American Renaissance (1830-1861)

From the middle of the 18 th century, the romantic spirit gradually strengthened its grip on literature,

first in France with Jean Jacques Rousseau, then in Germany’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

For the English speaking United States the most significant thing was the sudden blossoming from

1798 into the 1820’s of the poetry of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe

Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. These above mentioned stood as models for the

American romanticism.

The American romanticism, like the European, was less an organized system than an expression of

distinctive attitudes toward humanity, nature, and society. In reaction against the neoclassical spirit of

the Age of Reason, the romantics preferred freedom to formalism, and emphasized individualism

instead of authority. They appreciated imagination above either rationalism or strict fidelity to factual

representation.

Their reliance upon the subconscious, inner life was illustrated in Emerson’s intuitionalism, the very

center of transcendentalism, in the psychology displayed by Poe and Hawthorne.

Romanticism viewed nature more simply than did rationalism. The romantic universe was beautiful,

and human beings were the chosen and favored creatures in it. Romanticism was also celebrated in

strangeness and mystery, producing the medievalism of Keats and Lowell. The intellectual and

emotional climate in their new country made the Americans to examine the romance of their past, from

exploration through colonialism and revolution.

The City of New York, by 1800 the largest in the United States, with sixty thousand people, became

for several decades the literary capital, known especially for its leadership in the development of

newspaper journalism and for its flourishing theatrical life. Many writers published in the

Kinckerbocker Magazine, New York’s first monthly to gain national prestige. The name came from

Washington Irving’s A History of New York, by Dietrich Knickerbocker. With the publication of the

Sketch Book Irving became the first American to achieve true world status as an author, and his prose

remained a model for writers in England as well as in the United States for the remainder of the 19 th

century. Apart from the Knickerbockers include, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville and Walt

Whitman.

Philadelphia, called the Athens of America during the late colonial period, continued to produce

literary works. It became the center of a new popular periodical literature represented by Godey’s

Lady’s Book and Graham’s Magazine that provided space and readership for Poe, Longfellow,

Cooper, Emerson, Hawthorne and many more.

Meanwhile, the South built a flourishing agrarian civilization and distinguished planter aristocracy on

the shaky foundations of slavery. The slaves such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, who

escaped to write of their southern experience, did so. William Gilmore Simms was greatly praised and

widely popular as a rival to Cooper. His accurate and sympathetic portrayals of Indians contributed to

the rapidly growing understanding of the first Americans.

In the first period of the American literature, however, the most spectacular development was the

flowering of New England. It began in a new intellectualism. Unitarian and transcendental, that was

introduced by the appearance of the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 30s, and by the later

masterpieces of Henry David Thoreau. Boston journals such as The North American Review, The Dial

and The Atlantic Monthly provided outlets for New England’s vital contributions to the major reform

movements of abolition and women’s rights as well as to many related causes of human justice.

The less optimistic and more troubled side of American romanticism explored the great question of

private ownership and public responsibility that accompanied the fact of political independence. The

American government needed to consider the rights of the first Native Americans, many long removed

from their original tribal grounds, others removed by congressional act of 1830, and others continually

harassed in the rapidly closing west. Increasingly the right of a woman to possess real property on the

same terms as their husbands, brothers and fathers became a source of public debate. And then there

were the immigrants. The work titled The Pioneers by Cooper considers both legal private ownership

and right of public use.

Indians themselves started voicing their concerns through the powerful medium of print. Sequoya, a

Cherokee, invented an alphabet that by the 1820s made most Cherokees literate in their own language

and made possible the journals The Cherokee Phoenix and Cherokee Messenger. John Rollin became

the first Indian novelist. Meanwhile, the place of Indians in American life remained unresolved, a

problem removed to the western frontier while Americans in The East, in the period leading to the Civil

War, concerned themselves with social problems that seemed more immediate.

Although the prevailing romanticism in some ways encouraged turning away from present realities, its

idealism also fuelled the swelling tide of humanitarian reform. The new World attracted so many

immigrants that they soon represented 12 percent of the nation’s people. In these circumstances the

rapid development of industry and financial institution was accompanied by economic crises that

created in the older settlement an urban poverty. New reform movements, utopian communities, and

humanitarian organizations flourished, and reform became a profession attracting powerful and talented

leadership. They abolished inhuman punishments and imprisonment for debt, to clean up loathsome

jails, and to provide rehabilitation instead of punishment. The physically handicapped

were given proper education. The Women’s Rights movement, which drew such leaders as Margaret

Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, rose to the national scale in 1848 with the meeting of

the first women’s congress at Seneca Falls, New York.

In the early 19th century important modifications in religion sprang from the joining of New England

Unitarianism and transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism expressed an idealism natural to a young country still testing the revolutionary idea

that all men are created equal, and like the Revolution itself, it sprang from many sources.

Transcendentalists rejected Locke’s materialistic philosophy in favor of the idealism of the German

thinker Imanuel Kant, who declared that the transcendental knowledge in the human mind was innate,

assuming that intuition therefore surpassed reason as a guide to the truth. The most important idea

which transcendentalists preached was the freedom of individuals and the freedom to follow intuitional

knowledge. The Transcendental Club, an informal group, met most often at Emerson’s home. Beside

Emerson, Thoreau is the most noteworthy to literature for the enduring legacy of his extreme

individualism and for the containing power of his concept of civil disobedience.

The road to Civil War was a long one. Slaves revolted in South Caroline as early as 1739. In 1778,

Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania barred their citizens from engaging in the

salve trade. Slavery in England came to an end with the Reform Act of 1830. In the western

hemisphere in the 1850s, only Surinam, Brazil and Cuba remained alongside the United States as

slaveholding countries.

In 1831William Garrison founded The Liberator the abolitionist magazine that continued to appear

until slavery was abolished in 1865 by the Thirteen Amendment to the Constitution.

Act by act, American literature both contributed to and reflected upon the wrenching drama that from

1860 to 1865 tore the country apart.