American Experiment (129 page)

Read American Experiment Online

Authors: James MacGregor Burns

BOOK: American Experiment
9.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

[Population hurries to mines]:
Col. Richard B. Mason, letter in John C. Fremont,
The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California
(Derby, 1851), p. 427.

[Prospectors’ methods]:
Milo M. Quaife, ed.,
Pictures of Gold Rush California
(Lakeside Press, 1949), pp. 192-234.

[Gold rush]:
Quaife,
Pictures,
pp. xx-xxv.

[San Francisco]:
Dana, p. 353.

[Statehood convention]:
Dana, pp. 342-49.

[Slavery prohibition]: ibid.,
pp. 347.

[Remarks on slavery by Representatives Allen and Hilliard]: Congressional Globe,
31st Congress, 1st session (Appendix), Dec. 12, 1849 (speeches of Dec. 12, 1849, and Dec. 13, 1849), pp. 33-35.

[Extremist feelings in 1849-1850]:
Claude M. Fuess,
Daniel Webster
(Da Capo Press, 1968),

Vol. 2, pp. 20l-2.

[Clay’s meeting with Webster on omnibus proposal]: ibid,
pp. 204-5; Dalzell, p. 173; Glyndon G. Van Deusen,
The Life of Henry Clay
(Little, Brown, 1937), p. 399.

[Clay “never before arisen to address any assembly … so anxious ”]: Congressional Globe,
Feb. 5 and 6, 1850, p. 115.

[Clay’s presentation of his omnibus proposal to the Senate]: ibid.,
pp. 115-27, quoted at p. 127.

[Calhoun’s speech]:
quoted in Dalzell, p. 174 (March 4, 1850).

[Webster’s speech]: Congressional Globe,
March 7, 1850, pp. 269-76, quoted at pp. 269, 276.

[Philip Hone on post-Compromise rejoicing]:
quoted in Brock, p. 315.

[California lawlessness]:
Dana, pp. 367-68 and passim.

14. THE CULTURE OF LIBERTY

[Emerson on the limited culture of Massachusetts]: The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
eds. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes (Houghton Mifflin, 1912), Vol. 8, p. 339 (Oct. 1852).

[John Adams on the generational sequence of studies]:
James T. Adams,
The Adams Family
(Literary Guild, 1930), p. 67.

[New England cultural development in general]:
F. O. Matthiessen,
American Renaissance
(Oxford University Press, 1941); Vernon L. Parrington,
Main Currents in American Thought
(Harcourt, Brace
&
World, 1958), Vol. 2:
The Romantic Revolution in America;
Van Wyck Brooks,
The Flowering of New England
(E. P. Dutton, 1936); Russell Blaine Nye,
The Cultural Life of the New Motion
(Harper & Brothers, i960); Perry Miller,
The Life of the Mind in America
(Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).

[Harvard conflict over religion]:
Samuel Eliot Morison,
Three Centuries of Harvard
(Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 187-90.

[Parrington on Washington Irving’s detachment from literary America]:
Parrington, p. 203.

[Parrington on William Cullen Bryant’s “self-pollenizing nature”]:
Parrington, p. 239.

[Harvard in the early nineteenth century]:
Morison, pp. 224-30; Brooks, Ch. 2.

[William Ellery Channing on experience and experiment]:
Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds.,
Dictionary of American Biography,
Vol. 4 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), p. 7.

[Channing on the “great nature” and “divine image” of man]:
quoted in Parrington, p. 334.

[Oliver Wendell Holmes on Channing’s “bland, superior look”]:
quoted in Brooks, p. 43.

The Engine in the Vineyard

The title of this section is adapted from Leo Marx,
The Machine in the Garden
(Oxford University Press, 1967), which is a major source of ideas for this chapter.

[Emerson’s return to Concord with Lidian]:
Ralph L. Rusk,
The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), pp. 222-24.

[The Emersons’ home in Concord]:
Stephanie Kraft,
No Castles on Main Street
(Rand McNally, 1979), Ch. 11.

[Emerson’s early life]:
Rusk, Chs. 1-10;
Dictionary of American Biography,
Vol. 3, pp. 132-34.

[Emerson on moving “from the Unconscious to the Conscious”]:
quoted in Rusk, p. 66.

[Emerson’s return to Concord in 1834, with his mother]: ibid.,
pp. 208-9.

[Emerson’s Nature]:
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Nature
(Munroe, 1836). Quoted on nature, pp. 77, 9, 12, 53, 79; quoted on man, pp. 14, 41, 50-51, 80.

[Emerson on man’s talent and genius]:
quoted in Perry Miller, ed.,
The American Transcendentalists
(Anchor Books, 1957), p. 58, from Emerson’s lecture, “The Method of Nature,” Waterville College, Maine, Aug. 11, 1841.

[Emerson on man’s magnetic needle]:
quoted in Brooks, p. 206.

[Emerson on self-reliance]:
“Self-Reliance,” in Mary A. Jordan, ed.,
Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Houghton Mifflin, 1903), quoted at pp. 86, 88, 111.

[Theodore Parker on worshipping with no mediator between people and the father of all]:
quoted in
Dictionary of American Biography,
Vol. 7, pp. 239-40.

[Margaret Fuller as “unsexed version of Plato’s Socrates”]:
Barrett Wendell,
A Literary History of America
(Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), p. 300; see also Marie Mitchell Olesen Urbanski,
Margaret Fuller’s “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”
(Greenwood Press, 1980).

[Harriet Martineau on Margaret Fuller’s circle of women intellectuals]:
quoted in
Dictionary of American Biography,
Vol. 4, p. 64.

[Emerson on a “foolish consistency”]:
Jordan, p. 93.

[Emerson on technology]:
quoted in Marx, p. 230.

[“Things are in the saddle … ”]:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing,” Richard Ellmann, ed.,
The New Oxford Book of American Verse
(Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 67-69. On Emerson and his circle, see also Joel Porte,
Representative Man
(Oxford University Press, 1979).

[Henry Thoreau at Walden Pond]:
Henry D. Thoreau,
Walden
(Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 114-16; see also Marx, pp. 249-55; R·W. B. Lewis,
The American Adam
(University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 20-27; Henry Beetle Hough,
Thoreau of Walden
(Archon Books, 1970); James Mcintosh,
Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist
(Cornell University Press, 1974).

[Thoreau on the railroad]: Walden,
pp. 115-22.

[Lerner on Thoreau]:
Max Lerner, “Thoreau: No Hermit,” from Max Lerner,
Ideas Are Weapons
(Viking Press, 1939), p. 45·

[Thoreau on the railroad as an Atropos]: Walden,
p. 118.

[Thoreau’s description of his house]: Walden,
p. 48.

[Thoreau’s “experiment in human ecology”]:
so described by Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Henry Thoreau in Our Time,” in Sherman Paul, ed.,
Thoreau
(Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 26; this essay, p. 26, is also the source of Thoreau’s statement about living deep. See also Sherman Paul,
The Shores of America
(University of Illinois Press, 1958).

[James Russell Lowell on Thoreau’s “experiment ”]:
quoted in Leon Edel,
Henry D. Thoreau
(University of Minnesota Press, 1970), p. 29.

[Sam Staples on Thoreau’s jailing]:
quoted in Milton Meltzer and Walter Harding,
A Thoreau Profile
(Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962), p. 158.

[Thoreau’s exchange (apocryphal) with Emerson]: ibid.,
pp. 161-62.

[Sherman Paul on Thoreau’s means of self-emancipation]:
Sherman Paul, “A Fable of the Renewal of Life,” in Paul, p. 103.

[Emerson on Thoreau’s “Excursions on Concord & Merrimack Rivers ”]:
Emerson to Charles K. Newcomb, July 16, 1846, Emerson Papers, Concord Free Public Library.

[Emerson on communicating across seventeen miles]:
Emerson to Newcomb, Aug. 16, 1842,
ibid.

[Nathaniel Hawthorne on Sleepy Hollow]:
Randall Stewart, ed..
The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne
(Yale University Press, 1932), pp. 102-4.

[Hawthorne’s life]:
Nina Baym,
The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career
(Cornell University Press, 1976); Newton Arvin,
Hawthorne
(Little, Brown, 1929); Hyatt H. Waggoner,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(University of Minnesota Press, 1962).

[Van Wyck Brooks on the ghosts and legends of Salem]:
Brooks, p. 212.

[Hawthorne on the “supremely artificial establishments”]:
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Passages from The American Note-Books
(Houghton Mifflin, 1900), p. 156.

[Hawthorne interpretation]:
Harry Levin,
The Power of Blackness
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1958); A. N. Kaul, ed.,
Hawthorne
(Prentice-Hall, 1966).

[Ethan Brand on humanity as the subject of an experiment]:
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Ethan Brand,” in
Hawthorne’s Works
(Houghton Mifflin, 1887), Vol. 3, p. 495.

[Melville on his “Whale” and Hawthorne’s “Unpardonable Sin”]:
Melville to Hawthorne,

June 1?, 1851, in Merrell R. Davis and William H. Oilman, eds.,
The letters of Herman
,

Melville
(Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 126-31.

[Melville on “cruel cogs and wheels”]:
quoted in Marx, p. 286.

[Leavis on Melville]:
Q. D. Leavis, “Melville: The 1853-6 Phase,” in Faith Pullin, ed.,
New Perspectives on Melville
(Kent State University Press, 1978), p. 214.

[Marx on the American hero]:
Marx, p. 364.

[Philosophical themes and dualities in Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville]:
works cited above, esp. Levin, Marx, Parrington; Quentin Anderson,
The Imperial Self
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1971); Lewis,
The American Adam;
Stephen E. Whicher,
Freedom and Fate
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953).

Religion: Free Exercise

[Finney’s sermon]:
Bernard Weisberger.
They Gathered at the River
(Little, Brown, 1958), pp. 101, 109, 239.

[Concern of eastern ministers about lack of religion on the frontier]:
Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “Inductive and Deductive Politics: Science and Society in Antebellum Presbyterian Thought,”
Journal of American History,
Vol. 64, No. 3 (December 1977), p. 708.

[Timothy Dwight]:
Clifford S. Griffin,
Their Brother’s Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800-186;
(Rutgers University Press, 1960), p. 17.

[“Very wintry season” for religion after the Revolution]:
R. Carlyle Buley,
The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815-1840
(Indiana Historical Society, 1950), Vol. 2, p. 420.

[Tocqueville on everywhere meeting “a politician where you expected to find a priest”]:
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), Henry Reeve Text, Phillips Bradley, ed. Vol. 1, pp. 306-7.

[Dependence of American ministers on laity for support after disestablishment]:
Sidney E. Mead, “The Rise of the Evangelical Conception of the Ministry in America (1607-1850),” in H. Richard Niebuhr and Daniel D. Williams, eds.,
The Ministry in Historical Perspectives
(Harper & Brothers, 1956), p. 217.

[Timothy Dwight on uncertainty of voluntary contributions for support of ministry]:
Timothy Dwight,
Travels in New England and New York,
4 vols. (T. Dwight, 1821-22), Vol. 3, p. 3.

[Dominant religious groups in colonial America]:
Sidney E. Mead, “Denominationalism: The Shape of Protestantism in America,”
Church History,
Vol. 24 (December 1954), p. 294.

[Early missionary work of Presbyterians on the western frontier]:
William Warren Sweet,
Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765-1840
(Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), pp. 148-49.

[Cane Ridge revival described]:
Bulcy, p. 421.

[Presbyterian split into Old School and New School]:
Edward Pessen,
Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics
(Dorsey Press, 1969), p. 82.

[Methodist circuit riders]:
Buley, pp. 450-52.

[Description of camp meeting]:
John Allen Krout and Dixon Ryan Fox,
The Completion of Independence, 1790-1830
(Macmillan, 1944), p. 173.

[Peter Cartwright’s account of frontier proselytizing]:
Sydney E. Ahlstrom,
A Religious History of the American People
(Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 443-44.

[Ahlstrom on dramatic confrontation over “infant sprinkling”]: ibid.,
p. 444.

[Membership statistics of churches in 1850]:
Will Herberg,
Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology
(Doubleday, 1955), p. 119.

[Second Great Awakening in New England]:
Ahlstrom, p. 417.

[Timothy Dwight’s asceticism]:
Ann Douglas,
The Feminization of American Culture
(Avon Books, 1977), p. 173.

[Numbers of Roman Catholics in America in colonial era]:
Herberg, p. 151.
[Numbers of Roman Catholics in America in 1850]:
Ahlstrom, p. 542.

[Issue of “trusteeism” in Roman Catholic Church]:
Herberg, pp. 152-54.

[Anti-Catholic rioting in 1830s and 1840s]:
Ray Allen Billington,
The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism
(Macmillan, 1938), pp. 68-70; see also Herberg, p. 155.

[The beginning of the Mormon Church]:
Leonard J. Arlington and Davis Bitton,
The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). p. 204.

[Mormons expelled from Missouri and Illinois]:
Bernard De Voto,
The Year of Decision: 1846
(Houghton Mifflin, 1942), pp. 75-101, 327-30.

[Brigham Young growing up amidst “fiery” Methodist revivals]:
in Arlington and Bitton, p. 86.

Other books

Ghost Country by Sara Paretsky
Carla Kelly by Enduring Light
The Family by Kitty Kelley
Nightmare by Bonnie Bryant
To Seek a Master by Monica Belle
A Radiant Sky by Jocelyn Davies
Falling for Flynn by Nicola Marsh