Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln connected the dots in his 1858 “House Divided”
speech, where he laid out how the Dred Scott decision created the legal precedent
for extending slavery to every state. He warned that the “House Divided”—in this
case, between free and slave states—would not remain so; it must end up going one
way or the other.
Numerous social reform movements paralleled the democratic reforms of the
Jacksonian era, fueled by the middle class’ increase in leisure time and income
as well as by the evangelical energies of the second Great Awakening. Like the
rst one, the second Great Awakening was another surge in evangelical Protestant
piety starting around the 1820s. As evangelicalism emphasized public testimony
of spiritual experience as a way of spreading that experience, there was a natural
synergy between the reformation of souls and the reformation of society which
directed itself into numerous reform movements for a variety of social problems.
Two of the more signicant reform movements in terms of American literature
were the movements to abolish slavery and for women’s rights. Motivated by a
mix of the desire to make the Revolutionary ideal of freedom for all a reality and
the belief, originating in evangelical theology, that people must be free to choose
between right and wrong in order to achieve salvation, Northern churches took
up the cause of immediate emancipation of slaves and asserted that message in
numerous pulpits, lecture halls, and newspapers. The abolitionist movement also
overlapped the movement for reforming women’s rights. The Grimkeé sisters,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott were major forces in both. The latter two
were the organizers of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, which produced a female
bill of rights modeled along the lines of the Constitutional one. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Stowe, the blockbuster novel of the nineteenth century, can be seen as
the literary nexus of religious reform, abolition, and women’s rights. Arguing that
women had a special role in reforming the spirituality of her family and her society,
Stowe urged her readers to reject slavery, as it was an impediment to the spiritual
salvation of the slaves, the slaveholders, and the nation that tolerated it.
America, from its ocial beginning, has had a chip on its shoulder about
comparisons of its cultural achievements to those of Europe. Thomas Jeerson in
Query VI of his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) directly addresses the claim
that America had not produced any great literature:
When we shall have existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they
produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the
English a Shakespeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will
enquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded, that the other countries
of Europe and quarters of the earth shall not have inscribed any name in the
roll of poets.
However, by the time Sydney Smith, founder of the Edinburgh Review and
well-known literary critic, wrote his 1820 review of Statistical Annals of the United
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