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ANTEBELLUM CULTURE AND REFORM
LOOKING AHEAD
1. How did an American national culture of art, literature, philosophy, and communal living develop in the nineteenth century?
2. What were the issues on which social and moral reformers tried to “remake the nation”? How successful were their efforts?
3. Why did the crusade against slavery become the preeminent issue of the reform movement?
THE UNITED STATES IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY was growing rapidly in size, population, and economic complexity. Most Americans were excited by the new possibilities these changes produced. But many people were also painfully aware of the problems that accompanied them.
One result of these conflicting attitudes was the emergence of movements to “reform” the nation—to refine and improve it. Some reforms rested on an optimistic faith in human nature, a belief that within every individual resided a spirit that was basically good and that society should attempt to unleash. A second impulse was a desire for order and control. With their traditional values and institutions being challenged and eroded, many Americans yearned for above all stability and discipline. By the end of the 1840s, however, one issue—slavery—had come to overshadow all others. And one group of reformers—the abolitionists—had become the most influential of all.
THE ROMANTIC IMPULSE
“In the four quarters of the globe,” wrote the English wit Sydney Smith in 1820, “who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?” The answer, he assumed, was obvious: no one.
American intellectuals were painfully aware of the low regard in which Europeans held their culture, and they tried to create an artistic life that would express their own nation’s special virtues. At the same time, many of the nation’s cultural leaders were striving for another kind of liberation, which was—ironically—largely an import from Europe: the spirit of romanticism. In literature, in philosophy, in art, even in politics and economics, American intellectuals were committing themselves to the liberation of the human spirit.
Nationalism and Romanticism in American Painting
Despite Sydney Smith’s contemptuous question, a great many people in the United States were, in fact, looking at American paintings—and they were doing so because they believed Americans were creating important new artistic traditions of their own.
American painters sought to capture the power of nature by portraying some of the nation’s grandest landscapes. The first great school of American painters—known as the Hudson River school —emerged in New York. Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, Asher Durand, and others painted the spectacular vistas of the largely untamed Hudson Valley. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, whom many of the painters read and admired, they considered nature—far more than civilization—the best source of wisdom and fulfillment. In portraying the Hudson Valley, they seemed to announce that in America, unlike in Page 275Europe, “wild nature” still existed; and that America, therefore, was a nation of greater promise than the overdeveloped lands of the Old World.
In later years, some of the Hudson River painters traveled farther west. Their enormous canvases of great natural wonders—the Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone, the Rocky Mountains—touched a passionate chord among the public. Some of the most famous of their paintings—particularly the works of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran—traveled around the country attracting enormous crowds.
An American Literature
The effort to create a distinctively American literature made considerable progress in the 1820s through the work of the first great American novelist: James Fenimore Cooper. What most distinguished his work was its evocation of the American West. Cooper had a lifelong fascination with the human relationship to nature and with the challenges (and dangers) of America’s expansion westward. His most important novels—among them The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1841)—examined the experience of rugged white frontiersmen with Indians, pioneers, violence, and the law. Cooper evoked the ideal of the independent individual with a natural inner goodness—an ideal that many Americans feared was in jeopardy.
Another, later group of American writers displayed more clearly the influence of romanticism. Walt Whitman’s book of poems Leaves of Grass (1855) celebrated democracy, the liberation of the individual spirit, and the pleasures of the flesh. In helping free verse from traditional, restrictive conventions, he also expressed a yearning for emotional and physical release and personal fulfillment—a yearning perhaps rooted in part in his own experience as a homosexual living in a society profoundly intolerant of unconventional sexuality.
Less exuberant was Herman Melville , perhaps the greatest American writer of his era. Moby Dick, published in 1851, is Melville’s most important—although not, in his lifetime, his most popular—novel. It tells the story of Ahab, the powerful, driven captain of a whaling vessel, and his obsessive search for Moby Dick, the great white whale that had once maimed him. It is a story of courage and the strength of human will. But it is also a tragedy of pride and revenge. In some ways it is an uncomfortable metaphor for the harsh, individualistic, achievement-driven culture of nineteenth-century America.
Literature in the Antebellum South
The South experienced a literary flowering of its own in the mid-nineteenth century, and it produced writers and artists who were, like their northern counterparts, concerned with defining the nature of America. But white southerners tended to produce very different images of what society was and should be.
The southern writer Edgar Allan Poe penned stories and poems that were primarily sad and macabre. His first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), received little recognition. But later works, including his most famous poem, “The Raven” (1845), established him as a major, if controversial, literary figure. Poe evoked images of individuals rising above the narrow confines of intellect and exploring the deeper—and often painful and horrifying—world of the spirit and emotions.
Other southern novelists of the 1830s (among them Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, William Alexander Caruthers, and John Pendleton Kennedy) produced historical romances and eulogies for the plantation system of the upper South. The most distinguished of the Page 276region’s authors was William Gilmore Simms. For a time, his work expressed a broad nationalism that transcended his regional background; but by the 1840s, he too became a strong defender of southern institutions—especially slavery—against the encroachments of the North. There was, he believed, a unique quality to southern life that fell to intellectuals to defend.
One group of southern writers, however, produced works that were more broadly American. These writers from the fringes of plantation society—Augustus B. Longstreet, Joseph G. Baldwin, Johnson J. Hooper, and others—depicted the world of the backwoods South and focused on ordinary people and poor whites. Instead of romanticizing their subjects, they were deliberately and sometimes painfully realistic, seasoning their sketches with a robust, vulgar humor that was new to American literature. These southern realists established a tradition of American regional humor that was ultimately to find its most powerful voice in Mark Twain.
The Transcendentalists
One of the outstanding expressions of the romantic impulse in America came from a group of New England writers and philosophers known as the transcendentalists . Borrowing heavily from German and English writers and philosophers, the transcendentalists promoted a theory of the individual that rested on a distinction between what they called “reason” and “understanding.” Reason, as they defined it, had little to do with rationality. It was, rather, the individual’s innate capacity to grasp beauty and truth by giving full expression to the instincts and emotions. Understanding, by contrast, was the use of intellect in the narrow, artificial ways imposed by society; it involved the repression of instinct and the victory of externally imposed learning. Every person’s goal, therefore, should be the cultivation of “reason”—and, thus, liberation from “understanding.” Each individual should strive to “transcend” the limits of the intellect and allow the emotions, the “soul,” to create an “original relation to the Universe.”
Transcendentalist philosophy emerged first in America among a small group of intellectuals centered in Concord, Massachusetts, and led by Ralph Waldo Emerson . A Unitarian minister in his youth, Emerson left the clergy in 1832 to devote himself to writing, teaching, and lecturing. In “Nature” (1836), Emerson wrote that in the quest for self-fulfillment, individuals should work for a communion with the natural world: “in the woods, we return to reason and faith. . . . Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. . . . I am part and particle of God.” In other essays, he was even more explicit in advocating a commitment to individuality and the full exploration of inner capacities.
Emerson’s stress on individuality and the search for inner meaning apart from society inspired Margaret Fuller. In 1840 she became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial, where she argued for the important relationship between the discovery of the “self” and the questioning of the prevailing gender roles of her era. In Women in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845 and considered an important work in the early history of feminism, Fuller wrote, “Many women are considering within themselves what they need and what they have not.” She urged readers, especially women, to set aside conventional thinking about the place of women in society.
MARGARET FULLER Margaret Fuller was in the forefront of efforts to probe how contemporary gender roles limited the free expression of women’s souls and abilities.
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-47039])
Henry David Thoreau went even further than Emerson and Fuller in repudiating the repressive forces of society, which produced, he said, “lives of quiet desperation.” Each individual should work for self-realization by resisting pressures to conform to society’s Page 277expectations and responding instead to his or her own instincts. Thoreau’s own effort to free himself—immortalized in Walden (1854)—led him to build a small cabin in the Concord woods on the edge of Walden Pond, where he lived alone for two years as simply as he could, attempting to liberate himself from what he considered society’s excessive interest in material comforts. In his 1849 essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” he extended his critique of artificial constraints in society to government, arguing that when government required an individual to violate his or her own morality, it had no legitimate authority. The proper response was “civil disobedience,” or “passive resistance”—a public refusal to obey unjust laws. It was a belief that would undergird some antislavery reforms and, much later in the mid-twentieth century, attacks on racial segregation.
The Defense of Nature
As Emerson’s and Thoreau’s tributes to nature suggest, a small but influential group of Americans in the nineteenth century feared the impact of capitalism on the integrity of the natural world. “The mountains and cataracts, which were to have made poets and painters,” wrote the essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, “have been mined for anthracite and dammed for water power.”
To the transcendentalists and others, nature was not just a setting for economic activity, as many farmers, miners, and others believed. It was the source of deep, personal human inspiration—the vehicle through which individuals could best realize the truth within their own souls. Genuine spirituality, they argued, did not come from formal religion but through communion with the natural world.Page 278
In making such claims, the transcendentalists were among the first Americans to anticipate the conservation movement of the late nineteenth century and the environmental movement of the twentieth century. They had no scientific basis for their defense of the wilderness and little sense of the twentieth-century notion of the interconnectedness of species. But they did believe in, and articulate, an essential unity between humanity and nature—a spiritual unity, they believed, without which civilization would be impoverished. They looked at nature, they said, “with new eyes,” and with those eyes they saw that “behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present.”
Visions of Utopia
Although transcendentalism was at its heart an individualistic philosophy, it helped spawn one of the most famous nineteenth-century experiments in communal living: Brook Farm. The dream of the Boston transcendentalist George Ripley, Brook Farm was established in 1841 as an experimental community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. There, according to Ripley, individuals would gather to create a new society that would permit every member to have full opportunity for self-realization. All residents would share equally in the labor of the community so that all could share as well in the leisure, which was essential for cultivation of the self. The tension between the ideal of individual freedom and the demands of a communal society, however, eventually took its toll on Brook Farm. Many residents became disenchanted and left. When a fire destroyed the central building of the community in 1847, the experiment dissolved.
Among the original residents of Brook Farm was the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne , who expressed his disillusionment with the experiment and, to some extent, with transcendentalism in a series of novels. In The Blithedale Romance (1852), he wrote scathingly of Brook Farm itself. In other novels—most notably The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851)—he wrote equally passionately about the price individuals pay for cutting themselves off from society. Egotism, he claimed (in an indirect challenge to the transcendentalist faith in the self), was the “serpent” that lay at the heart of human misery.
Brook Farm was only one of many experimental communities in the years before the Civil War. The Scottish industrialist and philanthropist Robert Owen founded an experimental community in Indiana in 1825, which he named New Harmony. It was to be a “Village of Cooperation,” in which every resident worked and lived in total equality. The community was an economic failure, but the vision that had inspired it continued to enchant some Americans. Dozens of other “Owenite” experiments were established in other locations in the ensuing years.
Redefining Gender Roles
Inspired by the transcendentalist emphasis on liberating the individual from the constraints of social convention, many of the new utopian communities revised the traditional relationship between men and women. Some even experimented with radical redefinitions of gender roles.
One of the more radical of the utopian colonies of the nineteenth century was the Oneida Community, established in 1848 in upstate New York by John Humphrey Noyes. The Oneida “Perfectionists,” as residents of the community called themselves, rejected traditional notions of family and marriage. All residents, Noyes declared, were “married” to all other residents; there were to be no permanent conjugal ties. But Oneida was not, as horrified critics often claimed, an experiment in unrestrained “free love.” It was a placePage 279 where the community carefully monitored sexual behavior, where women were protected from unwanted childbearing, and where children were raised communally, often seeing little of their own parents. The Oneidans took pride in what they considered their liberation of women from the demands of male “lust” and from the traditional restraints of family. Their numbers were never large—only once did they count more than 300 members—and the community itself lasted only 30 years.
The Shakers , too, redefined traditional gender roles. Founded by “Mother” Ann Lee in the 1770s, the society of the Shakers survived through the twentieth century. (A tiny remnant is left today.) But the Shakers attracted a particularly large following in the mid-nineteenth century and established more than twenty communities throughout the Northeast and Northwest in the 1840s. They derived their name from a unique religious ritual—in which members of a congregation would “shake” themselves free of sin while performing a loud chant and an ecstatic dance.
The most distinctive feature of Shakerism, however, was its commitment to complete celibacy—which meant, of course, that no one could be born into the faith. All Shakers had to choose it voluntarily. Shakerism attracted about 6,000 members in the 1840s, more women than men. They lived in communities where contacts between men and women were strictly limited, and they endorsed the idea of sexual equality, although women exercised the greater power.
The Shakers were not, however, motivated only by a desire to escape the burdens of traditional gender roles. They were also trying to create a society set apart from the chaos and disorder they believed had come to characterize American life. In that, they were much like other dissenting religious sects and utopian communities of their time.
The Mormons
Among the most important religious efforts to create a new and more ordered society was that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons. The original Mormons were white men and women, many of whom felt that social changes had left them economically marginalized and in doubt about the fundamental tenets of traditional Christianity. They discovered in Mormonism a new history of the world, a new establishment of the Christian church, a new book of scripture and set of prophets to join those of the Bible, a new call to prepare for the Second Coming, and a new promise that—just as God had once been a man—all believers could become like God himself.
Mormonism began in upstate New York through the efforts of Joseph Smith . In 1830, when he was just twenty-four, he organized the church and published a remarkable document—the Book of Mormon, named for the ancient prophet who he claimed had been its chief editor. It was, he said, a translation of a set of golden tablets he had found in the hills of New York, revealed to him by Moroni, an angel of God and the book’s last prophet. The Book of Mormon told the story of two ancient civilizations in America, whose people had anticipated the coming of Christ and were rewarded when Jesus actually came to America after his resurrection. Ultimately, both civilizations collapsed because of their rejection of Christian principles. But Smith believed their history as righteous societies could serve as a model for building a new holy community in the United States.
In 1831, gathering a small group of believers around him, Smith began searching for a sanctuary for his new community of “saints,” an effort that would continue unhappily for more than fifteen years. Time and again, the Latter-day Saints, as they called themselves, attempted to establish peaceful communities. Time and again, they met with persecution Page 280from their neighbors, who were suspicious of their radical religious doctrines—their claims of new prophets, new scripture, and divine authority. Opponents were also concerned by their rapid growth and their increasing political strength. Near the end of his life, Joseph Smith introduced the practice of polygamy (giving a man the right to take several wives), which became public knowledge after Smith’s death. From then on, polygamy became a central target of anti-Mormon opposition.
Driven from their original settlements in Independence, Missouri, and Kirtland, Ohio, the Mormons founded a new town in Illinois that they named Nauvoo. In the early 1840s, it became an imposing and economically successful community. In 1844, however, bitter enemies of Joseph Smith published an inflammatory attack on him. Smith ordered his followers to destroy the offending press, and he was subsequently arrested and imprisoned in nearby Carthage. There, an angry mob attacked the jail and fatally shot him. The Mormons soon abandoned Nauvoo and, under the leadership of Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, traveled—12,000 strong, in one of the largest single group migrations in American history—across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. They established several communities in Utah, including the present Salt Lake City, where, finally, the Mormons were able to create a lasting settlement.
REMAKING SOCIETY
Central to romanticism and transcendentalism was a reform impulse—the drive to improve the life and health of men and women. Seeking to uncover the divinity of the individual inspired larger quests to perfect the world itself. The reform impulse helped create new Page 281movements to remake mainstream society—movements in which, to a striking degree, women formed both the rank and file and the leadership. By the 1830s, such movements had become organized reform societies.
Revivalism, Morality, and Order
Along with romanticism and transcendentalism, Protestant revivalism was another powerful source of the popular effort to rewrite society. It was the movement that had begun with the Second Great Awakening early in the century and had, by the 1820s, evolved into a powerful force for social reform.
The New Light evangelicals embraced the optimistic belief that every individual was capable of salvation through his or her own efforts. Partly as a result, revivalism soon became not only a means of personal salvation but also an effort to reform the larger society. In particular, revivalism produced a crusade against personal immorality.
Evangelical Protestantism greatly strengthened the crusade against drunkenness. No social vice, temperance advocates argued, was more responsible for crime, disorder, and poverty than the excessive use of alcohol. Women complained that men spent money their families needed on alcohol and that drunken husbands often beat and abused their wives. Temperance also appealed to those who were alarmed by immigration; drunkenness, many nativists believed, was responsible for violence and disorder in immigrant communities. By 1840, temperance had become a major national movement, with powerful organizations and more than a million followers who had signed a formal pledge to forgo hard liquor.
THE DRUNKARD’S PROGRESS This 1846 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier shows what temperance advocates argued was the inevitable consequence of alcohol consumption. Beginning with an apparently innocent “glass with a friend,” the young man rises step by step to the summit of drunken revelry, then declines to desperation and suicide while his abandoned wife and child grieve.
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-1629])
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Health, Science, and Phrenology
For some Americans, the search for individual and social perfection led to an interest in new theories of health and knowledge. In the nineteenth century, more than half of those who contracted cholera—a severe bacterial infection of the intestines, usually contracted from contaminated food or water—died. Nearly a quarter of the population of New Orleans in 1833 perished from the disease. Many cities established health boards to try to find ways to prevent epidemics. But the medical profession of the time, not yet aware of the nature of bacterial infections, had no answers.
Instead, many Americans turned to nonscientific theories for improving health. Affluent men and especially women flocked to health spas for the celebrated “water cure” (known to modern scientists as hydrotherapy), which purported to improve health through immersing people in hot or cold baths or wrapping them in wet sheets. Other people adopted new dietary theories. Sylvester Graham, a Connecticut-born Presbyterian minister and committed reformer, won many followers with his prescriptions for eating fruits, vegetables, and bread made from coarsely ground flour—a prescription not unlike some dietary theories today—and for avoiding meat. (The graham cracker is made from a kind of flour named for him.)
Perhaps strangest of all to modern sensibilities was the widespread belief in the new “science” of phrenology, which appeared first in Germany and became popular in the United States beginning in the 1830s through the efforts of Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, publishers of the Phrenology Almanac. Phrenologists argued that the shape of an individual’s skull was an important indicator of his or her character and intelligence. They made elaborate measurements of bumps and indentations to calculate the size (and, they claimed, the strength) of different areas of the brain. Phrenology seemed to provide a way of measuring an individual’s fitness for various positions in life and to promise an end to the arbitrary process by which people matched their talents to occupations and responsibilities. The theory is now universally believed to have no scientific value at all.
Medical Science
In an age of rapid technological and scientific advances, medicine sometimes seemed to lag behind. In part, that was because of the character of the medical profession, which—in the absence of any significant regulation or prescribed pathway of schooling—attracted many poorly educated people and not a few quacks. Efforts to regulate the profession were beaten back in the 1830s and 1840s by those who considered the licensing of physicians to be a form of undemocratic monopoly. The prestige of the profession, therefore, remained uneven.
The biggest problem facing American medicine, however, was the absence of basic knowledge about disease. The great medical achievement of the eighteenth century—the development of a vaccination against smallpox by Edward Jenner—came from no broad theory of infection but from a brilliant adaptation of folk practices among country people. The development of anesthetics in the nineteenth century came not from medical doctors at first, but from a New England dentist, William Morton, who was looking for ways to help his patients endure the extraction of teeth. Beginning in 1844, Morton began experimenting with sulfuric ether. John Warren, a Boston surgeon, soon began using ether to sedate surgical patients. Even these advances met with stiff resistance from some traditional physicians, who mistrusted innovation and experimentation.
In the absence of any broad acceptance of scientific methods and experimental practice in medicine, it was very difficult for even the most talented doctors to make progress in treating disease. Even so, halting progress toward the discovery of the germ theory did occur in antebellum America. In 1843, the Boston essayist, poet, and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes published Page 283a study of large numbers of cases of “puerperal fever” (septicemia in children) and concluded that the disease could be transmitted from one person to another. This discovery of contagion met with a storm of criticism but was later vindicated by the clinical success of the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who noticed that infection seemed to be spread by medical students who had been working with diseased corpses. Once he began requiring students to wash their hands and disinfect their instruments, the infections virtually disappeared.
Education
One of the most important reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century was the effort to produce a system of universal public education. As of 1830, no state had such a system. Soon after that, however, interest in public education began growing rapidly.
The greatest of the educational reformers was Horace Mann , the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, which was established in 1837. To Mann and his followers, education was the only way to preserve democracy, for an educated electorate was essential to the workings of a free political system. Mann reorganized the Massachusetts school system, lengthened the academic year (to six months), doubled teachers’ salaries, broadened the curriculum, and introduced new methods of professional training for teachers. Other states followed by building new schools, creating teachers’ colleges, and offering many children access to education for the first time. By the 1850s, the principle (although not yet the reality) of tax-supported elementary schools was established in every state.
The quality of public education continued to vary widely. In some places—Massachusetts, for example—educators were generally capable men and women, often highly trained. In other areas, however, barely literate teachers and severely limited funding hindered education. Among the highly dispersed population of the West, many children had no access to schools at all. In the South, all African Americans were barred from education, and only about a third of all white children of school age were actually enrolled in schools in 1860. In the North, 72 percent were enrolled, but even there, many students attended classes only briefly and casually.
Among the goals of educational reformers was to teach children the social values of thrift, order, discipline, punctuality, and respect for authority. Horace Mann, for example, spoke of the role of public schools in extending democracy and expanding individual opportunity. But he spoke, too, of their role in creating social order: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
The interest in education contributed to the growing movement to educate American Indians. Some reformers believed that Indians could be “civilized” if only they could be taught the ways of the white world. Efforts by missionaries and others to educate Indians and encourage them to assimilate were particularly prominent in such areas of the Far West as Oregon, where conflicts with the natives had not yet become acute. Nevertheless, the great majority of Native Americans remained outside the reach of white educational reform.
Despite limitations and inequities, the achievements of the school reformers were impressive. By the beginning of the Civil War, the United States had one of the highest literacy rates of any nation in the world: 94 percent of the population of the North, and 83 percent of the white population of the South.
Rehabilitation
The belief in the potential of the individual also sparked the creation of new institutions to help individuals with disabilities—institutions that formed part of a great network of charitable activities known as the Benevolent Empire. Among them was the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. Nothing better exemplified the romantic reform spirit of the era than the conviction Page 284of those who founded Perkins. They believed that even society’s supposedly most disadvantaged members could be helped to discover their own inner strength and wisdom.
Similar impulses produced another powerful movement of reform: the creation of “asylums” for criminals and those who were mentally ill. In advocating prison and hospital reform, Americans were reacting against one of society’s most glaring ills: antiquated jails and mental institutions whose inmates lived in almost inhuman conditions. Beginning in the 1820s, many states built new penitentiaries and mental asylums. New York built the first penitentiary at Auburn in 1821. In Massachusetts, the reformer Dorothea Dix began a national movement for new methods of treating individuals with mental illness.
New forms of prison discipline were designed to reform and rehabilitate criminals. Solitary confinement and the imposition of silence on work crews (both instituted in Pennsylvania and New York in the 1820s) were meant to give prisoners opportunities to meditate on their wrongdoings and develop “penitence” (hence the name “penitentiary”).
Some of the same impulses that produced asylums underlay the emergence of a new “reform” approach to the challenge of working with Native Americans. For several decades, the dominant thrust of the United States’ policy toward the Indians had been relocation—getting the tribes out of the way of white civilization. But among some whites, there had also been another intent: to move the Indians to a place where they would be allowed to develop to a point at which assimilation might be possible.
It was a small step from the idea of relocation to the idea of the reservation. Just as prisons, asylums, and orphanages would provide society with an opportunity to train and uplift misfits and unfortunates within white society, so the reservations might provide a way to undertake what one official called “the great work of regenerating the Indian race.” These optimistic goals failed to meet the expectations of the reformers.
The Rise of Feminism
Many women who became involved in reform movements in the 1820s and 1830s came to resent the social and legal restrictions that limited their participation. Out of their concerns emerged the first American feminist movement. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, sisters who became active and outspoken abolitionists, ignored claims by men that their activism was inappropriate to their gender. “Men and women were created equal,” they argued. “They are both moral and accountable beings, and whatever is right for man to do, is right for women to do.” Other reformers—Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (her sister), Lucretia Mott , Elizabeth Cady Stanton , Susan B. Anthony , and Dorothea Dix —similarly pressed at the boundaries of “acceptable” female behavior.
In 1840, American female delegates arrived at a world antislavery convention in London, only to be turned away by the men who controlled the proceedings. Angered at the rejection, several of the delegates became convinced that their first duty as reformers should now be to elevate the status of women. Over the next several years, Mott, Stanton, and others began drawing pointed parallels between the plight of women and the plight of slaves; and in 1848, in Seneca Falls , New York, they organized a convention to discuss the question of women’s rights. Out of the meeting came the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, which stated that “all men and women are created equal,” and that women no less than men are endowed with certain inalienable rights. (See “ Consider the Source: Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls, New York .”) In demanding the right to vote, they launched a movement for woman suffrage that would survive until the battle was finally won in 1920.
CONSIDER THE SOURCE
DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS AND RESOLUTIONS, SENECA FALLS, NEW YORK (1848)
On July 19 and 20, 1848, leaders of the women’s rights movement gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, to host a national conversation about “the social, civil, and religious conditions and rights of women.” They outlined their grievances and goals in the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, which helped shape a national reform movement.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.
He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.
He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.
He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. What central claim about the relationship of men and women lies at the heart of this declaration? What evidence did the authors produce to support their claim?
2. With what demand did the authors conclude their resolution? How would you have reacted to this text?
Source: Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, A History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1. Rochester, NY: Fowler and Wells, 1889, 70–71.
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Many of the women involved in these feminist efforts were Quakers. Quakerism had long embraced the ideal of sexual equality and had tolerated, indeed encouraged, the emergence of women as preachers and community leaders. Of the women who drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, all but Elizabeth Cady Stanton were Quakers.
Feminists benefited greatly from their association with other reform movements, most notably abolitionism, but they also suffered as a result. The demands of women were usually assigned a secondary position to what many considered the far greater issue of the rights of slaves.
Struggles of Black Women
Among the leading voices for women’s rights was Sojourner Truth , a black woman born into slavery in Ulster County in New York in 1799 but who escaped to freedom at age 29. Born Isabella Baumfree, she changed her name after becoming a Methodist in 1843 and believed that God had called her to testify to the truth of freedom from sin and slavery. A staunch abolitionist, she attended the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, and delivered an impassioned and well-publicized call for equal rights for women and blacks. Afterward Truth became a leading spokesperson for both causes.
While black women like Sojourner Truth campaigned publicly for women’s and blacks’ civil rights, others attempted to reform society from within their religious traditions. Like white clerics, black preachers in African American churches widely banned female congregants from becoming ordained and obtaining a license to preach and often required them to seek special permission to serve as class and prayer leaders. Indeed, no black denomination formally recognized a woman as a cleric until the African Methodist Episcopal Church ordained Julia Foote in 1895. Still, black women sought to preach throughout the colonial and antebellum eras. Among the first was Jarena Lee , born free in 1783 in Cape May, New Jersey. As a twenty-one-year-old woman then living in Philadelphia, she preached in public with such verve and passion that she earned an invitation from Rev. Richard Allen to speak at his church. Yet few other ministers welcomed her, which Lee struggled to understand theologically. As she argued in 1833, “If the man may preach, because the Savior died for him, why not the women, seeing he died for her also? Is he not a whole Savior, instead of a half one, as those who hold it wrong for a woman to preach, would seem to make it appear? Did not Mary first preach the risen Savior? Then did not Mary, a woman, preach the gospel?”
A more radical contemporary of Lee’s was Rebecca Cox Jackson . Growing up a free woman in Philadelphia during the early 1800s, she lived much of her life with her brother, Joseph Cox, an African Methodist Episcopal minister. Following instructions given to her by a heavenly spirit in 1830, Jackson began to host prayer meetings that quickly surged in popularity. She stirred controversy by tossing aside convention and inviting men and women to worship side by side. She earned a temporary reprieve, however, after a visit by Rev. Morris Brown, who succeeded Rev. Richard Allen as bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Brown came to one of Jackson’s meetings with the idea of silencing her, but left thoroughly impressed by her preaching and ordered that she be left alone. In 1833 Jackson embarked on a preaching tour outside Philadelphia but met with new and greater resistance. Her insistence on her right to preach, open refusal to join a church, and radical views on sexuality that included celibacy within marriage angered area clerics and, Jackson claimed, motivated some to assault her. Eventually she broke ranks with the free black church movement and joined a Shaker group in Watervliet, New York. In 1851 she returned to Philadelphia and founded a Shaker community composed mainly of black women.
Page 287Lee and Jackson rejected the limitations placed on their preaching because of their gender. Like other black women, they found confirmation for their efforts not in any church rule or clerical pronouncement but rather through their personal interpretation of the Bible and, more important, an unflagging conviction that God had called them to preach. Though denied official recognition as preachers, they still touched the lives of many and represented a vital dimension to the religious lives of northern blacks.
THE CRUSADE AGAINST SLAVERY
The antislavery movement was not new to the mid-nineteenth century. Nor was it primarily a domestic crusade. Indeed, the struggle to end slavery took root in countries around the world. (See “ America in the World: The Abolition of Slavery .”) But not until 1830 in America did the antislavery movement begin to gather the force that would ultimately enable it to overshadow virtually all other efforts at social reform.Page 288
AMERICA IN THE WORLD
The Abolition of Slavery
The United States formally abolished slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution in 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War. But the effort to abolish slavery did not begin or end in North America. Emancipation in the United States was part of a worldwide antislavery movement that began in the late eighteenth century and continued through the end of the nineteenth.
The end of slavery, like the end of monarchies and established aristocracies, was one of the ideals of the Enlightenment, which inspired new concepts of individual freedom and political equality. As Enlightenment ideas spread throughout the Western world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people on both sides of the Atlantic began to examine slavery anew. Some Enlightenment thinkers, including some of the founders of the American republic, believed that freedom was appropriate for white people but not for people of color. But others came to believe that all human beings had an equal claim to liberty, and their views became the basis for an escalating series of antislavery movements.
Opponents of slavery first targeted the slave trade—the vast commerce in human beings that had grown up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had come to involve large parts of Europe, Africa, the Page 289Caribbean, and North and South America. In the aftermath of the revolutions in America, France, and Haiti, the attack on the slave trade quickly gained momentum. Its central figure was the English reformer William Wilberforce, who spent years attacking Britain’s connection with the slave trade on moral and religious grounds. After the Haitian Revolution, Wilberforce and other antislavery activists denounced slavery on the grounds that its continuation would create more slave revolts. In 1807, he persuaded Parliament to pass a law ending the slave trade within the entire British Empire. The British example foreshadowed many other nations to make the slave trade illegal as well: the United States in 1808, France in 1814, Holland in 1817, Spain in 1845. Trading in slaves persisted within countries and colonies where slavery remained legal (including the United States), and some illegal slave trading continued throughout the Atlantic World. But the international sale of slaves steadily declined after 1807. The last known shipment of slaves across the Atlantic—from Africa to Cuba—occurred in 1867.
ANTISLAVERY MESSAGE The image of an enslaved man praying to God was popular in both British and American antislavery circles. It began as the seal of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, a British abolitionist group formed in 1787, accompanied by the quote, “Am I not a man and a brother?” This example from 1837 was used to illustrate John Greenleaf Whittier’s antislavery poem “Our Countrymen in Chains.”
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-5321])
Ending the slave trade was a great deal easier than ending slavery itself, in which many people had major investments and on which much agriculture, commerce, and industry depended. But pressure to abolish slavery grew steadily throughout the nineteenth century, with Wilberforce once more helping to lead the international outcry against the institution. In Haiti, the slave revolts that began in 1791 eventually abolished not only slavery but also French rule. In some parts of South America, slavery came to an end with the overthrow of Spanish rule in the 1820s. Simón Bolívar, the great leader of Latin American independence, considered abolishing slavery an important part of his mission, freeing those who joined his armies and insisting on constitutional prohibitions of slavery in several of the constitutions he helped frame. In 1833, the British parliament passed a law abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire and compensated slaveowners for freeing their slaves. France abolished slavery in its empire, after years of agitation from abolitionists, in 1848. In the Caribbean, Spain followed Britain in slowly eliminating slavery from its colonies. Puerto Rico abolished slavery in 1873; and Cuba became the last colony in the Caribbean to end slavery, in 1886, in the face of increasing slave resistance and the declining profitability of slave-based plantations. Brazil was the last nation in the Americas to abolish slavery, ending the system in 1888. The Brazilian military began to turn against slavery after the valiant participation of slaves in Brazil’s war with Paraguay in the late 1860s; eventually, educated Brazilians began to oppose the system too, arguing that it obstructed economic and social progress.
In the United States, the power of world opinion—and the example of Wilberforce’s movement in England—became an important influence on the abolitionist movement as it gained strength in the 1820s and 1830s. American abolitionism, in turn, helped reinforce the movements abroad. Frederick Douglass, the former American slave turned abolitionist, became a major figure in the international antislavery movement and was a much-admired and much-sought-after speaker in England and Europe in the 1840s and 1850s. No other nation paid such a terrible price for abolishing slavery as did the United States during its Civil War, but American emancipation was nevertheless part of a worldwide movement toward emancipation.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. Why did opponents of slavery focus first on ending the slave trade, rather than abolishing slavery itself? Why was ending the slave trade easier than ending slavery?
2. How do William Wilberforce’s arguments against slavery compare with those of the abolitionists in the United States?
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Early Opposition to Slavery
In the early years of the nineteenth century, those who opposed slavery were, for the most part, a calm and genteel lot, expressing moral disapproval but doing little else. To the extent that there was an organized antislavery movement, it centered on the effort to resettle American blacks in Africa or the Caribbean. In 1817, a group of prominent white Virginians organized the American Colonization Society (ACS), which proposed a gradual freeing of slaves, with masters receiving compensation. The liberated black men and women would then be transported out of the country and helped establish a new society of their own. The ACS received some private funding, some funding from Congress, and some funding from the legislatures of Virginia and Maryland. And it successfully arranged to have several groups of blacks transported out of the United States to the west coast of Africa, where in 1830 they established the nation of Liberia . (In 1846, Liberia became an independent black republic, with its capital, Monrovia, named for the American president who had presided over the initial settlement.)
But the ACS was in the end a negligible force. There were far too many blacks in America in the nineteenth century to be transported to Africa by any conceivable program. The ACS met resistance, in any case, from blacks themselves, many of whom were now three or more generations removed from Africa and, despite their loathing of slavery, had no wish to emigrate. They viewed themselves as entitled to fair treatment as Americans.
Garrison and Abolitionism
In 1830, with slavery spreading ideology rapidly in the South and the antislavery movement seemingly on the verge of collapse, a new figure emerged: William Lloyd Garrison . Born in Massachusetts in 1805, Garrison was in the 1820s an assistant to the New Jersey Quaker Benjamin Lundy, who published the leading antislavery newspaper of the time. Garrison grew impatient with his employer’s moderate tone, so in 1831 he returned to Boston to found his own newspaper, The Liberator.
Garrison’s philosophy was so simple that it was genuinely revolutionary. Opponents of slavery, he said, should not talk about the evil influence of slavery on white society but rather the damage the system did to slaves. And they should, therefore, reject “gradualism” and demand the immediate abolition of slavery and the extension of all the rights of American citizenship to both slaves and free African Americans. Garrison wrote in a relentless, uncompromising tone. “I am aware,” he wrote in the very first issue of The Liberator, “that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. . . . I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.”
Garrison soon attracted a large group of followers throughout the North, enough to enable him to found the New England Antislavery Society in 1832 and, a year later, after a convention in Philadelphia, the American Antislavery Society.
Black Abolitionists
Abolitionism obviously had a particular appeal to the free black population of the North. These free blacks typically lived in conditions of poverty and oppression and faced Page 291a barrage of local customs and state laws that frequently reminded them of their lowly social positions. For all their problems, however, northern blacks were fiercely proud of their freedom and sensitive to the plight of those members of their race who remained in bondage. Many in the 1830s came to support Garrison. But they also rallied to leaders of their own.
Among the earliest black abolitionists was David Walker , who preceded even Garrison in publicly calling for an uncompromising opposition to slavery on moral grounds. In 1829, Walker, a free black man who had moved from North Carolina to Boston, published a harsh pamphlet—An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World—that described slavery as a sin that would draw divine punishment if not abolished. “America is more our country than it is the whites’—we have enriched it with our blood and tears.” He urged slaves to “kill [their masters] or be killed.”
Most black critics of slavery were somewhat less violent in their rhetoric but equally uncompromising in their commitment to abolition. The greatest African American abolitionist of all—and one of the most electrifying orators of his time, black or white—was Frederick Douglass . Born a slave in Maryland, Douglass escaped to Massachusetts in 1838, became an outspoken leader of antislavery sentiment, and spent two years lecturing Page 292in England. On his return to the United States in 1847, Douglass purchased his freedom from his Maryland owner and founded an antislavery newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester, New York. He achieved wide renown as well for his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), in which he presented a damning picture of slavery. Douglass demanded not only freedom but also full social and economic equality for blacks.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?,” Douglass harshly asked in an Independence Day speech in Rochester, New York, in 1854. “I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. . . . There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”
Black abolitionists had been active for years before Douglass emerged as a leader of their cause. They held their first national convention in 1830. But with Douglass’s leadership, they became a more influential force than any other African American. They began, too, to forge an alliance with white antislavery leaders such as Garrison.
FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW CONVENTION Abolitionists gathered in Cazenovia, New York, in August 1850 to consider how to respond to the law recently passed by Congress requiring northern states to return fugitive slaves to their owners. Frederick Douglass is seated just to the left of the table in this photograph of some of the participants. The gathering was unusual among abolitionist gatherings in including substantial numbers of African Americans.
(Source: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program)
Anti-Abolitionism
The rise of abolitionism provoked a powerful opposition. Almost all white southerners, of course, were bitterly hostile to the movement. But even in the North, abolitionists were a small, dissenting minority. Some whites feared that abolitionism would produce a destructive civil war. Others feared that it would lead to a great influx of free blacks into the North and displace white workers.
The result of such fears was an escalating wave of violence. A mob in Philadelphia attacked the abolitionist headquarters there in 1834, burned it to the ground, and began a bloody race riot. Another mob seized Garrison on the streets of Boston in 1835 and threatened to hang him. He was saved from death only by being locked in jail. Elijah Lovejoy, the editor of an abolitionist newspaper in Alton, Illinois, was victimized repeatedly and finally killed when he tried to defend his printing press from attack.
That so many men and women continued to embrace abolitionism in the face of such vicious opposition suggests that abolitionists were not people who took their political commitments lightly. They were strong-willed, passionate crusaders who displayed not only enormous courage and moral strength but, at times, a fervency that many of their contemporaries found deeply disturbing. The mobs were only the most violent expression of a hostility to abolitionism that many, perhaps most, other white Americans shared.
Abolitionism Divided
By the mid-1830s, the unity of the abolitionist crusade began to crack. One reason was the violence of the anti-abolitionists, which persuaded some members of the abolition movement that a more moderate approach was necessary. Another reason was the growing radicalism of William Lloyd Garrison, who shocked even many of his own allies (including Frederick Douglass) by attacking not only slavery but the government itself. The Constitution, he said, was “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” In 1840, Garrison precipitated a formal division within the American Antislavery Society by insisting that women be permitted to participate in the movement on terms of full equality. He continued after 1840 to arouse controversy with new and even more radical stands: an Page 293extreme pacifism that rejected even defensive wars; opposition to all forms of coercion—not just slavery, but prisons and asylums; and finally, in 1843, a call for northern disunion from the South.
From 1840 on, therefore, abolitionism moved in many channels and spoke with many different voices. The radical and uncompromising Garrisonians remained influential. But so were others who operated in more moderate ways, arguing that abolition could be accomplished only as the result of a long, patient, peaceful struggle. They appealed to the conscience of the slaveholders; and when that produced no results, they turned to political action, seeking to induce the northern states and the federal government to aid the cause. They joined the Garrisonians in helping runaway slaves find refuge in the North or in Canada through the underground railroad.
The abolitionists also helped fund the legal battle over the Spanish slave vessel, Amistad. After the Supreme Court (in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 1842) ruled that states need not aid in enforcing the 1793 law requiring the return of fugitive slaves to their owners, abolitionists won passage in several northern states of “personal liberty laws,” which forbade state officials to assist in the capture and return of runaways. The antislavery societies also petitioned Congress to abolish slavery in places where the federal government had jurisdiction—in the territories and in the District of Columbia—and to prohibit the interstate slave trade.
Antislavery sentiment underlay the formation in 1840 of the Liberty Party, which ran Kentucky antislavery leader James G. Birney for president. But this party and its successors never campaigned for outright abolition. They stood instead for “Free Soil,” for keeping slavery out of the territories. Some Free-Soilers were concerned about the welfare of blacks; others were people who cared nothing about slavery but simply wanted to keep the West a country for whites. But the Free-Soil position would ultimately do what abolitionism never could: attract the support of large numbers of the white population of the North.
The slow progress of abolitionism drove some critics of slavery to embrace more drastic measures. A few began to advocate violence. A group of prominent abolitionists in New England, for example, funneled money and arms to John Brown for his bloody uprisings in Kansas and Virginia. Others attempted to arouse public anger through propaganda.
The most powerful of all abolitionist propaganda was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published as a book in 1852. It sold more than 300,000 copies within a year of publication and was reissued again and again. It succeeded in bringing the message of abolitionism to an enormous new audience—not only those who read the book but also those who watched countless theater companies reenact it across the nation. When Abraham Lincoln was introduced to Stowe once in the White House, he reportedly said to her: “So you are the little lady that has brought this great war.” Reviled throughout the South, Stowe became a hero to many in the North. And in both regions, her novel helped inflame sectional tensions to a new level of passion.
Stowe’s novel emerged not just out of abolitionist politics but also a popular tradition of sentimental novels written by, and largely for, women. (See “ Patterns of Popular Culture: Sentimental Novels .”) Stowe artfully integrated the emotional conventions of the sentimental novel with the political ideas of the abolitionist movement, and to sensational effect. Her novel, by embedding the antislavery message within a familiar literary form in which women were the key protagonists serving to improve society, brought that message to an enormous new audience.Page 294
PATTERNS OF POPULAR CULTURE
Sentimental Novels
“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,” Nathaniel Hawthorne complained in 1855, “and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.” Hawthorne, one of the leading novelists of his time, was complaining about the most popular form of fiction in mid-nineteenth-century America—not his own dark and brooding works, but the “sentimental novel,” a genre of literature written and read mostly by middle-class women.
In an age when affluent women occupied primarily domestic roles, and in which finding a favorable marriage was the most important thing many women could do to secure or improve their lots in life, the sentimental novel gave voice to both female hopes and female anxieties. The plots of sentimental novels were usually filled with character-improving problems and domestic trials, but most of them ended with the heroine securely and happily married. They were phenomenally successful, many of them selling more than 100,000 copies each—far more than almost any other books of the time.
Sentimental heroines were almost always beautiful and endowed with specifically female qualities—“all the virtues,” one novelist wrote, “that are founded in the sensibility of the heart: Pity, the attribute of angels, and friendship, the balm of life, delight to dwell in the female breast.” Women were highly sensitive creatures, the sentimental writers believed, incapable of disguising their feelings, and subject to fainting, mysterious illnesses, trances, and, of course, tears—things rarely expected of men. But they were also capable of a kind of nurturing love and natural sincerity that was hard to find in the predominantly male public world. In Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), for example, the heroine, a young girl named Ellen Montgomery, finds herself suddenly thrust into the “wide, wide world” of male competition after her father loses his fortune. She is unable to adapt to this world, but she is saved in the end when she is taken in by wealthy relatives, who will undoubtedly prepare her for a successful marriage. They restore to her the security and comfort to which she had been born and without which she seemed unable to thrive.
Sentimental novels accepted uncritically the popular assumptions about women’s special needs and desires, and they offered stirring tales of how women satisfied them. But sentimental novels were not limited to romanticized images of female fulfillment through protection and marriage. They hinted as well at the increasing role of women in reform movements. Many such books portrayed women dealing with social and moral problems—and using their highly developed female sensibilities to help other women escape from their troubles. Women were particularly suitable for such reform work, the writers implied, because they were specially gifted at helping and nurturing others.
The most famous sentimental novelist of the nineteenth century was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Most of her books—The Minister’s Wooing, My Wife and I, We and Our Neighbors, and others—portrayed the travails and ultimate triumphs of women as they became wives, mothers, and hostesses. But Stowe was and remains best known for her 1852 antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most influential books ever published in America. As a story about slavery, and about an aging black man—Uncle Tom—who is unfailingly submissive to his white masters, it is in many ways very different from her other novels. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a sentimental novel, too. Stowe’s critique of slavery is based partly on her belief in the importance of domestic values and family security. Slavery’s violation of those values, and its denial of that security, is what made it so abhorrent to her. The simple, decent Uncle Tom faces many of the same dilemmas that the female heroines of other sentimental novels encounter in their struggles to find security and tranquillity in their lives.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN Uncle Tom’s Cabin did much to inflame public opinion in both the North and the South in the last years before the Civil War. At the time, however, Stowe was equally well known as one of the most successful American writers of sentimental novels.
(©Bettmann/Corbis)
Another way in which women were emerging from their domestic sphere was in becoming consumers of the expanding products of America’s industrializing economy. The female characters in sentimental novels searched not just for love, security, and social justice; they also searched for luxury and for the pleasure of buying some favored item. Susan Warner illustrated this aspect of the culture of the sentimental novel—and the desires of the women who read them—in The Wide, Wide World, in her description of the young Ellen Montgomery in an elegant bookstore, buying a Bible: “Such beautiful Bibles she had never seen; she pored in ecstasy over their varieties of type and binding, and was very evidently in love with them all.”
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. How did the lives of the heroines of the sentimental novels compare with the lives of real women of the nineteenth century? What made them so popular?
2. How did the sentimental novels encourage women’s participation in public life? Did the novels reinforce prevailing attitudes toward women or broaden the perception of women’s “proper role”?
3. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is probably one of the best-known works of American fiction. Why was this novel so much more powerful than other sentimental novels? Why has it endured?
Page 295Even divided, abolitionism remained a powerful influence on the life of the nation. Only a relatively small number of people before the Civil War ever accepted the abolitionist position that slavery must be entirely eliminated in a single stroke. But the crusade that Garrison had launched, and that thousands of committed men and women kept alive for three decades, was a constant, visible reminder of how deeply the institution of slavery was dividing America.
CONCLUSION
The rapidly changing society of antebellum America encouraged interest in a wide range of reforms. Writers, artists, intellectuals, and others drew heavily from new European notions of personal liberation and fulfillment—a set of ideas often known as romanticism. But they also strove to create a truly American culture. The literary and artistic life of the nation expressed the rising interest in personal liberation—in giving individuals the freedom to explore their own souls and to find in nature a full expression of their divinity. It also called attention to some of the nation’s glaring social problems.
Reformers, too, made use of the romantic belief in the divinity of the individual. They flocked to religious revivals, worked on behalf of such “moral” reforms as temperance, supported education, and articulated some of the first statements of modern feminism. And in the North, they rallied against slavery. Out of this growing antislavery movement emerged a new and powerful phenomenon: abolitionism, which insisted on immediate emancipation of slaves. The abolitionist movement galvanized much of the North and contributed greatly to the growing schism between North and South.
