Another important movement for spiritual renewal was rooted in the transcendent power of nature. The founder of this transcendentalist school of thought was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian pastor who gave up his post to travel and read. In 1836 he published an essay entitled “Nature” that expressed his newfound belief in a Universal Being. This Being existed as an ideal reality beyond the material world and was accessible through nature. The natural world Emerson described was distinctly American and offered hope that moral perfection could be achieved in the United States despite the corruptions of civil society and man-made governments. Emerson expressed his ideas in widely read essays and books and in popular lectures to packed houses.
From the 1830s on, Emerson’s town of Concord, Massachusetts, served as a haven for writers, poets, intellectuals, and reformers who embraced his views. Many Unitarians and other liberal Protestants in the Boston area were drawn to transcendentalism as well. In 1840 Mar-garet Fuller, a close friend of Emerson, became the first editor of The Dial, a journal dedicated to transcendental thought. In 1844 she moved to New York City, where the editor Horace Greeley hired her as a critic at the New York Tribune. While in New York, she published her ideas about the conflict between women’s assigned roles and their innate abilities in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which combined transcendental ideas with arguments for women’s rights.
Henry David Thoreau also followed the transcendentalist path. He grew up in Concord and read “Nature” while a student at Harvard. In July 1845, Thoreau moved to a cabin near Walden Pond and launched an experiment in simple living. A year later, he was imprisoned overnight for refusing to pay his taxes as a protest against slavery and the Mexican-American War. In the anonymous Civil Disobedience (1846), he argued that individuals of conscience had the right to resist government policies they believed to be immoral. Five years later, Thoreau published Walden, which offered a classic statement of the interplay among a simple lifestyle, natural harmony, and social justice.
Emerson also urged Americans to break their cultural dependence on Europe, and American artists agreed. Led by Thomas Cole, members of the Hudson River School painted romanticized landscapes from New York’s Catskill and Adirondack Mountains. The sweeping vistas tied the nation’s power to its natural beauty. Western vistas inspired artistic efforts as well. George Catlin portrayed the dramatic scenery of western mountains, gorges, and waterfalls and offered moving portraits of Plains Indians, who, he feared, faced extinction. Other artists captured birds, plants, and animals distinctive to the West. Although relatively few Americans had yet visited the region, many hung copies of frontier paintings on their walls or marveled at them in books and magazines. Clearly the hand of God must be at work in such glorious landscapes.
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What impact did the Second Great Awakening have in the North? |
What new religious organizations and viewpoints emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, outside of Protestant evangelical denominations? |