The 1840s were a decade of transition and instability in America. A dozen or more revolutions grew as branches of a large-scale attempt to establish an American identity separate from Europe. This desire to achieve total independence from parent countries led historians to liken the era to adolescence gone national. As Emerson observed, Northerners were born, “with knives the brain,†; an open season on all institutions began, with revolutions in agriculture, transportation, feminism, abolitionism, civil rights for the mentally insane or imprisoned, religion, pop culutre, art, literature, and anything else conceivable.
With these revolutions, a new manner of thinking spread. Impractical romanticism was replaced with belief in the perfectibility of man. Emphasis shifted to include the value of emotion and reason. The Second Great Awakening gave rise to Transcendentalism, a philosophy stressing unity and intellectual and emotional understanding. (Root word: transcend, => transcendental => transcendentalist.) Transcendentalists are chronic observersand find meaning in commonplace events, sharing the thought that all the energy in the world comes from one communal source, and so it goes back to be upon destruction. Ralph Waldo Emerson was among the leaders of this non-institutionalized religion, along with Alcott and Hawthorne.
The Utopian movement was (unsuccessfully) graced with Transcendentalism, as well, when Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist writers’ community was set up in New York. (Meanwhile, Robert Own met with more success at New Harmony, Indiana, and Brigham Young led the Mormon exodus to Utah.)
Thoreau’s contemporaries in the North strove for originality, some to the extent that that quality was artificial and forced. Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Longfellow (“Hiawathaâ€), Melville (Moby Dick), James Russell Lowell (The Bigelow Papers), and Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter) all present aspects of the shift in thought. The South, by contrast, hosted closed rules for literature. Authors were forced to write in certain slavery supportive grooves or else be rejected. Note, then, that the politics were directly paralleled in the literature.
Westward territorial expansion was heavily on the minds of the masses. Those in support of slavery vouched that one’s “property†cannot be outlawed anywhere in the Union. Abolitionists were for the most part willing to accept slavery where it stood, but would tolerate extension. (Extremists existed at either end.) The Mexican War served as a point of contrition and one of Thoreau’s reasons for writing “Civil Disobedience.†At the time, legislation would have implied that territory gained in the war would have accepted slavery. (Ultimately, it didn’t.) Still, obvious inequality and black code laws were outrageous for moral men like Thoreau. Emerson, too, condemned the fugitive slave laws compelling Northerners to assist in the return of runaway slaves to their masters.
In the 50s, situations only escalated: The Dred Scott case and Bleeding Kansas dominate the slaveholding scheme and utopian realities fell far short of their founding ideals. Transcendentalism was not the only experiment going, nor was Thoreau’s perspective the only extraordinary one of the time. Whether the man is a product of his times or not, Thoreau certainly reacted to his times, giving literature and ideas that would endure beyond his century and well into the next millennium.
