Linck Johnson
“We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to his British friend Thomas Carlyle in October 1840.
Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket. […] George Ripley is taking up a colony of agriculturalists & scholars with whom he threatens to take the field & the book. One man renounces the use of animal food; & another of coin; & another of domestic hired service; & another the state; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason & hope.
(Emerson 1964: 283–284)
Emerson’s “here” was the area around Boston, Massachusetts, but a similar spirit of reform was manifested all across the country. The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, formed by his friend the Unitarian minister George Ripley, was but one of dozens of utopian communities formed during the 1840s, the busiest decade of communitarian activity in the history of the United States. The other reformers Emerson mentioned included his acquaintance Joseph Palmer, a crusader against money; and his close friend and fellow Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, who like many other reformers was involved in a wide range of movements. As the Unitarian minister and radical activist writer and reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson later recalled, during the 1840s there prevailed “a phrase, ‘the Sisterhood of Reforms,’” which referred to “a variety of social and physiological theories of which one was expected to accept all, if any” (quoted in Walters 1978: ix). Certainly, the eclectic Alcott never met a reform he did not like. As Emerson alluded, Alcott was a non‐resistant or Christian pacifist whose opposition to the state and consequent refusal to pay his town tax led to his arrest in 1843. (His act anticipated and inspired a similar protest by Henry David Thoreau, made famous by his essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” now better known as “Civil Disobedience.”) That year, Alcott and his associate Charles Lane formed a short‐lived utopian community, Fruitlands. Alcott, whose second cousin William Alcott was an influential health reformer, embraced both vegetarianism (in a strict form that would now be called veganism) and a far more widespread cause, temperance, which was closely associated with virtually all efforts to improve society. As a teacher, Alcott was also deeply involved in educational reform, as were many of his fellow Transcendentalists, including Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, who had taught at his progressive Temple School in Boston (1834–1839). Like them, Alcott became a strong supporter of women’s rights; and he was an early recruit to the antislavery crusade, which came to overshadow all other causes during the 1850s. Before that, however, it was but one among many reforms – sometimes competing but more often complementary movements that together powerfully shaped life and literature during the antebellum period.
Efforts to reform society were given enormous impetus by the period of intense Protestant revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening. The most influential preacher and acknowledged leader of the movement was Charles Grandison Finney, who in the 1820s began preaching in western and central New York State – known as the “burned‐over district,” since the region was swept by the fires of so many revivals that there remained no fuel, or potential converts, for further evangelism. In contrast to Jonathan Edwards and the leaders of the First Great Awakening, all of whom believed that the individual’s spiritual regeneration depended on the spirit of God, Finney insisted that such an awakening was the result of individual self‐discipline or determination. He also maintained that, just as Christians could choose to change themselves, so too could they reform society if only they had the will to do so. As James H. Moorhead has explained, “Finney expected nearly Utopian results to flow from evangelical enterprise. ‘Let Christians,’ he said, ‘do business one year on gospel principles,’ and the Christian spirit will ‘go over the world like the waves of the sea’” (Moorhead 1984: 105).
Finney’s optimism, which was pervasive among reformers of the period, found an echo in Emerson’s affirmation in his letter to Carlyle that “on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope.” Indeed, despite the stylistic and theological gulf between Finney’s populist evangelicalism and the elite Unitarianism from which Emerson and other Transcendentalists emerged, “Unitarian self‐culture and evangelical self‐discipline had much in common, and both could motivate Whig philanthropy and social reform” (Howe 1997: 132). Moreover, although they were sharply critical of “enthusiasm,” as displayed in the passionate intensity of the revivals, Unitarian ministers recognized the importance of emotion, and they shared with evangelicals a profound belief in the power of the word, and especially the spoken word, to influence the affections and actions of Americans. That faith was shared by preachers and reformers of every stripe, from moderate Unitarians through their transcendentalist offspring to radical abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison. Thus, Henry Ware, Jr., the Professor of Pastoral Theology and Pulpit Eloquence at Harvard Divinity School, observed in 1837 that “Preaching is the great instrument for reforming the world” (quoted in Howe 1970: 162); while Garrison in the “Declaration of Sentiments Adopted by the Peace Convention” of 1838 declared that the signers hoped “to carry forward the work of peaceful, universal reformation,” affirming:
We expect to prevail through THE FOOLISHNESS OF PREACHING – striving to commend ourselves unto every man’s conscience, in the sight of God. From the press, we shall promulgate our sentiments as widely as practicable. We shall endeavor to secure the co‐operation of all persons, of whatever name or sect. The triumphant progress of the cause of TEMPERANCE and ABOLITION in our land, through the instrumentality of benevolent and voluntary associations, encourages us to combine our own means and efforts for the promotion of a still greater cause. Hence, we shall employ lecturers, circulate tracts and publications, form societies, and petition our State and national governments, in relation to the subject of UNIVERSAL PEACE.
(Garrison 1995: 101,104–105)
As Garrison’s declaration indicates, he had pursued a similar strategy in his crusade against slavery, which he had vigorously pursued through lectures and in the pages of his newspaper, the Liberator, which began publication in Boston on 1 January 1831. At about the same time and in the same place, William Apess embarked on a far more lonely campaign against another form of racism, the dispossession, exploitation, and oppression of Native Americans. Apess first came before the public through A Son of the Forest (1829; rev. edn. 1831), the first full‐length autobiography by a Native American. Of mixed white, African American, and Native American (Pequot) ancestry, he traced his life from his birth and difficult childhood through his conversion experience to his ordination as a Protestant Methodist minister in 1829. But the narrative is not merely a conventional spiritual autobiography or even an account of his triumph against all odds, though they were formidable. In fact, the autobiography is finally less the story of an individual than of a race, since in an “Appendix” nearly as long as the preceding narrative Apess notes that he has “abridged ‘his life’” to make room for “some general observations on the origin and character of the Indians,” a kind of composite portrait and history of their sufferings since “the discovery of America by that celebrated navigator, Columbus” (Apess 1992: 52, 53).
Apess signaled the strategies that would be central to his later writings and sermons. Under the guise of humble questioner, he directly challenged stereotypes of the “savages” and the pervasive racial prejudice of the period, perhaps most notably in “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man,” the final section of his second book, The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe (1833). “If black or red skins or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God, it appears as if he has disgraced himself a good deal,” he ironically observed; “for he has made fifteen colored people to one white and placed them here upon this earth.” Like the abolitionists, he also vigorously exposed the gap between Christian profession and social practice among white Americans, concluding the essay and the book by exhorting them to follow biblical precept and moral principle until “this tree of distinction shall be leveled to the earth, and the mantle of prejudice torn from every American heart – then shall peace pervade the Union” (Apess 1992: 157, 160–161).
In his effort to gain recognition and full rights for Native Americans, Apess also sought to amend and revise American history, the central concern of his eloquent “Eulogy on King Philip.” Apess twice delivered the speech in Boston in January 1836 to commemorate the 160th anniversary of the death of King Philip, or Metacomet, the Wampanoag leader who was killed during the devastating conflict between Indigenous peoples and English colonists known as King Philip’s War (1675–1678). As Barry O’Connell has pointed out, Apess was writing during “the first age of the canonization of the ‘Founding Fathers,’” when speakers such as Daniel Webster elevated both “the freedom‐loving Pilgrims” and the leaders of the Revolution “to a form of Republican sainthood.” In sharp contrast, Apess sought “to disable white Americans’ ready assumption of a seamlessly glorious and singular American story,” offering a radically different portrait of the Pilgrim Fathers and an alternative history of the founding of New England (Introduction to Apess 1992: xx–xxi). Although he was careful not to challenge the pantheon of Revolutionary Fathers, Apess at the opening of his address compared the “noted warrior” to heroic figures such as George Washington and affirmed that King Philip “died a martyr to his cause, though unsuccessful, yet as glorious as the American Revolution” (Apess 1992: 277).
Apess’s cause was equally unsuccessful. “Eulogy on King Philip” was his final publication, and he disappears from the public record in 1838. The failure of efforts to preserve Native American rights was most vividly demonstrated by the forcible removal of the Cherokee and other Indian nations from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast to territory west of the Mississippi in the years after the Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson in 1830. Opposition to the removal revealed at once the power and the limitations of print culture. Already facing threats to their sovereignty and lands from the state of Georgia, in 1828 the Cherokee Nation established the first Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in English and Cherokee, using a Cherokee syllabary developed in 1821 by Sequoyah (S‐si‐qua‐ya). As Amy H. Sturgis has noted, the newspaper was designed “both to build and to publicize Cherokee progress”; in the prospectus for the Cherokee Phoenix its bilingual first editor, Elias Boudinot, thus emphasized that among its main subjects would be the “progress” of the Cherokees “in Education, Religion, and the arts of civilized life” (Sturgis 2007: 22, 23). Boudinot vigorously presented the Cherokee position in editorials that were reprinted in several newspapers around the country, and during the debate over the Indian Removal Act the Cherokee submitted a series of eloquent “Memorials,” or petitions, in which they appealed directly to Congress. The plight of the so‐called Five Civilized Tribes generated a good deal of sympathy and support, especially in the North; and the Cherokee were singled out for special consideration by supporters such as Emerson, who in a widely reprinted open letter of protest to President Van Buren, first printed in the Washington Daily National Intelligencer in May 1838, emphasized that he spoke for many of his countrymen: “In common with the great body of the American People, we have witnessed with sympathy the painful endeavors of these red men to redeem their own race from the doom of eternal inferiority, and to borrow and domesticate in the tribe the arts and customs of the Caucasian race” (Emerson 1995: 2). Despite such pleas and remonstrances, which themselves offered revealing glimpses of the prevailing attitudes toward those “red men,” the following winter 15 000 Cherokee were driven from their homes; and an estimated 4000 of them died during a forced 2200‐mile march to “Indian Territory,” present‐day Oklahoma, a journey that came to be known as the “Trail of Tears.”
Even as pervasive racism, the expansion of slavery, and the subjugation of Native American tribes revealed the limits of Jacksonian democracy, its egalitarian ideology helped spur both radical social criticism and reform. The growth of manufacturing and the ascendency of industrial capitalism in the Northeast generated a widening gulf between classes that many viewed with alarm as a profound threat to democracy, as it was described by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835, 1840). Observing that “at the very time at which the science of manufactures lowers the class of workmen, it raises the class of masters,” he added that “the one is continually, closely, and necessarily dependent upon the other, and seems as much born to obey as that other is to command. What is this but aristocracy?” (Tocqueville 1847: II.170). Although de Tocqueville did not explicitly draw the parallel, his description of the relationship between the master and the workman, whose labor would ultimately “require nothing but physical strength without intelligence,” closely resembled the system of slavery. In The Laboring Classes, a vigorous analysis and critique of capitalism and the class system published in 1840, the same year as the second part of Democracy in America, the radical Jacksonian Orestes Brownson argued that slavery was actually less oppressive than the system of free labor, as illustrated by the lot of operatives (that is, those who operated the looms and other machinery) in textile mills such as those in Lowell, Massachusetts, which had opened in 1823. Initially, most of those operatives were girls and young women, many of them daughters of New England farmers, who lived in company‐owned boarding houses adjacent to the mills. There, they toiled “as so many slaves,” Brownson asserted, concluding: “Wages is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave‐holders” (Brownson 1840: 11, 12).
Brownson was challenged by several of the “mill girls,” as they were commonly known. The first reply was “Factory Girls,” which appeared in the second issue of the Lowell Offering (1840–1845), a periodical featuring poetry, fiction, and essays “Written by Factory Operatives.” “We are under restraints, but they are voluntarily assumed,” the anonymous author responded, adding that “it is because our toil is so unremitting, that the wages of factory girls are higher than those of females engaged in most other occupations” (Eisler 1980: 189). Those wages were the major lure for the young women, though many of them also took advantage of opportunities for self‐improvement, including evening schools, lending libraries, lectures, and reading circles for those with a literary bent. That was true for the two most famous veterans of life in the mills, the poet Lucy Larcom (1824–1893) and the suffragette Harriet Hanson Robinson (1825–1911), both of whom had gone to work there in the mid‐1830s. Both contributed to the Lowell Offering and, much later, both wrote vivid memoirs of their experiences, Larcom in A New England Girlhood (1889) and Robinson in Loom and Spindle; or, Life among the Early Mill Girls (1898). Writing for “girls of all ages,” as Larcom put it in her preface, she described her 10 years in the mills as a crucial stage in her education and development: “Even the long hours [more than 70 hours a week in the 1830s], the early rising, and the regularity enforced by the clangor of the bell were good discipline for one who was naturally inclined to dally and to dream, and who loved her own personal liberty with a willful rebellion against control” (Larcom 1986: 183). Robinson also emphasized that the operatives gained an education through their work in the mills, “their Alma Mater,” and affirmed, “Except in rare instances, the rights of the early mill‐girls were secure […] They were not driven, and their work‐a‐day life was made easy. They were treated with consideration by their employers, and there was a feeling of respectful equality between them” (Robinson 1976: 25, 43).
Although Robinson stated that conditions in the mills began to deteriorate only after she left to get married in 1848, there was growing evidence of discontent even among what she called “the early mill‐girls.” They participated in their first strike, or “turn out,” in 1834, after mill owners reduced wages by 15%. The poorly organized strike was a failure, but in the face of another cut in wages the operatives walked out again in 1836. They then proceeded to a grove where they listened to speeches by labor reformers, including one of the factory girls who “gave vent to the feelings of her companions in a neat speech,” as Robinson recalled: “This was the first time a woman had spoken in public in Lowell, and the event caused surprise and consternation among her audience” (Robinson 1976: 51). The brief strike also proved fruitless, and the nascent labor movement in Lowell and elsewhere was crippled by the Financial Panic of 1837, following which wages were slashed, lack of demand led to the closing of many mills, and there was massive unemployment throughout the industrial North. The devastating effects of that economic collapse lasted well into the 1840s, during which decade the factory women organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. One of its major efforts was to gain passage of a law limiting the working day to 10 hours, or 60 hours a week, a cause that began among artisans in Boston and other east coast cities in the 1820s. But the effort failed, and conditions in the mills grew steadily worse as native‐born women were replaced by exploited immigrant laborers, many of them fleeing famine in Ireland. Certainly, the connection Brownson had drawn between slavery and the condition of northern laborers seemed even more compelling by 1848, not least for proslavery apologists such as the author of an article published that year in the Southern Quarterly Review who argued that “Negro servitude” was far less onerous than “wage slavery,” which he described as “the most intolerable slavery that men can suffer – a slavery which throws them into a state where wealth and power exercise the worst oppressions” (quoted in Greenberg 1985: 100).
The depression ushered in by the Panic of 1837 spurred the development of the communitarian movement in the United States. Of the roughly 60 utopian communities established during the 1840s, the most famous was Brook Farm, founded by George Ripley in 1841. Inspired by his close friend Orestes Brownson and by the influential Unitarian minister Dr. William Ellery Channing, whose Lectures on the Elevation of the Laboring Portion of the Community (1840) appeared as he was planning the community, Ripley summarized his goals in a letter urging Emerson to join the venture:
Our objects, as you know, are to ensure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor, adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing them the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity of menial services, by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressures of our competitive institutions.
(quoted in Guarneri 1991: 47)
Ripley’s commitment to social reform deepened during the following years, and in early 1844 the community was reorganized and its name was altered from the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education to the Brook Farm Association for Industry and Education. That shift “indicated the intended future emphasis on mechanical industries,” as well as the community’s commitment to Association, a system of social reform and reorganization based on the theories of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier (Delano 2004: 142–144).
Brook Farm revealed deep divisions among the Transcendentalists, the loosely organized group in which Ripley and Emerson came to represent different poles. The community gained the sympathy and interest of a number of the leading figures of the group, including Brownson, William Henry Channing (William Ellery Channing’s nephew), Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Margaret Fuller, who during the early years was one of the most frequent visitors to the farm in West Roxbury. As Carl J. Guarneri has argued, however, “A key facet of the evolution toward communitarian reform was the break with Emerson’s individualist version of Transcendentalism,” his “belief that through self‐culture the individual could transcend material circumstances” (Guarneri 1991: 46). After painful reflection, Emerson declined Ripley’s urgent appeal to join the community, a decision that he implicitly justified in his famous essay “Self‐Reliance,” published only a few months later in Essays (1841). Emerson promoted his own vision of reform through self‐culture in a series of addresses delivered during the following years, including “Man the Reformer” (1841) and the introductory lecture of his 1841–1842 series on The Times, in which he sharply distinguished between reforms, “our own light, and sight, and conscience,” and the reformers. “Beautiful is the impulse and the theory; the practice is less beautiful,” he declared. “The Reformers affirm the inward life, but they do not trust it, but use outward and vulgar means,” relying “not on love, not on a principle, but on men, on multitudes, on circumstances, on money, on party; that is, on fear, on wrath, and pride” (Emerson 1971: 176). Emerson subsequently offered his fullest and firmest reply to the communitarians in “New England Reformers,” delivered as part of a series on reform organized by William Lloyd Garrison and other radicals at Amory Hall, a rental hall in Boston, in 1844 (see Johnson 1991).
Emerson’s critique was expanded and amplified by his young friend Henry David Thoreau. At Amory Hall, Thoreau also offered a satirical critique of reformers, portions of which he later revised for Walden. He offered his first account of his life at Walden Pond in “A History of Myself,” a lecture he delivered at the Concord Lyceum in February 1847. “Mrs Ripley & other members of the opposition came down the other night to hear Henry’s account of his housekeeping at Walden Pond […] and were charmed with the witty wisdom which ran through it all,” Emerson reported in a letter to Fuller (Emerson 1939, vol. 3: 377–378). As he clearly recognized, the lecture was yet another salvo in the ongoing debate within Transcendentalism, though the communitarians may well have glimpsed in Thoreau’s account some of their own early aspirations and ideals. In fact, Thoreau’s goals at Walden Pond – at least as he initially defined them in “A History of Myself” – were not radically different from Ripley’s original goals at Brook Farm, which he had outlined in his 1840 letter to Emerson. After his embrace of Fourierism, however, Ripley had redefined those goals, expunging precisely those elements that most appealed to Emerson and Thoreau. Indeed, Ripley increasingly viewed self‐culture and self‐reliant individualism as among the greatest barriers to the reform of society. “The interests of Social Reform, will be considered as paramount to all others,” he asserted in the “Introductory Notice” to the Harbinger, the Fourierist journal established at Brook Farm in June 1845, the month before Thoreau moved to Walden Pond. “We will suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the downtrodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men” (quoted in Rose 1981: 145).
Thoreau, too, sought to appeal to those “masses,” exploited wage laborers, implicitly offering them a more attractive alternative to the Fourierist way that was being charted at Brook Farm. The word “labor” and the problems of labor consequently assumed a special prominence in “A History of Myself” and in the first version of Walden, which Thoreau completed by the time he left the pond in September 1847. “Most men through mere ignorance and mistake are so occupied by the factitious cares and coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them,” he observed early in that version. “Actually the laboring man has not leisure for a lofty integrity day by day, he cannot afford to sustain the noblest relations. His labor would deprecate in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.” Characteristically, Thoreau divided the responsibility for such conditions between the laborers themselves, who mistakenly accepted the necessity of such dehumanizing work, and the forces of the marketplace, which transformed men into machines. Playing upon the increasingly common analogy between slavery and wage slavery, he provocatively added: “I sometimes wonder how we can be so frivolous almost as to attend to the gross form of Negro slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north & south. It is bad to have a southern overseer, it is worse to have a northern one, but worst of all when you are yourself the slave‐driver.” Describing a mode of life that might free men from such self‐imposed bondage, those struggling to earn a living might adopt or adapt for themselves, later in the first version he described various visitors to his cabin, including “healthy and sturdy working men,” whom he met so often that “they began to look upon me as one of their kin.” One of these men is so impressed by what he sees and hears that he tells Thoreau, “‘Sir, I like your notions – I think I shall live so myself. […] I like your kind of life’” (Shanley 1957: 107, 108, 173).
Thoreau, however, was ultimately no more successful in his appeal to laborers than George Ripley was in capturing labor for Fourierism. Although he cast himself as a laborer, the Harvard‐educated Thoreau, like Ripley, was hardly free of condescension toward working men. Moreover, given the limitations of his analysis of social problems, as well as of the solutions he offered, it is unlikely that Thoreau could ever have had much impact on laborers. Despite his expressions of solidarity with them, he was not in the condition of working men, and it seems not to have occurred to him that women, too, might have to earn a living. In any case, after the commercial failure of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Thoreau evidently abandoned his earlier hopes of speaking to a mass audience in Walden. As he revised the first version, he dramatically expanded his account of life at the pond, especially by adding extended descriptions of natural phenomena; and he developed the seasonal structure of his increasingly dense and allusive narrative, thus heightening the symbolic drama of rebirth he celebrates in the penultimate chapter, “Spring.” Certainly, it became a very different book by the time he finally published Walden in 1854.
By that time, Brook Farm was a memory, having succumbed to financial difficulties in 1847. Although Ripley and his closest associate Charles Dana went on to distinguished careers in journalism, neither ever wrote about Brook Farm, probably because “it was simply too painful to revisit the mounds of ashes amid which lay the high ideals and faith in man’s perfectibility that genuinely animated each man during all but the last of the Brook Farm years” (Delano 2004: 313). But the community was the thinly veiled locale of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), which was based in part on the six months he had spent at Brook Farm 1842. The novel is less a history of Brook Farm than an analysis of its failure, which Hawthorne attributes to both the failure of theory and the personal limitations of its individual members, who place self‐interest above the claims of community. The lack of union and fruition is immediately suggested by its narrator, Miles Coverdale, a self‐described “frosty bachelor” sitting alone in his study and looking nostalgically back to the time when he and his companions set out from Boston with springtime hopes “for beginning the life of Paradise anew,” escaping the oppressive atmosphere of the city for the free air of the country at Blithedale: “Air, that had not been spoken into words of falsehood, formality and error, like all the air of the dusky city!” (Hawthorne 1964: 9, 11).
For many social critics and reformers, the city was both the primary site and a major source of social ills. The success of Eugène Sue’s wildly popular serialized novel Les Mystères de Paris (1842–1843) helped spawn the genre of city‐mysteries fiction and a host of imitations in Europe and the United States. Competing translations of Sue’s novel were swiftly published in New York City, the first by Harper and Brothers, which issued an abridged edition in two parts; and a second as a series of “Extras,” or supplements, issued by the literary weekly New World. At the opening of the Harper’s edition, the narrator informs “the reader that he is about to be a spectator of sorrowful and dismal scenes,” adding: “If he consents, we will penetrate into horrible, unknown regions; frightful and hideous figures swarm in these foul alleys, like reptiles in a swamp” (Sue 1843: 3). Untold numbers of American readers readily assented to follow its hero, the noble Rudolph, through the long and labyrinthine novel – even the abridged Harper’s edition was more than 400 double‐column pages. Blending sensationalism and social commentary, Sue explored all levels of Parisian society, from aristocrats to those of “the very lowest class,” notably the young streetwalker Fleur de Marie. Her fate and Sue’s moralistic treatment of prostitution enraged Karl Marx, who in a sweeping critique of the bourgeois ideology of the novel contemptuously noted: “So Rudolph changed Fleur de Marie first into a repentant sinner, then the repentant sinner into a nun and finally the nun into a corpse” (Marx and Engels 1956: 234). But many reformers praised Sue, who said that he became a socialist while writing the novel, in which he exposed the brutal conditions that drive the poor to a life of crime, the failure of the legal system, and the indifference of the wealthy to the lot of those living in the overcrowded slum surrounding Notre Dame cathedral.
The emergence of the city‐mysteries genre coincided with the rapid growth of American cities and urban slums during the first half of the nineteenth century, especially during the decade following the Panic of 1837. Sue’s most successful American imitator was a far more militant social critic, the radical Jacksonian George Lippard. His first major success and most famous book was published in 10 paperback installments in 1844 and then in an expanded edition as The Quaker City; or The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (1845), the most popular American novel before Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Responding to critics who attacked the novel as pornographic, Lippard in the Preface to a later edition declared that his motive “was destitute of any idea of sensualism,” since he simply sought to “describe all the phases of a corrupt social system, as manifested in the city of Philadelphia” (Lippard 1995: 2). Nonetheless, its “sensualism” was no doubt a major source of the appeal of the multi‐plotted and densely populated novel, which involves seduction, prostitution, infidelity and illicit sex, attempted rape, and murder among the corrupt urban elite, who meet for sordid rituals in Monk Hall, attended there by an evil caretaker called Devil‐Bug. Nonetheless, as David S. Reynolds has convincingly argued, Lippard was deeply committed to social reform and sincerely believed that a literature “which is too good or too dignified to picture the wrongs of the great mass of humanity, is just good for nothing at all,” as he insisted in an article published in 1849 (quoted in Lippard 1995: viii).
Lippard’s larger purpose is perhaps most clearly revealed in the chapter “Devil‐Bug’s Dream,” an apocalyptic vision of the last day of Philadelphia, in 1950, by which time the disparities between wealth and poverty have increased and the city has degenerated into an aristocracy. There, in front of “the Ruins of Independence Hall” and on “the anniversary of the Death of Freedom,” the King, nobility, and the “Sacred Clergy” lead a procession followed by the “slaves of the city, white and black […] the slaves of the cotton Lord and the factory Prince.” Suddenly, bolts of lightning strike the King and the earth, leaving heaps of “blackened corpses,” and a great wave rocks the city, “its temples tossed like autumn leaves by the wind,” as a “ghastly voice, speaking from the still air,” declares:
“The wrongs of ages are avenged at last! At last the voice of Blood crying from the very stones of the idolatrous city, has pierced the ear of God. Look beneath, and look upon the wreck of the Doomed City! Look below and with the angels of eternal justice, shout the amen to the litany of the city’s crimes, shout Wo, WO UNTO SODOM.”
(Lippard 1995: 372–393)
Although Lippard made a compelling case for Philadelphia, there were soon other strong candidates for America’s Sodom. The prolific George Thompson, whose modern editors describe him as “the most shockingly sensational and openly erotic American writer of his day” (Thompson 2002: xi), weighed in with pamphlet novels such as Venus in Boston: A Romance of City Life; City Crimes; or, Life in New York and Boston; and New York Life: or, The Mysteries of Upper‐Tendom Revealed, all published in 1849. Upper‐tendom, a term coined in the 1840s, was derived from the upper ten thousand; that is, the wealthiest people in the city, the primary target of both Thompson and Lippard, whose later works included New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1854). In addition to providing a new locale, the shift in focus from Philadelphia and Boston to New York also reflected the reality that by then the population of the latter had far outstripped that of all other American cities, while its burgeoning slums had become notorious for their poverty, crime, vice, and squalor. Following the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, when its population was roughly 160 000, New York became the nation’s major port, the transportation hub for goods flowing to and from the Great Lakes, as well as the main port of entry for immigrants from Europe. By 1850, its population had grown to 515 000, more than three times that of the second largest American city, Baltimore, and twice that of the combined populations of Boston and Philadelphia.
Thompson was but one of a number of authors who undertook the task of revealing the corruption at the heart of the sprawling new metropolis. Another was the journalist Ned Buntline, the pseudonym of Edward Zane Carroll Judson. Now better known for his later dime novels, Buntline first gained notoriety by writing The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life, originally published in five installments in 1848. Like Thompson, Buntline was a Nativist; and he later helped establish the anti‐immigrant Know‐Nothing Party, also known as the American Party. In an extended Appendix to the final part of his sordid tale, he explored “the causes of the crime and vice which surround us,” attributing most of their increase to the rapid rise of immigration. Where Sue treated prostitution as a symbol of the oppression and economic exploitation of the working class, Buntline viewed the large numbers of foreign‐born prostitutes (he estimated that they numbered 18 000) as a vivid illustration of the moral decline of “the Great Metropolis of the Union,” declaring that there were “over one thousand known houses of ill fame,” plus “at least one hundred assignation houses, supported by a more secret and select class of people, who carry vice into high life.” In contrast, there were “only 225 churches,” to whose clergy Buntline piously dedicated his exposé: “Knowing as they have, that our work had truth for its foundation, and moral reform for its aim, they have alluded to it in the most liberal and friendly terms, from their pulpits, and have satisfied us that we have at least partially succeeded in our object of doing good” (Buntline 1848: V. 87, 100, 111).
Along with prostitution, the most ubiquitous signs of temptation and vice in such urban exposés were the prevalence of drinking establishments and the heavy consumption of alcohol, the focus of the most widespread reform movement of the period. Initially led by evangelical clergy and laymen, who founded the American Temperance Society in 1826, the anti‐alcohol crusade gained renewed force from the Washingtonian Temperance Society, named after the first President (ironically, a major distiller of whiskey at his Mount Vernon plantation) and formed at a Baltimore tavern by six heavy‐drinking artisans in 1840. The primary goal of the Washingtonians was to convince other “drunkards” – the word alcoholic did not yet exist – to take the total‐abstinence pledge, employing gentle persuasion rather than fierce denunciation. “On this point, the Washingtonians greatly excel the temperance advocates of former times,” Abraham Lincoln observed in a celebrated temperance address delivered in 1842. “They are practical philanthropists; and they glow with a generous and brotherly zeal, that mere theorizers are incapable of feeling. Benevolence and charity possess their hearts entirely; and out of the abundance of their hearts, their tongues give utterance” (Lincoln 1953: 1.274). As Lincoln recognized, the Washingtonians developed new methods and kinds of appeals. While the most common weapon in the arsenal of the temperance crusade was the tract, distributed in the hundreds of thousands, the Washingtonians took to the lecture platform. Their movement also spawned what John W. Crowley (1997) has described as temperance narratives, a genre “located on the boundary between the novel and autobiography, in which inebriates recounted their enslavement to, and subsequent emancipation from, King Alcohol” (115). Of the numerous examples of the genre, the most familiar today is Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate. A Tale of the Times (1842), not because it was the most interesting or influential of those texts, but simply because it was written by Walter Whitman, then an obscure New York journalist but later to become known as the Walt Whitman of Leaves of Grass.
But the classic temperance narrative was penned by the most successful of all of the movement’s speakers, the famous John B. Gough, whose popular Autobiography was first published in 1845. Crowley (1997) has explored the connections between that narrative and a popular book published that year by a powerful orator who frequently lectured on temperance as well as abolition, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. The germ of yet another classic autobiographical text was also planted that year, when Thoreau – an advocate of temperance, though he had little use for temperance reformers or for reformers of any stripe – moved to Walden Pond. In various ways, all three texts concerned liberation: from strong drink, from slavery, and from the self‐enslavement Thoreau would adumbrate in Walden (1854). Gough announces his central theme in the epigraph on the title page of his Autobiography, some lines by the Rev. William B. Tappan, a religious poet and key figure in the American Sunday School Union: “Raging drink; thou’lt not enslave me! / Sparkling bowl! thou now art dim; / Angel Temperance stooped to save me / From the death within thy brim.” As Douglass would later expand and divide his autobiography into two contrasting parts in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), so Gough divided his life into distinct stages: the first depicting his bondage to drink, as he became “the slave of a habit which had become completely [his] master”; the second describing the new life he entered into after he was approached by kindly Washingtonians and took the pledge, the equivalent of the conversion experience in traditional spiritual autobiographies; and the third cataloguing his subsequent labors and successes on the lecture circuit, by his account traveling more than 12 000 miles, by land and water; delivering 605 addresses; and obtaining 31 760 signatures on the total‐abstinence pledge between May 1843 and 1 January 1845. “I shall now lay down my pen,” Gough concludes, expressing his humble reliance for aid in his “future endeavors to stem the tide of intemperance” on God, “in whose strength we may fearlessly go forth to wage an exterminating war against all that is opposed to the coming of his glorious kingdom” (Gough 1845: 38, 115, 124).
As his phenomenal success indicates, Gough was one of the most mesmerizing orators in the country, whose lectures were enlivened by his considerable skills as an actor, singer, and master of mimicry (Crowley 1997: 118). Recognizing the power of entertainment, the Washingtonians also sponsored local fairs, picnics, and parades, while the temperance appeal was broadcast to a large national audience through numerous plays. Among the earliest was William H. Smith’s The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved, first performed during the 1844–1845 season at the Boston Museum and later chosen by P.T. Barnum to inaugurate the stage of the elegant theater, or “Lecture Room,” at his American Museum in New York City. As Mark Mullen (2014) has suggested, Barnum understood that theater and temperance reform “were intimately linked through their shared reliance on the prevailing conventions of melodrama” (131). The Drunkard dramatizes the fall of an affluent landowner whose uncontrolled drinking leads to the loss of his fortune and his flight to the city, Boston in the original staging and New York in the version adapted for the American Museum. There, he lives as a homeless drunk until he is saved by a recovered alcoholic, obviously a Washingtonian, and is subsequently reunited with his wife and daughter, who have been living in destitution. In the final scene, the family is gathered together in a cozy cottage back in the country, where they and the villagers sing the sentimental parlor song “Home, Sweet Home.”
The Drunkard was the most popular American play before the dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 1850s, during which Smith’s melodrama was also eclipsed by a dramatization of another popular reformist novel, Timothy Shay Archer’s Ten Nights in a Bar‐Room, and What I Saw There (1854). Set in the Sickle and Sheaf, a tavern in the once‐happy town of Cedarville, the work “traces the downward course of the tempting vendor [the tavern keeper, Mr. Slade] and his infatuated victims, until both are involved in hopeless ruin,” as the publisher summarized the plot in the Preface (Arthur 2002: 3). In a famous scene in both the novel and the play, the daughter of the town drunk, Joe Morgan, piteously appeals to her father to come home but is ignored until she is struck in the head by a flying bottle. Like the saintly Little Eva, whose death so profoundly moves her father and others in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on her deathbed Mary appeals to her father to give up drinking and he of course complies, anticipating the closing of the Sickle and Sheaf and the town’s prohibition of alcohol at the end of Ten Nights in a Bar‐Room.
The impact of alcohol on the home and family drew many women to the cause of temperance. Although they were excluded from membership in male temperance organizations, women formed female counterparts such as the Daughters of Temperance and the Martha Washingtonians, named after the first First Lady. The temperance reform appealed to women across a broad spectrum, from social conservatives to the most militant supporters of women’s rights. Just as feminists such as Sarah and Angelina Grimké were awakened to the condition of women through their involvement in the antislavery crusade, others found their way to women’s rights by way of the temperance crusade. The Lily (1849–1853), the first newspaper for women, was originally distributed among members of the Seneca Falls Ladies Temperance Society, which was formed in 1848. That year, one of its founding members, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was also instrumental in organizing the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, a village in central New York State. Stanton, who wrote articles on temperance for The Lily, helped convert its editor, Amelia Bloomer, to the feminist cause; and she, in turn, introduced Stanton to Susan B. Anthony, who had earlier begun her career as a reformer when she joined the Daughters of Temperance. For many activists, temperance and women’s rights were inextricably bound together, to the chagrin of more conservative temperance reformers. Following a meeting in New York City at which Abby Kelly, Lucy Stone, and other feminists insisted on their right to participate in the deliberations, the temperance newspaper the Organ fumed, “We wish our friends abroad to understand that the breeze got up here is nothing but an attempt to ride the woman’s rights theory into respectability on the back of Temperance. And what absurd, infidel and licentious follies are not packed up under the general head of woman’s rights, it would puzzle any one to say” (quoted in Mattingly 1998: 103).
Like abolitionism, in which so many radical feminists were also deeply involved, what that outraged reporter called “the woman’s rights theory” was far more threatening to the social order than temperance. Certainly, it posed a direct challenge to the domestic ideology of the period, the “cult of domesticity,” in which middle‐class women were relegated to the home and to the traditional roles of wife and mother. When in the 1830s the Grimké sisters began to lecture, and especially after they began addressing mixed audiences of men and women, they were denounced for abandoning their proper sphere by the Congregational clergy of Massachusetts. In an article on “Women’s Rights” – one of her “Letters from New York,” a popular weekly feature of the National Anti‐Slavery Standard, which she edited – Lydia Maria Child in 1843 affirmed: “The nearer society approaches to divine order, the less separation will there be in the characters, duties, and pursuits of men and women” (Child 1843: 238). An even more vigorous response to the narrow restrictions imposed on women was written by Child’s friend Margaret Fuller, who in Woman in the Nineteenth Century famously declared: “But if you ask me what offices they may fill; I will reply – any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea‐captains if you will” (1845: 159). Like those other reformist books published in 1845, Gough’s Autobiography and Douglass’s Narrative, Fuller’s foundational text concerned liberation, a freedom from what many feminists conceived of as “the slavery of sex.” The extent of that bondage was most forcefully stated in the Declaration of Sentiments, which Stanton composed and presented at the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, that revolutionary document catalogued the “repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her” (Stanton et al. 1881: 70). In view of such oppression, the Convention adopted a series of resolutions calling for women to be granted full social and political equality, including the right to vote, a demand that was so controversial that the suffrage resolution passed by only a small majority after a lengthy debate and impassioned speeches in its favor by Stanton and Frederick Douglass.
Another primary goal of the early women’s rights movement was to change the inequitable laws governing marriage, separation, and divorce. Those laws and the very institution of marriage were the main targets of one of the most subversive of all reformist texts of the period, Mary Lyndon; or, Revelations of a Life. An Autobiography (1855), whose title concealed the actual identity of its author, the feminist and health reformer Mary Gove Nichols. In Nichols’s deeply autobiographical novel, the 16‐year‐old Mary Lyndon is pressured by her friends and relatives to marry the 40‐year‐old Alfred Hervey, despite her deep aversion to him and her growing love for a young man she meets before the wedding, which she goes through with because she is terrified of the spiritual consequences of breaking her engagement, “a sin of the blackest dye” among the Quakers: “I gave up all, and said I would be married. They took me at my word, and the marriage, or martyrdom, was solemnized.” Years later, no longer able to endure her “bondage” to her husband, a “taskmaster” who immediately claims all of her earnings, Mary seeks a separation; but, as she bitterly recounts, “I was told by ‘my husband,’ who lived in idleness on my labor, I might almost say on my bloody sweat, that the law left me no redress; that if I left him, public opinion would blast my name, and that my child, in whom alone I lived, should be taken from me. The law gave her to him, he said, and he should take her” (130). As her language suggests, their marriage resembles the relationship between master and slave; and in the face of his threats she resigns herself “to remain the property of a man who could find it in his nature to taunt me thus” (Nichols 1855: 122, 130).
Like the protagonists of slave narratives, however, Mary ultimately gains her freedom. Initially escaping with her daughter to her father’s house, she further liberates herself when she is invited by the president of the local Lyceum, “the Rev. Samuel Silkenby,” to deliver an essay – as she pointedly notes, it would have been called a lecture if it had been read by a man – on “the Sphere and Condition of Women.” Describing it as “a chapter from my own life, and a sure reflection of the lives of other women,” she dismisses the ministers and laymen who presume to “define and limit” woman’s sphere, recalling: “No one now needs go amiss of the common story of woman’s wrongs and disabilities, but then and there, I numbered her curses, almost for the first time, in the hearing of men and women in our ‘free country.’ […] I spoke of marriage as annihilation of woman, as often the grave of her heart and the destruction of her health and usefulness.” Lighted by that truth that flashes across her mind as she speaks, Mary thereafter makes her own way in the world. Ironically, as escaped slaves such as Frederick Douglass sought refuge in Massachusetts, Mary escapes the state’s custody laws by fleeing with her daughter to New York City. There, she supports them by running a boarding house, writing fiction, and lecturing on women’s health issues. When her husband finds someone else to wed, the action of the novel culminates in “A Divorce and a Wedding,” a title that is almost as unconventional as Mary’s stipulation in the chapter that she will marry her lover, Vincent, only if she can retain the freedom to leave if she should fall in love with another, telling him: “I enter into no compact to be faithful to you. I only promise to be faithful to the deepest love of my heart.” He agrees, they wed, and in the “Conclusion” Mary briefly describes their child, “a gift from heaven of our love,” and their happy life together, giving a domestic twist to a novel that so vigorously challenged the institution of marriage and the cult of domesticity (Nichols 1855: 164, 165–166, 385, 387).
Not surprisingly, given its radical critique of marriage and traditional gender roles, Mary Lyndon was denounced by most reviewers, as was another unconventional novel published in 1855, Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time, by Fanny Fern (Sarah Payson Willis Parton). Born only a year apart, Nichols in 1810 and Fern in 1811, the two women had several experiences in common. Each suffered through a disastrous marriage that ended in divorce – in Fern’s case, a second marriage following the premature death of her first husband in 1846. Against enormous odds, each gained national fame, Nichols as a prominent leader of the health‐reform movement and Fern as the most popular and highest paid newspaper writer in the United States. And each found happiness in a marriage to a man who shared her interests: Nichols to Thomas Low Nichols, a heath reformer and supporter of woman’s rights; and Fern to the writer and editor James Parton, after the couple signed a prenuptial agreement stipulating that she would retain both the rights to her considerable earnings and control of the copyrights for all of her writings.
But where Nichols hewed closely to the actual events of her life to illustrate the corrosive effects of marriage in Mary Lyndon, Fern shaped her autobiographical story to convey a different moral. She thus expunged her second marriage, focusing instead on Ruth Hall’s struggles to support herself and her two daughters following the death of her beloved husband. Denied financial and emotional support from her in‐laws and her own family, including her brother, Hyacinth Ellet – a devastating portrait of Fern’s brother, the prominent writer Nathaniel P. Willis – Ruth turns in desperation to writing for the popular “story papers” of the period. Like her creator, Ruth is a triumphant success; unlike Fanny Fern, however, she does not marry the figure modeled on James Parton. In fact, many readers are understandably surprised and some are no doubt chagrined to discover that the man in the novel that they have staked out as the heroine’s future husband, the editor John Walter, is already married and remains simply a supportive friend and advisor to Ruth. Instead of a wedding ring, at the end of the novel Walter presents her with “something which [she] may well be proud of,” a stock certificate for $10 000 (worth more than $275 000 today) representing the royalties from the sales of her first book (Fern 1997: 269). The certificate is not simply a reward for her literary labors; it is also a vivid illustration of her financial independence and an implicit affirmation of her self‐reliant individualism – as Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it in a review of the novel in the feminist journal The Una, “The great lesson taught in Ruth Hall is that God has given to woman sufficient brain and muscle to work out her own destiny unaided and alone” (quoted in Warren 1992: 140). Indeed, despite its subtitle, A Domestic Tale of the Present Time, Fern’s novel was a far cry from most women’s fictions of the period. Male reviewers, who were outraged by her treatment of family and what they viewed as her crass emphasis on money, recognized that distance; so did Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in a letter to his publisher admiringly observed that in Ruth Hall Fern “writes as if the devil was in her,” adding that when women writers “throw off the restraints of decency, and come before the public stark naked, as it were – then their books are sure to possess character and value” (quoted in Fern 1997: xxxv).
After Fern’s death, however, Ruth Hall and her other works fell into obscurity, a fate they shared with many of the reformist writings of the antebellum period. As Joyce Warren has pointed out, Fern was “criticized by her contemporaries for her ‘unfeminine’ writing while twentieth‐century critics disparaged her work because they regarded it as too ‘feminine’” (Warren 1992: 307). Other works of the period were variously dismissed as too sentimental, too polemical, or simply because they were of merely transient social or political interest, an assessment that drew a sharp line between the timely and the seemingly timeless – between such ostensibly non‐literary works and the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman, the pantheon established in F.O. Matthiessens’s influential study American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). The subsequent emphasis in American literary studies on the formal qualities of works by such “classic” writers tended to obscure how much those works were shaped by the spirit of reform generated during the turbulent decades preceding the Civil War. Moreover, that emphasis robbed the literature of the antebellum period of much its diversity and a good deal of its vitality, marginalizing not only slave narratives and antislavery writings such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the focus of other chapters in this volume), but also the kinds of reformist writings discussed in this chapter, many of them the products of those who profoundly believed in the power of the word to change life and lives in the United States.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 5 (RALPH WALDO EMERSON, MARGARET FULLER, AND TRANSCENDENTALISM); CHAPTER 6 (HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND THE LITERATURE OF THE ENVIRONMENT); CHAPTER 13 (SEX, THE BODY, AND HEALTH REFORM); CHAPTER 14 (PROSLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY LITERATURE); CHAPTER 15 (GENDER AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ANTEBELLUM SLAVE NARRATIVES).