CRUSADING WHEN THE REPUBLIC WAS YOUNG
Hesseltine, William B.
Crusading When The Republic Was Young FREEDOM'S FERMENT: Phases of American Social History to 1860, by Alice Felt Tyler. The University of Minnesota Press. $5. Reviewed by William B....
...The abolitionist movement, which involved political considerations and constitutional arguments, and eventuated in Civil War, has received attention, but temperance, prison reform, education, peace, women's rights, and Utopian socialism have been dismissed as mere crackpot excrescences, unworthy of a scholar's study...
...To Prof...
...Tyler, who "were filled with confidence and joy in the present and with faith that the future would be what they and their children wished to make it...
...cast an appraising eye upon the host of reform movements that sprang up in the United States in the first half of the 19th Century...
...No place under the sun was more suitable for the testing ground than the United States...
...Only in recent years have historians, turning aside from the traditional study of military and political campaigns...
...The Americans of 1800 to 1860 were convinced of the answer and eager to make the experiment...
...Americans were free men, says Mrs...
...of the Mormons, the Rappites, the Separatists of Zoar, and the Shakers...
...Alice Tyler, all of these movements are reflections of the "exuberant optimism of the young American Republic" which believed in democracy and had faith in the perfectability of its institutions...
...of Utopian socialism and religious communism...
...22, 1844, of the Fox sisters and the Spiritualists who reached beyond the grave...
...She reviews the humanitarian reforms, presenting, in readable form and with scholarly citations, the progress of education, the work of the Washington-ian temperance men and the Maine Law prohibitionists, Elihu Burritt and the peace crusade, the dress reformers and the Lucy Stoners, and Garrison and the Abolitionists...
...The book is a veritable encyclopedia of the reforms, the cults, and the Utopias of pre-civil war America...
...With evangelical fervor they set forth, by 100 different roads, on a single crusade to seek the Holy Grail of a perfect society...
...She tells the story of Thoreau, Channing, and Emerson in the Transcendental movement, of the Millerites who waited impatiently for the end of the world on Oct...
...of the Hopedale, Oneida, and Brook Farm communities...
...Lyman Beecher a century ago...
...Tyler presents them all in Freedom's Ferment...
...Mrs...
...The time has come when the experiment is to be made whether the world is to be emancipated and rendered happy, or whether the whole creation shall groan and travail together in pain," announced the Rev...
...But that, of course, was long ago...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine FREEMAN'S trite dictum that "History is past politics" has dominated the students of the American past for long decades...
...If the analysis is not penetrating or the synthesis particularly satisfying, and even if there is considerable . variation in the quality of the discussion of the many subjects included, certainly the author demonstrates her thesis that the period was one of social ferment, "full of optimism, of growth, and of positive affirmation...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 27
