American Transcendentalism Read online

  For Bob Richardson, always a guide on these trails

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE “LIKE-MINDED”

  1 - SEARCHING THE SCRIPTURES

  2 - REINVIGORATING A FAITH

  3 - TRANSCENDENTALISM EMERGENT

  4 - RELIGIOUS COMBUSTION

  5 - CENTRIPETAL FORCES AND CENTRIFUGAL MOTION

  6 - HEAVEN ON EARTH

  7 - VARIETIES OF TRANSCENDENTALISM

  8 - SELF AND SOCIETY

  9 - THE INWARD TURN

  10 - FREE RELIGION AND THE DREAM OF A COMMON HUMANITY

  11 - TOWARD THE GENTEEL TRADITION

  ALSO BY PHILIP F. GURA

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE

  Most educated Americans identify Transcendentalism as a nineteenth-century intellectual movement that spawned Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. They recall such iconic gestures of individual conscience as Emerson’s studied insult of the Harvard faculty in his “Divinity School Address,” Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond and the great book that resulted, and the pioneering feminist Fuller’s declaration, “I accept the universe!” The more sophisticated know as well that the Transcendentalists comprised one of the nation’s first coherent intellectual groups: movers and shakers in the forefront of educational reform; proselytizers for the rights of women, laborers, prisoners, and the indigent and infirm; and agitators for the abolition of slavery.

  For a twenty-year period between 1830 and 1850 they met in one another’s homes, attended one another’s lectures and sermons, and read and reviewed one another’s writings. Along with the “expatriate” generation of the 1920s and the Beat generation of the 1950s, they remain one of the nation’s most compelling and influential intellectual coteries, and as well are the source of many ideas that have come to define what is “American.” Writing in The Dial, the Transcendentalists’ house organ, the journalist J. A. Saxton summed it up well. The very existence of the United States is “transcendental,” he observed, for “its right to be a nation was broadly and unequivocally legitimated upon the instinctive truth of the principle of the equality and brotherhood of universal man.”1

  We cannot overestimate the excitement the Transcendentalists’ ideas generated and the commitment they engendered. Orestes Brownson, the group’s member most identified with the cause of the laborer, put it best late in his life when he recalled how, forty years earlier, he and his friends had threatened to turn the world upside down. Addressing a new cadre of reformers, he reminded them that the Transcendentalists had been first at the barricades. “What have any of you to teach me who participated in the Boston intellectual movement from 1830 to 1844?” he asked. “We Bostonians,” he proudly proclaimed, “were a generation ahead of you.”2 The Unitarian minister and erstwhile Transcendentalist Cyrus Bartol concurred, viewing his contemporaries as the present-day guarantors of America’s millennial promise. Transcendentalism was nothing less than “a new vessel, a better Mayflower for the Truth’s escape from her foes.”3

  Emerson described the almost palpable excitement at the Transcendentalist flowering and its promise of a new world. “No one,” he wrote in 1840, “can converse much with the different classes of society in New England, without remarking the progress of a revolution,” even as “the spirit of the time is felt by every individual with some difference.” To one person, the zeitgeist comes “in the shape of special reforms in the state; to another, in modifications to the various callings of men, and the customs of business; to a third, opening a new scope for literature and art; to a fourth, in philosophical insight; to a fifth, in the vast solitude of prayer.” It is, he concluded, “in every form a protest against usage, and a search for principles.”4 His young friend James Freeman Clarke agreed. “I find social life in a precious state of fermentation,” he observed to a correspondent that same year. “New ideas are flying, high and low,” and “every man,” as Emerson recently had remarked, “carries a revolution in his waistcoat pocket.”5

  To many people, however, the Transcendentalists were unsettling, and as often ridiculed or reviled as respected. On his famous trip to the United States at the height of the Transcendentalist ferment, for example, the English novelist Charles Dickens observed that when he inquired of some of his American friends what Transcendentalism signified, he was given to understand that “whatever was unintelligible would be certainly transcendental.”6 The Scottish writer and reformer Thomas Carlyle, following a visit from the Transcendentalist George Ripley, who had resigned his ministry to start a socialist community at Brook Farm, a few miles from Boston, was equally acerbic: Carlyle termed his recent New England guest “a Socinian [that is, Unitarian] minister, who has left the pulpit to reform the world by cultivating onions.”7 Even fellow travelers could not resist such humorous characterizations. In her old age, Annie Russell Marble, who had lived at Ripley’s Brook Farm community, quipped that the Transcendentalists, for all their goodwill, were “a race who dove into the infinite, soared into the illimitable, and never paid cash.”8 The historian Henry Adams, no stranger to New England’s ways, concluded that they were “unutterably funny.”9

  These gibes masked a profound uneasiness with the Transcendentalists’ challenge to contemporary beliefs and mores, based as it was in radical European philosophical and social thought that puzzled and frightened many Americans. The staunch Unitarian Francis Bowen put it baldly. The “new philosophy” of the emergent Transcendentalist group, he wrote, is “abstruse in dogma, fantastic in its dress, and foreign in its origin.” It comes from Germany, he continued, “and is one of the first fruits of a diseased admiration of every thing from that source,” amounting in many individuals to nothing less than “sheer midsummer madness.”10 Nor did it help that the Transcendentalists often expressed their thoughts in what seemed to many an arcane and affected vocabulary and diction, making their style as frequent a target as their substance (or supposed lack thereof). “Their favorite method of composition,” one skeptic complained, “seems to be transposition, a conciseness approaching to obscurity.”11 A wit in the Boston Post, commenting on the Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott’s dreamy “Orphic Sayings,” observed that their content “resembled a train of 15 railroad cars with one passenger.”12 Another critic, voicing a similar objection to the Transcendentalists’ seemingly willful tendency to obfuscation, noted that their philosophy seemed more a “manner than a creed.”13 Simply put, the Transcendentalists’ message was more ridiculed than understood or appreciated.

  And yet the group was undeniably seminal to American cultural and intellectual history. In the nation’s centennial year, Transcendentalism’s first historian, O. B. Frothingham, summed it up well. The movement, “though local in activity, limited in scope, brief in duration, engaging but a comparatively small number of individuals,” left “a broad and deep trace on ideas and institutions.” It “affected thinkers, swayed politicians, guided moralists, inspired philanthropists, created reformers.”14 By reexamining the Transcendentalists’ intellectual genealogy and the development of their philosophical and cultural agenda, I return this eclectic group of New England thinkers to the transatlantic stage whose boards they so eagerly trod and examine their attempts to reform American society along more democratic lines. From their emergence in the early 1830s—the first American to use the word “Transcendentalist” in print did so in 1833—at least through the early 1850s, they cultivated a vibrant openness to social and cultural ideals that directly challenged the materialism and insularity that were already hallmarks of American culture.1
5

  The Transcendentalists were split, however, over how best to effect such reformation. One group, which Emerson epitomized, championed introspection and self-reliance—what one precursor to the movement termed “self-culture”—as keys to the spiritual life, an ethic that fitted conveniently with the antebellum economic expansion known as the Market Revolution. 16 Another group, centered on Ripley and Brownson, stressed the brotherhood of man and outer-directed behavior for the common good, an ethic inherited from the civic republicanism of the post-Revolutionary generation as well as from contemporary European socialism. Friction between those who emphasized hyper-individualism—what one participant called “egotheism”—and those who championed men’s and women’s irreducible equality marked Transcendentalism from the time of its initial coalescence as an identifiable movement.

  For a while, however, the movement held together, and what began as parochial religious controversy over the relative values of reason versus emotion in the spiritual life spawned a vital culture of reform. But as the sectional crisis of the 1850s challenged Americans to confront the immense fact of chattel slavery, hitherto prominent dimensions of such reform—the rights of women, labor, and the indigent, for example—were lost in the maelstrom, viewed as less significant than the horrors of the Southern plantation. Unfortunately, it was decades before such issues again came front and center, for in the post–Civil War era, the uneasy balance between the parties of self and of society tipped in the direction of the former, whose philosophy supported individual rights and market capitalism—or what is now called democratic liberalism—rather than humanitarian socialism. Emerson’s demanding philosophy of self-reliance, an artifact of the early 1840s, became simplified and was adopted as a chief article of national belief. More and more, American Transcendentalism became identified through his vision of the imperial self, a process only accelerated after his death in 1882.

  Transcendentalism thus was another in a long line of attempts to redirect the still incomplete American experiment, in this case by anchoring it in the sanctity of each individual’s heart. The Transcendentalists’ unique position in, as well as their final contributions to, the cultural life of the new nation resided in their attempts to reenergize and redirect what they increasingly regarded as the country’s misguided and faltering democratic experiment. This book records the story of how these early-nineteenth-century Americans awakened to the possibility of a fully egalitarian brotherhood, encouraged it, and then, under the pressure of insular politics, finally lost their battle to maintain its relevance to the meaning of America. It answers the question of how a movement whose roots were so catholic and universal eventuated in a discourse that promoted an American exceptionalism based on self-interest.

  Philip F. Gura

  Antiquarian Hall

  Worcester, Massachusetts

  2007

  INTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE “LIKE-MINDED”

  In 1869, Louisa May Alcott, under the cognomen Tribulation Periwinkle, submitted to the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican a tongue-in-cheek letter with the “Latest News from Concord,” Massachusetts. The town had long been associated with such residents as Ralph Waldo Emerson; her father, Bronson Alcott; and other representatives of the Transcendentalist movement that had flourished in New England thirty years before. “No gossip concerning this immortal town seems to be considered too trivial for the public,” she observed, and thus she thought it her duty to add “the last rumor afloat.”

  Her humorous report was filled with jokes and puns today accessible mainly to scholars but in her time in common circulation. A new hotel was about to be established, she reported, called the Sphinx’s Head, where “pilgrims to this modern Mecca” would be entertained in the most hospitable and appropriate style. “Walden water, aesthetic tea, and ‘wine that never grew in the belly of the grape’” would be on tap for the refreshment of thirsty guests. “Wild apples by the bushel, orphic acorns by the peck, and Hawthorne’s pumpkins, in the shape of pies,” could be had “at philosophic prices.” The accommodations themselves were special, for the inn would be furnished “with Alcott’s rustic furniture, the beds made of Thoreau’s pine boughs, and the sacred fires fed from the Emersonian woodpile.” Moreover, the thoughtful proprietors would provide telescopes for those who wished “to watch the soarings of the Oversoul, when visible.” The innkeeper would supply, gratis, samples of “Autumn Tints, Mosses from the Manse, Rhodora, and herbs from the Garden,” as well as “photographs of the faces divine which have conferred immortality upon one of the dullest little towns in Massachusetts.”

  Most important to those eager to catch a glimpse of the community’s famous residents (who by this time included Alcott herself ), the hotel also would provide a daily bulletin to announce “the most favorable hours for beholding the various lions” who still roamed Concord’s landscape. It would look something like this:

  Emerson will walk at 4 p.m.

  Alcott will converse from 8 a.m. till 11 p.m.

  Channing may be seen with the naked eye at sunset.

  The new Hermit will grind his meal at noon, precisely.

  The ladies of Concord will not be exhibited on Sundays.

  The need for such an establishment, Periwinkle concluded, had been long and deeply felt, especially because each spring brought “with the robins, a flock of reporters” who, like the inquisitive birds, “roost upon Concordian fences, chirp on Concordian doorsteps, and hop over Concordian fields and hills, scratching vigorously, as if hoping to unearth a new specimen from what is popularly believed to be the hot-bed of genius.”1

  Obviously, by 1869 Transcendentalism was part of the nation’s popular mythology. But as much as Concord and its environs had become shorthand for this important and well-known group of thinkers, writers, and social activists, precisely who they were, beyond those whom Alcott specifically named, has always been a vexed question. There was no central creed that signaled membership in the Transcendentalist coterie nor any roll that certifiably recorded participants. Definition and boundaries are further vexed by the fact that, as with the word “Puritan” in seventeenth-century England, at first the movement’s detractors most commonly used “Transcendentalism” as an epithet. Not until the 1840s were some advocates of what was known as the “New Thought” comfortable describing their beliefs with the label Transcendentalist.

  One of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s earliest biographers, James Elliot Cabot, went to the heart of the matter. He observed that the movement’s supporters comprised an ever-shifting and open-ended group. The Transcendental Club (so named, he claimed, by “the public” and not by its participants) comprised “the occasional meetings of a changing body of liberal thinkers, agreeing in nothing but their liberality,” a statement he qualified by quoting his friend the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, a Unitarian clergyman and one of the group’s original members. Clarke had wittily noted that “they called themselves ‘the club of the like-minded,’” primarily because “no two … thought alike.”2 Frederic Henry Hedge, another Unitarian minister and a herald of the group’s interests in German philosophy, agreed. “There was no club in any strict sense,” he wrote, “only occasional meetings of like-minded men and women.”3

  Soon enough the catchphrase entered the public domain. The Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist William Henry Channing observed that “the brotherhood of the ‘Like-Minded’” was a “nickname” used by outsiders as well as his friends in the group, “on the ground that no two were of the same opinion.”4 This characterization of the group as amorphous was common even outside Boston, where the Transcendentalists were centered. In New York City, for example, one wit, writing in the fledgling literary journal Arcturus in 1841, observed that those in “the new Boston school of philosophy” held “no very precise doctrines,” did not have “any one bond of union,” and “unite to differ.”5 Transcendentalists agreed. “No single term can describe them,” said erstwhile member Orestes Brownson, and “nothing can be more u
njust to them, or more likely to mislead the public than to lump them all together, and predicate the same things of them all.”6 Liberality was the group’s hallmark, another noted. Among them “the only guest not tolerated was intolerance.”7

  Such statements are maddeningly vague but were common among these “like-minded.” Some contemporaries, however, thought that they knew how to characterize them. First, most Transcendentalists were indeed New Englanders, with ties to Harvard College and the Boston area. Second, at some point in their lives, almost to a person, they had been associated with Unitarianism and thus were considered “liberal Christians” whose reading of scripture made them reject Calvinism’s harsh and, to them, unreasonable tenets. Finally, although a loosely knit group of thinkers and activists, they had a distinct philosophical bent toward German Idealism rather than British Empiricism, that is, toward the revolution wrought by Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and others who championed the inherent powers of the human mind, against the philosophy of John Locke and his followers, who believed that external circumstances primarily formed man’s consciousness. Noah Porter, a conservative Trinitarian minister at the Andover Theological Seminary, early on acknowledged this profile. The Transcendentalists, he opined, were alike in “their intellectual and moral predispositions, their favorite philosophical and literary sympathies,” and they possessed a “strong family likeness of their modes of thought and expression.”8 The conservative Unitarian Francis Bowen was not as polite. He had no sympathy, he wrote, “with that ill-regulated admiration, which seeks to transplant German roots to an English soil,—to cultivate a hot-bed, where plants shall be forced to lose their native character.” Indeed, the only result he had seen thus far was an “insufferable arrogance” among young people so inclined.9

  Writing pseudonymously, the Transcendentalist Theodore Parker humorously parodied such caricatures and in so doing provided an index to the fears the group engendered in the general populace. In The Christian Register he offered a fictional account of a Boston layman who encountered the word “Transcendentalism” in the daily press and wondered what it meant. “I thought of Trans-sylvanian, and Trans-substantiation,” the fellow explained, “but found no light.” Neither could he find the novel term in any standard dictionary. Then he turned to a pamphlet recently published by some conservative clergy at Princeton who had weighed in on New England’s recent religious turmoil, from which he learned the truth. “Trans-cendentalism,” he said, is “a very naughty thing.” Indeed, what he read so upset him that he subsequently had a frightening dream in which all the Transcendentalists “and countless others” were thrown together “in the greatest confusion, without regard to age, opinion or character.” The outcome was frightening.