The Flowering of New England
One of the most interesting periods of New England history is the "American Renaissance," also called "The Flowering of New England." The American Renaissance is the period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil War in which American literature, in the wake of the Romantic movement, came of age as an expression of a national spirit and national identity. The Romantic period in art and literature had begun in Europe in the late 1700s and was at its peak in Europe from 1800 to about 1850. The American intellectual renaissance was led by the leading philosophers, writers and poets of New England.
Five of the major literary figures of this period are Bissell Notable Cousins, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Ripley. (Some of this information is from the Encyclopedia Britannica online.) Also noted below is that William Cullen Bryant, from the Berkshires near Goshen, MA, is also considered part of the Flowering of New England.
One of the most important influences in the period was that of the Transcendentalists, centered in the village of Concord, MA and including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, George Ripley and Margaret Fuller.
Transcendentalism was a 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. The Transcendentalists contributed to the founding of a new national culture based on native elements. They advocated reforms in church, state, and society, contributing to the rise of free religion and the abolition movement and to the formation of various utopian communities, such as Brook Farm.
The pre- Civil War abolition movement was also bolstered by other New England writers, including the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) dramatized the plight of the black slave.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born Feb. 27, 1807, in what is now Portland, Maine, was also part of this movement and was the most popular American poet in the 19th century. (There is much more on the Notable Cousins page about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.)
Longfellow graduated from Bowdoin College and traveled in Europe before joining the modern-language faculty at Bowdoin (1829 – 35) and then at Harvard (1836 – 54). His Voices of the Night (1839), containing "The Psalm of Life" and "The Light of the Stars," first won him popularity. Ballads and Other Poems (1841), including "The Wreck of the Hesperus" and "The Village Blacksmith," swept the nation, as did his long poem "Evangeline" (1847).
With "Hiawatha" (1855), "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858) and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), including "Paul Revere's Ride," he became the best-loved American poet of the 19th century. The hallmarks of his verse are gentleness, simplicity, and an idealized vision of the world.
Americans owe a great debt to Longfellow because he was among the first of American writers to use native themes. He wrote about the American scene and landscape, the American Indian ('Song of Hiawatha'), and American history and tradition ('The Courtship of Miles Standish', 'Evangeline'). At the beginning of the 19th century, America was a stumbling babe as far as a culture of its own was concerned. The people of America had spent their years and their energies in carving a habitation out of the wilderness and in fighting for independence. Literature, art, and music came mainly from Europe and especially from England. Nothing was considered worthy of attention unless it came from Europe.
But "the flowering of New England," as Van Wyck Brooks terms the period from 1815 to 1865, took place in Longfellow's day, and he made a great contribution to it. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Prescott were a few of the great minds and spirits among whom Longfellow took his place.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a 5th cousin to the Bissells through common ancestor 10th Great-grandparents Edward Griswold and Margaret.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of William and Ruth (Haskins) Emerson; his father was a clergyman, as many of his male ancestors had been. He attended the Boston Latin School, followed by Harvard University (from which he graduated in 1821) and the Harvard School of Divinity. Emerson’s early preaching had often touched on the personal nature of spirituality. Now he found kindred spirits in a circle of writers and thinkers who lived in Concord, Henry David Thoreau. In the 1830s Emerson gave lectures that he afterward published in essay form. These essays, particularly “Nature” (1836), embodied his newly developed philosophy. “The American Scholar,” based on a lecture that he gave in 1837, encouraged American authors to find their own style instead of imitating their foreign predecessors.
Emerson became known as the central figure of his literary and philosophical group, now known as the American Transcendentalists. These writers shared a key belief that each individual could transcend, or move beyond, the physical world of the senses into deeper spiritual experience through free will and intuition. In this school of thought, God was not remote and unknowable; believers understood God and themselves by looking into their own souls and by feeling their own connection to nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is a 6th cousin to the Bissells through common ancestor 10th Great-grandfather William Stebbing III.
Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. He began writing nature poetry in the 1840s, with poet Ralph Waldo Emerson as a mentor and friend. In 1845 he began his famous two-year stay on Walden Pond, which he wrote about in his master work,Walden. He also became known for his beliefs in Transcendentalism and civil disobedience, and was a dedicated abolitionist. A bright student, Thoreau went to Harvard College (now Harvard University). There he studied Greek and Latin as well as German. He graduated from college in 1837.
In 1845, Thoreau built a small home for himself on Walden Pond, on property owned by Emerson. He spent more than two years there. Published in 1854, Walden; or, Life in the Woods espoused living a life close to nature. The book was a modest success, but it wasn't until much later that the book reached a larger audience. Over the years, Walden has inspired and informed the work of naturalists, environmentalists and writers.
While living at Walden Pond, Thoreau also had an encounter with the law. He spent a night in jail after refusing to pay a poll tax. This experience led him to write one of his best-known and most influential essays, "Civil Disobedience" (also known as "Resistance to Civil Government") which influenced Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau died in 1862.
Henry David Thoreau is a 5th cousin to the Bissells through common ancestor 10th Great-grandparents Thomas Hayward, Sr. and Susanna Towne.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, born in Litchfield, CT., lived from 1811 to 1896. Her father was Rev. Lyman Beecher, a leading minister of the time. She grew up in a large, intellectually active family, was well-educated and wrote her first publications when she was 22 years old. Lyman Beecher was among the best known clergymen of the first half of the 1800s. He began to attract national attention in the 1820s when he preached anti-slavery sermons in response to the Missouri Compromise. Lyman's dynamic preaching and energy had a profound impact on all of his children. Harriet published regularly for nearly two decades more while raising a family and then was hired to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The first installment of Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared on June 5, 1851 in the anti-slavery newspaper, The National Era. Stowe enlisted friends and family to send her information and she scoured freedom narratives and anti-slavery newspapers for first hand accounts as she composed her story. In 1852 the serial was published as a two volume book. Uncle Tom's Cabin was a best seller in the United States, Britian, Europe, Asia, and translated into over 60 languages.
The strength of Uncle Tom's Cabin is its ability to illustrate slavery's effect on families, and to help readers empathize with enslaved characters. Stowe's characters freely debated the causes of slavery, the Fugitive Slave Law, the future of freed people, what an individual could do, and racism. Writing in the 1950s, poet Langston Hughes called the book a "moral battle cry for freedom." According to legend, Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 by saying "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Whether the story is true or not, the sentiment underscores the public connection between Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin contributed to the outbreak of war by personalizing the political and economic arguments about slavery. Stowe's informal, conversational writing style inspired people in a way that political speeches, tracts and newspapers accounts could not. Uncle Tom's Cabin helped many 19th-century Americans determine what kind of country they wanted.
Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet's brother and the seventh child of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote Beecher, became one of the most famous men in the United States during the 19th century. Among the Beecher family, only sister Harriet bested Henry's life time celebrity and historical legacy. Henry became the first minister of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York and shaped Plymouth Church into one of the most influential pulpits in the United States. By 1850, the crowds coming to hear Beecher's sermons on temperance and the wrongs of slavery often could not fit inside the building.
Harriet Beecher Stowe is a 4th cousin to the Bissells through common ancestor 9th Great-grandparents Benjamin Parsons and Sarah Vore.
George Ripley was born Oct. 3, 1802, in Greenfield, MA. He was a journalist and reformer whose life, for half a century, mirrored the main currents of American thought. He was the leading promoter and director of Brook Farm, the celebrated utopian community at West Roxbury, MA. and a spokesman for the utopian socialist ideas of the French social reformer Charles Fourier. Ripley became literary critic for the New York Tribune, and his articles and reviews were widely syndicated. He was an arbiter of taste and culture for much of the reading public.
Ripley left his congregation in Northampton, MA in 1840 and set out to find his own church to which he could be honest and faithful. Emerson praised Ripley's decision because he knew that Ripley's church would be more than a Sunday gathering place. Indeed, Emerson predicted that Ripley's church would be an experiment in Christian living. Just as Ripley's home had attracted men who doubted the Unitarian church, it also became a point of contact between transcendentalists and more radical social critics. These people helped channel Ripley's discontent into the idea of a community that would eventually be called Brook Farm, begun in 1841.
Ripley's goals for Brook Farm were a systematic statement of what all the transcendentalists had been looking for: individual freedom and humane relationships. Specifically, however, the transcendentalists sought harmony, the merging of values, ideas, and spiritual matters with physical events, the union of mind and body, spirit and flesh.
At Brook Farm, and in other communities, physical labor is perceived as a condition of mental well-being and health. They believed that manual labor was uplifting, and thus, every member, even the writers and poets, spent at least a few hours a day in physical effort. Another expression of the connection of flesh and spirit is manifested through the abundance of physical tasks performed at Brook Farm. The members of Brook Farm believed that they could create a utopian microcosm of society that would eventually serve as a model for and inaugurate the social macrocosm.
By May 1846, troubled by the financial difficulties at Brook Farm, Ripley had made an informal split from the community. By its closure a year later, Brook Farm had amassed a total debt of $17,445. After Brook Farm, George Ripley began to work as a freelance journalist. In 1849 he was employed by Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune. George Ripley then became a part of the Gilded Age New York literary scene for the remainder of his life. Because of his convivial nature, he was careful to avoid the city's rampant literary feuds at the time. He became a public figure with a national reputation and, known as an arbiter of taste, he helped establish the National Institute of Literature, Art, and Science in 1869. He died July 4, 1880.
George Ripley is a 5th cousin to the Bissells through common ancestor 10th Great-grandparents William Ripley and Katherine.
Sources for the text on this page include the Encyclopedia Britannica online; biography.com in particular for the Emerson and Thoreau material; a biographical sketch of Longfellow by Roberto Rabe on the Auburn University website; the HarriettBeecherStoweCenter.org; and Jessica Gordon on http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/ideas/brhistory.html.
William Cullen Bryant was a romantic poet, journalist and an editor of The New York Evening Post. He was born in 1794 in Cummington, MA and died in 1878.