Yankee Republicanism and Northern Worldview

Sept 12th

Lousiana Purchase

Antebellum Period

1815 – 1860• Westward Expansion• Political Democratization

• Universal Male, White Suffrage

• Industrialization vs. Agricultural Boom

• Great Awakening• Abolition Movement

• Development of Free Religious Sentiment

Market Revolution• 1820 – 1830 different future

between North and South• Consumer, defense of free labor,

common man ideology

• Tremendous Technological Change

• Transportation, Communication, Cities

• Change from Subsistence to Cash Crops

• Home becomes its own Domestic Factory for Markets

Yankee Peddler

Market Revolution• First Reform Period

– Thoreau & Emerson

2. Industrialization Process

3. Racial Equality

4. Gender Equality

5. War and Pacifism

6. Individual Religious and Morality

• Emerson – Man the Reformer

Market Revolution Ideology

• Individualism vs. Structure– ‘I can remake my world’– Reduce the ideology that

individualism is powerful

• Tremendous Optimism– Broad social optimism, but…– Industrial Fortunes

• Wall Street, Railroads• Inequality would widen• Redefinition of family, childhood

in the bourgeoisie class

• Doctrine of Progress

Yankee Worldview

• Inheritance from History• Uriah Parmalee & Abolitionism, Civil War, Idealism• Young, white, northern, yankee, anglo-saxon

protestants

• Free Labor Ideology• “The West” • Women, children entering the labor market,

immigrants arriving from Ireland

• Mentalité• Habits, individual rights, mobility, morality, conception

of what men and women can give their children

Yankee Worldview• Self Reliance

• Expression of Individualism (Agency) • Without using the word ‘individualism’• Realities of Agency in the Market Revolution

• Anxiety, Dread, Despair• Great Fortunes, Great Inequality, Boom and Bust

• Mechanical vs. Organic Solidarity• Young women, and girls left farms, child laborers, new concept,

definition of ‘childhood’

• Immigration and Population Boom • Double in 1825 – 1850 (1.5 billion)• 1830s (600,000 ), 1840s (1.5 m), 1850s (3m)

• Boston and New York had 50 percent foreign born

Yankee Worldview• Mexican War of 1848• Markers of Technological & Transportation Progress

– Steam-boats• Romantic symbol of transportation revolution

– Railroads• Revolutionize sense of time and travel• Made the first multi-millionaires and private fortunes• Deep relationship between government subsidies, business, and

official corruption• Certain sense of economic isolation in the southern states

– Erie Canal• 1825 – 1880s: 300 miles between Buffalo and New York City

Yankee Worldview• Manifest Destiny

– Most prevalent idea of the 19th Century– Progress: Boundless resources, boundless land,

natural wealth, the place of progress in the world– Rooted in the principals of the Declaration of

Independence • Assertion of American Exceptionalism

– Poets, writers, politicians• “A new man”, “a new start for mankind”, “new hope”

– Never vanished in American Culture– Consequences and contradictions to saying ‘this’ to the world

Self-Reliance and Individualism

• Trancendentalism– New conception of how the mind knows the world, and the place and

result of thought• Paradigm shift from empiricism and reliance on the past to a trust in the

power of original thought• Lockean “understanding” and Emersonian “intuition”• Sensory understanding, as Locke describes the process, reason then

interprets, but religion molds an understanding of reason, linking reason to intuition of the soul.

• You-Tube “Self Reliance” Commercial • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hslN0C8GGaA

Self Reliance and Individualism

• America’s greatest cultural and political philosophy• Individualism

• Calm and considered feeling that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the masses of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of his family and friends. With this little society formed to his taste he gladly leaves greater society to look after himself. (Tocqueville)

– For Tocqueville it is a destructive social current. He defines it as different from ‘egoism’ but ultimately to ‘egoism’

• Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” individualism is a concept toward self-maturity

• Breach between Puritinism and Enlightenment (Franklin) • Breach between the Enlightenment and Unitarianism (Emerson)

– Central drama of human life returns to religion

Self-Reliance and Individualism

• Consistency-Contradiction• “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…” (pg.19)

• Conformity• Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist… (pg.17)• If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument… (pg.18)

• Intuition • The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of

virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instict (pg.20)• Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I

think’, ‘I am’ but quotes some saint or sage (pg.21)

• Philanthropy/Travel/Society

Abolitionism

• Generation of children that inherit the ideology of the American Revolution– 15 % of the population of the Northern States– Enlightenment Ideology vs. Southern Slave System– Sanctity of the Constitution– Monumental challenge of intractable issue

Abolitionism

• American Colonation Society– Volunteer free blacks who choose to return to

Africa to found an African-American Colony• Jeffersonian Idealism• Rejected by a majority of free African Americans

– Liberia 1820-1822– 1500 Free African Americans to Liberia 1821-1831

• Gradualism

Radical Abolitionsm

• Evangelical Christianity– Second Great Awakening

• Realization of Southern Ideological Commitment to Slavery

• British Influence from Anti-Slavery Crusade– 1807 anti-slave trade act of parliament– 1833 abolition act of parliament

• Political and Social Events– South Carolina– Ohio Resolution– Domestic Slave trade and demographic movement– William Lloyd Garrison – The Liberator