By June of 1850, Daniel Guiney had made up his mind.  He was going to leave his impoverished town in Ireland and move to the United States.  The enthusiastic letters he had received from friends convinced him that life had to be better in the United States.  Ireland was suffering a devastating famine.  Tens of thousands of citizens were dying of starvation, while many more were fleeing the country.

By August 1850, Guiney and a group from his neighborhood had moved to Buffalo, New York.  After settling in, Guiney wrote back home about the wondrous new land where they now resided.

“We mean to let you know our situation at present. ...  We arrived here about five o’clock in the afternoon of yesterday, fourteen of us together, where we were received with the greatest kindness of respectability. ...  When we came to the house we could not state to you how we were treated.  We had potatoes, meat, butter, bread, and tea for dinner. ...  If you were to see Denis Reen when Daniel Danihy dressed him with clothes suitable for this country, you would think him to be a boss or steward, so that we have scarcely words to state to you how happy we felt at present.”

The New Wave of Immigrants

Daniel Guiney was just one of the millions of immigrants who came to the United States in search of a better life in the mid-1800s.  The arrival of these newcomers coincided with a time when Americans were blazing new paths in a host of cultural areas, including religion, art, and literature.  Together, these events helped bring great changes to American society in the years before the Civil War.

Between 1815 and 1860, the United States experienced a massive influx of immigrants.  Over 5 million foreigners arrived on its shores.  Many had fled violence and political turmoil at home, while others sought to escape starvation and poverty.  Most of these newcomers found opportunity and a fresh start, but some also found discrimination and prejudice.

Newcomers From Ireland and Germany

The largest wave of immigrants, almost 2 million, came from Ireland.  The driving force behind the massive exodus was the onset of widespread famine in 1845, when a fungus destroyed much of the nation’s crop of potatoes, a mainstay of the Irish diet.  Most Irish immigrants arrived in the United States with no money and few marketable skills.  They generally settled in the industrialized cities of the Northeast, where many worked as unskilled laborers and servants.

Between 1815 and 1860, Germans represented the second largest group of immigrants.  By 1860 over 1.5 million Germans had arrived in the United States.  Most had enough money to move beyond the large eastern cities and settle in the Midwest.  There they became farmers or went into business.  Like most other immigrants, Germans reveled in their newfound sense of freedom and liberty.  German immigrant August Blümmer expressed this sentiment in a letter he wrote in 1838:
 

“Over there [Germany] common sense and free speech lie in shackles. ...  I invite you to come overhere, should you want to obtain a clear notion of genuine public life, freedom of people and a sense of being a nation. ...  I have never regretted that I came here, and never! never! again shall I bow my head under the yoke of despotism and folly.”

Nativism

While immigrants often found a new sense of freedom in the United States, some encountered discrimination.  The presence of people from different cultures, with different languages and different religions, produced feelings of nativism, or hostility toward foreigners.

In the 1800s, many Americans were strongly anti-Catholic.  Many prominent ministers preached anti-Catholic sermons.  Occasionally, anti-Catholic riots erupted.  The arrival of millions of predominantly Catholic Irish and German immigrants led to the rise of several nativist groups, such as the Supreme Order of the Star Spangled Banner, founded in 1849.  These groups pledged never to vote for a Catholic and pushed for laws banning immigrants and Catholics from holding public office.  In July 1854, delegates from these groups formed the American Party.  Membership in the party was secret, and those questioned were obliged to answer, “I know nothing.” The Know-Nothings, as the party was nicknamed, built a large following in the 1850s.

Analyze:
Why did nativism become so strong in the mid-1800s?
 

A Religious Revival

As immigrants added to the diversity of society, Americans were transforming the society in which they lived.  One important change came in American religious life, where traditional Protestantism experienced a dramatic revival, and new forms of worship became prominent.

The Second Great Awakening

By the end of the 1700s, many church leaders sensed that Americans’ commitment to organized religion was weakening.  This deterioration was due in large part to the growth of scientific knowledge and rationalism, notions that challenged the doctrine of faith.  In the early 1800s, religious leaders organized to revive Americans’ commitment to religion.  The resulting movement came to be called the Second Great Awakening.  It began in Kentucky, among frontier farmers, and quickly spread to the rest of the country.  Leaders of the various Protestant denominations—most often Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—held camp meetings that attracted thousands of followers for days of song, prayer, and emotional outpourings of faith.

The basic message of the Second Great Awakening was that individuals must readmit God and Christ into their daily lives.  The new revivalism rejected the traditional Calvinist idea that only a chosen few were predestined for salvation.  Instead, ministers preached that all people could attain grace through faith.

One of the most prominent advocates of this new message was a Presbyterian minister named Charles Grandison Finney.  Finney preached that each person contained within himself or herself the capacity for spiritual rebirth and salvation.  Finney helped found modern revivalism.  His camp meetings were carefully planned and rehearsed to create as much emotion as possible.  He compared his methods to those used by politicians and salespeople, and he used emotion to focus people’s attention on his message.  Finney began preaching in upstate New York, where he launched a series of revivals in towns along the Erie Canal.  He then took his message to the cities of the Northeast.

Finney also served as president of Oberlin College in Ohio, the first college in the United States to admit women and African Americans.  Although Oberlin became a center for social reform movements in the United States, Finney warned against using politics to change society.  He believed that if Christian ideas reformed people from within, society would become better, but if people remained selfish and immoral, political reforms would not make any difference.

New Religious Groups Emerge

A number of other religious groups also flourished during this period.  The Unitarians and Universalists broke away from the New England Congregational Church.  Unitarians reject the idea that Jesus was the son of God, arguing instead that he was a great teacher.  Their name comes from the belief that God is a unity, not a trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Universalists believe in the universal salvation of souls.  They reject the idea of hell and believe God intends to save everyone.

Another religious group that emerged during this period was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose followers are commonly known as Mormons.  Joseph Smith, a New Englander living in western New York, began preaching Mormon ideas in 1830 after claiming to have been called to restore the Christian church to its original form.  Smith published The Book of Mormon that year, saying it was a translation of words inscribed on golden plates that he had received from an angel.  The text told of the coming of God and the need to build a kingdom on Earth to receive him.

After enduring continuous harassment in Ohio, Missouri, and elsewhere, Mormons from around the Midwest moved to Commerce, Illinois, in the spring of 1839.  They bought the town, renamed it Nauvoo, and began building a self-contained community.  The group prospered in the Midwest, with Nauvoo numbering about 15,000 in 1844.  Persecution continued, however, and that same year local residents murdered Smith.  After Smith’s death, Brigham Young became the leader of the Church.  The Mormons then left Illinois and trekked westward to the Utah territory, where they put down permanent roots.

Summarize:
What was the basic message of the Second Great Awakening?
 

A Literary Renaissance

The optimism of the Second Great Awakening about human nature also influenced philosophers and writers.  Many leading thinkers of the day adopted the tenets of romanticism, a movement that began in Europe in the 1800s.  Romanticism advocated feeling over reason, inner spirituality over external rules, the individual above society, and nature over environments created by humans.

One notable expression of American romanticism came from New England writers and philosophers who were known as the transcendentalists.  Transcendentalism urged people to transcend, or overcome, the limits of their minds and let their souls reach out to embrace the beauty of the universe.

American Writers Emerge

The most influential transcendentalist was Ralph Waldo Emerson.  In his 1836 essay Nature, Emerson wrote that those who wanted fulfillment should work for communion with the natural world.  Emerson influenced other writers, including Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau.  Thoreau believed that individuals must fight the pressure to conform.  “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” he wrote.  “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
 
 

American Literature

Henry David Thoreau was part of the Transcendentalist movement that started as a reform movement within the Unitarian Church.  Transcendentalism stressed the connection of the soul of the individual to the soul of the world.  Simply put, the Transcendentalists believed that God resided in each person.  None of the works of poetry and prose during this period more fully embodied Transcendental ideals than Thoreau’s Walden.

Part journal, part social commentary, and part sermon, the work summarizes and expands Thoreau’s experiences at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, where he built a cabin and lived in relative solitude for two years.

from Walden by Henry David Thoreau

I went to 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.  I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.  I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience.  .  .  .  For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have 
somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Still we live meanly, like ants....  Our life is frittered away by detail.  An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers....  Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.  .  .  .

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails ....Why should we knock under and go with the stream?
 
 

Emerson and Thoreau were only two of many writers who set out to create uniquely American works.  Washington Irving, famous for his “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1819), became one of the first prominent American writers.  James Fenimore Cooper romanticized Native Americans and frontier explorers in his Leatherstocking Tales, the most famous being The Last of the Mohicans (1826).  Nathaniel Hawthorne, a New England customs official, wrote over 100 tales and novels.  His novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), with its Puritan setting, explored the persecution and psychological suffering that results from sin.  Herman Melville, another New Englander, wrote the great Moby Dick (1851).  Edgar Allan Poe, a poet and short story writer, achieved fame as a writer of terror and mystery.  Perhaps the most important poet of the era was Walt Whitman, who published a volume of poetry in 1855 called Leaves of Grass.  Whitman loved nature, the common people, and American democracy, and his famous work reflects these passions.  The best-remembered female poet of the era was Emily Dickinson, who wrote simple, personal, deeply emotional poetry.
 
 

Margaret Fuller
1810–1850

As a young woman, Margaret Fuller was a member of a group of prominent New England writers and philosophers who developed transcendentalism.  In 1840, with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson, she founded the magazine The Dial, which published poetry and essays of the transcendentalist movement.

Fuller also organized groups of Boston women to promote their education and intellectual development.  These meetings convinced her to write the book 
Women in the Nineteenth Century, in which she argued that women deserved equal political rights.

Fuller’s success in editing The Dial caught the eye of Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the New York Tribune.  In 1844 Greeley hired Fuller to be the Tribune’s literary critic.  In 1846 he sent Fuller to Europe to cover European reform efforts.  While visiting Italy, Fuller met and married Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a revolutionary fighting to unite Italy into one country.

Fuller sent home reports about the Italian revolution of 1848, becoming the first American woman foreign war correspondent.  In 1850, as the revolution fell apart, Fuller, Ossoli, and their young son set sail for the United States.  Tragedy struck when their ship sank near Long Island, New York, and all three drowned.
 
 

The Penny Press

Another important development of the early 1800s was the rise of the mass newspaper.  Before the 1800s, most newspapers catered to well-educated readers.  They were typically published once a week and cost around six cents, which was far beyond the reach of the average worker.

As more Americans learned to read and gained the right to vote, publishers began producing inexpensive newspapers, known as penny papers, which provided the kind of news most people liked.  Reports of fires, crimes, marriages, gossip, politics, and local news made the papers an instant success.

General interest magazines that catered to a more specialized readership also emerged around this time.  In 1830 Louis A.  Godey founded Godey’s Lady’s Book , the first American magazine for women.  The poet James Russell Lowell launched Atlantic Monthly, another magazine for the well-educated, in 1857, while Harper’s Weekly covered everything from book reviews to news reports.

Evaluate:
What were the main themes of American writers in the early 1800s?

Utopian Communities

The ideas that drove the religious and artistic movements of the United States in the mid-1800s—optimism about human nature and a belief in people’s ability to redefine their lives—also spurred the establishment of new communities.  The people who formed these communities believed that society tended to corrupt human nature.  They thought that the way to a better life was to separate themselves from society and form their own utopia, or ideal society.  Cooperative living and the absence of private property characterized these communities, and dozens of them sprang up and flourished during the Jacksonian Era.

In New England, near West Roxbury, Massachusetts, transcendentalist George Ripley established a utopian community known as Brook Farm in 1841.  The farm offered its members the chance to engage in intellectual activity while cooperatively running a farm.  Ultimately, Brook Farm collapsed after a large fire left the group with huge debts.

The religious group known as the Shakers established small utopian communities from Maine to Kentucky.  The group got its name from a ritual “shaking” dance that members performed.  The Shakers reached their peak in the mid-1800s with some 6,000 members.  Since they did not believe in marrying or having children, the group could only expand by making converts.

In the end, the number of Americans who chose to live in utopian communities was relatively small.  Many more, inspired by a strong faith in human goodness, attempted not to escape society but to reform it.

Interpreting
What spurred the establishment of utopian societies?
 

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