APUSH – CH. 12 Antebellum Culture & Reform
The Romantic Impulse:
Art-
1. Reform movements emerged in the United States in the Mid-nineteenth century in part because of a desire for social stability and discipline in the face of change.
2. Americans desire for nationalism was only overshadowed by a spirit of romanticism. Romanticism – liberation in literature, in philosophy, in art, even in politics and economics. American intellectuals were committing themselves to the liberation of the human spirit.
3. Europeans and European artists believed that they and they alone were at the center of the world of art. Europeans believed that Americans had little to offer.
4. Unlike European artists American painters sought to capture the undiluted power of nature by portraying the nation's wildest most spectacular areas, the feeling of awe and wonderment and even grandeur of natural beauty.
5. The first great school of American painters emerged in New York. Frederick Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, and Asher Durand – were, along with others, known as the Hudson River School
6. According to the Hudson River School NATURE was the best source of wisdom and spiritual fulfillment.
Literature-
1. James Fenimore Cooper – His most important novels were known as the "Leatherstocking Tales" = among them were The Last of the Mohicans (1826) & The Deerslayer (1841). It explored the American frontiersman's expansion westward - experience with Indians, pioneers, violence, and the law. He evocated the ideal of the independent individual with a natural inner goodness. His characters illustrated the vicious, grasping nature of some of the nation's settlers and suggested a need for social discipline even in the wilderness.
2. Walt Whitman – "Leaves of Grass" (1855) - His poems were a celebration of liberation of the individual, unrestrained celebration of democracy, and of the pleasures of the flesh as well as of the spirit. His poems 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.
3. Herman Melville – "Moby Dick" (1851) ran away to the sea as a youth and spent years sailing before returning home to become the greatest American novelist of his era. A story of Captain Ahab's courage and pf the strength of individual will; but it was also a tragedy pf pride and revenge. IT suggested how the search for personal fulfillment and triumph could not only liberate but destroy as well. Melville reflected that the human spirit was a troubled one & often a self-destructive force.
4. Edgar Allen Poe – Lived a short & unhappy life. He died at the age of 40. His works were primarily sad and macabre. "Tamerlane and Other Poems" (1827) and his most famous "The Raven" (1845) established him as a major, if controversial,
literary figure. Poe's literary world contained pain and horror.
• Southern writers prior to the Civil War (This era is known as Antebellum) developed a realist tradition that focused on the lives of ordinary people; brought a robust, vulgar humor to American literature; and romanticized the institution of slavery.
Transcendentalists – regarded reason to be the most important human faculty. Transcendentalists feared the impact of the new capitalist enthusiasms on the integrity of the natural world. They were among the first Americans that anticipated the environmentalist movement of the twentieth century.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson – "Nature" (1836) - Leader and most eloquent voice of transcendentalists. He believed that through nature individuals could find personal fulfillment.
6. Henry David Thoreau – "Walden" (1854), & essays "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849) where he explained that individuals had a moral right to civil disobedience or passive resistance/refusal to obey unjust laws.
Vision of Utopia / Communal Living –
7. George Ripley – established Brook Farm – primary goal was to permit all members to realize their full potential as individual beings.
8. Nathaniel Hawthorne – expressed his disillusionment with the experiment and, to some extent, with transcendentalism.
9. Robert Owen – Founded an experimental community of his own in Indiana call New Harmony. It was to be a Village of Cooperation in which every resident worked and lived in total equality.
10. John Humphrey Noyes – established the most enduring of the utopian colonies of the 19th century – Oneida Community. Declared that all residents were married and there were to be no conjugal ties.
▪ Oneida Community – redefined gender roles and carefully monitored sexual behavior in order to protect women.
▪ The Shakers – even more than Onedians, made a redefinition of traditional sexuality and gender roles. The most distinctive feature of Shakerism was its commitment to complete celibacy. Within Shaker society as a whole, it was women who exercised the most power. There were characterized by not only desire to escape the burdens of traditional gender roles bur to create a society separated and protected from the chaos and disorder that they believed had come to characterized American life as a whole.
Mormons –
1. Among the most important efforts to create a new and more ordered society within the old was that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – the Mormons. This was due to the efforts of Joseph Smith.
2. He published the Book of Mormons in 1830.
3. Mormons believed in human perfectibility.
4. Joseph Smith creation of a large standing army aroused great alarm in surrounding non-Mormon communities and contributed to the clashes that led to both the murder of Joseph Smith and the expulsion of Mormons from Illinois.
5. Early Mormons were poor and practiced polygamy.
Remaking Society in the 19th Century –
1. 19th century –
Morality -
a. Protestant revivalists such as the New Light revivalist formed a crusade against personal immorality.
b. In the 1840's, the organized movement against drunkenness in the United States linked alcohol to crime and poverty.
Medicine -
c. In the 1830's and 1840's, cholera epidemics in the United States typically killed more than half of those who contracted the disease.
d. According to 19th century science of phrenology, what could be discerned from the shape of an individual's skull? --- their character and intelligence.
e. In an age of rapid technological and scientific advances, the science of medicine lagged behind. The largest obstacle to improved medical care in America was the absence of basic knowledge about disease.
f. In the 1840's in the United States, an initial understanding of germ theory was developed by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
g. Dorothea Dix was the Massachusetts reformer who built a national movement for new methods of treating the mentally ill
h. Prior to 1860, prison reform in the United States included the practice of solitary confinement.
i. The practice of placing American Indians on reservation was partially designed to isolate and protect the Indians from a white society, help "regenerate" them, and allow them to develop to a point where they could assimilate into white society.
Education –
j. Prior to 1860, public education in the United States gave the nation one of the highest literacy rates in the world.
k. Reformer Horace Mann believed that education should promote democracy.
Feminist Movement –
l. In 1840 one catalyst for an American feminist movement was a London convention that dealt with abolition. (Abolition–to abolish/get rid of slavery)
m. In 1848 Seneca Falls, New York, convention on women's rights issued a manifesto patterned after the Declaration of Independence.
n. Quakers were the religious denomination most active in feminism prior to the Civil War.
o. Elizabeth Cady Slaton is the 19th century leader primarily known for her pioneering work in the American feminist movement.
