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 independence behind them, Americans entered the 1800s intent on exploring the vast wilderness that lay west of their former colonies. This frontier mindset 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 society, from which he acquired knowledge about 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 astronomy, mathematics, botany, paleontology, and biology. 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 and salutations were over, conducted him to a sort of circular tent or shade of willows. Here he was seated on a white robe; and the chief immediately tied in his hair six small shells resembling pearls, an ornament highly valued by these people, who procure them in the course of trade from the sea-coast. The moccasins of the whole party were then taken off, and after much ceremony the smoking began.

Meriwether Lewis and his expeditionary journals provided fodder for proper writers to explore the nineteenth-century American dream of taming the West—if only on paper. James Fenimore Cooper, credited as being one of America's first professional writers, did just that in his historically influenced novels. His most widely recognized work, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), draws from wilderness themes borrowed from Lewis and actual events that occurred before, during, and after the War of 1812. Cooper's epic was one of the most popular English-language novels of the era. The novel's main character, Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo, or "Hawkeye," personifies the rugged individualism that was quickly defining the new American identity. In her biographical essay on Cooper, Jill Anderson describes the Bumppo character as "a white man who resisted the onslaught of American civilization and law and who wanted only to live in harmony with nature like his Indian friends."

A survey of American frontier literature would not be complete without mentioning A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett. According to Paul Andrew Hutton's introduction from the 1987 University of Nebraska Press edition of the autobiography,

[The Narrative] falls within the tradition of American autobiography pioneered by Benjamin Franklin. Like Franklin's work, it is peculiarly American in form and tone, recounting one of the most beloved of our national obsessions: the success story of the self-made man. It is also a literary and folk document, capturing the humor and backcountry dialect eventually enshrined in our highest literary traditions by Mark Twain.

The autobiography, co-authored by Crockett's congressional colleague, Thomas Chilton, documents the American frontier experience of the first half of the 1800s. It describes Crockett's early life growing up in eastern Tennessee through his moves westward, his experiences in the Creek War, his infamous hunting trips—he allegedly killed 105 "b'ars" in one season—and his political appointments as Tennessee House Representative and U.S. congressman. The book ends before his fateful journey to the Alamo, where he died in 1836.

Transcendentalism

Once the American geographical landscape had been conquered, time was ripe for an exploration of the American psyche. If the literature of Lewis and Cooper is regarded as a study of the difference between the old and the new America, then Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the first new American writers. Once the frontier was tamed, rugged individualism became somewhat more refined and the wilderness was given a far less fearsome name: nature. This happened in 1836 when Emerson, a self-described "naturalist," anonymously published "Nature," a powerfully lyrical essay that renounced both conventional religion and materialism and declared nature the source of endless human possibility and fulfillment. An excerpt from the first chapter hints at Emerson's vision:

I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

Soon after the essay was published, Emerson became the voice for the Transcendental movement, a generation of American men and women who sought to create a wholly new literature divorced from European influence. Their poetry, essays, and philosophical writings were defined by their reliance on intuition rather than rationality, individuality rather than conformity. Many Transcendentalists went on to become social reformers, especially anti-slavery and women's rights advocates.

Henry David Thoreau, a friend of Emerson's and a fellow Transcendentalist, was profoundly affected after reading "Nature." As important as "Nature" was is in the canon of nineteenth century American literature (and American literature in general), Thoreau's Walden (1854) is widely considered the best representation of American Transcendentalist thought.

Walden is Thoreau's account of the two years he spent living in solitude on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. According to the first lines of the first chapter, "I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself … and earned my living by the labor of my hands only." The book's chapter headings hint at Thoreau's general topics of interest—economy, reading, sounds, solitude—but at its heart, Walden is a call for higher living. In the appropriately titled chapter, "Higher Laws," Thoreau writes,

All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

Like Thoreau, Herman Melville was supremely affected by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Unlike Thoreau, Melville did not become a devoted Transcendentalist, even though his short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853) exhibits similarities to Emerson's essay "The Transcendentalist." "Bartleby" is Melville's commentary on reason and common sense. Experimental in style, the short story rates as one of Melville's most important works and has been cited as a precursor to both Absurdist and Existential literature.

Slave Narratives

The proliferation of slave narratives published throughout the mid- to late 1800s shed new light on the human tragedy of slavery. The best-known authors of nineteenth century slave narratives are Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), according to Linda M. Carter, "is an important work in that it is the most comprehensive slave narrative by a woman." Read in the context of the nineteenth-century American dream, these narratives parallel the emphasis on individualism and freedom found in the literary works of free white American writers. Carter writes,

The nineteenth-century slave narratives continued the tradition of black self-definition and self-assertion that was established by the eighteenth-century slave narratives. The slave narratives of both centuries served as a preface and a foundation for subsequent expression through fiction, poetry, autobiography, essays, and other genres.

Jacobs's story is told in rich, vivid detail, giving the reader a firsthand account of the daily humiliations and punishments meted out by her cruel masters. In the preface to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written after her escape to the North, Jacobs writes,

I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history. Neither do I care to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations. May the blessing of God rest on this imperfect effort in behalf of my persecuted people!

The Civil War

Another woman who took great pains to document the events that shaped her life and reflected the nation at large was Mary Boykin Chesnut. Her Diary from Dixie (1905), published nearly twenty years after her death, is a record of the events, issues, and people involved in the tragic occurrences related to the Civil War. Chesnut, wife of Senator James Chesnut, began a diary in February 1861 in which she recorded her thoughts about the war as it unfolded. What makes the Diary especially fascinating is Chesnut's spirited personality, her wide literary knowledge, her proximity to the events of the war and the politicians who guided its course, and her anti-slavery stance supported by her belief that southern women, such as herself, suffered enslavement by the male-dominated culture of the region. Her outspokenness regarding female equality echoed a growing trend among women across the country; an all-out fight for women's rights loomed on the horizon.

Unlikely American Heroes and Heroines

As the nineteenth century waned, popular literary characters of the day revealed a shift in cultural heroes and heroines. At the beginning of the century, frontiersmen and larger-than-life folk heroes dominated the pages of popular books. Toward the end, beloved literary characters started to look more like everyday people who possessed independence, individuality, and a willingness to make their own way in the world, despite traditional cultural mores.

One of the most beloved of these characters is Jo, Louisa May Alcott's timeless creation who plays the leading role in her 1868 novel, Little Women. According to Elizabeth Janeway in her 1968 New York Times book review,

Jo is a unique creation: the one young woman in nineteenth-century fiction who maintains her individual independence, who gives up no part of her autonomy as payment for being born a woman—and who gets away with it. Jo is the tomboy dream come true, the dream of growing up into full humanity with all its potentialities instead of into limited femininity: of looking after oneself and paying one's way and doing effective work in the real world instead of learning how to please a man who will look after you, as Meg and Amy both do with pious pleasure.

Another nineteenth-century literary favorite is Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain's eternally beloved ruffian from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). It is Tom's vivid imagination and quick wit that define him as a loveable prankster, a conformist who behaves like a rebel, an adventurer who seeks the approval of the adults in his life. Nineteenth-century readers of fiction, especially young readers, had never met a character like Tom. Tom's complexities coupled with Twain's exposure of the inherent hypocrisy of institutions such as church and school signaled a break in American literary traditions. The American dream of individuality and self-interest was beginning to include a rejection of institutions and moral laws.

The Implications of Rapid Change

The Education of Henry Adams (1871) is more than the autobiography of the great-grandson of American founding father John Adams, the grandson of U.S. President John Quincy Adams, and the son of U.S. Senator and Ambassador to the United Kingdom Charles Francis Adams. It is a critical review of the political, social, intellectual, and technological changes this aristocratic American witnessed over the course of his life. A fervent individualist and product of a life of observation, education, and writing, Adams was imminently qualified to write what is essentially a critique of intellectual and political life in the nineteenth century. Written in the third person, The Education, though somewhat dark, is full of wit and humor, as witnessed from this excerpt from the chapter titled "Failure":

Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

Adams levels the bulk of his criticism at the American educational model—thus the title of his autobiography. He fully intends his life experiences to be used as an educational tool to be used by those who have been failed by a cynical nation overrun with materialism, civility, and vulgar exploitation.

Conclusion

The American dream at the beginning of the 1800s was defined by rugged individualism of those standing on the brink of a vast and wild frontier. As the land was tamed, so was the independent spirit that had come to characterize the American character; it was not lost, it simply turned inward. Independent thinking replaced land-grabbing and the Transcendental movement was born. This independent spirit was shared by slaves and expressed in slave narratives that exposed the violence and fear experienced by millions held in bondage so that the horror of the institution might be seen for what it truly was. The Civil War shattered the American dream for many, though those left standing were inspired to speak out against rampant inequalities between the races and the sexes. Finally, individualism and the American dream reached a crossroads; once society excoriated the individual for not conforming to a standard of behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was society that was faulted for failing to live up to the standards of its citizens.

SOURCES

Adams, Henry, "Chapter 20: Failure (1871)," The Education of Henry Adams, Houghton Mifflin, 1918; reprint, Bartleby.com, 1999, www.bartleby.com/159/20.html (December 10, 2006).

Anderson, Jill E., "Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851)," in American Eras, Volume 5: The Reform Era and Eastern U.S. Development, 1815–1850, edited by Gerald J. Prokopwicz, Vol. 5. Gale Research, 1998.

Carter, Linda M., "The Slave Narratives," in African American Almanac, edited by Jeffrey Lehman, 9th ed., Thomson Gale, 2003, Thomson Gale Trial Site (December 9, 2006).

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Nature," in Essays and English Traits, P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–1914; reprint, Bartleby.com, 2001, www.bartleby.com/5/114.html (December 26, 2006).

Hutton, Paul Andrew, "Introduction," in A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, University of Nebraska Press, 1987, p. i.

Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, xroads.virginia.edu/∼Hyper/JACOBS/hj-preface.htm (December 26, 2006), originally published in 1861.

Janeway, Elizabeth, "Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy and Louisa," in the New York Times Book Review, September 29, 1968, pp. 42, 44, 46.

Lewis, Meriwether, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Bernard DeVoto, Mariner Books, 1997, p. 203.

Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, xroads.virginia.edu/∼HYPER/WALDEN/walden.html (December 26, 2006), originally published in 1854.

Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, American Publishing, 1876; reprint, Penguin Classics, 1986, p. 151.