A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

The Culture of the Early Republic

DANIEL BOONE

• Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, America’s cultural scene was imported from Britain. Most Americans read British literature and admired British art.

• The first home-grown literary sensation in the United States was John Filson’s biography of the frontiersman Daniel Boone. The romance of Boone’s solitary life in the western wilderness captured the imaginations of many readers.

WASHINGTON IRVING

• In the early nineteenth century, the population became large enough to sustain a local literary industry.

• One of the first writers to make a living from his literary output was Washington Irving.

• Irving wrote fantasy stories about America’s colonial past.

• His best-known stories are the fairytale ‘Rip van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

• In the 1820s, James Fenimore Cooper began publishing a series of novels about a legendary frontiersman known as ‘Leatherstocking’ and his Indian ‘brother’ Chingachgook.

• Cooper romanticized his Indian characters, portraying them as ‘noble savages’ who lived a simple but virtuous lifestyle in the wilderness, which was ruined when settlers arrived.

• Cooper also romanticized his frontiersman, involving him in various colonial adventures including key battles in the French and Indian War.

FRONTIER ROMANCE AND HORROR

• Cooper’s popularity in America and Europe led other writers to imitate his style and choice of subject.

• Lydia Maria Child and Catherine Maria Sedgwick both achieved popularity with tales of women who are taken captive by Indians.

• Later, Robert Montgomery Bird achieved popularity with Nick of the Woods, the tale of a bloodthirsty frontiersman who slaughters countless Indians as payback for the violence they inflicted on his family.

• Portrayals of Indians became less romantic and more grotesque as America entered the Jacksonian era.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

• An American intellectual movement began with the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays in the 1830s.

• In his essay ‘The Poet’ (1844), Emerson urged other American writers to write more about distinctly American subjects: “Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics… our Negroes, and Indians… the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung.”

TRANSCENDENTALISM

• Throughout the late 1820s, the 1830s, and the early 1840s, Emerson also founded and developed an intellectual and spiritual movement known as Transcendentalism.

• The Transcendentalists believed the following:

• that both human beings and the natural environment are inherently good,

• that human social institutions ultimately corrupt the individual,

• and that the true individual must therefore seek solitude in nature and develop his or her identity through self-reliance, without being influenced by traditions, manners, and so on.

JOSEPH SMITH

• Founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church. Lived in upstate New York.

• Claimed that he received a visit from an angel named Moroni in 1823. Moroni pointed him towards the location of some golden plates on which was written a lost book of the Bible, the Book of Mormon.

• Suggested that Native Americans formed the ‘lost tribe of Israel’ mentioned in the Bible and that Jesus visited North America after his death.

BRIGHAM YOUNG

• Smith gathered many followers and, in 1831, he convinced them to move west in order to build an American Zion.

• The Mormons first established themselves in Independence, Missouri, until violence pushed them north to Nauvoo, Illinois.

• After Smith was killed by a mob in an Illinois prison in 1844, his follower Brigham Young led the Mormons further west to Utah, which was then part of Mexico. Under Young’s leadership, the Mormons settled permanently by Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

THE MORMON MIGRATION OF 1846-1847

‘OLD HICKORY’

• Throughout the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the American West was romanticized along with the figure of the American frontiersman, even as the West became a dumping ground for Indians displaced by Jackson.

• Jackson himself benefited from this romanticization. His military record from the War of 1812 gave him a popular reputation as an adventurous ‘Indian killer’ and he made much of the youth he spent in a cabin in the backwoods of Tennessee.

ABOLITIONISM GAINS ENERGY

• In 1831, the political activist and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper.

• Garrison radically called for an immediate end to slavery: “Assenting to the ‘self-evident truth’ maintained in [our] Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights — among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.”

ABOLITIONISM GAINS ENERGY

• Garrison continued: “I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. … [U]rge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

• Until this moment, abolitionism in America had been a patient, incremental phenomenon. Now, though, it gained new urgency, attracting increasing numbers of religious proponents.

A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

The Culture of the Early Republic