In the late eighteenth century, many Americans wondered whether their country’s infant democracy could produce great works of art. The revolutionary generation drew its models of art and architecture from the world of classical antiquity, especially the Roman republic. The new United States had few professional writers or artists. It lacked a large class of patrons to subsidize the arts. It published few magazines and housed only a single art museum. Above all, America seemed to lack the traditions out of which artists and writers could create great works.

     In the early nineteenth century, a number of American authors began to create literature emphasizing native scenes and characters.

     Washington Irving (1783–1859), who was probably the first American to support himself as a man of letters, demonstrated the possibility of creating art out of native elements in his classic tales "Rip Van Winkle" (1818) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820).

     The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was even more successful in transforming American legends into the stuff of art and reaching a broad popular audience. His narrative poems dramatizing scenes from America’s past made such figures as Paul Revere, Miles Standish, John Alden, Priscilla Mullins, and Hiawatha household names. His simple evocative lines have been cherished by generations of American children:  "Under the spreading chestnut tree The village smithy stands; I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; There was a little girl Who had a little curl Right in the middle of her forehead."

     Ironically, this popular poet was a “Boston Brahmin” (a member of one of Boston’s leading families), an expert in linguistics, a professor of modern languages at Harvard, and a translator of the latest European poetry.

     James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was another successful mythmaker. His works gave us such staples of western fiction as the lone frontiersman, the faithful Indian companion, and the kidnap, chase, and rescue. He also made such words and phrases as “paleface,” “on the warpath,” and “war paint” part of the American vocabulary. Born in Burlington, New Jersey, the son of a land speculator, Cooper grew up in the frontier community of Cooperstown in central New York. At 13, he enrolled at Yale but was expelled for blowing open a classmate’s door with a charge of gunpowder and roping a donkey onto a professor’s chair. He then went to sea as a common sailor. In 1819, following his return to Cooperstown, Cooper was reading a popular novel of the day aloud to his wife. He tossed the book aside and claimed that he could write a better one. His wife dared him to try, and during the remaining 32 years of his life he wrote 34 books.

     In his second and third novels, The Spy (1821) and The Pioneers (1823), Cooper created one of the most enduring archetypes in American culture. His hero, the frontiersman Natty Bumppo (also known as Hawkeye, Leatherstocking, and Pathfinder) was an American knight at home in the wilderness. He became the prototype not only for future trappers and scouts, but also for countless cowboys, detectives, and superheroes found in popular American fiction and film. Part of Natty Bumppo’s appeal was that he gave expression to many of the misgivings early nineteenth-century Americans had about the cost of progress (his last words were “Let me sleep where I have lived—beyond the din of settlements”). An acute social critic, Cooper railed against the destruction of the natural environment, the violence directed at Native Americans, and the rapaciousness and materialism of an expansive American society.

     The American Transcendentalists were a group of young New Englanders, mostly of Unitarian background, who found liberal religion too formal and rationalistic to meet their spiritual and emotional needs.  Logic and reason, they believed, were incapable of explaining the fundamental mysteries of human existence.  Where, then, could people find answers to life’s fundamental problems?  The deepest insights, the transcendentalists believed, were to be found within the human individual, through intuition.

     The transcendentalists shared a common outlook: a belief that each person contains infinite and godlike potentialities; an emphasis on emotion and the senses over reason and intellect; and a glorification of nature as a creative, dynamic force in which people could discover their true selves and commune with the supernatural.  Like the romantic artists and poets of Europe, they emphasized the individual, the subjective, the imaginative, the personal, the emotional, and the visionary.

     The central figure in transcendentalism was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Trained, like his father, to be a liberal Unitarian minister, Emerson found his parents’ faith unsatisfying.  Unitarian theology and ritual, he wrote, was “corpse cold”; it was the “thin porridge or cold tea” of genteel Bostonians.  Emerson’s life was marked by personal tragedy and illness—his father died when he was a boy; his first wife died after less than two years of marriage; his firstborn son died at the age of five; a brother went insane.  Consequently, Emerson could never believe that logic and reason offered answers to life’s mysteries.

     Appalled by the complacency, provinciality, and materialism of Boston’s elite, the 29-year-old Emerson resigned as minister of the prestigious Second Church of Boston in 1832.  Convinced that no external answers existed to the fundamental problems of life, he decided to look inward and “spin my thread from my own bowels.”

     In his essays and public lectures, Emerson distilled the essence of the new philosophy:  All people contain seeds of divinity, but society, traditionalism, and lifeless religious institutions thwart the fulfillment of these potentialities.  In his essay “Nature” (1836), Emerson asserted that God’s presence is inherent in both humanity and nature and can best be sensed through intuition rather than through reason.

     In his essay “Self-Reliance” (1841), he called on his readers to strive for true individuality in the face of intense social pressures for conformity : “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members....The virtue in most request is conformity....Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

     Although Emerson himself was not an active reformer (he once wrote that whenever he saw a reformer, he felt like asking, “What right, Sir, do you have to your one virtue?") his philosophy inspired many reformers far more radical than he.  His stress on the individual, his defense of nonconformity, and his vocal critique of the alienation and social fragmentation that had accompanied the growth of cities and industry led others to try to apply the principles of transcendentalism to their personal lives and to society at large.

     Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was one of the transcendentalists who strove to realize Emersonian ideals in his personal life.  A pencilmaker, surveyor, and poet, Thoreau, like Emerson, was educated at Harvard.  He felt nothing but contempt for social conventions and wore a green coat to chapel because Harvard’s rules required black.  After college, he taught school and worked at his father’s pencil factory, but these jobs brought him no fulfillment.

     In March 1845, the 28-year-old Thoreau, convinced that his life was being frittered away by details, walked into the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, to live alone.  He put up a cabin near Walden Pond as an experiment—to see if it was possible for a person to live truly free and uncommitted: “I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”  The aim of his experiment was to break free from the distractions and artificialities of life, to shed himself of needless obligations and possessions, and to establish an original relationship with nature.  His motto was “simplify, simplify.”

     During his 26 months at Walden Pond, he constructed his own cabin, raised his own food (“seven miles of beans”), observed nature, explored his inner self, and kept a 6000-page journal.  He served as “self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms,” “surveyor of forest-paths,” and protector of “wild-stock.”  He also spent a night in jail, for refusing to pay taxes as a protest against the Mexican-American War.  This incident led him to write the classic defense of nonviolent direct action, “Civil Disobedience.”

      Two dramatic attempts to apply the ideas of transcendentalism to everyday life were Brook Farm, a community located near Boston, and Fruitlands, a utopian community near Harvard, Massachusetts.  In 1841, George Ripley, like Emerson a former Unitarian clergyman, established Brook Farm in an attempt to substitute transcendentalist ideals of “brotherly cooperation,” harmony, and spiritual fulfillment for the “selfish competition,” class division, and alienation that increasingly characterized the larger society.  “Our ulterior aim is nothing less than Heaven on Earth,” declared one community member.  Brook Farm’s residents, who never numbered more than 200, supported themselves by farming, teaching, and manufacturing clothing.  The most famous member of the community was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who based his 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance on his experiences there.  The community lasted in its original form just three years.

     The 1840s and 1850s witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of literary creativity as American writers abandoned their subservience to foreign models and created a distinctly American literature.

     During his lifetime, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) received far more notoriety from his legendary dissipation than from his poetry or short stories. Poe was raised by a Richmond, Virginia, merchant after his father abandoned the family and his mother died. For two years he went to the University of Virginia and briefly attended West Point, but drinking, gambling debts, and bitter fights with his guardian cut short his formal education. At the age of 24, he married a 13-year-old second cousin, who died a decade later of tuberculosis, brought on by cold and starvation. Found drunk and unconscious in Baltimore in 1849, Poe died at the age of 40.

     Sorely underappreciated by contemporaries, Poe invented the detective novel; edited the Southern Literary Messenger, one of the country’s leading literary journals; wrote incisive essays on literary criticism; and produced some of the most masterful poems and frightening tales of horror ever written.  His literary techniques inspired a number of important French writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry.  Poe said that his writing style consisted of “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful coloured into the horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought into the strange and mystical.”

     Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), the author of The Scarlet Letter (1850), one of America’s towering works of fiction, did not consider himself a novelist.  He wrote “romances,” he insisted—imaginative representations of moral problems, rather than novelistic depictions of social realities.  A descendant of one of the Salem witch-trial judges, the Salem-born Hawthorne grew up in a somber and solitary atmosphere.  His father, a sea captain, perished on a voyage when his son was just 4 years old, and Hawthorne’s mother spent the remainder of her life in mourning.  After attending Bowdoin College, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce were among his classmates, he began to write.  It would not be until 1837, however, when he published Twice-Told Tales, that the 33-year-old Hawthorne first gained public recognition.  He lived briefly at Brook Farm and participated in the transcendentalist circle, but did not share their idealistic faith in humanity’s innate goodness.

     Hawthorne was a secretive, painfully shy man no pre–Civil War author wrote more perceptively about guilt—sexual, moral, and psychological.  “In the depths of every human heart,” he wrote in an early tale, “there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide.” In his fiction, Hawthorne, more than any other early nineteenth-century American writer, challenged the larger society’s faith in science, technology, progress, and humanity’s essential goodness.  Many of his greatest works project nineteenth-century concerns—about women’s roles, sexuality, and religion—onto seventeenth-century Puritan settings.  Some of his stories examine the hubris of scientists and social reformers who dare tamper with the natural environment and human nature.

     Herman Melville (1819–1891), author of Moby Dick (1851), possibly America’s greatest romance, had little formal education and claimed that his intellectual development did not begin until he was 25.  By then, he had already seen his father go bankrupt and die insane, worked as a cabin boy on a merchant ship, served as a common seaman on a whaling ship, deserted in the Marquessa Islands, escaped on an Australian whaler, and been imprisoned in Tahiti.  He drew on these experiences in his first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), which were popular successes, but his third book Mardi (1849), a complex blend of political and religious allegory, metaphysics, and cosmic romance, failed miserably, foreshadowing the reception of his later works.  Part of a New York literary circle called Young America, Melville dreamed of creating a novel as vast and energetic as the nation itself.  In Moby Dick, he produced such a masterwork.  Based on the tale of “Mocha-Dick,” a gigantic white whale that sank a whaling ship, Moby Dick combined whaling lore and sea adventure into an epic drama of human arrogance, producing an allegory that explores what happens to a people who defy divine limits.  Tragically, neither Moby Dick nor Melville’s later works found an audience, and Melville spent his last years as a deputy customs collector in New York.  He died in utter obscurity, and his literary genius was rediscovered only in the 1920s.

     If Americans could produce literary masterpieces, were they also capable of creating visual art that would rival that of Europe?  At the end of the eighteenth century, this seemed doubtful.  Artistic implements, such as paints, brushes, and canvases, were difficult to obtain, and professional artists were few in number. Although a number of talented portrait painters—including John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and Gilbert Stuart—appeared during the last half of the eighteenth century, most painters were simply skilled craftspeople, who devoted most of their time to painting houses, furniture, or signs.

     Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the development of the visual arts was the fact that the revolutionary generation associated art with luxury, corruption, sensual appetite, and aristocracy. Commented one person: “When a people get a taste for the fine arts, they are ruined.”

     During the early nineteenth century, however, artists succeeded in overcoming public hostility toward the visual arts. One way artists gained a degree of respectability was through historical painting.  The American public hungered for visual representations of the great events of the American Revolution, and works such as John Trumbull’s Revolutionary War battle scenes and his painting of the Declaration of Independence (1818) fed the public’s appetite.  Romantic landscape paintings also attracted a large popular audience. Portrayals of the American landscape by artists of the Hudson River school, such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederick Church, evoked a sense of the immensity, power, and grandeur of nature, which had not yet been tamed by an expansive American civilization.

     A more favorable public attitude toward art was also evident in public campaigns to erect patriotic monuments, to landscape homes, and to beautify cities by restoring town greens and commons, constructing the first urban parks, and building the first modern “park” cemeteries. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, public monuments and statues were rarities; town commons were muddy, ill-kept areas, often containing buildings and packs of animals; houses lacked lawns; and cemeteries were unlandscaped collections of graves located near town centers.

     Beginning in 1825, when an obelisk was erected at Bunker Hill to commemorate that Revolutionary War battle, Americans started to construct patriotic monuments. Around the same time, homeowners began to beautify their homes with lawns and landscaping, while cities established the nation’s first urban parks. Construction of Mount Auburn cemetery in the 1830s in a pastoral setting outside Boston marked the beginning of the modern park cemetery, where the living could commune with the spirit of the dead (though the site was initially popular because it was a “green space” that could be used as a picnic ground). These beautification campaigns represented a response to the urban and industrial growth of cities that already threatened to destroy the physical beauty of city environments.

     One important aspect of popular culture was the penny press.  Before the American Revolution, newspapers were few in number, expensive, short, small in circulation, infrequently printed, and aimed at a narrow audience.  As late as 1765, there were only 23 weekly newspapers in the American colonies and no daily papers at all. At six cents a copy, these papers were out of reach of a popular audience; the contents of their four-page issues—announcements of ship arrivals, piracies, court actions, and maritime news—were of interest only to merchants.  It was not until 1783 that the first daily newspaper, the Pennsylvania Evening Post, began to be published.

     After the Revolution, political newspapers expressing the viewpoint of a particular political faction began to flourish.  In the 1830s, when the development of the steam printing press dramatically cut printing costs and speeded production, the first mass-circulation newspapers began to appear. The first penny newspapers, Horatio David Sheppard’s New York Morning Post and Benjamin H. Day’s New York Sun, began publication in 1833.

     The Sun, the first American paper to use newsboys to hawk papers on the street, soon discovered other ways of increasing its circulation.  In the summer of 1835, the Sun announced that British astronomer Sir John Herschel had made “astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description.”  With a new and powerful telescope, he had discovered “planets in other solar systems” and, most remarkably, the winged inhabitants of the moon.  As a result of the “Great Moon Hoax,” the Sun’s circulation soared from 10,000 to 19,000. The Sun’s success inspired other publishers to use hoaxes and stories of murders, railroad accidents, cannibalism, and freaks of nature—horror, gore, and perversity—to build circulation.  English novelist Charles Dickens thought that appropriate names for newspapers would be the New York Sewer and the New York Stabber.

     During the 1830s and 1840s, the modern mass-circulation newspaper emerged.  Journalistic pioneers, such as James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, introduced features that we still associate with the daily newspaper, including crime stories, gossip columns, editorials, stock tables, and sports pages.

     Along with the modern newspaper came magazines.  From just 5 American magazines in 1794, the number rose to nearly 100 in 1825 and 600 in 1850. By 1850, there were magazines for almost every imaginable audience, with the proliferation of children’s magazines, scientific journals, literary reviews, women’s magazines, religious periodicals, and comics.

The Dime Novel

     In 1860 an Oswego, New York, printer named Erastus Beadle, issued his first dime novel, Malaeska, The Indian Wife. Critics attacked this book and others about heroes such as Daniel Boone as “devil-traps for the young,” but within three years, Beadle had sold more than 2.5 million copies. Well before Erastus Beadle introduced the dime novel (which usually sold for a nickel), opportunistic publishers had already produced murder trial transcripts, criminals’ biographies, pirate tales, and westerns targeted at working-class and frontier readers.

     The respectable middle-class tended to read sentimental domestic tales, such as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, one of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century novels; sentimental love poetry by authors such as Lydia Sigourney, “the sweet singer of Hartford”; or morally high-minded adventure tales, such as Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) or historian Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1847). Less educated Americans, however, favored adventure novels and urban crime novels.

     Popular southern writers such as William Gilmore Simms and Robert Montgomery Bird produced tales of pirates and sea monsters for working-class and younger readers, and popular northern writers such as George Lippard, author of New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million, and Ned Buntline, author of The Mysteries and Miseries of New York, created tales of urban poverty and criminality.  Although not great works of literature, the urban crime novels, in particular, offered valuable social commentary, providing graphic details of aspects of pre–Civil War American life, such as teenage prostitution, urban poverty, class division, and social inequity, that were absent from the works of more respectable writers such as Washington Irving.

     Much of the most popular American fiction produced before the Civil War was written by women. Although Nathaniel Hawthorne dismissed female novelists as “mere scribbling women,” their works offered psychologically and sociologically insightful descriptions of drunken husbands brutalizing their wives, amoral men seducing and abandoning trusting young women, and callous employers exploiting ill-paid seamstresses and maids.

     The earliest woman-authored novel—Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), a story of a trusting heroine lured from her English home by a British officer and abandoned into poverty and premature death in New York—dealt with seduction and betrayal. At a time when the rate of illegitimate births was sharply rising (approaching 10 percent in New England), such stories offered a stark warning to young women.

     By the 1820s, the form of women’s literature most in demand was the “domestic novel,” which typically described the “trials and triumphs” of a young woman who encounters hardships in a hostile society and discovers the resources within herself to surmount these difficulties.  Authors such as Maria Cummins, Catharine Sedgwick, and Susan Warner gave expression to an early feminist vision.  Their books upheld “feminine” values—of duty, tenderness, and self-sacrifice—as an alternative to the acquisitive, pecuniary values of the dominant society and called on women to attain a sense of self-respect and self-worth.

Popular Entertainment

     A freewheeling, irreverent spirit pervaded American popular culture before the Civil War—a spirit typified by P. T. Barnum, nineteenth-century America’s most famous purveyor of popular entertainment.  A Connecticut Yankee born in Bridgeport in 1810, Barnum is reputed to have said that “there is a sucker born every minute.” A staunch advocate of temperance, antislavery, and women’s rights, Barnum made a fortune through pioneering campaigns of advertising and self-promotion.  A critic said that an appropriate motto for Barnum would be: “Lie and swindle as much as you please...but be sure you read your Bible and drink no brandy!”

     Throughout his life, the “prince of humbugs” never stopped believing that the public enjoyed having its wits tested. He got his start exhibiting a slave woman named Joice Heth, whom he claimed was 161 years old and had served as George Washington’s nursemaid (an autopsy later revealed that she was 80 at her death). Barnum achieved fame and fortune from his 25-cent American Museum in New York, which contained the “Feejee mermaid,” which had the head of a monkey and the body of a fish; a working model of Niagara Falls; the 25-inch-tall General Tom Thumb; and Jumbo, an immense white elephant. After the Civil War, Barnum closed his museum and opened “the greatest show on earth,” a spectacular three-ring circus. With his hoaxes, humbugs, and shameless self-promotion, Barnum epitomized the buoyant, irreverence of antebellum popular culture—which taught Americans to pay gladly for entertainment.

     A rowdy, boisterous spirit was particularly evident in popular humor.  The word “grotesque” sums up a defining characteristic of American humor before the Civil War.  Employing crude language, wild exaggeration, pungent images, and incongruity, the writings of such early American humorists as James Kirke Paulding and George Washington Harris paved the way for the later success of Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain.

     No form of humor was more popular than the tall tale, an incredibly exaggerated account of improbable events.  The most famous comic hero was Davy Crockett, loosely based on the life of the frontier hero and Whig politician who died at the Alamo.  More than 50 wildly popular Crockett almanacs and humor pamphlets described him as a high-spirited resourceful braggart, “half-man, half-alligator.”  He is depicted as an ardent opponent of corruption in business and politics, who spends his leisure time riding on streaks of lightning, and lighting his pipe with the sun.

     American popular culture found one of its most well-received forms of expression on the stage.  A typical night at the theater included not only a play, but various musical interludes and a comic opera, as well as demonstrations of magic tricks, tightrope walking, fireworks, acrobatics, or pantomime.  Melodramas were an especially popular form of theatrical entertainment, often describing a villain’s efforts to strip a young maiden of her virtue and fortune.  Emphasizing action over characterization, melodramas were filled with thrilling fights, daring escapes, and breathtaking rescues, and featured elaborate scenery, including working waterfalls and volcanoes.

     Critics condemned the theater as a “Synagogue of Satan” that attracted “the most depraved and yet the most enticing companions the community affords.”  Antebellum theaters were rowdy places where liquor dealers and prostitutes plied their wares, and audiences interacted directly with actors and musicians. Theatergoers were not passive spectators.  They ate during performances and expressed their praise with boisterous clapping.  When they were displeased, they yelled and hissed and pelted actors with rotten eggs, stones, and even chairs.  Some performances actually ignited riots—usually when an English actor was accused of insulting the United States.  The most famous, the Astor Place Riot of 1849, resulted in dozens of injuries.

     Oratory was a particularly popular form of entertainment. Americans attended sermons, political speeches, poetry readings, and public lectures with an enthusiasm unmatched in American history. The lyceum movement, founded by Josiah Holbrook, a Connecticut farmer, in 1826, sponsored traveling lectures on the arts, literature, philosophy, religion, and science, including such prominent figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Whig politician Daniel Webster.  Perhaps the most distinctive feature of pre–Civil War popular culture was the minstrel show. The first uniquely American entertainment form, the minstrel show, provided comedy, music, dance, and novelty acts to audiences hungry for entertainment.  Offering humor that ranged from comedy skits to slapstick and one-liners—often mocking pompous politicians and pretentious professionals—the minstrel shows also introduced many of America’s most enduring popular songs, including “Turkey in the Straw” and “Dixie.”  Minstrel shows popularized the songs of Stephen Foster (1826–1864), the most acclaimed American composer of the mid-nineteenth century. Foster wrote more than 200 songs during his lifetime, mainly sentimental ballads and love songs (such as “Old Folks at Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Beautiful Dreamer”) and uptempo, rhythmic comic songs (such as “Camptown Races” and “Oh! Susanna”).  At a time when the country was undergoing rapid urbanization and industrialization, Foster’s music responded to a deep nostalgia for a simpler era.  Although Foster died in utter poverty—at the age of 37 in the paupers’ wing of New York’s Bellevue Hospital, with just 37 cents in his pocket—he, more than any other composer, stimulated popular enthusiasm for American music.

     The minstrel shows are difficult to interpret, in part because they relied on blackfaced humor that we find particularly abhorrent.  Reflecting the racism of the broader society, minstrel shows presented a denigrating portrayal of African Americans.  Racial stereotypes were the minstrel shows’ stock in trade.  Actors wore grotesque makeup, spoke in ludicrous dialects, and presented plantation life in a highly romanticized manner. Yet if the minstrel shows expressed the virulent racism of many white Americans, the blackfaced minstrel had another side.  His humor frequently mocked whites and challenged traditional values.  Moreover, the shows often incorporated elements of African-American folklore and showed black men and women outwitting white masters.