American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  But with the war raging, what work was left for the circle, of whom Emerson now was the center, so many of whom had sacrificed their other interests—philosophical, literary, philanthropic, and theological—to this all-consuming national tragedy? In 1849, after the debacle at Brook Farm, George Ripley moved to New York to work at Greeley’s Tribune, and after Fuller’s death he became the literary editor of the paper. Although he supported the Free-Soil candidate, John Frémont, in the presidential election of 1856, after his defeat, Ripley had withdrawn from politics. He did not think that violence was the way to destroy slavery, and falling back on the French thinkers who had so influenced him, he was willing to await the march of social progress to end the evil. If enough antislavery immigrants settled in the South, he thought, eventually proslavery forces would be defeated in each state and change effected through the legislative system. Ripley supported the North during the conflict, of course, but he thought that even with the South’s defeat, one had to work with Southerners to realize a lasting peace. Not on record about the Secret Six, he probably would have found his friend Parker’s involvement quixotic at best.59

  Brownson’s case was different. By the 1850s he had been a devout Roman Catholic for a decade—indeed, one of the American church’s chief intellectual voices—and lived in New York, where he joined his old Transcendentalist friends in lamenting the increase in slave territories and the South’s attempts to gain even more. For many years a staunch member of the Democratic Party, after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case in 1857, Brownson drifted toward the new Republican Party, even though he was slow to relinquish his long-standing support of states’ rights. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ruling that Dred Scott, a slave then living in Missouri who had sued for his freedom because he had lived in Free States and territories, was not a citizen (implying as well that no African American could be) and so could not bring suit, so outraged Brownson that he moved to the party of Lincoln. In Brownson’s Quarterly Review he continued to argue for the unity of the races and the inherent dignity of each person, and he lambasted Southerners for trying to enlarge their political base. Although these views were not popular with all his Catholic readers, he continued to advocate the notion that the war was not only to preserve the Union but to effect full emancipation.60 By 1861, the impending crisis thus preoccupied virtually all surviving Transcendentalists, even though none served in battle.

  But what was the long-term effect of this turn away from the kinds of intellectual and social engagement that hitherto had so clearly defined the Transcendentalist movement? When the war was over, where would the energy flow? After the North’s victory, what work remained for the circle of which Emerson now was the de facto center, if almost by default? One thing is clear. Because of the Transcendentalists’ confrontation with the internal demon of slavery, their vision for cultural and social renewal became more nationalistic and less concerned with the universal humanitarianism that hitherto had defined the faith of so many of them. A few among the second generation continued to dream of a new kind of social harmony, but with the North’s triumph, industrial capitalism only increased its hold on the nation. The self-reliant entrepreneur was man of the hour, and the Gilded Age was Emerson’s, as he was canonized as America’s philosopher.

  10

  FREE RELIGION AND THE DREAM OF A COMMON HUMANITY

  Reviewing his life in Cheerful Yesterdays (1898), Thomas Wentworth Higginson devoted a chapter to “The Birth of a Literature,” in which he chronicled the rise of the “Atlantic circle” who wrote for The Atlantic Monthly and its longtime publisher, Ticknor and Fields. This group was typified, he continued, by Emerson, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the abolitionist and poet John Greenleaf Whittier, the genial essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, and poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, “to name only the six most commonly selected as representatives.” These embodied a truly national literary culture, Higginson claimed. What “saved this circle from becoming a clique and a mere mutual admiration society,” he continued, “was its fortunate variety of temperaments.” A contributor to the magazine from its inception as well as a friend of all the parties whom he named, Higginson was in a position to know.1

  In the 1860s The Atlantic was still a new publishing venture. A decade earlier the author and abolitionist Francis Henry Underwood, a native of the small western Massachusetts hill town of Enfield, had conceived of a monthly magazine, comparable to Harper’s Magazine, devoted to the literature and culture of Boston and its environs, more lively and au courant than the stuffy North American Review and more wide-ranging than The Christian Examiner. In 1857 Underwood convinced Phillips, Sampson and Company to undertake the venture, and he lined up as supporters and potential contributors Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and others. The first issue of The Atlantic: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics appeared late that same year, Lowell its first editor and Underwood offering stalwart assistance for several years. In 1859, after Phillips, Sampson failed, the publisher William Ticknor bought the journal and transferred the editorship to his business partner, James T. Fields. Thereafter the firm used the journal as virtually a house organ to tout its own authors (including Higginson). At its inception The Atlantic was pro-Union and antislavery and, once the war had begun, solidly behind Lincoln.2

  Given Emerson’s prominence on Higginson’s list, one might expect that other Transcendentalists would find a home in the new periodical, but such was not the case. Ironically, the 1850s, which saw the Transcendentalists’ inward turn, also produced the most highly regarded American literature to date, but most of it related only indirectly to Emerson’s and, to a lesser degree, Margaret Fuller’s encouragement of belles lettres. By most standards, the Transcendentalists’ lasting literary achievement was limited to Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman (a special case), a reminder that the movement’s most important influence lay elsewhere. And while the literary achievement of these Transcendentalists resulted from attempts to reconcile long-standing interests in self-culture with the bumptious nationalism that dominated the 1850s, in the cases of other great writers from the period, particularly Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, it issued from their challenge to the New England Idealists’ cosmic optimism.

  Consider, for example, Emerson’s English Traits (1856), in which he used his recent trip to England and the Continent, in the signal years 1847–48, as the occasion to meditate on the Old World and the New. Herein he did not stress cross-fertilization so much as America’s direct cultural inheritance from the mother country. “If there be one test of national genius universally accepted,” he continued, “it is success; and if there be one successful country in the universe for the last millennium, that country is England.”3 He also admired, in his chapter on “Manners,” England’s enshrinement of domesticity, the “taproot[,] which enables the nation to branch wide and high,” rooted as it was in the sanctity of private property.4 Coupled with an unwavering common sense that issued in “strong earthy expression” rather than airy symbol and metaphor, the English emphasized “fact” in a way that permanently marked their, and their ex-colonies’, character.5

  Emerson was aware of how accurately these same traits now were viewed as American, as Alexis de Tocqueville had noted in his influential Democracy in America. Emerson thus linked his fulsome praise of England to a belief that the United States had inherited its virtues. This Anglophilia accounts for his implicit devaluation of France’s and Germany’s contributions to the world’s social construction: England had been successful because it did not fall into the mire of French socialism or wander aimlessly in the labyrinth of German philosophy. Albion’s gift to the New World thus consisted of simplicity and clarity, virtues that fitted well with the Market Revolution, rather than the moral complexity and ambiguity that characterized Hawthorne’s and Melville’s great works.

  Thoreau’s Walden (1854), arguably the literary masterpiece of the Transcendentalist movem
ent, similarly embodies a love affair with America as the writer struggles to square his devotion to conscience with the republican ideals on which the nation was founded. An American Everyman, Thoreau mixes the water of Walden Pond with that of the Ganges and slashes the weeds in his bean field like a soldier fighting the Trojan War. For Thoreau, God culminates in the present moment of each person’s life and transforms all aspects of that life into acts of devotion. Content to be in and of the world rather than to transcend it, in his great book Thoreau moved Emerson’s lessons in new directions and, describing the results in his crystalline prose, offered what became the culmination of Transcendentalism’s literary phase.

  But Thoreau, from whom one might have expected more good writing, died of tuberculosis at a tragically young age. His friend Ellery Channing, although a promising poet, never approximated the bard Emerson envisioned in his essay “The Poet” (1843), nor did such male representatives of the sentimental genre as Longfellow, Lowell, or Holmes. That left Walt Whitman, who filled Emerson’s description of an American bard more than any other, but his Transcendentalism was not so much a deep intellectual substratum but simply another layer to the complex social and imaginative life that eventuated in Leaves of Grass (1855). Tellingly, he initially won Emerson’s praise but resisted gravitation into his orbit, something that tended to short-circuit promising careers unless one eventually broke free from Emerson’s magnetic field, as Thoreau did in Walden. To Emerson, Whitman was just another aspiring author, no more or less interesting, finally, than a handful of other young writers whose careers he boosted. When, in subsequent editions of his book, Whitman included homoerotic and otherwise sexually explicit verse, Emerson lost interest.

  Thus, through the 1870s Emerson remained the patriarch of American letters, for European visitors a wonder of the Western world as well known as Niagara Falls and the Lowell mills, but his best work was behind him. The Conduct of Life (1860), published on the eve of the war, is his only satisfying book from his later career, and after 1865 he settled more and more into his newly assumed role as the country’s de facto philosopher in chief, his essays old and new used to justify the economic order. Other first-generation Transcendentalists simply dropped from the literary radar screen. Ripley labored in New York, serving the republic of letters with reviews for Greeley’s newspaper and then turning his attention to the New American Cyclopedia, the many volumes of which he edited with his old Brook Farm friend Charles A. Dana. Brownson wrote endless polemics and book reviews for Brownson’s Quarterly Review, now essentially a church organ. Peabody busied herself with the kindergarten movement, which she worked tirelessly to popularize in the United States, and with Native American rights. Hedge moved back to the Boston area, serving several terms as president of the American Unitarian Association and finally as a professor of ecclesiastical history and (later) of German at Harvard.

  Where did this leave younger, second-generation Transcendentalists who, like their mentors, had been swept up in the sectional crisis and survived? Though little remarked, these younger figures, many trained at Harvard Divinity School in the 1840s and 1850s, were not in the least retiring; and they kept philosophical Idealism and its moral implications in the public eye long after the war. What was the relationship of these younger Transcendentalists to this “Atlantic group,” and what were their contributions to the subsequent cultural moment, what George Santayana termed the “Genteel Tradition,” of which they were representative? More generally, how significant was the afterlife to Transcendentalist ideas and ideals beyond their widespread diffusion in a watered-down Emersonianism, which for three decades had shaped New England’s intellectual discourse?

  Theirs were very different intellectual battles from those their precursors had waged. Giving credence to Emerson’s notion of the timeless conflict between opposed philosophical views, in the postbellum period American intellectuals again divided into the two contending parties, Materialists and Idealists. Now, however, the former marched under a banner emblazoned with the names of Auguste Comte, Charles Darwin, and William Graham Sumner rather than with that of John Locke, while their opponents struggled to maintain consciousness at the center of philosophical inquiry and to buttress ethical imperative in the face of what they regarded as amoral scientific materialism. In the post–Civil War period their contributions to other aspects of American intellectual discourse remained vital, if less remarked, particularly among those who kept alive a dream of a common humanity based in the irreducible equality of all souls.

  The most unusual group of these Idealists surfaced in the 1850s, not in Concord or Boston, but half a continent away, in Cincinnati and St. Louis. The Ohio group centered on John B. Stallo, whose General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature (1848) offered American readers a sophisticated introduction to Hegel’s philosophy.6 Joining him in his admiration for the German philosopher were social reformer Peter Kaufmann, Transcendentalist fellow traveler Moncure Conway, and socialist August Willich, whose lectures and writings illustrate the various uses to which Hegelian Idealism could be put.7 Kaufmann, for example, drew on Hegel’s notion of how, over time, contested truth resulted in social amelioration, while Conway used the philosopher to interrogate the supernatural basis of faith, positing a belief in miracles as simply a stage to a higher form of religion. Willich, a champion of the laborer, eventually found his way to Hegel’s followers, Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, powerfully grounding his critique of market capitalism in historical dialectic.

  Stallo’s contributions to the proliferation of Hegel’s ideas were manifold. For one thing, he elaborated the philosopher’s belief that thought is fundamentally identical with the universe, itself God’s self-revelation. Not surprisingly, given the congruence of this concept with Transcendentalism, Stallo’s book became well known among certain New England intellectuals. Parker, who knew his Hegel, reviewed it for his Massachusetts Quarterly Review and called it “a grand, solid book” and “altogether the best thing upon the profound subject to which it relates that has ever appeared on this side of the water.”8 In his journals, Emerson redacted Stallo’s General Principles, a book that exerted considerable influence on his subsequent understanding of history. Indeed, Stallo, one scholar writes, was “the most persistent influence to keep Emerson’s mind occupied with German thought.”9

  By the late 1850s American interest in Hegel had shifted to St. Louis, where William Torrey Harris (1835–1909), a Connecticut native who emigrated to the West after dropping out of Yale, gathered around him a group of German émigré intellectuals committed to German Idealism.10 Bronson Alcott’s conversations on Platonism as well as his ideas on education had whetted Harris’s philosophical interests; in Cincinnati he both taught in and administered the public school system, and was an early advocate of the kindergarten movement. In 1858 Harris met Henry C. Brockmeyer, a Prussian immigrant to the Mississippi Valley who made and lost a fortune in tanning and shoe manufacture. An autodidact, Brockmeyer subsequently devoted himself to reading and discussing philosophy and politics. He introduced his new friend to Hegel’s thought, which he had discovered in the selections that Frederic Henry Hedge offered in his Prose Writers of Germany (1848). After the Civil War, Harris and Brockmeyer organized the St. Louis Philosophical Society, devoted to the popularization of Hegelian philosophy. When convenient, Stallo and Willich made the trip downriver for meetings.

  Hegel provided these men with a way to understand such large-scale events as America’s rapid economic development and the recent trauma of war. In their view, to date, the United States occupied the highest step of humanity’s progress, even as, given the dialectical nature of history, the country was still evolving, for good or ill. The St. Louis Hegelians sought to align themselves with its future course. They also appreciated the philosopher’s proposition that spirit continuously manifests itself in the world, providing a way for humanity to ground philosophical abstractions in experience. Like their counterparts in Ohio, the St. Louis Hegelians lament
ed the growing tendency to privilege fact over consciousness, a tendency responsible for the country’s descending spiral into philosophical materialism.

  Given Harris’s conversion at Alcott’s hands, these midwesterners also were much interested in Transcendentalism, and they invited both Emerson and Alcott to lecture in St. Louis. They particularly admired the New Englanders’ longtime advocacy of spiritual self-consciousness, as well as their notion of God’s eternal presence in the world, concepts they married to Hegel’s philosophy. To forward the group’s agenda, in 1867 Harris founded the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, a mouthpiece for American Hegelianism that he edited until 1893. In addition to carrying many of his essays, the journal included work by Alcott, Emerson, and several prominent younger Unitarians, as well as pieces by such budding philosophers as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. The influence of the St. Louis Hegelians, however, never extended far beyond the rarified world of philosophical debate. Mounting a systematic challenge to Comte’s Positivism and Darwinian thought, they never extended their influence enough to redirect the nation’s priorities.

  Other direct inheritors of the Transcendentalists deployed philosophical Idealism in different ways. The oldest member to emerge as a major voice of postwar Transcendentalism was Cyrus Bartol (1813-1900), who had published his first important work, Discourses on the Christian Spirit and Life, in 1850 but whose influence within the group was minimal until after the Civil War. O. B. Frothingham remembered him as “a soaring mind enamored of thoughts on divine things, inextricably caught in the toils of speculation.” His Transcendentalism, Frothingham concluded, “had a cast of its own,” for Bartol was a transitional figure.11 He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1832 and Harvard Divinity School in 1835, and attended many of the early meetings of the Transcendentalist Club. However, after he began a pastorate at Boston’s West Church in 1837 that continued until 1884, he made a concerted effort to escape Emerson’s and Parker’s force fields, worshipping a more personal Christian deity than they allowed and remaining loyal to the mainstream Unitarians—he voted, for example, with ministers who sought to exclude Parker from their pulpits. In his theology the West Church minister thus recalls Frederic Henry Hedge, another long-lived first-generation Transcendentalist stalwart who distanced himself from Emerson and Parker even as he continued to inflect his Unitarianism with Transcendentalist ideas.