American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  [Henry Thoreau at Walden Pond]: Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 114-16; see also Marx, pp. 249-55; R·W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 20-27; Henry Beetle Hough, Thoreau of Walden (Archon Books, 1970); James Mcintosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist (Cornell University Press, 1974).

  [Thoreau on the railroad]: Walden, pp. 115-22.

  [Lerner on Thoreau]: Max Lerner, “Thoreau: No Hermit,” from Max Lerner, Ideas Are Weapons (Viking Press, 1939), p. 45·

  [Thoreau on the railroad as an Atropos]: Walden, p. 118.

  [Thoreau’s description of his house]: Walden, p. 48.

  [Thoreau’s “experiment in human ecology”]: so described by Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Henry Thoreau in Our Time,” in Sherman Paul, ed., Thoreau (Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 26; this essay, p. 26, is also the source of Thoreau’s statement about living deep. See also Sherman Paul, The Shores of America (University of Illinois Press, 1958).

  [James Russell Lowell on Thoreau’s “experiment ”]: quoted in Leon Edel, Henry D. Thoreau (University of Minnesota Press, 1970), p. 29.

  [Sam Staples on Thoreau’s jailing]: quoted in Milton Meltzer and Walter Harding, A Thoreau Profile (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962), p. 158.

  [Thoreau’s exchange (apocryphal) with Emerson]: ibid., pp. 161-62.

  [Sherman Paul on Thoreau’s means of self-emancipation]: Sherman Paul, “A Fable of the Renewal of Life,” in Paul, p. 103.

  [Emerson on Thoreau’s “Excursions on Concord & Merrimack Rivers ”]: Emerson to Charles K. Newcomb, July 16, 1846, Emerson Papers, Concord Free Public Library.

  [Emerson on communicating across seventeen miles]: Emerson to Newcomb, Aug. 16, 1842, ibid.

  [Nathaniel Hawthorne on Sleepy Hollow]: Randall Stewart, ed..The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Yale University Press, 1932), pp. 102-4.

  [Hawthorne’s life]: Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Cornell University Press, 1976); Newton Arvin, Hawthorne (Little, Brown, 1929); Hyatt H. Waggoner, Nathaniel Hawthorne (University of Minnesota Press, 1962).

  [Van Wyck Brooks on the ghosts and legends of Salem]: Brooks, p. 212.

  [Hawthorne on the “supremely artificial establishments”]: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from The American Note-Books (Houghton Mifflin, 1900), p. 156.

  [Hawthorne interpretation]: Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (Alfred A. Knopf, 1958); A. N. Kaul, ed., Hawthorne (Prentice-Hall, 1966).

  [Ethan Brand on humanity as the subject of an experiment]: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Ethan Brand,” in Hawthorne’s Works (Houghton Mifflin, 1887), Vol. 3, p. 495.

  [Melville on his “Whale” and Hawthorne’s “Unpardonable Sin”]: Melville to Hawthorne,

  June 1?, 1851, in Merrell R. Davis and William H. Oilman, eds., The letters of Herman,

  Melville (Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 126-31.

  [Melville on “cruel cogs and wheels”]: quoted in Marx, p. 286.

  [Leavis on Melville]: Q. D. Leavis, “Melville: The 1853-6 Phase,” in Faith Pullin, ed., New Perspectives on Melville (Kent State University Press, 1978), p. 214.

  [Marx on the American hero]: Marx, p. 364.

  [Philosophical themes and dualities in Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville]: works cited above, esp. Levin, Marx, Parrington; Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self (Alfred A. Knopf, 1971); Lewis, The American Adam; Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953).

  Religion: Free Exercise

  [Finney’s sermon]: Bernard Weisberger. They Gathered at the River (Little, Brown, 1958), pp. 101, 109, 239.

  [Concern of eastern ministers about lack of religion on the frontier]: Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “Inductive and Deductive Politics: Science and Society in Antebellum Presbyterian Thought,” Journal of American History, Vol. 64, No. 3 (December 1977), p. 708.

  [Timothy Dwight]: Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brother’s Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800-186; (Rutgers University Press, 1960), p. 17.

  [“Very wintry season” for religion after the Revolution]: R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815-1840 (Indiana Historical Society, 1950), Vol. 2, p. 420.

  [Tocqueville on everywhere meeting “a politician where you expected to find a priest”]: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), Henry Reeve Text, Phillips Bradley, ed. Vol. 1, pp. 306-7.

  [Dependence of American ministers on laity for support after disestablishment]: Sidney E. Mead, “The Rise of the Evangelical Conception of the Ministry in America (1607-1850),” in H. Richard Niebuhr and Daniel D. Williams, eds., The Ministry in Historical Perspectives (Harper & Brothers, 1956), p. 217.

  [Timothy Dwight on uncertainty of voluntary contributions for support of ministry]: Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 4 vols. (T. Dwight, 1821-22), Vol. 3, p. 3.

  [Dominant religious groups in colonial America]: Sidney E. Mead, “Denominationalism: The Shape of Protestantism in America,” Church History, Vol. 24 (December 1954), p. 294.

  [Early missionary work of Presbyterians on the western frontier]: William Warren Sweet, Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765-1840 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), pp. 148-49.

  [Cane Ridge revival described]: Bulcy, p. 421.

  [Presbyterian split into Old School and New School]: Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Dorsey Press, 1969), p. 82.

  [Methodist circuit riders]: Buley, pp. 450-52.

  [Description of camp meeting]: John Allen Krout and Dixon Ryan Fox, The Completion of Independence, 1790-1830 (Macmillan, 1944), p. 173.

  [Peter Cartwright’s account of frontier proselytizing]: Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 443-44.

  [Ahlstrom on dramatic confrontation over “infant sprinkling”]: ibid., p. 444.

  [Membership statistics of churches in 1850]: Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Doubleday, 1955), p. 119.

  [Second Great Awakening in New England]: Ahlstrom, p. 417.

  [Timothy Dwight’s asceticism]: Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (Avon Books, 1977), p. 173.

  [Numbers of Roman Catholics in America in colonial era]: Herberg, p. 151. [Numbers of Roman Catholics in America in 1850]: Ahlstrom, p. 542.

  [Issue of “trusteeism” in Roman Catholic Church]: Herberg, pp. 152-54.

  [Anti-Catholic rioting in 1830s and 1840s]: Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (Macmillan, 1938), pp. 68-70; see also Herberg, p. 155.

  [The beginning of the Mormon Church]: Leonard J. Arlington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). p. 204.

  [Mormons expelled from Missouri and Illinois]: Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (Houghton Mifflin, 1942), pp. 75-101, 327-30.

  [Brigham Young growing up amidst “fiery” Methodist revivals]: in Arlington and Bitton, p. 86.

  [Mead on competition]: Mead. “Denominationalism,” p. 316.

  [Evangelical antislavery activities of Lane rebels]: Buley, p. 617.

  [Whittier on antislavery]: quoted in Anne C. Loveland, “Evangelicalism and ‘Immediate Emancipation’ in American Antislavery Thought,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 32 (1966), pp. 187-88.

  Schools: The “Temples of Freedom”

  [George Washington on the need for “general diffusion of knowledge”]: “Farewell Address,” John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Government Printing Office, 1940), Vol. 35, p. 230.

  [Thomas Jefferson on need for education]: Jefferson to Charles Yancey, Jan. 6, 1816, in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (C. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), Vol. 10, p. 4.

  [The need to educate jurors, etc., in the “first interest of all”]: Charles Stewart Davis, “Popular Government,” reprinted in Joseph L. Blau
, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (Hafner, 1947), pp. 45-46.

  [Edward Everett on “the utmost practicable extension … to a system of education ”]: Lawrence A. Cremin, The American Common School (Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1951), p. 32.

  [Schools as “Temples of Freedom”]: J. Orville Taylor, quoted in Rush Welter, Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America (Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 43.

  [William Manning on “larning”]: William Manning, The Key of Libberty (The Manning. Association, 1922), pp. 20-21.

  [Welter on republican and democratic educational institutions]: Welter, p. 57.

  [Leaders and goals of the Common School Awakening]: Robert L. Church and Michael W. Sedlak, Education in the United States: An Interpretive History (Free Press, 1976), pp.

  55-57.

  [Undermining of status of skilled craftsmen and the decline of the apprenticeship system]: Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), p. 25.

  [Leadership of Robert Dale Owen in Working Men’s party demands for education]: Richard William Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: A Biography (Octagon Books, 1969), p. 93; Joseph G. Rayback, A History of American Labor (Macmillan, 1959), p. 66; Welter, p. 45.

  [Owen on need for national system of education]: Cremin, p. 33.

  [Leadership of Thaddeus Stevens in passage of common school law in Pennsylvania]: Carl Russell Fish, The Rise of the Common Man, 1830-1850 (Macmillan, 1927), p. 217.

  [Colonial education]: Bernard Bailyn, cited in Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System (Harvard University Press, 1973), p. viii.

  [Estimates of number of children without education in middle Atlantic states]: Curti, p. 28.

  [Statistics on free education in Massachusetts, New England, and the middle Atlantic states]: ibid., pp. 27-28.

  [Complaint of school board member on a teacher’s lack of dedication]: Stanley K. Schultz, The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789-1860 (Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 76. See also Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Harvard University Press, 1968).

  [Henry Barnard’s estimates on better funding of private schools in Connecticut]: Curti, p. 27. [Horace Mann on the money value of education]: ibid., p. 112.

  [Views of Henry Barnard on education]: ibid., pp. 139-68, and in Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 1, p. 623.

  [Leaders of the Common School Awakening in the South]: Church and Sedlak, pp. 123-27.

  [Calvin Wiley on universal education]: Curti, p. 71.

  [Educational effort of the South before the Civil War]: Church and Sedlak, pp. 122-23.

  [Teacher training program of Catharine Beecher]: Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (Yale University Press, 1973), p. 183.

  [Missionary effort of New England ministers “swarming out” to save the West]: Fish, p. 224.

  [Caleb Mills and the founding of the Indiana school system]: R. E. Banta, Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 (Wabash College, 1949), p. 221; Charles W. Moores, Caleb Mills and the Indiana School System (Indiana Historical Society Publications, Vol. 3, No. 6, 1905), pp. 363-78; Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850-1880 (Indiana Historical Bureau and Indiana Historical Society, 1965), pp. 461-65.

  [Mills on advisability of meeting the expense of “proper education “]: Thornbrough, pp. 462-63.

  [John Pierce and the establishment of the Michigan educational system]: Buley, Vol. 2, p. 368, and in Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 14, p. 583.

  [Religious leaders’ founding of public schools described]: Timothy L. Smith, “Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800-1859,”Journal of American History, Vol. 53, No. 4 (March 1967), pp. 679-95.

  [Religious issues in New York City schools]: Church and Sedlak, pp. 158-68.

  [Conflict of purposes in common school movement]: ibid., pp. 186-89. See also Selwyn K. Troen, The Public and the Schools (University of Missouri Press, 1975); Kaestle.

  [High school movement]: Church and Sedlak, p. 182.

  [School attendance figures]: Fish, p. 224.

  [Mann on the need to be free before being educated]: Curti, p. 136.

  Leaders of the Penny Press

  [Hamilton on liberty of the press]: Federalist No. 84.

  [Rise of the penny press]: Frank L. Mott, American Journalism (Macmillan, 1962), Ch. 12; Edwin Emery, The Press and America (Prentice-Hall, 1972), Ch. 11; Sidney Kobre, Foundations of American Journalism (Florida State University, 1958), Ch. 13.

  [Newspapers dependent on big-city environment]: Allan R. Pred, ed., The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban-Industrial Growth, 1800-1914 (MIT Press, 1966), pp. 174-175, 202-3.

  [Police-court reports of the Sun]: Mott, p. 223.

  [Bennett’s New York Herald]: Kobre, Ch. 15, quoted at p. 259; Mott, pp. 229-35.

  [Hoes “lightning press”]: Emery, pp. 201-2.

  [Impact of cost of large presses]: Kobre, p. 289.

  [Telegraph dispatch]: Molt, p. 247.

  [Papers in every tavern]: ibid., p. 241.

  [Refusal of southern postmasters to deliver abolitionist papers]: ibid., p. 306.

  [New papers in the East]: Kobre, pp. 302-3; Moll, pp. 238-41. [New papers in the West]: Mott, Ch. 16, quoted at p. 282.

  [Attacks on Bennett]: Kobre, pp. 269-71.

  [Coverage of the Mexican War]: Emery, p. 194.

  [Horace Greeley’s description of himself]: Greeley Papers, New York Public Library, 1844-47 folder.

  [Greeley’s boss’s desire for “decent- looking men”]: Mott, p. 219 n.

  [Greeley’s ideal of a paper]: Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (J. B. Ford, 1868), p. 137.

  [Greeley on reform]: Mott, p. 272.

  [Criticism of “libertines”]: ibid., p. 271.

  [Advice to Emerson and other young writers]: Greeley Papers, 1844-47 folder.

  [Readership of the Tribune]: Kobre, p. 285.

  [Parrington’s description of Greeley]: Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, Vol. 2. p. 257.

  [Young reporters’ income]: Kobre, p. 291.

  [Melville’s source of income]: Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870: The Papers of William Charvat (Ohio State University Press 1968), p. 196.

  [The penny press in a democratic market society]: Michael Shudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (Basic Books, 1978), pp. 43-60.

  [Subscribers to Godey’s Lady’s Book and North American Review]: Douglas, p. 275.

  [Domestic novels ]: John T. Frederick, “Hawthorne’s ‘Scribbling Women,’ ” New England Quarterly, Vol. 47 (June 1975), pp. 231-40.

  [The special journal devoted to reform]: Bernard A. Weisberger, The American Newspaperman (University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 86.

  [Elijah Lovejoy]: Buley, p. 623.

  Abolitionists: By Tongue and Pen

  [Reactions of Adams, New York Evening Post, and Channing to murder of Lovejoy]: Lawrence Lader, The Bold Brahmins: New England’s War Against Slavery, 1831-1863, (E. P. Dutton, 1961), p. 82.

  [Lovejoy as bigot]: Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery (Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 78.

  [Faneuil Hall protest meeting]: Lader, pp. 82-85; Irving H. Bartlett, Wendell Phillips (Beacon Press, 1961), Ch. 4.

  [Attorney General’s castigation of blacks]: Lader, p. 83.

  [Phillips joining antislavery cause]: Bartlett, Ch. 3.

  [Speech of Phillips]: Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Negro Universities Press, 1968, orig. pub. 1884), pp. 1-10, quoted at p. 3.

  [Garrison on Phillips]: Bartlett, p. 51.

  [Early antislavery sentiment]: David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Cornell University Press, 1975).

  [Questions of goals, strategy, and tactics]: Aileen Kraditor. Means and Ends in American Abolitionism (Pantheon Books, 1967), passim; Gerald Sorin,
Abolitionism (Praeger, 1972), passim; Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Pantheon Books, 1968), Chs. 4-5; William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 (Cornell University Press, 1977).

  [Garrison on the Constitution]: Filler, p. 216.

  [Wendell Phillips on government and the safety of the Republic’s liberties]: Wendell Phillips, “Public Opinion,” speech of Jan. 28, 1852, reprinted in Speeches, pp. 53-54; Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), Ch. 6.

  [Phillips on roles of reformer and politician]: Hofstadter, p. 136.

  [Lydia Child on moral influence and party action]: Lydia M. Child, “Talk About Political Party,” reprinted from The National Anti-Slavery Standard in The Liberator, Aug. 5, 1842, quoted in Kraditor, p. 163.

  [Characterization of abolitionists]: Sorin, Ch. 1; see also Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists (Greenwood, 1971), Ch. 1.

  [Lewis Tappan]: Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Atheneum, 1969), p. viii.

  [The Grimké sisters]: Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina (Houghton Mifflin, 1967), passim.

  [Kraditor on abolitionists]: Kraditor, p. x.

  [Influence of Phillips’ wife]: Hofstadter, p. 139.

  [Lydia Child on changing public opinion]: Kraditor, p. 160.

  [James Russell Lowell]: Martin Duberman, James Russell Lowell (Houghton Mifflin, 1966), passim.

  [Hildreth, and antislavery themes in American literature]: Lorenzo D. Turner, Anti-Slavery Sentiment in American Literature Prior to 1865 (Kennikat Press, 1929).

  [Harriet Beecher Stowe]: Robert Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline (Lippincott, l940.

  [Sales figures for Uncle Tom’s Cabin]: Filler, p. 210; Wilson, pp. 281, 341.

  [John Brown in Ohio]: Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood (Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 41-42.