the brainchild of prominent leaders from the Upper South, including President James Monroe, who wanted to eradicate slavery in order to foster economic and social development along northern lines. B. The new colonizers had a different outlook than those who had attempted it before. Unable to envision a society in which free blacks and whites could live peaceably together, they wanted to make the US a “white’s only” country. Northerners who joined the Colonization Society had much the same outlook. III. The African Colonization Society was a failure. Despite appeals to wealthy individuals, churches, state governments, it raised enough money to purchase freedom for only a few hundred slaves. A. Most free blacks continued to reject colonization. Their goal was to advance in American society. Slave Rebellions I. Having rejected colonization, free blacks demanded an end to slavery. To build support for emancipation in the South, in 1827 John Russwurm and Samuel D. Cornish began the first African American newspaper. A. David Walker wrote Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that ridiculed the religious pretensions of slaveholders, justified slave rebellion, and warned Americans that slaves would rebel if justice was delayed. II. In 1830 Walker and other African American activists called a national convention in Philadelphia. The delegates did not accept Walker’s radical position but urged free blacks to use every legal means to improve the condition of their race and asked for divine assistance in breaking the shackles of slavery. A. To assist free African Americans, who were threatened by expulsion from some states and cities, they pushed forward plans for a refuge for blacks in British Canada. B. As Walker was calling for violent black rebellion from Boston, Nate Turner started a bloody revolt in Virginia. Turner thought that a vast army of slaves would rally to his cause, but he mustered only 60 men by the time the white militia dispersed his poorly armed and exhausted followers. III. Deeply shaken by Turner’s rebellion, the Virginia legislature debated a bill providing for gradual emancipation and colonization. When the bill was rejected in 1832, the possibility that southern planters would legislate and end to slavery faded forever. A. Instead, the southern planters went down another path, toughening slave codes, limiting the movement of slaves, and prohibiting anyone

from teaching them how to read. Evangelical Abolitionism I. Frightened by the prospect of a bloody racial revolution and inspired by the antislavery efforts of free blacks, evangelical northern whites launched a moral crusade to abolish slavery. A. Radical Christian abolitionists demanded that southerners free their slaves immediately and without compensation. B. The issue was absolute: slaveowners and their supporters were sinning by depriving slaves of their status as free moral agents. Garrison, Weld, and the Grimkés I. The most uncompromising leader of the abolitionist movement during the 1830s was William Lloyd Garrison. He spearheaded the formation of the NE Anti-Slavery Society and published The Liberator. A. From the outset The Liberator took a radical stance demanding the immediate abolition of slavery w/o reimbursement for slaveholders. B. Garrison condemned the American Colonization Society and charged that its real aim was to strengthen slavery by removing troublesome African Americans who were already free. C. He assailed the constitution for its implicit acceptance of racial bondage. As time went on, he concluded that slavery was a sign of deep corruption infesting all American institutions and called for comprehensive reform of society. D. He demanded not only equality for women but also the repudiation of all governments b/c their rule rested ultimately on force. II. Theodore Dwight Weld came to the movement from religious revivals of the 1830s. He became the 1st advocate of temperance and educational reform. A. He worked in Presbyterian and Congregational Churches in the North preaching moral responsibility of all Americans for a denial of liberty to slaves. B. His crusade gathered force, helped by the theological arguments he advanced in the Bible Against Slavery. III. Weld and the Grimkés provided the abolitionist movement w/a mass of evidence in American Slavery as It Is: Temperance of a Thousand Witnesses, it which they recorded detailed accounts of the brutality of slavery. The American Anti-Slavery Society I. In 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society was established. It received financial support from the Tappans, using it to promote their cause to the middle class. A. Women abolitionists soon established their own organizations such as the Anti-Slavery Conventions of American Women. B. Women’s societies raised money for The Liberator and were a major force in the movement, distributing abolitionist literature, collecting signatures, and creating schools for free blacks. II. Abolitionist leaders developed a 3-prong plan of attack, beginning w/a appeal to public opinion. To foster condemnation of slavery in the North, the American Anti-Slavery Society adopted the tactics of the religious revivalists: large rallies led by stirring speakers, the distribution of anti-slavery manifestos, and home visits by agents. A. They also launched a widespread postal campaign. B. Their 2nd strategy was to encourage slaves to flee from slavery and assist those who did. They financed the settlement of some escapees in Canada and forcibly prevented the reenslavement of others. C. The 3rd element of their program was to seek support among state and national legislators. They encouraged local chapters of their organization to bombard Congress w/petitions demanding the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, an end to the domestic slave trade, and denial of the admission of new slave states to the Union. III. This agitation drew thousands of middle-class men and women to abolitionism. Emerson and Thoreau both condemned slavery.