1831

by Louis P. Masur

  The icy heart of the American needed to be thawed, but Trollope dismissed as little more than a humbug evangelical attempts to do so. The “endless variety of religious factions” astonished her, as did the “vehement expressions of insane or hypocritical zeal” offered by itinerant ministers. In Indiana, she attended a revivalist camp-meeting and witnessed “hysterical sobbings, convulsive groans, shrieks, and screams the most appalling.” “I felt sick with horror,” Trollope reported. She viewed the preachers as actors playing to a participating audience that consisted mainly of young women. Once she saw a girl, in a fit of ecstasy, fall twelve feet from a gallery above into the arms of the congregation below. She watched with disgust as preachers sidled up to attractive women and whispered in their ears, “Sister, dear Sister,” and the ladies responded by blushing and murmuring their confessions. The feminization of American religion astonished Trollope, who “never saw, or read, of any country where religion had so strong a hold upon the women, or a slighter hold upon the men.” She believed that the reason religion attracted women more than men was that the clergy devoted to them “that sort of attention which is so dearly valued by every female heart throughout the world.” And she chastised the good husbands and fathers of America for abandoning their wives and daughters to the domestic, evangelical realm, where ministers bound them in the “iron chains of a most tyrannical fanaticism.”57

  For Trollope, religion offered but one example of the evils of the illusion of equality in America. She despised the incessant political talk that inundated conversation. “Election fever,” she noted, was “constantly raging through the land.” The “electioneering madness alone,” she exclaimed, even if everything else in America was attractive, “would make me fly it in disgust. It engrosses every conversation, it irritates every temper, it substitutes party spirit for personal esteem; and, in fact, vitiates the whole system of society.” She was nauseated by the behavior of politicians who smoked cigars, swilled whiskey, and spit repeatedly; the title of her book might have been “the total and universal want of manners” in America. Despite all the statements, expositions, and editorials, the resignation of Jackson’s Cabinet remained an enigma to Trollope, though she admired Edward Clay’s caricature of the fleeing rats. Listening to deliberations in Congress, she gleaned a puzzling truth about the American polity: every debate seemed to pivot on the issue of “the entire independence of each individual state, with regard to the federal government.” “The jealousy on this point,” she commented, “appeared to me to be the very strangest political feeling that ever got possession of the mind of man.”58

  On only one day out of the year did the nation seem to be united and the people magnanimous: July 4. On that day, “the hearts of the people seem to awaken from a three hundred and sixty-four days’ sleep; they appear high-spirited, gay, animated, social, generous.” The rest of the year, however, Americans seemed an uncouth, inarticulate people driven only by the pursuit of wealth. In Cincinnati, trash was left in the streets to be disposed of by roving pigs; no one read books, only newspapers; and the only topic of conversation was enterprise. Trollope agreed with an English friend who proclaimed that, regardless of the location—on the street, in the home, in the field, at the theater—“he had never overheard Americans conversing without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them.” “Such unity of purpose, such sympathy of feeling,” Trollope insisted, “can be found nowhere else, except, perhaps, in an ants’ nest. The result is exactly what might be anticipated. This sordid object, for ever before their eyes, must inevitably produce a sordid tone of mind, and, worse still, it produces a seared and blunted conscience on all questions of probity.” Thus Americans, Trollope thought, gave fewer alms than any other nation in the world and averted their eyes from the problems of the poor.

  But where profit was to be made, there the American commitment was limitless. Even Trollope marveled at “the boldness and energy with which public works are undertaken and carried through. Nothing stops them if a profitable result can be fairly hoped for. It is this which has made cities spring up amidst the forests with such inconceivable rapidity; and could they once be thoroughly persuaded that any point of the ocean had a hoard of dollars beneath it, I have not the slightest doubt that in about eighteen months we should see a snug covered railroad leading direct to the spot.”

  Such grandiose scheming matched the grandeur of the American landscape, which offered forests and storms and vistas unlike anywhere else. “The clearness and brightness of the atmosphere” astonished Trollope with its radiance and purity. “Every thing seems colossal on this great continent,” she observed. “If it rains, if it blows, if it thunders, it is all done fortissimo; but I often felt terror yield to wonder and delight, so grand, so glorious were the scenes a storm exhibited.”59

  Trollope was giving voice to the romantic ideal of the sublime, a fascination with the power of nature to overwhelm the imagination and overturn the creations of humankind. At the precise moment when she was writing about the terrors and wonders of nature, an American artist in Europe was painting such a scene. Trollope, as with everything else, disdained the quality of the arts in the United States. She believed that American artists, whatever their natural talents, had to make their way “through darkness and thick night.”60 To the extent that she was correct, artists groped along by leaving the United States for study in Europe. One such artist, Thomas Cole, was in his second year of travel in England and on the Continent when he painted his Tornado in an American Forest, a work he described as “the greatest picture, perhaps, I have painted.”

  A storm has enveloped a forest and it threatens devastation. The sky has turned black; only a patch of light remains. The wind pushes against the trees. A man seeks cover between two gnarled trunks, but he is as inconsequential as a fallen branch. What power hath nature. How insignificant the worldly pursuits of man. Those caught in the storm’s fury might survive, but the experience would change them, and their society, forever.

  Cole exhibited the painting in England and then traveled the continent before returning to New York. “Completely tired of voyaging,” he escaped the civilization of Europe for the landscape of America. Upon his return, he began his famous cycle of five works on The Course of Empire (1833–36). The paintings depicted the inevitable decline and destruction of all great commercial empires. Try as it might, America could not escape the fate of previous republics, and the current low condition of society, suggested Cole, would only hasten the disappearance of the nation before it had survived a century.61

  Trollope took the opposite journey from Cole. She fled America for England, but not before experiencing a terrible storm like the one depicted in Tornado. She stood with her children on a hill, mesmerized as the tempest approached and unleashed its fury. The air grew heavy. The sky turned blue-black. Birds dived to the ground seeking shelter. Slowly, but inescapably, the darkening heavens moved overhead until “the inky cloud burst asunder, and cataracts of light came pouring from behind it … . The heavens blazed and bellowed above and around us, till stupor took the place of terror, and we stood utterly confounded … . Torrents of water seemed to bruise the earth by their violence; eddies of thick dust rose up to meet them; the fierce fires of heaven only blazed the brighter for the falling flood … . The wind was left at last the lord of all, for after striking with wild force, now here, now there, and bringing worlds of clouds together in most hostile contact, it finished by clearing the wide heavens of all but a few soft straggling masses, whence sprung a glorious rainbow, and then retired, leaving the earth to raise her half-crushed forests.”

  19. Thomas Cole, Tornado in an American Forest, 1831. 1835, oil on canvas, 463/8 × 645/8 in. (117.7 x 164.1 cm) (Courtesy of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., Gallery Fund)

  Some weeks later, Trollope looked heavenward again and witnessed the solar eclipse. She described it as “nearer total than any I ever saw, or ever shall see.” Though “the darkness was considerable,” the s
now lessened the effect by reflecting what light shone through. It was a freezing day in Alexandria, but Trollope spent the entire time outdoors, on a rise near the Potomac River. “In this position,” she noted, “many beautiful effects were perceptible; the rapid approach and change of shadows, the dusky hue of the broad Potomac, that seemed to drink in the feeble light … the gradual change of every object from the colouring of bright sunshine to one sad universal tint of dingy purple, the melancholy lowing of the cattle, and the short, but remarkable suspension of all labour.”62 The day seemed mysterious, pregnant with meaning; its hues would linger for a long time to come.

  1. “A Map of the Eclipse of Feb.y 12th in Its Passage Across the United States,” American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

  CHRONOLOGY

  January 1: William Lloyd Garrison publishes the first issue of The Liberator and emerges as a leader of the abolitionist movement in the United States.

  February 12: Eclipse of the sun.

  February 14: Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts speaks against Indian removal.

  February 17: Correspondence between President Andrew Jackson and Vice-President John C. Calhoun is published.

  March 7: Supreme Court hears arguments in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge.

  March 14: William Wirt, former attorney-general and lead counsel for the Cherokee Indians, addresses Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia.

  March 18: Supreme Court issues decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia.

  March 24: Dinner for Daniel Webster, senator from Massachusetts, at City Hotel in New York.

  April 7: Resignations of Cabinet members in Jackson’s administration begin.

  April 26: New York legislature abolishes imprisonment for debt.

  May 10: Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont arrive in New York from France and begin their tour of American society.

  June 4-7: Meeting between Black Hawk, a Sauk warrior, and Major General Gaines of the United States Army at Rock Island, Illinois.

  June 29: Magdalen Society Report on prostitution in New York is issued.

  July 4: James Monroe, former President of the United States, dies.

  Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina addresses the States Rights and Free Trade Party.

  Representative William Drayton of South Carolina addresses the Union and States Rights Party.

  John Quincy Adams, former president, addresses the town of Quincy, Massachusetts.

  Hymn “America” performed for the first time.

  July 25: Cyrus McCormick, a Virginia farmer and inventor, tests his mechanical reaper.

  July 26: John C. Calhoun issues Fort Hill letter irrevocably linking him to nullification.

  August 5: Frances Trollope arrives home in England with the manuscript of Domestic Manners of the Americans in hand.

  August 22: Nat Turner’s rebellion begins.

  August 25: John Quincy Adams delivers eulogy for James Monroe.

  September 3: John James Audubon, artist and naturalist, arrives in New York.

  September 24: Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story delivers consecration address at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

  September 28: Anti-Masonic Convention in Baltimore nominates William Wirt as candidate for president.

  September 30—October 7: Free Trade Convention, opposed to tariffs, meets in Philadelphia.

  October 23: Charles Grandison Finney, a leading evangelical minister, delivers sermon “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.”

  October 26: Friends of Domestic Industry Convention in support of tariffs is held in New York.

  November 11: Nat Turner executed.

  November 12: The John Bull, a steam-powered railroad car, makes its first trip.

  November 25: Confessions of Nat Turner published.

  December 12-16: National Republican Convention in Baltimore nominates Henry Clay of Kentucky for president.

  December 14: Virginia legislature begins debate over the abolition of slavery.

  December 24: Nicholas Biddle, director of the Second Bank of the United States, decides to apply early for rechartering of the institution.

  December 26: Newspapers report that the cholera epidemic has reached England and is headed for the United States.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book about a year has been many years in the making. I am grateful to the Mellon Foundation for a Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard University, where I first started thinking about 1831. Additional support has come from the Rifkind Center for the Humanities at City College as well as the PSC-CUNY Fund. Two short-term fellowships allowed me to complete the research for this work. I served as a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, where the collections and staff are superb. I am indebted to Georgia Barnhill, Nancy Burkett, Joanne Chaison, Alan Degutis, Ellen Dunlap, John Hench, and Marie Lamoureux. I also profited from an Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. My thanks to Jenny Ambrose, Jim Green, Phil Lapsan-sky, Erika Piola, Jessy Randall, Nicole Scalessa, John Van Horne, and Sarah Weatherwax. At City College, Martin Tamny, Jim Watts, and Frank Grande helped make certain I would have time to write.

  Over the years, a number of friends have contributed in different ways to this project. They include Bob Allison, John Brooke, Tom Brown, Peter Coclanis, David Gerber, Christine Herbes-Sommers, David Jaffee, Keith Mayes, David Nasaw, Carol Quirke, Richard Skolnik, and Darren Staloff. I so wish John Phillips were here to share in this moment. I do not know where I would be without Dave at the Bagel Dish, Ed at Raritan Video, the BLRB, occasional Friday nights with the Whites, Allan Lockspeiser and all our teams, and Jesse Wolpert and the guys at the Center School. I appreciate the interest in my work shown by the entire Fox and Mallin families. A few years ago, my parents, Sarah and Seymour Masur, moved five blocks away. They always ask “How is the book going?”—and, if it is not too much trouble, could I run an errand? I am fortunate that they live nearby. Dave Masur, Bruce Rossky, and Mark Richman would not think to look for their names here, and that is only one of many reasons why I cherish them.

  I am lucky that Arthur Wang first expressed interest in this project and even luckier that Lauren Osborne became my editor. I am grateful to Lauren for encouraging me to write the book that I envisioned and improving the one that I wrote. Her assistant, Catherine Newman, ushered me through the publication process with efficiency and wit.

  Kathy Feeley, Jim Goodman, Doug Greenberg, Peter Mancall, Aaron Sachs, and Tom Slaughter read the manuscript and provided insight, encouragement, and bottomless cups of coffee. They also danced at my son’s bar mitzvah. For my fortieth birthday, Tom gave me a rock with the word CREATE carved in it, and soon thereafter I started writing. What I owe him can not be repaid with the next present I buy, but I will certainly try.

  I promised Sophie that her name would go first this time. I promised Ben that I would not list all his accomplishments. And I promised Jani that for our twentieth wedding anniversary, we would vacation in Hawaii. Well, two out of three is not bad. Every day they show me that love is wild, love is real, love will not let you down.

  LPM

  Highland Park, N.J.

  May 2000

  ALSO BY LOUIS P. MASUR

  Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and

  the Transformation of American Culture 1776–1865

  NOTES

  ECLIPSE

  1 Ash’s Pocket Almanac, quoted in the Saturday Bulletin, February 5, 1831; Daily Chronicle, February 11, 1831. See also Boston Evening Transcript, February 14, 1831.

  2 Diary of Sarah Connell Ayer (Portland, 1910), p. 312; Boston Evening Gazette, February 12, 1831; Richmond Enquirer, February 15, 1831.

  3 Daily Chronicle, February 11, 1831; Hampden Gazette, quoted in Daily Chronicle, February 9, 1831.

  4 Philadelphia Gazette, February 18, 1831; Germantown Telegraph, February 16, 1831; N. L. Frothingham,
Signs in the Sun: A Sermon Delivered on the Day After the Eclipse of the 12th February, 1831 (Boston, 1831), p. 6.

  5 National Intelligencer, February 14, 1831; Connecticut Mirror, February 19, 1831; Daily Chronicle, February 14, 1831; Hazard’s Register, February 19,1831; Boston Daily Evening Transcript, February 12, 1831.

  6 Independent Chronicle and Boston Patriot, February 19, 1831; United States Gazette, February 17, 1831.

  7 Edward Everett to Charlotte Everett, February 12, 1831, Everett Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; United States Gazette, February 16, 1831; Philadelphia Gazette, February 17, 1831.

  8 Saturday Bulletin, February 12, 1831.

  SLAVERY AND ABOLITION

  1 The Confessions of Nat Turner (Baltimore, 1831), p. 11; Boston Evening Transcript, August 18, 1831.

  2 Many of the newspaper accounts of Turner’s insurrection are compiled in Henry Irving Tragle, The Southampton, Slave Revolt of 1831 (New York, 1971). Parenthetical page references below are to this volume; all dates are 1831. Constitutional Whig, August 23 (p. 35); Richmond Compiler, August 24 (p. 37); American Beacon, August 26 (p. 40). Turner discusses Travis in his Confessions. See also Samuel Warner, Authentic and Impartial Narrative of the Tragical Scene (New York, 1831).