Studies in Rhetoric & Communication

The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism

Nathan Crick

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781611177794
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Examines Transcendentalism as a distinct rhetorical genre concerned primarily and self-consciously with questions of power

Nathan Crick has crafted a new critical rhetorical history of American Transcendentalists that interprets a selection of their major works between the years 1821 and 1852 as political and ethical responses to the growing crises of their times. In The Keys of Power, Crick argues that one of the most enduring legacies of the Transcendentalist movement is the multifaceted understanding of transcendental eloquence as a distinct rhetorical genre concerned primarily and self-consciously with questions of power.

Crick examines the Transcendentalist understanding of how power is constituted in both th self and in society, conceptualizing the relationships among technology, nature, language, and identity, critiquing the ethical responsibilities to oneself, the other, and the state, and defining and ultimately praising the unique role that art, action, persuasion, and ideas have in the transformation of the structure of political culture over historical time.

What is offered hereis not a comprehensive genealogy of ideas, a series of individual biographies, or an effort at conceptual generalization, but instead an exercise in narrative rhetorical theory and criticism that interprets some of the major specific writings and speeches by men and women associated with the Transcendentalist movement—Sampson Reed, Amos BronsonAlcott, Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederick Douglass—by placing them within a specific political and social history. Rather than attempting to provide comprehensive overviews of the life and work of each of these individuals, this volume presents close readings of individual texts that bring to life their rhetorical character in reaction to particular exigencies while addressing audiences of a unique moment. This rhetoric of Transcendentalism provides insights into the "keys of power"—that is, the means of persuasion for our modern era—that remain vital tools for individuals seeking to reconcile power and virtue in their struggle to make manifest a higher ideal in the world.

CHAPTER 1

“Eloquence is the language of love”

Sampson Reed and the Calling of Genius

The world was always busy; the human heart has always had love of some kind; there has always been fire on the earth. There is something in the inmost principles of an individual, when he begins to exist, which urges him onward; there is something in the center of the character of a nation, to which the people aspire; there is something which gives activity to the mind in all ages, countries, and worlds. This principle of activity is love; it may be the love of good or evil; it may manifest itself in saving life or in killing; but it is love.

Sampson Reed, “Genius,” 1821

In the month of August 1821, love was in the air. On August 4 the first issue of the Saturday Evening Post appeared in the United States. Sold for just a nickel, the Post was the makeover of Benjamin Franklin’s original 1754 Pennsylvania Gazette, to be published as a four-page newspaper that contained essays, poems, stories, and advertisements. Soon to become the most widely read publication in the United States, the Post was the model for a new kind of American periodical that spoke with the voice not of a region or class but of the nation. And its debut could not have been more timely. On August 10 Missouri peaceably became the twenty-fourth state of the Union. Finally admitted as a slave state over strenuous objections from the North, its integration had only been made possible by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that forbid slavery in any subsequent territories above 36°30' north latitude. The Missouri Compromise was delivered with a promise that the nation would continue expanding West without further discord and strife. And farther south Stephen Austin was making his way to the Texas capital of New Spain, San Antonio de Béxar, following in the steps of his father, Moses Austin, who had earlier been authorized by Spanish authorities to bring American colonists into Texas to help populate its sparse landscape. Then he heard the news. On August 20 Juan O’Donojú, captain general of New Spain and representative of the Spanish Crown, signed the Treaty of Córdoba, which granted independence to Mexico and ended the decade-long Mexican War of Independence. In a few years, Austin, with the permission of the new Mexican government, would bring about fifteen hundred families from the United States into the territory, where they eventually outnumbered Hispanic tejanos more than two to one.¹ In August 1821 Americans were falling in love with their growing nation, which seemed to be increasing in scope and power by the day.

Few people were feeling more amorous that month than Sampson Reed (1800–1880). The son of a Massachusetts clergyman, Reed had been on his way to graduating from Harvard College in 1818 and then entering the fledgling Divinity School at Cambridge to become a Unitarian minister. But something happened to him in the privacy of his study that would change the course of his life: he fell in love with the idea of love. Specifically he discovered the writings of Swedish visionary and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, who, after a long career studying metallurgy and mining, had suddenly prophesized the coming of a New Jerusalem and the final unity of the two worlds of matter and spirit, which had too long been kept separate. But the day was dawning, imagined Swedenborg, when humanity would discover the key that would interpret the true correspondences between language, nature, and God. On that day human beings would no longer simply be detached observers of nature and passive imitators of religious texts; they would instead be active interpreters of “the vast allegory we behold as the universe” and the medium by which the power of the divine spirit would be made manifest.² For Reed reading Swedenborg was a revelation; it had disclosed to him that the true power of the universe that guided all things was not strife or matter or law or chance, but love.

And so it was that love guided Reed to the podium that August to deliver his address, “Oration on Genius,” on reception of his MA from Harvard. Perry Miller described his address as his “farewell to academic security and respectability,” effectively announcing to his own graduating class that he cared nothing for pursuing a life of a gentleman minister.³ But in another way it was a manifesto for those who would gain a different kind of security and respectability in the new nation that was just being born. His oration was delivered to give confidence and direction to all those like him who wished to strike out on their own to seek power through an original, creative, and direct encounter with nature not for the sake of contemplation but for the sake of transformation and power. The language of divine love gave him this confidence and direction, for it represented that “fire on the earth” that had always given “activity to the mind in all ages, countries, and worlds.”⁴ One’s power potential was thus not measured by physical size but by the degree to which one lives by and channels this force. Nor did it matter what one loved, whether it be good or evil, life or killing. People’s continual doubts about whether or not they love the right object are self-imposed limitations, artificial constraints that prevent them from tapping into the power of their innate activity. But genius knows no constraint, for it is the uninhibited disclosure of the power and truth of love in history.

To the graduates of Harvard, including in attendance one BA student named Ralph Waldo Emerson, Reed defined for them a new calling much in the way that Emerson would do sixteen years later. That calling was genius, which was both the perception of the light of divine truth through the “intellectual eye of man” and the public disclosure of that truth through the language of eloquence.⁵ In contradistinction to both the scholastic philosopher who buries insights into indecipherable tomes of learning and the celebrity dilettante who exists mainly to flatter the people, true genius seeks a higher form of communication: “Here is no sickly aspiring after fame,—no filthy lust after philosophy, whose very origin is an eternal barrier to the truth. But sentiments will flow from the heart warm as its blood, and speak eloquently; for eloquence is the language of love.”⁶ Unenlightened society, of course, continued to reiterate the stale dualistic pieties that “greatness is one thing, and goodness another; that philosophy is divorced from religion; that truth is separated from its source; that that which is called goodness is sad, and that which is called genius is proud.” But Reed tells those geniuses of a new generation not to give up hope: “The time is not far distant. The cock has crowed. I hear the distant lowing of the cattle which are grazing on the mountains. ‘Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? The watchmen saith, the morning cometh.’”⁷ And when morning comes, the eloquence of genius will shine forth.

The relatively elusive figure of Reed serves as an appropriate introduction to the rhetoric and politics of Transcendentalism for two reasons. First, although never formally a member of the inner circle of the Transcendentalists, Reed was the first to give public expression to many themes that would be central to their attitudes and assumptions. Arthur Wrobel identifies these shared romantic characteristics as “a philosophical optimism that viewed nature as existing for the soul’s use, a faith in the inherent godlikeness of man, the belief in the unique genius of each individual, and a confidence that all the elements of the creation are linked together according to a benevolent divine order.”⁸ And these characteristics would have practical effects in terms of how individuals were to understand their political relationships to each other and the form and function of eloquence within that system. Reed’s vision of a divine order of love, for instance, “aroused expectations of mankind’s spiritual rejuvenation, elevated intuition over Lockean empiricism, asserted that the genius of the individual’s mind links him to the infinite, exalted the uniqueness of each individual and his potential for greatness, and proposed that lasting art has its foundation in nature.”⁹ For Reed, then, genuine politics was not a struggle between partisan interests but an arena whereby individual geniuses would display through eloquence their intuited visions of perfection rooted in nature’s laws and God’s love.

Perhaps more important, however, Reed is significant because his actual life and times reveal a great deal about the social and economic conditions that make his prophetic vision a suitable myth for ambitious individuals like himself in the decades following the War of 1812. This is because even though Reed produced only two important rhetorical texts, his oration “Genius” and his 1826 essay, “The Growth of the Mind,” in his life he embodied in many ways the spirit of his place and time, illuminating important changes in the nation that prefigure the emergence of Transcendentalism as a social movement. Reed was not, like other Transcendentalists, a minister, writer, or public intellectual. After his epic pronouncements about love, he followed his own genius by eventually becoming the leading wholesale druggist of New England under the firm Reed, Cutter, and Company. He thus participated not only in the intellectual and religious movements surrounding Swedenborg, but also in the new market economy of the Northeast that promised to remake the entire economic and social landscape of the United States. His pronouncements about love are thus misunderstood if their meaning is restricted to emotional or spiritual growth. Love for Reed was a force not only of the spiritual but also of the natural world, and therefore of the world of technology, economy, finance, and politics. To investigate him in his time is to establish at the beginning the intimate relationship between Transcendentalism and a rapidly changing nation and to discover in his conception of eloquence a language that endeavors to remake the nation by transforming the latent capacities of love into practical and political power.

Rather than beginning with the context of New England Unitarianism, then, it is more valuable to begin with a figure such as Reed, who more directly places the movement within the larger changes in American politics and economy. Transcendentalism did not arise simply out of religious controversies involving the nature of miracles or philosophical debates about the meaning of Lockean empiricism; it became a popular movement because it channeled the actual ambitions and desires of individuals who saw before them new opportunities in a developing nation that were being obstructed by the recalcitrance of old gods. The United States in the 1820s was saying farewell to the old myth of Jeffersonian agrarianism. The South was entrenching itself into a conservative plantation aristocracy, while the North was rapidly embracing the transportation, communication, and market revolutions that were pushing the nation spreading westward at a rapid rate. Reed’s conception of love was thus a symbol of a latent power that was now transforming the continent through a union of technology and ideas and seemed to make it possible for a few individuals to remake themselves and their environment in their own image of God. That each of the Transcendentalists would develop his or her own image to pursue makes each worthy of particular attention; but that they all thought to tap into this newfound power for the sake of their own self-culture makes them consistent with Reed’s conception of politics and rhetoric in an age in which eloquence had finally come into its own.

In May 1834 Emerson wrote a letter to his friend Thomas Carlyle in England, in which he promised to send forthwith a copy of the speeches of Daniel Webster, “a good man and as strong as if he were a sinner,” who “begins to find himself at the centre of a great and enlarging party.”¹⁰ The volume of Webster included his famous “Second Reply to Hayne,” delivered in response to the 1829 Foot Resolution, a resolution supported by Jacksonian Democrats that would have handed federal land over to the states to be parceled out and sold as quickly as possible to white settlers eager to “civilize” the land. But the resolution was defeated, in large part because of the eloquence of Webster, a leader in the emerging Whig Party, whose speech Emerson rightly notes “the Americans have never done praising.”¹¹ In fact newspaper reprints and pamphlets of Webster’s “Second Reply” made the artifact the most widely circulated speech in history up until that point, with at least one hundred thousand copies sold in addition to those reprints that were recorded in schoolbooks and memorized by grammar students for almost a century afterward.¹²

What made the speech so remarkable was that Webster had taken what might have seen initially as a minor policy dispute and turned it into a referendum on whether the United States was simply a confederation of individual states, each pursuing its own self-interest, or an entire nation guided by shared ideals. Webster championed the latter. In his closing he made his famous declaration of nationalistic sentiment: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”¹³ In Webster, Emerson placed his hope; after years of having endured the regime of Andrew Jackson, “the most unfit person in the Presidency” who has been “doing the worst things,” he perceived that finally “now things seem to mend.”¹⁴

But the Webster volume was not the only book that he sent to Carlyle. He included “with it the little book of my Swedenborgian druggist of whom I told you.”¹⁵ This was Reed’s The Growth of the Mind. Of the two books he received, Carlyle was more struck by Reed’s. Webster seemed to him a man he “can recognize: a sufficient, effectual man, whom one must wish well to, and prophecy well of.” But Reed was altogether different: “he is a faithful thinker, that Swedenborgian Druggist of yours, with really deep ideas, who makes me too pause and think, were it only to consider what type of man he must be, in what manner of thing, after all, Swedenborgianism must be.” To express his wonder at Reed’s thought, he then quotes a line from Reed’s pamphlet: “Through the smallest window look well, and you can look out into the Infinite.”¹⁶ A few months later, Emerson followed up with a letter praising to Carlyle the novelty of Reed and his “New Church,” which challenged all separations and dualisms in the world and instead viewed “the Natural World as strictly the symbol or exponent of the Spiritual, and part for part; the animals to be incarnations of certain affections; and scarce a popular expression seemed figurative, but they affirm to be the simple statement of fact.”¹⁷ Although not perfect by any means, Emerson acknowledges, Reed and his sect “must contribute more than all of the other sects to the new faith which must arise out of all.”¹⁸ It was Emerson’s hope that through this faith everything that had been kept apart for so long would be suddenly brought together—and if not with liberty and union, then with a love by some other name.

The pairing of Webster and Reed may have been coincidental by Emerson, but it was also fitting. Reed’s significance to the Transcendentalist movement cannot be understood apart from the economic and political changes catalyzed by what Charles Sellers wryly refers to as “that hired gun of wealth and power, Webster.”¹⁹ Born to a New Hampshire family a few years before the signing of the Constitution and graduating from Dartmouth College just after the turn of the nineteenth century, Webster quickly rose to power as a lawyer specializing in a defense of corporate interests and rights, famously winning the case of Dartmouth College vs. Woodward (1819) by persuading the Supreme Court to declare that a corporation was an “artificial being” endowed with characteristics of “immortality and, if the expression be allowed, individuality,” which made it an independent agent that had contractual rights that could not be modified at whim by the states.²⁰ Chief Justice John Marshall even went so far as to express wonder that a “perpetual succession of individuals are capable of acting for the promotion of the particular object, like one immortal being.”²¹ By the time Webster was elected to Congress in 1823, he had replaced the old conservatism of aristocratic Federalism, which had been based on a firm distinction between the propertied and nonpropertied classes, with a new conservatism of capitalistic Whiggery that dissolved this distinction by reinterpreting every citizen as a potential corporate shareholder: “by the 1830s, he came to understand that by appealing for an even broader diffusion of property—to be achieved by sound conservative business policies and not by destructive Jacksonian foolishness—the experiment of democracy might be rendered safe.”²²

Of all the Transcendentalists, it was Reed who took this faith to heart and dedicated his life to its realization. The most detailed early account of his life is not found in any history or biogr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Introduction: “Eloquence is forever a power”—Transcendentalism and the Search for New Gods
• 1. “Eloquence is the language of love”: Sampson Reed and the Calling of Genius
• 2. “Jesus was a teacher”: The Dialogic Rhetoric of Amos Bronson Alcott
• 3. “To break the fetters of the bound”: Orestes Brownson and the Ideology of Democratic Radicalism
• 4. “The transformation of genius into practical power”: Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Power of Eloquence
• 5. “The cause of tyranny and wrong everywhere the same”: The Revolutionary Nationalism of Margaret Fuller
• 6. “The perception and the performance of right”: Henry David Thoreau and the Rhetoric of Action
• Conclusion: “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God”—Frederick Douglass and the Legacy of Transcendentalism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author