What Hath God Wrought (91 page)

Except for James Marsh up in Vermont, all the Transcendentalists were either Unitarians or ex-Unitarians. Emerson’s career illustrates this derivation in his own gradual transition from Christian humanism to a non-sectarian spiritual humanism. In 1829, young Waldo (as his family called him) became the assistant pastor of a Unitarian church in Boston. It seemed a logical choice of vocation for a man whose forebears included a long line of New England ministers going back to Puritan times. But after three years Emerson resigned rather than continue to administer the Lord’s Supper, a rite he (like the Quakers) had come to consider an unnecessary ritual, meaningless in the modern world. He now pursued a new career as lecturer and writer, seeking to refashion for himself a role something like the one the minister had historically embodied in New England: an inspiring intellectual, spiritual, and moral leader. Instead of looking to Protestantism to define this role, he invoked the Romantic conception of the artist.
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After leaving the ministry, Emerson turned himself into what scholars have called a “public intellectual,” meaning he was a creative thinker not operating within an academic or church setting, who sold his ideas on a wide range of issues to a general audience in the open marketplace.
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Emerson came to earn a good living on the lecture circuit, delivering inspirational talks on many subjects including “Self-Reliance,” “Experience,” and “Fate,” which he would later work up into publishable essays. All over America, lyceums, Mechanics’ Institutes, and other voluntary associations eagerly awaited such addresses; by midcentury, in each week, something like 400,000 Americans heard someone lecture at a lyceum.
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Emerson became so well known he could book lecture halls independently of any local host organization. His lectures rank as masterpieces of nineteenth-century American oratory alongside the sermons of Channing, the legal arguments of Webster, and the political speeches of Lincoln.

Emerson became a popular philosopher with his short book
Nature
(1836), which espoused what was essentially a new religion: idealistic, monistic, mystical, and intuitive, based on spiritual communion with nature. He summed it up (prosaically) this way: “1. Words are signs of natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.”
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Emerson’s God (which he elsewhere named the Oversoul) was immanent in the universe. Through harmony with nature, a person achieved not merely “likeness to God” (Channing’s aspiration) but participation in divinity itself. Emerson’s message thus accorded self-improvement a spiritual dimension and sanction. Emerson won a hearing for these ideas because the American public felt concern about spiritual things and eagerly engaged in schemes of self-improvement. What he and his fellow Transcendentalists most valued about the their new form of spirituality was its individualism: It put every person directly in touch with the divine, without any need for tradition, a written scripture, or an institutional church. Emerson taught that all existing religious traditions represented partial visions of ultimate truth. He found Hinduism and Buddhism particularly attractive and evoked them in his poetry.

Emerson startled the American intellectual establishment of his day when he delivered an address to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School in July 1838, challenging the harmony of reason with revelation as then understood. The prevailing orthodoxy in natural science and theology taught that both disciplines were empirical. John Locke had synthesized the Enlightenment with biblical religion in
The Reasonableness of Christianity
, where he argued that the truth of Christian theology rested on historical facts: The miracles recorded in Old and New Testaments proved Christ and the prophets indeed revealed divine truths. Emerson challenged this orthodoxy, not by questioning whether the miracles had really occurred, but by proclaiming that religious faith came
before
, not
after
, belief in the biblical miracles. “To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul.” People believed in the biblical miracles because they had faith, not the other way around. Faith came, according to Emerson, by immediate revelation from the divinity immanent in the universe, not “second hand,” from revelations made to others thousands of years ago. Perhaps not since the trial of Anne Hutchinson in the seventeenth century had New England faced so disturbing a claim for immediate revelation.
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Emerson not only substituted his Oversoul for the Judeo-Christian personal God, he challenged the received conception of the empirical unity of reason with revelation. Unitarian Harvard professors and Calvinist Princeton professors joined together in unusual alliance to denounce Emerson’s “latest form of infidelity.” Transcendentalists George Ripley, Theodore Parker, and Orestes Brownson (who would soon convert to Catholicism) rallied to defend the Emersonian position in one of the most profound intellectual debates of pre–Civil War America. In this “Miracles Controversy” the religion of the Romantic movement confronted the religion of the Protestant Enlightenment.
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From our standpoint in the twenty-first century, the Transcendentalist who looks the most “modern” is Margaret Fuller. Versatile and passionate, she made her impact felt on journalism, feminism, criticism (literary, music, and art), and revolution. Daughter of Timothy Fuller, a Massachusetts congressman allied with John Quincy Adams, as a precocious child Margaret had received an intensive education from her devoted father. As an adult she could draw upon a formidable fund of learning across a wide range of subjects and made herself a role model at a time when well-educated women were scarce. Aided by her friend Emerson, Fuller edited the Transcendentalists’ experimental literary magazine, the
Dial
, which introduced readers to European Romanticism, criticized American bourgeois culture, and all too often fell short of its editor’s grand expectations and pronouncements. Fuller, Emerson, and the other members of the Transcendentalist group sought to rescue their country from provincialism and put the American public in touch with transatlantic writers like Goethe, Coleridge, and Carlyle. America’s culture derived too exclusively from Calvinism and the Enlightenment, they believed. Even though the Transcendentalists shared a debt to this inheritance (in their emphasis on literacy, individualism, and a sense of the Divine, for example), they saw these traditions as limiting and wished to press harder to explore the full range of human feelings and potential.
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Fuller applied Channing’s humanist ideal, “self-culture,” to the nurture of the female self and developed a theory of human personality as androgynous, with every person having both masculine and feminine qualities. Between 1839 and 1844, she presided over a series of “conversations” (“discussion groups,” in today’s terminology) intended to help women think for themselves and about themselves, and to express their ideas clearly and with confidence. Her book
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
argues that women possess the full range of human capacities (“faculties”) and need to be allowed to develop their potential, rather than living only for the sake of their men. “A much greater range of occupations” must be opened to women “to rouse their latent powers,” she wrote. “Let them be sea-captains, if they will.”
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In 1844, Fuller left for New York City, where she went to work as book review editor on Horace Greeley’s crusading
New York Tribune
. There her ideas reached a far wider audience. Known as the “star” of the paper, Fuller’s columns typically appeared on page one, got reprinted in the
Tribune Weekly
(which had a nationwide circulation), and earned her ten dollars a week—worth about two hundred dollars after taxes in 2005 and then considered a good salary for a writer. When widespread revolution broke out in Europe in 1848, Fuller found herself defining the role of a newspaper foreign correspondent. From her vantage point in Rome, she covered such dramatic events as the first Italian efforts at democracy and national unification, and the overthrow and then the restoration of the papacy’s civil authority. Meanwhile, she fell in love with a dashing Italian nobleman younger than herself, married him secretly (since his family did not approve), and bore a child. On her way back to America in 1850, the ship bearing the new marchesa d’Ossoli, her husband, and their little boy ran aground in a storm off Long Island. Although within sight of land, all three perished, and Fuller’s unpublished manuscript on the Italian Revolution washed out to sea. At the end of
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
, she had written, “What concerns me now is, that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life in its kind.” Though she was only forty when she died, the life of Margaret Fuller fulfilled her heroic aspiration.
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Any account of the Concord Transcendentalists must reckon with Henry David Thoreau (properly pronounced “
Thaw
-roe”). Thoreau has served as a patron saint for two movements in American life: environmentalism and civil disobedience. In actuality, Thoreau was neither a natural scientist nor a political philosopher. His genius lay in reflecting upon relatively modest experiences and turning them into great writing.

By Walden Pond, just a mile and a quarter from Concord town center, Thoreau built a one-room cabin on land owned by his friend Emerson. He stayed in it, off and on, from July 1845 to September 1847. Other Transcendentalists had experimented with living in a utopian commune called Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Thoreau constructed his own one-man utopia in search of a way of life that would bypass what he found to be the distractions of social convention and material clutter. Like the Shakers and the early Quakers, like the original Christian monastics, Thoreau opted for simplicity. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Practicing thrift as a form of spiritual discipline, Thoreau turned his back on the consumer products that his countrymen embraced so eagerly. Yet he did not scorn the industrial revolution; he felt in awe of the railroad trains that passed not far from his cabin, for they exemplified the human qualities of invention and adventure that he admired.

Why did Thoreau not go out to the frontier and build his cabin in an actual wilderness? Because he wanted to prove such a major undertaking not necessary; one could conduct a living experiment within easy reach, using few resources. If others who felt discontented with their lives wished to imitate his example, they could readily do so. The important thing was to explore one’s inner state of mind, not journey long distances. As Thoreau wryly put it, “I have traveled a good deal in Concord.”
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As for “civil disobedience,” there is no evidence that Thoreau ever used the expression in his life. He spent a night in Concord jail—either the twenty-third or twenty-fourth of July 1846 (we cannot tell which)—for refusing to pay the Massachusetts state poll tax of $1.50. News traveled fast in the village, and within a few hours someone had paid the tax for him—probably his aunt Maria Thoreau, a member of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society like a number of other women in the Thoreau and Emerson families, who closely monitored the political stands of their menfolk.
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So the local constable, Sam Staples, freed his friend Henry the next morning.

Henry Thoreau made this brief experience the basis of a lecture and later turned the lecture into an essay entitled “Resistance to Civil Government.” He there discusses his action as a moral protest against immoral government practices: the return of escaped slaves, the war against Mexico, and the treatment of the American Indians. The essay has often been invoked by subsequent generations of protesters, including Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, and opponents of South African apartheid. Those who have cited Thoreau in this way have generally been non-violent and willing to accept punishment for their lawbreaking, but his essay makes no mention of either of those principles (and Thoreau elsewhere had repudiated non-violence). Nor, of course, did he invoke the federal Constitution to sanction his violation of a state statute. The only “higher laws” Thoreau cared about were the eternal principles of morality. Linking his act of protest with the Concord of 1775, he asserted an individual right of revolution. On the whole, Thoreau seems less concerned with disobedience as a reform tactic than as a demonstration of the moral integrity of the protester. When human law conflicted with the dictates of conscience, he did not doubt which should prevail.
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Confident that the intuitions of conscience put everyone in touch with the same immutable moral law, neither Thoreau nor the other Transcendentalists worried about the possibility of conflicting moral principles.

The Concord Transcendentalists addressed two kinds of questions about American liberty in their day. One of these was what we might term the
quantitative
issue: How many people did American freedom include? In particular, did it include women and people of color? The other kind of question was
qualitative
: What should a free person’s life be like? Would their freedom make Americans’ lives more meaningful? On the quantitative issue, the Transcendentalists certainly supported the inclusive side. Emerson, for example, publicly protested to President Van Buren against Cherokee Removal and delivered a great address affirming black dignity on August 1, 1844, commemorating the tenth anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies (a date widely celebrated by African Americans).
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Margaret Fuller inspired the next generation of the women’s movement. In a Transcendentalist community called Fruit-lands, Bronson Alcott conducted experiments in greater equality between the sexes and respecting the autonomy of children. Theodore Parker, a Transcendentalist who unlike Emerson remained a Unitarian minister, preached a fiery blend of Transcendentalism and antislavery to overflow crowds at a converted theater in Boston; among his converts was Julia Ward Howe, future author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
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