The spreading of democracy in the time of Andrew Jackson had an impact not only on the political life of the American people, but also on the feelings Americans had about themselves. In his Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville recognized the connections between an emergent in American culture and the growth of American democracy. Rapid expansion of economic opportunities brought about by the creation of factories and the broad expansion of transportation networks helped to create a feeling of connectedness among the American people. Those links in many ways overrode regional differences. The period between the age of Jackson and the outbreak of the Civil War was a time of enormous literary growth in America. Giants such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Melville and other lesser lights began to create a truly American literature that reflected America's cultural maturity.
The blossoming of American literature coincided with the growth of what in the greater literary world is called the Romantic Movement. Romanticism was a reaction to the classicism that characterized the age of the enlightenment, when a common belief existed that the path to truth was that of reason. Romanticism argued that reason, or intellect, could not explain emotional responses to phenomena such as the viewing of a gorgeous sunset, the birth of a child, or the sound of a beautiful melody. The inability to recognize the importance of emotional response to God's creation made for a sterile existence. Since the emotional or subjective reactions to the world that surround us must necessarily be individualistic, the individual being—the individual-formed much of the focus of the Romantic era.
With American political and legal ethics centered on the rights of the individual, the romantic notion of individualism aptly described what might be called the American consciousness in its pre-Civil War incarnation. Romantics understood that complete fulfillment of the human experience came from emotional responses to the world; they also recognized the pain and agony that came when individuals encountered the world's harsher realities. Just as the classic writers sought to define the world in terms of rationality and order, the Romantics sought to define the world in terms of beauty and all that the human spirit might obtain through imagination. At the core of much of this romantic philosophy was the idea of transcendentalism, a quest to discover a higher truth than can be obtained by mere observation of the world through consciousness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the best-known of the transcendental writers of the antebellum period, expressed many romantic ideals in his essays on nature and self-reliance. In The American Scholar Emerson emphasized the interaction between the historical development of a nation and its habits of thought; he wrote in that essay:
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. _
He is the one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history.
Just as the literature of the Revolution, such as Thomas Paine's Common Sense, provided a framework for the development of a mature political ideology, romantic literature sought to create a broader framework within which men and women could live more fulfilling lives.
The connection between Romanticism and American patriotism also extended itself to the arts. Romantic, often melodramatic fiction was part of the written word that proliferated in America in the anti-bellum age. And rather than being employed to depict portraits of the wealthy aristocracy, as English painters had done, American artists painted scenes of American life and the beauties of nature.
Walt Whitman was a poet who expressed America's democratic ideals as well as any writer before or since. He dedicated one of his most famous works, Leaves of Grass, to the "advanced, composite, electric, Democratic nationality." Although much of his poetry was centered on himself—"! celebrate myself, and sing myself"—he held himself to be a representative of every American, for he said, "every atom belonging to me as good but longs to you." His compelling images of America in all its complexity reach across all elements of society; he wrote, "I am of old and young, of the foolish as much of the wise." Whitman's Civil War poetry reflected the anguish and pain of that conflict, and his poetic eulogy, "Oh Captain, My Captain," on the death of Abraham Lincoln Walt Whitman reflected the greatness of the man and the tragedy of his dying. His poem has been called "a remarkable fusion of public events and private response" and recalls Whitman's years working in hospitals during the Civil War.
World History
