Interpreters of the Divine and the

Human Condition

American Thoughts and Thinkers, 1800-1860

Unitarianism/Universalism

Rational religion Rejection of Orthodox

Calvinism Unitarianism—man

was too good to damn; Universalists—God was too good to damn

Fatherhood of God, Brotherhood of man, neighborhood of Boston

Evangelicalism Academics tend to focus on the

Universalists and Unitarians, many of whom were in the forefront of reform movements

The dominant U. S. religion was Evangelical Protestantism, which rejected rigid Calvinism

Emphasized reality of sin, redemption, heaven, hell, and personal responsibility for seeking and responding to salvation.

2d Great Awakening Began as a reaction to both rational

religion and apostasy Cain Ridge Revivals in Kentucky “Burned Over District” in Upstate NY New Religions—LDS Church

Cain Ridge Revivals Response to rural isolation and lack of

ecclesiastical structures on the Frontier

Further emergence of low-church Protestantism

Democratization of Christianity

Peter Cartwright (1785-1873) “And who is General Jackson; if General Jackson don’t get his soul converted, God will damn him as soon as anyone else.”

“Burned Over District” Charles Grandison

Finney “I have a retainer from

the Lord to plead his cause; I cannot plead yours”

New Methods of Evangelicalism

Religious Values supported Market Revolution

LDS CHURCH Crucible of Burned Over

district Discovery of the

Tablets Converts by the

Thousands, especially among women

Persecuted by majority protestants in Palmyra, Kirtland, and Nauvoo

Smith murdered in 1844

Significance of 2d Great Awakening

Spawned Reform Movements (Temperance, Abolitionism) and Methods (Moral Suasion

Created a secular, political rhetoric Huge growth in Church membership;

especially among protestants Protestant-based religious bigotry

becomes U. S. norm

Romanticism and Transcendentalism

Reaction to the mechanistic world view of the enlightenment

U. S. version of anti-enlightenment was “transcendentalism”—focusing on the presumed true but improvable and one’s inner light

Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller were key exponents

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

American Scholar (1837)

Self Reliance (1841)

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

“If an man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer

Walden Civil Disobedience

Margaret Fuller (1810-1815)

Editor of the Dial Author of Woman in the 19th

Century “What woman needs is

not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely, and unimpeded to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home.”

Belles Lettres Americanae

Nathaniel Hawthorne—Scarlet Letter Emily Dickinson—1800 poems Washington Irving—Knickerbocker’s . .

. History of New York James Fenimore Cooper--Leather

Stocking Tales Herman Melville—Moby Dick Walt Whitman—Leaves of Grass

Newspapers Richard Hoe’s Rotary Press New York Evening Post—William

Cullen Bryant New York Tribune—Horace Greeley New York Times—Henry J. Raymond

Ferment of Reform Public Education—Horace Mann &

Calvin Wiley Temperance Prison Reform—Dorothea Dix

Women’s Rights Reaction to

Domestic Sphere and to dependency on men for legal protection and political participation

Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Seneca Falls ConventionThe history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men--both natives and foreigners.

Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

Utopian Societies Shakers—Mother Ann Lee Oneida Community—John Humphrey

Noyes New Harmony—Robert Dale Owen Brook Farm—George Ripley

What might this all mean?

Reaction to myriad changes unleashed by Market Revolution

Desire to understand one’s place in the cosmos

Desire to tame “mankind” the way that machines were taming nature.