Painting was likewise popularized. Many of the trained artists who emigrated from England, such as George Beck, William Winstanley, and William Groombridge, some of whom had seceded from Peale’s Columbianum, were unable to make a living painting in America. Beck and Groombridge had to turn to schoolteaching, while Winstanley ended up copying Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of Washington before returning to England. But Francis Guy, another expatriate from England, prospered brilliantly where others had failed. Guy was trained as a tailor and dyer in England and in the 1790s fled to America to escape his debts. Unable to make it as a dyer, he, in the words of Rembrandt Peale, “boldly undertook to be an artist, although he did not know how to draw.” Nevertheless, without repudiating his occupational title as a dyer, he learned how to reproduce landscapes in a new and strange manner—by stretching over the window of a tent some thin black gauze upon which he traced an actual scene before transferring it to canvas. According to Peale, who concluded that Guy’s “rough transcripts from Nature . . . were really good,” this amateur artist “manufactured” these topographical pictures by the dozens and sold them for twenty-five dollars apiece.
That this self-taught artist was succeeding in Baltimore, while trained artists failed, enraged a female editor, Eliza Anderson, daughter of a distinguished Irish physician and fiancée of the French architect Maximilian Godefroy, who was exiled to the United States by Napoleon in 1805. Anderson could not get over the American tendency to believe that mere artisans—tailors and carpenters—could pretend to a taste in painting. Americans, she wrote in the Baltimore Federal Gazette in 1807, seemed unable to distinguish between the useful arts of artisans and the fine arts of real artists. “Apollo is somewhat aristocratic,” she claimed, “and does not permit of perfect equality in his court. . . . The Muses are rather saucy, and do not admit of workmen to their levees.” She advised Guy to return to his “soul-inspiring avocation of making pantaloons.” As for Baltimore, Anderson concluded, it was “the Siberia of the arts.”
Guy went on to become, along with the German immigrant John Lewis Krimmel, the English immigrant William Russell Birch, and the visiting Russian diplomat Pavel Svinin, one of the first genre painters in American history. These painters depicted people, buildings, and landscapes topographically, more or less as they were, not as the artistic conventions of the day dictated. Sophisticated critics like Eliza Anderson may not have liked their work, but many Americans did.76
Serious artists thought that genre scenes were too mean and lowly for their talent, and painters such as John Vanderlyn and Samuel Morse scorned the depicting of ordinary folk—except, said Vanderlyn, Italian peasants. With their lack of “fashion and frivolity,” Italian peasants, Vanderlyn declared, were close enough to nature to possess a neoclassical universality that was worth depicting. But most major artists would have nothing to do with such common and humble subjects. William Dunlap mocked the former sign painter Jeremiah Paul for his crude efforts at genre painting. Paul, he said, was “one of those unfortunate individuals who, showing what is called genius in early life, by scratching the lame figures of all God’s creatures, or every thing that will receive chalk or ink, are induced to devote themselves to the fine arts, without the means of improvement or the education necessary, to fit them for a liberal profession. . . . He was a man of vulgar appearances and awkward manners.”77
Too many men, middling men, men of vulgar appearances and awkward manners, it seemed, were participating in all the arts, and serious artists and many of the elite despaired over what they saw as the increasing vulgarization of taste. As the social distinction between gentlemen and ordinary people blurred, cultivation itself seemed to have descended, as Dunlap grumbled, to “a certain point of mediocrity.” The arts had become popularized, creating, complained disgruntled Federalists, a new kind of commodity culture, “widely and thinly spread,” whose contributors had become cultural “methodists,” “feebly grasping at everything . . . flying from novelty to novelty and regaling upon the flowering of literature.”78 Members of the literati who clung to traditional humanist standards of the republic of letters found themselves beset by an avaricious popular culture they could scarcely control, yet to which they bore a peculiar republican responsibility. “We know, that in this land, where the spirit of democracy is everywhere,” wrote young biblical scholar Andrews Norton in 1807, “we are exposed, as it were, to a poisonous atmosphere, which blasts every thing beautiful in nature and corrodes every thing elegant in art.” Nevertheless, these learned gentry like Norton believed that they had a special civic obligation to purify this poisonous atmosphere, “to correct blunders, to check the contagion of false taste, to rescue the publick from the impositions of dullness, and to assert the majesty of learning and of truth.”79
In the minds of many, the future of the new Republic had come to rest on the cultivation of its public. Because the cultural atmosphere was drenched with civic and moral concerns, artists and critics alike found it impossible to justify any sort of independent and imaginative existence in defiance of the public. Two nude paintings—Danae by the Danish immigrant Adolph Wertmüller and Jupiter and Io (renamed Dream of Love) by Rembrandt Peale—were exhibited in Philadelphia in 1814 to multitudes of paying viewers, but also to some intense criticism. Americans were naturally suspicious of the fine arts, wrote one critic in the Port Folio, but they have tolerated the arts “by representing them as able auxiliaries in the cause of patriotism and morals.” But the exhibition of the two nude paintings did nothing for patriotism or morality. Instead, their exhibition offered, daily, scenes of “seducing voluptuousness to the young and thoughtless part of the city” of Philadelphia, which was such “a quiet, decent, moral city.” True, admitted the critic, artists must be allowed “great latitude” for their imagination, and the critic “should be among the last to abridge the limits of their fancy.” But these two nudes went too far; they violated “every consideration of morals and decorum, and even ordinary decency.” He knew of “no apology for such licentiousness.”80
This sort of moralistic criticism led to the immediate withdrawal of the paintings and to a contrite public apology from the Society of Artists, which condemned the exhibition as “indecorous and altogether inconsistent with the purity of republican morals.” The dociety, which represented dozens of various Philadelphia artists, went on to express its “deep regret” over the way these exhibitions were “evidently tending not only to corrupt public morals, but also to bring into disrepute those exhibitions which experience has proved to be important in cultivating a chaste taste for the fine arts in our country.”81
Even the first copyright law in the country, adopted by Connecticut following the Revolution, put the needs of the society over the artist’s right to earn what the market would bear. An artist’s originality and individual inspiration could not count against such civic demands. When Wordsworth was criticized for writing too solitary and too unsocial a kind of poetry, what freedom from social obligations could an American poet expect?82 Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads was published only once in America before 1824. By contrast, Robert Bloomfield’s Farmer Boy and its cult of sympathy had five American editions between 1801 and 1814. Indeed, all the great English Romantic poets—Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley—were condemned or ignored in early nineteenth-century America, and Pope remained the most popular English poet until at least the 1820s.
The experience of painter Washington Allston reveals the tragedy of a romantic sensibility in a didactic neoclassical world. Born in 1779 in South Carolina, Allston was educated at Harvard where he became determined “to be the first painter, at least, from America.” In 1801 he sold his inherited Carolina property and took off for England, where he befriended Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He returned to America in 1808 in order to fulfill his destiny but ended up painting portraits, which were all that Americans seemed to want. Frustrated, he returned once more to England in 1811, where his romantic artistic impulses found some success. Three years after
the death of his wife in 1815, he returned once more to America. He brought with him Belshazzar’s Feast, an unfinished canvas, which was supposed to become his masterpiece, but which over the next twenty-five years he never completed. When he declared in his Lectures on Art, published after his death, that “all effort at originality must end either in the quaint or the monstrous,” he may have been reflecting on his own inability to express himself fully in a society that did not value originality.83
Some artists, like Allston’s closest friend, Edmund Trowbridge Dana, rebelled against this suffocating neoclassicism. In 1805 Dana protested the great deference paid to the ancients. “One is hagridden . . . with nothing but the classicks, the classicks, the classicks!” he complained. He yearned for a literature of feeling. “In our day of refinement,” he said, “very little is directed to the fancy or heart; for, from some cogency or other, it is unfashionable to be moved. . . . Establishment has crowded out sentiment,” and readers were stuck with Alexander Pope and sitting “primly with Addison and propriety” instead of devouring Shakespeare. Dana wanted writers to appreciate that “the untutored gestures of children are more exquisite than the accomplished ceremony of courts.”84
But Dana’s was an isolated voice. Everywhere most American critics and artists urged the suppression of individual feeling and, instead, earnestly insisted on the moral and social responsibilities of the artist, an insistence that flowed not simply from the Americans’ legacy of Puritanism or from their reading the Scottish moralists but from their Revolutionary aspirations for the arts. So deeply involved was the neoclassical commitment to society that most American writers and artists became incapable of revealing personal truths at the expense of their public selves, unwilling to regard beauty, as George Bancroft declared as late as 1827, as “something independent of moral effect.” Indeed, the young Bancroft, who studied in Germany, found Goethe “too dirty, too bestial in his conceptions, and thus unfit for American consumption.”85 These were the sorts of sentiments that gave birth to the genteel society of the nineteenth century.
16
Republican Religion
Cultivated gentlemen like Thomas Jefferson may have relied on the arts and sciences to help them interpret and reform the world, but that was not the case with most average Americans. Nearly all common and middling people in the early Republic still made sense of the world through religion. Devastating fires, destructive earthquakes, and bad harvests were acts of God and often considered punishments for a sinful people. As they had in the mid-eighteenth century, people still fell on their knees when struck by the grace of God. People prayed openly and often. They took religion seriously, talked about it, and habitually resorted to it in order to examine the state of their souls. Despite growing doubts of revelation and the spread of rationalism in the early Republic, most Americans remained deeply religious.
As American society became more democratic in the early nineteenth century, middling people rose to dominance and brought their religiosity with them. The Second Great Awakening, as the movement was later called, was a massive outpouring of evangelical religious enthusiasm, perhaps a more massive expression of Protestant Christianity than at any time since the seventeenth century or even the Reformation. By the early decades of the nineteenth century American society appeared to be much more religious than it had been in the final decades of the eighteenth century.
The American Revolution broke many of the intimate ties that had traditionally linked religion and government, especially with the Anglican Church, and turned religion into a voluntary affair, a matter of individual free choice. But contrary to the experience of eighteenth-century Europeans, whose rationalism tended to erode their allegiance to religion, religion in America did not decline with the spread of enlightenment and liberty. Indeed, as Tocqueville was soon to observe, religion in America gained in authority precisely because of its separation from governmental power.
AT THE TIME OF THE REVOLUTION few could have predicted such an outcome. Occurring as it did in an enlightened and liberal age, the Revolution seemed to have little place for religion. Although some of the Founders, such as Samuel Adams, John Jay, Patrick Henry, Elias Boudinot, and Roger Sherman, were fairly devout Christians, most leading Founders were not deeply or passionately religious, and few of them led much of a spiritual life. As enlightened gentlemen addressing each other in learned societies, many of the leading gentry abhorred “that gloomy superstition disseminated by ignorant illiberal preachers” and looked forward to the day when “the phantom of darkness will be dispelled by the rays of science, and the bright charms of rising civilization.”1 Most of them, at best, only passively believed in organized Christianity and, at worst, privately scorned and mocked it. Although few of them were outright deists, that is, believers in a clockmaker God who had nothing to do with revelation and simply allowed the world to run in accord with natural forces, most, like South Carolina historian David Ramsay, did tend to describe the Christian church as “the best temple of reason.” Like the principal sources of their Whig liberalism—whether the philosopher John Locke or the Commonwealth publicists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon writing as “Cato”—the Founders viewed religious enthusiasm as a kind of madness, the conceit “of a warmed or overweening brain.” In all of his writings Washington rarely mentioned Christ, and, in fact, he scrupulously avoided testifying to a belief in the Christian gospel. Many of the Revolutionary leaders were proto-Unitarians, denying miracles and the divinity of Jesus. Even puritanical John Adams thought that the argument for Christ’s divinity was an “awful blasphemy” in this new enlightened age.2
Jefferson’s hatred for the clergy and organized religion knew no bounds. He believed that members of the “priestcraft” were always in alliance with despots against liberty. “To this effect,” he said—privately, of course, not publicly—“they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man, into mystery and jargon unintelligible to all mankind and therefore the safer engine for their purposes.” The Trinity was nothing but “Abracadabra” and “hocus-pocus. . .so incomprehensible to the human mind that no candid man can say he has any idea of it.” Ridicule, he said, was the only weapon to be used against it.3
Most of the principal Founders seemed to be mainly interested in curbing religious passion and promoting liberty. They attached to their Revolutionary state constitutions of 1776 ringing declarations of religious freedom, like that of Virginia’s, stating that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.” And they used this enlightened faith in liberty of conscience to justify disestablishing the Anglican Church everywhere.
The most lengthy and bitter fight for disestablishment took place in Virginia. Although the 1776 Virginia constitution guaranteed the “free exercise of religion” and the state legislature suspended the collection of religious taxes, the Anglican Church was not actually disestablished in 1776. Many Virginia leaders like Patrick Henry were willing to settle for some sort of multiple establishment, but others led by Jefferson and Madison wanted an end to all forms of state support for religion. They wanted to move beyond John Locke’s plea for religious toleration; they wanted religious liberty, a different thing altogether. Consequently, the state legislature remained deadlocked for nearly a decade. The impasse was eventually broken in 1786 with the passage of Jefferson’s famous Statute for Religious Freedom that abolished the Anglican establishment in Virginia.
With many of the Founders holding liberal and enlightened convictions, politics in the Revolutionary era tended to overwhelm religious matters. During the Revolution political writings, not religious tracts, came to dominate the press, and the clergy lost some of their elevated status to lawyers. The Revolution destroyed churches, interrupted ministerial training, and politicized people’s political thinking. The older established churches were unequipped to handle a rapidly growing and mobile population. The proportion of college graduates entering the ministry fell off, and the num
ber of church members declined drastically. It has been estimated that scarcely one in twenty Americans was a formal member of a church.4 All this has led more than one historian to conclude that “at its heart, the Revolution was a profoundly secular event.”5
Many of the religious leaders themselves wholeheartedly endorsed this presumably secular revolution and its liberal impulses. Most Protestant groups could think of no greater threat to religion than the Church of England, and consequently enlightened rationalists had little trouble in mobilizing Protestant dissenters against the established Anglican Church. Few clergymen sensed any danger to religion in the many declarations of religious freedom and in the disestablishment of the Church of England, which took place in most states south of New England. Even in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where religious establishments existed but were Puritan, not Anglican, Congregational and Presbyterian clergy invoked enlightened religious liberty against the dark twin forces of British civic and ecclesiastical tyranny without fear of subverting their own peculiar alliances between church and state. From all this enlightened and liberal thinking, the framers of the Constitution in 1787 naturally forbade religious tests for any office or public trust under the United States.
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 Page 72
