(UNIT- I) American Literature ( IV SEM )

Puritanism :- 

Puritanism is a religious movement. The movement played a significant role in the histories of the United States, England and Germany.

The word "Puritan" is formed from the Latin word "Puritas" which means "purity". The King of England, Henry VIII, established his own church. This irked 

the Puritans because they felt that the Roman Catholic Church was in danger. They raised their voices against the King. The result was that the King gave an order to 

execute all the Puritans. The Puritans ran away, and came to settle down in New England, in the north part of America. 

 The Puritans believed in the Bible as the source of all authority, accepted "inner light" as a source of understanding and maintained a rigid faith in hard work and duty. They were mostly influenced by the French religious reformer, Jean Calvin (1509-1574) whose belief in "Predestination" and "Grace" they fully accepted. According to the theory of "Grace", God's ways are unknown to men. Men only have to work hard and pray hopefully, but which souls are to be saved and whose to be condemned is not decided by one's devotion to God and the holiness of one's 

life, but by God Himself, although purity of thought and action is important. Hence, all life was a stage for the constant struggle between the forces of good (God) and evil (Satan). 

There were four basic tenets of Puritanism. They are : 

1. Total Depravity is the first tenet. Adam and Eve, the creations of God, were in the Garden of Eden; they were tempted by the devil. Because of disobedience 

to God, they were thrown out of Eden. Belief in the fact of the fall was the basis of all Puritan thought. Puritans believed that with this fall came Total Depravity; 

that is, all nature and all humans were corrupted and incapable of perfection; 'In Adam's Fall/ We sinned all', as the New England primer pithily expressed it. 

2. Limited Atonement is the second tenet. Contrary to the belief that Christ's crucifixion had made redemption available to all, the Puritans believed in 

Limited Atonement; that is, only a minority, called the elect, were to be saved. The majority were damned or reprobate. 

3. Irresistible Grace is the third tenet. The doctrine stated that the condition of being elect or reprobate was unalterable. 

4. The fourth tenet is predestination. As in the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, God had determined the course of human history since the 

beginning of time, and this included deciding who would be damned and who saved. Good works could not bring about salvation, although it was believed 

that individuals could show a readiness for grace by moral conduct.  Because of rigid principles of Puritanism, the influence in the colonies waned 

with increased immigration of non-Puritans. The critics of Puritanism have seen it as a blight on American history and culture. Ezra Pound called Puritanism 'blood poison' in a 1920 letter to William Carlos Williams. It has been held responsible for 

the American repression of sexuality, a fear of the body, a dualistic world view, the 

denigration of women and the cultivation of censoriousness.  In addition to the rich legacy of Puritan Literature, Puritanism profoundly 

affected many later American writers, including Hawthorne, Melville, T. S. Eliot and 

Emily Dickinson.

Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is a literary and philosophical movement in New England in 

the early and middle part of the 19th century. It gave 

expression to several strains of

thought : 

1) the weakening of Calvinistic views about the corruption of human nature;

2) the rise of Romantic attitudes toward the pervasiveness of the divine and the inherent power of the individual imagination; 

3) and the frustration with what was seen as the polite and unemotional rationalism of Unitarian thought. 

 Once considered to have derived from European movements, it is now generally seen as a development of native tendencies. Centered on Boston and Concord, some of its most notable voices were those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thorean, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. The 

British writers such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle profoundly influenced these writers. Transcendentalism was opposed to the idea that man needed an intercessor 

through which to reach the divine, and was critical of formalized religion. Like the physical universe itself, all constructive practical activity, all great literature, all forms of spiritual awareness were viewed as an expression of the divine spirit. The oft- expressed ambition was to achieve vivid perception of the divine as it operates in common life, an awareness seen as leading at once to personal cultivation and to a 

sense of history as an at least potentially progressive movement.

What is transcendentalism? 

Transcendentalism was a philosophical dissent from Unitarianism, which represented the compromise of rational Deism with Calvinism, relating to the rationalist's acceptance of liberal scientific thought and rejecting extreme concepts concerning the original depravity and the inherited guilt of man. The rising young transcendentalists asserted that the Unitarian creed had become conventional and complacement in its orthodox fidelity to Christian dogmas of supernaturalism. They rejected Locke's materialistic psychology in favour of the idealism of the German thinker Immanuel Kant who declared that the "transcendental" knowledge in the mind of man was innate. Following the philosophy of Kant, they asserted the doctrine of correspondence between the 

microcosom of the individual mind and the macrocosom over-soul of the universe, and they derived an enlarged conception of the sanctity of the individual and his freedom to follow his intuitional knowledge. 

The American Transcendentalists were influenced by British writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle; Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Richter, 

Harder influenced the transcendentalists with their philosophy; Greek philosophers like Plato, the Sufis, and the writers of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Buddhists and the eclectic idealists profoundly influenced the transcendentalists. 

 These transcendentalists used to meet at Emerson's Concord house, and through their magazine The Dial, they published their philosophy. "Book Farm" 

(1841) and "Fruit Lands" (1842) were agrarian experiments in communal living, supported briefly by the transcendentalists concerned with the social order. 

'Nature' was the first comprehensive expression of American Transcendentalism. Emerson provided a fresh and lyrical intimation of many of the 

leading ideas that developed in various essays and poems. 

Thoreau's transcendentalism was empirical, not theological. He did what he felt to be right and publicly opposed what he felt to be wrong. If Emerson believed in Man, Thoreau believed in men. Both were the party of Hope against the party of Memory, and were symbolic of a New England turn from Calvinism through Unitarianism to a belief in man. Both wrote and lived as if the 'American Adam' were more possibility than myth. Walden is his famous book.

Whitman came to transcendentalism by way of his mother's Quakerism, and Carlyle's and Hegel's writings, but Emerson was the immediate influence. The Leaves of Grass was his mommental work. Through his book, he taught the philosophy of democracy. He believed in the transforming power of love in humanity and in life. Whitman was theoretically the answer of Emerson's prayer, as he was also the voice of the land of Promise, the first wholly unique one to emerge from American continent. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne satirized Book Farm in his novel The Blithedale Romance. The Scarlet Letter was his another novel in which he has bitterly satirized 

Puritanism. Herman Melville satirized Puritanism in his novel Moby Dick. 

These transcendentalists – Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman – seem to differ from one another more than they agree. First, they are divergent in temperament; second, they are different in their choice of subject matter and literary form; thirdly, they differ in their interest and capacity for sustained philosophical thought. Despite their differences, they have certain common things. These writers have a profound sense of human predicament. They are worried about the problem of man. They all believe that individual virtue and happiness depends upon self realization and the self realization depends upon the harmonious reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies. The five writers have a common assumption. They think that intuition and imagination offer a surer road to truth than 

abstract logic or scientific method. Finally, these five writers were able to deduce a consequence of immense practical importance not only for their own work but for the subsequent course of American literature as a whole. 

To conclude, American literature of 19th century was developed, and enriched by these writers. They are unforgettable for their philosophy. They prepared the 

way for the coming writers.

American Revolution

American Revolution, also called United States War of Independence or American Revolutionary War, (1775–83), insurrection by which 13 of Great Britain’s North American colonies won political independence and went on to form the United States of America. The war followed more than a decade of growing estrangement between the British crown and a large and influential segment of its North American colonies that was caused by British attempts to assert greater control over colonial affairs after having long adhered to a policy of salutary neglect. Until early in 1778 the conflict was a civil war within the British Empire, but afterward it became an international war as France (in 1778) and Spain (in 1779) joined the colonies against Britain. Meanwhile, the Netherlands, which provided both official recognition of the United States and financial support for it, was engaged in its own war against Britain. From the beginning, sea power was vital in determining the course of the war, lending to British strategy a flexibility that helped compensate for the comparatively small numbers of troops sent to America and ultimately enabling the French to help bring about the final British surrender at Yorktown

Slavery

Slavery Comes To The New World
The Missouri Compromise And Dred Scott
The Abolitionism Movement Spreads
Frederick Douglass: A Black Abolitionist
The Seneca Falls Convention
Harriet Tubman and The Underground Railroad
Learn more about the Underground Railroad
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Abolitionist and Author
Abolitionists Invoke A Higher Law
Abolitionism, Politics and the Election Of Abraham Lincoln
John Brown: Abolitionism’s Fiery Crusader
Dred Scott V. Sanford
John Brown’s Raid On Harpers Ferry
Learn more about John Brown’s Raidon Harpers
Abraham Lincoln: Abolitionist President
Learn more about the The 13th Amendment: Emnacipation Paroclamation The Abolitionism Movement Triumphs

African slavery began in North America in 1619 at Jamestown, Virginia. The first American-built slave ship, Desire, launched from Massachusetts in 1636, beginning the slave trade between Britain’s American colonies and Africa. From the beginning, some white colonists were uncomfortable with the notion of slavery. At the time of the American Revolution against the English Crown, Delaware (1776) and Virginia (1778) prohibited importation of African slaves; Vermont became the first of the 13 colonies to abolish slavery (1777); Rhode Island prohibited taking slaves from the colony (1778); and Pennsylvania began gradual emancipation in 1780.

The Maryland Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes and Others Unlawfully Held in Bondage was founded in 1789, the same year the former colonies replaced their Articles of Confederation with the new Constitution, “in order to form a more perfect union.”

When the U.S. Constitution was written, it made no specific mention of slavery, but it provided for the return of fugitives (which encompassed criminals, indentured servants and slaves). It allowed each slave within a state to be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining population and representation in the House of Representatives (Article I, Section 3, says representation and direct taxation will be determined based on the number of “free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons.”)

The Constitution prohibited importation of slaves, to begin in 1808, but again managed to do so without using the words “slave” or “slavery.” Slave trading became a capital offense in 1819. There existed a general feeling that slavery would gradually pass away. Improvements in technology—the cotton gin and sewing machine—increased the demand for slave labor, however, in order to produce more cotton in Southern states. By the 1830s, many Southerners had shifted from, “Slavery is a necessary evil,” to “Slavery is a positive good.” The institution existed because it was “God’s will,” a Christian duty to lift the African out of barbarism while still exerting control over his “animal passions.”

Learn More About Slavery In America

Missouri’s appeal for statehood brought a confrontation between free and slave states in Congress in 1820; each feared the other would gain the upper hand. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 set a policy of admitting states in pairs, one slave, one free. (Maine came in at the same time as Missouri.) The compromise prohibited slavery above parallel 36 degrees, 30 minutes in the lands of the Louisiana Purchase, and it included a national Fugitive Slave Law requiring all Americans to return runaway slaves to their owners. The Fugitive Slave Law was upheld in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 1842, but the Missouri Compromise’s prohibitions on the spread of slavery would be found unconstitutional in the 1857 Dred Scott decision.

Learn more about Dred Scott

Although many New Englanders had grown wealthy in the slave trade before the importation of slaves was outlawed, that area of the country became the hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. Abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets sprang into existence. These were numerous enough by 1820 that South Carolina instituted penalties for anyone bringing written anti-slavery material into the state.

These publications argued against slavery as a social and moral evil and often used examples of African American writings and other achievements to demonstrate that Africans and their descendents were as capable of learning as were Europeans and their descendents in America, given the freedom to do so. To prove their case that one person owning another one was morally wrong, they first had to convince many, in all sections of the country, that Negroes, the term used for the race at the time, were human. Yet, even many people among the abolitionists did not believe the two races were equal.

In 1829, David Walker, a freeman of color originally from the South, published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in Boston, Massachusetts. It was a new benchmark, pushing abolitionists toward extreme militancy. He called for slaves to rise up against their masters and to defend themselves: “It is no more harm for you to kill a man who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” As early as 1800, a Virginia slave known as Gabriel Prosser had attempted an uprising there, but it failed when two slaves betrayed the plan to their masters.

Walker’s publication was too extreme even for most abolition leaders, including one of the most renowned, William Lloyd Garrison. In 1831, Garrison founded The Liberator, which would become the most famous and influential of abolitionist newspapers. That same year, Virginia debated emancipation, marking the last movement for abolition in the South prior to the Civil War. Instead, that year the Southampton Slave Riot, also called Nat Turner’s Rebellion, resulted in Virginia passing new regulations against slaves. Fears of slave revolts like the bloody Haitian Revolution of 1791–1803 were never far from Southerners’ minds. Publications like An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World led white Southerners to conclude Northern abolitionists intended to commit genocide against them.

In 1833 in Philadelphia, the first American Anti-Slavery Society Convention convened. In a backlash, anti-abolition riots broke out in many northeastern cities, including New York and Philadelphia, during 1834-35. Several Southern states, beginning with the Carolinas, made formal requests to other states to suppress abolition groups and their literature. In Illinois, the legislature voted to condemn abolition societies and their agitation; Delegate Abraham Lincoln voted with the majority, then immediately co-sponsored a bill to mitigate some of the language of the earlier one. The U.S. House of Representatives adopted a gag rule, automatically tabling abolitionist proposals.

The first national Anti-Slavery Convention was held in New York City in 1837, and the following year the second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women met in Philadelphia; the latter resulted in pro-slavery riots. The Liberty Party, a political action group, held its first national convention, at Albany, N.Y., in 1839. That same year, Africans mutinied aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad and asked New York courts to grant them freedom. Their plea was answered affirmatively by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1841.

Frederick Douglass—a former slave who had been known as Frederick Bailey while in slavery and who was the most famous black man among the abolitionists—broke with William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, after returning from a visit to Great Britain, and founded a black abolitionist paper, The North Star. The title was a reference to the directions given to runaway slaves trying to reach the Northern states and Canada: Follow the North Star. Garrison had earlier convinced the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to hire Douglass as an agent, touring with Garrison and telling audiences about his experiences in slavery. In England, however, Douglass had experienced a level of independence he’d never known in America and likely wanted greater independece for his actions here.

Working with Douglass on The North Star was another black man, Martin R. Delaney, who gave up publishing his own paper, The Mystery, to join with Douglass. Born to a free mother in Virginia (in what is now the eastern panhandle of West Virginia), Delaney had never been a slave, but he had traveled extensively in the South. After Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a bestseller, he attempted to achieve similar success for himself by penning a semi-fictional account of his travels, Blake: The Huts of America. In 1850, he was one of three black men accepted into Harvard Medical School, but white students successfully petitioned to have them removed. No longer believing that merit and reason could allow members of his race to have an equal opportunity in white society, he became an ardent black nationalist. In 1859, he traveled to Africa and negotiated with eight tribal chiefs in Abbeokuta for land, on which he planned to establish a colony for skilled and educated African Americans. The agreement fell apart, and he returned to America where, near the end of the Civil War, he became the first black officer on a general’s staff in the history of the U.S. Army.

In 1848, the first Women’s Rights convention was held, in Seneca Falls, N.Y. Outside of the Society of Friends (“Quakers”), women were often denied the opportunity to speak at abolitionist meetings. The women’s rights movement produced many outspoken opponents of slavery, including Elizabeth Cody Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. In fact, women’s equality and abolition became inextricably linked in the minds of many Southerners. In the 20th century, that lingering animosity nearly defeated the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.

Although Delaney’s planned African colony failed, in 1849 Great Britain recognized the African colony of Liberia as a sovereign state. It had been founded in 1822 as a colony for free-born blacks, freed slaves and mulattoes (mixed race) from the United States. A number of Americans who opposed slavery (including Abraham Lincoln for a time and the aforementioned Delany) felt that the two races could never live successfully together, and the best hope for Negroes was to return them to freedom in Africa. However, the slave trade between Africa and the Western Hemisphere (the Caribbean and South America) had never ended, and many American ship owners and captains were enjoying something of a golden era of slave-trading while the U.S. and Europe looked the other way. Even if freed slaves had been sent to Africa, many would have wound up back in slavery south of the United States. Only in the late 1850s did Britain step up its anti-slavery enforcement on the high seas, leading America to increase its efforts somewhat.

When the federal government passed a second, even more stringent fugitive slave act in 1850, several states responded by passing personal liberty laws. The following year, Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree) gave a now-famous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman,” at the Women’s Rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Born a slave in New York, she walked away from her owner after she felt she had contributed enough to him. In the late 1840s, she dictated a memoir, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, published by Garrison in 1850. She began to tour, speaking against slavery and in favor of women’s rights.

Learn more about the Seneca Falls Convention

While Sojourner Truth, Douglass, Delaney and others wrote and spoke to end slavery, a former slave named Harriet Tubman, nee Harriet Ross, was actively leading slaves to freedom. After escaping from bondage herself, she made repeated trips into Dixie to help others. Believed to have helped some 300 slaves to escape, she was noted for warning those she was assisting that she would shoot any of them who turned back, because they would endanger herself and others she was assisting.

Tubman was an agent of the Underground Railroad, a system of “safe houses” and way stations that secretly helped runaways. The trip might begin by hiding in the home, barn or other location owned by a Southerner opposed to slavery, and continuing from place to place until reaching safe haven in a free state or Canada. Those who reached Canada did not have to fear being returned under the Fugitive Slave Act. Several communities and individuals claim to have created the term “Underground Railroad.” In the southern section of states on the north bank of the Ohio River, a “reverse underground railroad” operated; blacks in those states were kidnapped, whether they had ever been slaves or not, and taken South to sell through a series of clandestine locations.

Learn more about Harriet Tubman

In 1852, what may have been the seminal event of the abolition movement occurred. Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist who had come to know a number of escaped slaves while she was living in Cincinnati, authored the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It presented a scathing view of Southern slavery, filled with melodramatic scenes such as that of the slave Eliza escaping with her baby across the icy Ohio River:

The huge green fragment of ice on which she alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it but she stayed there not a moment. With wild cries and desperate energy she leaped to another and still another cake;—stumbling,—leaping,—slipping—springing upwards again! Her shoes are—gone her stockings cut from her feet—while blood marked every step; but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side and a man helping her up the bank.

Critics pointed out that Stowe had never been to the South, but her novel became a bestseller in the North (banned in the South) and the most effective bit of propaganda to come out of the abolitionist movement. It galvanized many who had been sitting on the sidelines. Reportedly, when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War he said to her, “So you’re the little woman who started this big war.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Abolitionists became increasingly strident in their condemnations of slave owners and “the peculiar institution of slavery.” Often, at Fourth of July gatherings of abolition societies, they reportedly used the occasion to denounce the U.S. Constitution as a “covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” Many of them came to believe in “higher law,” that a moral commitment to ending slavery took precedent over observing those parts of the Constitution that protected slavery and, in particular, they refused to obey the Fugitive Slave Act. Slave owners or their representatives traveling north to reclaim captured runaways were sometimes set upon on abolitionists mobs; even local lawmen were sometimes attacked. In the South, this fueled the belief that the North expected the South to obey all federal laws but the North could pick and choose, further driving the two regions apart.

The abolition movement became an important element of political parties. Although the Native American Party (derisively called the Know-Nothing Party because when member were asked about the secretive group they claimed to “know nothing”) opposed immigrants, they also opposed slavery. So did many Whigs and the Free Soil Party. In 1856, these coalesced into the Republican Party. Four years later, its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, captured the presidency of the United States.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed the citizens of those territories to determine for themselves whether the state would be slave or free. Proponents of both factions poured into the Kansas Territory, with each side trying to gain supremacy, often through violence. After pro-slavery groups attacked the town of Lawrence in 1856, a radical abolitionist named John Brown led his followers in retaliation, killing five pro-slavery settlers. The territory became known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

Learn more about John Brown

The 1857 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sanford denied citizenship to anyone of African blood and held the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to be unconstitutional. While Southern states had been passing laws prohibiting “Negro citizenship” and further restricting the rights even of freemen of color (Virginia in 1857 prohibited slaves from smoking and from standing on sidewalks, among other restrictions), one Northern state after another had been passing laws granting citizenship to their black residents. The Court’s findings upended that, and the ruling outraged many Northerners. Abraham Lincoln revived his personal political career, coming out of a self-imposed semi-retirement to speak out against the Dred Scott decision.

The year 1859 saw two events that were milestones in the history of slavery and abolition in America. The ship Clotilde landed in Mobile, Alabama. Though the importation of slaves had been illegal in America since 1808, Clotilde carried 110 to 160 African slaves. The last slave ship ever to land in the United States, it clearly demonstrated how lax the enforcement of the anti-importation laws was.

Learn more about the Dred Scott Decision

Nearly 1,000 miles northeast of Mobile, on the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown—the radical abolitionist who had killed proslavery settlers in Kansas—led 21 men in a raid to capture the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Though Brown denied it, his plan was to use the arsenal’s weapons to arm a slave uprising. He and his followers, 16 white men and five black ones, holed up in the arsenal after they were discovered, and were captured there by a group of U.S. Marines commanded by an Army lieutenant colonel, Robert E. Lee. Convicted of treason against Virginia, Brown was hanged December 2.

Initial reaction in the South was that this was the work of a small group of fanatics, but when Northern newspapers, authors and legislators began praising him as a martyr—a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier eulogizing Brown was published in the New York Herald Tribune less than a month after the execution—their actions were taken as further proof that Northern abolitionists wished to carry out genocide of white Southerners. The flames were fanned higher as information came out that Brown had talked other abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, about his plans and received financial assistance from some of them.

Following Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860, Southern states began seceding from the Union. Though personally opposed to slavery and convinced the United States was going to have to be all free or all slave states—”a house divided against itself cannot stand”—he repeatedly said he would not interfere with slavery where it existed. But he adamantly opposed its expansion into territories where it did not exist, and slave owners were determined that they had to be free to take their human property with them if they chose to move into those territories.

Less than two years into the civil war that began over Southern secession, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It freed all slaves residing in areas of the nation currently in rebellion. Often ridiculed, both then and now, because it only freed slaves in areas that did not recognize Lincoln’s authority, it meant that Union Army officers no longer had to return runaway slaves to their owners because, as the armies advanced, slaves in the newly captured areas were considered free. It also effectively prohibited European nations that had long since renounced slavery from entering the war on the side of the South.

Learn more about Abraham Lincoln

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, declared ratified on December 18, 1865, ended slavery in the United States—at least in name. During the Reconstruction Era, Southern states found ways to “hire” black workers under terms that were slavery in all but name, even pursuing any who ran off, just as they had in the days of the Underground Railroad.

Abolition had been achieved, but the lessons learned by those in the abolition movement would be applied to other social concerns in the decades to come, notably the temperance and woman’s suffrage movements.