Toward an American Culture (c) 2003 Wadsworth Group All rights reserved Chapter 10.

Toward an American Culture

(c) 2003 Wadsworth Group All rights reserved

Chapter 10Chapter 10

The Northern Middle Class

• “Most valuable class in any community is the middle class”—Walt Whitman

• New kinds of proprietors made in the market revolution– City and county merchants– Master craftsmen, manufacturers– Market-oriented farmers

• Many were New Englanders• Yankee Protestantism: the foundation of American

middle-class culture


The Evangelical Base

• Charles Grandison Finney– Rochester, New York– New Evangelicalism


Domesticity

• Distinctions made between the home and the world

• Spheres for men and women:– Men: politics and economics– Women: moral influence in households:

• A feminization of domestic life

• Fewer children, more attention to each

– Morals reflected in Sunday schools


Sentimentality

• Godey’s Lady’s Book– Sarah Josepha Hale

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “damned mob of scribbling women”– Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World– Maria Cummin, The Lamplighter

• Women writers de facto Evangelical ministers• Harriet Beecher Stowe

– Uncle Tom’s Cabin


Fine Arts

• 1820s and 1830s: literature and the arts are viewed more favorably than in previous post-revolutionary era

• Relations between nature and civilization


Nature and Art

• Art as avenue to grand lessons of nature

• Mt. Auburn Cemetery

• Thomas Cole– “Essay on American Scenery”

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Henry David Thoreau


Scenic Tourism: Niagara Falls

• Wealthy Americans began to travel for the purpose of looking at scenery

• Niagara Falls– Erie Canal


The Plain People of the North

• Settlers in the lower Northwest remained culturally southern

• Hill-country New Englanders, New Yorkers, and Pennsylvanians

• Refugees from countryside working as urban laborers

• Irish and German immigrants• All often rejected sentimentalism and reformist

religion


Religion and Common Folk

• Huge diversity in churches, faiths• Evangelical emphasis on individual experience over

churchly authority• Providence

– God has blueprint– Death of loved one God’s test


Popular Millennialism

• postmillennialists

• premillennialism

• William Miller– Millerites– Seventh Day Adventist Church


Family and Society

• Baptists, Methodists and smaller sects evangelized among those left behind by market revolution: dependent, wage-earners

• Middle-class saw progress, while poorer and more conservative evangelicals saw a descent into worldliness

• Critical of Market Revolution assault on traditional patriarchy


The Prophet Joseph Smith

• Reaction against weakening of traditional patriarchy

• The Book of Mormon– Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints


The Rise of Popular Culture

• Plain folk: producers and consumers of nonreligious commercial popular culture


Blood Sports

• Urban working-class neighborhoods• Bachelor sub-culture formed

– Departure from piety and self-restraint of the middle-class

– Volunteer fire companies and militia units or drinking gangs

• Sportsman Hall, New York City– Cock fights, ratting, dog fighting


Boxing

• Irish and English immigrants

• Ethnic-based street gangs:– Dead Rabbits– Bowery B’hoys

• Role of butchers


An American Theater

• Theater and theater companies spread to interior• Theater riots• Theaters separate to appeal to rival audiences

– Edwin Forrest vs. William Charles Macready

– Astor Place Riot (1849)

• Playhouses for working class


Minstrelsy• Most popular form of theater: blackface minstrel

shows: 1840-1880– 1st Minstrel show Thomas Rice “jumps Jim Crow” 1831– Mostly attended by men– Performed by white men who wore “blackface”– Toned down, Europeanized African American song and

dance– Reinforced racial stereotypes– Content of shows dealt with social and political life

• Traveling Minstrel shows– Grecian Dog Apollo


Novels and the Penny Press

• Penny newspapers and dime novels• Philadelphia Gazette and sensationalism• “yellow back novels”

– Quaker City (1845)

• Working class popular culture – Melodramatic contest between good and evil– World is evil– E.Z.C. Judson (Ned Buntline)


Family, Church, and Neighborhood: The White South

• Southerners remained localistic and culturally conservative

• Prospects for most Southern whites: inherited land and family

• Southerners were grounded in authority of patriarchs and integrity of families


Southern Families

• Family members: representatives of families, rather than individuals – duty to their family

• Reputation and defense of the family name and honor

• Family honor more important than wealth

• Southern code of honor

• Honor the obligations to which one is born


Southern Entertainments• Rural character of South meant fewer commercial

entertainments• English literature preferred

– Sir Walter Scott and Chivalry

• Hunting and fishing• Commercial entertainment

– Showboats along river towns– Horse racing– New Orleans


The Camp Meeting Becomes Respectable

• Evangelical “Bible Belt”

• Revivals continue

• Reinforced localistic neighborhoods and patriarchal families


Religious Conservatism

• Misfortune is divine punishment

• Southern cultural conservatism was rooted in:– Religion– The family– A system of fixed family roles


Proslavery Christianity• By 1830 South was minority in a democratic and

capitalist nation• Northern middle-class: made a connection

between material and moral progress– Individual autonomy and universal rights

• Radical northern minority advocated abolition of slavery

• Southern response: moral and religious defense of slavery– Rejects Jefferson’s “self-evident” equality of man


The Private Lives of Slaves

• Plantation slaveholders knew their success depended on slaves’ labor and obedience in exchange for allowing slaves some privilege and autonomy


The Slave Family

• Most precious slave privilege: right to make and maintain families

• Slave marriages• Slave families vulnerable

– Slaves used for sex by owners– Slaves were assets that were sometimes liquidated

• Slaves modified their relations in anticipation of uncertainties

• Extended kinship


White Missions

• Missions to slaves– Owners responsible for spiritual welfare of

slaves

• Charles Colcock Jones


Slave Christians

• Slaves ignored much of missionary teachings

• Slaves embraced Christianity:– transformed it into an independent African

American faith

• Incorporated social and ritual practices passed down from West Africa

• Moses not Abraham at Jesus’s side


Religion and Revolt

• Slave revolt rare• Running away common form of rebellion• Christianity convinced slaves that justice would come

to them• Denmark Vesey

– Vesey plot (1822)– Gullah Jack


Nat Turner

• Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831)– Instrument of God’s wrath

• Virginia: 60 slaves killed 55 whites• Deeply troubling for Southern whites


Conclusion

• America’s patchwork of regional, class, and ethnic cultures:– New middle-classes of North and West– Poor urban dwellers– Evangelical, socially conservative Southerners– Slave culture


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Toward an American Culture (c) 2003 Wadsworth Group All rights reserved Chapter 10.

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