In the early years of the republic, as Americans built a new nation, the Enlightenment’s intellectual commitments were neither fully realized nor forgotten. “Reason” and “virtue” still gripped the imagination of American political figures, clergy, writers, and their publics. But rapid population growth, westward expansion, urbanization, and industrialization, along with political experiments (and failures) in democracy abroad, put intense pressure on American Enlightenment ideas. The desire for the enlightened republican vision of a government of independent landowners ensured that white freedom would continue to be predicated on black exploitation and Native Americans’ dispossession of their ancestral lands and their ways of life.
While few professed to be able to read the mind of God, many vocal proponents of westward expansion were convinced that his desire for white Christendom’s transcontinental destiny was manifest. Improvements to technology and the market revolution helped provide critical infrastructure for the new nation, but they also caused many observers to worry that technological and economic advances were outpacing human development and threatening individual autonomy. Nevertheless, those same critics made use of the communications revolution to spread their Romantic visions of alternative paths. Republican ideals fused with new Romantic sensibilities in response to the changing political and social conditions of the early republic.
All of these dramatic changes transformed the ways Americans thought. What antebellum Americans learned from making a new world was that human beings did indeed have it within their power to make, remake, or even destroy worlds. What persisted was a frame of mind with an emboldened sense of human agency and power but also one frightfully aware of the impermanence and instability of their new nation. The desire to remake worlds can be seen in the flurry of evangelical revivals of the Second Great Awakening; utopian experiments including Brook Farm, Oneida, and Ceresco; and reform movements, such as antislavery, prison reform, temperance, and women’s rights. But the discomfort with too dramatic a change in customary ways of life helps explain the limits of their influence and, in some cases, their failures.
The most reliable commentators on a period are often those who lived through its changes, and this is especially true when that commentator is Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was as if Emerson had a divining rod to the inner yearnings, worries, and inconsistencies of antebellum Americans’ “modern mind.” He noted that it “believed that the nation existed for the individual. . . . This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision.” America produced a “mind [that] had become aware of itself” and keenly aware of warring impulses of “intellect and affection.” A young republic in its gangly adolescence, America during the first half of the nineteenth century produced a generation of “young men [who] were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, dissection, anatomizing of motives.”1 Emerson, his Transcendentalist coconspirators, and many other critical thinkers of the day showed just what was possible—but also what was not—when enough Americans put their mental cutlery to work to make a new world consonant with its founding ideals.
The notion of a new nation founded on ideals of its own choosing inspired the French-born American writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). In it he posed the memorable question: “What then is the American, this new man?” Crèvecœur thought the answer was both clear and compelling: “He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.”2 In the decades to come, however, American commentators would wrestle with what it meant to leave behind all of their inheritances from and intellectual affiliations with Europe, and continue to question just what exactly being “American” even meant.
Well into the nineteenth century it was clear that the Revolutionary War had ruptured America’s political ties to the king but not its cultural bonds with England and continental Europe. Even with the considerable expansion of domestic manufacturing in the early republic, Americans who could afford imported consumer goods typically preferred them over those made in America. Pocket watches and candelabras from France; blue and white earthenware from Delft; decorative prints from Bavaria; and chintzes, crockery, and cosmetics from England were all the rage. The origin of the cultural good, often more than the good itself, signified refinement. Elite American children learned to play Mozart and Haydn on their fortepianos imported from Vienna, and practiced good penmanship writing passages from Coleridge and Byron excerpted in American periodicals. But of all the foreign goods in circulation, books were by far the most treasured. South Carolinians, for example, were more likely to read Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell (1804), which used the Swiss struggle for independence from the Habsburg Empire as a parable for the American Revolution, than The History of the American Revolution (1789), written by their own native son David Ramsay. Few educated Americans in the early republic questioned the axiom that cultivation (what by the 1840s would be called “culture”) came from Europe. Even fewer noticed the inconsonance between their criticisms of European decadence and degeneracy and their own heavy reliance on Europe’s cultural and intellectual wares.
During the early republic, Americans’ consternation over the perceived absence of a native culture fostered efforts to build new intellectual institutions that could cultivate a liberated intellect and habits befitting a politically liberated people. One of the most important initiatives was spearheaded by the Connecticut educator Noah Webster, who had started his career as a schoolteacher in 1778, witnessing firsthand the impediments to educating a citizenry for a republic. His experiences led him to the conclusion that language was as essential for shaping a distinct American identity as was literacy for supporting a fledgling democracy. Troubled that Americans’ language was wholly derivative of the English spoken and written in Britain, Webster set out to give Americans an English of their own. “Language,” he declared, “as well as government should be national. . . . America should have her own distinct from all the world.”3 He regarded British English as the product of a decaying civilization, of a Europe “grown old in folly, corruption, and tyranny,” and thus thought it was imperative to found a national language.4
With this urgency in mind, Webster produced his “blue-backed” Spelling Book in 1783, which phonetically simplified and standardized spellings, quickly becoming the authority on American English. With the success of his speller (which sold one and a half million copies and was reprinted fifty times between 1783 and 1801 alone), he set out to further his cause by compiling the first dictionary of American English, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), to both give new authority to everyday words and set limits on the language of the new nation. Webster regarded it an “honor” (not “honour”) to “labor” (not “labour”) in the service of American “civilization” (not “civilisation”), while granting himself the “license” (not “licence”) to include new American words such as “chowder” and “squash.” He clearly wanted to accentuate the difference between the health and vitality of the new American republic and the degeneracy of the Europe it left behind, so he even coined a new word to do so: “demoralize,” meaning “to corrupt or undermine the morals of; to destroy or lessen the effect of moral principles on; to render corrupt in morals.”5
The founding of the Library of Congress is another example of an early effort to cultivate a distinctly American intellect and culture. Initially established in 1800, the library provided resources for the country’s legislators. It started out in the north wing of the US Capitol as a modest collection of 740 volumes and three maps. But the library expanded quickly, thanks in part to the vision of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was certain that he could not “live without books,” and he believed that the new nation could not either.6 While he was president of the United States, from 1801 to 1809, he facilitated the expansion of the library to become a national library—a resource for all Americans. After the British army invaded Washington, DC, and burned the Capitol in the War of 1812, Jefferson sold his personal collection of more than 6,000 books to the library, which was the biggest collection in America at that time. Thanks to its wide range of subjects, from law, economics, and the natural sciences to literature and the arts, including many works in French, German, Latin, and Greek in addition to English, Jefferson’s collection helped turn the Library of Congress into an institution for citizens to imagine their role in their young nation and the wider world, as well as one that stood as a monument of America’s intellectual aspirations.
Throughout the early republic and well into the nineteenth century, there were continued efforts to foster a national culture that was more befitting of a democracy while also marking the boundaries of a distinctly American identity. As the case of Prussian expatriate Francis Lieber shows, this urgent work fell even to recent American immigrants. Lieber had arrived in Boston in 1827 after having been persecuted for participating in liberal movements in Prussia, and he saw no better testament of his fidelity to the cause of liberal freedoms than to help provide Americans with an intellectual record of their own. He thus gave his new adopted homeland its very own Encyclopedia Americana (1829–33), which he modeled on the Conversations-Lexikon (1796–1808), later referred to as the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, as way of documenting and cataloging knowledge necessary for a national body. Drawing on the rich tradition of German scholarship, he applied his knowledge and expertise to this Enlightenment enterprise, attempting to catalog, classify, and organize everything about the known (American) world. Thus, Lieber, like so many immigrants to America before and after him, played a vital role in the making of an “American” national culture.
But despite all of these efforts, educated Americans still sought to keep abreast of intellectual developments in Europe. One of them, which proved both influential but also troubling, was German Romanticism, with its exaltation of the idea of the Volk (folk), as this caused them additional consternation about living off a culture secondhand. The philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder provided the most bracing version of this notion when he mingled ideas about Kultur (culture) and Geist (spirit) to imagine a people knitted together by a common history, language, tradition, and sensibility. Propelled by the rudimentary nations taking shape in France and America, Herder’s Romantic impulse emphasized that only an organic Volksgeist—not social contracts, not laws, not leaders—could be the basis of a true Vaterland (fatherland), which was his preferred term for the modern “nation-state.”
Herder’s Romantic nationalism was an intoxicating brew. The only problem for his American readers was that their America did not have a Volk nurtured by a common Kultur, which was expressive of a singular Geist. And it certainly was no Fatherland—it was nothing other than a contractual arrangement. America was populated with peoples, but not a people, who, with the exception of the Indians, were all transplants from different parts of Europe, each with their own mother tongues, faith traditions, and cultural sensibilities. In fact, there was no substantive “American” anything prior to the creation of a nation by that name and solidified in the drafting of its Declaration of Independence, its early laws, and its formal Constitution. Indeed, that is precisely what made the American experiment seem so extraordinary and filled with promise just a few decades earlier.
With the influx of early Romantic ideas, this notion of national belonging as something one inherits rather than becomes would give some of Herder’s early nineteenth-century American readers pause. Without roots in collective memory and tribal bonds knitting the people to each other and to a homeland, was it even possible to be a nation? And if so, what could legitimately serve as the basis for that nation’s collective imagination and affections? These were some of the questions that both vexed and energized many American thinkers for the decades to come.
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense broke every record in America’s short publishing history. Whereas books typically had press runs of no more than 2,000 copies and pamphlets roughly 1,000, Common Sense sold more than 120,000 copies in its first year alone. One of the reasons for its success was that he worked so effectively with biblical references long familiar to colonists and reformulated them as arguments against monarchy. He drew liberally from the Old Testament to show that only “the King of heaven” could be Israel’s “proper Sovereign.”7 For Paine, it was simple common sense to see that the Bible showed Americans that monarchical government was ungodly.
But after the revolution, Paine came to doubt that institutionalized Christianity could be a force for freedom in the new republic, and he turned his sights to divesting it of its moral authority in The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (1794). “It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man,” he argued, using the same fervor with which he had once employed the Bible in the cause of freedom.8 Here he concluded that the Bible was “more. . . the word of a demon, than the Word of God,” and would leave his conscience to its own best moral resources: “My own mind is my own church.” Franklin and Jefferson may have privately shared his sentiment that “pure and simple deism” was the best religion for the fledgling republic, but they tried to persuade him not to publish such incendiary claims in a devoutly Christian America.9 Like Common Sense, his Age of Reason was a commercial success (though not on the scale of the earlier book), but it was panned by former supporters (Adams described it as the product of a “malignant heart”), and Paine was ostracized for the remainder of his life.10
Rather than being a force for loosening the Bible’s hold on Americans’ minds, The Age of Reason inspired a religious counterattack that made Paine’s fervor seem restrained. The revolutionary-era lawyer and statesman Elias Boudinot (who was baptized in 1740 by the First Great Awakening Anglican minister George Whitefield) was so appalled with Paine’s blasphemy that he wrote a stern rebuke in The Age of Revelation, or, the Age of Reason Shewn to Be an Age of Infidelity (1801). It was a commercial flop, but Boudinot was determined to let the Word get the last word. So in 1816 he joined forces with delegates from small biblical societies from all over the country and formed the American Bible Society (ABS). The goal of the ABS was to get scripture into the hands (and hearts) of every American. The ABS used the latest print technologies to scale the production to meet its bold aspirations and built distribution networks into unsettled frontier regions; this ensured that the gospel would expand along every path of western migration. Its efforts paid off handsomely: from the early republic through the Civil War, the Bible became the single most printed, distributed, and read (extensively and intensively) text in American society.
However, to say that the Bible was the single most important text in antebellum American life is not to say that all those Americans agreed on what they were reading. Biblical interpretation varied widely—even wildly—from denomination to denomination, region to region. And some of the most powerful forces parsing those interpretations came not from critics outside the church, like Paine, but from reformers within it.
“Biblical criticism” or “higher criticism,” coming mostly out of Germany and England, was one of those forces remaking early nineteenth-century belief. It was a new method of exegesis that relied on the most recent insights of philology, history, and archeology to reevaluate the Bible in terms of the new sciences. A direct outgrowth of the Enlightenment, biblical criticism appealed to the authority of rationalism as an aid to improving religious belief and practice. One of the strongest impulses at work was the desire to study the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as historical texts, to see where they lined up with knowledge of the social contexts from which they came, and to examine the human traces on their production. The aim of biblical criticism was not to undermine the authority of scripture but to use science to distinguish what Unitarian minister Theodore Parker in 1841 referred to as “the transient and permanent in Christianity.”11
Many American colleges and seminaries began teaching this new methodology just as theological journals promoted the discoveries unearthed by its approach, which included compelling evidence of inaccurate dating in the Bible, discrepancies between different translations, and multiple authorship of stories thought to be the Word of God.
This method of scriptural interpretation was welcomed most especially by liberal Congregationalists, whose interest was in employing science as a means to loosen the grip of austere forms of Calvinism in order to get to the deeper truths of their faith and to transcend doctrinal differences. In some cases, biblical criticism only reinforced the liberalizing, modern, and rationalist direction in which some American Congregationalist clergy and theologians were already heading. The most important figure in this development was the Congregationalist-turned-Unitarian William Ellery Channing, who, in his sermon “Unitarian Christianity” (1819), pushed for using reason as the arbiter of religious beliefs. “If reason be so dreadfully darkened by the fall, that its most decisive judgments on religion are unworthy of trust,” he maintained, “then Christianity, and even natural theology, must be abandoned; for the existence and veracity of God, and the divine original of Christianity, are conclusions of reason, and must stand or fall with it.” The application of Enlightenment faith in human reason, he asserted, required getting rid of the “fictions of theologians” such as a wrathful God, the Trinity (which he regarded as “irrational and unscriptural”), and an emphasis on man’s depravity rather than goodness.12 Channing laid out many a “moral argument against Calvinism,” asserting that even John Calvin would have found the dour, forbidding, austere religion that sprang up in his name an abomination.13
Unitarianism may have pushed the logic of the Enlightenment the furthest, but it was not the only Protestant faith to welcome rationalism and historicism in its approach to religion. Liberal-minded Congregationalists, and in time other Protestants, welcomed Enlightenment notions of human progress and perfectibility as they built what they increasingly referred to as “humane” (i.e., tender, compassionate) social and legal institutions, and ease their own accommodation to the worldly pursuits of the burgeoning market economy and commercialism.
Beginning in the early 1830s, the twin desires to cultivate an intellectual life more expressive of American experience and to bring religion in line with secular knowledge energized a loose circle of thinkers in and around Boston who came to be known as Transcendentalists. This diverse group of liberal theologians, Romantic writers, and social reformers included, among many others, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Elizabet Parker Peabody, and Bronson Alcott. They were a vibrant and unruly group of restless seekers hungry for novelty, eager to break out of their intellectually cramped religious inheritances, desperate to tap into the resplendent particularity of every individual soul, and ever-struggling to find the balance between individual protest and social commitment.
Many Transcendentalists shared concerns that grew out of their backgrounds in Unitarianism. Though they affirmed the Unitarian belief in the human capacity for good, they regarded its heavy emphasis on reason over spirit as a “corpse-cold” way of being in the world. Trained as Unitarian ministers, Emerson, Parker, and Ripley took a different tack than the Congregationalist minister and leading light of nineteenth-century liberal theology Horace Bushnell. Though they read the same Bible, biblical criticism, and European Romanticism, the Unitarians typically took these intellectual influences to abandon theology as the prime realm of their intellectual work. Bushnell, however, used them to radically reinvent theology, thereby becoming a unique bridge figure between the Transcendentalists’ Romanticism and naturalism on the one hand and Calvinist supernaturalism and acceptance of original sin on the other.The Transcendentalists welcomed the notion of a transcendent realm of nature, but not a supernatural one, and therefore repudiated even the remaining traces of supernatural explanations in their own Unitarianism. They rejected the Unitarian belief that the miracles in the New Testament were proof of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Instead, they held that Christian doctrine was true and deserved assent not because it was proven by a few divine parlor tricks eighteen hundred years before, but because it was true self-evidently, universally, and timelessly. Likewise, the Transcendentalist ministers downplayed the unique divinity of Christ, arguing that all people were equally divine. This notion inspired Emerson in 1838 to address Divinity School graduates with the claim thatHistorical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love.14
The Divinity School repaid Emerson for his blasphemy by banishing him from Harvard for the next thirty years. The Harvard clergy were scandalized to discover that one of their own graduates and a man of the cloth would come in and “admonish” their students “first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.”15
Though the central ideas of Transcendentalism come out of Unitarianism, much of its inspiration also comes from trends in European thought. The more literary of the writers gravitated to the beauty and emotional range found in the poetry of the British Romantics, including Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Transcendental social reformers turned to the post-Kantian empiricism of Victor Cousin and to the communitarian ideas of French socialist Charles Fourier for his science of social perfection. Though critical of the traces of pantheism and subjectivism they detected in German philosophy, a number of Transcendentalists nevertheless discovered in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Friedrich Schleiermacher insights on the intuitiveness of religion; in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling a philosophy of nature as the artwork of God; and in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a model of moral self-reliance. Like their European counterparts, the Transcendentalists mined translated sources of Eastern philosophy and mysticism for the qualities they sought in themselves: awe, a sense of wholeness, and enchantment. As Thoreau confessed in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849): “The reading which I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindoos, the Chinese, and the Persians, than that of the Hebrews. . . . Give me one of these Bibles and you have silenced me for a while.”16 Thoreau’s imagination, like that of his other Transcendentalist friends and coconspirators, traveled far and wide looking for new intellectual sources to guide the American democratic experiment and to inspire a new, liberated personality.
American Transcendentalists were thus very much part of a transnational flurry of Romantic texts and ideas, but to view it as an outpost of European thought would miss how and why they employed foreign intellectual sources and to what end. Like Noah Webster and Francis Lieber before them, the Transcendentalists wanted nothing more than to create an American intellectual voice and vision befitting the experience of the new nation. They were all diehard fans of Goethe, but when the German master praised their America as a land of innocence, sloughed free of encrusted traditions and liberated to know itself and the universe in terms of its own making, he both buoyed them with visions of intellectual liberation and terrified them that their culture was too immature and insubstantial to pull off such a feat.
None was as enlivened and disturbed by the vision of American newness and innocence as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Though celebrated as the thinker who gave form to a distinctly American intellectual tradition, Emerson spent his career drawing attention to its shortcomings. He affirmed that the life of the mind was not only a life well lived but also essential to a vibrant democracy. And yet he worried that the democratic, capitalist forces in American antebellum life worked against the cultivation of the intellectual wealth of the commonwealth so vital to its own well-being. “The American Scholar” (1837), his most concise meditation on the American mind, and one that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. exalted as the nation’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence,” nevertheless contains some of his most potent terms for describing an American mind indifferent to or incapable of sustained, rigorous intellectual engagement.17 Emerson expressed concern about a “people too busy [for] letters”; a society that thinks of human life in averages and aggregates, as if men were “bugs,” “spawn,” and “the herd”; and the “sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude,” which showed regard only for “exertions of mechanical skill” but no esteem for the reason and revelation wrought by philosophical inquiry and speculation. He describes Americans as caught up in the immediacy of making a living while forgetting what makes life worth living. Emerson warned: “See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.”18
Figure 3.1 Herman Melville heavily annotated his personal copy of Emerson’s “Poet” in Essays; Second Series, but not always with words of approval. He feigns shock at the top of the page: “ ‘Defects’ signify ‘exuberances.’—My Dear Sir!” and at the bottom he asks in exasperation “What does the man mean?” AC85.M4977.Zz844e, Houghton Library, Harvard University
Emerson believed that the democratic mind could aim higher only by learning to express itself in terms of its own making. In his estimation, that enterprise meant a new style of thinking organic to and uniquely expressive of the American experience. He longed for an American intellect free from the bullying thoughts of foreign traditions: piety should be reserved for the process of one’s own thinking, not the product of another culture’s thought. He believed that this achievement was possible only once American intellect ended its “long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands” and stopped feeding on the “remains of foreign harvests.”19 All truths are achieved, not inherited; they are prospective, never retrospective.
Emerson’s vision in “Self-Reliance” of life—not as being, but as ever creatively becoming—retains the power to knock the wind out of its readers as much today as it did when it first appeared in 1841: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.”20 Emerson called his American intellectual ideal “Man Thinking,” and he considered him to be a figure capable of embodying this aboriginal power.21 He was the “plain old Adam, the simple genuine Self” with no history at his back, who enjoys an original relationship with the universe.22
All of the Transcendentalists developed their own terms for describing the direct, unmediated, radiant divinity of the self. For Channing that was “likeness to God,” for Emerson it was “Oversoul,” Walt Whitman called it the “Song of Myself,” and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody described it as something for her male colleagues to avoid: “ego-theism.” Two other favorites common to them all were “Genius” and “conscience.” Their paths to that higher self were as diverse as they were. For Lydia Maria Child, the trail led her to campaign for the rights of slaves, Native Americans, and women, while experimenting with different literary forms to make her case. For George Ripley, following the economic depression of the 1840s, it led to the founding of the socialistic community of Brook Farm, based on a model of organic collectivization and flat labor hierarchies, as a corrective to the exploitation in the emergent capitalist economy. And for Henry David Thoreau, tapping into one’s higher self meant trying to figure out what a principled life in harmony with nature could look like at Walden Pond, resisting a government that sanctions the moral abomination of slavery, and finding various strategies (such as withholding one’s poll tax) to protest against unjust wars.
Altogether, the Transcendentalists took a variety of intellectual, social, and political paths to release the self from outworn beliefs, to free supplicants from exploitation, and to bring American culture into its own. Though they were exceptionally cosmopolitan in their reading and their appreciation of other cultures and ideas, the Transcendentalists were deeply committed to their New England heritage and to a vibrant future for the American republic. The path to this better future, they believed, followed the course of new thinking about the relationship between the individual and God and between independence and obligation.
The movement of ideas rarely respects national borders. In the eighteenth century, the republic of letters fostered a transnational exchange of Enlightenment thought. A century before that, information about the New World and its inhabitants had a profound impact on European thinking and informed the worldviews of those Europeans who crossed the Atlantic to build new lives there. The same is true with nineteenth-century Romanticism. The texts of its major poets, philosophers, and social theorists traversed the English Channel to and from Britain and the countries of Northern Europe, across to America and back again. But over the course of much of the nineteenth century, the traffic of intellectual exchanges did manage to respect one border: the 36°30´ parallel of the United States, set out by the Missouri Compromise in 1820 to demarcate free Northern from Southern slave states.
This is not to say that there were no cross-border intellectual transactions (indeed, white Northerners and white Southerners were reading many of the same texts), but rather that their mental and moral worlds grew steadily apart during the first half of the nineteenth century, and that their competing economic systems had everything to do with it. Between 1774 and 1804, all Northern states gradually abolished slavery as they moved toward an industrialized economy, though the actual emancipation of slaves would prove slow and fitful. In the South, however, slavery increased exponentially (from roughly seven hundred thousand in 1790 to almost four million by the start of the Civil War). The hideous irony of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin of 1793 was that instead of decreasing the burdens of human labor on Southern plantations, it unleashed a rapacious demand for slaves as cotton became the nation’s most valuable commercial crop during the first half of the nineteenth century, and America’s largest foreign export.
As the North and South developed two very different (though interdependent) economic systems, so too did they develop two very different ways of viewing the world, modes of analysis, and explanations. The North had to wrestle with the question of free labor, with some observers dodging and others confronting head-on the growing inequities in their emergent wage economy. But in the South, thinking about the slave economy was a very complicated affair because theirs was not simply a society with slavery but a slave society whose entire political, social, and moral economies were built to justify the presence of a permanent labor force based on race. Chattel slavery animated the entire lived experience of the South, as well as white Southerners’ habits of mind to make sense of those experiences.
While Southerners had little use for the literature and social criticism of the Transcendentalists, they shared their affection for European Romanticism. But where Northerners employed European Romanticism to challenge the prevailing social order, Southerners read it as a confirmation that they needed to resist being pulled into Northern-style modernization and social change. Southerners, like their Northern counterparts, were cosmopolitan in their reading tastes, but with a sense of longing and elsewhereness much more intense, and much more prone to anxiety and foreboding. It was often hard for the mistress of the plantation household to delight in the subtle pleasures of Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798) when her home was a beehive of activity with slaves cooking in the kitchen, tending to crying children in the nursery, and loudly shuffling from room to room with baskets of laundry and cleaning supplies. Likewise, reading Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1834) could make a Southern master happy to be landlocked on his cotton plantation while feeling similarly adrift and scared for his safety amid his dozens of slaves, who hated him more than they feared him. Southerners’ wistful, if anxious, elsewhereness encouraged them to look to the historians of the distant past (Thucydides, Herodotus, Livy) and the recent past (David Hume, Edward Gibbon) to place their lives in Athens (Georgia) or Oxford (Mississippi) or Montpelier (Virginia) or Selma (Alabama, named for Celtic poet Ossian’s The Songs of Selma [1760]) in the grander scheme of world history. If theirs was a cosmopolitan perspective, it was one in which certainty was tinged with doubt and a chronic yearning for rootedness was offset by persistent feelings of being trapped at the edges of civilization.
For the Virginia lawyer and slavery apologist George Fitzhugh, thinking in the South meant thinking about the Southern way of life and its superiority to that of the North. Rather than dodge the issue of slavery, he took it head-on. In Sociology for the South (1854), Fitzhugh thought that slavery was a more natural, organic way of organizing society than free labor, for it better preserved the mutual interdependence of one group with another. The master-slave relationship, much like feudal relationships in the past, recognized that the powerful group has both the ability and the responsibility to protect its subjects. He presented paternalist arguments for slavery as more humane than the “free” labor system emerging in the north: “[The slave economy] makes [our] society a band of brothers, working for the common good, instead of a bag of cats biting and worrying each other. The competitive system is a system of antagonism and war; ours of peace and fraternity. The first is the system of free society; the other that of slave society.”23 While Fitzhugh was no Marxist and Karl Marx no advocate of slavery in any form, Fitzhugh’s challenges to the exploitation within capitalism echoed some of the criticisms Marx had advanced just six years earlier in The Communist Manifesto (1848).
Southern intellectual life and defenses of the “peculiar institution” went hand in glove, but never more so than in the writings of Louisa S. McCord. A highly educated South Carolinian mistress of a cotton plantation with more than two hundred slaves, McCord wrote ardent defenses of Southern slave society. In “Negro-Mania” (1852), one of her many essays on the necessity and moral superiority of slavery, she put it plainly:
Is the negro made for slavery? God in heaven! What are we that, because we cannot understand the mystery of this Thy will, we should dare in rebellion and call it wrong, unjust, and cruel? The kindness of natures fits each creature to fulfill its destiny. The very virtues of the negro fit him for slavery, and his vices cry aloud for the checks of bondage.24
McCord systematically and passionately compared Southern and Northern culture and the different personalities they produced, such as her comparison of the Southern matron with Yankee “petticoated despisers of their sex—these would-be men. . . . Moral monsters they are.” Had McCord known that female education was actually more widespread in the South than the North (because there were lower fears of Southern petticoated women entering public life), she would have had another barb with which to sting them. She sought to make it clear to her readers that slavery was in perfect harmony with nature and God’s will, and that any threat to eradicating it would upset the Southerners’ entire way of life, which was precisely as their Maker wanted it to be.25
The vast majority of slaves in America were legally forbidden to learn to read (and write), so it was nearly impossible for them to come in contact with elaborate intellectual justifications for their servitude and suffering like Fitzhugh’s and McCord’s. But by necessity they had to learn to “read” their masters’, mistresses’, and overseers’ minds for sheer survival. Forced illiteracy did not mean that they had no elaborate mental and moral lives of their own. They did. Their mindscapes were created from the religious beliefs they brought with them from Africa, folk tales they told and remade in each telling to speak to the conditions of their enslavement, biblical songs or stories they learned from their owners, and their experience as human beings, albeit in the most inhumane of circumstances. Their greatest mental challenge lay not in constructing their own beliefs and viewpoints, but in jealously guarding them from their masters. As one African American folk song went:
Got one mind for white folks to see,
‘Nother for what I know is me;
He don’t know, he don’t know my mind.
When he see me laughing,
Laughing just to keep from Crying.26
There was nothing more threatening to a master than to admit to owning a slave who thought for him- or herself. Slaves knew that even thinking for themselves could be a punishable offense, and yet they persisted. Thus, when trying to access the intellectual worlds of the antebellum South, there is not only a split screen between white masters and their black slaves but also a split screen within the slaves’ minds, keeping their innermost thoughts to themselves and projecting whatever acceptable thoughts could keep them from further torment, or even death.
Even slave narratives composed by former slaves fortunate enough to have been taught to read and write, or ingenious enough to figure out how to do so on their own, had to perform their own doublespeak. They strove to be as forthcoming with their first-hand experiences of enslavement, while risking nothing that could jeopardize the millions still held in captivity to the Southern way of life. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African (1798), Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) are the three most prominent examples of the form. Authors toggled between religious assertions and political arguments, fierce logic and emotional petition, and ethnographic detail and broad generalizations, as they brought their readers as close to their pain as they could without making it pornographic.
Each of them, in their own way, expressed the very Romantic sensibilities and republican assumptions articulated by white authors. The main difference is that white authors had the luxury of coming to these ideas by way of books and polite conversation. The black authors of slave narratives, by contrast, had to come to them by way of a daily struggle for survival.
Though the gulfs between the worldviews of Southerns and Northerners and blacks and whites were deep and wide, all were, nevertheless, deeply entangled in a struggle for control over their destinies in America, as Americans.
It is often tempting to try to identify a thinker who can adequately represent the intellectual preoccupations and styles of thought particular to an era. However, such efforts never quite do justice to the variegated intellectual landscape in question, nor do they suffice to illuminate the mind of the thinker who is enlisted to be a representative. No single author can stand for an age. But if there was one figure who helps identify some of the central preoccupations of the republican Romanticism of antebellum America, it would be Margaret Fuller.
Even by splitting Fuller’s résumé in half, and then splitting those halves in half, just one of those cropped and quartered segments of her intellectual record has the power to astonish us. How is it that one person managed to pack so many stunning intellectual accomplishments into her brief forty years? Fuller pioneered a dialogical mode of pedagogy called “conversations.” She served as editor of the Transcendentalists’ main organ, The Dial. She was widely recognized as a formidable interlocutor and the source of ideas for many of the major writers in the orbit of Boston and Concord. She was the one thinker Emerson knew personally whom he marveled at (perhaps with the exception of Thoreau), even if with a little discomfort at the imposing rigor and erudition of her mind. Fuller wrote the most important feminist manifesto of her day, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which has since become a classic of feminist philosophy. She served as a foreign correspondent in Europe, writing important dispatches about social and political developments there for readers back home. She was not content to be a witness to the democratic revolutions rocking Europe and the northern transatlantic world more broadly, so she participated in the Italian Risorgimento in Rome before dying as her ship returning from Italy hit stormy seas just off the coast of Fire Island, New York, in 1849. And those are just the highlights. Most remarkable of all is that she pulled off this intellectual productivity in a culture that thought she should be seen (though not too much in public) and not heard.
But what makes Fuller such a compelling thinker not only of her age but also for ours is that, without much Sturm und Drang, she harmonized the warring intellectual and moral imperatives that vexed so many other thinkers of her day. She was the very model of antebellum “self-culture”: an average day for her involved studying French, Greek, and Italian; attending lectures on philosophy; practicing the piano and singing; taking long walks; conducting “conversations”; and writing in her journal. Ego-theism was never her motivation; rather, it was to perfect her self so that it could help perfect her society. Likewise, she cultivated a cosmopolitan orientation to establish as large a moral and intellectual frame of reference as possible to help her readers hear themselves thinking over the din of a clamoring materialism. Fuller regarded the labor of her words to be work as dignified and urgent as other forms of social protest; she drew no distinctions between thinking and doing, refusing to privilege one over the other in the making of a new nation. And though she similarly longed for a kind of Emersonian self-sovereignty, she could not do so from the perspective of his “transparent eyeball,” nor did she seem to have any desire to do so. Balancing intellectual autonomy with the bounded perspective of dispossessed Native Americans, enslaved African Americans, and privileged white women who were nevertheless second-class citizens was good enough for her. Where Emerson called out to his reader to “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” and “Insist on yourself; never imitate,” Fuller wondered quietly instead: “Where can I hide till I am given to myself?”27 She thus had all of the Transcendentalist ambition to step outside the limitations of one’s culture and circumstance, while understanding intimately the structural constraints making that possible for some and impossible for others.
Emerson dared in 1837 to imagine a time when America would produce its own Man Thinking. He scanned the horizons far and wide, eager for signs of his advent. In this regard, Emerson was both a visionary and a man of his day. By searching yonder, he failed to notice that right there next to him in the Dial office, editing one of his essays or debating with him a finer point of his argument, was his Man Thinking, in the shape of a woman.