Technology, Culture, and Everyday Life, 1840–1860 · Technology, Culture, and Everyday Life, 1840–1860 CHAPTER 11 Isaac M. Singer’s life was not going well in 1850. Thirty-nine

Technology, Culture, and Everyday Life,1840–1860

CHAPTER11

Isaac M. Singer’s life was not going well in 1850. Thirty-nine and often pen-niless, he had been an unsuccessful actor, stage hand, ticket seller, carpen-

ter, and inventor. His early inventions had been clever, but not much indemand. Having deserted his wife and children, he promised marriage tolure Mary Ann Sponslor into living with him. Mary Ann tried to please him,nursing him when he was sick and even taking up acting, but to no avail.Instead of marrying her, Singer often beat her, and he would have affairs withseveral other women during the 1850s. But by 1860 Singer had grown fabu-lously wealthy. In 1850 he had come upon and quickly improved a sewingmachine similar to one patented in 1846 by Elias Howe, Jr.

Here was a machine that everyone wanted; sewing-machine designerswere practically bumping into each other at the patent office. The rise of theNew England textile industry in the 1820s had spurred the development ofthe ready-made clothing industry, but the textile factories did not stitchpieces of fabric together to make clothes. Rather, factories contracted sewingout to young women who stitched fabric by hand in their homes. Sewing wasboth a business that employed women and a social activity that womencherished. Even fashionable ladies with no need to earn cash formed sewingcircles to finish or mend their families’ wardrobes, to make garments for thepoor, and to chat.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Technology and Economic Growth

The Quality of Life

Democratic Pastimes

The Quest for Nationality in Literatureand Art

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Stitching by hand took as long as three hours for apair of pants and seven hours for a calico dress. In con-trast, a pair of pants could be stitched by machine inthirty-eight minutes, and a calico dress in fifty-sevenminutes. But the early sewing machines, themselveshand-made, were expensive; in 1851 the largest sewingmachine company could turn out only 700 to 800 sewingmachines a year. The number jumped to 21,000 by 1859and to 174,000 by 1872. What made this huge increasepossible was the adaptation to sewing-machine manu-facturing of machine tools which had recently beendevised for the manufacture of pistols and revolvers (seeCulture and Technology: Guns and Gun Culture).

Having adapted machine tools from gun factories inorder to speed production, sewing-machine makersthen pioneered new ways to market their machines. In1856 a company formed by Singer initiated installmentbuying—five dollars down and small monthly pay-ments—to speed the sale of sewing machines.

Contemporaries could not praise sewing machinesenough. Most of the machines were sold to factories. Bysaving time, they made clothing cheaper, and they gave aterrific boost to the ready-made clothing industry. TheNew York Tribune predicted that, with the spread ofsewing machines, people “will dress better, changeoftener, and altogether grow better looking.” This upbeatresponse to technological change was typical of the1850s. Many Americans believed that technology, a wordcoined in 1829 to describe the application of science toimproving the conveniences of life, was God’s choseninstrument of progress. Just as the Tribune predicted thatsewing machines would create a nation “without spot orblemish,” others forecast that the telegraph, anotherinvention of the age, would usher in world peace.

Yet progress had a darker side. Revolvers were use-less for hunting and of little value in battle, but excellentfor the violent settling of private scores. The farmwomenwho had traditionally earned money sewing by hand intheir homes gradually gave way to women who sewed bymachine in small urban factories that came to belabeled sweatshops for their gruesome conditions.Philosophers and artists began to worry about thedespoliation of the landscape by the very factories thatmade guns and sewing machines, and conservationistslaunched conscious efforts to preserve enclaves ofnature as parks and retreats safe from progress.

This chapter focuses on five major questions:

■ What technological improvements increased theproductivity of American industry between 1840 and1860?

■ In what ways did technology transform the daily livesof ordinary Americans between 1840 and 1860?

■ Technological change contributed to new kinds ofnational unity and also to new forms of social division. What were the main unifying features oftechnology? The principal dividing or segmentingfeatures?

■ How did the ways in which Americans passed theirspare time change between 1840 and 1860?

■ What did American writers and artists see as the dis-tinguishing features of their nation? How did theirviews of American distinctiveness find expression inliterature, painting, and landscape architecture?

TECHNOLOGY ANDECONOMIC GROWTH

Widely hailed as democratic, the benefits of technologydrew praise from all sides. Conservatives like DanielWebster praised machines for doing the work of ten peo-ple without consuming food or clothing, while SarahBagley, a Lowell mill operative and labor organizer,traced the improvement of society to the developmentof technology.

The technology that transformed life in antebellumAmerica included the steam engine, the cotton gin, thereaper, the sewing machine, and the telegraph. Some ofthese originated in Europe, but Americans had a flair forinvesting in others’ inventions and perfecting their own.Improvements in Eli Whitney’s cotton gin between 1793and 1860, for example, led to an eightfold increase in the amount of cotton that could be ginned in a day. Of course, technology did not benefit everyone.Improvements in the cotton gin served to rivet slaverymore firmly in place by making the South more depend-ent on cotton. Technology also rendered many tradition-al skills obsolete and thereby undercut the position ofartisans. But technology contributed to improvementsin transportation and increases in productivity, which inturn lowered commodity prices and raised the livingstandards of a sizable body of free Americans between1840 and 1860.

Agricultural Advancement

Although few settlers ventured onto the treeless, semi-arid Great Plains before the Civil War, settlements edgedwestward after 1830 from the woodlands of Ohio andKentucky into parts of Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois,where flat grasslands (prairies) alternated with forests.

318 CHAPTER 11 Technology, Culture, and Everyday Life, 1840–1860

The prairie’s matted soil was difficult to break for plant-ing, but in 1837 John Deere invented a steel-tipped plowthat halved the labor to clear acres to till. Timber forhousing and fencing was available in nearby woods, andsettlements spread rapidly.

Wheat became to midwestern farmers what cottonwas to their southern counterparts. “The wheat crop isthe great crop of the North-west, for exchange purpos-es,” an agricultural journal noted in 1850. “It pays debts,buys groceries, clothing and lands, and answers moreemphatically the purposes of trade among farmers thanany other crop.” Technological advances sped the har-vesting as well as the planting of wheat on the midwest-ern prairies. Using the traditional hand sickle consumedhuge amounts of time and labor, all the more so becausecut wheat had to be picked up and bound. Since theeighteenth century, inventors in Europe had experi-mented with horse-drawn machines to replace sickles.But until Cyrus McCormick came on the scene, theabsence of the right combination of technical skill andbusiness enterprise had relegated mechanical reapers tothe realm of tinkerers’ dreams.

In 1834 McCormick, a Virginian, patented amechanical reaper that drew on and improved previousdesigns. Opening a factory in Chicago in 1847,McCormick mass produced reapers and introducedaggressive marketing techniques such as deferred pay-ments and money-back guarantees. By harvesting grain

seven times more rapidly than traditional methods andwith half the labor force, the reaper guaranteed the pre-eminence of wheat on the midwestern prairies ofIllinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri. McCormick sold80,000 reapers by 1860, and during the Civil War hemade immense profits by selling more than 250,000.

Ironically, just as a Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney,had stimulated the foundation of the Old South’s econo-my by his invention of the cotton gin, Cyrus McCormick,a proslavery southern Democrat, would help the Northwin the Civil War. The North provided the main marketfor McCormick’s reaper and for the models of his manycompetitors; the South, with its reliance on slave labor,had far less incentive to mechanize agriculture. Thereaper would keep northern agricultural productionhigh at a time when labor shortages caused by troopmobilization might otherwise have slashed production.

Although Americans proved resourceful at invent-ing and marketing machines to speed planting and har-vesting, they farmed wastefully. With land abundant,farmers were more inclined to look for virgin soil than toimprove “worn out” soil. But a movement for agricultur-al improvement in the form of more efficient use of thesoil did develop before 1860, mainly in the East.

Confronted by the superior fertility of western soil,easterners who did not move west or take jobs in facto-ries increasingly experimented with new agriculturaltechniques. In Orange County, New York, for example,

Technology and Economic Growth 319

Guns and Gun Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

Even in the early 1800s some Americans painted animage of their countrymen as expert marksmen. A

popular song attributed the American victory at theBattle of New Orleans in 1815 to the sharpshooting skillsof the Kentucky militia. Yet Andrew Jackson, who com-manded American forces in the battle, thought other-wise, and historians have agreed with him. Accurateguns were the exception in 1815 and for decades after-ward. Balls exited smooth-bore muskets at unpre-dictable angles and started to tumble after fifty or sixtyyards. In 1835 Jackson himself, now president, becamea beneficiary of another feature of guns: their unreliability.A would-be assassin fired two single-shot pistols atJackson at point-blank range. Both misfired.

It was not just the inaccuracy and unreliability ofguns that made the sword and bayonet preferredweapons in battle. Guns were expensive. A gunsmithwould count himself fortunate if he could turn out twentya year; at the Battle of New Orleans, less than one-third

of the Kentucky militia had any guns, let alone guns thatworked.

Believing that the safety of the republic depended ona well-armed militia, Thomas Jefferson was keenly inter-ested in finding ways to manufacture guns more rapidly.As president-elect in 1801 he witnessed a demonstrationby Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin, of gunsmanufactured on the new principle of interchangeableparts. If each part of a gun could be machine-made andthen fitted smoothly into the final product, there would beno need for the laborious methods of the skilled gun-smith. In Jefferson’s presence, Whitney successfully fit-ted ten different gun locks, one after another, to onemusket, using only a screwdriver.

Eager to stave off the impending bankruptcy of hiscotton-gin business, Whitney had already accepted afederal contract to manufacture ten thousand musketsby 1800. His demonstration persuaded Jefferson that,although Whitney had yet to deliver any muskets, he

could do the job. What Jefferson did not knowwas that Whitney cheated on the test: healready had hand-filed each lock so that itwould fit. It would be another eight yearsbefore Whitney finally delivered the muskets.

Whitney’s problem was that as late as 1820no machines existed that could make gun partswith sufficient precision to be interchangeable.During the 1820s and 1830s, however, JohnHall, a Maine gunsmith, began to constructsuch machines at the federal arsenal at HarpersFerry, Virginia. Hall devised new machines fordrilling cast-steel gun barrels, a variety of largeand small drop hammers for pounding piecesof metal into shape, and new tools for cuttingmetal (called milling machines). With improve-ments by others during the 1840s and 1850s,these machine tools made it possible toachieve near uniformity, and hence inter-changeability, in the parts of guns.

At first, Hall’s innovations had little effectsince the army was scaling back its demand forguns in the 1830s. The outbreak of war withMexico in 1846 marked a turning point. Tenyears earlier, a Connecticut inventor, Samuel

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Colt, had secured a patent for a repeating pistol with arotating chambered-breech, usually called a revolver. Atthe start of the Mexican-American War, Colt won a federalcontract to provide the army with one thousand revolvers.These proved to be of negligible value during the war, butColt, a masterful publicist, was soon traveling the globeand telling all that his revolvers had won the war.

Eager to heighten the revolver’s appeal to Americans,Colt made use of a recent invention, called a gramma-graph, that engraved the same design repeatedly onsteel. On the cylinders of his revolvers he impressedimages of frontiersmen using their Colt pistols to heroical-ly protect their wives and children from savage Indians.

In contrast to Hall, a man more interested in makingthan selling guns, Colt had a genius for popularizinggun ownership, not just on the frontier but also amongrespectable citizens in the East. He gave away scores ofspecially engraved revolvers to politicians and WarDepartment officials, and he invited western heroes todine at his Hartford, Connecticut, mansion. NewEngland quickly became the center of a flourishingAmerican gun industry. By 1860 nearly 85 percent of allAmerican guns were manufactured there. By 1859 Colthad cut the price of a new revolver from fifty dollars tonineteen dollars.

As guns became less expensive, they became theweapon of choice for both the military and street toughs.At the Astor Place Riot in 1849 (discussed later), soldiersfrom New York’s Seventh Regiment fired a volley thatkilled twenty-two people, the first time that militia fired onunarmed citizens. Murderers, who traditionally had goneabout their business with knives and clubs, increasinglyturned to guns. In the 1850s a surge in urban homicidesusually caused by guns led to calls for gun control. In1857 Baltimore became the first city to allow its police touse firearms. Confronted with an outbreak of gang war-fare the same year, some New York police captainsauthorized their men to carry guns. No longer a luxury,guns could be purchased by ordinary citizens in newstores that sold only guns and accessories, forerunnersof the modern gun supermarket.

Most states had laws barring blacks from owningguns. Women rarely purchased them. But for whiteAmerican men, owning guns and knowing how to usethem increasingly became a mark of manly self-reliance.Samuel Colt did all he could to encourage this attitude.When the home of a Hartford clergyman was burglarizedin 1861, Colt promptly sent the clergyman “a copy of mylatest work on ‘Moral Reform,’ ” a Colt revolver. Twoyears earlier Dan Sickles, a New York congressman, hadcreated a sensation by waylaying his wife’s lover, PhilipBarton Key (the son of the author of the ”Star-SpangledBanner”), across the street from the White House. Armed

with two pistols and shouting that Key was a “scoundrel”who had dishonored Sickles’s marriage bed, Sickles shotthe unarmed Key four times in front of several witnesses,killing him with the final shot. A notorious womanizer,Sickles had repeatedly cheated on his wife, but hisbehavior struck many men as justifiable. PresidentJames Buchanan, a political ally, paid one witness to dis-appear. Eventually, Sickles was acquitted of murder onthe grounds of “temporary insanity.” He continued toclimb the ladder of politics and in 1863 he led a regimentat the Battle of Gettysburg.

Focus Question:

• Historians of technology remind us that innovationshave often been linked, that an invention in onesphere gives rise to inventions in related spheres.How did this principle operate in the history of gunmanufacture?

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farmers fed their cows the best clover and bluegrass andemphasized cleanliness in the processing of dairy prod-ucts. Through these practices, they produced a superiorbutter that commanded more than double the price ofordinary butter. Still other eastern farmers turned to theuse of fertilizers to keep their wheat production compet-itive with that of the bountiful midwestern prairies. Byfertilizing their fields with plaster left over from the con-struction of the James River Canal, Virginia wheat grow-ers raised their average yield per acre to fifteen bushelsby the 1850s, up from only six bushels in 1800. Similarly,during the 1840s American cotton planters began toimport guano, left by the droppings of sea birds onislands off Peru, for use as fertilizer. Fertilizer helpedeastern cotton farmers close the gap created by thesuperior fertility of southwestern soil for cotton.

Technology and Industrial Progress

Industrial advances between 1840 and 1860 owed animmense debt to the nearly simultaneous developmentof effective machine tools, power-driven machines thatcut and shaped metal. In the early 1800s Eli Whitney’splan to manufacture muskets by using interchangeableparts made by unskilled workers was stalled by theabsence of machine tools. Such tools were being devel-oped in Britain in Whitney’s day, but Americans werenear strangers to them until the 1830s. By the 1840s pre-cise machine tools had greatly reduced the need tohand-file parts to make them fit, and they were appliedto the manufacture of firearms, clocks, and sewingmachines. By 1851 Europeans had started to refer tomanufacture by interchangeable parts as the “AmericanSystem.” In 1853 a small-arms factory in Englandreequipped itself with machine tools manufactured by

two firms in the backwoods of Vermont. After touringAmerican factories in 1854, aBritish engineer concludedthat Americans “universallyand willingly” resorted tomachines as a substitute formanual labor.

The American manufac-turing system had several dis-tinctive advantages. Trad-itionally, damage to any partof a mechanical contrivancehad rendered the whole use-less, for no new part would fit.With the perfection of manu-facturing by interchangeable

parts, however, replacement parts could be obtained. Inaddition, the improved machine tools upon which theAmerican System depended enabled entrepreneurs topush inventions swiftly into mass production. The likeli-hood that inventions would quickly enter productionattracted investors. By the 1850s Connecticut firms likeSmith and Wesson were mass-producing the revolvingpistol, which Samuel Colt had invented in 1836.Sophisticated machine tools made it possible, a manu-facturer wrote, to increase production “by confining aworker to one particular limb of a pistol until he hadmade two thousand.”

After Samuel F. B. Morse transmitted the first tele-graph message from Baltimore to Washington in 1844,Americans also seized enthusiastically on the telegraph’spromise to eliminate the constraints of time and space.The speed with which Americans formed telegraphcompanies and strung lines stunned a British engineer,who noted in 1854 that “no private interests can opposethe passage of a line through any property.” Althoughtelegraph lines usually transmitted political and commer-cial messages, some cities adapted them for reportingfires. By the early 1850s, Boston had an elaborate systemof telegraph stations that could alert fire companiesthroughout the city to a blaze in any neighborhood. By1852 more than fifteen thousand miles of lines connect-ed cities as distant as Quebec, New Orleans, and St.Louis.

The Railroad Boom

Even more than the telegraph, the railroad dramatizedtechnology’s democratic promise. In 1790 evenEuropean royalty could travel no faster than fourteenmiles an hour and that only with frequent changes of


horses. By 1850 an ordinary American could travel threetimes as fast on a train, and in considerable comfort.American railroads offered only one class of travel, incontrast to the several classes on European railroads.With the introduction of adjustable upholstered seatsthat could serve as couches at night, Americans in effecttraveled first class except for African-Americans whooften were forced to sit separately.

Americans loved railroads “as a lover loves his mis-tress,” one Frenchman wrote, but there was little to loveabout the earliest railroads. Sparks from locomotivesshowered passengers riding in open cars, which werecommon. In the absence of brakes, passengers often hadto get out and pull trains to stop them. Lacking lights,trains rarely ran at night. Before the introduction ofstandard time zones in 1883, scheduling was a night-mare; at noon in Boston it was twelve minutes beforenoon in New York City. Delays were frequent, for trainson single-track lines had to wait on sidings for oncomingtrains to pass. Because a train’s location was a mysteryonce it left the station, these waits could seem endless.

Between 1840 and 1860 the size of the rail networkand the power and convenience of trains underwent astunning transformation. Railroads extended track fromthree thousand to thirty thousand miles; flat-roofedcoaches replaced open cars; kerosene lamps made nighttravel possible; and increasingly powerful engines lettrains climb steep hills. Fifty thousand miles of telegraphwire enabled dispatchers to communicate with trains enroute and thus to reduce delays.


Nonetheless, problems lingered. Sleeping accom-modations remained crude, and schedules erratic.Because individual railroads used different gauge track,frequent changes of train were necessary; eight changesinterrupted a journey from Charleston to Philadelphiain the 1850s. Yet nothing slowed the advance of railroadsor cured Americans’ mania for them. By 1860 the UnitedStates had more track than all the rest of the world.

Railroads spearheaded the second phase of thetransportation revolution. Canals remained in use; theErie Canal, for example, did not reach its peak volumeuntil 1880. But railroads, faster and less vulnerable towinter freezes, gradually overtook them, first in passen-gers and then in freight. By 1860 the value of goodstransported by railroads greatly surpassed that carriedby canals.

As late as 1860, few rail lines extended west of theMississippi, but railroads had spread like spider webseast of the great river. The railroads turned southerncities like Atlanta and Chattanooga into thriving com-mercial hubs. Most important, the railroads linked theEast and the Midwest. The New York Central and the ErieRailroads joined New York City to Buffalo; the

Pennsylvania Railroad connected Philadelphia toPittsburgh; and the Baltimore and Ohio linked Baltimoreto Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia). Simul-taneously, intense construction in Ohio, Indiana, andIllinois created trunk lines that tied these routes to citiesfarther west. By 1860 rail lines ran from Buffalo toCleveland, Toledo, and Chicago; from Pittsburgh to FortWayne; and from Wheeling to Cincinnati and St. Louis(see Map 11.1).

Chicago’s growth illustrates the impact of these raillinks. In 1849 it was a village of a few hundred peoplewith virtually no rail service. By 1860 it had become acity of one hundred thousand served by eleven railroads.Farmers in the Upper Midwest no longer had to shiptheir grain, livestock, and dairy products down theMississippi to New Orleans; they could now ship prod-ucts directly east. Chicago supplanted New Orleans asthe interior’s main commercial hub.

The east-west rail lines stimulated the settlementand agricultural development of the Midwest. By 1860Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin had replaced Ohio,Pennsylvania, and New York as the leading wheat-grow-ing states. Enabling farmers to speed their products tothe East, railroads increased the value of farmland andpromoted additional settlement. In turn, populationgrowth triggered industrial development in cities suchas Chicago; Davenport, Iowa; and Minneapolis, for thenew settlers needed lumber for fences and houses andmills to grind wheat into flour.

Railroads also propelled the growth of small townsalong their routes. The Illinois Central Railroad, whichhad more track than any other railroad in 1855, mademoney not only from its traffic but also from real estatespeculation. Purchasing land for stations along its path,the Illinois Central then laid out towns around the sta-tions. The selection of Manteno, Illinois, as a stop on theIllinois Central, for example, transformed the site from acrossroads without a single house in 1854 into a bustlingtown of nearly a thousand in 1860, replete with hotels,lumberyards, grain elevators, and gristmills. (TheIllinois Central even dictated the naming of streets.Those running east and west were always named aftertrees, and those running north and south were num-bered. Soon one rail town looked much like the next.) Bythe Civil War, few thought of the railroad-linked Midwestas a frontier region or viewed its inhabitants as pioneers.

As the nation’s first big business, the railroads trans-formed the conduct of business. During the early 1830s,railroads, like canals, depended on financial aid fromstate governments. With the onset of depression in thelate 1830s, however, state governments scrapped overly


Railroads, 1850

Railroads built 1850 – 1860

Houston New Orleans

Jacksonville

Savannah

Charleston

Jackson

Memphis

Nashville

Louisville

Cincinnati

St. Louis

St. Joseph

Chicago

Detroit

Pittsburgh

Richmond

Washington, D.C.

Philadelphia

New York

Boston

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA(CANADA)

MAP 11.1Railroad Growth, 1850–1860Rail ties between the East and the Midwest greatly increasedduring the railroad “boom” of the 1850s.

0 500 Kilometers

0 500 Miles

ambitious railroad projects. Convinced that railroadsburdened them with high taxes and blasted hopes, vot-ers turned against state aid, and in the early 1840s, sev-eral states amended their constitutions to bar statefunding for railroads and canals. The federal govern-ment took up some of the slack, but federal aid did notprovide a major stimulus to railroads before 1860.Rather, part of the burden of finance passed to city andcounty governments in agricultural areas that wanted toattract railroads. Municipal governments, for example,often gave railroads rights-of-way, grants of land for sta-tions, and public funds.

The dramatic expansion of the railroad network inthe 1850s, however, strained the financing capacity oflocal governments and required a turn toward privateinvestment, which had never been absent from the pic-ture. Well aware of the economic benefits of railroads,individuals living near them had long purchased rail-road securities issued by governments and had directlybought stock in railroads, often paying by contributingtheir labor to building the railroads. But the large rail-roads of the 1850s needed more capital than such smallinvestors could generate.

Gradually, the center of railroad financing shifted toNew York City. In fact, it was the railroad boom of the1850s that helped make Wall Street the nation’s greatestcapital market. The securities of all the leading railroadswere traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchangeduring the 1850s. In addition, the growth of railroadsturned New York City into the center of modern invest-ment firms. The investment firms evaluated the securi-ties of railroads in Toledo or Davenport or Chattanoogaand then found purchasers for these securities in NewYork, Philadelphia, Paris, London, Amsterdam, andHamburg. Controlling the flow of funds to railroads,investment bankers began to exert influence over therailroads’ internal affairs by supervising administrativereorganizations in times of trouble. A Wall Street analystnoted in 1851 that railroad men seeking financing “mustremember that money is power, and that the [financier]can dictate to a great extent his own terms.”

Rising Prosperity

Technological advances also improved the lives of con-sumers by bringing down the prices of many commodi-ties. For example, clocks that cost $50 to fabricate byhand in 1800 could be produced by machine for fiftycents by 1850. In addition, the widening use of steampower contributed to a 25 percent rise in the averageworker’s real income (actual purchasing power) between

1840 and 1860. Early-nineteenth-century factories,which had depended on water wheels to propel theirmachines, had to shut down when the rivers or streamsthat powered the wheels froze. With the spread of steamengines, however, factories could stay open longer, andworkers could increase their annual wages by workingmore hours. Cotton textile workers were among thosewho benefited: although their hourly wages showed lit-tle gain, their average annual wages rose from $163 in1830 to $176 in 1849 to $201 by 1859.

The growth of towns and cities also contributed toan increase in average annual wages. Farmers experi-enced the same seasonal fluctuations as laborers in theearly factories. In sparsely settled rural areas, the onsetof winter traditionally brought hard times; as demandfor agricultural labor slumped, few alternatives existedto take up the slack. “A year in some farming states suchas Pennsylvania,” a traveler commented in 1823, “is onlyof eight months duration, four months being lost to thelaborer, who is turned away as a useless animal.” In con-trast, densely populated towns and cities offered moreopportunities for year-round work. The urban dock-worker thrown out of his job as a result of frozen water-ways might find work as a hotel porter or an unskilledindoor laborer.

Towns and cities also provided women and childrenwith new opportunities for paid work. (Women and chil-dren had long performed many vital tasks on farms, butrarely for pay.) The wages of children between the agesof ten and eighteen came to play an integral role in thenineteenth-century family economy. Family heads whoearned more than six hundred dollars a year might havebeen able to afford the luxury of keeping their childrenin school, but most breadwinners were fortunate if theymade three hundred dollars a year. Although the cost ofmany basic commodities fell between 1815 and 1860(another consequence of the transportation revolution),most families lived close to the margin. Budgets of work-ing-class families in New York City and Philadelphia dur-ing the early 1850s reveal annual expenditures of fivehundred to six hundred dollars, with more than 40 per-cent spent on food, 25 to 30 percent on rent, and most ofthe remainder on clothing and fuel. Such a family couldnot survive on the annual wages of the average malehead of the household. It needed the wages of the chil-dren and, at times, those of the wife as well.

Life in urban wage-earning families was not neces-sarily superior to life in farming communities. A farmerwho owned land, livestock, and a house did not have toworry about paying rent or buying fuel for cooking andheating, and rarely ran short of food. Many Americans


continued to aspire to farming as the best of all occupa-tions. But to purchase, clear, and stock a farm involved aconsiderable capital outlay that could easily amount tofive hundred dollars, and the effort promised no rewardsfor a few years. The majority of workers in agriculturalareas did not own farms and were exposed to seasonalfluctuations in demand for agricultural labor. In manyrespects, they were worse off than urban wage earners.

The economic advantages that attended living incities help explain why so many Americans moved tourban areas during the first half of the nineteenth centu-ry. During the 1840s and 1850s cities also provided theirresidents with an unprecedented range of comforts andconveniences.

THE QUALITY OF LIFE“Think of the numberless contrivances and inventionsfor our comfort and luxury,” the poet Walt Whitmanexclaimed, “and you will bless your star that Fate hascast your lot in the year of Our Lord 1857.” Changes inwhat we now call the standard of living affected housingand such daily activities as eating, drinking, and wash-ing in the 1840s and 1850s. The patent office inWashington was flooded with sketches of reclining seats,beds convertible into chairs, street-sweeping machines,and fly traps. Machine-made furniture began to trans-

form the interiors of houses. Stoves revolutionized heat-ing and cooking. Railroads brought fresh vegetables tocity dwellers.

Despite all the talk of comfort and progress, howev-er, many Americans experienced little improvement inthe quality of their lives. Technological advances made itpossible for the middle class to enjoy luxuries formerlyreserved for the rich, but often widened the distancebetween the middle class and the poor. At a time whenthe interiors of urban, middle-class homes were becom-ing increasingly lavish, the urban poor congregated incramped and unsightly tenements. In addition, someaspects of life remained relatively unaffected by scientif-ic and technical advances. Medical science, for example,made a few advances before 1860, but none that rivaledthe astonishing changes wrought by the railroad and thetelegraph.

The benefits rather than the limitations of progress,however, gripped the popular imagination. FewAmericans accepted the possibility that progress couldneglect such an important aspect of everyday life ashealth. Confronted by the failure of the medical profes-sion to rival the achievements of Cyrus McCormick andSamuel F. B. Morse, Americans embraced popular healthmovements that sprang up outside the medical profes-sion and that promised to conquer disease by the pre-cepts of diet and other health-related regimens.


Dwellings

Whereas most city dwellers in the eighteenth centuryhad lived in unattached frame houses, all of whichlooked different and faced in different directions, theirnineteenth-century counterparts were more likely toinhabit brick row houses. Typically narrow and long, rowhouses were practical responses to rising urban land val-ues (as much as 750 percent in Manhattan between 1785and 1815).

Some praised row houses as democratic; otherscondemned “their extreme uniformity—when you haveseen one, you have seen all.” But they were not all alike.In the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class row houseswere larger (3 to 3 1/2 stories) than working-class rowhouses (2 to 2 1/2 stories). In addition, soaring land val-ues led to the subdividing of many row houses for occu-pancy by several families. The worst of these subdividedrow houses were called tenements and became theusual habitats of Irish immigrants and free blacks.

The most fashionable urban residences usually sur-rounded small parks ringed by iron fences, and theiraddresses contained “Place” or “Square” rather than“Street.” The wealthy also had a taste for elegant doors,curved staircases, carved columns, and rooms with fan-ciful, asymmetrical shapes. All of this was beyond theresources of the urban middle class, but the rise of massproduction in such furniture centers as Grand Rapids,Michigan, and Cincinnati between 1840 and 1860brought the so-called French antique, or rococo, furni-ture style within the financial reach of the middle class.

Rococo furniture was ornate. Upholstered chairs,for example, displayed intricate scrolls depicting vines,leaves, or flowers and rested on curved legs with orna-mental feet (called cabriole legs). The heavily uphol-stered backs of sofas were often trimmed with floraldesigns topped by carved medallions. Mirrors with gild-ed moldings that depicted birds, flowers, and evenyoung women frequently weighed so much that theythreatened to tumble from walls. Technologicaladvances in the fabrication of furniture tended to leveltaste between the middle and upper classes whilesimultaneously setting off those classes from everyoneelse.

In rural areas the quality of housing depended asmuch on the date of settlement as on social class. Inrecently settled areas, the standard dwelling was a rudeone-room log cabin with planked floors, crude claychimneys, and windows covered by oiled paper or cloth.As rural communities matured, log cabins gave way toframe houses of two or more rooms and better insula-

tion. Most of these were balloon-frame houses. In placeof foot-thick posts and beams laboriously fitted togeth-er, a balloon-frame house had a skeleton of thin-sawntimbers nailed together in such a way that every strainran against the grain of the wood. The simplicity andcheapness of such houses endeared them to westernbuilders who had neither the time nor the skill to cutand fit heavy beams.

Conveniences and Inconveniences

By today’s standards, everyday life in the 1840s and1850s was primitive, but contemporaries were struck byhow much better it was becoming. The transportationand industrial revolutions were affecting heating, cook-ing, and diet. In urban areas where wood was expensive,coal-burning stoves were rapidly displacing openhearths for heating and cooking. Stoves made it possibleto cook several dishes at once and thus contributed tothe growing variety of the American diet, while railroadsbrought in fresh vegetables, which in the eighteenthcentury had been absent from even lavish banquettables.

Too, contemporaries were struck by the construc-tion of urban waterworks— systems of pipes and aque-ducts that brought fresh water from rivers or reservoirsto street hydrants. In the 1840s New York City completedthe Croton aqueduct, which carried water into the cityfrom reservoirs to the north, and by 1860 sixty-eightpublic water systems operated in the United States.

Despite these improvements, newly acquired ele-gance still bumped shoulders with squalor. Coal burnedlonger and hotter than wood, but it left a dirty residuethat polluted the air and blackened the snow, and afaulty coal stove could fill the air with poisonous carbonmonoxide. Seasonal fluctuations continued to affectdiets. Only the rich could afford fruit out of season, sincethey alone could afford to use sugar to preserve it.Indeed, preserving almost any kind of food presentedproblems. Home iceboxes were rare before 1860, so saltremained the most widely used preservative. One reasonantebellum Americans ate more pork than beef was thatsalt affected pork’s taste less negatively.

Although public waterworks were among the mostimpressive engineering feats of the age, their impact iseasily exaggerated. Since the incoming water usuallyended its trip at a street hydrant, and only a fraction ofthe urban population lived near hydrants, housesrarely had running water. Taking a bath required firstheating the water, pot by pot, on a stove. A New

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England physician claimed that not one in five of hispatients took one bath a year.

Infrequent baths meant pungent body odors, whichmingled with a multitude of strong scents. In theabsence of municipal sanitation departments, streetcleaning was let to private contractors who gained a rep-utation for slack performance of their duties, so urban-ites relied on hogs, which they allowed to roam freelyand scavenge. (Hogs that turned down the wrong streetoften made tasty dinners for the poor.) Stables backedby mounds of manure and outdoor privies added to thestench. Flush toilets were rare outside cities, and withincities sewer systems lagged behind water systems.Boston had only five thousand flush toilets in 1860 for apopulation of 178,000, a far higher ratio of toilets to peo-ple than most cities.

Expensive conveniences like running water andflush toilets became another of the ways in which

progress set the upper and middle classes apart from thepoor. Conveniences also sharpened gender differences.In her widely popular Treatise on Domestic Economy(1841), Catharine Beecher told women that technologi-cal advances made it their duty to make every house a“glorious temple” by utilizing space more efficiently.Women who no longer made articles for home con-sumption were now expected to achieve fulfillment byobsessively sweeping floors and polishing furniture.Home, a writer proclaimed, had become woman’s “royalcourt,” where she “sways her queenly authority.”Skeptical of this trend toward fastidiousness, anotherwriter cautioned women in 1857 against “ultra-house-wifery.”

Disease and Health

Despite the slowly rising standard of living, Americansremained vulnerable to disease. Epidemics sweptthrough antebellum cities and felled thousands. Yellowfever and cholera killed one-fifth of New Orleans’s popu-lation in 1832–1833, and cholera alone carried off 10percent of St. Louis’s population in 1849.

The transportation revolution increased the perilfrom epidemics. The cholera epidemic of 1832, the firsttruly national epidemic, followed shipping routes: onebranch of the epidemic ran from New York City up theHudson River, across the Erie Canal to Ohio, and thendown the Ohio River to the Mississippi and south to NewOrleans; the other branch followed shipping up anddown the East Coast from New York City.

Each major antebellum epidemic of cholera or yel-low fever intensified public calls for the establishment ofmunicipal health boards, and by the 1850s most majorcities had formed such agencies. However, so few pow-ers did city governments give them that the boards couldnot even enforce the reporting of diseases. The inabilityof physicians to find a satisfactory explanation for epi-demic diseases led to a general distrust of the medicalprofession and contributed to making public health alow-priority issue.

Prior to 1860 no one understood that tiny organismscalled bacteria caused both cholera and yellow fever.Rather, rival camps of physicians battled furiously andpublicly over the merits of the “contagion” theory versusthose of the “miasma” theory. Insisting that cholera andyellow fever were transmitted by touch, contagionistscalled for vigorous measures to quarantine affectedareas. In contrast, supporters of the miasma theoryargued that poisonous gases (miasmas) emitted by rot-ting vegetation or dead animals carried disease through


the air. The miasma theory led logically to the conclu-sion that swamps should be drained and streets cleaned.

Neither theory was consistent with the evidence.Quarantines failed to check cholera and yellow fever (anargument against the contagionist theory), and manyresidents of filthy slums and stinking, low-lying areascontracted neither of the two diseases (a refutation ofthe miasma theory). Confronted by this inconclusivedebate between medical experts, municipal leadersrefused to delegate more than advisory powers to healthboards dominated by physicians. After the worst epi-demic in the city’s history, a New Orleans editor stated in1853 that it was “much safer to follow the common senseand unbiased opinion of the intelligent mass of the peo-ple than the opinions of medical men . . . based uponhypothetical theories.”

Although most epidemic diseases baffled antebel-lum physicians, a basis for forward strides in surgerywas laid during the 1840s by the discovery of anesthet-ics. Prior to 1840 young people often entertained them-selves at parties by inhaling nitrous oxide, or “laughinggas,” which produced sensations of giddiness and pain-lessness; and semicomical demonstrations of laughinggas became a form of popular entertainment. (SamuelColt, the inventor of the revolver, had begun his career asa traveling exhibitor of laughing gas.) But nitrous oxidehad to be carried around in bladders, which were diffi-cult to handle, and in any case, few recognized its surgi-cal possibilities. Then in 1842 Crawford Long, a Georgiaphysician who had attended laughing-gas frolics in hisyouth, employed sulfuric ether (an easily transportableliquid with the same properties as nitrous oxide) duringa surgical operation. Long failed to follow up on his dis-covery, but four years later William T. G. Morton, a den-tist, successfully employed sulfuric ether during anoperation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.Within a few years, ether came into wide use inAmerican surgery.

The discovery of anesthesia improved the publicimage of surgeons, long viewed as brutes who hackedaway at agonized patients. Furthermore, by makinglonger operations possible, anesthesia encouraged sur-geons to take greater care than previously during sur-gery. Nevertheless, the failure of most surgeons to recog-nize the importance of clean hands and sterilizedinstruments partially offset the benefits of anesthesiabefore 1860. In 1843 Boston physician and poet OliverWendell Holmes, Sr., published an influential paper onhow the failure of obstetricians to disinfect their handsoften spread a disease called puerperal fever amongmothers giving birth in hospitals. Still, the medical pro-

fession only gradually accepted the importance of disin-fection. Operations remained as dangerous as the dis-eases or wounds they tried to heal. The mortality rate foramputations hovered around 40 percent. During theCivil War, 87 percent of soldiers who suffered abdominalwounds died from them.

Popular Health Movements

Doubtful of medicine and cynical toward public health,antebellum Americans turned to a variety of therapiesand regimens that promised to give them healthier andlonger lives. One popular response to disease washydropathy, or the “water cure,” which filtered into theUnited States from Europe during the 1840s. By the mid-1850s the United States had twenty-seven hydropathicsanatoriums, which used cold baths and wet packs toprovide “an abundance of water of dewy softness andcrystal transparency, to cleanse, renovate, and rejuve-nate the disease-worn and dilapidated system.” Thewater cure held a special attraction for well-off women,partly because hydropathics professed to relieve thepain associated with childbirth and menstruation andpartly because hydropathic sanatoriums were congenialgathering places in which middle-class women couldrelax and exercise in private.

In contrast to the water cure, which necessitated thetime and expense of a trip to a sanatorium, a health sys-tem that anyone could adopt was propounded bySylvester Graham, a temperance reformer turned popu-lar health advocate. Alarmed by the 1832 cholera epi-demic, Graham counseled changes in diet and regimenas well as total abstinence from alcohol. Contendingthat Americans ate too much, he urged them to substi-tute vegetables, fruits, and coarse, whole-grain bread(called Graham bread) for meat and to abstain fromspices, coffee, and tea as well as from alcohol. SoonGraham added sexual “excess” (by which he meant mostsex) to his list of forbidden indulgences. Vegetables werepreferable to meat, according to Graham, because theyprovoked less hunger. The food cravings of the “flesh-eater” were “greater and more imperious” than those ofthe vegetarian.

Many of Graham’s most enthusiastic disciples werereformers. Grahamites had a special table at the BrookFarm community. Until forced out by indignant parentsand hungry students, one of Graham’s followers ran thestudent dining room at reformist Oberlin College. Muchlike Graham, reformers traced the evils of Americansociety to the unnatural cravings of its people.Abolitionists, for example, contended that slavery inten-

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sified white men’s lust and contributed to the violentbehavior of white southerners. Similarly, Grahambelieved that eating meat stimulated lust and otheraggressive impulses.

Graham’s doctrines attracted a broad audience thatextended beyond the perimeters of the reform move-ments. Many towns and cities had boarding houseswhose tables were set according to his principles. Hisbooks sold well, and his public lectures were thronged.Like hydropathy, Grahamism addressed the populardesire for better health at a time when orthodox medi-cine seemed to do more damage than good. Graham

used religious phrases that were familiar to churchgoersand then channeled those concepts toward nonreligiousgoals. Luxury was “sinful,” disease resembled hell, andhealth was a kind of heaven on earth. In this way, he pro-vided simple and familiar assurances to an audience asignorant as he was of the true causes of disease.

Phrenology

The belief that each person was master of his or her owndestiny underlay not only evangelical religion and popu-lar health movements but also the most popular of theantebellum scientific fads: phrenology. Imported fromEurope, phrenology rested on the idea that the humanmind comprised thirty-seven distinct faculties, or“organs,” each located in a different part of the brain.Phrenologists thought that the degree of each organ’sdevelopment determined skull shape, so that they couldanalyze a person’s character by examining the bumpsand depressions of the skull.

In the United States two brothers, Orson andLorenzo Fowler, became the chief promoters of phrenol-ogy in the 1840s. Originally intending to become aProtestant missionary, Orson Fowler became instead amissionary for phrenology and opened a publishinghouse in New York City (Fowler and Wells) that mass-marketed books on the subject. The Fowlers’ critics werelegion, but so were their responses to criticism. Accusedof propounding a godless philosophy, they pointed to apart of the brain called “Veneration” to prove that peoplewere naturally religious, and they answered charges thatphrenology was pessimistic by claiming that exercisecould improve every desirable mental organ. LorenzoFowler reported that several of his skull bumps had actu-ally grown. Orson Fowler wrapped it all into a tidy slo-gan: “Self-Made, or Never-Made.”

Phrenology appealed to Americans as a “practical”science. In a mobile, individualistic society, it promiseda quick assessment of others. Some merchants usedphrenological charts to pick suitable clerks, and somewomen even induced their fiancés to undergo phreno-logical analysis before tying the knot.

Phrenologists had close ties to popular healthmovements. Fowler and Wells published the Water-CureJournal and Sylvester Graham’s Lectures on the Science ofHuman Life. Orson Fowler filled his phrenological bookwith tips on the evils of coffee, tea, meat, spices, and sexthat could have been plucked from Graham’s writings.

Easily understood and practiced and filled with thepromise of universal betterment, phrenology was idealfor antebellum America. Just as Americans had invented


machines to better their lives, so did they invent “sci-ences” that promised human betterment.

DEMOCRATIC PASTIMESBetween 1830 and 1860 technology increasingly trans-formed leisure by making Americans more dependenton recreation that could be manufactured and sold.People purchased this commodity in the form of cheapnewspapers and novels as well as affordable tickets toplays, museums, and lectures.

Just as the Boston Associates had daringly capital-ized on new technology to produce textiles at Lowell andWaltham, imaginative entrepreneurs utilized technolo-gy to make and sell entertainment. Men like JamesGordon Bennett, one of the founders of the penny pressin America, and P. T. Barnum, the greatest showman ofthe nineteenth century, amassed fortunes by sensingwhat people wanted and employing available technolo-gy to satisfy their desires. Bennett and Barnum thoughtof themselves as purveyors of democratic entertain-ment. They would sell their wares cheaply to anyone.

Technology also ignited the process by which indi-viduals became spectators rather than creators of theirown amusements. Americans had long found ways toenjoy themselves. Even the gloomiest Puritans hadindulged in games and sports. After 1830, however, theburden of providing entertainment began to shift fromindividuals to entrepreneurs who supplied ways toentertain the public.

Newspapers

In 1830 the typical American newspaper was a mere fourpages long, with the front and back pages devotedalmost wholly to advertisements. The second and thirdpages contained editorials, details of ship arrivals andcargoes, reprints of political speeches, and notices ofpolitical events. Few papers depended on their circula-tion for profit; even the most prominent papers had adaily circulation of only one thousand to two thousand.Rather, papers often relied on subsidies from politicalparties or factions. When a party gained power, it insert-ed paid political notices only in papers loyal to it.“Journalists,” a contemporary wrote, “were usually littlemore than secretaries dependent upon cliques of politi-cians, merchants, brokers, and office seekers for theirprosperity and bread.”

As a result, newspapers could be profitable withoutbeing particularly popular. Because of their potential forprofit, new papers were constantly being established.

But most had limited appeal. The typical paper sold forsix cents an issue at a time when the average daily wagewas less than a dollar. Papers often seemed little morethan published bulletin boards. They typically lackedthe exciting news stories and eye-catching illustrationsthat later generations would take for granted.

The 1830s witnessed the beginnings of a stunningtransformation. Technological changes, most of whichoriginated in Europe, vastly increased both the supply ofpaper (still made from rags) and the speed of printingpresses. The substitution of steam-driven cylindricalpresses for flatbed hand presses led to a tenfold increasein the number of printed pages that could be producedin an hour. Enterprising journalists, among them theScottish-born James Gordon Bennett, grasped the impli-cations of the new technology. Newspapers could nowrely on vast circulation rather than on political subsidiesto turn a profit. To gain circulation, journalists likeBennett slashed the price of newspapers. In 1833 theNew York Sun became America’s first penny newspaper,and Bennett’s New York Herald followed in 1835. By June1835 the combined daily circulation of New York’s threepenny papers reached 44,000; in contrast, the city’seleven dailies had a combined daily circulation of only26,500 before the dawn of the penny press in 1833.Spearheaded by the penny papers, the combined dailycirculation of newspapers throughout the nation rosefrom roughly 78,000 in 1830 to 300,000 by 1840. Thenumber of weekly newspapers spurted from 65 in 1830to 138 in 1840.

Affordability was not the only feature of the pennypapers. Dependent on circulation and advertising ratherthan on subsidies, the penny press revolutionized themarketing and format of papers. Where single copies ofthe six-cent papers were usually available only at theprinter’s office, newsboys hawked the penny papers onbusy street corners. Moreover, the penny papers subordi-nated the recording of political and commercial events tohuman-interest stories of robberies, murders, rapes, andabandoned children. They dispatched reporters to policecourts and printed transcripts of trials. As sociologistMichael Schudson observes, “The penny press inventedthe modern concept of ‘news.’ ” Rather than merelyrecording events, the penny papers wove events intogripping stories. They invented not only news but alsonews reporting. Relying on party stalwarts to dispatchcopies of speeches and platforms, and reprinting newsitems from other papers, the older six-cent papers did lit-tle, if any, reporting. In contrast, the penny papersemployed their own correspondents and were the firstpapers to use the telegraph to speed news into print.

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Some penny papers were little more than scandalsheets, but the best, like Bennett’s New York Herald andHorace Greeley’s New York Tribune (1841), pioneeredmodern financial and political reporting. From itsinception, the Herald contained a daily “money article”that substituted the analysis and interpretation of finan-cial events for the dull recording of commercial facts.“The spirit, pith, and philosophy of commercial affairs iswhat men of business want,” Bennett wrote. The relent-less snooping of the Tribune’s Washington reporters out-raged politicians. In 1848 Tribune correspondents weretemporarily barred from the House floor for reportingthat Representative Sawyer of Ohio ate his lunch(sausage and bread) each day in the House chamber,picked his teeth with a jackknife, and wiped his greasyhands on his pants and coat.

The Theater

Like newspapers, theaters increasingly appealed to amass audience. Antebellum theaters were large (twenty-five hundred to four thousand seats in some cities) andcrowded by all classes. With seats as cheap as twelvecents and rarely more than fifty cents, the typical theateraudience included lawyers and merchants and theirwives, artisans and clerks, sailors and noisy boys, and asizable body of prostitutes. Prostitutes usually sat in thetop gallery, called the third tier, “that dark, horrible,guilty” place. The presence of prostitutes in theaters wastaken for granted; the only annoyance came when theyleft the third tier to solicit customers in the more expen-sive seats.

The prostitutes in attendance were not the only fac-tor that made the antebellum theater vaguely disrep-utable. Theatrical audiences were notoriously rowdy.They showed their feelings by stamping their feet,whistling, hooting at villains, and throwing potatoes orgarbage at the stage when they did not like the charac-ters or the acting. Individual actors developed huge fol-lowings, and the public displayed at least as much inter-est in the actors as in the plays. In 1849 a long-runningfeud between the leading American actor, EdwinForrest, and popular British actor William Macreadyended with a riot at New York City’s Astor Place that lefttwenty-two people dead.

The Astor Place riot demonstrated the broad popu-larity of the theater. Forrest’s supporters included Irishworkers who loathed the British and appealed to the “working men” to rally against the “aristocrat”Macready. Macready, who projected a more polished andintellectual image than Forrest, attracted the better-edu-

cated classes. Had not all classes patronized the theater,the deadly riot probably would never have occurred.

The plays themselves were as diverse as the audi-ences. Most often performed were melodramas in whichvirtue was rewarded, vice punished, and the heroinemarried the hero. Yet the single most popular dramatistwas William Shakespeare. In 1835 audiences inPhiladelphia witnessed sixty-five performances ofShakespeare’s plays. Americans who may never haveread a line of Shakespeare grew familiar with Othello,King Lear, Desdemona, and Shylock. Theatrical man-agers adapted Shakespeare to a popular audience. Theyhighlighted the sword fights and assassinations, cutsome speeches, omitted minor characters, and prunedwords or references that might have offended the audi-ence’s sense of propriety. For example, they substitutedpottels for urinals and quietly advanced Juliet’s age at thetime that she falls in love with Romeo from fourteen toeighteen. They occasionally changed sad endings tohappy ones.

The producers even arranged for short performanc-es or demonstrations between acts of Shakespeare—andindeed, of every play. During such an interlude, theaudience might have observed a brief impersonation ofTecumseh or Aaron Burr, jugglers and acrobats, a drum-mer beating twelve drums at once, or a three-year-oldwho weighed a hundred pounds.

Minstrel Shows

The Yankee or “Brother Jonathan” figure who served as astock character in many antebellum plays helped audi-ences form an image of the ideal American as rustic,clever, patriotic, and more than a match for city slickersand decadent European blue bloods. In a different way,the minstrel shows that Americans thronged to see inthe 1840s and 1850s forged enduring stereotypes thatbuttressed white Americans’ sense of superiority bydiminishing black people.

Minstrel shows arose in northern cities in the 1840swhen white men in blackface took to the stage to presentan evening of songs, dances, and humorous sketches.Minstrelsy borrowed some authentic elements ofAfrican-American culture, especially dances character-ized by the sliding, shuffling step of southern blacks, butmost of the songs had origins in white culture. Suchfamiliar American songs as Stephen Foster’s “CamptownRaces” and “Massa’s in the Cold Ground,” which firstaired in minstrel shows, reflected white Americans’notions of how blacks sang more than it representedauthentic black music.


In addition, the images of blacks projected by min-strelsy both catered to and reinforced the prejudices ofthe working-class whites who dominated the audienceof minstrel shows. Minstrel troupes usually depictedblacks as stupid, clumsy, and obsessively musical andemphasized the Africanness of blacks by giving theircharacters names like the Ethiopian Serenaders andtheir acts titles like the Nubian Jungle Dance and theAfrican Fling. At a time of intensifying political conflictover race, minstrel shows planted images and expecta-tions about blacks’ behavior through stock characters.These included Uncle Ned, the tattered, humble, anddocile slave, and Zip Coon, the arrogant urban free blackwho paraded around in a high hat, long-tailed coat, andgreen vest and who lived off his girlfriends’ money.Minstrels lampooned blacks who assumed public rolesby portraying them as incompetent stump speakers whocalled Patrick Henry “Henry Patrick,” referred to JohnHancock as “Boobcock,” and confused the word statutewith statue.

By the 1850s major cities from New York to SanFrancisco had several minstrel theaters. Touring profes-sional troupes and local amateur talent even broughtminstrelsy to small towns and villages. Mark Twainrecalled how minstrelsy had burst upon Hannibal,Missouri, in the early 1840s as “a glad and stunning sur-prise.” So popular was the craze that minstrels even vis-ited the White House and entertained Presidents JohnTyler, James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, and FranklinPierce.

P. T. Barnum

P. T. Barnum understood how to turn the antebellumpublic’s craving for entertainment into a profitable busi-ness. As a young man in Bethel, Connecticut, he starteda newspaper, the Herald of Freedom, that assailedwrongdoing in high places. Throughout his life, hethought of himself as a public benefactor and pointed tohis profits as proof that he gave people what they want-ed. Yet honesty was never his strong suit. As a small-town grocer in Connecticut, he regularly cheated hiscustomers on the principle that they were trying to cheathim. Barnum, in short, was a hustler raised in the land ofthe Puritans, a cynic and an idealist rolled into one.

After moving to New York City in 1834, Barnumstarted a new career as an entrepreneur of popularentertainment. His first venture exhibited a blackwoman, Joice Heth, whom Barnum billed as the 169-year-old former slave nurse of George Washington.Barnum neither knew nor cared how old Joice was (in

fact, she was probably around 80); it was enough thatpeople would pay to see her. Strictly speaking, he cheat-ed the public, but he knew that many of his customersshared his doubts about Joice’s age. Determined toexpose Barnum’s gimmick, some poked her to seewhether she was really a machine rather than a person.He was playing a game with the public, and the publicwith him.

In 1841 Barnum purchased a run-down museum inNew York City, rechristened it the American Museum,and opened a new chapter in the history of popularentertainment. The founders of most earlier museumshad educational purposes. They exhibited stuffed birdsand animals, specimens of rock, and portraits. Most ofthese museums had languished for want of public inter-est. Barnum, in contrast, made pricking public curiositythe main goal. To attract people, he added collections ofcuriosities and faked exhibits. Visitors to the AmericanMuseum could see ventriloquists, magicians, albinos, afive-year-old person of short-stature whom Barnum

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named General Tom Thumb and later took on a tour ofEurope, and the “Feejee Mermaid,” a shrunken odditythat Barnum billed as “positively asserted by its owner tohave been taken alive in the Feejee Islands.” By 1850 theAmerican Museum had become the best-known muse-um in the nation and a model for popular museums inother cities.

Blessed with a genius for publicity, Barnum recog-nized that newspapers could invent as well as reportnews. One of his favorite tactics was to puff his exhibitsby writing letters (under various names) to newspapersin which he would hint that the scientific world was agogover some astonishing curiosity of nature that the publiccould soon see for itself at the American Museum. ButBarnum’s success rested on more than publicity. Astaunch temperance advocate, he provided regular lec-tures at the American Museum on the evils of alcohol

and soon gave the place a reputation as a center for safefamily amusement. By marketing his museum as familyentertainment, Barnum helped break down barriers thathad long divided the pastimes of husbands from thoseof their wives.

Finally, Barnum tapped the public’s insatiablecuriosity about natural wonders. In 1835 the editor ofthe New York Sun had boosted his circulation by claim-ing that a famous astronomer had discovered pelicansand winged men on the moon. At a time when eachpassing year brought new technological wonders, thepublic was ready to believe in anything, even the FeejeeMermaid.

THE QUEST FOR NATIONALITYIN LITERATURE AND ART

Europeans took little notice of American poetry or fic-tion before the 1820s. “Who ever reads an Americanbook?” a British literary critic taunted in 1820.Americans responded by pointing to Washington Irving,whose Sketch Book (1820) contained two famous stories,“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”Naming hotels and steamboats after Irving, Americanssoaked him in applause, but they had to concede thatIrving had done much of his best writing, including theSketch Book, while living in England.

After 1820 the United States experienced a floweringof literature that is sometimes called the “AmericanRenaissance.” The leading figures of this Renaissanceincluded James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph WaldoEmerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, WaltWhitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, andEdgar Allan Poe. In 1800 American authors accountedfor a negligible proportion of the output of Americanpublishers. By 1830, 40 percent of the books publishedin the United States were written by Americans; by 1850this had increased to 75 percent.

Not only were Americans writing more books;increasingly, they sought to depict the features of theirnation in literature and art. The quest for a distinctivelyAmerican literature especially shaped the writings ofCooper, Emerson, and Whitman. It also revealed itself inthe majestic paintings of the so-called Hudson Riverschool, the first home-grown American movement inpainting, and in the landscape architecture of FrederickLaw Olmsted.

Roots of the American RenaissanceTwo broad developments, one economic and the otherphilosophical, contributed to this development. First,


the transportation revolution created a national marketfor books, especially fiction. Initially, this worked to theadvantage of British authors, especially Sir Walter Scott.With the publication of Waverley (1814), a historicalnovel set in Britain of the 1740s, Scott’s star began itsspectacular ascent on the American horizon. Americansnamed more than a dozen towns Waverley; advertise-ments for Scott’s subsequent novels bore the simplecaption, “By the author of Waverley.” Scott’s successdemonstrated that the public wanted to read fiction.Although American publishers continued to pirateBritish novels (reprinting them without paying copy-right fees), Scott’s success prompted Americans likeJames Fenimore Cooper to write fiction for sale.

Second, the American Renaissance reflected the riseof a philosophical movement known as romanticism. Byinsisting that literature reveal the longings of an individ-ual author’s soul, romanticism challenged the eigh-teenth-century view, known as classicism, that stan-dards of beauty were universal. For the classicist, theideal author was an educated gentleman who wrote ele-gant poetry and essays that displayed learning andrefinement and that conformed to timeless standards oftaste and excellence. In contrast, romantics expected aliterary work to be emotionally charged, a unique reflec-tion of its creator’s inner feelings.

The emergence of a national market for books andthe influence of romanticism combined to democratizeliterature. The conventions of classicism led writers toview literature as a pastime of gentlemen. They were towrite only for one another (and never for profit) and useliterature as a vehicle for displaying their learning, espe-cially their knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman civi-lization. In contrast, the emerging national market forbooks tended to elevate the importance of fiction, acomparatively democratic form of literature, more thanpoetry and essays. Writing (and reading) fiction did notrequire a knowledge of Latin and Greek or a familiaritywith ancient history and mythology. Significantly, manyof the best-selling novels of the antebellum period—forexample, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—were written by women, who were still barred from high-er education. In addition, fiction had a certain subver-sive quality that contributed to its popularity. Authorscould create unconventional characters, situations, andoutcomes. The essay usually had an unmistakable con-clusion. In contrast, the novel left more room for inter-pretation by the reader. A novel might well have a lessonto teach, but the reader’s interest was likely to bearoused less by the moral than by the development ofcharacters and plot.

Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman

James Fenimore Cooper was the first important figure inthis literary upsurge. His most significant innovationwas to introduce a distinctively American fictional char-acter, the frontiersman Natty Bumppo (“Leather-stocking”). In The Pioneers (1823), Natty appears as anold man settled on the shores of Lake Otsego in upstateNew York. A hunter, Natty blames farmers for the wan-ton destruction of game and for turning the majesticforests into deserts of tree stumps. As a spokesman fornature against the march of civilization, Natty immedi-ately became a popular figure, and in subsequent novelssuch as The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder(1840), and The Deerslayer (1841), Cooper unfoldedNatty’s earlier life for an appreciative reading public.

Although he wrote no novels, Ralph Waldo Emersonemerged in the late 1830s as the most influentialspokesman for American literary nationalism. As theleading light of the transcendentalist movement, anAmerican offshoot of romanticism, Emerson broke withthe traditional view that ideas arise from the toil ofhuman reason, which gathers evidence from the senses.Rather, he contended, our ideas of God and freedom areinborn; knowledge resembles sight—an instantaneousand direct perception of truth. That being so, Emersonconcluded, learned people enjoy no special advantagein pursuing truth. All persons can glimpse the truth ifonly they trust the promptings of their hearts.

Transcendentalist doctrine pointed to the exhilarat-ing conclusion that the United States, a young and dem-ocratic society, could produce as noble a literature andart as the more traditional societies of Europe. “Our dayof dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learningof other lands draws to a close,” Emerson announced inhis address “The American Scholar” (1837). The timehad come for Americans to trust themselves. Let “thesingle man plant himself indomitably on his instinctsand there abide,” he proclaimed, and “the huge worldwill come around to him.”

Emerson admired Cooper’s fiction but his own ver-sion of American literary nationalism was expressedmainly in his essays, which mixed broad themes—“Beauty,” “Wealth,” and “Representative Men”—withpungent and vivid language. For example, he wrote inpraise of independent thinking that the scholar shouldnot “quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, thoughthe ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be thecrack of doom.” Equally remarkable was Emerson’s wayof developing his subjects. A contemporary compared

The Quest for Nationality in Literature and Art 335

listening to Emerson to trying to see the sun in a fog;one could see light but never the sun itself. Believingthat knowledge reflected God’s voice within each per-son and that truth was intuitive and individual, henever amassed persuasive evidence or presented sys-tematic arguments to prove his point. Rather, he reliedon a sequence of vivid if unconnected assertions whosetruth the reader would instantly see. (They did notalways see it; one reader complained that she mighthave understood Emerson better if she had stood onher head.)

Emerson had a magnetic attraction for intellectuallyinclined young men and women who did not fit neatlyinto American society. In the 1830s several of them gath-ered in Concord, Massachusetts, to share Emerson’s intel-lectual pursuits. Henry David Thoreau was representativeof the younger Emersonians. A crucial difference separat-ed the two men. Adventurous in thought, Emerson wasnot adventurous in action. Thoreau was more of a doer. Atone point he went to jail rather than pay his poll tax. This

revenue, he knew, would support the war withMexico, which he viewed as part of a southernconspiracy to extend slavery. The experienceled Thoreau to write “Civil Disobedience”(1849), in which he defended a citizen’s right todisobey unjust laws.

In spring 1845 Thoreau moved a fewmiles from Concord to the woods nearWalden Pond. There he constructed a cabinon land owned by Emerson and spent partsof the next two years providing for his wantsaway from civilization. His stated purpose inretreating to Walden was to write a descrip-tion (later published) of a canoe trip that heand his brother had taken in 1839. During hisstay in the woods, however, he conceivedand wrote a much more important book,Walden (1854). A contemporary describedWalden as “the logbook of his woodlandcruise,” and indeed, Thoreau filled its pageswith descriptions of hawks and wild pigeons,his invention of raisin bread, his trapping ofthe woodchucks that ate his vegetable gar-den, and his construction of a cabin forexactly $28.50. But true to transcendental-ism, Thoreau had a larger message. His rusticretreat taught him that he (and by implica-tion, others) could satisfy material wantswith only a few weeks’ work each year andthereby leave more time for reexamininglife’s purpose. The problem with Americans,he said, was that they turned themselves into

“mere machines” to acquire wealth without asking why.Thoreau bore the uncomfortable truth that materialand moral progress were not as intimately related asAmericans liked to think.

Among the most remarkable figures in Emerson’scircle, Margaret Fuller’s status as an intellectual womandistanced her from conventional society. Disappointedthat his first child was not a boy, her Harvard-educatedfather, a prominent Massachusetts politician, deter-mined to give Margaret the sort of education a malechild would have acquired at Harvard. Drilled by herfather in Latin and Greek, her reading branched intomodern German romantics and the English literary clas-sics. Her exposure to Emerson’s ideas during a sojourn inConcord in 1836 pushed her toward transcendentalism,with its vindication of the free life of the spirit over for-mal doctrines and of the need for each person to discov-er truth on his or her own.

Ingeniously, Fuller turned transcendentalism intoan occupation of sorts. Between 1839 and 1844 she sup-


ported herself by presiding over “Conversations” for fee-paying participants drawn from Boston’s elite men andwomen. Transcendentalism also influenced her classicof American feminism, Woman in the NineteenthCentury (1845). Breaking with the prevailing notion ofseparate spheres for men and women, Fuller contendedthat no woman could achieve the kind of personal fulfill-ment lauded by Emerson unless she developed herintellectual abilities and overcame her fear of beingcalled masculine.

One of Emerson’s qualities was an ability to sympa-thize with such dissimilar people as the reclusive andcritical Thoreau, the scholarly and aloof Fuller, and theoutgoing and earthy Walt Whitman. Self-taught and inlove with virtually everything about America except slav-ery, Whitman left school at eleven and became a print-er’s apprentice and later a journalist and editor for vari-ous newspapers in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and NewOrleans. A familiar figure at Democratic party functions,he marched in party parades and put his pen to the serv-ice of its antislavery wing.

Journalism and politics gave Whitman an intimateknowledge of ordinary Americans; the more he knewthem, the more he liked them. His reading of Emersonnurtured his belief that America was to be the cradle of anew citizen in whom natural virtue would flourishunimpeded by European corruption, a man like AndrewJackson, that “massive, yet most sweet and plain charac-ter.” The threads of Whitman’s early career came togeth-er in his major work Leaves of Grass, a book of poemsfirst published in 1855 and reissued with additions insubsequent years.

Leaves of Grass shattered most existing poetic con-ventions. Not only did Whitman write in free verse (thatis, most of his poems had neither rhyme nor meter),but the poems were also lusty and blunt at a time whendelicacy reigned in the literary world. Whitman wroteof “the scent of these armpits finer than prayer” and“winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me.” Noless remarkably, Whitman intruded himself into hispoems, one of which he titled “Song of Walt Whitman”(and later retitled “Song of Myself”). AlthoughWhitman thought well of himself, it was not egotismthat moved him to sing of himself. Rather, he viewedhimself—crude, plain, self-taught, and passionatelydemocratic—as the personification of the Americanpeople. He was

Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of allwho shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,

A learner with the simplest, a teacher of thethoughtfullest.

By 1860 Whitman had acquired a considerable repu-tation as a poet. Nevertheless, the original edition ofLeaves (a run of only about eight hundred copies) wasignored or derided as a “heterogeneous mass of bom-bast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense.” One reviewersuggested that it was the work of an escaped lunatic.Only Emerson and a few others reacted enthusiastically.Within two weeks of publication, Emerson, never havingmet Whitman, wrote, “I find it the most extraordinarypiece of wit and wisdom that America has yet con-tributed.” Emerson had long called for the appearanceof “the poet of America” and knew in a flash that inWhitman was that poet.

Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe

Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, and Whitman expressedthemselves in essays and poetry. In contrast, two majorwriters of the 1840s and 1850s—Nathaniel Hawthorneand Herman Melville—primarily wrote fiction, andanother, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote both fiction and poetry.Although they were major contributors to theAmerican Renaissance, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poepaid little heed to Emerson’s call for a literature thatwould comprehend the everyday experiences of ordi-nary Americans. Hawthorne, for example, set TheScarlet Letter (1850) in New England’s Puritan past, TheHouse of the Seven Gables (1851) in a mansion hauntednot by ghosts but by memories of the past, and TheMarble Faun (1859) in Rome. Poe set several of hisshort stories such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”(1841), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), and“The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) in Europe; as onecritic has noted, “His art could have been produced aseasily had he been born in Europe.” Melville did drawmaterials and themes from his own experiences as asailor and from the lore of the New England whalingindustry, but for his novels Typee (1846), Omoo (1847),and Mardi (1849) he picked the exotic setting of islandsin the South Seas; and for his masterpiece Moby-Dick(1851) the ill-fated whaler Pequod. If the only survivingdocuments from the 1840s and 1850s were its majornovels, historians would face an impossible task indescribing the appearance of antebellum Americansociety.

The unusual settings favored by these three writerspartly reflected their view that American life lacked thematerials for great fiction. Hawthorne, for example,bemoaned the difficulty of writing about a country“where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, nopicturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a com-monplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight, as is


happily the case with my dear native land.” In addition,psychology rather than society fascinated the three writ-ers; each probed the depths of the human mind ratherthan the intricacies of social relationships. Their preoc-cupation with analyzing the mental states of their char-acters grew out of their underlying pessimism about thehuman condition. Emerson, Whitman, and (to a degree)Thoreau optimistically believed that human conflictscould be resolved if only individuals followed thepromptings of their better selves. In contrast,Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe saw individuals as bun-dles of conflicting forces that, despite the best inten-tions, might never be reconciled.

Their pessimism led them to create charactersobsessed by pride, guilt, a desire for revenge, or a questfor perfection and then to set their stories along thebyways of society, where they would be free to explorethe complexities of human motivation without the jar-ring intrusion of everyday life. For example, in TheScarlet Letter Hawthorne turned to the Puritan past inorder to examine the psychological and moral conse-quences of the adultery committed by Hester Prynneand the minister Arthur Dimmesdale. So completely did

Hawthorne focus on the moral dilemmas of his centralcharacters that he conveyed little sense of the social lifeof the Puritan village in which the novel is set. Melville,who dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne, shared the lat-ter’s pessimism. In the novel’s Captain Ahab, Melvillecreated a frightening character whose relentless andfutile pursuit of the white whale fails to fill the chasm inhis soul and brings death to all of his mates save the nar-rator, Ishmael. Poe also channeled his pessimism intocreative achievements. In perhaps his finest short story,“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), he demonstrat-ed an uncanny ability to weave the symbol of a crum-bling mansion with the mental agony of a crumblingfamily.

Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe ignored Emerson’scall to write about the everyday experiences of their fel-low Americans. Nor did they follow Cooper’s lead by cre-ating distinctively American heroes. Yet each con-tributed to an indisputably American literature.Ironically, their conviction that the lives of ordinaryAmericans provided inadequate materials for fiction ledthem to create a uniquely American fiction marked lessby the description of the complex social relationships ofordinary life than by the analysis of moral dilemmas andpsychological states. In this way, they unintentionallyfulfilled a prediction made by Alexis de Tocqueville thatwriters in democratic nations, while rejecting many ofthe traditional sources of fiction, would explore theabstract and universal questions of human nature.

Literature in the Marketplace

No eighteenth-century gentleman-author imagined thathe was writing for the public or that he would makemoney from his literary productions. Such notions wereunthinkable. That suspicion that commercialism cor-rupted art did not disappear during the AmericanRenaissance. The shy and reclusive poet EmilyDickinson, who lived all of her fifty-six years on the samestreet in Amherst, Massachusetts (“I do not go fromhome,” she wrote with characteristic pithiness) and whowrote exquisite poems that examined, in her words,every splinter in the groove of the brain, refused to pub-lish her work. But in an age lacking university professor-ships or foundation fellowships for creative writers,authors were both tempted and often compelled towrite for profit. For example, Poe, a heavy drinker alwayspressed for cash, scratched out a meager living writingshort stories for popular magazines. Despite his reputa-tion for aloof self-reliance, Thoreau craved recognitionby the public and in 1843 tried, unsuccessfully, to markethis poems in New York City. Only after meeting disap-


pointment as a poet did he turn to detailed narratives ofnature, and these did prove popular.

Emerson, too, wanted to reach a broader public, andafter abandoning his first vocation as a Unitarian minis-ter he virtually invented a new one, that of “lyceum” lec-turer. Lyceums, local organizations for sponsoring lec-tures, spread throughout the northern tier of statesbetween the late 1820s and 1860; by 1840 thirty-fivehundred towns had lyceums. Most of Emerson’s pub-lished essays originated as lectures before lyceums inthe Northeast and Midwest. He delivered some sixtyspeeches in Ohio alone between 1850 and 1867, and lec-ture fees provided him with his main form of income.Thanks to newly built railroads and cheap newspapersthat announced their comings and goings, others fol-lowed in his path. Thoreau presented a digest of Waldenas a lyceum lecture before the book itself was published.One stalwart of the lyceum circuit said that he did it for“F-A-M-E—Fifty and My Expenses,” and HermanMelville pledged, “If they will pay my expenses and givea reasonable fee, I am ready to lecture in Labrador or onthe Isle of Desolation off Patagonia.”

The age offered women few opportunities for publicspeaking, and most lyceum lecturers were men. Butwomen discovered ways to tap into the growing marketfor literature. Writing fiction was the most lucrativeoccupation open to women before the Civil War. Forexample, the popular novelist Susan Warner had beenbrought up in luxury and then tossed into poverty by thefinancial ruin of her father in the Panic of 1837. Writingfiction supplied her with cash as well as pleasure.

Warner and others benefited from advances in thetechnology of printing that brought down the price ofbooks. Before 1830 the novels of Sir Walter Scott hadbeen issued in three-volume sets that retailed for asmuch as thirty dollars. As canals and railroads openedcrossroads stores to the latest fiction, publishers in NewYork and Philadelphia vied to deliver inexpensive novelsto the shelves. By the 1840s cheap paperbacks that soldfor as little as seven cents began to flood the market.Those who chose not to purchase books could read fic-tion in so-called story newspapers such as the New YorkLedger, which was devoted mainly to serializing novelsand which had an astonishing weekly circulation of fourhundred thousand by 1860. In addition, the spread of(usually) coeducational public schools and academiescontributed to higher literacy and a widening audience,especially among women, for fiction.

The most popular form of fiction in the 1840s and1850s was the sentimental novel, a kind of women’s fic-tion written by women about women and mainly forwomen. The tribulations of orphans and the deaths of

children filled these tearjerkers. In Susan Warner’s TheWide, Wide World (1850), the heroine weeps on an aver-age of every other page for two volumes. But women’sfiction dealt with more than the flow of tears. It chal-lenged the image of males as trusty providers and offemales as delicate dependents by portraying men asdissolute drunkards or vicious misers and women asresourceful and strong-willed. In the typical plot, afemale orphan or spoiled rich girl thrown on hard timesby a drunken father learned to master every situation.The moral was clear. Women could overcome trials andimprove their worlds. Few of the novelists were activefeminists, but their writings provide a glimpse into theprivate feelings of their female readers.

Such authors as Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, andMelville, who now are recognized as major figures, hadto swim in the sea of popular culture represented by thestory newspapers and sentimental novels. Emerson, theintellectual, competed on the lecture circuit with P. T.Barnum, the showman. Hawthorne complained aboutthe popularity of the “female scribblers.” Poe thoughtthat the public’s judgment of a writer’s merits was nearlyalways wrong. Indeed, the public did fail to see Melville’sgenius; the qualities of Moby-Dick were not widely rec-ognized until the twentieth century. By and large, how-ever, the major writers were not ignored by their society.Emerson’s lectures made him famous. Hawthorne’s TheScarlet Letter enjoyed respectable sales. Poe’s poem “TheRaven” (1844) was so popular that some suggested sub-stituting the raven for the eagle as the national bird.What these writers discovered, sometimes the hard way,was that to make a living as authors they had to meetcertain popular expectations. For example, The ScarletLetter had greater popular appeal than Moby-Dick inpart because the former told a love story while the latter,with its all-male cast and high-seas exploits, was simplynot what the public looked for in a novel.

American Landscape Painting

American painters also sought to develop nationality inart between 1820 and 1860. Lacking the mythic past thatEuropean artists drew on—the legendary gods and god-desses of ancient Greece and Rome—Americans subor-dinated history and figure painting to landscape paint-ing. Just as Hawthorne had complained about the flat,dull character of American society, so had the painters ofthe Hudson River school recognized that the Americanlandscape lacked the European landscape’s “poetry ofdecay” in the form of ruined castles and crumbling tem-ples. Like everything else in the United States, the land-scape was fresh, relatively untouched by the human



imprint. This fact posed a challenge to the Hudson Riverschool painters.

The Hudson River school flourished from the 1820sto the 1870s. Numbering more than fifty painters, it wasbest represented by Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, andFrederick Church. All three men painted scenes of theregion around the Hudson River, a waterway thatAmericans compared in majesty to the Rhine. But nonewas exclusively a landscapist. Some of Cole’s most popu-lar paintings were allegories, including The Course ofEmpire, a sequence of five canvases depicting the riseand fall of an ancient city and clearly implying that luxu-ry doomed republican virtue. Nor did these artists paintonly the Hudson. Church, a student of Cole and interna-tionally the best known of the three, painted the AndesMountains during an extended trip to South America in1853. After the Civil War, the German-born AlbertBierstedt applied many Hudson River school techniquesin his monumental canvases of the Rocky Mountains.

The works of Washington Irving and the opening ofthe Erie Canal had sparked artistic interest in the

Hudson during the 1820s. After 1830 the writings ofEmerson and Thoreau popularized a new view of nature.Intent on cultivating land, the pioneers of Kentucky andOhio had deforested a vast area. One traveler com-plained that Americans would rather view a wheat fieldor a cabbage patch than a virgin forest. But Emerson,Thoreau, and landscape architects like Frederick LawOlmsted glorified nature; “in wildness is the preserva-tion of the world,” Thoreau wrote. Their outlook blendedwith growing popular fears that, as one contemporaryexpressed it in 1847, “The axe of civilization is busy withour old forests.” As the “wild and picturesque haunts ofthe Red Man” became “the abodes of commerce and theseats of civilization,” he concluded, “it behooves ourartists to rescue from its grasp the little that is left beforeit is too late.”

The Hudson River painters wanted to do more thanpreserve a passing wilderness. Their special contribu-tion to American art was to emphasize emotional effectover accuracy. Cole’s use of rich coloring, billowingclouds, massive gnarled trees, towering peaks, and deep


chasms so heightened the dramatic impact of his paint-ings that the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant com-pared them to “acts of religion.” Similar motifs markedChurch’s paintings of the Andes Mountains, which usederupting volcanoes and thunderstorms to evoke dreadand a sense of majesty. Lacking the poignant antiquitiesthat dotted European landscapes, the Americans stroveto capture the natural grandeur of their own landscape.

Like Cole, the painter George Catlin also tried topreserve a vanishing America. Observing a delegation ofIndians passing through Philadelphia in 1824, Catlinresolved on his life’s work: to paint as many NativeAmericans as possible in their pure and “savage” state.Journeying up the Missouri River in 1832, he sketched ata feverish pace, and in 1837 he first exhibited his “Indiangallery” of 437 oil paintings and thousands of sketches offaces and customs from nearly fifty tribes.

Catlin’s Indian paintings made him famous, but hisromantic view of Indians as noble savages (“the Indianmind is a beautiful blank”) was a double-edged sword.Catlin’s admirers delighted in his portrayals of dignifiedIndians but shared his view that such noble creatureswere “doomed” to oblivion by the march of progress.

While painters sought to preserve a passing Americaon canvas, landscape architects aimed at creating littleenclaves of nature that might serve as sources of spiritu-al refreshment to harried city dwellers. Starting with theopening of Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston in1831, “rural” cemeteries with pastoral names such as“Harmony Grove” and “Greenwood” sprang up nearmajor cities and quickly became tourist attractions, somuch so that one orator described them as designed forthe living rather than the dead. In 1858 New York Citychose a plan drawn by Frederick Law Olmsted andCalvert Vaux for its proposed Central Park. Olmsted(who became the park’s chief architect) and Vaux wantedthe park to look as much like the countryside as possi-ble, showing nothing of the surrounding city. A border-ing line of trees screened out buildings, drainage pipeswere dug to create lakes, and four sunken thoroughfareswere cut across the park to carry traffic. The effect was tomake Central Park an idealized version of nature, “pic-turesque” in that it would remind visitors of the land-scapes that they had seen in pictures. Thus nature wasmade to mirror art.

CONCLUSIONTechnological advances transformed the lives of mil-lions of Americans between 1840 and 1860. Themechanical reaper increased wheat production andenabled agriculture to keep pace with the growing popu-lation. The development of machine tools, first in gunmanufacture and next in the manufacturing of sewingmachines, helped Americans achieve Eli Whitney’s ideal


CHRONOLOGY, 1840–1860

1820 Washington Irving, The Sketch Book.1823 Philadelphia completes the first urban water-supply

system.James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers.

1826 Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans.1831 Mount Auburn Cemetery opens.1832 A cholera epidemic strikes the United States.1833 The New York Sun, the first penny newspaper, is

established.1834 Cyrus McCormick patents the mechanical reaper.1835 James Gordon Bennett establishes the New York Herald.1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar.”1841 P. T. Barnum opens the American Museum.1842 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”1844 Samuel F. B. Morse patents the telegraph.

Poe, “The Raven.”1846 W. T. G. Morton successfully uses anesthesia.

Elias Howe, Jr., patents the sewing machine.1849 Second major cholera epidemic.

Astor Place theater riot leaves twenty dead.1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.1851 Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.Erie Railroad completes its line to the West.

1852 Pennsylvania Railroad completes its line betweenPhiladelphia and Pittsburgh.

1853 Ten small railroads are consolidated into the New YorkCentral Railroad.

1854 Henry David Thoreau, Walden.1855 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.1856 Pennsylvania Railroad completes Chicago link.

Illinois Central completed between Chicago and Cairo,Illinois.

1857 Baltimore-St. Louis rail service completed.1858 Frederick Law Olmsted is appointed architect in chief

for Central Park.

of production by interchangeable parts and made arange of luxuries affordable for the middle class. Steampower reduced the vulnerability of factories to thevagaries of the weather, stretched out the employmentseason, and increased productivity and income. Thespread of railroads and the invention of the telegraphshrunk the barriers of space and time.

Many of these developments unified Americans.Railroad tracks threaded the nation together. The tele-graph speeded communication and made it possible forAmericans to read about the same current events intheir newspapers. The advances in printing that gavebirth to the penny press and the inexpensive novel con-tributed to a widening of the reading public. Not onlywere Americans now more able to read the same newsitems; increasingly, they read the same best-sellers, justas they flocked to the commercial amusements market-ed by P. T. Barnum. Advocates of progress hailed thesedevelopments as instruments of ever-rising popularhappiness. Even disease came to be seen less as a divinepunishment for human depravity than as God’s warningto those who ate or drank too much.

Progress carried a price. By bringing commoditiesonce available only to the rich within the financial reachof the middle class, technology narrowed the social dis-tance between these classes. At the same time, though, itset them off more sharply from the poor and intensifiedthe division between the experiences of middle-classmen and women. Progress also posed moral and spiritu-al challenges. The march of progress threatened todevour unspoiled nature. In different ways, writers likeJames Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, andHenry David Thoreau called attention to the conflictbetween nature and civilization as a distinctive featureof the American experience. Artists of the Hudson Riverschool created majestic paintings of the natural wondersof the New World. For their part, Nathaniel Hawthorneand Herman Melville challenged the easy confidencethat technology and democracy could liberateAmericans from the dilemmas of the human condition.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE

READINGS

Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (1986). Anexcellent study of the relationship between writers andtheir culture.

Mary Kupiec Cayton, Emerson’s Emergence: Self and Societyin the Transformation of New England, 1800–1845 (1989).A sensitive interpretation of the major figure in theAmerican Renaissance.

Ruth S. Cowan, A Social History of American Technology(1997). An excellent survey.

Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture(1977). An analysis of the role of middle-class womenand liberal ministers in the cultural sphere during thenineteenth century.

Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American PostalSystem from Franklin to Morse (1996). A revealing look atthe age.

Judith A. McGaw, ed., Early American Technology (1994). Acollection of fine essays on technology from the colonialera to 1850.

Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American LandscapePainting, 1825–1875 (1982). An insightful study of therelationships between landscape painting and contem-porary religious and philosophical currents.

Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History ofHousing in America (1981). An exploration of the ideolo-gies and policies that have shaped American housingsince Puritan times.

WEBSITES

The Industrial Revolutionhttp://www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/prog07/feature/index.htmlThis site contains useful maps of road, canal, and rail-road development, 1830–1860.

Labor and Industry in Troy and Cohoeshttp://www.albany.edu/history/troy-cohoesIlluminates manufacturing and working conditions intwo industrial centers on the upper Hudson River.

Tales of the Early Republichttp://216.202.17.223/This site contains links to materials on science, technol-ogy, popular culture, and literature in the decades lead-ing up to the Civil War.

For additional works please consult the Bibliography atthe end of the book.

For Further Reference 343

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Technology, Culture, and Everyday Life, 1840–1860 · Technology, Culture, and Everyday Life, 1840–1860 CHAPTER 11 Isaac M. Singer’s life was not going well in 1850. Thirty-nine