Apocalyptic Geographies

Religion, Media, and the American Landscape

Jerome Tharaud

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691203263
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

How nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to shape American culture In nineteenth-century America, "apocalypse" referred not to the end of the world but to sacred revelation, and "geography" meant both the physical landscape and its representation in printed maps, atlases, and pictures. In Apocalyptic Geographies, Jerome Tharaud explores how white Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to present the antebellum landscape as a "sacred space" of spiritual pilgrimage, and how devotional literature influenced secular society in important and surprising ways.Reading across genres and media—including religious tracts and landscape paintings, domestic fiction and missionary memoirs, slave narratives and moving panoramas— Apocalyptic Geographies illuminates intersections of popular culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the spiritual narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. Placing works of literature and visual art—from Thomas Cole's The Oxbow to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Henry David Thoreau's Walden —into new contexts, Tharaud traces the rise of evangelical media, the controversy and backlash it engendered, and the role it played in shaping American modernity.

PART I

Evangelical Space

1

Thomas Cole and the Landscape of Evangelical Print

ONE FRIDAY EVENING in February 1835, the most famous evangelical revivalist in the United States, Charles Grandison Finney, called on an audience of at least two thousand listeners in New York’s Chatham Street Chapel to imagine themselves standing on the brink of Niagara Falls:

As you stand upon the verge of the precipice, you behold a man lost in deep reverie, approaching its verge unconscious of his danger. He approaches nearer and nearer, until he actually lifts his foot to take the final step that shall plunge him in destruction.—At this moment you lift your warning voice above the roar of the foaming waters, and cry out, Stop. The voice pierces his ear, and breaks the charm that binds him; he turns instantly upon his heel, all pale and aghast he retires, quivering, from the verge of death.

Finney used this harrowing scene to illustrate the forces at work in “the conversion of a sinner,” explaining that while God “is the agent in changing the mind,” “he is not the only agent.” The minister plays a crucial role through his words, but, most important of all, “a change of heart is the sinner’s own act.”¹

For the economically diverse and racially mixed audience who attended Finney’s Second Free Presbyterian Church as well as the national readership of the New-York Evangelist, the prominent evangelical weekly newspaper that first published Finney’s popular “Lectures on Revivals,” the scene at Niagara was an invitation to use a well-known image from an emerging national landscape culture to imagine more vividly the dramatic (and controversial) process of religious conversion that Finney sought to spark in his audiences.² Those who visited Niagara in person might experience its sublimity in similar terms, as did an Evangelist correspondent later that year who described how her visit to the falls helped her “learn to fear and obey that wo[n]der-working God who is not less merciful to his friends than he is terrible to his enemies.”³ But they could also enter this spiritualized space by immersing themselves in a burgeoning body of landscape illustrations and prints (fig. 1.1) or by paying a visit to public art exhibitions like the ones put on every spring by the National Academy of Design in New York, where no fewer than eight views of Niagara Falls were displayed during the 1830s.⁴ Over the next decade visual art increasingly became a tool for nurturing evangelical piety and morality. The Evangelist promoted exhibitions of Frederick Catherwood’s panoramas of Niagara and Jerusalem, encouraged readers to support a campaign to purchase Luman Reed’s art collection for “a public gallery of paintings” because of the “moral uses” it would provide, and even called visiting the academy’s annual exhibitions an “obligation resting upon the moral and religious community.”⁵ For the reform-oriented Protestant evangelicalism that connected preachers like Finney, publications like the Evangelist, and the Benevolent Empire of voluntary associations devoted to causes including missions, temperance, and abolition, “visual piety” extended beyond explicitly religious images and themes to encompass a broadly moralized and sacralized art culture.⁶

FIGURE 1.1. William James Bennett, Niagara Falls. To Thomas Dixon Esq. this view of the American Fall taken from Goat Island, 1829. Aquatint and etching, color. Popular Graphic Arts Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pga-00206.

FIGURE 1.2. Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836. Oil on canvas, 51½ × 76 in. (130.8 × 193 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908, 08.228.

This evangelical art culture helped fuel the rise of a new class of bourgeois art patrons and led to the purchase of one of the most iconic American landscape paintings of the nineteenth century: Thomas Cole’s View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (fig. 1.2; see plate 4).⁷ Here again evangelicalism mediated the consumption of the landscape. While Finney brought his rapt audiences to the edge of Niagara, a colleague in New York’s evangelical free church movement, the Reverend Erskine Mason, instructed his congregation at the Bleecker Street Church in a similar form of spatial imagination.⁸ In a typical sermon he described the spiritual condition of a sinner who “resist[s] the Holy Ghost” in terms of what Mason called the “moral landscape”: “though he may live amid scenes of spiritual beauty, and though the refreshing showers of heavenly grace may brighten and give new verdure to the moral landscape around him—there he is—a spot blasted by heaven’s fire, which can never be cultivated, a tree scathed by heaven’s lightning, ready to be cut down as fuel for the burning.”⁹ The visual and pictorial sensibility that Mason infused into his sermons at the Bleecker Street Church from 1830 until his death in 1851 intersected with the New York art world in 1836, when a prominent member of his congregation, the New York merchant and long-time American Bible Society (ABS) board member Charles N. Talbot, visited the National Academy and decided to purchase The Oxbow for five hundred dollars.¹⁰ Riven by lightning and sunlight, life-giving rain and wrathful storm, Mason’s moral landscape uncannily evokes the painting’s celebrated clash of pictorial and meteorological elements and translates them into a cosmic drama of sin and salvation. Cole’s lone entry at the exhibition that year, The Oxbow was a “well known” prospect from Mount Holyoke that Cole considered “the finest scene I have in my sketchbook.” Although it depicted an actual site, Cole intended the painting to be more than just a “view” in order to attract more attention at the exhibition. As he explained to his patron Luman Reed, “understanding there will be some dashing landscapes there, I thought I should do something that would tell a tale.”¹¹

The tale that The Oxbow and landscapes like it might have told to Talbot and countless others swept up in the “evangelical surge” of the early nineteenth century is the subject of this chapter.¹² Deciphering that tale requires bringing evangelical culture, and in particular evangelical print culture, into dialogue with landscape art in a way that has eluded literary scholars and art historians alike. More fundamentally, it requires using that religious mediascape to complicate the way we think about space itself in antebellum America. In the constellation of meaning that crystallizes around places like Niagara and Mount Holyoke, we glimpse what this chapter defines as “evangelical space,” a pervasive form of imagined space that emerged at the tumultuous confluence of popular visual culture, the antebellum “revolution” in transportation and communications technologies, and the period of religious mobilization known as the Second Great Awakening.¹³ Evangelical space was “produced” (to adopt the terms of spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre) through the interaction of “material spaces” like churches, art galleries, and tourist sites; the “represented space” evoked in sermons, pamphlets, Bibles, and paintings; and the “lived space” of believers who used religious narratives to orient their lives.¹⁴ To recognize landscape art as a crucial node within this layered, interactive spatial field is to unsettle an entrenched scholarly account that interprets landscape representation as a transparent manifestation of expansionist ideology and political imperialism; it is to begin to restore texture to a landscape that performed a much more complex role in mediating the tensions and contradictions that gripped evangelical culture and American culture as a whole during the period.¹⁵ Landscape paintings were not simply real-estate ads for the appropriation of physical land; they were immersive spaces where viewers learned to cultivate a particular kind of self, defined by distinctive moral perceptions and imperatives, directed toward a concrete set of practices and habits, and oriented toward an overarching vision of a good society. It is within this more capacious moral geography, which includes but exceeds the literal space of the continent, that American landscape painting assumes its most compelling and luminous cultural presence.

After a brief discussion of why Cole’s work is particularly appropriate for studying evangelical modes of vision, I turn to The Oxbow as a case study of evangelical space. Situating the painting in the context of Cole’s exhibition record at the National Academy, contemporary published accounts of Mount Holyoke, and developments in American Bible illustration, the chapter reconstructs an immersive form of looking closely tied to evangelical reading practices and shows how devout viewers used the landscape to orient themselves in sacred history. Next delving into the illustrated pamphlets of one of the period’s most prolific evangelical publishing societies, I show how picturesque landscape aesthetics became a tool to guide spiritual life within an apocalyptic framework drawn from the work of Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century theologian and revivalist who became a touchstone for many antebellum evangelicals, particularly the Presbyterians and Congregationalists who led the print distribution efforts intended to bring about the earthly millennium Edwards had predicted.¹⁶ In this light, Cole’s famous split composition takes on a significance that goes beyond its innovative combination of the aesthetic modes of the sublime and the beautiful, and beyond its dramatization of the historical clash between wilderness and settlement.¹⁷ Though perhaps not the “tale” Cole had in mind, The Oxbow tells a neglected story about how popular religion, mass media, and visual culture combined in antebellum America to create an apocalyptic geography in which viewers could use the landscape to envision the unfolding of sacred history and to rehearse their roles in hastening the millennium. Meanwhile other observers including Catharine Maria Sedgwick and the Methodist Pequot preacher William Apess contested that evangelical vision from Mount Holyoke, using fiction and oratory to expose a terrain scarred by a history of colonial violence and dispossession.

Thomas Cole and the Evangelical Eye

Scholars have explored revealing links between Cole’s work and evangelical culture. Alan Wallach has documented the artist’s ties to the Protestant “dissenting tradition” of emblems, Bunyanesque allegory, and other formal devices that influenced nineteenth-century evangelicals; more recently, Michael Gaudio has explored Cole’s interest in revivalism in the late 1820s.¹⁸ Turning to The Oxbow itself, Mark R. Stoll interprets the painting as a proto-environmentalist statement that reflects “the vital place of nature and landscape in the Reformed Protestant tradition in which Cole was raised,” while David Bjelajac has read the painting as “an imaginative Christian allegory” that spoke to Talbot’s religious and philanthropic commitments.¹⁹ As Cole catered to devout patrons including Samuel Ward, Luman Reed, and Talbot throughout his career, his personal background and intellectual temperament seem to have positioned him well to speak to their religious concerns through his art. Certainly Cole’s own version of the moral landscape surfaces frequently in his writings, perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in his “Essay on American Scenery” of 1835, which describes how “in gazing on the pure creations of the Almighty,” the viewer “feels a calm religious tone steal through his mind, and when he has turned to mingle with his fellow men, the chords which have been struck in that sweet communion cease not to vibrate.”²⁰ While this formulation lacks the dramatic spiritual rupture that marks the landscapes of Finney and Mason as evangelical, in the paintings themselves Cole’s romantic idiom, with its stark juxtapositions of sublime storms and waterfalls with clear skies and placid valleys, provides an apt visualization of what David Morgan calls the “evangelical sublime”—nowhere more clearly than in The Oxbow.²¹

This chapter locates The Oxbow at the intersection of two major thematic threads of Cole’s career that align with a tension at the heart of antebellum evangelical thought. The first is his persistent effort to visualize sacred history, from the Old Testament scenes of his early career to his later interest in apocalyptic themes reflected in the series The Course of Empire (ca. 1834–36) and a proposed sequel called “The Future Course of Emp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I. Evangelical Space
• Color Plates
• Part II. Geographies of the Secular
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index