What Hath God Wrought (34 page)

On the frontier, pioneer newspaper editors performed a function similar to the schoolteachers and religious evangelists: They brought civilization. At the age of twenty, Eber D. Howe moved from Buffalo to the Western Reserve area of Ohio, following a typical path of Yankee migration. There he started the
Cleveland Herald
and later the
Painesville Telegraph.
In the early days, he had to rely on once-a-week mails to fill his papers with news. After writing the articles and setting them in type, he would mount his horse to deliver the papers himself to scattered farmhouses, sometimes taking payment in kind. He kept the settlers in touch with what was happening in the world, even though the news was forty-some days old from Europe and ten days old from New York.
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To people at the time, of course, this did not seem slow.

Despite its admirable function of helping keep the citizenry informed, the typical local post office did not present a very edifying scene. Except in the handful of cases where a postmistress was in charge, it was a purely male environment where the occasional woman who ventured in was considered fair game. Most postmasters were also storekeepers selling liquor by the drink on the premises. The federal government mandated that post offices open every day, and this overrode whatever state and local laws might require Sunday closings. The post office thus became a conspicuous exception to general Sabbath observance in small-town America. On Sundays many men would flock to the local post office after church to pick up their mail and have a drink. Christian reformers, including Lyman Beecher and Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, called for the suspension of transportation and sorting of mail on Sunday, and for postmasters to have the option of closing their offices that day. The reformers argued that the government’s rules were effectively preventing conscientious observers of the Sabbath from working for the Post Office.

The sabbatarians mounted concerted campaigns to change postal rules in 1810–17 and again in 1827–31; antisabbatarians rallied to oppose them. With the communications revolution, it became possible to wage a nationwide contest over public opinion. Both sides used the mails to enlist support for their view on how the mails should be treated; the debate proved a training ground for organizing grassroots politics. The sabbatarians pioneered mass petition drives, a tactic later exploited by the antislavery movement, which included many of the same people. The sabbatarian postal cause won more supporters among Presbyterians and Congregationalists than other Christian denominations, and fewest on the frontier where information was precious. As long as the transmission of urgent news remained slow, the antisabbatarians were able to prevail, pressing the needs of the military and of merchants in remote business centers. After the invention of the electric telegraph these arguments carried less weight, and much of the transportation of the mails on Sunday was discontinued. In 1912, after a hundred years of recurrent agitation, the sabbatarians, aided now by organized postal workers, finally succeeded in closing U.S. post offices on Sundays. This antebellum reform, like temperance and women’s suffrage, at last achieved its big victory in the Progressive era.
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In spite of the sabbatarian controversy, it would be a mistake to assume that the churches opposed improved communication. In fact, the evangelical movement seized upon the communications revolution, exploited it, and even fostered it. Religious publishers took advantage of advances in the technology of printing to turn out Bibles and tracts by countless thousands, many of which they distributed free of charge. The churches also contributed heavily to a new genre of printed matter, the magazine. Magazines, even more than newspapers, tended to be published for specialized audiences with similar interests and opinions. Literary and scientific magazines had existed in America for more than a generation. The most influential included Boston’s
North American Review
, founded in 1815 and modeled on Scotland’s
Edinburgh Review
in its wide-ranging subject matter, and Richmond’s
Southern Literary Messenger
, which began in 1834. Agricultural journals appealed to sophisticated farmers and planters. But most of the periodicals with national circulations and successful publishing histories before 1840 were religious. They included the
Christian Spectator
(Congregationalist), the
Christian Register
(Unitarian), the
Watchman-Examiner
(Baptist),
Zion’s Herald
(Methodist), and the
United States Catholic Miscellany.
In 1829, the Methodist
Christian Advocate
claimed twenty thousand subscribers, at a time when no secular periodical had as many as five thousand. The religious press was certainly as authentically popular a medium as the political press.
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In democratizing American political life, the transportation and communications revolutions played an even more important role than did changes in state laws and constitutions. While states in the 1820s were abolishing remaining property qualifications for voting, and providing that presidential electors should be chosen by the voters instead of the legislators, the spread of information kept the voters politically informed and engaged, especially since so many of the periodicals existed for this express purpose. Improved roads made it easier for rural farmers to come into the polling place, typically the county courthouse. The turnout of eligible voters increased markedly in the generation from 1820 to 1840, and foreign visitors marveled at the extent of public awareness even in remote and provincial areas of the country.
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A periodical of particular value in creating an informed public was
Niles’ Register
, published in Baltimore from 1811 to 1849. This weekly constituted the closest thing to a nonpartisan source and provided, as it boasted, “political, historical, geographical, scientifical, statistical, economical and biographical” information. Historians as well as contemporaries have reason to be grateful to Hezekiah Niles.

Besides newspapers and magazines, the production and distribution of books also changed. A new book publishing business developed out of the old craft of printing. These early publishing companies typically acted as printers, wholesalers, and even retailers of their own books.
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In the 1820s, the modest American book publishing industry was scattered among a number of cities, each serving a regional market. As transportation improved, publishing gradually concentrated in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, with Cincinnati as a smaller western center. Few books were published south of the Potomac, where population was dispersed and literacy rates lower; however, the South’s river transportation network facilitated the distribution of books brought in from outside. Conversely, Boston was able to remain in the publishing business even without access to the kind of river transport system New York and Philadelphia enjoyed, because New England’s high literacy rate made it a fine regional book market. Although concentrated in fewer cities, the publishing industry expanded steadily; the value of books manufactured and sold in the United States rose from $2.5 million in 1820 to five times that by 1850 even while the price of individual books fell sharply.
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A historian named William Gilmore has studied the distribution of printed matter in the Upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire during the early nineteenth century. Thousands of newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, almanacs, advertisements, and books of all kinds, including hymnals, children’s books, and textbooks, circulated among the inhabitants. As a consequence, he found, “landlocked rural residents in areas such as the Upper Valley kept up with many recent intellectual trends in the North Atlantic Republic of Letters.”
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The printed media were overcoming geographical isolation and providing consumers with unprecedented choices in what to read.

The expansion of publishing enabled a few American authors to earn a living, for the first time, by writing. One of the earliest writers to take advantage of this new opportunity was New York’s Washington Irving. Irving’s
Sketch Book
(1819), a collection of short stories and essays, proved an instant success with the public. Some of its tales, including “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” found an enduring place in the hearts of American readers. “Rip Van Winkle,” about a man who goes to sleep for twenty years and awakens to find his world utterly transformed, spoke to the feelings of a generation acutely aware of the quickening pace of change. Yet Irving’s writings owed much of their popularity to the fact that they were comfortable and comforting. They affirmed traditional values, sentimental favorites, and picturesque local color; they poked fun at people who were too serious, like Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Irving went on to a celebrated career, wrote commercially successful histories and biographies, was rewarded by the government with diplomatic posts in Britain and Spain, and became recognized internationally as an American “gentleman of letters.”
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A contemporary and rival of Irving, less polished but more profound, was James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper’s father, William, a large-scale land speculator and Federalist congressman, had founded Cooperstown, New York. When the elder Cooper died he left Fenimore and his five siblings each assets worth fifty thousand dollars. Unfortunately he also left tangled legal affairs that led ultimately to the family estates having to be auctioned off at depressed prices after the Panic of 1819. Cooper found himself unable to live his expected life of a gentleman landowner and turned to his pen for a livelihood. When Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe,
set in medieval England, attained great success upon its appearance in the United States in 1819, Cooper decided that romances based on American history could be popular too.

The most memorable of Cooper’s books were the five novels called “the Leatherstocking Tales.” The first of these,
The Pioneers
, appeared in 1823. The story takes place in a town called Templeton, presided over by a landed magnate named Marmaduke Temple. Contemporaries and posterity alike have found Temple and Templeton fictionalized versions of William Cooper and Cooperstown. In the complex character of Judge Temple, the author worked through his ambivalent feelings toward the dead father whose aristocratic values Fenimore Cooper shared but whose commercial dealings had betrayed the son’s trust. The novel also explores Cooper’s ambivalent feelings toward the westward movement, which was spreading not only the high civilization the author prized but also the mercenary greed he loathed. What seems at first a conventional romance actually grapples with fundamental moral questions of Cooper’s time and place. Three years later, Cooper produced
The Last of the Mohicans,
based on the siege of Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War. Here the heroic woodsman Leatherstocking, a marginal character in
The Pioneers,
becomes central. He and his Mohican Indian friends, Chingachgook and Uncas, exemplify the natural virtues that the westward movement was destroying. In Leatherstocking, Cooper had created an enduring American mythic figure, the manly hero who relates to nature rather than women, who stands outside society but not outside morality, who resorts to violence to do right. The myth sold well, both in Cooper’s time and since.
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Irving and Cooper both lived in Britain for several years, enabling the two authors to claim royalties on British editions of their works. Returning to America in 1833, Cooper repurchased his father’s mansion and tried to settle down to the life of a country squire. But he quarreled with his neighbors and his countrymen in general and soon found himself again embroiled in lawsuits. Cooper came to feel ever more estranged from the American society whose paradoxes he probed in his fiction. He identified with the old landed gentry rather than with the commercial world he inhabited. Ironically, he particularly despised the mass printed media that facilitated his own success. This bitterness is most evident in his novel
Home as Found
(1838), with its savage portraits of the unscrupulous journalist Steadfast Dodge and the demagogic politician Aristabulus Bragg. Cooper’s sense of alienation from bourgeois society would be typical of a host of later American intellectuals.

The extension of secondary education to many (not all) women in the years since American independence had created a new audience for printed matter. With female literacy rates rising, especially in the North, a majority of the audience for creative writing now consisted of women, for middle-class women had more leisure than their men. Women relished reading as a way to broaden their horizons, the more so since their everyday lives were so often constrained by home and children. Female writers sometimes found it easier to address this wide new audience than male writers did. In spite of the prevailing attitude that earning money was inappropriate for middle-class married women, some professional women writers and editors emerged. The best known of the American women writers of this generation was Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a New Englander. Sedgwick started out writing about young heroines who triumphed over adversity, then moved into historical romance with
Hope Leslie
, and finally developed a formula for didactic stories that reached a mass working-class audience. In her lifetime Sedgwick achieved both critical and commercial success, though she was then forgotten and has only recently been rediscovered. Disenchanted with the Calvinist theology of her cultural inheritance, Sedgwick turned to storytelling to convey her message of liberal spirituality. She exemplified the type of writer, especially common among women authors, who treated literature as a form of religious and moral suasion. This literary enterprise would achieve its high point in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852).
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