Interpreters of the Divine and the Human Condition

1
Interpreters of the Divine and the Human Condition

• American Thoughts and Thinkers, 1800-1860

2
Unitarianism/Universalism

• Rational religion
• Rejection of Orthodox Calvinism
• Unitarianismman was too good to damn
  UniversalistsGod was too good to damn
• Fatherhood of God, Brotherhood of man,
  neighborhood of Boston

3
Evangelicalism

• Academics tend to focus on the Universalists and
  Unitarians, many of whom were in the forefront of
  reform movements
• The dominant U. S. religion was Evangelical
  Protestantism, which rejected rigid Calvinism
• Emphasized reality of sin, redemption, heaven,
  hell, and personal responsibility for seeking and
  responding to salvation.

4
2d Great Awakening

• Began as a reaction to both rational religion and
  apostasy
• Cain Ridge Revivals in Kentucky
• Burned Over District in Upstate NY
• New ReligionsLDS Church

5
Cain Ridge Revivals

• Response to rural isolation and lack of
  ecclesiastical structures on the Frontier
• Further emergence of low-church Protestantism
• Democratization of Christianity

6
Peter Cartwright (1785-1873) And who is General
Jackson if General Jackson dont get his soul
converted, God will damn him as soon as anyone
else.
7
Burned Over District

• Charles Grandison Finney
• I have a retainer from the Lord to plead his
  cause I cannot plead yours
• New Methods of Evangelicalism
• Religious Values supported Market Revolution

8
LDS CHURCH

• Crucible of Burned Over district
• Discovery of the Tablets
• Converts by the Thousands, especially among women
• Persecuted by majority protestants in Palmyra,
  Kirtland, and Nauvoo
• Smith murdered in 1844

9
Significance of 2d Great Awakening

• Spawned Reform Movements (Temperance,
  Abolitionism) and Methods (Moral Suasion
• Created a secular, political rhetoric
• Huge growth in Church membership especially
  among protestants
• Protestant-based religious bigotry becomes U. S.
  norm

10
Romanticism and Transcendentalism

• Reaction to the mechanistic world view of the
  enlightenment
• U. S. version of anti-enlightenment was
  transcendentalismfocusing on the presumed true
  but improvable and ones inner light
• Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller were key
  exponents

11
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

• American Scholar (1837)
• Self Reliance (1841)
• Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of
  your own mind.

12
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

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

13
Margaret Fuller (1810-1815)

• Editor of the Dial
• Author of Woman in the 19th Century
• What woman needs is not as a woman to act or
  rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to
  discern, as a soul to live freely, and unimpeded
  to unfold such powers as were given her when we
  left our common home.

14
Belles Lettres Americanae

• Nathaniel HawthorneScarlet Letter
• Emily Dickinson1800 poems
• Washington IrvingKnickerbockers . . . History
  of New York
• James Fenimore Cooper--Leather Stocking Tales
• Herman MelvilleMoby Dick
• Walt WhitmanLeaves of Grass

15
Newspapers

• Richard Hoes Rotary Press
• New York Evening PostWilliam Cullen Bryant
• New York TribuneHorace Greeley
• New York TimesHenry J. Raymond

16
Ferment of Reform

• Public EducationHorace Mann Calvin Wiley
• Temperance
• Prison ReformDorothea Dix

17
Womens Rights

• Reaction to Domestic Sphere and to dependency on
  men for legal protection and political
  participation
• Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

18
Seneca Falls Convention
The history of mankind is a history of repeated
injuries and usurpations on the part of man
toward woman, having in direct object the
establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To
prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid
world. He has never permitted her to exercise
her inalienable right to the elective
franchise. He has compelled her to submit to
laws, in the formation of which she had no
voice. He has withheld from her rights which are
given to the most ignorant and degraded men--both
natives and foreigners. Having deprived her of
this first right of a citizen, the elective
franchise, thereby leaving her without
representation in the halls of legislation, he
has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her,
if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
19
Utopian Societies

• ShakersMother Ann Lee
• Oneida CommunityJohn Humphrey Noyes
• New HarmonyRobert Dale Owen
• Brook FarmGeorge Ripley

20
What might this all mean?

• Reaction to myriad changes unleashed by Market
  Revolution
• Desire to understand ones place in the cosmos
• Desire to tame mankind the way that machines
  were taming nature.