4.9 The Development of an American Culture

Romanticism was a movement in art and literature, imported from Europe, that valued emotion, imagination, nature and the individual over the cool reason of the Enlightenment. American Romantics used it to celebrate what made their country distinct, especially its wilderness.

Washington Irving wrote tales set in the Hudson Valley, such as 'Rip Van Winkle' (1819) and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' (1820). James Fenimore Cooper's frontier novels, including The Last of the Mohicans (1826), dramatized the wilderness and Native peoples, often in romanticized, stereotyped ways. Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne explored darker emotions; Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) looked back critically at Puritan New England.

Transcendentalism was a philosophy, centered in Concord, Massachusetts, which held that people could find truth and God directly through intuition and nature, beyond ('transcending') what reason and the senses show. Transcendentalists distrusted organized religion, conformity and materialism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson spread these ideas in essays like 'Nature' (1836) and 'Self-Reliance' (1841), urging people to trust themselves rather than tradition. Henry David Thoreau lived simply in a cabin at Walden Pond (1845–1847) and wrote Walden (1854). After spending a night in jail in 1846 for refusing to pay a tax that he believed supported slavery and the Mexican War, he wrote the essay now called 'Civil Disobedience' (1849), which argued that people should refuse to obey unjust laws. It later influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Margaret Fuller, a transcendentalist editor, argued for women's equality in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845).

The Hudson River School was a group of painters who made dramatic landscapes of American wilderness, especially the Hudson Valley and the Catskill Mountains. Its founder, Thomas Cole, painted works like The Oxbow (1836), which contrasts wild, stormy forest with neatly cleared farmland, raising questions about progress and the loss of wilderness. Asher Durand and later Frederic Church continued the style. These paintings presented American nature as grand and even sacred, a source of national pride equal to Europe's cathedrals and ruins.

Enslaved and free African Americans created a distinct culture that blended African traditions with American Christianity. Spirituals, religious songs sung by enslaved people, expressed faith, sorrow and hopes for freedom, sometimes with hidden messages about escape. Black churches became centers of community life (4.12).

Slave narratives were autobiographies of formerly enslaved people that exposed slavery's cruelty and argued for abolition. The most famous, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), described Douglass's life in Maryland, how he secretly learned to read and his escape. Because it was written by an eyewitness, it was powerful evidence against Southern claims that slavery was benign.

Popular culture also reflected racism. Minstrel shows, in which white performers in blackface mocked African Americans, were one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the North by the 1840s.