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The Utopian Corporation

Kenneth Lipartito

in Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture

This chapter argues for historians to explore the ‘elective affinity’ between communal and utopian societies of 19th-century America and the managerial corporation. It explores the ways that American ... More

This chapter argues for historians to explore the ‘elective affinity’ between communal and utopian societies of 19th-century America and the managerial corporation. It explores the ways that American society sought to reconcile freedom with the growth of market culture through new disciplinary institutions designed to foster self control and to deal with the travails of laissez faire competition. These methods, practiced in famous utopian communities such as Oneida, used systems of management and control, and embraced early corporate forms of organization at a time when such methods and forms were uncommon in private business. Many utopian experiments in fact evolved into profit-making enterprises after the Civil War, while many of the architects of business corporations were often connected — by ties of blood or by their ideas — to the antebellum reform tradition. The chapter argues for historians to explore these cultural connections and to recognize the deeper cultural sources of the modern corporate organization.Less

“That is the last speech he will ever make”: The Antebellum Racial Alliances

Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith

in Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama's America

This chapter discusses the formation of political alliances centered on differences over racial politics in antebellum America. Even before there was a Constitution, there were pro-slavery and ... More

This chapter discusses the formation of political alliances centered on differences over racial politics in antebellum America. Even before there was a Constitution, there were pro-slavery and anti-slavery alliances in the not-so-United States. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence, which embedded the rhetoric of human equality and inalienable rights into American political culture, still sought to justify tribal subjugation (by denouncing “merciless Indian Savages”) and to avoid criticism of chattel slavery (by editing out Jefferson's language attacking the slave trade). Throughout the antebellum era, pro-slavery forces retained great power, particularly in regard to the protection of slavery where it was already established. Moreover, the chapter considers how racial politics continued to shape American life—particularly for the disenfranchised people of color—during the period of transition after the Civil War.Less

Looking Backward and Westward: The “Indian Wilderness” in the Antebellum Era

Mark David Spence

in Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks

This chapter provides a clear understanding of early preservationist thinking and better recognition of the changing condition that reshaped American ideas about wilderness and Indians at ... More

This chapter provides a clear understanding of early preservationist thinking and better recognition of the changing condition that reshaped American ideas about wilderness and Indians at mid-century. George Caitlin devoted his entire life to preserving and recording an “Indian wilderness.” His ideas about national parks somehow foreshadowed twentieth-century concerns and policies regarding wilderness preservation. To understand why Caitlin's proposal for a national park was superseded by the idealization of uninhabited landscapes in the late nineteenth century, it is important to situate it within the artistic, social, and political trends that shaped antebellum America. As Henry Brackenridge predicted, “different modes of life and habits altogether new” would transform American perceptions of the landscapes and peoples of the West. It was these new modes and habits and the policies they gendered that ultimately led to the creation of the first reservations and national parks later in the century.Less

The Wealth of the Plantations

Trevor Burnard

in Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820

The plantation system was at its height after the first quarter of the eighteenth century. It made British America wealthy and valuable within the British Empire. Slavery and colonization were ... More

The plantation system was at its height after the first quarter of the eighteenth century. It made British America wealthy and valuable within the British Empire. Slavery and colonization were closely related but were problematic to imperial theorists like Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith. A detailed examination of the wealth of the plantations, however, shows that the plantation system was expansive, modern, and innovative. Contrary to earlier historiography, British American plantations did not decline over time but flourished in places like the American South and British Guiana into the nineteenth century. What needs to be explained is why a system that promoted social and economic inequality was supported by ordinary white men. The reason was that while rich men benefited most from living in slave societies, ordinary white men also received economic benefits, especially if they themselves became slave owners. The wealth of the plantations made imperial officials want to foster this type of colonization even if white population levels remained low. It encouraged, however, a short term attitude among planters and merchants to gaining money and increased tendencies to work slaves excessively hard. Slaves became disposable people as long as the slave trade allowed for fresh inputs of labor.Less

The Antebellum Popular Discourse on Mechanization

Stephen P. Rice

in Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America

This chapter examines the popular discourse on mechanization in antebellum America. It explains that though the presence of machines in the workplace was by no means the dominant reality, the extent ... More

This chapter examines the popular discourse on mechanization in antebellum America. It explains that though the presence of machines in the workplace was by no means the dominant reality, the extent to which mechanization figured in popular discussion outstripped its actual pace in the workplace. Men and women discussed new machinery in newspapers, periodicals, lectures, and sermons and they frequently wrote and spoke as if the machine was present everywhere. One site of mechanized production that was widely discussed during the antebellum decades was the textile mill.Less

Introduction The Metaphysics of Secularism

in Secularism in Antebellum America

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the history of secularism in antebellum American. This volume tells a story about the feelings, epistemic moves, and habits ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the history of secularism in antebellum American. This volume tells a story about the feelings, epistemic moves, and habits that made the nova effect a living possibility. It argues that the secular imaginary occurred at the levels of emotion and mood and shows that the “true religion” known and practiced by a significant number of antebellum Americans was anything but natural. This volume also describes the way which true religion carried a normative sociality to which individuals aligned themselves.Less

Racial and Class Frontiers: Lynching and Social Identity in Antebellum America

Michael J. Pfeifer

in The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching

This chapter charts the emergence of racially motivated lynching in the antebellum United States. During the antebellum era, practices of collective murder took root on the cotton and resource ... More

This chapter charts the emergence of racially motivated lynching in the antebellum United States. During the antebellum era, practices of collective murder took root on the cotton and resource extraction frontiers as white planters, farmers, and miners stepped outside of formal law to execute slaves, free blacks, Indians, and Mexicans who challenged white authority with acts of resistance or criminality. The chapter documents how southern planters created legal institutions that protected the master class's interest in slave property, but also how antebellum southern whites resorted to the lynching of slaves through burning or hanging at times when the master's property interest was effectively nullified by a slave's murder of a member of the master class, or when portions of the white community rejected the criminal justice system's ability to enforce racial control.Less

Campus Prominence: Collegiate Literary Societies in Nineteenth-Century Lexington

Kolan Thomas Morelock

in Taking the Town: Collegiate and Community Culture in the Bluegrass, 1880-1917

The victory parade that followed the 1896 oratorical contest in the streets of Lexington served as a manifestation of one of the student group's oldest traditions. Even before the war, public ... More

The victory parade that followed the 1896 oratorical contest in the streets of Lexington served as a manifestation of one of the student group's oldest traditions. Even before the war, public parading and its attributed merriment and notoriety serves as a departure point for analyzing the development of these societies, particularly in one of Lexington's most prominent collegiate institutions. Honor and status were appropriated to the participants of this type of cultural performance, and these events were viewed as “cultural performances” in antebellum America. This chapter attempts to explore the various features and the proliferation of collegiate literary societies in Lexington during the nineteenth century.Less

Vigilantes, Criminal Justice, and Antebellum Cultural Conflict

Michael J. Pfeifer

in The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching

This chapter traces, in the social and legal context of the southern, midwestern, and western frontiers, the lethal transition from the nondeadly collective violence (typically floggings) perpetrated ... More

This chapter traces, in the social and legal context of the southern, midwestern, and western frontiers, the lethal transition from the nondeadly collective violence (typically floggings) perpetrated by regulator movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the prolific extralegal hangings of gamblers, alleged slave insurrectionists, horse thieves, and murderers in Mississippi, Iowa, and Wyoming Territory from the mid-1830s through the late 1860s. Furthermore, the chapter looks at the phenomenon of vigilantism and how it operates within the legal context of the period. Vigilantes articulated a preference for criminal justice that privileged local opinion over a neutral commitment to due process law and the rights of the defendant, a stance that rejected an emerging commitment in reformist circles and in the legal culture to the notion of a fair-handed, omnipotent state as arbitrator of community differences and guarantor of individual rights.Less

Revolution and Reform: The Antebellum Jewish Abolitionists

Jayme A. Sokolow

in Jews and the Civil War: A Reader

This chapter examines the Jews' opposition to slavery and their participation in antebellum America's most controversial reform: abolitionism. It first looks at two groups of Jews who migrated to ... More

This chapter examines the Jews' opposition to slavery and their participation in antebellum America's most controversial reform: abolitionism. It first looks at two groups of Jews who migrated to America following the revolutions of 1848. The largest group migrated because they were determined to find the personal opportunity, economic freedom, and civic equality denied them in Europe. The second, smaller group fled to America because they had participated in the 1848 revolutions or were opposed to the restoration of the conservative regimes. The chapter then considers Jewish abolitionists' use of their liberal European beliefs and Reform Judaism to defend antebellum Blacks, along with their antislavery activities throughout the free states, Kansas, and Maryland. It also explores how different strains of Western and Jewish thought converged in the mid-nineteenth century to produce the particular emotional and intellectual intensity of the Jewish antislavery movement.Less

Democratic America: The Ethos of Liberalism

Drew Maciag

in Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism

This chapter looks at the prevailing intellectual perspectives on Edmund Burke in postrevolutionary America. Burke's impact was more directly felt during the turbulent era of the American Revolution, ... More

This chapter looks at the prevailing intellectual perspectives on Edmund Burke in postrevolutionary America. Burke's impact was more directly felt during the turbulent era of the American Revolution, but during the more peaceful antebellum period the primary driving force of human agency in America shifted from a relative handful of important men to a larger and more diverse collection of citizens intent on reaping the benefits of their new social, political, and economic order. Unfortunately, in this new, progressive, democratic era, no national self-image could have been less hospitable to the exaggerated Anglo-traditionalism of Edmund Burke. Yet the chapter notes that Burke's ideals have gained purchase even in this new era of national development, as illustrated by the later treatment of Burke in such eminent circles as the transcendentalists and the Jacksonians, and even by the historian George Bancroft himself.Less

Publicity

David Haven Blake

in Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity

This chapter examines the subject of publicity, a concept that had both a political and promotional meaning in antebellum America. It analyzes the works of Walt Whitman alongside the rise of ... More

This chapter examines the subject of publicity, a concept that had both a political and promotional meaning in antebellum America. It analyzes the works of Walt Whitman alongside the rise of advertising and compares his unrhymed lines to the jingle of commercial verse. It also discusses how Whitman adapted the lessons from advertising to an array of promotional activities, such as the creation of poetics that promised to improve his readers' lives.Less

A Short Biography of Lewis Henry Morgan with Curious Asides on the Affect of Spirituality & the Emergence of Anthropological Comprehension

in Secularism in Antebellum America

This chapter examines the life of Lewis Henry Morgan in the context of secularism in antebellum America. It explains that Morgan's intersected with evangelical revivalism and séance spiritualism and ... More

This chapter examines the life of Lewis Henry Morgan in the context of secularism in antebellum America. It explains that Morgan's intersected with evangelical revivalism and séance spiritualism and that he distanced himself from the formalities of religion choosing to describes his own scientific pursuits in the language of spirit and spirituality. This chapter also highlights the contribution of Morgan to the culture concept, a key term of anthropological comprehension.Less

Epilogue What Do I Love When I Love My Machine?

in Secularism in Antebellum America

This chapter focuses on the question of agency in the context of secularism in antebellum American. It analyzes engagement with machines as depicted in the lives of Captain Ahab and John Murray Spear ... More

This chapter focuses on the question of agency in the context of secularism in antebellum American. It analyzes engagement with machines as depicted in the lives of Captain Ahab and John Murray Spear and suggests that they represent a new kind of agency born of deterministic schemes. This chapter also considers the powers of public Protestantism during the 1850s and examines the force relations that were involved in and established by conceiving of and inhabiting religion in a particular way.Less

Cultural Meanings of Gardening

Myra B. Young Armstead

in Freedom's Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America

In early and antebellum America, gardening was more than an application of science to fruit, vegetable, and flower cultivation. It was a way to affirm male hegemony, one's social class, civic virtue, ... More

In early and antebellum America, gardening was more than an application of science to fruit, vegetable, and flower cultivation. It was a way to affirm male hegemony, one's social class, civic virtue, commitment to a dominant American political economy, and one's respectability. Among the nation's black population, the forms that gardening sometimes took often reflected African farming and aesthetic norms. This chapter examines where James F. Brown stood in relation to these possibilities. It argues that as a gardener-employee Brown promoted the goals of leading horticulturalists; according to contemporary conceptions, his work by definition assisted in improving the moral climate, and his displays helped make the “gradual improvement in our [American] markets clearly manifest,” as a New York agricultural periodical explained garden shows. Gardening also provided a structure for Brown to prove his self-moderation and steadiness of character.Less

South Carolina Volunteers in the Second Seminole War: A Nullifier Debacle as Prelude to the Palmetto State Gubernatorial Election of 1836

James M. Denham and Canter Brown

in America's Hundred Years' War: U.S. Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Seminole, 17631858

This chapter illustrates how another major political and constitutional crisis in Antebellum America—the Nullification Crisis—involved the long conflict between the United States and the Seminole. ... More

This chapter illustrates how another major political and constitutional crisis in Antebellum America—the Nullification Crisis—involved the long conflict between the United States and the Seminole. Following the outbreak of the Second Seminole War, Nullifiers used the conflict in Florida to ensconce their political power in South Carolina. As a result of their dismal military record in the conflict, the Nullifiers quickly blamed the federal government for the military morass in Florida, which led to national controversy over the conduct of the war and a subsequent investigation of several prominent U.S. commanding generals.Less

“All Is Violence”:: Mutiny and Revolt as Labor Negotiation

Matthew Taylor Raffety

in The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America

Prior to the Civil War, merchant vessels were a precarious and dangerous workplace for seamen in antebellum America. The dangers came not only from seafaring itself—harsh weather, hazardous waters, ... More

Prior to the Civil War, merchant vessels were a precarious and dangerous workplace for seamen in antebellum America. The dangers came not only from seafaring itself—harsh weather, hazardous waters, and hard labor—but also from their officers and from one another. Despite the existence of statutes that put increasing limits on their power by the later years of the antebellum period, the officers continued to hold a monopoly on legal violence at sea. The sweeping powers granted to captains limited the seamen’s legal recourse against brutal, incompetent, or insane officers, even into the 1850s. To defend their rights, seamen resorted to both subtle and more explicit means. When other forms of labor negotiation broke down, seamen engaged in both collective and individual disobedience such as malingering, work slowdowns, work stoppages, and violent insurrection such as revolt, mutiny, assault, and murder.Less

On the Edge of the Volcano: The Last Days of Pompeii in the Early American Republic

Margaret Malamud

in Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today

Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton' novels were widely read and admired in nineteenth-century antebellum America. In fact, his 1834 religious romance The Last Days of Pompeii was one of the most ... More

Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton' novels were widely read and admired in nineteenth-century antebellum America. In fact, his 1834 religious romance The Last Days of Pompeii was one of the most popular novels of the century. What accounts for the appeal of Bulwer-Lytton's novel in the United States? This chapter argues that novel's combination of bloated and corrupt Romans, idealized Greeks, and pious Christians appealed to antebellum Americans who were turning away from Republican Rome as a source of exemplary moral and political virtue towards a romanticized Greece, the birthplace of democracy and the source of a timeless beauty and art. The novel also functioned to dramatize contradictions and debates within America over the morally and politically charged pleasures of empire and wealth.Less