rational and liberal Unitarianism. This dramatic shift confused and discomfited many New Englanders. Combined with economic prosperity, however, it fostered a social and cultural awareness that bolstered liberal causes such as abolition, education, and women’s suffrage, as well as such innovations as athenaeums and lyceums, which were important cultural institutions in early-nineteenth-century America. It was due in large part to the prevalence of these social organizations that the Transcendentalists enjoyed the modest financial successes they did (Emerson, for instance, made much of his money on the lecture circuit), and it was due in large part to the fresh perspectives of the Transcendentalists that these social organizations flourished in nineteenth-century America.
The success of the movement also owed a great deal to the increasing financial stability of antebellum New England. Boston was coming into its own as a shipping port, and the industrial revolution was bringing manufacturing to New England. Great wealth was flowing into the port cities of Boston, Salem, and New York. With the 1826 opening of the first railroad in Quincy, just south of Boston, and the doubling of the industrial output of the United States between 1840 and 1850, the sleepy market villages of New England became suburbs and mill towns.
The untamed wilderness frontiers moved farther west, and the undeveloped lands of New England were no longer the dark, dangerous places they had been for the Puritans eking out their existence in the hills of Massachusetts. Instead, the wild lands were now viewed increasingly as sources of inspiration and proof of the unity of the Spiritual with the Natural.
The years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, while a time of great economic prosperity for New England, were also turbulent and occasionally violent. The issue of slavery and its expansion into the newly settled territories was never far from many people’s minds as they struggled to reconcile their understanding of the past with an unclear American future. For many, the use of slaves underscored the differences between the agrarian South and the more industrial North.
The Hudson River School
As Emerson urged the American scholar, in a famous 1837 address at Harvard, to turn his back on the “courtly muses of Europe” in order to create a truly American tradition, the visual artists of the Hudson River School were doing just that. Following the lead of Thomas Cole, a group of painters, mostly living in the Hudson River valley of New York State, were painting sweeping landscapes filled with light and color. Essentially concurrent with Transcendentalism, the Hudson River School, active from 1835 to 1870, was the first native school of American art.
Artists such as Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, Asher Durand, Frederic Church, and George Gatlin sought to display a vast wilderness filled with promise for the small yet uplifted human figures shown communing with it. Many key Transcendentalist themes—inspiration from the natural world, the spiritual unity found in nature, friendship among men of ideas—can be found in the works of the Hudson River School. For example, in James Hamilton’s painting Scene on the Hudson the human figure is dwarfed by the scale of the natural world.
In 1836, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that any slave brought within the state’s borders by a master would be a free person. The next twenty-seven years, leading to the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, brought further successes for the antislavery movement, such as the organization of the Underground Railroad in 1838, as well as losses, such as the 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Scott, born a slave, could never be a free man because slaves were property, not citizens. By the time John Brown led twenty-one armed men in an assault against the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, the nation was already beginning to break apart over the issue of slavery.
These events were being reported to the country’s citizens at an increasingly rapid pace. With the proliferation of newspapers in the early part of the nineteenth century, and basic literacy for white adults near 90 percent by midcentury, people had unprecedented access to news and ideas filtered through a variety of perspectives (temperance, abolitionist, Christian, suffragist, and so on). Newspapers, magazines, and cultural figures were beginning to rival the clergy as influences on the ideas and values of the lay public.
The Transcendentalists, for their part, succeeded as a philosophical and literary movement because they did not demand adherence to a doctrine or prescribe a set of rules. Transcendentalism valued each individual as a spirit equal to and intimately connected to another. It encouraged each soul to develop its own original relationship with the universe, based on its particular situation.
That is why the Transcendentalism that Emerson spoke about to Harvard Divinity School students in 1838 could be felt and explored by Emily Dickinson twenty years later, some ninety miles to the west. What Thoreau accomplished by living at Walden Pond exemplified the same values and ideals that brought hordes of people to Boston’s Music Hall to hear Theodore Parker preach. Transcendentalism provided New Englanders with a uniquely American philosophy, one of individuality and idealism, intimately tied to place ... their place.
Chapter 2
Boston: Public Face
Boston, New England’s only real metropolis, was the center of the American literary landscape for most of the nineteenth century. Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed Boston’s State House “the hub of the solar system,” and the phrase was quickly applied to the city as a whole by proud Bostonians, who had no doubt that their city was the center of the country. Situated on a peninsula jutting out into Boston Harbor, this growing city proved an ideal location for the publishing and distribution of many of America’s first and finest-literary works.
After the War of 1812, the city surpassed its neighbor to the north, Salem, as the leading port and shipping center of New England. By midcentury, the industrial revolution had brought both unbelievable wealth and an influx of poverty-stricken immigrants, which helped fuel the enormous changes taking place in the city. The well-ordered society of the Puritans and Calvinists soon became a hotbed for radical thought and theology, a fertile ground for social movements defending the oppressed and enslaved, and a bustling publishing center that gave the young nation much of its literature. Lectures, formal discussion groups, clubs, and planning societies debated and developed many of the ideas that were to make an indelible mark on American society. This was the Boston of the nineteenth century that helped introduce Transcendentalism to the world.
A Heritage of Rebellion
Ever since its founding on September 7, 1630, Boston has had a rich history of rebellion and conformity, radicalism and conventionalism. As a chartered English colony in the seventeenth century, the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its capital, Boston, were steeped in the Puritan values of hard work, moral uprightness, and education. These helped give the fledgling community stability as well as a sense of purpose and mission. John Winthrop, the colony’s first leader, declared Boston to be “the City on a Hill,” a beacon of Christianity whose success was a clear indication of God’s approval.
This “blessed” city, as one of the major cultural and political centers of the thirteen colonies, played a pivotal role in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. The Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and Paul Revere’s famous ride are all a part of Boston’s historical pedigree. All are duly commemorated in the city’s two-and-a-half-mile Freedom Trail, a red-painted path that leads visitors from its starting point on Boston Common to the major historical sites around the city connected with the birth of the nation.
Like the American Revolution, the literary and philosophic movement