The Development of an American Culture in two minutes
- After the War of 1812 Americans wanted cultural independence. In 1820 the British critic Sydney Smith mocked American culture by asking who read an American book, and writers and artists answered him.
- Irving's Rip Van Winkle (1819–1820), Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales and Webster's American Dictionary (1828) gave Americans their own stories, frontier and language. Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans portrayed Native Americans as vanishing.
- Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School painted American wilderness in the Romantic style, which valued emotion and the sublime. Neoclassical and Greek Revival buildings linked the republic to Athens and Rome.
- Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature, 1836; Self-Reliance, 1841) held that truth lies in the individual and nature. Thoreau urged civil disobedience, and Margaret Fuller argued for women's equality.
- Regions differed: George Caleb Bingham painted Missouri River traders, and plantation novels such as Swallow Barn pictured slaveholding Virginia as gracious and happy. Edgar Allan Poe wrote tales of guilt and madness.
- Groups left out told their own stories: the Pequot minister William Apess (1833), the Black painter Robert S. Duncanson and Frederick Douglass, whose Narrative appeared in 1845. Minstrel shows mocked Black Americans.
- On the exam: expect questions on cultural nationalism, Romanticism and Transcendentalism as responses to the market revolution and national identity, and on how reform and slavery shaped writers' ideas.
Topic 4.9 key terms
- Cultural nationalism
Pride in a country's own literature, art and ideas, apart from its government or its economy. After the War of 1812, Americans wanted a national culture that was not borrowed from Britain.
- Copyright Act of 1790
The first federal copyright law. It protected books, maps and charts by U.S. citizens and residents, and gave foreign authors nothing. Not until 1891 did the U.S. protect them, so printers could reprint British books free.
- The Sketch Book (1819–1820)
Washington Irving's collection of essays and stories, published under the pen name Geoffrey Crayon. It included "Rip Van Winkle," set in the Catskills, and was among the first works by an American author to be widely read in Britain.
- War of 1812
The U.S. fought Britain from 1812 to 1815 and ended it without losing territory. Americans felt they had beaten Britain twice, and the pride it stirred fed a push for a national culture.
- Knickerbocker writers
A loose group of New York authors in the early 1800s, among them Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant, who wrote about American places and legends. The name comes from Irving’s comic historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker.
- Leatherstocking Tales
Cooper’s five frontier novels about the scout Natty Bumppo, ending in 1841. They glorified scouts and settlers and gave Americans a frontier story of their own. They also helped spread the myth of the “vanishing Indian.”
- An American Dictionary (1828)
Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary. It recorded American spellings such as color and center, and American words, including words borrowed from Native languages. It was cultural nationalism in print: an independent nation, Webster argued, needed a language of its own.
- Romanticism
A European movement of the early 1800s that valued emotion, imagination and nature over the Enlightenment's reason and order. American Romantics pointed it at American subjects: the wilderness, the frontier, the individual.
- The sublime
The Romantic feeling of awe mixed with fear, set off by nature that is vast, wild and powerful: waterfalls, storms, mountains. Cole and the painters who followed him aimed for it.
- Hudson River School
America's first school of landscape painting, led by Thomas Cole from the 1820s. Its painters showed the Hudson Valley, the Catskills and the western wilderness as grand national subjects, in the Romantic style.
- Market revolution
The early-1800s shift from making goods mostly for home use to producing for distant markets, helped by canals, steamboats and railroads. Farms, factories and cities all changed with it.
- Neoclassical
A style that revived the look of ancient Greece and Rome: columns, domes and symmetry. After independence, Americans used it for government buildings to link the new republic to the old ones.
- Second Bank of the United States
The national bank chartered in 1816. Andrew Jackson called it a monopoly that favored the rich. He vetoed its recharter in 1832 and pulled out the government's deposits.
- Greek Revival
A style popular from the 1820s to the 1850s that copied ancient Greek temples: white columns and triangular pediments. Americans built banks, courthouses, churches and homes this way. Cheering for Greece's war of independence in the 1820s helped make it fashionable.
- Transcendentalism
A New England philosophy of the 1830s and '40s: people find truth through intuition and nature, not through churches or tradition, and every person carries a spark of the divine. It borrowed German idealism, read in English through Coleridge and Carlyle, and turned it into something American.
- Self-reliance
Emerson's core demand, from his 1841 essay: trust your own mind and conscience over custom, tradition or the crowd. In a young democracy it became a national creed.
- Perfectibility
The Romantic belief that people, and so society, can keep improving. It drove the reform movements of the 1830s and 1840s: temperance, abolition, women’s rights, schools and asylums.
- Civil disobedience
Refusing, openly and on principle, to obey a law you think is unjust, and accepting the penalty. Thoreau called his essay "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849); the title we use came after his death. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. both drew on it.
- Dark Romanticism (American Gothic)
Romantic writing about guilt, madness and fear. Poe and Hawthorne doubted the Transcendentalist faith that people could perfect themselves.
- Genre painting
Painting of everyday scenes and ordinary people, not heroes or grand history. Bingham’s river scenes are American examples.
- Slave narrative
A first-person account of slavery by someone who lived it. Written to turn readers against slavery, these books were widely read in the 1840s and 1850s.
- Minstrel show
A stage entertainment that grew hugely popular in the 1840s. White performers in blackface mocked Black Americans and spread racist stereotypes to audiences across the country.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Who Reads an American Book?
Jan.–Feb. 1820
Key terms: Cultural nationalism, Copyright Act of 1790, The Sketch Book (1819–1820), War of 1812
January 1820. A Yorkshire vicar, Sydney Smith, is reviewing a book of American statistics. He envies America's low taxes. He's tired of its bragging.
Rev. Sydney Smith
In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?
Rev. Sydney Smith
or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?
He had a point. U.S. copyright protected only Americans, so printers reprinted British books without paying the authors. A British author cost a printer nothing. An American author cost money.
That February, a London bookseller named John Miller brought out a new book.
The United States had won its independence. Now it wanted a second one: stories, pictures and ideas of its own. What would that culture look like, and whose America would it show?
Rip Van Winkle Wakes Up
1809–1828
Key terms: Knickerbocker writers, Leatherstocking Tales, An American Dictionary (1828)
Geoffrey Crayon was Washington Irving, a New Yorker stuck in England after his family’s business went bankrupt.
Irving’s Rip Van Winkle sleeps twenty years in the Catskills, straight through the Revolution.
Back in the village, he announces he’s a loyal subject of the King. The crowd shouts: “a tory! a tory! a spy!”
James Fenimore Cooper wrote the frontier. Europe read The Last of the Mohicans in translation.
Cooper’s heroes were invented, and his title told readers a whole people was vanishing. It was a comfortable story, four years before the Indian Removal Act.
The real Mohicans were pushed west, not erased. Their nation lives in Wisconsin today.
Noah Webster
As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.
Note the spelling.
Noah Webster spent more than twenty years on An American Dictionary of the English Language. He finished it in 1825, in Cambridge. Cambridge, England.
In his book, colour lost its u. Centre turned around. Tung, for tongue, didn’t catch on.
He also added American words, many from Native languages. Skunk:
In America, the popular name of a fetid animal of the weasel kind.
The View from Mount Holyoke
1825–1840
Key terms: Romanticism, The sublime, Hudson River School, Market revolution
The painter who taught Americans to love their wilderness grew up in an English mill town. Thomas Cole was born in Lancashire in 1801 and came to America at seventeen.
In 1825 he sketched up the Hudson and came back with three paintings. A New York shop asked twenty-five dollars each. John Trumbull, who painted the Declaration of Independence, bought one.
Cole painted in a European style called Romanticism, which trusted feeling over reason. Its favorite feeling was the sublime: nature big enough to scare you.
Thomas Cole
the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.
In 1829 a British naval officer, Basil Hall, published a sketch of the view from Mount Holyoke. Hall thought Americans paid too little attention to their own scenery. Cole made an exact tracing of it.
In 1836 he painted that view more than six feet wide, and told his patron why.
Thomas Cole
Fancy pictures seldom sell & they generally take more time than views so I have determined to paint one of the latter.
A thunderstorm, leaving. Look closer.
Cole never says which side he's on. He mourned the axe in print. And he painted every fence and haystack with care. That tension is Romantic America in one picture.
Temples and Togas
1818–1841
Key terms: Neoclassical, Second Bank of the United States, Greek Revival
Painters got the woods. Architects got Athens.
The capital's architects borrowed columns and domes from Greece and Rome. A republic wanted to look like the old republics.
In Philadelphia, the Second Bank of the United States copied the Parthenon. Jackson's enemy bank was a Greek temple.
Soon churches, courthouses and farmhouses grew columns. In the 1820s, Americans cheered the Greeks' own war of independence against the Ottoman Empire.
Congress ordered a statue of Washington. Horatio Greenough carved him as Zeus.
Twelve tons of marble, a toga, no shirt. In 1843, Congress moved it outdoors.
New York's former mayor Philip Hone wrote in his diary:
It looks like a great Herculean, warrior-like Venus of the bath.
Trust Thyself
1832–1849
Key terms: Transcendentalism, Self-reliance, Perfectibility, Civil disobedience
In 1832 a Boston minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, quit his pulpit. In Concord he wrote a little book called Nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all.
Critics called his circle the Transcendentalists, a word borrowed from a German philosopher. Their idea: truth lives in you and in nature, not in a church.
In 1837 Emerson told Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society to stop copying Europe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.
Many Americans met Emerson on a lyceum bench, not in a book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
If everyone carries that spark, anyone can grow toward perfection. Reformers across the North set out to prove it.
Margaret Fuller edited their magazine, The Dial. In 1843 she asked whether that spark belonged to women too.
Margaret Fuller
We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.
On July 4, 1845, Emerson's friend Henry David Thoreau moved into a house he'd built by Walden Pond. The date, he says, was an accident.
Henry David Thoreau
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…
Henry David Thoreau
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard…
He listed the cost of the house to the half cent. Some of its boards came from the shanty of James Collins, an Irish railroad worker.
The Collins family carried away everything they owned in one bundle.
For years Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax to a government that protected slavery. In July 1846, with the country at war with Mexico, he spent a night in jail.
Someone paid the tax. The next morning he went huckleberrying.
Henry David Thoreau
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Gandhi printed pieces of it in his newspaper. Martin Luther King Jr. read it as a student.
Whose America?
1829–1848
Key terms: Dark Romanticism (American Gothic), Genre painting, Slave narrative
Edgar Allan Poe mocked the Transcendentalists as “Frogpondians,” after the pond on Boston Common.
Edgar Allan Poe
TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been, and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
Emerson said people could perfect themselves. Poe wrote about guilt and madness.
Every region made its own version. Out west, George Caleb Bingham painted a fur trader and his son drifting down the Missouri.
In Virginia, novels like Swallow Barn showed the plantation as a gracious, happy home. The view was from the porch.
Some Americans were left out of these pictures. So they made their own.
William Apess, a Pequot minister, wrote one of the first book-length autobiographies by a Native American. In 1833 he asked white readers a question.
William Apess
Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it—which skin do you think would have the greatest?
In Cincinnati, a free Black painter, Robert S. Duncanson, painted the Ohio woods in Cole’s style.
Rev. Sydney Smith
Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a Slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?
The census of 1820 counted 1,538,022 enslaved people. About one American in six. On this question, the critic was right.
Frederick Douglass
You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
Dublin printed his Narrative twice. It was translated into Dutch and French. Readers in Britain and Ireland were reading an American book.
Answer the Critic
1820 → 1848
Key terms: Cultural nationalism, Minstrel show, Perfectibility
Twenty-eight years later.
Sydney Smith died in 1845, the year Douglass's book came out. Here are his answers.
An American book? Europe read Irving and Cooper. A picture? The Oxbow. A statue? They laughed, but they looked.
American surgeons? In 1846, a Boston surgeon operated on a patient breathing ether. The first public demonstration of surgical anesthesia.
An American play? By the late 1840s, one of the most popular was the minstrel show. White men in blackface, mocking Black Americans.
And every sixth man a slave? That one took a war to answer.
Some Americans didn't wait for a war. If people could perfect themselves, they said, so could a country.