Description
Book SynopsisEXCERPT: The half century between the War of 1812 and the Civil War was above all an age of expansiveness in America. Whether measured in terms of population, territory, urbanization, economic growth, technological development, democratization, or nationalism, American society was transformed quantitatively and qualitatively at a spectacular rate. What Americans thought about themselves, their country, and their universe was always tightly linked to the changes they confronted, and the ideas they shared and disputed were both a product of and a commentary upon the expanding political, social, and economic democracy of the period.
Strictly speaking, of course, there was no American mind during this period, since Americans were then, as they are now, of many minds. Child and adult, man and woman, native and foreign born, Northerner and Southerner, slave and citizen-everyone who lived in America lived in a world of ideas and values shaped in part by a particular history and particular
Table of Contents
One: Interpreting American Democratic Thought 1
Two: Religion, Philosophy, and Science in the American Democracy 6
Religion 7
William Ellery Channing 9
Charles Grandison Finney 13
Horace Bushnell 15
Philosophy 19
The Academic Mind 20
The Transcendental Mind: Emerson 22
Science 27
Three: Political and Social Thought in the American Democracy 35
The Mind of the Jacksonians 36
William Leggett 39
George Bancroft 41
The Reform Impulse 42
Henry Thoreau: The Transcendentalist as Critic and Reformer 47
Wendell Phillips: The Rationale for Agitation 52
The Grimke Sisters and the Birth of Feminism 59
Conservatism and Democracy 65
Daniel Webster and National Conservation 66
Abraham Lincoln and Democratic Conservatism 74
Four: The Mind of the South 83
The Democratic Mind in the South 84
The Southern Mind as Apologist for Slavery 89
John C. Calhoun 91
George Fitzhugh 97
The Reactionary Enlightenment 102
The Mind of the Slave 104
Five: The Democratic Imagination 108
P.T. Barnum: The Showman as Artist 108
An American Literature 112
Walt Whitman: The Democrat as Poet 115
The Novel in America 121
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Democrat as Puritan 123
Herman Melville: The Democrat as Skeptic 127
Six: Conclusion 132
Bibliographical Essay 136
Index 145
