{"id":764,"date":"2015-06-22T21:38:28","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T21:38:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.candelalearning.com\/americanyawp\/?post_type=chapter&p=764"},"modified":"2015-06-22T21:38:28","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T21:38:28","slug":"atlantic-origins-of-reform","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-ushistory1ay\/chapter\/atlantic-origins-of-reform\/","title":{"raw":"Atlantic Origins of Reform","rendered":"Atlantic Origins of Reform"},"content":{"raw":"The reform movements that emerged in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century were not all American inventions.\u00a0 Instead, these movements were rooted in a transatlantic world where both sides of the ocean faced similar problems and together collaborated to find similar solutions.\u00a0 Many if of the same factors that spurred American reformers to action\u2014urbanization, industrialization, class struggle, and more\u2014equally affected Europe. Reformers on both sides of the Atlantic visited and corresponded with one another, exchanging ideas and building networks that proved crucial to shared causes like abolition and women\u2019s rights.\r\n\r\nSuch exchanges began as part of the larger processes of colonialism and empire-building. American Quakers began to question slavery as early as the late-17th century, and worked with British reformers in the successful campaign that ended the slave trade, and then slavery itself, in the early nineteenth century.\u00a0 Before, during, and after the Revolution, many Americans continued to admire European thinkers.\u00a0 Influence extended both east and west.\u00a0 By foregrounding questions about rights, the American Revolution helped inspire British abolitionists, who in turn offered support to their American counterparts.\r\n\r\nDeepening ties between reformers across the Atlantic owed not just to the emergence of new ideas, but also to the material connection of the early nineteenth century.\u00a0 Improvements in transportation, including the introduction of the steamboat, canals, and railroads, connected people not just across the United States, but also with other like-minded reformers in Europe. \u00a0(Ironically, the same technologies also helped ensure that even after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the British remained heavily invested in slavery, both directly and indirectly.)\u00a0 Equally important, the reduction of publication costs created by the printing technologies of the 1830s allowed reformers to reach new audiences across the world.\u00a0 Almost immediately after its publication in the United States, for instance, the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass\u2019s autobiography was republished in Europe and translated into French and Dutch, galvanizing Douglass\u2019s supporters across the Atlantic.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_990\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1000\"]\"Figures<\/a> This print from the French Society of the Friends of Blacks demonstrates the belief held by many (but not all) abolitionists throughout the Atlantic World that all persons, regardless of skin color, are equal by birth. \u201cLes Mortels sont \u00e9gaux, ce n'est pas la naissance c'est la seule vertu qui fait la diff\u00e9rence\u201d (\u201cMortals are equal, it is not birth, but virtue alone that makes the difference\u201d), 1794. Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nA compelling illustration of the transatlantic nature of reform can be found even in what is often considered the most \u201cAmerican\u201d of literary, cultural, and social movements, Transcendentalism.\u00a0 The Transcendentalist movement began in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1836, when a group of Unitarian clergymen formed what later became known as the Transcendental Club. The club met for four years and included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, and Theodore Parker. While initially limited to ministers or former ministers\u2014except for the eccentric Alcott\u2014the club quickly expanded to include numerous literary intellectuals. Among these were the author Henry David Thoreau, the proto-feminist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, and the educational reformer Elizabeth Peabody.\r\n\r\nTranscendentalists were deeply influenced by British Romanticism and German idealism, visiting, corresponding with, and translating the work of thinkers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and Immanuel Kant.\u00a0 The Transcendentalists followed these thinkers in celebrating individual artistic inspiration, personal spiritual experience, and aspects of human existence not easily explained by reason or logic. Transcendentalism had no established creed, but this was intentional. What united the Transcendentalists was their belief in a higher spiritual principle within each person that could be trusted to discover truth, guide moral action, and inspire art. They often referred to this principle as \u201cSoul,\u201d \u201cSpirit,\u201d \u201cMind,\u201d or \u201cReason.\u201d But the Transcendentalists were no mere disciples of their European predecessors. They established an enduring legacy precisely because they developed distinctly American ideas that emphasized individualism, optimism, oneness with nature, and a modern orientation toward the future rather than the past. These themes resonated in an American nineteenth century where political democracy and readily available land distinguished the United States from Europe.\r\n\r\nThe individual careers of the Transcendentalists demonstrate how a movement rooted in New England derived from and contributed to the larger transatlantic exchange, while still retaining a distinctly American character.\u00a0 The most influential transcendentalist was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson\u2019s intellectual development was sparked in part by his visit to the Jardin des Plantes, Paris\u2019 botanical garden, where he experienced a sense of the divine in nature.\u00a0 On his return to the United States, Emerson espoused a religious worldview wherein God, \u201cthe eternal ONE,\u201d manifested through the special harmony between the individual soul and nature.\u00a0 In \u201cThe American Scholar\u201d (1837) and \u201cSelf-Reliance\u201d (1841), Emerson emphasized the utter reliability and sufficiency of the individual soul, and in \u201cThe American Scholar\u201d he exhorted his audience to overcome \u201cour long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands.\u201d\u00a0 Emerson\u2019s call for Americans to investigate their own landscape derived in part, ironically, from his travels abroad. Emerson believed that the time had come for Americans to declare their intellectual independence from Europe.\r\n\r\nOther Transcendentalist reformers, such as George Ripley, looked to European socialists such as Charles Fourier for their inspiration.\u00a0 In the mid-1840s, Ripley and other members of the utopian Brook Farm community began to espouse Fourierism, a vision of society based upon cooperative principles, as an alternative to the same capitalist conditions that had troubled its proponent, Charles Fourier, in France.\u00a0 Ripley also published translations of European romanticists and engaged in a full-scale pamphlet war when he drew on the arguments of German theologians to declare that it was not necessary to believe in miracles if one wished to be a Christian.\r\n\r\nMargaret Fuller also engaged extensively with Europeans. As, the editor of the Transcendentalist\u2019s journal The Dial<\/i>, Fuller helped shape the ideas of the movement. Fuller\u2019s Woman in the Nineteenth Century <\/i>(1845) was deeply influenced by European predecessors like Mary Wollstonecraft\u2019s\u00a0Vindication of the Rights of Woman<\/i>. Fuller\u2019s text became one of the most probing and important texts of nineteenth-century feminism. \u00a0Her interest in European culture brought her to Europe as a correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune <\/i>in 1846, where she sent home reports of the revolutions on the Continent in 1848. Fuller was not the only woman involved in these causes. Elizabeth Peabody, for her part, became a well-known educational reformer, founding the first kindergarten in America on the principles of the German pedagogue Frederich Froebel.\r\n\r\nA movement shaped by <\/i>European thinkers itself became an important influence on <\/i>Europeans and others.\u00a0 Perhaps one of the most widely known transcendentalist authors was Henry David Thoreau, who in 1845 took up residence at Walden Pond, in what was essentially his friend\u2019s backyard. \u00a0The result was Walden <\/i>(1854), which touted simple living, communion with nature, and self-sufficiency with such strength that it has remained in print ever since. Thoreau\u2019s sense of rugged individualism, perhaps the strongest among even the Transcendentalists, also yielded \u201cResistance to Civil Government\u201d (1849). Later titled \u201cCivil Disobedience,\u201d this text also became an American classic that outlined the case for non-violent resistance to unjust laws and helped to inspire Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.\r\n\r\nWhile a limited and disparate group, the Transcendentalists exerted an enduring influence not just on American thought and culture, but also on those around the world. Their ideas and texts served to inspire numerous later movements, including but not limited to liberal religion, environmentalism, women\u2019s rights, and educational reform. Most importantly, and in keeping with their philosophy, their suggestive prose has inspired countless individuals to search for their true selves.\r\n\r\nThe Transcendentalists were not the only Americans to look across the Atlantic for support in their reform efforts.\u00a0 A number of transnational networks devoted to antislavery and women\u2019s rights developed during the early nineteenth century.\u00a0American antislavery activists, for example, developed close relationships with British abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, Daniel O\u2019Connell, and Joseph Sturge. \u00a0The prominent American abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld converted to the antislavery idea of immediatism\u2014that is, the demand for emancipation without delay\u2014by the wealthy British evangelical Charles Stuart.\u00a0 Although Anglo-American antislavery networks reached back to the late-eighteenth century, they dramatically grew in support and strength over the antebellum period, as evidenced by the General Antislavery Convention of 1840. \u00a0This antislavery delegation consisted of more than 500 abolitionists, mostly coming from France, England, and the United States. All met together in England, united by their common goal of ending slavery in their time. \u00a0Although abolitionism was not the largest American reform movement of the antebellum period (that honor belongs to temperance), it did foster greater cooperation among reformers in England and the United States.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_992\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1000\"]\"A<\/a> This enormous painting documents the 1840 convention of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, established by both American and English anti-slavery activists to promote worldwide abolition. Benjamin Haydon, The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840. Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn the course of their abolitionist activities, many American women began to establish contact with their counterparts across the Atlantic, each group penning articles and contributing material support to the others\u2019 antislavery publications and fundraisers.\u00a0 The effect of this cooperation can be seen in the nascent women\u2019s rights movement.\u00a0 During the 1840 meeting, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formulated the idea for a national women\u2019s suffrage convention, which they held at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. \u00a0The General Antislavery Convention played an important role in laying the foundation for an Anglo-American Women\u2019s Suffrage Movement. \u00a0As Stanton eloquently wrote in The History of Woman Suffrage<\/i> (1887), \u201cThe movement for women\u2019s suffrage, both in England and America, may be dated from this World Antislavery Convention\u201d(62). \u00a0Mott also made several lasting connections with her reforming sisters in England, who included Elizabeth Pease of Darlington, Ann Knight of Chelmsford, and Elizabeth Jesse Reid of London.\r\n\r\nThe bonds between British and American reformers can be traced throughout the many social improvement projects of the nineteenth century. Transatlantic cooperation galvanized efforts to reform individuals\u2019 and societies\u2019 relationships to alcohol, labor, religion, education, commerce, and land ownership. This cooperation, stemming from the recognition that social problems on both sides of the Atlantic were strikingly similar, helped American reformers to conceptualize themselves as part of a worldwide moral mission to attack social ills and spread the gospel of Christianity.","rendered":"

The reform movements that emerged in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century were not all American inventions.\u00a0 Instead, these movements were rooted in a transatlantic world where both sides of the ocean faced similar problems and together collaborated to find similar solutions.\u00a0 Many if of the same factors that spurred American reformers to action\u2014urbanization, industrialization, class struggle, and more\u2014equally affected Europe. Reformers on both sides of the Atlantic visited and corresponded with one another, exchanging ideas and building networks that proved crucial to shared causes like abolition and women\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n

Such exchanges began as part of the larger processes of colonialism and empire-building. American Quakers began to question slavery as early as the late-17th century, and worked with British reformers in the successful campaign that ended the slave trade, and then slavery itself, in the early nineteenth century.\u00a0 Before, during, and after the Revolution, many Americans continued to admire European thinkers.\u00a0 Influence extended both east and west.\u00a0 By foregrounding questions about rights, the American Revolution helped inspire British abolitionists, who in turn offered support to their American counterparts.<\/p>\n

Deepening ties between reformers across the Atlantic owed not just to the emergence of new ideas, but also to the material connection of the early nineteenth century.\u00a0 Improvements in transportation, including the introduction of the steamboat, canals, and railroads, connected people not just across the United States, but also with other like-minded reformers in Europe. \u00a0(Ironically, the same technologies also helped ensure that even after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the British remained heavily invested in slavery, both directly and indirectly.)\u00a0 Equally important, the reduction of publication costs created by the printing technologies of the 1830s allowed reformers to reach new audiences across the world.\u00a0 Almost immediately after its publication in the United States, for instance, the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass\u2019s autobiography was republished in Europe and translated into French and Dutch, galvanizing Douglass\u2019s supporters across the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

\"Figures<\/a><\/p>\n

This print from the French Society of the Friends of Blacks demonstrates the belief held by many (but not all) abolitionists throughout the Atlantic World that all persons, regardless of skin color, are equal by birth. \u201cLes Mortels sont \u00e9gaux, ce n’est pas la naissance c’est la seule vertu qui fait la diff\u00e9rence\u201d (\u201cMortals are equal, it is not birth, but virtue alone that makes the difference\u201d), 1794. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A compelling illustration of the transatlantic nature of reform can be found even in what is often considered the most \u201cAmerican\u201d of literary, cultural, and social movements, Transcendentalism.\u00a0 The Transcendentalist movement began in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1836, when a group of Unitarian clergymen formed what later became known as the Transcendental Club. The club met for four years and included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, and Theodore Parker. While initially limited to ministers or former ministers\u2014except for the eccentric Alcott\u2014the club quickly expanded to include numerous literary intellectuals. Among these were the author Henry David Thoreau, the proto-feminist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, and the educational reformer Elizabeth Peabody.<\/p>\n

Transcendentalists were deeply influenced by British Romanticism and German idealism, visiting, corresponding with, and translating the work of thinkers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and Immanuel Kant.\u00a0 The Transcendentalists followed these thinkers in celebrating individual artistic inspiration, personal spiritual experience, and aspects of human existence not easily explained by reason or logic. Transcendentalism had no established creed, but this was intentional. What united the Transcendentalists was their belief in a higher spiritual principle within each person that could be trusted to discover truth, guide moral action, and inspire art. They often referred to this principle as \u201cSoul,\u201d \u201cSpirit,\u201d \u201cMind,\u201d or \u201cReason.\u201d But the Transcendentalists were no mere disciples of their European predecessors. They established an enduring legacy precisely because they developed distinctly American ideas that emphasized individualism, optimism, oneness with nature, and a modern orientation toward the future rather than the past. These themes resonated in an American nineteenth century where political democracy and readily available land distinguished the United States from Europe.<\/p>\n

The individual careers of the Transcendentalists demonstrate how a movement rooted in New England derived from and contributed to the larger transatlantic exchange, while still retaining a distinctly American character.\u00a0 The most influential transcendentalist was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson\u2019s intellectual development was sparked in part by his visit to the Jardin des Plantes, Paris\u2019 botanical garden, where he experienced a sense of the divine in nature.\u00a0 On his return to the United States, Emerson espoused a religious worldview wherein God, \u201cthe eternal ONE,\u201d manifested through the special harmony between the individual soul and nature.\u00a0 In \u201cThe American Scholar\u201d (1837) and \u201cSelf-Reliance\u201d (1841), Emerson emphasized the utter reliability and sufficiency of the individual soul, and in \u201cThe American Scholar\u201d he exhorted his audience to overcome \u201cour long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands.\u201d\u00a0 Emerson\u2019s call for Americans to investigate their own landscape derived in part, ironically, from his travels abroad. Emerson believed that the time had come for Americans to declare their intellectual independence from Europe.<\/p>\n

Other Transcendentalist reformers, such as George Ripley, looked to European socialists such as Charles Fourier for their inspiration.\u00a0 In the mid-1840s, Ripley and other members of the utopian Brook Farm community began to espouse Fourierism, a vision of society based upon cooperative principles, as an alternative to the same capitalist conditions that had troubled its proponent, Charles Fourier, in France.\u00a0 Ripley also published translations of European romanticists and engaged in a full-scale pamphlet war when he drew on the arguments of German theologians to declare that it was not necessary to believe in miracles if one wished to be a Christian.<\/p>\n

Margaret Fuller also engaged extensively with Europeans. As, the editor of the Transcendentalist\u2019s journal The Dial<\/i>, Fuller helped shape the ideas of the movement. Fuller\u2019s Woman in the Nineteenth Century <\/i>(1845) was deeply influenced by European predecessors like Mary Wollstonecraft\u2019s\u00a0Vindication of the Rights of Woman<\/i>. Fuller\u2019s text became one of the most probing and important texts of nineteenth-century feminism. \u00a0Her interest in European culture brought her to Europe as a correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune <\/i>in 1846, where she sent home reports of the revolutions on the Continent in 1848. Fuller was not the only woman involved in these causes. Elizabeth Peabody, for her part, became a well-known educational reformer, founding the first kindergarten in America on the principles of the German pedagogue Frederich Froebel.<\/p>\n

A movement shaped by <\/i>European thinkers itself became an important influence on <\/i>Europeans and others.\u00a0 Perhaps one of the most widely known transcendentalist authors was Henry David Thoreau, who in 1845 took up residence at Walden Pond, in what was essentially his friend\u2019s backyard. \u00a0The result was Walden <\/i>(1854), which touted simple living, communion with nature, and self-sufficiency with such strength that it has remained in print ever since. Thoreau\u2019s sense of rugged individualism, perhaps the strongest among even the Transcendentalists, also yielded \u201cResistance to Civil Government\u201d (1849). Later titled \u201cCivil Disobedience,\u201d this text also became an American classic that outlined the case for non-violent resistance to unjust laws and helped to inspire Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n

While a limited and disparate group, the Transcendentalists exerted an enduring influence not just on American thought and culture, but also on those around the world. Their ideas and texts served to inspire numerous later movements, including but not limited to liberal religion, environmentalism, women\u2019s rights, and educational reform. Most importantly, and in keeping with their philosophy, their suggestive prose has inspired countless individuals to search for their true selves.<\/p>\n

The Transcendentalists were not the only Americans to look across the Atlantic for support in their reform efforts.\u00a0 A number of transnational networks devoted to antislavery and women\u2019s rights developed during the early nineteenth century.\u00a0American antislavery activists, for example, developed close relationships with British abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, Daniel O\u2019Connell, and Joseph Sturge. \u00a0The prominent American abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld converted to the antislavery idea of immediatism\u2014that is, the demand for emancipation without delay\u2014by the wealthy British evangelical Charles Stuart.\u00a0 Although Anglo-American antislavery networks reached back to the late-eighteenth century, they dramatically grew in support and strength over the antebellum period, as evidenced by the General Antislavery Convention of 1840. \u00a0This antislavery delegation consisted of more than 500 abolitionists, mostly coming from France, England, and the United States. All met together in England, united by their common goal of ending slavery in their time. \u00a0Although abolitionism was not the largest American reform movement of the antebellum period (that honor belongs to temperance), it did foster greater cooperation among reformers in England and the United States.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

This enormous painting documents the 1840 convention of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, established by both American and English anti-slavery activists to promote worldwide abolition. Benjamin Haydon, The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In the course of their abolitionist activities, many American women began to establish contact with their counterparts across the Atlantic, each group penning articles and contributing material support to the others\u2019 antislavery publications and fundraisers.\u00a0 The effect of this cooperation can be seen in the nascent women\u2019s rights movement.\u00a0 During the 1840 meeting, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formulated the idea for a national women\u2019s suffrage convention, which they held at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. \u00a0The General Antislavery Convention played an important role in laying the foundation for an Anglo-American Women\u2019s Suffrage Movement. \u00a0As Stanton eloquently wrote in The History of Woman Suffrage<\/i> (1887), \u201cThe movement for women\u2019s suffrage, both in England and America, may be dated from this World Antislavery Convention\u201d(62). \u00a0Mott also made several lasting connections with her reforming sisters in England, who included Elizabeth Pease of Darlington, Ann Knight of Chelmsford, and Elizabeth Jesse Reid of London.<\/p>\n

The bonds between British and American reformers can be traced throughout the many social improvement projects of the nineteenth century. Transatlantic cooperation galvanized efforts to reform individuals\u2019 and societies\u2019 relationships to alcohol, labor, religion, education, commerce, and land ownership. This cooperation, stemming from the recognition that social problems on both sides of the Atlantic were strikingly similar, helped American reformers to conceptualize themselves as part of a worldwide moral mission to attack social ills and spread the gospel of Christianity.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t

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Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t
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CC licensed content, Shared previously<\/div>