Chapter 12: Religion and Reform, 1820–1860

1. Chapter 12: Religion and Reform, 1820–1860

2. In order to comprehend the reform movement in its true context we need to obtain an understanding how the increased commercialism in American society resulted from the Industrial Revolution and how this generated reformers’ criticisms of private property. And ultimately how this process led to utopian experiments.

3. The notion is that through an analysis of the transcendentalists, we can explore how intellectual and spiritual movements respond to social situations. • We can see for example transcendentalists’ elevation of the individual above tradition and conformity: • their emphasis on individualism to the reduction of social hierarchy in American life during this period • how transcendentalists as an intellectual, ministerial class threatened by the increasing materialism, conformity, and commercialism of the new industrial order.

4. Individualism • Rapid economic and political change after 1820 prompted many men and women to question their values. • Increasing social problems due to industrialization and the market revolution led to attempt to correct the problems with reform movements. • Reform movements altered the cultural landscape of American society • Intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman elevated the individual above the demands of what they believed to be an overly materialistic society

5. Emerson and Transcendentalism Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, to the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister in a famous line of ministers. He gradually drifted from the doctrines of his peers, then formulated and first expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his essay Nature

6. American transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about 1836-1860).  • Began as a reform movement in the Unitarian church, extending the views of William Ellery Channing on an indwelling God and the significance of intuitive thought. • Based on "a monism holding to the unity of the world and God, and the immanence of God in the world" (Oxford Companion to American Literature 770). • For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains.

7. Transcendentalists rejected Lockean empiricism, unlike the Unitarians: • Wanted to • rejuvenate the mystical aspects of New England Calvinism (although none of its dogma) • go back to Jonathan Edwards' "divine and supernatural light," sermon in which he stated that that “there is such a thing as a spiritual and divine light immediately imparted to the soul by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural means.”

8. Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (1986) "Transcendentalism, [then] began as a religious movement, an attempt to substitute a Romanticized version of the mystical ideal that humankind is capable of direct experience of the holy for the Unitarian rationalist view that the truths of religion are arrived at by a process of empirical study and by rational inference from historical and natural evidence"

9. This reform movement reflected the social conditions and intellectual currents of American life; Alexis de Tocqueville coined the word individualism to describe the condition and values of native-born white Americans. • Ralph Waldo Emerson of New England was the leading spokesman for transcendentalism.

10. English romantics and Unitarian radicals believed in an ideal world; to reach this deeper reality, people had to transcend the rational ways in which they normally comprehended the world. • Emerson thought people were trapped in unquestioned and unexamined customs, institutions, and ways of thinking; remaking themselves depended on their discovery of their “original relation with Nature.”

11. Emerson’s genius lay in his capacity to translate vague ideas into examples that made sense to ordinary middle-class Americans. • Emerson believed that all nature was saturated with the presence of God, and he criticized the new industrial society, predicting that it would drain the nation’s spiritual energy.

12. Emerson’s message reached hundreds of thousands of people through writings and through lectures on the Lyceum circuit. • Emerson celebrated the individual who was liberated from social controls but remained self-disciplined and responsible members

13. Emerson’s Literary Influence • Emerson urged American writers to celebrate democracy and individual freedom and to find inspiration in the familiar.

14. Emerson associated closely with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau and often took walks with them in Concord. • Emerson encouraged Thoreau's talent and early career. The land on which Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond belonged to Emerson. • Henry David Thoreau heeded Emerson’s call and turned to nature for inspiration. In 1854, he published Walden, or Life in theWoods.

15. Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862 American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, and philosopher best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, which argues for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

16. Thoreau became an advocate for social nonconformity and civil disobedience against unjust laws, both of which he practiced. • "Civil Disobedience" is like a venerated architectural landmark: it is preserved and admired, and sometimes visited, but for most of us there are not many occasions when it can actually be used. • It is seldom mentioned without references to Gandhi and King, "Civil Disobedience" • In the 1940's it was read by the Danish resistance, • 1950's it was cherished by people who opposed McCarthyism • 1960's influential in the struggle against South African apartheid, • 1970's it inspired a new generation of anti-war activists. • The lesson learned from all this experience is that Thoreau's ideas really do work, just as he imagined they would. 

17. Margaret Fuller, also a writer, began a transcendental discussion group for elite Boston women and published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which proclaimed that a“new era” was coming in the relations betweenmen and women

18. Sarah Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810 - June 19, 1850)

19. Fuller believed that women, like men, had a mystical relationship with God and that every woman deserved psychological and social independence.

20. In 1855,Walt Whitman—a teacher, journalist, and publicist for the Democratic Party—published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which recorded his attempts to pass a number of “invisible boundaries.”

21. Whitman did not seek isolation but rather perfect communion with others • celebrated democracy as well as himself, arguing that a poet could claim a profoundly intimate, mystical relationship with a mass audience.

22. Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, 1850) and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick, 1851) addressed the opposition between individualism and social order, discipline, and responsibility.

23. Of all of these writers, American readers preferred the more modest examples of individualism offered by Emerson, who made personal improvement through spiritual awareness and self-discipline seem possible.

24. Brook Farm • Transcendentalists and other radical reformers created ideal communities called utopias. The most important was Brook Farm, founded in 1841, where members hoped to develop their minds and souls and then uplift society. • The intellectual life at the farm was electric; all the major transcendentalists were residents or frequent visitors. • Brook Farmers supported themselves by selling goods from their farm but organized their farming so that they remained independent of the market cycles.

25. Brook Farm failed financially, and after a fire in 1846, the organizers disbanded and sold the farm. • The transcendentalists abandoned their attempts to fashion a new social organization, yet their passion for individual freedom and social progress lived on in the movement to abolish slavery.

26. Communalism Many reformers created utopian communities to experiment with different forms of social organization, the most extreme of which were the Shaker communities and John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida community. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young led the most successful utopian group, the Mormons (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), who created their own agricultural communities in Utah. Rejecting conventional American mores of one kind or another, these reformers offered alternative visions of society.

27. The Shakers • Led by “Mother” Ann Lee Stanley, the Shakers were the first successful American communal movement. Shakers ---The Shakers were celibate, they did not marry or bear children, yet theirs is the most enduring religious experiment in American history. Seventy-five years before the emancipation of the slaves and one hundred fifty years before women began voting in America, the Shakers were practicing social, sexual, economic, and spiritual equality for all members.

28. The Shakers were ordinary people who chose to give up their families, property, and worldly ties in order “to know, by daily experience, the peaceable nature of Christ’s kingdom.” • In return, they were welcomed into “holy families” where men and women lived as brother and sister, where all property was held in common, and where each participated in the rigorous daily task of transforming the earth into heaven.

29. The Shakers accepted the common ownership of property and a strict government by the church and pledged to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, politics, and war. • Shakers believed that God was both male and female, but they eliminated marriage and were committed to a life of celibacy. • Beginning in 1787, Shakers founded twenty communities, mostly in New England, New York, and Ohio.

30. Their agriculture and crafts, particularly furniture making, enabled most of the communities to become self-sustaining and even comfortable. • Shaker communities attracted more than three thousand converts during the 1830s, with women outnumbering men more than two to one and they welcomed blacks as well as whites. • Because Shakers had no children of their own, they relied on conversion or adoption of orphans to replenish their numbers. • The Shakers had virtually disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century.

31. The Fourierist Phalanxes • Charles Fourier, a French utopian reformer, devised an eight-stage theory of social evolution and predicted the decline of individualism and capitalism. • Albert Brisbane, Fourier’s disciple, believed that cooperative work groups called phalanxes would replace capitalist wage labor and liberate both men and women. • Brisbane skillfully promoted Fourier’s ideas in his influential book The Social Destiny ofMan (1840), through a regular column in the New York Tribune, and via hundreds of lectures.

33. In the 1840s, Brisbane and his followers started nearly one hundred cooperative communities, but they could not support themselves and quickly collapsed because of internal disputes over work responsibilities and social policies.

34. Noyes and the Oneida Community • The minister John Humphrey Noyes set about creating a community that defined sexuality and gender roles in radically new ways.

35. Noyes, who was inspired by the preaching of Charles Finney, was expelled from his Congregational Church and became a leader of “perfectionism.” • Perfectionists believed that the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred and that people could therefore aspire to perfection in their earthly lives and attain complete freedom from sin. • Noyes and his followers embraced complex marriage—all the members of the community being married to one another.

36. Noyes sought to free women from being regarded as their husbands’ property and to free them from endless childbearing and childrearing. • Opposition to complex marriage in Noyes’s hometown of Putney, Vermont, prompted him to move to Oneida, New York, in 1848.

37. The Oneida community became financially self-sufficient when one of its members invented a steel animal trap, and others turned to silver manufacturing; the silver making business survived into the twentieth century. • The historical significance of the Shakers, the Fourierists, and Noyes and his followers is that they attempted to live their lives in what they conceived of as a more egalitarian social order and left their counter-cultural blueprints to posterity.

38. The Mormon Experience • The Mormons aroused more hostility than did the Shakers and the Oneidians because the Mormons successfully attracted thousands of members to their controversial group. • Founder Joseph Smith believed God had singled him out to receive a special revelation of divine truth—The Book ofMormon.

39. Smith organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; affirmed traditional patriarchal authority; encouraged hard work, saving of earnings, and entrepreneurship; and started a church-directed community intended to inspire moral perfection.

40. The Mormons eventually settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, and became the largest utopian community in America. • Resentment toward the Mormons turned to overt hostility when Smith refused to abide by some Illinois laws, asked that Nauvoo be turned into a separate federal territory, and then declared himself candidate for president. • Smith believed in polygamy—having more than one wife at a time.

41. In 1844, Smith was murdered in jail after being arrested for trying to create a Mormon colony in Mexico. • Mormons who did not support polygamy remained in the United States, and led by Smith’s son, they formed the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

42. Led by Brigham Young, the Mormons settled in the Great Salt Lake Valley and spread planned agricultural communities across present-day Utah (then part of Mexico).

43. Mormons who did not support polygamy remained in the United States, and led by Smith’s son, they formed the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

44. The “Mormon War” was a bloodless encounter; President James Buchanan was afraid that if he tried to eliminate polygamy it might set a precedent that could be used to end slavery. • Mormons in Utah and the Midwest succeeded because they reinvigorated the patriarchal family, endorsed private ownership of property, and accepted the entrepreneurial spirit of a market economy.

45. Abolitionism • The antislavery movement was divided among gradual emancipationists, who argued for African colonization, and immediate abolitionists. African Americans rejected colonization and fought for abolition. • After Nat Turner’s Rebellion, southerners began to defend slavery, protecting it through state laws and blocking national laws that might restrict slavery by means of the congressional gag rule. A backlash erupted in the North: people who feared the effects of abolition and its associated radicalism savagely attacked abolitionist speakers, conventioneers, and writers.

46. The antislavery movement split between radicals, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, and moderates, who sought political solutions to the problem of slavery through the Liberty Party.

47. Women’s role in society was also reevaluated. As men left home to work, middle-class women came to be regarded as bastions of morality and religion. • From this new position of higher moral authority, women attempted to protect the home by fighting intemperance and prostitution. • They also became active in the abolitionist movement. In 1848, their experiences in reform movements led women to claim their own political rights at a meeting at Seneca Falls, New York.

48. Uplift, Race-Equality, and Rebellion • Leading African Americans in the North advocated policies of social uplift; they encouraged free blacks to “elevate” themselves through education, temperance, moral discipline, and hard work and, by securing “respectability,” to assume a position of equality with the white citizenry. • Some whites felt threatened by this and in the mid-1820s led mob attacks against blacks.

49. In 1829, David Walker (“An Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens”) justified slave rebellion, warning of a slave revolt if their freedom was delayed.

50. In 1830, African American activists called a national convention in Philadelphia. The delegates did not endorse Walker’s radical call for revolt but made collective equality for all blacks their fundamental demand. This new generation of African American leaders focused on “race-equality” rather than individual uplift and respectability.