Transcendental movement

American transcendentalism was a New England-based philosophical and literary movement that began with the 1836 founding of the Transcendental Club in Concord, Massachusetts. The movement’s members included Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), Margaret Fuller (1810-50), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), and Bronson Alcott (1799-1888).

The transcendentalists believed in the inherent goodness of humanity and all of nature. They were strongly influenced by the German idealists, including Immanuel

Kant, and the romantic movement in England. Emerson was inspired to form the Transcendental Club on his return from a trip to Europe, where he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and other important romantic writers. The transcendentalists explicitly rejected rationalism and the Puritan attitudes they had inherited as New Englanders. Instead, they expressed near-religious fervor for nature, intuition, and the creative process. They believed that God (or, as they called it, the Over-Soul) permeated all of creation, living and nonliving things alike, and that an individual’s highest potential could only be achieved through complete awareness of the truth and beauty of the natural world.

The Transcendental Club’s magazine, The Dial, was published from 1840 to 1844 and was an influential literary journal of the day. Edited by Fuller in its first two years of publication, it introduced many of Emerson’s best-known essays.

The transcendentalists were known for their experiments in alternative modes of living. Thoreau, most famously, lived alone and largely off the land for a time. His book about his solitary experience, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), remains one of the most widely read of the transcendentalists’ works. The idea that intellectual work and physical labor must go hand in hand appealed to the transcendentalists, whose philosophy after all compelled them to seek a complete awareness of and union with nature. Communal living and cooperative farming were attempted at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, where a number of the transcendentalists, including Hawthorne, lived in a socialist society from 1841 to 1847. Alcott’s cooperative vegetarian farm, Fruitlands, in Harvard, Massachusetts, endured for only a few months in 1843. Neither of the farms were financial successes, and in fact their members had to endure much monetary hardship. But these utopian communities did allow their residents to attempt to live in harmony with the land and in accordance with their transcendental ideals. They were also an important inspiration for the communes, organic farms, and cooperatives of later generations of idealists, especially in the 1960s.

It is for their writings that the transcendentalists are best remembered. Emerson’s book Nature (1836) and his essay “Self-Reliance” (1841) both focus on important aspects of transcendentalist philosophy. Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) is a major early feminist work that grew out of the women-only philosophy seminars she held in Boston between 1839 and 1844. Hawthorne’s novels and short stories remain important; The Blithedale Romance (1852) was based on his experience as part of the Brook Farm community, and his masterworks The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) criticize the values and legacy of Puritanism. Along with

Walden, Thoreau is best known for his essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849), which was a powerful influence on 20th-century thinkers and activists including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Further reading: Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, eds. Transient and Permanent: The Transcenden-talist Movement and Its Contexts (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999); Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

—Mary Kay Linge

Travis, William Barret (1809-1836) lawyer, soldier A lawyer and Texas military leader, William Barret Travis was an ardent supporter of American expansion into Mexican territory. He was born in Edgefield, South Carolina, in 1809. In 1818, the Travis family joined the great migration to the opening of new lands in the South, moving to Conecuh County, Alabama. The young Travis received a fair education at the local school. Like other ambitious young men in this frontier environment, he decided to read law. He pursued his study in the office of Judge James Dellett in Claiborne, Alabama. In 1819, just before his 20th birthday, he was admitted to the bar. Travis set up a legal practice in a new state whose prospects were immediately blighted by the economic crisis of 1819. To supplement his income, he taught school. In 1828, he married Rosanna Cato, one of his students.

In 1831, Travis left his wife (they were divorced in 1835) and two children and moved to Texas, where he settled in Anahuac, on Galveston Bay. This was also the site of the Mexican military garrison, commanded by Colonel John Bradbury, a Kentucky native now in the service of Mexico. Bradbury was an arbitrary officer, and Travis quickly rose to the leadership of an American faction in opposition to Mexican authority. The newly arrived immigrants from the United States aggressively defended their rights in the Republic of Mexico, viewing their position from the perspective of a different frontier tradition and generally ignoring their responsibilities as recipients of Mexican land grants. On every issue, Travis took a radical position, asserting that settlers’ rights must be upheld, if necessary, by force. Almost immediately on his arrival in Texas, he offended the authorities and was arrested. When an armed force gathered to demand his release, Mexican officials complied. The issue was settled peacefully, but hard feelings remained on each side. In October 1832, Travis moved to San Felipe, where he set up a thriving legal practice and soon became involved in local politics, once again as a vigorous defender of the rights of new settlers from the United States.

When General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna ascended to power in Mexico City, alarm bells sounded for

Travis and other Texans. Heretofore, the issues of rights and obligations, while hotly debated, had been largely abstract matters of principle. With Santa Anna’s decision to march north with his army and subdue dissident factions in Texas, these issues had become immediate. Travis was at the forefront of those determined to take vigorous action. In 1835, when Santa Anna sent soldiers to regarrison the fort at Anahuac, Travis raised a volunteer company, disarmed the Mexican soldiers, and seized the fort. The surrounding countryside was electrified by his actions. Many Texans repudiated his radical steps, but Travis and others pressed the issue of Texan rights and forced Santa Anna toward a campaign to subjugate the rebels. His aggressive actions at the head of an invading army validated Travis’s position that Texans must take up arms in defense of their rights.

When a convention convened at San Felipe to prepare a defense, Travis was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the cavalry. In autumn 1835, he participated actively in the siege of San Antonio. In December that year, he was appointed to command the artillery, and soon thereafter, he transferred to the cavalry, once again with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In early February 1836, with 25 men, he reinforced the small garrison at The Alamo. On February 13, he was appointed joint commander (with James Bowie) of the force, Travis to command the regulars and Bowie to lead the volunteers. Travis and Bowie disagreed on almost every aspect of the command, and they were still sorting out their views when Santa Anna’s army arrived at the gates of the Alamo. Bowie was soon felled by typhoid fever, and Travis assumed overall command. When Santa Anna launched his frontal assault on March 6, Travis was killed along with the other defenders, including Bowie and Davy Crockett. He was 26 years old. Officials and citizens alike remembered him as a staunch defender of principle and a Texas patriot.

Further reading: William C. Binkley, The Te:xas Revolution (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1952); T. R. Fahrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans (New York: Macmillan, 1968).