Read American Experiment Online
Authors: James MacGregor Burns
[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.
[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 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).
[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.