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After a last surge in the 1830s, the once-powerful Sab-
batarian movement, dedicated to preventing govern-
ment from compelling its employees to violate the
Lord s day by moving the mail on Sundays, was re-
duced from a serious political challenge to a nuisance.
(By the 1850s, as the new technology of telegraphy
made Sunday mail trains more or less expendable, the
sabbath could be honored without much curtailing the
transaction of business). In other words, church and
state were working out the amicable separation that
we take for granted today.4
With the lifting of civil authority, a burst of spiri-
tual frenzy was released and the United States became
what Schaff called the classic land of sects. If today
we live in a celebrity-of-the-week culture, antebellum
America was a place where every week seemed to mark
the appearance of a fresh prophet determined (to use
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The Real American Dream
Melville s phrase) to gospelize the world anew. Mor-
mons claimed that an angel named Moroni had
brought them golden tablets inscribed by God.
Millerites (named for their leader, William Miller) ex-
pected the world to end in 1843. A sect under John
Humphrey Noyes sought perfection through polyg-
amy to which they adverted in a slightly leering song
about their communal farm at Oneida, New York:
We have built us a dome
On our beautiful plantation,
And we all have one home
And one family relation.
As for religion in other parts of the country, Emerson
heard that down south one could ªnd Methodists
jumping about on all fours, imitating the barking of
dogs & surrounding a tree in which they pretended
they had treed Jesus. 5
Like many intellectuals since, Emerson regarded the
American religious scene as a carnival of crackpots. But
traditional religion seemed to him no more satisfying
than the new prophets with their promises and nos-
trums. The very idea of divine creation had been
thrown into doubt by the geologist Charles Lyell and
the naturalist Robert Chambers, whom we think of
now as pre-Darwinians. From Germany came David
Friedrich Strauss s bestselling Life of Jesus, news of
which preceded its translation into English (1846) by
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NATI ON
George Eliot a book that made belief in the incarna-
tion and the resurrection seem merely credulous. This
was the intellectual atmosphere in which Emerson told
the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School in
1838 that men have come to speak of the revelation as
somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were
dead. Christianity, he thought, was becoming a
Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of
Egypt, before. 6
What it left in its wake was unquenched spiritual
longing. Our people, Emerson wrote in his journal a
few years before Tocqueville noted the Americans
strange melancholy in the midst of abundance, are
surrounded with a greater external prosperity & gen-
eral well-being than Indians or Saxons . . . Yet we are
sad & they were not . . . Why should it be? Has not
Reºection any remedy for her own diseases? What
Emerson knew of the inner lives of Indians and Saxons
might be questioned, but he is always worth listening
to on the subject of his own culture: History gave no
intimation of any society in which despondency came
so readily to heart as we see it & feel it in ours. Young
men, young women at thirty & even earlier seem to
have lost all spring & vivacity, & if they fail in their
ªrst enterprize the rest is rock & shallow. 7
And so, as religion split into what he called corpse-
cold rationalism on the one hand and the phantasma-
goria of sects on the other, Emerson joined the crowd of
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The Real American Dream
those seeking a new faith. I look for the new Teacher
. . . I look for the hour when the supreme Beauty
which ravished the souls of those Eastern men . . . shall
speak in the West also. His shaggy disciple Walt
Whitman summed up the age (with uncharacteristic
succinctness) in a sentence the priest departs, the
divine literatus comes by which, in the ªrst in-
stance, he meant to announce himself. And Whitman
was explicit about the content of the new faith that was
coming: The United States themselves, he declared,
are essentially the greatest poem. 8
Now what could this oracular pronouncement mean?
How could a political entity deliver the saving power
of religion? And what exactly was the United States
anyway?
It is easier to say what it was not. It collected no
income taxes and, until the Civil War, administered no
military conscription. Through the ªrst half of the
nineteenth century its capital city was a fetid little
town without sewers or paved streets, puny enough in
proportion to the grandeur of the national dream that
Whitman thought the future national capital may . . .
migrate a thousand or two miles to the West, where it
would be refounded . . . on a different plan, original,
far more superb. Twenty years earlier, traveling from
New England and New York to Ohio, Tennessee, and
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Louisiana, Tocqueville had been impressed by the irri-
table patriotism that made Americans impatient if he
criticized any feature of American life, except, perhaps,
the weather. In every region he found grand plans for
public buildings and monuments not as commemo-
rations of some past grandeur, but as symbols of the
future.9
By the 1850s this futuristic state still did not exist
in a bureaucratic or administrative sense. It remained
an unrealized idea what William James was later to
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