American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  More disturbing was the insane asylum. There the space was insufficient for its population, with twice as many patients housed than the building could accommodate. Fuller compared the institution unfavorably to another in the city, Bloomingdale, under the enlightened supervision of Pliny Earle, a doctor with a special interest in treating the mentally ill. There, she noted, people were the objects of individualized treatment, with attendants taking into account different “shades of character and feeling” among the inmates; there, too, the accommodations were “nicely kept up” and “decorum preserved.” The asylum’s administration took care to show the insane “in every way that they felt no violent separation betwixt them and the rest of the world, and might easily return to it.” At the city asylum, by contrast, the inmates “crouched in corners,” she wrote, and “had no eye for the stranger, no heart for hope, no habitual expectation of light.”

  All this paled, however, before what Fuller found at Blackwell’s Island, where the city’s hardened criminals were sequestered. In comparison to Sing Sing, conditions were abysmal, and she hoped that the enlightened administration of the New York State institution could be replicated at the penitentiary. Fuller particularly lamented the want of proper matrons—indeed, of any matrons—to care for the seven hundred women incarcerated there. Worse still, the entire institution lacked any organizing principle, save “the punishment of fault.” The penitentiary needed, she urged, a classification and division of the prisoners according to the nature of their crimes; instruction, “practical, oral, and by furnishing books which may open entirely new hopes and thoughts” to the inmates; and a sanitary system, which would promote “self-respect, and through health and purity of body, the same in mind.”

  She closed by noting that in New York “there is wealth enough, intelligence, and good desire enough, and surely, need enough” to effect the necessary reformation of such institutions and make them models for those in other cities. But because the administrators of such reformatories were entangled in the political patronage system, she despaired of immediate change. “It is a most crying and shameful evil,” she wrote, “that the men and measures are changed in these institutions with changes from Whig to Democrat, from Democrat to Whig.” People like Earle and Farnham, not political hacks, should be the ones under whose charge the unfortunate were rehabilitated. Week after week Fuller alerted readers to the social injustice so rampant in the city but from which they too often shielded their eyes, and her columns constitute an early form of municipal exposé that reached its height in the muckraking journalism at the turn of the twentieth century.

  Like many in Greeley’s circle, Fuller also was exercised by the horror of American slavery, and in her columns she indicted politicians that supported it. Significantly, however, she resisted the notion that communitarian association was the answer to the country’s ills. Rather, following her friend Channing’s lead, she appealed to her readers’ Christian conscience. Institutions themselves—the almshouses, asylums, and prisons—were not the problem. Personal ignorance perpetuated the misery seen on the city’s streets. To live the Gospel of Christ implied a profound brother- and sisterhood that would initiate a social and spiritual millennium. That Fuller had moved to such a position after her long sojourn in Emerson’s orbit testifies to New York’s indelible impact on her. There she could not avert her eyes from suffering, as she could in Concord or at Brook Farm. Awakened to the inequalities that gave the lie to America’s purportedly egalitarian society, she subordinated her transcendent ego to her social conscience.

  When the opportunity arose for Fuller to sail to Europe to report on the unfolding democratic revolutions, she jumped at the chance, eager finally to visit the Continent and to see how other nations welcomed freedom, equality, and brotherhood. Beginning in the 1830s, Transcendentalists periodically had come into contact with European émigrés who had fled the Continent. Europe’s freedom fighters had watched Greece achieve independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1827 and were inspired as well by both the Belgian Walloons’ success against the Dutch and the Italians’ challenges to Austrian Hapsburg rule. The next to strike for their freedom were the Poles, but their insurrection, commenced in November 1830 and lasting over a year, was decisively and savagely crushed by Czar Nicholas I. Those who could, escaped. Among them were such prominent individuals as the poet Adam Mickiewicz, the composer Frédéric Chopin, and the Hungarian philologist Karoly (Charles) Kraitsir. For many of these exiles, France was their destination; a few hundred, aided by the Massachusetts reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, made their way to the United States, determined to keep alive their dreams for a free Poland.61

  Howe had interested many of his Transcendentalist friends in these wars for European liberation. Trained as a physician, he had served with the Greek rebels for six years in their fight against Turkey and now threw himself into the Polish cause. He raised money in Boston that he personally delivered to the exiles—along with two flags “from the youth of Boston”—in Paris, where he remained for several months as chairman of the newly established Polish National Committee. He was joined by such prominent Americans as Samuel F. B. Morse and James Fenimore Cooper, who likewise had raised funds in the United States. They aided Kraitsir’s and others’ attempts in 1833 to obtain land grants in America so that émigrés could resettle. Like that of the Greeks a few years earlier, the cause of the Poles captured the Americans’ imagination because they believed that their own Revolution half a century earlier served as the inspiration for such republican movements in Europe.

  Among the émigrés, Kraitsir was important to the Transcendentalists through Elizabeth Peabody’s sponsorship of his novel philological and pedagogical ideas. Subsequent to his attempts to obtain land grants, Kraitsir had established a foreign-language school in Maryland and in 1840 was named professor of modern languages and history at the University of Virginia. Not finding Charlottesville, or the South in general, to his liking, particularly because of slaveholding, he moved to New England and found himself under Peabody’s wing. He was not the first émigré whose cause she had espoused. The same year, Joseph Podbielski, another pedagogue, boarded with her and convinced her of the importance of Josef Bem’s chronological charts for teaching world history. Peabody crusaded to have public schools adopt his published grids, overlaid with colors and shapes, to learn by decade the succession of important events. Over the next few years she elaborated on his work with her own researches into ancient history to make the charts more all-encompassing.

  Kraitsir’s method of teaching languages was even more influential. In 1845 he lectured in Boston on the philosophy of language, positing a universal vocabulary based on the sounds the vocal organs could produce. If Bem’s charts organized the complex history of the world into manageable form, Kraitsir offered nothing less than proof of mankind’s primal unity. Peabody was fascinated. She published his pamphlet The Significance of the Alphabet, in which he announced his radical ideas, and in 1847 he boarded with her family on West Street.62 In 1849, after a trip to Europe, Kraitsir returned to West Street, but embroiled in a nasty custody suit with his wife in which Peabody futilely intervened, by 1851 he moved to New York. There in 1852 he published his Glossology: Being a Treatise on the Nature of Language and on the Language of Nature. What Peabody found compelling in Kraitsir’s system was his search for and presumed discovery of that phantom of uniformity for which the nineteenth century yearned, a unity that demonstrated how, beneath their temperamental and cultural differences, men in fact were one.63

  While Peabody was involved in the sponsorship of such immigrant pedagogues as Podbielski and Kraitsir, by the late 1840s Fuller had become even more directly involved in the European struggles. In 1846 her friends the philanthropists Marcus and Rebecca Spring invited her to accompany them to Europe as a tutor to their twelve-year-old son, and Greeley agreed to pay her—he advanced her $125—for periodic travel reports. Between 1846 and 1850 she filed thirty-seven dispatches from the Continent (twenty
-four from Italy alone during the height of its revolution), a rich archive of how one American understood her country’s example to other nations struggling toward democracy. Moreover, in Europe her interest in utopian socialism, whetted by her reading in Fourier and her experiences in New York and now tempered by her firsthand experience among European intellectuals and their émigré friends, was transformed into deep sympathy with the revolutionary agenda.

  The Springs and Fuller first toured England, where she met Wordsworth and Carlyle, visited her acquaintance Harriet Martineau, and met Giuseppe Mazzini. Living in exile since 1837 and already planning his return to Italy, Mazzini filled Fuller’s mind with his mystical understanding of nationhood and of an individual’s need to subsume himself in it. Neither did the travelers neglect Europe’s social conditions: they visited mechanics’ institutes in the factory cities of Manchester and Liverpool, a coal mine in Newcastle, and ironworkers in Sheffield. By mid-November 1846 the group moved on to Paris, Fuller carrying letters of introduction from Mazzini to many French intellectuals. In that city she met, among others, the writer George Sand (Mme Dudevant); the Catholic abbé Félicité Robert de Lamennais, and the socialist and onetime Saint-Simonian Pierre Leroux; and such prominent followers of Fourier as Victor Considérant, Hugh Doherty, an Irish socialist and translator of his works, and Clarisse Vigoureux, another follower. Most important, Fuller also encountered the exiled Polish poet Mickiewicz, who advocated strong nation-states as well as women’s rights. He became Fuller’s intimate friend and prophesied that her mission was to contribute to the deliverance of the Polish, French, and American women, all the while encouraging her to think more about herself and her sexual needs.

  Psychologically, to Fuller, Europe was like a strong, healthy tonic. “Had I only come ten years earlier,” she lamented to her friend Caroline Sturgis, for “now my life must ever be a failure, so much strength has been wasted on obstructions which only came because I was not in the soil most fitted to my nature.”64 On meeting Mickiewicz, she wrote Emerson that she found him “the man I had long wished to see, with the intellect and passions in due proportion for a full and healthy human being,” a comment that must have given Emerson pause, given Fuller’s frustrating attempts for him to see her in just this way.65 But besides fulfilling her lifelong dreams about art, literature, and romance, Fuller’s travels also deepened her sense of the significance of national culture and destiny to which Mazzini had awakened her. She understood that she was witnessing an impending large-scale social crisis caused by the inequalities in wealth that the present political regimes tolerated. With her eyes opened to Europe’s social ills, she saw more clearly her own nation’s failures, which she blamed on “the selfishness or stupidity” of those who opposed “an examination of these subjects.”66

  Early in 1847 the Springs’ traveling party crossed the Alps into Italy, where under the new pope, Pius IX, the hope for liberty for and the union of the various Italian principalities grew. Among his first acts, for example, Pius IX freed many political prisoners who had agitated for such reform. Here Fuller again encountered the charismatic Mazzini, who, encouraged by the pope’s policies, had returned from exile to lead efforts to liberate and unify the various city-states. Fuller found herself in the middle of heated political activity, swept up with enthusiasm for the patriots’ cause. She also had a newfound appreciation of what socialists brought to the table. Writing from Rome to her friend Channing in May 1847, Fuller told him that art was no longer important to her. “I see the future dawning,” she prophesied, and “it is in important aspects Fourier’s future,” melded with Mazzini’s quasi-religious understanding of the necessity of individual sacrifice for the nation.67

  By 1848 the Continent was on fire with revolutionary zeal. Early that year, citizens of Palermo rose against Ferdinand II, who ruled Sicily and Naples, and he quickly capitulated to their demands by granting a constitution. French workers and students deposed the corrupt and insensitive Louis-Philippe and declared a republic overseen by poet Alphonse de Lamartine. Inspired by these successes, other liberation movements broke out in Prussia, Austria, Spain, Ireland, Romania, and Denmark. The powerful Prince Metternich of Austria fled his country, and Frederick William IV of Prussia was forced to allow the election of a popular assembly in the city-states he oversaw. In Hungary, Louis Kossuth led his people against the Hapsburg monarchy. Back in the United States, these revolutions were greeted with goodwill and followed with great interest, none more so than those in France and Italy. When the Springs decided to continue on to Germany, Fuller, excited over the Italian freedom fighters’ prospects, stayed on in Rome.

  She had another reason to do so. When she first arrived, in May 1847, she met a twenty-six-year-old Italian patriot, the Marchese Giovanni Ossoli, under the dome of St. Peter’s. By December 1847, as throughout Europe the republicans’ dreams rose, Fuller was pregnant with his child, and in May she retreated to the hills of Abruzzi to await the birth. There she also continued work on a book-length history of the Italian revolution, a project that grew from her dispatches to Greeley. Their son, Angelo Eugene Philip Ossoli, was born early in September, and in November, Fuller left him with a wet nurse and returned to Rome to rejoin her husband, now a member of the pope’s Civic Guard. She found herself in the heart of revolution. But throughout Europe the uprisings failed. By 1849, foreign troops attacked the Holy City, quashing the resistance and restoring the papacy. Everywhere liberation movements collapsed under assault from entrenched powers. The republican moment had passed.

  The several months of reports Fuller filed with Greeley remain among the best eyewitness accounts of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. “I have been engrossed, stunned almost, by the public events that have succeeded one another with such rapidity and grandeur,” she wrote her friend Channing. “It is a time such as I always dreamed of, and for long secretly hoped to see.”68 She faithfully read newspapers from around the Continent to keep apprised of events in other countries, and she corresponded with European friends who could provide her new information. “I rejoice to be in Europe at this time,” she wrote, “and shall return possessed of a great history.”69

  She was particularly moved that Italians viewed their battles as an extension of the principles of freedom for which her countrymen had fought and secured for the entire American people, even as she lamented Americans’ ignorance and lack of interest in political and social developments on the Continent, a fact that she blamed on their crass materialism. In one column, on “Old and New World Democracy,” she reminded her readers that the same arguments against the emancipation of Italy were used against the emancipation of American slaves, “the same arguments in favor of the spoliation of Poland as for the conquest of Mexico.” America, Fuller concluded scornfully, was “no champion of the rights of men, but a robber and a jailer … her eyes fixed, not on the stars, but on the possessions of other men.”70

  Whereas America was “spoiled by prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of Slavery, shamed by an unjust war, noble sentiment much forgotten even by individuals, the aims of politicians selfish or petty, the literature frivolous and venal,” in Europe a nobler spirit was struggling, a spirit that cheered and animated hers. As she had promised, she transformed her dispatches into a book manuscript, declaring, “Here things are before my eyes worth recording, and, if I cannot help this work, I would gladly be its historian.”71 But the siege of Rome made it dangerous for the Ossolis to remain. The family—she and Ossoli now were married—moved to Florence, where Fuller unsuccessfully sought out an English publisher for her history. No matter. She remained confident in what she had written: “If I cannot make any thing out of my present materials,” she wrote her friends, “my future is dark indeed.”72

  The Ossolis decided to leave in the summer of 1850, on an illfated voyage. The choice of a sailing ship rather than a newer, more reliable steamship was dictated by Fuller’s always precarious financial
condition. Even before leaving the Mediterranean, the captain died of smallpox, and the first mate assumed command for the Atlantic crossing. In sight of land, off Fire Island, New York, in a full hurricane, the mate miscalculated his position and drove the Elizabeth onto a bar, where hours spent being battered by the high seas finally broke the vessel. There were some survivors, but the Ossolis were not among them. Only their son’s body was recovered, along with some of their belongings, but not the manuscript.

  It is difficult to say what sort of greeting awaited Fuller and what she would have done once she resettled. Letters from friends strongly suggest their discomfort with Ossoli—not an intellectual, as most of them were. Such personal considerations aside, however, it would have been even more difficult for Fuller to deal with the increasingly virulent and volatile political situation in her home country. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, part of the infamous Compromise of 1850, those who had nourished dreams of shared progress with the nations of Europe toward more freedom and equality were brought face to face with what Fuller had seen in Rome as she contemplated her nation’s shortcomings.

  The triumphal American tour of Louis Kossuth, leader of the abortive Hungarian revolution, who arrived in New York in 1851 from exile, was telling. Greeted by immense crowds wherever he went, he nevertheless symbolically marked the end of America’s fascination with European republicanism. As he traveled throughout the country trying to garner support for his country’s revolutionary cause, Whigs and Democrats North and South divided over whether the nation should consider the kind of foreign intervention he urged.73 The United States had its own problems, and in the next decade that meant turning from Europe to face the internal demon, slavery.