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. Raised a Unitarian, Emerson began challenging the church’s ideas. His 1836 essay entitled “Nature” expounded his newfound belief in a Universal Being. This Being existed as an ideal reality beyond the material world and was accessible through nature. Emerson’s natural world was distinctly American and suggested that moral perfection could be achieved in the United States. Emerson expressed his ideas in widely read essays and books and in popular lectures.

Emerson’s hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, served as a haven for writers, poets, intellectuals, and reformers who were drawn to transcendentalism. In 1840 Margaret 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 Horace Greeley hired her as a critic at the New York Tribune. She soon published a book, 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 the mid-1830s. 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), Thoreau argued that individuals of conscience had the right to resist government policies they believed to be immoral. Five years later, he published Walden, which highlighted the interplay among a simple lifestyle, natural harmony, and social justice.

Like Emerson, many American artists embraced the power of nature. Led by Thomas Cole, members of the Hudson River School painted romanticized landscapes from New York’s Catskill and Adirondack Mountains. Some northern artists also traveled to the West, painting the region’s grand vistas. Pennsylvanian George Catlin portrayed the dramatic scenery of western mountains, gorges, and waterfalls and also painted moving portraits of Plains Indians.

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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?