Results by title

Tracing the impact of transcendental philosophy on Union soldiers and their loved ones during the American Civil War

Scholars of the American Civil War have long wondered about the seemingly earnest and sincere sentimental commitment that most Northern soldiers had to their nation and the North’s cause. Unlike many others in other wars, Union soldiers appeared to embrace the war with an unusual conviction and sacrificed their lives with a rare nobility. Their grieving relatives were also buoyed up by their steadfast beliefs in the righteousness of the cause. What was so different about this war, and this period of American history, and what encouraged such an outlook?

In Every Revolution Was First a Thought, Aren Lerner Craig argues that in the Civil War era the American Transcendentalist movement provided a coherent worldview that fostered powerful idealism around issues of character, gender, race, and nationhood, even in the worst of times. Through an exploration of diaries, newspaper editorials, popular songs, and more, Craig demonstrates how Transcendentalist thought moved from elite intellectual circles to the public, providing people a firm belief in the power of individual agency to shape the world and a view of spirituality in which each person was divine, and thus beyond death and destruction. Transcendentalist tenets proved strong enough to withstand the devastation of war and inspired high levels of faith and optimism in soldiers and civilians alike throughout the conflict.

Craig traces the origins of Transcendentalism across the Atlantic, to ideas from Scottish Realism and German Idealism, and connects these philosophies to writings and speeches of major figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. This intellectual history offers a new interpretation of Transcendental thought and its role in the Civil War.

Praised at the time as the most emphatically “American” book ever written, Margaret is a breathtaking combination of female bildungsroman, utopian novel, and historical romance. First published in 1845, Sylvester Judd's novel centers on the fictional New England village of Livingston, where the young Margaret Hart strives to escape the poverty and vice of her surroundings by learning from a mysterious teacher, the “Master,” and by entwining herself with the powers of nature. But when Margaret's brother is tried and hanged for murder, this rural community collapses, forcing Margaret to face the temptations of an urban underworld and to confront the intrigue of her family history. Margaret is the story of a young woman's attempt to create a new social order, founded on beauty and truth, in a land plagued by violence, debauchery, and political instability.

As Gavin Jones points out in his new introduction, Margaret perhaps stands alone in its creation of a female character who grows in social rather than domestic power. The novel also remains unique in its exploration of transcendental philosophy in novelistic form. Part eco-criticism, part seduction novel, part temperance tract, and part social history, Margaret is a virtual handbook for understanding the literary culture of mid-nineteenth-century America, the missing piece in puzzling out connections between writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau. 

Margaret was widely read and deeply influential on both British and American writers throughout the nineteenth century but controversial for its representations of alcoholism and capital punishment. Judd's novel remains resonant for today's readers as it overturns conventional views of the literary representation of women and the origins of the American Renaissance.

At a moment when the requirements of belief and unbelief were being negotiated in unexpected ways, transcendentalism allowed for a more creative approach to spiritual questions. Interrogating the movement's alleged atheistic underpinnings, David Faflik contends that transcendentalism reconstituted the religious sensibilities of 1830s and 1840s New England, producing a dynamic and complex array of beliefs and behaviors that cannot be categorized as either religious or nonreligious. Rather than “the latest form of infidelity,” as one contemporary described it, adherents viewed their unconventional and distinct spiritual practices as a modern religion.

Transcendental Heresies draws on an expansive antebellum archive of period commentary and writings by transcendentalism's practitioners, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, and the women of transcendentalism's second and third waves. From Boston to Concord to the heady environs of Harvard, the species of unbelief they practiced multiplied the religious possibilities of the era, expressing misgivings about traditional notions of divinity, flouting religion's customary forms, and ultimately encouraging spiritual questioning.