Abolitism and Walt Whitman

1.         Antislavery sentiment in the United States began in colonial times, but in the thirty years before the Civil War, the sentiment turned to militant action as blacks and whites began demanding the immediate abolition of slavery. Abolitionist organizations, local and national, were created to promote the emancipation of slaves and to aid fugitive slaves. Abolitionist publications attacked slavery as a moral and political evil, trying to raise the consciousness of northern whites and force the issue of slavery onto the national agenda.

            Although they often worked together, the relationship between black and white abolitionists was complex. Both groups hated slavery and fought for emancipation, but the struggle was much more personal for black abolitionists, who wanted not only their freedom but equal rights as well. Many white abolitionists, while decrying slavery, could not accept blacks as their equals.

            Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) was a sort of Martin Luther King, Jr., for the 19th century.  His life and words have often been seen as a living example of the ideals of the New England Transcendentalists.  As a runaway slave, he was virtually self-educated, and his journalism and lecturing connected him to important developing media of the time, giving him a platform and a public.  His life and work as an abolitionist came to stand for the moralist as an individual above all else as is evident when he broke with both William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown, for example, in favor of the power of his own vision.

            Fugitive slave, abolitionist, freethinker, and eventual advisor to presidents Douglass met many leading Transcendentalist figures during the time that he lectured in Boston and Concord. More importantly Douglass’ life was seen as a perfect embodiment of Transcendentalist ideals.  A runaway slave and leader of the Underground Railroad, he was largely self-educated yet became a bestselling author and counselor to Abraham Lincoln. He began publishing The North Star, a widely circulated abolitionist periodical, during the same year that the first women’s rights convention was held at Seneca Falls. As a lecturer, editor, campaigner for women’s rights, and political appointee, Douglass revealed that the power of one person’s ideas might become the embodied truth of an entire social movement.

            By the time of his death at the end of the century, he had come to represent the authority of a single soul trying to bring about sweeping social change.  In the course of his long career, Douglass lectured in both Boston and Concord and met Emerson, Thoreau, Dr. Channing, and

Theodore Parker.  Emerson spoke out in public against slavery for the first time in 1844; by 1851, he attacked the Fugitive Slave Law in front of the people of Concord: “An immoral law makes it a man’s duty to break it […] Let us respect the Union to all honest ends. But also respect an older and wider union, the law of Nature and rectitude.”  Emerson concluded, and many abolitionists came to agree, that the law that would lead to the recapture of runaway slaves needed to be “wiped out of the statute-book; but whilst it stands there, it must be disobeyed.”  Douglass initially joined these Concordians in support of John Brown; in fact, he became a confidante of Brown up until the time of the Harpers Ferry raid.  His great public power derived initially from the effect of his oratory.

            Douglass’ early speeches dealt mainly with his own experiences; some refused to believe that he had been a slave.  Those who heard him speak reported the dramatic power of the oratory. He described slave-owners beating slaves of every sort, a young girl’s head “covered with festering sores,” and the practice of breeding slaves like prized animals. Some of these details were news at the time to northerners. “I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom [Mr. Plummer] used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cow skin.”  (Narrative, 1845)

            Douglass used humor to good effect, as in his retelling of the moment when he “broke the slave breaker” named Edward Covey by fighting back, an-unheard-of response at the time.

Likewise, he offered a laughable imitation of clergy in their pulpits promising slaves that God would be angered if they dared disobey their owners and masters.  From his birth into slavery until his death as an international figure, Douglass fought tirelessly for the rights of black Americans, and he linked those rights to the rights of all human beings.  Born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland in 1818, he was the son of a white man and a slave woman whom he saw only several times in his life.  He escaped once and was recaptured, an event he recorded as

one of his most terrible experiences: freedom achieved, then taken away.  He escaped for good when he was 20 by impersonating a sailor, but in certain places, he was still a fugitive for decades until the Civil War ended.  He had met the free black woman Anna Murray while he was

still enslaved; they married and moved north to Massachusetts to begin a family.

            Douglass soon lectured for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and met William Lloyd Garrison.  His career as a public speaker and writer flourished; who but a former slave could speak or write with this accuracy and conviction?  Douglass began a related career in 1847 with the first publication of The North Star, a weekly to rival Garrison’s Liberator; Douglass’s masthead motto was: “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.”  In 1848 he attended the first convention for women’s rights held at Seneca Falls, where he linked the struggles of slaves with the struggles of oppressed women.  Douglass traveled to England, where he claimed to have felt fully free for the first time and where he came to link the rights of slaves to the rights of oppressed people of all kinds.

            His lectures supported women, Irish home rule, and the temperance movement. He returned to England later, when he was worried about being linked to Brown’s raid and execution.  By the time of the Civil War, Douglass was enough of a public figure to be called to the White House for meetings with Lincoln.  Lincoln called him “my friend Douglass.”  Douglass’ influence also helped him to become a recruiter for black soldiers, eventually totaling two companies, including two sons of Douglass.  He went on to meet with Andrew Johnson after the war to discuss the rights of former slaves and the complex issues surrounding Reconstruction.

            After the end of the Civil War, Douglass actively supported the constitutional amendments that made equal rights a matter of law. The issue was by no means settled, however. Douglass consistently lamented the lack of real opportunity for black people and the continuing separation of the races.  He claimed that racism was not merely “a southern problem.”

            Late in life, and after the death of his first wife, Douglass married his white former secretary. He silenced critics of this marriage by saying that his mother’s race was honored by his first marriage, his father’s race by his second marriage. The legacy of Douglass was widespread and powerful in America and beyond.  His writings were bestsellers, and he spoke out publicly until the end of his life.  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) was his first book. My Bondage, My Freedom (1855) described his first trip to England and added, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”    In 1881, he published the third of his autobiographical volumes, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Each subsequent volume added more details and more candor.

2.         Walt Whitman (1819–1892) saw himself as the “The Poet” described by Emerson in his 1844 essay.  Emerson called for a poet who could speak for the people and who would also be a public figure in the life of the nation.  Whitman had the kind of expansiveness and inclusiveness that appealed to many Transcendentalists and his career as a printer was central to his art.  He personally set the type for parts of the first edition; in fact, grass is a term that printers use to refer to preliminary or experimental typesetting, drafts, less than final work.  Transcendentalists would have applauded this link between the practical and the artistic, as well as this open-ended aesthetic.

            A poet and thinker whose works reveal direct links to ideas that were flying from brain to brain in Concord and elsewhere during this era Whitman’s poetry is, like Dickinson’s, a poetry of the individual, yet Whitman’s individual is very different from Dickinson’s. Whitman clearly believed that he was “The Poet” described by and hoped for by Emerson in his essay of the same name. Whitman says as much in the preface to Leaves of Grass, his greatest single volume of poetry and he insisted that he was a prophetic voice of, by, and for the “People.” Even his poetic practice bears comparison with the Transcendentalists.  He would write short snippets of immediate inspiration on slips of printer’s paper, the so-called “leaves” of Leaves of Grass. He collected them only later and worked to organize them into a unified whole. Emerson and Thoreau both visited Whitman in New York.

            The Civil War was a shaping influence on a great deal of Whitman’s verse, culminating in his elegiac masterpiece for Lincoln.  Leaves of Grass, as a number of critics have noted, brought two new subjects into American poetry, the importance of sexuality and the value of human labor. Sex was part of nature, as the more liberal Transcendentalists had taught, and all employment was potentially noble, whether that of the lawyer, the seamstress, the ditch digger, or even the prostitute.  As the critic Jerome Loving has noted: The poet reasoned that if—according to transcendentalist doctrine—everyone was divine because nature was emblematic of God, then all were equal, politically equal, including women, whom Whitman treated equally with men […] This idea of equality and self-divinity also meant that one could celebrate himself or herself.  Whitman’s sensuousness caused him problems throughout his career.  He wrote about the human body, and about sexual desire, in ways that had rarely been attempted: “Examine these limbs, red, black, or white—they are so cunning in tendon and nerve; they shall be stript, that you may see them.”

            Whitman offended many, including many Transcendentalists, with his open and frank approach to sexuality: “Have you ever loved the Body of a woman? Have you ever loved the Body of a Man?”  His homosexual desire was implicit rather than explicit, but it was evident to many readers.  Emerson tried to present Whitman to the respectable Saturday Club in Boston, but after such sexually explicit poems as “Enfans d’Adam” appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others refused.

            Emerson, on a famous walk around Boston Common, tried to convince Whitman to tone down his overt sexuality, but even after the poet refused, Emerson remained his defender. As

Whitman wrote, “I could never hear the point better put—and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way.”  Whitman relished the role of eccentric outsider, but he linked that role with a very American view of the individual.  As Emerson had requested, Whitman clearly saw himself as a spokesman for America and for all Americans, from women to Indians to freed slaves.

            Whitman knew that some of the positions he adopted would set him against culturally accepted ways of thinking and acting.  Romanticism had sometimes depicted the poet as an outsider, almost too good for society, but Wordsworth, among others, had written passionately about the lives of ordinary people. Whitman may have solved the dilemma by saying, “If you

want me again look for me under your boot-soles” (“Song of Myself”).  He called himself “a cosmos” but also “a loafer.”  Whitman’s life came to be seen as “Romantic” as his art. He was self-taught after being apprenticed to a printer at age 14; his rough-and-tumble career as a journalist prepared him for the poetry that was to come.

            On Long Island, he worked as an innovative schoolteacher who told his students to call him “Walt” and used games to help teach math and spelling.  He traveled widely in the North and South and experienced slavery firsthand in New Orleans.  His career as a journalist and editor included working for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the New Orleans Crescent, and a “free

soil” abolitionist paper back in Brooklyn. Emerson and Thoreau visited Whitman in New York and found him a uniquely remarkable figure.  Emerson visited in 1855, but when the two went to Emerson’s hotel, the elegant Astor, Whitman’s shabby clothes denied him entrance to Emerson’s room. They met many times in the next three decades, and their relationship mixed respect with

an element of suspicion.

            Thoreau and Bronson Alcott visited Whitman a year after Emerson. Alcott recorded that each man was “surveying the other curiously, like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do.”  By the time of Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman’s unique style was fully formed: experimental, the long line, unrhymed, no consistent meter, journalistic, biblical, prophetic, mundane, democratic, dispersed, but unifying, like America itself.  His unconventionality of style and substance can be linked to a Romantic and to a more specifically American view of the artist.  Such artistic eccentricity or excess is often seen as a sign of genius.  The artist is unable to fit into polite society or accepted standards of behavior.

            Transcendentalists believe that any idea is worth scrutiny if it leads to a vision of the truth and as Whitman, like many with Romantic sensibilities, might say, the divine can appear in even the most unlikely places; the ordinary is extraordinary.  Whitman’s influence extends to us through many artists and ideas. Ezra Pound, as early as 1915, declared Whitman to be a father

figure of Modernism.  Poets from T. S. Eliot to William Carlos Williams to Robert Frost have agreed with Pound’s high praise and have cited Whitman’s influence.  More significant than the personality of the artist, however, and like many Transcendentalists, Whitman gave voice to early versions of America’s gradual progress toward racial, social, and sexual freedom.

Conway, Very, Channing, The Utopians

1.         Moncure Conway (1832–1907) was one of the few southerners whose life was transformed by his encounter with Transcendentalism. Conway’s life unfolded in ways that proved indicative of the history of Transcendentalism. His life also reveals why Transcendentalism was primarily a northern movement. Conway was a Virginian, born to a wealthy family near Fredericksburg.  His father and brothers were slaveholders and southern sympathizers, but his mother was more liberal in her thinking as Conway also became.  He was first exposed to the ideals of Emerson at Dickinson (1847).  At this time, the South was suspicious of Transcendentalism and especially of Emerson because his egalitarian ideas were a direct threat to an aristocratic, slave-holding society. Conway wrote to Emerson claiming to be “a Natural Radical—to whose soul Radicalism is as air to a bird,” and he lamented his upbringing among conservative southerners.

            It was while studying at Harvard Divinity School that he met Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott.  Conway became an avid abolitionist under the influence of Theodore Parker and William Lloyd Garrison, among others much to the astonishment of his aristocratic southern family.

            Conway became a Methodist minister after graduating from Harvard Divinity School in 1854, but his own religious doubts caused him to become a Unitarian within a year.  He became minister of First Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., but he was soon dismissed for preaching that slavery was immoral. When he took his new wife to Virginia she scandalized the family when she embraced and then kissed a young female slave.  Conway visited the White House in an effort to convince Lincoln to free all slaves, but although he failed at the time, he led his own family’s escaped slaves to freedom in Ohio.

            Unable to retain the consistent optimism he attributed to Emerson, he eventually abandoned the organized church altogether.       His abandonment of religion was spurred in part by the death of his young son, named Emerson, as Darwin’s disillusionment was also brought about by his 10-year-old daughter’s death.  Conway, like Emerson before him, eventually left organized religion altogether in favor of a secular and scientific version of spirituality.  As he wrote after giving up on the idea of a personal God: “Eyes turned from phantom gods have caught glimpses of a divine life in the evolution of nature, and the mystical movement at the heart of man” (Christianity, 1876).

            Dissatisfied with life in America during this time, Conway moved to England after the Civil War ended.   In London, Conway continued his career as a social activist and public speaker, and soon came to know a wide range of England’s most influential people such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Darwin.  Conway was able to continue his free thinking ideals (abolition, women’s suffrage, complete religious freedom or freedom from religion) in the more conducive and accepting climate in England. To this day, Conway Hall in London’s Red Lion Square stands as a memorial to his influence.

            Conway traveled back and forth between England and America, never feeling quite at home in either place.  After the Civil War ended he ended up in Paris, where he died in 1907.

Like Emerson and Fuller, Conway contributed to the internationalization of Transcendentalist ideas by traveling overseas and publishing works that were widely read throughout Europe: Testimonies Concerning Slavery (1864), The Sacred Anthology: A Book of Ethical Scriptures (1874), and an autobiography that appeared three years before his death.

           

2.         Prophet, poet and madman, Jones Very was, to say the very least, unique among the men of his time. His childhood was unconventional, his college career exemplary, and his religious enthusiasm literate and profound. He in essence went where others feared to tread.[1]   Jones Very was a curious but impassioned zealot, and some, especially Very himself, said that he was chosen by God, while others thought he was just plain insane.  However, what cannot be doubted is that Very produced poems and other writings that helped to solidify a link between independent or artistic thinking and eccentric behavior. 

            Jones Very (1813–1880), was one of those divinely inspired religious madmen who appear at certain points in history and produce a powerful effect on people around them.  It is said that Very moved early in life into the circle of New England intellectuals of the period.  He was born in Salem to first cousins who never married, and his mother was an outspoken atheist.  Very went to Harvard where he won the Bowdoin Prize two years in a row and drew praise for his work as a classicist and for his essays on poetry and religious topics.  Very was influenced by European Romantic writers and by Shakespeare and, soon after his first reading of Nature, by Emerson.  Emerson’s Divinity School Address set forth ideas Very took to heart: “The man who renounces himself, comes to himself,” and the poet should make himself into “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,—cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.”  This kind of direct witness and mystical nonconformity became Very’s goal.     

            In 1838, Very underwent his powerful spiritual rebirth: “In my senior year in college I experienced what is commonly called a change of heart, which tells us that all we have belongs to God and that we ought to have no will of our own.”   His crisis and resulting move toward an otherworldly mysticism was so extreme that he was committed for a month to the McLean Asylum for the mentally ill. He said that he had been personally chosen by God.

            After graduation Very stayed at Harvard as a divinity student and tutor of Greek, but by the autumn of 1838, he was encouraging his students that they should “Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand.”  His writings indicate that at times he clearly saw himself as a

sort of second coming of a Christ-like divinity:

                        I saw on earth another light

                        Than that which lit my eye

                        Come forth as from my soul within,

                        And from a higher sky  (“The Light from Within”)

Very published a book of essays and poems with the encouragement and editorial guidance of Emerson who supported Very’s literary talent.  Emerson personally reviewed Very’s poems and essays in 1841 in The Dial.

            As a writer, Very had what many saw as the audacity to assume God’s voice or point of view. He wrote hundreds of poems in total, many surrounding his intense conversion or “new birth” but also many after he received permission to preach as a Unitarian in 1843.  The general mood of Transcendentalist inquiry often produced this type of intensely personal questioning or transformation of belief.  Very immersed himself in the theology of the Unitarian creed, intending for himself a career as a minister and poet. This can be viewed as an active rebellion against his mother's tenacious defense of atheism. 

            In Very, Emerson saw someone that had gone too far; in Emerson, Very saw someone who was unwilling to go far enough. They were fascinated by each other's company, though their relationship was never entirely placid. Emerson would subsequently refer to Very as his "brave saint.’

            Having learned to avoid those likely to be strongly opposed to his message, Very concentrated on converting those who already had one foot in his camp. However, no one Channing, Emerson, Alcott, Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody or Elizabeth Peabody or in fact anyone was willing to give up all in order to follow him. He was to remain without disciples. He repeatedly returned to the theme of a spiritual life guided by the complete submergence of the individual will into the nature of God. Such a conception of "will-less existence," which has much in common with both mysticism and with other traditional Christian forms of quietist moralism, accounts for what readers have noted as the burning intensity of Very's better poems, and his unusual technique of assuming the voice of God or the Spirit in some of them.   

            Very's poetic reputation had grown to an extent with the increasing importance of the Transcendentalist movement even though he was in many ways closer to earlier Christian and Unitarian thinking than Transcendentalism. He made a much needed contribution to Transcendentalism--a number of poems of stylistic excellence and technical polish which embodied a unique and forceful religious vision.

           

            William “Ellery” Channing (1817–1901) was undisciplined from childhood, and he dropped out of Harvard and then failed once again as a law student.  From an early age, however, he pointed out each flower, bird, or insect that he observed in the natural world around him.

Everyone from Thoreau to the elder Henry James commented on the precise care and attentiveness of his observations. He examined objects with an almost childlike intensity.

He was unable to provide, financially or emotionally, for his wife (the sister of Margaret Fuller) or their five children. She left him and sent the children to relatives at a time when such

a marital separation was almost unheard of among members of polite society.

            Channing sent many of his curious poems to Emerson to publish in The Dial, and Emerson did so while consistently defending Channing’s strange poetry against the criticism of others.   Thoreau called the lyric poems “sublime-slipshod,” by which he seems to have meant vaguely abstract and technically careless.  Edgar Allan Poe was even harsher in his review: “His book contains about sixty-three things, which he calls poems, and which he no doubt seriously supposes them to be. They are full of all kinds of mistakes, of which the most important is

that of their having been printed at all.”

            In 1839, Channing traveled to Illinois, where he lived in a tiny dirt-floored hut and farmed a small plot with his own hands. This effort to get back to the land would later inspire his more famous friend.  Ten years after this time as a hermit, Thoreau and Channing took a trip to Cape Cod, the first of a number of such trips.  Channing was probably Thoreau’s best friend, and in fact, Channing later wrote a letter to Thoreau in which he said: “I see nothing for you on this earth but that field which I once christened ‘Briars’; go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you.”

            Channing was not widely known for his poetry, then or now, but he was significantly the first person to write a book-length biography of Thoreau; Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist (1873) which became his most important and widely read work and inspired interest in, and subsequent writing about, his more famous eccentric friend.  Channing lived on until 1901, like Conway, bringing the direct influence of New England Transcendentalism into the dawn of the 20th century.

3.         Transcendentalism was not simply about those major and minor figures who developed and promulgated its doctrines, but it was also about a series of attempts at new ways of living that had a powerful impact on 19th-century thinking. Social instability, as well as the gradual move from agrarian to urban life, led numerous individuals to consider alternative modes of family and social organization. Brook Farm, perhaps the most well-known of these experiments, was founded by George Ripley. Bronson Alcott founded Fruitlands and the Temple School which was a sort of idealized educational plan for living, and then there was Walden Pond; a new version of a kind of utopia.  But, the social experiments of the period also included religious communities and loose linkages of like-minded individuals. The goal was often to find smaller social groupings within the wider society that could produce better methods for sharing property, educating the young, and producing a unified vision of social life.   The idea of utopia goes back to Thomas More and Plato, but 19th-century America contributed its own Transcendentalist versions.

            America has been a land of experimental communities, especially during the 19th century, and a bit of background will help make sense of the Transcendentalist versions of this phenomenon.  In England, in 1772, “Mother” Ann Lee was told by God that “a place had been prepared” for her followers in America. Nine believers broke with the Quakers and founded the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, linking such utopian movements historically with the founding of America itself as a new “promised” land.  Mother Ann and her followers built the original Shaker community in America in the rugged wilds of New York State, in which ecstatic visions led to religious ceremonies of “shaking.” Shakers believed in a universal equality that included non-Christians, African-Americans, and Native Americans, some of whom joined these communities. The Shakers would go on to become one of the most durable communal sects in America, establishing almost 20 communities that included nearly 4,000 members by 1850. Up to 20,000 Americans may have lived in Shaker communities for some period of time.

            Another community, Oneida, founded by John H. Noyes, was another of the most well known utopian communes in American history. Noyes and his followers shared land and property for approximately three decades, and they lived in a single group marriage that included up to 200 individuals, variously called “free love” or “complex marriage.”  Resistant to turning former city dwellers into successful agrarian farmers, they established a number of business concerns, the most famous of which evolved eventually into the Oneida flatware company.

            New Harmony, in both Indiana and Pennsylvania, became another widely influential communal experiment.  The community was founded as early as 1804 by George Rapp and later sold to Robert Owen.  Owen was a visionary Welsh reformer who thought that society might be perfected on the basis of free public education and the abolition of social classes and personal

wealth; the community eventually introduced kindergartens and vocational education.  Its members included a wide range of scientists (especially geologists), artists, authors, and teachers. Noted theologian Paul Tillich is buried there.

            The Nashoba community was perhaps the most directly socialist model for subsequent Transcendentalist experiments at Brook Farm and Fruitlands.  Frances Wright came from a prosperous Scots family and became well known for her essays on social ethics.  While at New Harmony, Wright conceived of a community that might address the wrongs of the slave system, and imagined an environment in which former slaves could become self-reliant through education and so-called “schools of industry” designed to produce funds that could buy freedom and return those who wished to Africa, as Marcus Garvey would advocate later.  In 1826, Wright founded Nashoba, which lasted for four years, in Tennessee, with a handful of whites and 15 free blacks.  The community failed in part because whites remained in control through a system of overseers. Reality did not always live up to such ideals.

            George Ripley’s Brook Farm and Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands became the two most successful Transcendentalist attempts at communal living.  Brook Farm was established by former Unitarian minister George Ripley in 1841 in an effort to create a classless society. The goal was to reduce physical labor through shared activity and thereby advance intellectual and spiritual growth.  Although it began with only 20 members in 1841 it had close to 200 followers by the time it collapsed.  The community succeeded well for a time based on a rational sharing of labor as well as a link between manual and mental labor.  Members worked in return for food and lodging on the farm; additional income was derived from the well-respected school on site.

            Charles Dana, a Brook Farm resident who later became famous as a newspaper editor and secretary of war during the Civil War, said, “In the first place we have abolished domestic servitude. In the second place we have secured thorough education for all, and in the third place we have established justice to the laborer.”  Brook Farm, more than any other utopian experiment in American history, made an impression on social thinkers and intellectuals.              As Transcendentalists, Ripley and his followers believed deeply in the power of each individual to contribute to creating a better world.  Brook Farm, unlike many such communes, preserved a belief in private ownership that did not threaten earlier American ideas about property, the nuclear family, and church or state authority.

            Fruitlands was Bronson Alcott’s idea, an outgrowth of his Temple School.  Like Brook Farm, Fruitlands sought a rural retreat that would challenge industrial capitalism, but this dream lasted less than a year, from 1843–1844.  Fruitlands turned out to be even less practical than Ripley’s experiment: no animal food or animal labor, only the Alcott and Lane families and a handful of eccentrics (a nudist, a cracker-eater), as Louisa May later recorded in her punning

essay, “Transcendental Wild Oats.”  When the impractical male idealists would travel to spread the word about their utopian dreams, only the women and children were left behind to work. “They look well in July,” Emerson himself said after a visit there: “We shall see them in

December.”

            Thoreau’s Walden was also a version of a utopian community even if it was a community of one.  There is a sense in which all utopian communities are experiments, not intended to last forever but, rather, to explore new possibilities for interactions among humans.  The sense of a life of limitless possibilities is strong in all these people. When Thoreau said, in Walden, “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear,” he was expanding on an idea put forth earlier by Emerson.  These reflections on Walden is a reminder of why so many Americans have been drawn to the ideal of utopian communities, which may not last but have a powerful impact nonetheless. 

            Charles and Myrtle Fillmore envisioned a place where Unity workers and students could go to pray, work and recreate themselves physically and spiritually, so it was natural for the Fillmores to find a place suitable for their “Unity family.”[2]  Hence Unity Village was born.  Home to Unity Institute and Seminary, and Silent Unity among others, Unity Village could be described as an experiment in utopian society.

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[1] http://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/very

[2] James Dillet Freeman, The Story of Unity.

Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott

Margaret Fuller

“A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.”

Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850) was a pioneer of women’s rights in thought and practice, and spent her adult life advocating the idea that women’s lives might not have to be shaped entirely by the lives of the men around them.  Her own life had been dramatically altered by the death of her father when she was a young adult leaving her responsible for the emotional and economic welfare of her family.  She argued that women needed the freedom to grow and develop through education, reading, conversation, and friendship.  Fuller was powerfully influenced by Emerson and other Transcendentalists, but she found herself influencing men’s thinking as well.  Fuller met Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1835, falling into a deep friendship with him that would last the rest of her life. Dazzled by her eloquence, he introduced her to his circle of educators, writers, and ministers; the next year, several of them formed the Transcendental Club, to discuss new ideas in theology, literature, education, and beyond.

In 1838 Emerson invited Fuller to join meetings of the Transcendentalist circle, and she rose to greater prominence when Emerson asked her to edit The Dial, a journal devoted to transcendentalist views in 1840.  She found herself writing large portions of the influential journal in her own words, as well as corresponding with, and editing the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Channing and others. Fuller became a contributor from the first issue and its editor. Her first book, based on a trip through the Midwest, was Summer on the Lakes (1844) and this led to an invitation by Horace Greeley to be literary critic at the New York Tribune that same year. She published her feminist classic, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in 1845. In addition to writing a solid body of critical reviews and essays, she became active in various social reform movements. In 1846 she went to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune, and in England and France she was regarded as a serious intellectual and met many prominent people. The first to publish Henry David Thoreau, it also gathered poetry, essays, and anything else that Emerson classified as “an antidote to all narrowness.”

In 1840, she conducted her famous “Conversations,” discussion groups at which educated women discussed the big questions: “What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” One enraptured attendee compared Fuller’s leadership to “the sun shining upon plants and causing buds to open into flowers.” Fuller was sufficiently forward thinking and frank enough to link the topic of sexuality to not only the rights of women, but to men's rights as well.  She alienated some people because of a personality that was variously described as strident, energetic and intense. Fuller's most original and influential professional activities were her organized "Conversations" for women where two dozen women attended the first meeting, and where many other women soon found a new intellectual outlet. These dialogues led Fuller to her most influential work, Women in the 19th Century.

By the mid 1840's Fuller moved to New York to become a critic for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, where she had the foresight to champion Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Emerson’s lecture entitled Woman which he delivered to the Women’s Rights Convention in Boston in 1855 is clearly a result of her influence on him. 

Louisa May Alcott

“My book came out; and people began to think that
topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all ...”

Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888) reminds us that Transcendentalism was often a family affair.  Her upbringing was as unconventional as it was intellectual, and as a young child she referred to her father and his friends Theodore Parker, Emerson and Thoreau as “the modern Plato.”  An influential member of the Transcendentalists Louisa May Alcott never joined an organized church, but instead she practiced a Transcendental form of personal religion, especially unusual for a woman at the time, and could describe a spiritual morning in Thoreau’s woods near Concord. She also went to hear Theodore Parker preach his secular sermons.  Alcott’s career as a writer made her influential among her Transcendentalist friends and a woman with widespread public influence.  Her closeness to the Emerson family led to her first book, Flower Fables written for Ellen, Emerson’s daughter.

Her most famous work Little Women was perhaps sentimental, but it also presented a new version of the American family and a new set of American family values linked to Transcendentalist ideals such as self-awareness, resourcefulness, and resilience. Alcott gave much of her energy to practical social reforms such as nursing, women’s rights, and temperance.  Her contribution during the Civil War was her service as an army nurse.  Her social conscience was also evident when she attended the 1875 Women’s Congress in Syracuse New York, and like many women of the time she helped to establish the value of community activism.

Only a follower of Transcendentalist principles was likely to be a famous writer, a social activist, the sole supporter of her family, and also a woman in the second half of the 19^th century.

William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker

1.         William Ellery Channing, a theologian and minister not only changed the history of Unitarianism, but provided a new version of liberal American theology.  While Channing helped to found the Transcendental Club, and died during the height of the Transcendentalist movement, his views had a direct impact on philosophers and theologians who followed.  In his ground breaking sermon Unitarian Christianity, Channing said the Bible was a book “written for men, in the language of men, whose meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.” This and other claims in Channing’s sermon embodied the impulse behind Emerson’s Divinity School Address and Transcendentalism in general.

            Excited by transcendental ideas of the German Romantics and Emerson's Nature, he began sending Emerson his poems, and Emerson obligingly published them in The Dial.  As a poet, Channing could be fluent and pictorial, and his early poems were full of Transcendental abstractions.  Although Channing participated in some of the earliest meetings of the Transcendental discussion groups he eventually decided that their views were too extreme for him.   His theology developed into Unitarian Universalism, which is still active today. 

            The central views of Transcendentalism were soon linked to this liberal form of Unitarianism, and its connection to social reform movements.  Many Transcendentalists developed an even more liberal version of Unitarianism that led to later ideas o secular individualism.  Among New England Unitarians Channing was accepted and debated by radical Transcendentalists and their conservative critics.  Some referred to themselves as “Channing” Unitarians.  His influence continues in the modern denomination.

2.         Theodore Parker was one of the most practical and active of the Transcendentalist group in causes ranging from the reform of parish ministry to widespread social activism.   Parker’s own theological evolution paralleled that of many Transcendentalists.  He helped turn Unitarianism away from its strict Calvinist origins toward a liberal theology that encouraged social activism.  Parker’s theology fit well with ideas of early Transcendentalist thinkers.  Included in the first gatherings held by the Transcendental Club, he contributed regularly to The Dial the most important Transcendentalist periodical.

            In 1840 Parker published a pamphlet, The Previous Question which he wrote in the voice of a fictitious ordinary Unitarian believer named "Levi Blodgett." Here he vigorously laid out the Transcendentalist position on inspiration, miracles, and religious authority.  Parker emerged as a major Transcendentalist spokesman in May 1841, when he delivered A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity at an ordination in South Boston. 

Thoreau

            Henry David Thoreau is one of the most read and most influential American authors; his writings have been reprinted countless times, both in English and in translation into many foreign languages. Thoreau's strong individualism, rejection of the conventions of society, and philosophical idealism all distanced him from others.  He had no desire to meet external expectations if they varied from his own sense of how to live his life.

            His contemporary literary reputation began with the publication between 1840 and 1844 of some of his poetry, essays, and translations in the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial. Publication in The Dial identified Thoreau as a member of the Transcendental circle, however, it did not do much to establish a reputation beyond those directly involved with the magazine. The esoteric Dial had a very limited circulation.

            Thoreau reached a broader audience through the more popular magazines that proliferated during the nineteenth century.  Titles directed at the general reader such as Godey's, Graham's, Harper's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, Knickerbocker, and The United States Magazine and Democratic Review gave considerable exposure to the work of many writers, Thoreau included.  In 1843, Thoreau published "A Walk to Wachusett" in the Boston Miscellany and two pieces in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. His article "Thomas Carlyle and His Works" was published in Graham's Magazine in 1847.  

            Having delivered lyceum lectures based on his travels to various places, Thoreau knew that the popular appeal of such material was far greater than that of more abstract subjects.  He consequently adapted his experience in the lecture hall to the literary world and submitted travel pieces to periodicals likely to publish them. His "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods" (initially presented in lecture form) appeared in The Union Magazine in 1848.  Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, whom Thoreau had met in New York in 1843, had taken a special interest in him and helped Thoreau to find a publisher for the piece. "Excursions to Canada" appeared in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in 1853, "Cape Cod" in Putnam's in 1855, and "Chesuncook" in Atlantic Monthly in 1858. Although the appearance of these pieces did not create great demand for Thoreau's work, the general magazines provided a venue that allowed him to write with reasonable expectation of seeing at least some of his material brought before an audience.

            Although Thoreau sometimes complained in his journals of the level of comprehension of his lecture audiences, he nevertheless continued to lecture and to work lecture material into publishable form. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, he was presenting material that would be incorporated into Walden (1854). In 1852, he published "The Iron Horse" and "A Poet Buying a Farm" — both of them parts of Walden — in two issues of Sartain's Union Magazine. When it finally appeared, then, Walden had already received what amounted to significant advance publicity.

            The book was published in an edition of two thousand copies in August of 1854 by the Boston firm of Ticknor and Fields.  As the premier literary publisher in America in the mid-nineteenth century, the company was in a position to see that Thoreau's work was well promoted and distributed.  A sufficient number of notices and reviews appeared to assure broad interest in the book, which sold well.  Walden was praised not only by those who knew Thoreau and his writings, but also in a variety of newspapers and magazines around the United States and in England.   This reception of the book gave Thoreau greater recognition as an author between 1854 and his death in 1862 than his earlier literary efforts had brought him.

            In "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau presented his ideas about the individual's responsibilities in relation to government.  In the twentieth century, this work powerfully affected Mohandas Gandhi, who applied the principle of nonviolent resistance in the struggle for independence in India, and Dr. Martin Luther King, in his leadership of the American civil rights movement.

            Thoreau’s contribution affected Unity and me in that in his writings he exhorts his reader to begin a new, higher life.  He points out that we restrict ourselves and our view of the universe by accepting externally imposed limits, and urges us to make life's journey deliberately, to look inward and to make the interior voyage of discovery.  According to Thoreau our proper business is to seek the reality the absolute beyond what we think we know. This higher truth may be sought in the here and now in the world we inhabit.  Our existence forms a part of time, which flows into eternity, and affords access to the universal.  Thoreau points out that if we attain a greater closeness to nature and the divine, we will not require physical proximity to others.    He comments on man's dual nature as a physical entity and as an intellectual spectator within his own body, which separates a person from himself and adds further perspective to his distance from others.  Thoreau urges us to face life as it is, to reject materialism, to embrace simplicity, serenely to cultivate self, and to understand the difference between the temporal and the permanent. He ends Walden with an affirmation of resurrection and immortality through the quest for higher truth.

Nature

The main themes in Emerson’s Nature are: Nature, Commodity, Beauty, Language, Discipline, Idealist, Spirit and Prospects.

            Nature expresses Emerson's belief that each individual must develop a personal understanding of the universe.  According to Emerson, people in the past had an intimate and immediate relationship with God and nature, and arrived at their own understanding of the universe.  All the basic elements that they required to do so exist at every moment in time.  

            Emerson's rejection of received wisdom is reinforced by his repeated references throughout Nature to perception of familiar things, to seeing things anew.  For Emerson, each moment provides an opportunity to learn from nature and to approach an understanding of universal order through it.  The importance of the present moment, of spontaneous and dynamic interactions with the universe, of the possibilities of the here and now, render past observations and schemes irrelevant. Emerson focuses on the accessibility of the laws of the universe to every individual through a combination of nature and his own inner processes.

            In Language, he states that the relation between spirit and matter "is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men."  In his discussion of "intellectual science" in Idealism, he writes that "all men are capable of being raised by piety or by passion" into higher realms of thought.  And at the end of the essay, in Prospects, he exhorts, "Know then that the world exists for you.  For you is the phenomenon perfect."  Each man is capable of using the natural world to achieve spiritual understanding.

            In Discipline, Emerson discusses the ways in which each man may understand nature and God — through rational, logical "Understanding" and through intuitive "Reason." Although the mystical, revelatory intuition leads to the highest spiritual truth, understanding, too, is useful in gaining a particular kind of knowledge, but whichever mental process illuminates a given object of attention at a given time, insight into universal order always takes place in the mind of the individual, through his own experience of nature and inner powers of receptiveness.

            In Idealism, Emerson stresses the advantages of the ideal theory of nature.  Idealism makes God an integral element in our understanding of nature, and provides a comprehensively inclusive view - Idealism sees the world in God; it beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.

            Emerson writes in Prospects: "The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.  He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit."  By drawing upon our latent spiritual capabilities and seeking evidence of God's order in nature, we will make sense of the universe.

            In Beauty, he describes the way in which the structure of the eye and the laws of light conspire to create perspective: “By the mutual action of [the eye's] structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character so ever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical.”

            In discussing the similarities between natural objects and between natural laws in Discipline, Emerson reiterates and expands the image, making it more complex and comprehensive: “It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens [that is, being or entity] seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.”

            In Beauty, Language, and Discipline, Emerson examines Reason's revelation to man of the larger picture behind the multiplicity of details in the material world.  In Beauty, he describes the stimulation of the human intellect by natural beauty.  He offers artistic creativity as the extreme love of and response to natural beauty.  In Language, he describes the symbolism of original language as based on natural fact, and the integral relationship between language, nature, and spirit.  

            In Prospects, Emerson implores his readers to trust in Reason as a means of approaching universal truth.   Emerson puts forward examples of intuition at work — the "traditions of miracles," the life of Jesus, transforming action based on principle, the "miracles of enthusiasm, as those . . . of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers," "animal magnetism" "prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children..

            Emerson explores at length the difference between Understanding and Reason, both serve to instruct man, however, Understanding is tied to matter and leads to common sense rather than to the broadest vision.  Emerson grants that as man advances in his grasp of natural laws, he comes closer to understanding the laws of creation, but Reason is essential to transport man out of the material world into the spiritual.  In Idealism, Emerson asserts that intuition works against acceptance of concrete reality as ultimate reality, thereby promoting spiritualization.

            In Spirit, Emerson presents the notion of the mystical and intuitively understood "universal essence" which, expressed in man through nature's agency, confers tremendous power: “Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man?  Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite.”

            Emerson stresses throughout Nature that nature exists to serve man, and explains the ways in which it does so.  In Commodity, he enumerates the basic material uses of nature by man.  Emerson then goes on to point out the fact that man harnesses nature to enhance its material usefulness. In Beauty, Emerson discusses the power of natural beauty to restore man when exhausted, to give him simple pleasure, to provide a suitable backdrop to his glorious deeds, and to stimulate his intellect, which may ultimately lead him to understand universal order.  Man's artistic expression is inspired by the perception and translation in his mind of the beauty of nature.

            In Language, Emerson details language's uses as a vehicle of thought and, ultimately, through its symbolism and the symbolism of the things it stands for, as an aid to comprehension and articulation of spiritual as well as material truth.  A person effectively expresses himself, Emerson notes, in proportion to the natural vigor of his language.  Nature both exists for and intensifies man's capabilities.

            In Discipline, he introduces human will, which, working through the intellect, emphasizes aspects of nature that the mind requires and disregards those that the mind does not need.  Thus man imposes himself on nature, makes it what he wants it to be.  

            Emerson develops this idea in Idealism, in discussing the poet's elevation of soul over matter in "subordinating nature for the purpose of expression" — giving emphasis and drawing connections as suits the message he wishes to convey.  Nature is thus "fluid," "ductile and flexible," changeable by man.

            Emerson asserts throughout Nature the primacy of spirit over matter.  Nature's purpose is as a representation of the divine to promote human insight into the laws of the universe, and thus to bring man closer to God.  Emerson writes of nature in Spirit as "the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it."  He explores the relationship between matter and spirit extensively in Language, in which he discusses the correspondence between material and moral laws, and in Idealism, in which he presents the concept of nature as a projection by God on the human mind, as opposed to a concrete reality.

            Emerson's discussion in Language is based on three premises: that words — even those used to describe intellectual or spiritual states — originated in nature, in an elemental interaction between mind and matter; that not only do words represent nature, but, because nature is an expression of the divine, the natural facts that words represent are symbolic of spiritual truth; and that the whole of nature — not just individual natural facts — symbolizes the whole of spiritual truth. Emerson writes: “The world is emblematic.  Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass.”

            Moral law, as he suggests in Discipline, "lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference." At the end of Language, Emerson works toward the ideal theory in presenting all the particulars of nature as preexisting "in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by preceding affections, in the world of spirit." He writes that a fact is "the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world." Matter thus issues from and is secondary to spirit.

            In Idealism and Spirit, Emerson takes a philosophical leap in asking whether nature exists separately, or whether it is only an image created in man's mind by God.  Although he says that the answer cannot be known, and that it makes no difference in man's use of nature, he suggests that idealism is preferable to viewing nature as concrete reality because it constitutes "that view which is most desirable to the mind."  Emerson supports the ideal theory by pointing to the ways in which poetry, philosophy, science, religion, and ethics subordinate matter to higher truth, but he also acknowledges that idealism is hard to accept from the commonsensical point of view — the view of those who trust in rationality over intuition.

            In various ways in Nature, Emerson appears to suggest that the natural world does, in fact, exist separately from spirit.  For instance, he carefully distinguishes between man's inner qualities and his physical existence, between the "ME" and the "NOT ME," which includes one's own body.  His progressive argument is marred by this seeming contradiction, and by his hesitancy to state outright that nature is an ideal, even while he discusses it as such.  Emerson concludes the essay by asking his readers to open themselves to spiritual reality by trusting in intuitive reason.