The American Dream in the Nineteenth Century

The American Dream in the Nineteenth Century Introduction The American dream of the nineteenth century was marked by a heightened sense of individualism and self-interest—a natural response to America’s relatively new freedom from British rule. With a mere twenty-five years of independ- ence behind them, Americans entered the 1800s intent on exploring the vast wilderness that lay west of their former colonies. This frontier mind- set called for a rugged individualism that quickly replaced the community-oriented thinking that once motivated the American colonists. With the push west came the forced expulsion of Native Americans and, later, a frenzied scramble for California gold. Nineteenth-century Americans also witnessed wave upon wave of immigration, the nightmare of the Civil War, and a period of industrialization that seemed to alter the American economy and culture overnight. Competitiveness took the place of cooperation as Americans fought to control the development and seize the wealth of their hard-won country. In this century of rapid expansion, the notion of the ‘‘self-made man’’ took on a new meaning. The American Frontier One of the first to explore the American West was Meriwether Lewis. Raised between Virginia’s frontier and its settlements, young Lewis learned wilderness skills, including how to hunt and fish, and was also exposed to refined plantation soci- ety, from which he acquired knowledge about 509 The American Dream in the Nineteenth Century surveying, geography, and natural history. After serving in the Virginia militia, Lewis rose through the ranks to become President Thomas Jefferson’s private secretary. In 1803, Jefferson sent Lewis to Pennsylvania to be trained in the areas of astron- omy, mathematics, botany, paleontology, and biol- ogy. Lewis, his expeditionary partner, William Clark, and their men set off for the western wilderness in the spring of 1804 to explore the Louisiana Purchase—land west of the Mississippi river recently acquired from France. On November 8, 1805, Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific Ocean; when they returned home on September 23, 1806, they brought with them a wealth of information. Lewis and Clark recorded their findings in minute detail in a series of journals that have come to be known as The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Excerpts such as the following reveal how respectful and friendly relations were between the white explorers and their Native American counterparts: While Sacajawea was renewing among the women the friendships of former days, Captain Clark went on, and was received by Captain Lewis and the chief, who after the first embraces Davy Crockett ª Bettmann/Corbis and salutations were over, conducted him to a sort of circular tent or shade of willows. Here he wasseatedonawhiterobe;andthechiefimme- diately tied in his hair six small shells resembling pearls, an ornament highly valued by these peo- A survey of American frontier literature ple, who procure them in the course of trade would not be complete without mentioning A from the sea-coast. The moccasins of the whole Narrative of the Life of David Crockett. party were then taken off, and after much cere- According to Paul Andrew Hutton’s introduc- mony the smoking began. tion from the 1987 University of Nebraska Press Meriwether Lewis and his expeditionary jour- edition of the autobiography, nals provided fodder for proper writers to explore the nineteenth-century American dream of taming [The Narrative] falls within the tradition of American autobiography pioneered by the West—if only on paper. James Fenimore Benjamin Franklin. Like Franklin’s work, it is Cooper, credited as being one of America’s first peculiarly American in form and tone, recount- professional writers, did just that in his historically ing one of the most beloved of our national influenced novels. His most widely recognized obsessions: the success story of the self-made work, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), draws man. It is also a literary and folk document, from wilderness themes borrowed from Lewis capturing the humor and backcountry dialect and actual events that occurred before, during, eventually enshrined in our highest literary tra- ditions by Mark Twain. and after the War of 1812. Cooper’s epic was one of the most popular English-language novels The autobiography, co-authored by Crock- of the era. The novel’s main character, Nathaniel ett’s congressional colleague, Thomas Chilton, ‘‘Natty’’ Bumppo, or ‘‘Hawkeye,’’ personifies the documents the American frontier experience of rugged individualism that was quickly defining the the first half of the 1800s. It describes Crockett’s new American identity. In her biographical essay early life growing up in eastern Tennessee on Cooper, Jill Anderson describes the Bumppo through his moves westward, his experiences in character as ‘‘a white man who resisted the the Creek War, his infamous hunting trips—he onslaught of American civilization and law and allegedly killed 105 ‘‘b’ars’’ in one season—and who wanted only to live in harmony with nature his political appointments as Tennessee House like his Indian friends.’’ Representative and U.S. congressman. The 510 Literary Themes for Students: The American Dream, Volume 2 The American Dream in the Nineteenth Century book ends before his fateful journey to the Walden is Thoreau’s account of the two Alamo, where he died in 1836. years he spent living in solitude on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. According to the first lines of the first chapter, Transcendentalism ‘‘I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any Once the American geographical landscape had neighbor, in a house which I had built myself ... been conquered, time was ripe for an exploration and earned my living by the labor of my hands of the American psyche. If the literature of Lewis only.’’ The book’s chapter headings hint at and Cooper is regarded as a study of the differ- Thoreau’s general topics of interest—economy, ence between the old and the new America, then reading, sounds, solitude—but at its heart, Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the first new Walden is a call for higher living. In the appro- American writers. Once the frontier was tamed, priately titled chapter, ‘‘Higher Laws,’’ Thoreau rugged individualism became somewhat more writes, refined and the wilderness was given a far less All nature is your congratulation, and you have fearsome name: nature. This happened in 1836 cause momentarily to bless yourself. The great- when Emerson, a self-described ‘‘naturalist,’’ est gains and values are farthest from being anonymously published ‘‘Nature,’’ a powerfully appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they lyrical essay that renounced both conventional exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding religion and materialism and declared nature the and most real are never communicated by man source of endless human possibility and fulfill- to man. The true harvest of my daily life is ment. An excerpt from the first chapter hints at somewhat as intangible and indescribable as Emerson’s vision: the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I which I have clutched. see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of Like Thoreau, Herman Melville was supremely God. The name of the nearest friend sounds affected by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to Unlike Thoreau, Melville did not become a devoted be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a Transcendentalist, even though his short story ‘‘Bar- trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of tleby the Scrivener’’ (1853) exhibits similarities to uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wil- Emerson’s essay ‘‘The Transcendentalist.’’ ‘‘Bar- derness, I find something more dear and con- tleby’’ is Melville’s commentary on reason and com- nate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of monsense.Experimentalinstyle,theshortstory the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beauti- rates as one of Melville’s most important works and ful as his own nature. has been cited as a precursor to both Absurdist and Existential literature. Soon after the essay was published, Emerson became the voice for the Transcendental move- ment, a generation of American men and women Slave Narratives who sought to create a wholly new literature The proliferation of slave narratives published divorced from European influence. Their poetry, throughout the mid- to late 1800s shed new light essays, and philosophical writings were defined on the human tragedy of slavery. The best- by their reliance on intuition rather than ration- known authors of nineteenth century slave narratives are Frederick Douglass, William Wells ality, individuality rather than conformity. Many Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. Jacobs’s Incidents Transcendentalists went on to become social in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), according to reformers, especially anti-slavery and women’s Linda M. Carter, ‘‘is an important work in that it rights advocates. is the most comprehensive slave narrative by a Henry David Thoreau, a friend of Emerson’s woman.’’ Read in the context of the nineteenth- and a fellow Transcendentalist, was profoundly century American dream, these narratives paral- affected after reading ‘‘Nature.’’ As important as lel the emphasis on individualism and freedom ‘‘Nature’’was is in the canon of nineteenth century found in the literary works of free white American literature (and American literature in American writers. Carter writes, general), Thoreau’s Walden (1854) is widely con- The nineteenth-century slave narratives contin- sidered the best representation of American ued the tradition of black self-definition and Transcendentalist thought.

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