The Age of Romanticism N 1810 TH poruLATION of the sev- enteen United States totaled little more than 7 million, Fifty-one years later, at the beginning of the Civil War, the number of states had doubled, and the Population had increased to more than $1 million, American pioneers had pushed the frontier line of settlement beyond the Mississippi to the Great Plains, and the nation’s center of population had shifted westward from the eastern seaboard, actoss the Appalachians, to Ohio. The West had risen as a sectional power to challenge the political dominance of the Fast and the South. In 1828 the election of the frontier hero Andrew Jackson as the sev- enth President of the United States had brought an end to the “Virginia Dy- nasty” of American Presidents, By the 1840s the Age of the Common Man had arrived. Voting restrictions were eased, The Jeffersonian concept of a natural aristocracy had been replaced by the egalitarian belief that all white tmen are literally equal, and most are capable of political leadership. A new nationalism had emerged, proudly American and justified by "Manifest Des tiny.” the doctrine asserting that the new nation was spiritually supreme and its expansion was the will of God, Well before 1860 the United States had begun to change into an industrial and urban society, The word “technology” was coined in 1829. A form of au- tomation had come with the construction of a one-man flour mill in Virgini Americans had invented the cotton gin, the sewing machine, and the tele- raph; the principles of assembly-line mass production had been established. in 1800 when Eli Whitney built a factory in Whimeyville, Connecticut to make muskets for the United States Army. The fire and roar of newly per- fected steam engines symbolized the beginning of a technology that would bring vast material benefits and cause overwhelming social disorders. In its first years the United States had been a republic of small landholders, with- ‘out sharp contrasts of wealth. Now the nation became a land of contrasting riches and poverty. The numbers of “millionaires” multiplied, as did the number of paupers. Political corruption grew widespread: during Jackson's administration the New York Collector of the Customs, Samuel Swartwout, became the first public servant known in American history to steal a million dollars, In the frst half of the nineteenth century the proportion of Ameri- cans who labored on farms declined as more and more men and women left the land to work in urban businesses and factories. New York became Amer 459ica’s langest city, supplanting Boston and Philadelphia as the economic and cultural capital of the nation. ‘Through the first half of the century the pursuit of simplicity, utility, and perfection remained an American characteristic. Gentlemen ceased to wear Srnate, powdered wigs, and they replaced their elegant knee breeches with Grab stove-pipe trouscrs. Highfashioned ladies adopted simpler dress styles and spurned the elaborate use of cosmetics. Utopian communal societies flourished. Transcendentalists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and v- sionaries who called themselves Millennialists, Universalists, Perfectionist, and Come-Outers, all offered new paths to God. A renewed interest in re form and humanitarianism appeared. Churches embarked on temperance ‘crusades to save drunkards and to slay “demon rum," In 1817 the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism was formed, and in 1838 a national coalition of abolitionist groups established the American Anti-Slavery Society. The brand- ing, mutilation, and whipping of convicts declined. Imprisonment for debt was abolished. ‘By mid-century the bread lines and soup kitchens of public aid societies had become a permanent part of life in America’s big cities. The feminist ‘movement blazed forth with a host of notable women battling for their rights and for social reform. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone fought to es tablish women’s right to vote and to hold property. Dorothea Lynde Dix led a movement to improve prisons and insane asylums, Amelia Jenks Bloomer worked to promote woman's education and left her name to the pantaloons she wore to foster the movement for dress reform. In 1837 the first college level institution for women, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, opened in Massachusetts to serve “the muslin sex.” By the 1850s the level of education and literacy had risen significantly, State legislatures had started to enact compulsory school attendance laws. More Americans began to read books, magazines, and newspapers. Improve ‘ments in the printing press and the expansion of the postal service made possible the rapid production and wide distribution of periodicals, George Washington had proclaimed that magazines were “easy vehicles of knowh edge” that would “preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people.” In 1794 five magazines were published in the United States; by 1825 there were 100; by 1860 more than 500. The mass circulation penny press began with the establishment of the New York Herald and the New York Sun, and such distinguished journals as the North American Review, Graham's, and the Southern Literary Messenger gained wide circulation, The turn of the century continued to be an age of literary dilettantes and gentleman authors. Book royalties were few and meager. Compensation for magazine contributors was almost unknown until the 1820s, and long there: after payment remained slight and uncertain, But by mid-century, magazines ‘were paying Henry Wadsworth Longfellow $50 for a poem and James Fe ‘more Cooper $10 for a page of his prose. A swarm of professional “magazi ists" appeared, “quill drivers” and “inkslingers,” male and female, who strove to earn their living with a pen. In the years preceding the Civil War relatively few works of imaginative lit erature were published in the United States. Most books were almanacs, 460schoolbooks, selfhelp manuals, or works on religion, medicine, or law. Fewer than a dozen volumes of poetry were published annually. Fiction was a prime component of ladies’ magazines. Novels were increasingly popular, especially historical romances written by Europeans, most notably by “the monarch and master of moder fiction,” Sir Walter Scott. But as the century progressed, native American writers won increasing national and international fame. Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819-1820) became the first work by an American vriter to win financial success on both sides of the Atlantic. By the 1830s Irving was judged the nation’s greatest writer, a lofty position he later shared with James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant. Soon a rich national literature had begun to emerge at the hands of Poe, Mclille, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman. The attitudes of America’s writers were shaped by their New World envi- ronment and an array of ideas inherited from the romantic traditions of Eu- rope. A new romanticism had appeared in England in the last years of the cightecnth century. It spread to continental Europe and then came to Amer- ica early in the nineteenth century. It was pluralistic; its manifestations were as varied, as individualistic, and as conflicting as the cultures and the intel- lects from which it sprang. Yet romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and in- tuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world is a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption, Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy Until the Givil War. The romantic exaltation of the individual suited the na- tion’s revolutionary heritage and its frontier egalitarianism. The romantic re- volt against traditional art forms gratified those cramped by the strict limits, ‘of neoclassic literature, painting, and architecture, The romantic rejection of rationalism gladdened those who were opposed to cool, intellectuai religions encrusted with the remnants of Calvinism. Increasing numbers of Americans tumed to the fervid joys of camp-meeting revivalism or to the buoyant teach: ings of New England transcendentalism. As a moral philosophy, transcendentalism was neither logical nor system- atized. It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the re- straints of law and custom It appealed to those who disdained the harsh God of their Puritan ancestors, and it appealed to those who scomed the pale de- ity of New England Unitarianism. Transcendentalists took their ideas from the romantic literature of Europe, from neo-Platonism, from German idealis- tic philosophy, and from the revelations of Oriental mysticism. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American socicty. ‘They believed in the transcendence of the “Oversoul,” an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come and of which all things are a a shitnphicatymd lenary pene: tomectohoanite omiheciin New England from the 1830s to the Civil War. Its doctrines found their great- sst literary advocates in Emerson, who believed that man was a part of ab- solute good, and in Thoreau, who beheld divinity in the “unspotted inno- cence” of nature, To later generations, scarred by the horrors of the Civil War, the wanscendentalist persuasion that humanity was godlike and that evil ‘was nonexistent seemed to be an optimistic folly. Yet transcendentalism was a 461powerful expression of the intellectual mood of the age, and the ideas it rep- resented have remained a strong influence on American writers from the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman to the present. ‘The growth of cultural nationalism aroused American artists to write patri- otic songs, to paint vast panoramas of American scenes, and to design monu- ‘mental buildings that would register the grandeur of the American people and their land. Yet, in the midst of expansion and change, most American ‘music, except for black spirituals and work songs, remained derivative. Com- posers adapted European operatic forms to American legends and lore. Hymns and songs were set to European tunes: Francis Scott Key's “Star Spangled Banner” borrowed the music of an English drinking song. In the 1820s American painters began to turn away from the European conventions of cighteenth-century aristocratic portraiture. The Hudson River School of landscape painters emerged; artists roamed from the Catskills and the Hudson River to the Rockies in search of the “wild grandeur” of America's mountains, valleys, forests, and rivers. A reaction de- veloped against the artificial elegance of neoclassic gardening. The unchit tered vistas and geometric hedgerows of welltempered eighteenth-century domestic landscapes were rebuilt to display scenes of untamed nature. Well todo nineteenth-century Americans sometimes even adorned their gardens with artificial ruins that tastefully suggested nature’s triumph over the intru- sive works of man, By the 1850s a growing interest in the asymmetrical art of the Middle Ages had generated a new taste for Gothic design and challenged the dominance of Greek Revival architecture. Gothic arches, towers, and or namental details began to replace the Greek and Roman temple style in the design of the banks, courthouses, university buildings, mansions, cottages, and even the backyard privies of Americans. Literature ceased to be primarily didactic, a servant of politics and reli- gion. The great age of American political writing by the Founding Fathers had ended. Statesmen, such as Daniel Webster, now dominated American politics not with their prose but with the emotional force of their oratory. Novels, short stories, and poems replaced sermons and manifestoes as Amer- ica’s principal literary forms. The playhouse was no longer considered to be wholly a source of wickedness, but native playwrights still were few and their works second-rate. small number of dramas based on native themes had appeared, but throughout the period a lack of effective copyright protection and the large-scale importation of English plays and actors gave little encour- agement to the development of American drama. Yet the mass of men and women could find their yearning for entertainment satisfied in che revivalism of evangelical churches, in parades and patriotic festivals, in the freaks, trained fleas, and wild beasts exhibited by such showmen as Phineas T. Bar- num, or in the gentler excitements of lecture-going. Imaginative literature became intense, personal, and symbolic as more writers came to perceive themselves not as mere literary craftsmen following the ordered rules of ncoclassic literature but as prophets and scers. Moved by calls for a national literature that would glorify the land, that would “breathe the spirit of our republican institutions,” writers celebrated Amer- ica’s meadows, groves, and streams, its endless prairies, dense forests, and vast oceans. The wildemess came to function almost as a dramatic character 462,that illustrated moral law. The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature, evident in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, in Thoreau’s Walden, and later in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and in the twentieth-century writing of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Romantic writers placed increasing value on the free expression of emo- tion and displayed increasing attention to the psychie states of their charac- ters, Heroes and heroines exhibited extremes of sensitivity and excitement. The novel of terror became the profitable literary staple that it remains to- day. Writers of gothic terror novels sought to arouse in their readers a turbu- lent sense of the remote, the supernatural, and the terrifying by describing castles and landscapes illuminated by moonlight and haunted by specters. A preoccupation with the demonic and the mystery of evil marked the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and a host of lesser writers. Nationalism stimulated a greater interest in America’s language and its common people. In 1828 Noah Webster published An American Dictionary of ‘he English Language. American character types speaking local dialects ap- peared in poetry and fiction with increasing frequency. Literature began to celebrate American farmers, the poor, the unlettered, children, and noble savages (red and white) untainted by society. At mid-century a cultural reawakening brought a “flowering of New En- gland." Led by Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau, and stirred by the teach- ings of transcendentalism, writers of Boston and nearby towns and villages produced a New England literary renaissance. Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman found literary fame in the writing of history; and the *Schook room Poets,” Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier, interpreted the aspi- rations of the age to their countrymen and brought honor to the nation by achieving international fame. America, from the early 1800s to the Civil War, was a land of paradoxes, a land stirred by spiritual dreams and shaped by the realities of a growing ma- terialism, The age had rejected the ruined promise and stale wisdom it saw in cighteenth-century rationalism, Americans had sought new liberties and new ideas in life and art, but the excesses and conflicts of their society had brought bloody Civil War. To the Age of Realism following that great na- tional agony, the ideas of the romantic era often seemed to have produced xnot only a catastrophic war but also a national decline. Political egalitarianism had brought a politics that was frequently ignorant, impulsive, and irrational, a rabid democracy that its patrician detractors de. scribed as rule by “King Mob.” Intense individualism and soaring optimism had deteriorated into their natural consequences: selfishness, a crippling pessimism, and a frivolous addiction to the pleasures of despair and woe. Ro- manticism had cncouraged the worship of outcasts and worthless chivalric ideals. In its efforts to capture the popular imagination and excite the public rind, it had senselessly generated phantoms and gothic bugaboos. The exal- tation of nature had often decomposed into a sprawling pantheism and giddy worship of “each daisy in the leafy glen.” The rejection of society and the exaltation of primitive men, “nurslings of nature without art and without schooling,” was often a cranky rejection of the problems faced by humans obliged to live in complex societies,‘Yer romanticism remained one of the glories of the age. It accelerated the spread of democracy to the downtrodden and the poor, It revitalized art and established new ways of perceiving humanity and the universe. And it re- mains evident today, in the resurgence of democratic radicalism, in the fasci- nation with nature and the simple life, in the exaltation of love, in the re- newed interest in follctales and balladry, in the popularity of novels and movies of heroic adventure and intense introspection, and in the social and sexual upheavals that have become a characteristic of American life.