The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History

By the eighteenth century in America, two types of economies existed in interaction but also independently of each other—a coastal exporting economy along the eastern seaboard and an inland subsistence-oriented economy, where access to transportation and export markets was limited and costly. During the nineteenth century, a dynamic market-oriented economy arose throughout the United States westward to the Mississippi River that integrated the two sectors. This chapter explores the transition from the coastal exporting and inland subsistence-oriented economies of the eighteenth century to the market economy of the nineteenth century. It investigates the ways writers, poets, philosophers, and artists reacted to the economic development of the country and the ways they perceived nature, wilderness, and civilization.

The environmental costs of commercial production did not reach most of America until the nineteenth century. Above the fall line and beyond the reach of coastal markets, retreating Indians were supplanted by Euro-American subsistence farmers attracted by cheap land. Their small farms spread over the hills of upland New England, the woodlands of western Pennsylvania, the southern Piedmont, and the valleys of the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains. In these areas, limited production supplied the rude comforts of subsistence, and transportation costs prohibited open-ended production for the market. Economic and social relationships were based largely on bartering and cooperation, as opposed to the commercial exchange found along the coast. By the early nineteenth century, this subsistence culture of small farmers comprised the majority of free Americans.

The virtues of this independent and land-owning citizenry were soon being celebrated as an “agrarian ideal” by French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and American statesman Thomas Jefferson. Crèvecoeur, a member of the French lesser nobility, came to the American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1759, after traveling in western Pennsylvania, he settled beside New York’s Hudson River, where he wrote Letters from an American Farmer (1782). In his letter “What is an American: This New Man,” he made a fundamental distinction between hierarchical, aristocratic European society and egalitarian American society. The people of America, he wrote, were simple farmers, “tillers of the soil,” and as such typified a new American ideal based on ownership of property and the work ethic. Those willing to live a frugal but comfortable life could obtain title to land held in “fee simple.” This agrarian-minded society was supported politically by what Crèvecoeur called the “silken bonds of mild government,” a laissez-faire economic system untrammeled by government regulations.

The same ideal for America was held up in Query 19 of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787). “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” he asserted. Independent yeoman farmers—those who owned a small piece of land in their own name and controlled their own labor—formed the very foundation of American democracy. In reality, this status applied primarily to white male property-owners, and did not include slaves or women (although some women did own property or were conduits for the passage of inherited property to male heirs of the next generation). Jefferson warned that if manufacturing became established in America, the country’s workshops would soon resemble the sweatshops of Europe, destroying the ideals of democracy and farm ownership. He therefore recommended that manufacturing stay in Europe and that the United States remain the home of independent farmers who produced goods and used resources for domestic subsistence.

Environmental historians have debated the extent to which eighteenth-century farmers were involved in the market economy. William Cronon in Changes in the Land (1983) states that “land in New England became for the colonists a form of capital, a thing consumed for the express purpose of creating augmented wealth.”¹ Carolyn Merchant, on the other hand, sees land as a source of family and community subsistence. In Ecological Revolutions (1989), she argues that “between 1700, when the inland towns were being settled, and 1790, when ecological crisis and European markets stimulated agricultural intensification, an economy oriented to subsistence and family preservation flourished in inland-upland New England.”² Both agree, however, that the market economy did ultimately transform the environment of New England and other eastern states by the nineteenth century.

The inland economy was based on an ecological system derived from both Europe and Native Americans. After clearing a small patch in the woods, perhaps two to five acres, farmers typically used it two or three years for crops and then five to eight years for pasture before allowing it to revert to woodland. When the soils in the first plot were exhausted of nutrients, they cleared and planted another two-to-five-acre plot. The plot itself was often put through a rotation system (developed in medieval Europe) of three sub-fields, in which Indian corn was grown on one or two acres the first year and a European grain, such as rye or barley, the second year. Each sub-field in succession was then allowed to lie fallow for the third year, to recover its nutrients. This short-term three-field rotation system allowed restoration of the soil, while the long-fallow “swidden” system allowed the regrowth of forests.

Once fields were carved out of the eastern pine and hardwood forests, subsistence ecology prescribed using them, spatially and sequentially, for both crops and animals. While crops were growing, rail fences kept out the pigs and cattle grazing in the woods. Then, after the harvest, cattle were let in to clean up the refuse and, in the process, manure the land for the coming year. Thus soil, water, and light combined with crops and animals to recycle nutrients and maintain crop yields. Meanwhile, the surrounding forest moderated the climate, reduced winds, and provided habitat for beneficial birds and insects.

Farmers also cleared one or two acres of forest a year to obtain fuel for the family, reserving a 40-acre woodlot that would reforest itself over a period of 20 to 30 years. People bartered crops, tools, and labor with neighbors. They used produce as if it were cash, exchanging food for shoes, bricks, or help in building fences and butchering hogs. Women exchanged cheese, eggs, and vegetables with other housewives, sometimes keeping accounts on the pantry door. In these ways, inland farmers formed cooperative communities. Some farmers kept written account books in which money appeared in the debit and credit columns, but no cash actually changed hands. Money, which was scarce in rural areas, was simply a notation for recording the exchange of products and labor between individuals.

Despite the transportation barrier, subsistence farmers found various ways to get enough cash for paying nominal taxes and buying high-utility store goods such as guns, crockery, and metal utensils or farm implements. One farmer might drive cattle to market. Another might burn wood from cleared fields to produce an easily transportable kettle of potash, which fetched a good price as an essential ingredient of glass and fertilizer. Others who lived close enough might haul a cart of firewood or surplus produce to the villages that grew up around country stores. Linking farm to market was the country storekeeper, who, like the miller, was one of the more well-to-do people in the rural community. Coopers, broommakers, and shoemakers (who were also farmers) bartered their wares directly with neighbors or traded them to the storekeeper in exchange for imported wares.

White subsistence farmers pressured the environment differently from Native Americans. Euro-American livestock and three-field short fallows made permanent settlement possible, whereas Indians’ long fallows entailed moving their villages to fresh ground every seven or eight years. White farmers’ free-ranging cattle trampled the forest floor and their pigs rooted in the soil, creating erosion but also manuring the woods. Whereas Indians’ greater reliance on hunting and gathering entailed firing the woods for easier passage and more browse for deer, whites burned only to clear fields. Whites’ firearms were more destructive than Indian arrows and spears, and their hunting decimated “pest” species such as bears, wolves, foxes, and hawks; reduced such subsistence prey as squirrels, possums, doves, quail, and grouse; and helped to exterminate passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, and heath hens. Their overall effect on the environment eventually exceeded that of Indians, as their populations grew faster and occupied the land more densely. Nevertheless, production for subsistence, whether by Indians or whites, made far lighter demands on the natural dower than would the impending market economy.

American farmers inherited an organic worldview from their forebears in Renaissance Europe, who likewise drew livelihood directly from the land. Through this prism they saw themselves as interacting with a nature that was alive in all its interconnected parts. Historian Herbert Leventhal describes this perspective in his book entitled In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth Century America (1976). A chain of being, as he explains the organic worldview, linked together all the parts of a living cosmos, from fixed stars and planets and moon down to earth, animals, plants, and even the lowliest stone. “By using the chain of being,” Leventhal writes, “man was able to place any entity in its proper place, and determine its relationship to all other beings.”³ God as ultimate creator acted through an animate entity, often characterized as “Mother Nature,” who carried out his dictates in the mundane world. People lived out an interactive I-Thou, rather than an instrumental relation with an animate natural order in all its manifestations. Therefore failed harvests, storms, or droughts were interpreted as punishments for improper actions, bountiful harvests as rewards for good behavior. The organic worldview thus contained within it an ethic of reinforcement or retaliation for human actions.

The organic worldview’s hold on American subsistence farmers was most evident in their devotion to the almanac. “Except for the Bible,” writes historian Charles M. Andrews, “probably no book was held in greater esteem or more widely read in the colonies in the eighteenth century than the almanac.”⁴ In Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (1977), historian Marion Barber Stowell explains that the almanac comprised mainly “astrological predictions, advice on husbandry and health, and humor,” a format dating back to medieval Europe.⁵ Based on the idea that the macrocosm, or larger cosmos, influenced the microcosm, or human body, each almanac contained a “man of the signs,” a diagram depicting the part of the body influenced by a particular sign of the zodiac. The moon’s daily location in a given zodiacal sign rendered the associated part of the body especially vulnerable. Within the organic framework, therefore, possessing an almanac for the farmer’s particular location was critical to predicting human health and determining herbal remedies.

Almanacs were also essential for timing agricultural activities. “The waning or declining moon,” Leventhal writes, “helped a plant set its roots down in the earth just as the rising moon helped plants grow upward toward the sky.”⁶ When the moon was full or waxing, it was believed to exert a pull on water and hence on the fluids in plants, an extrapolation from observations of the moon’s tidal action on oceans. When the moon was full, farmers planted crops that grew upward, such as corn, rye, and wheat, and when the moon was new, and presumably had the least influence, they planted root crops, such as carrots, turnips, and beets. They bred pigs in the full of the moon, believing that its influence would produce more offspring. They grafted fruit trees or cleared bushes in the “new of the moon” because the sap would bleed less and the graft would heal faster. Such practices were consistent with the microcosm-macrocosm theory that the heavens above influenced the earth below. An organic worldview thus guided the behaviors of farmers and explained their place in the cosmos.

The subsistence culture was ultimately doomed by the growing difficulty of providing viable farms for the sons of traditionally large families. Although many farmers adapted to shrinking land by selling out and moving to larger tracts of cheaper lands farther west, it was becoming clear by the early nineteenth century that cheap land was not as inexhaustible as it had once seemed. In long settled eastern areas—especially New England—where farms had been undergoing subdivision longest and western lands were less accessible, landless sons and daughters resorted to infertile lands, or to putting-out systems of household manufacture, such as spinning and weaving, shoemaking, and broommaking, or to wage labor for port cities and the swarm of small manufactories spawned along the fall line by abundant water power and cheap labor.

While this agrarian crisis crept inland at the turn of the century, a bonanza galvanized the coastal market economy. Western Europe, disorganized by the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, turned to the United States for shipping and foodstuffs. As a commercial boom pushed wheat prices high enough to bear the cost of wagoning from the interior, production of wheat for the market caught up a broad swath of subsistence farmers, stretching from northern Virginia to New York.

Leading the shift to market farming were the Pennsylvania “Dutch” (from “Deutsch” or German). Schooled to a painstaking husbandry in Germany, they had migrated to the rich soils of Chester and Lancaster counties outside Philadelphia. As described by Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush (1745–1813) in his 1789 article, “The German Farmers of Pennsylvania,” they constructed substantial barns to protect their animals, built high fences to keep cattle and pigs out of their gardens, and transported wheat and vegetables in large wagons to the city’s markets.

Inspired by this example, agricultural improvements based on the use of fertilizers spread elsewhere to wealthier farmers with access to an urban market. Only they could afford the additional hired hands required to restore their soils and take up agriculture designed for market profit. To do so, they began raising cattle in order to obtain manure for fertilizing fields and planting higher-yielding crops. They seeded legumes in fallow fields and enriched their soils with fish fertilizers and expensive guano, the dung of seabirds from islands off the coast of Peru. Educated market farmers kept account books, numbered fields, weighed products, and calculated costs and profits for each field, crop, and agricultural practice. Produce was taken to county fairs, where prizes were given for the largest vegetables and heaviest cattle.

As pioneers of market farming, the Pennsylvania Dutch had capitalized on the country’s first major transportation project—a turnpike, or improved wagon road, financed by tolls, from Philadelphia to Lancaster. Its success inspired a craze for turnpike building, as capital generated by the commercial boom reached out from the great ports and smaller commercial centers to stimulate and engross trade with the countryside. The advent of market farming, based on the dynamic interplay of profit motive, wage labor, and turnpike construction, heralded the interlinked transportation and market revolutions of the early nineteenth century.

The commercial boom inspired dreams of a comprehensive national transportation system, and in 1808, Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin proposed a federally financed network of roads and canals to “shorten the distances into the remote corners of the United States.”⁷ The War of 1812 and fears of a powerful central government stymied this grandiose plan. But when the war ended in 1815, an outburst of entrepreneurial zeal, technological ingenuity, and financing by state and local governments produced a series of transportation developments that transformed American life.

Leading this transportation revolution was the steamboat, which Robert Fulton had perfected on the Hudson in 1807. After the war, steamboats spread rapidly along the vast network of rivers beyond the Appalachians, where there was no fall line and therefore almost no rapids to impede navigation. Adapted for this purpose with a multi-deck superstructure built on a flat raft and paddlewheels skimming the surface, the western steamboat could navigate up to the shallow headwaters of the Mississippi-Ohio river system and its multitude of tributaries, as well as lesser rivers flowing to the Gulf of Mexico. Transporting bulky commodities upstream as well as downstream far more rapidly and at a fourth of the former cost, steamboats spread market production across the West, from the bustling river ports of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Memphis, and the great western entrepôt at New Orleans, to new domains of the Cotton Kingdom on the fertile black loams of Alabama and Mississippi.

New forms of transportation affected the environment not only directly, but also by fostering population growth and production for the market. To supply steamboats with fuel, squatters along the rivers felled great tracts of forests. “Consumption of firewood by steamboats,” writes environmental historian Andrew Isenberg, “was probably the primary cause of riparian deforestation in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.”⁸ Traveling the great western rivers in the 1820s, the inspired painter of American birds, John James Audubon (1785–1851), expressed admiration for the industrious squatters along the Mississippi, but amazement at the rapidity of the land’s transformation farther upstream on the Ohio. “This grand portion of our Union,” he lamented, “instead of being in a state of nature, is now more or less covered with villages, farms, and towns, where the din of hammers and machinery is constantly heard; … the woods are fast disappearing under the axe by day, and the fires by night; … [and] hundreds of steamboats are gliding to and fro over the whole length of the majestic river, forcing commerce to take root and to prosper at every spot.”⁹ His Birds of America (1827) brilliantly captured the beauty and abundance of American birdlife at a time when much of it was vanishing before axe and rifle.

The rising commodity production fostered by steamboats in the West sharpened competition among East Coast ports to engage in western trade by surmounting the Appalachian transport barrier. With state financing in 1817, New York City exploited the unique water-level gap between the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains for the western world’s most ambitious engineering project, a canal linking the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers with Lake Erie at Buffalo. Generating an amazing flow of commodities upon its completion in 1825, the Erie Canal set off a canal-building mania. Most important were the ambitious systems of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, connecting the Great Lakes with the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. By linking the western rivers to the Erie Canal in cheap water transport, they guaranteed the Empire City’s dominance as the great American entrepôt.

Rounding out the transportation revolution was a British technological innovation—the railroad. After 1830, railroads reached out to tap interior trade from Charleston, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. By the 1860s, trunk-line railroads connected the East Coast with St. Louis on the Mississippi and Chicago on Lake Michigan, and 30,000 miles of track brought cheap transport for bulky market commodities within a few days’ wagoning of most settled areas. In 1869, the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific at Promontory Point in Utah to complete the first transcontinental railroad.

Railroads cut deep scars through the landscape and made heavy demands on forests and mines for firewood, timber, coal, and iron. They contaminated their routes with noise, smoke, ashes, and threats of fire. William Cronon brings their larger impact to life in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), by demonstrating how capital reached out hundreds of miles from the railroad hub of the Midwest to extract lumber, cattle, and wheat from the countryside for the Chicago market.

The railroad fired the mid-century American imagination as nothing else. For Concord’s sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), it was a “work of art which agitates and drives mad the whole people, as music, sculpture, and picture have done in their great days,” and it “introduced a multitude of picturesque traits into our pastoral scenery.” Emerson waxed most eloquent, however, about the railroad’s practical benefits. He exulted over “railroad iron” as a “magician’s rod” with “power to awake the sleeping energies of land and water.”¹⁰ “A clever fellow,” he wrote, “was acquainted with the expansive force of steam; he also saw the wealth of wheat and grass rotting in Michigan. Then he cunningly screws on the steam-pipe to the wheat-crop. Puff now, O Steam! The steam puffs and expands as before, but this time it is dragging all Michigan at its back to hungry New York and hungry England.”¹¹

Emerson’s Concord neighbor and protégé, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), was characteristically otherwise-minded. “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter,” Thoreau complained, “… informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving.… Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay.… All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the country meadows are raked into the city.”¹²

Both men sensed the historic shift the railroad announced. The transportation revolution was part cause and part effect of a broader market revolution that brought with it a profound transformation of American economy, society, values, and environment. The entire nation was becoming a unified, dynamic market of interdependent sections, each specializing in commodities as advantaged by its natural resources. The South continued to produce tobacco and rice and expanded its cotton and sugar production. The Middle Atlantic states and the Northwest focused on wheat, livestock, iron, and coal. The Northeast, while retaining its dominance of international trade, finance, and commercial services, moved increasingly into the manufacture of textiles, clothing, shoes, and hats.

Tradition-bound farmers did not convert easily to the competitive, get-ahead culture demanded by the market. According to historian Charles Sellers, “Radically new imperatives confronted people when they were lured or pushed from modest subsistence into open-ended market production. By the 1820s rapidly spreading channels of trade were replacing an un-pressured security of rude comfort with an insecurity goaded by hope of opulence and fear of failure. Within a generation in every new area the market invaded, competition undermined neighborly cooperation and family equality.”¹³ Everywhere American society was wrenched in new directions to reshape people for careers of calculation and competitive striving.

The market revolution triumphed politically only after a final struggle that produced the democratic subsistence culture’s most lasting legacy. “When market stresses climaxed in the Panic of 1819,” Sellers writes, “… subsistence farmers and urban workers rose in political rebellion against banks, conventional politicians, and ‘aristocrats.’” Seizing on a popular hero scorned by market elites, “the people” elected Andrew Jackson president in 1828 by “the largest popular majority in the nineteenth century.” Jacksonian democracy was characterized by its exclusion of women and its racist animus against banished Indians and enslaved blacks, and it eventually bowed to the market’s inexorable imperatives. Nevertheless, by attacking banks as engines of capitalist transformation, Jackson mobilized for the first time a mass national electorate and ushered in modern democratic politics. Every American president since has had to run the gauntlet of his popular democracy. “Democracy,” Sellers concludes, “arose in resistance to capitalism, not as its natural political expression.”¹⁴

The market revolution threatened the American environment more than any other development in modern history. It threw open land, water, air, and all the life they contained to unrestrained development in the pursuit of wealth and status. It made profit-and-loss the sole criterion for dealing with nature, conceived as inert matter. A mechanistic worldview based on the quantification of matter and energy, interchangeable parts, mathematical prediction, and the control of nature replaced the animate cosmos of the colonial farmer. In its wake lay cut-over forests, smoky air, polluted streams, and endangered wildlife. But the market’s triumph evoked the first stirrings of an environmental consciousness that would eventually challenge its excesses through the democratic process.

As the market economy moved across the land, the comments of Audubon, Emerson, and Thoreau evinced a growing preoccupation with nature and its relation to humanity. In reaction to loss of the wild, poets, philosophers, novelists, and artists lamented the rapidity with which the country was being developed and eulogized sublime and picturesque vistas found in mountains, oceans, sunsets, and rivers.

Taken collectively, however, this body of thought betrayed an ambivalence between dismay at devastated nature and fear of nature’s untamed wildness, both nonhuman and human. It moved toward preference for a middle ground, the cultivated garden, as prefigured in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. Crèvecoeur maintained that people took their character from the environments in which they lived. Along the Atlantic coast, fishermen were energetic and independent, taking their “nature” from the boisterous ocean. Farther inland, people were simple farmers, nurtured, like plants, by the soil. On the frontiers, however, they donned buckskin clothing and lived by consuming the meat of wild beasts, taking on animal-like characteristics. Crèvecoeur’s ideal environment, therefore, was the middle ground inhabited by the simple farmer.

Explorers and scientists in the eighteenth century were among the first to record their appreciation of nature. Virginia planter William Byrd (1674–1744) described the delights of wilderness camping on a survey of the North Carolina boundary in his 1728 History of the Dividing Line, and depicted the Appalachians as ranges of blue clouds rising one above the other in vistas of increasing perfection. He lamented, however, that wilderness valleys lacked “nothing but cattle grazing in the meadow, and sheep and goats feeding on the hill, to make … a complete rural landscape.”¹⁵ Botanist William Bartram (1739–1823), after a trip through the southern Appalachians in 1773, reported that he was “seduced by these sublime, enchanting scenes of primitive nature.” Similarly, in 1791, British publicist William Gilpin (1724–1804) found in American forests “the pleasing quality of nature’s roughness and irregularity and intricacy.”

An urban appreciation of nature also began to appear. The poetry of Boston’s Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) delighted in the natural world as a rational, harmonious whole rather than a tumultuous wilderness. Arriving on a slave ship at age eighteen and studying ancient literature and Latin at the behest of her impressed mistress, she mastered the fashionable classical allusions and tropes that were conventions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—the nine muses including Calliope, muse of poetry; Aurora, goddess of the dawn; the sun as “illustrious king of the day”; and the “gentle zephyr,” or wind. In “An Hymn to the Morning” and “An Hymn to the Evening” (1773), she evoked the beauty of nature, the transitory quality of life, and the power of God’s action in the natural world. Presaging the more romantic nature poetry of Philip Freneau and William Cullen Bryant, Wheatley became the country’s first published black poet.

The middle-ground ideal of the cultivated garden was most definitively articulated in the Leatherstocking novels of the upstate New York squire James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), the most popular American writer of the early nineteenth century. He pitted the nature-nurtured nobility of backwoods scout Leatherstocking, or Natty Bumppo, against the artificiality of advancing civilization on the one hand, and against the barbarism and “wasty ways” of frontiersmen on the other. Although Cooper, in The Pioneers (1823), described with anguish the massive slaughter, for sport and market, that drove vast flocks of passenger pigeons into extinction, he was forced to admit, concludes literary historian Annette Kolodny, “that a non-exploitative white community, living harmoniously within the embrace of nature, was no longer a possibility.”¹⁶

Nature’s tensions and affinities with American market society were most deeply explored by the “transcendentalists.” This coterie of clerics, poets, and philosophical essayists, centered in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts and led by Emerson, had absorbed in Harvard classrooms the abstruse philosophy developed in Germany by Immanuel Kant, as made intelligible for them by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It offered these youthful rebels an alternative to the soul-withering rationality of Boston’s Unitarian commercial elite, which had leached away the passion and commitment that their forebears derived from the Puritan God. In place of Jehovah as ultimate reality, it posited transcendent ideas—those above the material world—that sustained and were mirrored in natural reality and implanted in every soul. Nature became the source of spiritual insight, as symbol or emblem of these ideal truths. Revering wilderness as bespeaking God rather than denigrating it as evil, like their Puritan ancestors, many transcendentalists came to feel that it should be cherished and preserved.

Thoreau saw this new faith as reinforcing the organic cosmology of rural America against threatening market forces. He was influenced, as well, by the romantic poets of Europe—Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Germany and William Wordsworth, along with Coleridge, in England—who viewed nature as a source of spiritual insights. In 1845 he “retired” for two and a half years to Walden Pond, just outside Concord, to think through, in this new way, the values of the natural landscape. Drawing also on folk and traditional cultures, on the sages of India, and on the Native American animist view that deities and spirits exist in all things, Thoreau published his masterpiece Walden in 1854. Here, luminously homely metaphor expressed an I-Thou relationship with nature that made plants and animals equal, animate beings.

Thoreau spoke of looking into the depths of Walden Pond—the earth’s eye—as a means of absorbing higher truths. Acutely aware of how rapidly nature was disappearing under the aegis of the market, he wished to live lightly on the land. His beanfield exemplified his desire to save and restore nature by infusing subsistence farming with an ethic of preservation. If the land were left alone, the forest would return through the process of plant succession. Native plants and animals would reappear, and perhaps even the Indian would once again walk along the paths of a restored wilderness. The axiom “in wildness is the preservation of the world” distilled his personal wilderness ideal.

Walden Pond, for Thoreau, represented the middle ground between civilization and wilderness. Concord and Boston symbolized the market, Mount Katahdin (or Ktaadin) in Maine the distant wilderness. The railroad, which traveled along the edge of his pond, brought commodities and excitement from Boston and beyond, disrupting the serenity of his woodland retreat. But the pond was also a safe haven against the wild. On a trip to Mount Katahdin, Thoreau experienced the terror and loneliness of the wilderness and paused to ask, “Who are we? What are we?” Here nature, in contrast to the pastoral setting of Walden, was savage and titanic, inhuman and lonely. He relished the community, not just of people, but of other animals and plants in the middle landscape of Walden Pond.

Emerson took a different tack. Bred in the Boston bosom of New England’s commercial elite and finding an audience for his lectures among the businessmen of northern cities, he strove to fuse enthusiasm for nature with enthusiasm for the market. “The Over-Soul” (1841) linked the human soul with “the eternal One,” the transcendental “soul of the whole … the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related.” As offshoots of an “everlasting nature,” we “see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animals, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.” The worship of nature as manifestation and emblem of the Over-Soul instilled in every human soul an appreciation for the earth as part of the “Unity” of all creation. But simultaneously, Emerson’s great manifesto, Nature (1836), lauded “commodity” or usefulness to humans as one of nature’s preeminent qualities, and his most popular lecture (and essay), “Wealth” (1844), rested on the proposition that man “is born to be rich” and will not “content himself with a hut and a handful of dried pease.” The most moral individuals, it seemed to follow, were those “men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map, and survey” who “esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves.”¹⁷

As national sage, Emerson elaborated his vision of national destiny in “The Young American” (1844). “Trade planted America,” he proclaimed, and trade was its high calling. “This great savage country should be furrowed by the plough, and combed by the harrow; these rough Alleghenies should know their master; these foaming torrents should be bestridden by proud arches of stone; these wild prairies should be loaded with wheat; the swamps with rice; the hill-tops should pasture innumerable sheep and cattle.”¹⁸ Emerson’s popularity at mid-century suggested that his commodification of nature was drowning out concerns about its degradation in a flood of exhilaration about progress.

The dialogue between Thoreau and Emerson became richly visual in the landscape paintings of a group of artists called the Hudson River School. They were so called because many of them lived in New York City and found their favorite locale for painting in the nearby Catskill Mountains region of the Hudson River Valley. Here, and later in New England, the West, Europe, and even South America, they sought out landscapes through which to capture on canvas their preoccupation with nature and its invasion by civilization.

Environmental historian William Cronon interprets the paintings of the Hudson River School, along with later representations of the westward movement, as capturing narrative moments within a larger history. “Reading the history of environmental change,” he writes, “requires us to place each painting in a dynamic continuum that encompasses not just the painting’s present moment but the past from which the landscape emerged and the future toward which its artist believed it was heading.”¹⁹ These paintings are set in a narrative of progression through three stages. The first stage, the wild, representing untamed nature, gives way to the second stage, the pastoral, representing the middle ground of the cultivated garden, which gives way to the third stage, the urban, representing the railroads, factories, and cities of the triumphant market. The narrative can be a progressive saga of material progress or a declensionist tale of nature’s degradation.

Hudson River painting, like transcendentalism, was part of a shift in European and American culture from eighteenth-century rationalism to nineteenth-century “romanticism.” Spiritual truth, according to romantic doctrine, was implanted in every soul, evoked by nature, and experienced intuitively and emotionally rather than intellectually and analytically. This tendency in art and thought, along with the simultaneous upsurge of an emotional Protestant revivalism, expressed yearning for a spirituality and feeling denied by the market’s cash calculus. Thomas Cole (1801–1848), the tutelary genius of the Hudson River School, preached that scenes of pristine nature “affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them … the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.”²⁰

The Hudson River artists stood on the cusp between the first two stages of Cronon’s narrative, the wild and the pastoral. Wild nature was the special theater of “the sublime,” meaning that its untamed grandeur, beauty, and power evoked the strongest emotions of reverence, awe, and dread. Cole and his closest associates, Thomas Doughty (1792–1856) and Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) were tenaciously attached to the wild and sublime. “Landscape painting,” said Durand, “will be great in proportion as it declares the glory of God, by representation of his works, and not of the works of man.” Cole’s “scenes of wild grandeur … never touched by the axe, … never deformed by culture,” brought delight to his bosom friend William Cullen Bryant, the nature poet and Jacksonian Democratic editor of the New York Evening Post.²¹

The Hudson River painters captured the sublimity of the wild, as in Cole’s “The Clove” (1827), by constructing chaotic landscapes of dark forests, menacing clouds, jagged or looming peaks, twisted tree trunks, and foaming cataracts. They were especially accomplished in the dramatic use of light, and their dark landscapes of the wild were backlit by brilliant skies of divine luminescence. They feared, as Cole put it, “that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away”; and they were trying, said the Literary World, to rescue from the grasp of “Yankee enterprise … the little that is left, before it is too late.”²² The sublime reached its apogee of extravagance when western exploration carried later members of the Hudson River School to the irresistibly suggestive spectacles of the Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains. Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) painted enormous canvases of Estes Park, Colorado; Yosemite Valley; and other majestic showcases; and Thomas Moran (1837–1926), who accompanied the 1871 Hayden expedition to Yellowstone, produced overwhelming paintings of spectacular canyons and peaks in Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.

Many feared, however, that the untamed sublimity of the wild might release the untamed passions of the human heart. As wild nature retreated, the Hudson River painters gave equal time to evoking a more tranquil sublimity from warmly sunlit representations of the pastoral’s cultivated garden. Doughty’s “Autumn on the Hudson” (1850) captures the pastoral mood in a tranquil scene of a modest home on the edge of the river, with sailboats drifting along the water, and people in the foreground preparing a field for crops.

More characteristically these “priests of the natural church,”²³ as art historian Barbara Novak names them, juxtaposed the wild and pastoral stages, often with disquieting intimations of the third or urban stage to come. Cole’s “The Oxbow” (1836), portraying a nearly circular bend in the Connecticut River near the town of Holyoke, reveals stark contrasts. Wild nature, depicted by forests and dark clouds on the left, moves toward a pastoral landscape on the right, where sheep graze in a meadow and corn husks are stacked along the river’s edge. The land has been cleared, the setting is tranquil, and the river wends its way through a peaceful scene. But there are intimations of what is to come. A haze on the hillside indicates the burning of the forest by people settling the land, and scars among the trees represent the cut-over forest. Cronon suggests that the river, painted in the shape of a question mark, is Cole’s way of asking, “What will the future hold?”

Cole framed the problematic of nature most explicitly. Through painting he sought “to walk with nature as a poet.”²⁴ Durand portrayed him and Bryant together as “Kindred Spirits” (1848) communing with nature in the sublimity of a Catskills glen. When Cole departed for Italy to hone his skills amid paintings by the old masters, friend Bryant distilled their vision of America as nature’s nation in a farewell sonnet. The painter would carry with him “a living image of thy native land,” as he viewed Europe’s “fair, but different” scenes, bearing “everywhere the trace of man.” “Gaze on them, till the tears shall dim thy sight,” the poet admonished, “But keep that earlier, wilder image bright.²⁵

Cole’s most ambitious project for keeping the wilder image bright was “The Course of Empire” (1836), a series of five paintings that turned the three-stage progressive narrative of material progress on its head by adding a two-stage declensionist conclusion. Drawing on his Italian experience, and using ancient Rome as a metaphor for the United States, he painted the same setting as changing through five stages: “The Savage State” (hunters in the wilderness), “The Pastoral State” (shepherds and their sheep in an Arcadian landscape), “Consummation” (bustling commerce amid an imposing array of classical buildings), “Destruction” (the same scene swept by fire and pillage), and “Desolation” (deserted ruins engulfed by wild nature).

Cole’s fantasy of recovering the wild became increasingly hard to sustain when the urban menace claimed industrial sites and raw materials in the Catskills. As geographer Michael Heiman points out, the Hudson River painters “often overlooked or screened out with vegetation the burned-over fields, stinking tanneries, polluted streams, clamorous sawmills, and other production intrusions” on their temple of the sublime.²⁶ Around that temple the country’s particularly noxious tanning industry first concentrated. This “environmental malignancy,” writes historian Isenberg, fouled streams with organic contaminants that overwhelmed the capacity of aerobic bacteria to break them down, and chewed up for tannin dense forests of ancient hemlocks that had taken three centuries to mature. “Deforestation,” he adds, “had widespread environmental as well as economic consequences, ranging from the destruction of local wildlife habitat to increased erosion and runoff of soil into streams.”²⁷

Bowing to reality, Hudson River artists began to include in their paintings occasional renderings of towns (Durand’s “View of Troy”), as well as railroads (George Inness’s “Delaware Water Gap”), but these were subsumed in the distant backgrounds of pastoral landscapes. “So it is with a shock,” Novak writes of Inness’s “Lackawanna Valley” (1855), “that we find a train forcing its way toward us out of the middle distance to become the main protagonist.” No other picture in American art, she concludes, so “aptly embodies the moment of juncture between nature and civilization.” The “busily smoking” locomotive charges into a pastoral landscape prominently and incongruously scarred by stumps.²⁸ This painting was doubtless seen as a celebration of progressive technology by directors of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, which commissioned it, but perhaps by the artist as an elegy for vanishing pastoral nature. From here it was only a small step to unequivocal celebration of the onrushing urban and industrial order by later artists and illustrators.

As the Hudson River School lamented a vanishing nature, other artists were recording the lifeways of a vanishing Indian, demonstrating in the process that American Indians were far more complex and interesting than contemporary stereotypes allowed. Swiss painter Carl Bodmer (1809–1893), who accompanied the German scientist Prince Maximillian to the western prairies in 1832–34, portrayed the varied Indian uses of nature with greater detail and precision than any other artist. His “Interior of a Mandan Earth Lodge” (1833–34) depicts the strong timbers dragged by Mandan and their horses from the mountains to the plains to frame their lodges. The lodges themselves had roofs of earth and prairie grasses. Indians, along with their dogs, are shown sitting in the center of the lodge at a campfire, their tethered horses visible outside. The painting includes a basket intricately woven by a woman of the tribe, spears used by men in the buffalo hunt, and shields for warfare made from buffalo skins and decorated with pictographs.

A chance encounter with a group of Indians visiting Philadelphia was an epiphany for George Catlin (1796–1872). Entranced by these “lords of the forest,” and alarmed that they were “rapidly passing away from the face of the earth,” he resolved to spend his life painting them in their native wildness before they were gone. “Wild” was not a pejorative word to Catlin. “A wild man may have been endowed by his Maker with all the humane and noble traits of a tame man,” he insisted, and he delighted in “the vast and pathless wilds” he first experienced in 1832 on the Trans-Mississipi prairies. He advocated a national park, in which the lifestyle and lands of “a truly lofty and noble race” might be preserved. His numerous paintings of varied Indian interactions with nature included a group extracting red-brown shale (named Catlinite) for pipes (“Pipestone Quarry,” 1848), and women scraping and dressing buffalo hides to make robes and hanging them to dry along with buffalo meat (“Comanche Village,” 1834).²⁹

The growing perception that Indians were doomed brought an alternative into prominent view in 1853, when a sculpture by Horatio Greenough (1805–1852) was placed in the United States Capitol. “The Rescue” depicts a white woman and her child shrinking in terror from an Indian with tomahawk raised. The central figure, however, is a giant frontiersman firmly restraining, but not harming, the Indian. Both the woman and the Indian are being rescued. White men, the sculpture seems to say, could save the vanishing Indian by quelling his imputed “savagery” and transforming him into a “civilized” being.

By mid-century, differences over vanishing western Indians and vanishing western wilderness were meshing with differences over the wild, the pastoral, and the urban that derived from the East. Increasingly, contending narratives of nature and national destiny framed, and were framed by, dramatic change in the Trans-Mississipi West.

One narrative suggested by pre–Civil War environmental history may be summarized as follows. The advancing market not only devastated nature, but also stirred a widespread hunger for an emotionally compelling spirituality and connectedness that the competitive ethic of profit and loss could not satisfy. For much of the market world’s new middle classes, this hunger focused on nature, as indicated by the popularity of Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales, transcendentalism, and the Hudson River painters. This yearning could not be satisfied for long by Emerson’s arranged marriage between commodified nature and the elusive Over-Soul. When, at century’s end, peaking assaults on nature finally aroused a conservationist majority, it would draw inspiration from the tradition of Thoreau and Cole, and the means for checking market excesses from Jacksonian democracy.

10. William H. Gilman et al., eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 10:353; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a biographical introduction and notes by Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904), 1:370, 451–55.

15. William Byrd, The Writings of ‘Colonel William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esqr,’ ed. John Spencer Bassett (New York: Doubleday, 1901), 242; William Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist’s Edition, ed. Francis Harper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 69; William Gilpin, “Remarks on Forest Scenery and Other Woodland Views” (1791), quoted in Wilderness and the American Mind, rev. ed., by Roderick Nash (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 46.

19. William Cronon, “Telling Tales on Canvas,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts, by Jules David Prown et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 45. Many of the paintings discussed below are reproduced in Cronon’s article and in Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875, rev. ed., by Barbara Novak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).