Hunter Moskowitz responds to Chapter 3—From Republican to Romantic (1800-1850) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
Beyond and Below Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller
Like many US intellectual historians, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen focuses on Transcendentalism as a foundation of American thought during the early nineteenth century. The Transcendentalists combined existing Protestant theology with Enlightenment reasoning to center the exploration and development of the self and individual consciousness to push for a better world. Figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller navigated a time of rapid social and economic changes that included industrialization, urbanization, westward expansion, and the deepening conflict over slavery. Yet despite acknowledging the divisions of antebellum life, these writers worked and lived in elite New England society. What if we shift to a more bottom-up approach to the intellectual history of antebellum America in that same New England milieu? We discover that those most marginalized from society generated their own intellectual frameworks and contributed to the central ideas of the early nineteenth century: Romanticism, nationalism, free labor, Christian theology, and Transcendentalism itself.
A bottom-up approach to pre-Civil War American intellectual history adds two distinct elements to the history of ideas and culture during this era. First, examining worlds of thinking beyond elites shifts the site of intellectual production towards a crucial new space of the time period: the factory. Mills in the antebellum period brought together white women workers on factory floors and company boardinghouses who engaged in literary movements that generated new ways of thinking about industrial life and patriarchy. The factory also emerged as a symbol for Black activists in the North at Colored Conventions to critique their exclusion from industrial economy and its ties to enslavement, while exploring how industry and technology could improve the lives of Black Americans.
Secondly, as conventions and factories formed the basis for engagement with intellectual thinking for those outside the elites, the Transcendentalists’ “radiant divinity of the self” was not as powerful a force for rethinking one’s position in society as conventional US intellectual historians tend to emphasize. Instead, workers and Black activists’ collective experiences with capitalism, white supremacy, industrialization, and patriarchy helped shape ideas of Romanticism, free labor, and Transcendentalism. Social commitment emerged more from collective experience rather than just individual reflection, and Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and Christian theology all offered tools for successfully engaging with the transformative changes of the antebellum era. Self and collective came together in new ways that could be used to navigate oppressive systems. Put simply, for white, female factory workers and African American activists, social commitment was not an outgrowth of an ideology of the self; instead, ideology arose from life experiences and became a tool for furthering shared assertions of the self. Especially in Lowell, workers developed a “working-class Transcendentalism” aimed at community improvement and believed in a vision of collective transcendence by working people. While the thinking of “those from below” could sometimes reinforce hierarchies of race, gender, and class, they also offered a new version of Romanticism, Naturalism, and technological development that created openings for collective action to change their world. Here is a far richer fabric of antebellum American intellectual history than the sole focus on Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and other upper-class figures.
Working-class white female textile workers and Northern Black activists matter as much to a survey of US intellectual history as elite Transcendentalists. While Emerson may have believed that the “sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude” lacked the capability to contribute to an American intellectual and cultural tradition, workers within textile factories and participants at Colored Conventions shaped intellectual endeavors just as much as Emerson himself.[1] The works of these often-marginalized figures demonstrate how antebellum intellectual life arose embedded in the long hours of factory shop floors, the changing expectations of what it meant to be a working woman, the exclusion of Black Americans from most profitable and stable employment, and early feminist, labor, religious, and abolition movements. A bottom-up approach expands our view of the people and ideas that made early America, and how these ideas intertwined within the structures of society. It reminds us that intellectual history is not just an elite field, but one profoundly shaped by everyday people, who themselves are no homogenous block of thinkers. For example, while white women workers in Lowell expressed feminine desire through imperialist narratives of race, Black writers critiqued the textile factory as a symbol of Northern white supremacy.
A wide range of historical scholarship about intellectual and everyday life, combined with new and less-used primary sources, demonstrates how working people’s collective experiences shaped new thought. Within the overlapping social hierarchies among the emerging working classes, we glimpse a robust intellectual world that offers a new lens on the shift from Republican to Romantic America in the early nineteenth century.
In the North, Ratner-Rosenhagen focuses on sites of intellectual production such as the Protestant church and Harvard Divinity School. Yet only a few miles down the road from where Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller wrote in Boston and Concord sat the textile mills of Lowell. For white female factory workers, Lowell was not just a place of labor, but also a space of intellectual production. Female workers wrote widely distributed periodicals, letters, and books that shaped ideas such as free labor, Romanticism, and Protestant thought. Northern Black writers and activists, typically excluded from working in mills, used the image of the textile factory in newspapers and conventions to denounce the racist caste system of the North and offered their own views of a technological future. These stories have typically been the precinct of social and labor historians, but treating them as intellectual history reveals the alternative framework that workers and activists built to improve their lives in ways different than elite Transcendentalists.
During the nineteenth century, an explosion of writing and intellectual work emerged from those marginalized in American society. As Ratner-Rosenhagen highlights, advances in transportation and communication technology allowed both elite advocates as well as critics of Western expansion and economic progress to publish widely.[2] Yet these technological changes also made it far easier for those without access to wealth or privilege to publish their words. Harriet E. Wilson, David Walker, William Wells Brown, Lucy Larcom, and William Apess exemplify a set of figures outside elite white society who emerged in a literary and intellectual movement that critiqued the foundations of a country based on widespread inequality and violence, even as it joined in the building of the American nation. As historian Manisha Sinha has demonstrated for abolitionism, the prominent social movements of the early nineteenth century, such as women’s rights, antislavery, and labor advocacy, did not merely appear within the ranks of elite or sympathetic middle-class reformers, but also in the actions and thoughts of enslaved people, Indigenous people, and workers.[3] So too did the intellectual foundations of these political movements. As historian Karen Cook-Bell argues, what “freedom” itself meant during the American Revolution emerged partially from the thinking and experience of self-emancipated Black women who offered an alternative notion of liberty that challenged enslavement.[4]
Working-Class Thinking in the City of Spindles
In Lowell, a working-class literary culture developed in which white female factory operatives engaged and shaped the most prominent intellectual ideas of the nineteenth century. The so-called “city of spindles” was one of the birthplaces of American industrialization, and its history presents one of the earliest examples of industrial labor organizing in the United States. [5] Yet it was also a place in which these women produced ideas. Historian David Zonderman offers a “working-class intellectual history” of the New England textile industry in contrast to Ratner-Rosenhagen’s focus on Transcendentalism. He suggests that workers often had an ambiguous relationship with factories and industrial work. Periodicals, letters, and biographies of textile workers reveal how women saw the mills as opportunities for autonomy, but at the same time renounced industrialization’s more constraining labor practices. Overall, they critiqued the industrial revolution’s impacts on their lives, not only in their turn toward labor organizing, but also in their expressions of disaffection and dissent. Worker newspapers such as Voices of Industry sometimes described the mill towns as harming the health of their workers and generating class hierarchies embedded in worker exploitation, even as workers celebrated the contributions of their own labor.[6]
As with Transcendentalists such as Thoreau and Emerson, women workers in factories shaped ideas of Naturalism and Romanticism as these intellectual movements arose. They too explored ideas of nature. Many of the first workers in the Lowell mills arrived from rural towns in Northern New England. As Chad Montrie argues, their protests in Lowell arose not merely within conventional labor activism but also from what one might now call an environmental critique. Mill work separated operatives from prior rural engagements with the natural world. It transformed their experiences of daily life. Women writers in Lowell looked back across this rupture from their past and described nature with divinity and nostalgia for their rural upbringings. They employed Romantic literary descriptions of hills and forests to attack the capitalist mill system and labor exploitation.[7] For these workers, Romanticism emerged from their experience within the walls of the factory and boardinghouses, which they linked to both their real experience and imaginations of rural life.
As Ratner-Rosenhagen indicates, Transcendentalist thinkers in the early nineteenth century offered new connections to the self and individual consciousness, and in the case of Fuller and Childs, this motivated a push for social reform. Workers in Lowell embraced parts of this individualistic view, arriving in the city seeking self-improvement and independence. Yet, as Thomas Dublin argues, workers also engaged in labor protest based on their kinship connections and tight communities, which arose within the mills and boardinghouses. Ideas about nature, technology, and labor in Lowell did not emerge solely as expressions of the self but developed from a collective experience of city life, particularly the messiness of early industrial urbanization.[8]
Workers generating ideas from below constructed frameworks out of a sense of self deeply enmeshed in the community and culture of the mill town. Their intellectual ideas emerged from this collective energy of the factory environment, bred from earlier shared rural upbringings. Unlike the social experiments of Transcendentalists at Brook Farm, workers’ social commitment did not fully reject industrial life, but matured within it. Through their collective understandings of city and nature, workers in Lowell constructed a “working-class Transcendentalism” aimed at reshaping industrial environments for their benefit.
Ideas of Republicanism, free labor, and labor radicalism also evolved through the rhetoric of workers in Lowell. As Dublin notes, in their earlier protests of the 1830s, workers embraced an ideal of Yankee Republican womanhood, appealing to their heritage and forefathers who had embraced the revolutionary spirit. They saw themselves not as workers under exploitation, but as the descendants of propertied Yankee farmers seeking economic autonomy. While their gender may have precluded them from some forms of citizenship, their protest language placed them directly within the legacy of the nation.[9]
Women accused their managers and factory owners of trying to “enslave” them, arguing they were “fond of liberty.” In this sense, female workers engaged with notions of free labor, refuting the claim of scholars who have seen free labor as the sole domain of white men and small proprietors. Women workers tied new free labor concepts to prior rural upbringings and preindustrial ideas of work, offering a Romantic notion of labor in the countryside to further labor advocacy and assert a collective identity. Working for wages, these women envisioned factory employment as a means to independence. In doing so, they either carved out spaces within the ideology of free labor for themselves or at least reappropriated its terminology for their own means.[10]
As workers defined their own labor against what they perceived to be a kind of enslavement, many in Lowell also became participants in anti-slavery causes. Far before the formation of the Republican Party, women in Lowell already engaged with concepts of free labor. In some ways, they constructed themselves and their identities in opposition to the enslaved, yet by the 1840s, in more militant periodicals such as Voices of Industry, workers in Lowell, led by Sarah Bagley, utilized the rhetoric of labor radicalism to form regional worker movements. She and other activists denounced the paternalistic practices of owners, attacking the foundations of capitalism, and pushed back against patriarchy. Workers in Lowell embraced a variety of evolving thoughts and rhetorical strategies to articulate their understandings of work, contributing to the growth of some of the most powerful ideologies of the nineteenth century concerning labor and freedom.[11]
As factory workers contributed to the intellectual development of Romanticism and free labor ideology, they also navigated hierarchies of class, race, and gender. According to Sylvia Jenkins-Cook, writers who worked in the mills grew especially concerned that their writings would be used to accuse them of genteel mannerism and class betrayals, and often worked to reshape boundaries or explore contradictions of identity through embracing Romanticism and literary realism.[12] They built from the work of Transcendentalists such as Fuller, but also rejected the style of elites as inauthentic to their everyday lives.
Their efforts could reinforce hierarchies of race in the antebellum United States while trying to clarify a working-class intellectual position. Literary scholar Lori Merish argues that the image of the mill girl associated the textile trade with whiteness and obscured its connection to enslavement through a particular type of literary aesthetic.[13] Literary theorist Julie Husband reveals how worker women writers used the symbol of enslavement to describe the different systems of oppression they faced. Some Lowell women envisioned their rural lives through the racist character of the “tragic mulatta,” which associated rural areas in New England with the destruction of the family during enslavement and sexual violence. These white women linked rural life with enslavement as a means to defend themselves against accusations of immorality and degeneration in the mills.[14] While this at times could resemble empathy for the plight of enslaved women, it also distanced these mill workers from the degradation of slavery and asserted superiority over Blackness, as white women hoped to elevate themselves in the New England racial hierarchy that defined Blackness as dangerous and servile.
While some women romanticized their rural past to critique mill labor, others asserted they had ventured to Lowell to escape the “slavery” of rural households. Yet they also connected factory life with the dangers of unlimited freedom of the market and consumption, which they linked to caricatures of Indigenous figures in their writings. The figure of the “untamed Indian” became a symbol of too much social independence within the industrial city. They could express moments of solidarity, but Lowell women also utilized racial foils to define themselves against both enslaved and Indigenous figures amidst shared urban and rural experience, placing themselves in an elevated social position. After emancipation in New England, white society attempted to construct the region as a space of white free labor devoid of Blackness and Indigeneity, and women in Lowell utilized their literary output to fix themselves squarely within this community of free white workers as they navigated the difficulties of mill life.[15]
Overall, women in Lowell explored the promises and limits of independence through reinforcing racial hierarchy and their own privilege.[16] The development of intellectual thought among workers about freedom, industrial technology, and labor emerged through racist tropes built in the collective environment of the mill town. These are more fraught, morally compromised forms of thought than the celebrated abstractions of elite Transcendentalists, but that is precisely what makes them significant: female, working-class New Englanders in a textile mill town spun out many threads of ideas under conditions that forced them to make deliberate decisions about their engagement with the transformations across Early America. They stitched together philosophies that would serve their needs and marginalized others. They thought long and hard about ideological issues and produced fascinating combinations of problematic and promising intellectual reasoning.
Global Working-Class Thought
As Ratner-Rosenhagen explains, elite writers engaged with ideas of nationalism and culture circulating around the Atlantic world in the early nineteenth century, such as German ideas of the nation and Romanticism. The writing of workers in Lowell also followed similar global circuits and influenced workers across the globe. The Lowell Offering was a literary magazine edited by Harriet Farley and written by women workers. The periodical examined women’s everyday life experiences in Lowell through fictional stories and promulgated their literary prowess across New England, the nation, and the rest of the world. The magazine had a complicated relationship with factory ownership, who often used its content to attract workers to the mills and supported it economically by purchasing many of its issues. Yet the publication always presented multifaceted views and subtle critiques of factory life, as workers themselves still seemed to retain ownership of its content and editing.[17]
Amber Shaw shows how worker periodicals such as The Lowell Offering participated in a transatlantic dialogue about factory labor, advocating for a need to improve the miserable conditions of European mills, while also critiquing the idea that Lowell could function as a model for the world.[18] Pieces such as the “Red-Cross Knight” in The Lowell Offering reveal the ways in which workers framed their writing through a global understanding that intersected with systems of race, gender, and class.[19] “The Red-Cross Knight” illustrates how the intellectual output of Lowell workers shaped antebellum religious currents in this “working-class Transcendentalism.” The writing appeared in an 1845 edition of The Lowell Offering, with an author identified as “M.A.”[20] The story includes twenty stanzas of poetry describing a knight from England who ventures to Palestine during the crusades. The knight is encouraged on this journey by a “maid,” who, upon news of the knight’s death in battle, falls into miserable grief and possibly passes away. Religious overtones pervade all parts of the poem, especially through the setting of the crusades.
Ratner-Rosenhagen notes how some of the most influential intellectual ideas of the early nineteenth century included religious transformations such as the increased study of scriptures with the scientific gaze, the growth of liberal Protestantism, and Transcendentalism that tied divinity to nature. The text of “The Red-Cross Night” echoes this and suggests how women workers participated in religious changes, albeit in a manner that responded closely to the transformation of industrialization. Religious and natural imagery intermix in the poem. The author describes “heaven’s blue canopy” of England and the “the murmuring palm-trees waves, by Judah’s hallowed stream” of Palestine, linking religious language to natural worlds.
Yet, as with Fuller, Lowell women did not just find divine inspiration in nature. The crusading of the knight demonstrates the need to bring Christian action into everyday life. The maid herself gives the primary encouragement for the knight to take on the crusade. This echoes how women in Lowell embraced the call to action of the Second Great Awakening through engaging in causes of temperance, anti-slavery, women’s rights, and labor reform as part of a Christian mission, their very own crusade. Women in Lowell shaped the new theological innovations of the nineteenth century, infusing nature with divinity, while expressing their religious devotion through Christian acts on earth to improve their world.
In many ways, this appears similar to Fuller, who Ratner-Rosenhagen argues, “drew no distinctions between thinking and doing,” and who took part in various social reforms.[21] Fuller, in her life, did make some critiques of labor exploitation, or at least of poverty. Yet these criticisms emerged as an observer from afar, and sometimes framed oppression as a denial of the self.[22] The women of the Lowell mills did not see the struggles against either patriarchy or labor as part of a cause of the self, even if they desired self-improvement, but as larger movements toward repositioning themselves within their town and industrial life. The working-class Transcendentalism and Christian theology of Lowell directed to collective actions, even if women still believed in individual religious devotion to find oneself, as in “The Red-Cross Knight.”
As white women workers pushed back against some hierarchies, they reinforced others, yet here, too, the ways in which they did registered their own thinking about a working-class feminist agency that harnessed a romanticized past to address the inequalities of the modern world. The poem “The Red-Cross Knight” appears as a standard patriarchal narrative. The masculine knight leaves to crusade with a “sainted” maid who has little agency and waits for his return. In his death, her life seems to dissipate with the poem ending with the phrase, “her spirit fled forever.” Yet as Jenkins Cook and Merish describe, the writings of The Lowell Offering often captured a type of female desire and love, one in which women could generate their own expressions inside the patriarchal system or look to confront patriarchal values. [23] In this text, it is the maid herself who pushes the knight on his quest, declaring:
“Go! go!” she cries, where banners
float,
Let FAME thy watchword be,
Yet with the bugle’s swelling note
Mingle one thought of me….
The knight’s success and drive for the Christian mission tie to the maid’s own ambitions. The entire narrative, framed from her eyes, appears as a projection of her desires—and then later her miseries. The mission occurs through her endorsement, and the crusades become a device for thinking about love, desire, and romance from the perspective of women in factory life. The poem demonstrates how women workers living under the restraining boarding systems of Lowell and the mills navigated patriarchy. Through a knight from the romanticized feudal past, they pursued their autonomy within their own structures of class and gender oppression.
Yet as much as “The Red-Cross Knight” looks to navigate and possibly challenge hierarchies, its promotion of white female desire and working-class Transcendentalism rested upon a racist and imperialist discourse. Whiteness defined the “noble race” of the English knight, and the description of the maid “with blue and love-lit eye, stands by with marble cheek.” This claim of white identity contrasted with the Knight’s goal, “to crush the Moslem power,” framing the crusades as an imperialist fantasy built on white supremacy. The author asserted a white womanhood central to the mission of white men to violently colonize and crush Islam. The romance that symbolized her power and autonomy intertwined with a narrative of global racial violence.
The attempts of white women workers to resist or at least manage hierarchies of class and gender and organize labor protest ultimately existed upon a claim of racial superiority. The use of whiteness to assert working-class female agency in Lowell within a racialized colonial ethos had direct implications in early American society as white women, including those who had worked in the mills, went westward in the massive flood of settler colonialism of the nineteenth century. They participated in the frontier violence of the American West.[24] The construction of white womanhood in this manner, even in its strains of female autonomy and class politics of the factory, cannot be separated from these racist discourses and violent actions.
The intellectual foundations of antebellum thought are inextricably tied to the violence and genocide at the heart of American society. Examining American intellectual history from the bottom-up not only demonstrates collective understanding and the influence on a wider Romanticism and Transcendentalism, but also how slavery and imperial ambition were at the heart of all antebellum intellectual traditions.
Black Northerners, Industry, and Technology
What of the intellectual history of Black Northerners? How do they widen the story beyond antebellum elites and white society? The factories of Lowell may have been more working-class and femininized, but this does not mean they were not also places of exclusion. Widespread violent racism, discrimination, and segregation defined Northern society, keeping most Black workers out of industrial employment. [25] For Black Northerners, the specter of the factory appeared far less ambiguous than that described in the poetry of Lowell women. As Ratner-Rosenhagen argues, ideologies of enslavement in the South offered a vision of a different kind of society, which Black abolitionist literature critiqued. Yet starting with the scholarship of Eric Williams, and emerging in the new histories of capitalism, historians demonstrate how the economic, political, and social life of the North intertwined with the South. This was especially relevant to Lowell, where the cotton that fed the factories was a direct product of the violence of enslavement.[26] Northern and Southern racism existed on linked foundations. Black writers, therefore, wished to demonstrate that racism and white supremacy lay at the core of Northern society even among industrial changes.
Northern Black activists made radical critiques of Northern society based on the factories that epitomized racial exclusion and white supremacy. Black writers in the North founded various newspapers such as Freedom’s Journal, The Colored American, and The Christian Recorder that distributed ideas and information relevant to Black communities. Martin R. Delaney, an activist and collaborator of Frederick Douglass who worked as a journalist and lecturer in the late 1840s, published a column in The North Star in 1849 commenting on Northern racism in manufacturing and stating, “do colored men or women pass a workshop, should their eye be turned toward the establishment, instantly is there a dozen of abusive, insulting, and frequently obscene epithets hurled at them, continuing at times as long as their ear is within reach of sound.”[27] For Delaney, the doors of the factory epitomized the anti-Black racism that pervaded all parts of life in the North.
Even more clearly to many Black Northerners, factories symbolized the linkages between enslavement in the South and Northern industrial production. To them, the fact that white society excluded Black workers from the factories, along with the reliance of Northern mills on cotton from the South produced by enslaved labor, made mills central places for upholding racial violence and white supremacy. William Whipper, editor of The National Reformer and a leader of the Black moral reform movement in Philadelphia, argued that, “situated as we are in relation to the productive and manufacturing interests of this country, we are constantly strengthening the system of slavery by our patronage of products of slave labor.” [28] For Whipper, Black Americans could use their consumer power to challenge enslavement and racism. He went as far as to accuse those who bought cotton goods and did advocate abolition as contributing to “murder.” For Black Americans in the North, the factory emerged as a symbol to articulate ideas of anti-Black racism, critique the foundations of racial hierarchy, and promote anti-slavery.
Yet Northern Black activists and writers did not just merely oppose machinery or industry, they also debated the wide-ranging impacts of technology. Some were eager to envision manufacturing as a means for liberation. One place where activists and leaders did so was through the Colored Conventions movement. If white women embraced the textile city as a central place of intellectual production, Black activists generated many ideas at the alternative space of the conventions. As Gabrielle Foreman argues, conventions operated as places of Black collective organizing where Black women held an important role in driving the movement forward, even as their efforts do not appear overtly in the archive. These conventions operated as sites that crystallized and disseminated challenges to racial violence, segregation, and exclusion.[29] Rather parallel to factories for white women workers, conventions represent the growth of Black collective activism and intellectual effort in the nineteenth century. These were spaces that provided the setting for examining the self in the Transcendentalist mode, but more decisively within close-knit communities that lived, struggled, and theorized together.
During the conventions, Black organizers and participants contested the future of employment discrimination and presented their own thoughts on technology. At an 1853 Convention in Rochester, New York, Professor Charles L. Reason read a report from the manual labor school committee concerning women’s employment which declared, “looms could be erected for the weaving of carriage and other trimmings; for bindings of various kinds; that the straw hat business in some of its branches, paper box making, and similar occupations, might from time to time be connected.” Prominent activists viewed manufacturing, or at least mechanical labor, as a path forward for Black employment and success in the North. Frederick Douglass declared in a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe that, “we must become mechanics.” He also remarked that “there are skill, invention, power, industry and real mechanic genius among the colored people.” [30]
Black activists imagined achieving autonomy through technology. Historian Kabria Baumgartner argues that some activists undertook a concerted push for more manual education and industrial college training during Conventions that intertwined with gender relations.[31] In the Colored Convention movement, activists and leaders not only challenged factories as spaces of oppression, but also responded to industrialization and technological change by looking for new opportunities for Black liberation. As with white women workers in the mills, Black activists maintained an ambiguous relationship with technology. They sometimes envisioned mechanization as constraining and even as violently oppressive. The North Star itself even reprinted a portion of a pamphlet called “Revolution of the Spindles” that declared, “…American slavery derives its life-blood from the cotton trade…” and highlighted the need to sever the connection between manufacturing and slavery.[32] Yet even as some pointed out the oppression tied to mills, many could also, as Douglass did, imagine seizing control of technology and industry as potential paths toward independence.
A Bottom-up, Collective Transcendentalism
As much as antebellum culture and early national values influenced the making of Black identity, Black writers and activists also shaped antebellum culture. Black intellectuals in Boston, such as William Cooper Nell, even worked between the Abolitionist and Transcendentalist movements, forming ideas of the need for collective “Elevation” of Black Northerners through political organizing, partially from engagement with transcendental thought.[33] Black leaders and activists made the ideas that made America as much as elites. The scholarship of Patrick Rael, Leslie Harris, Douglas Jones, James Oliver, and Lois Horton demonstrates this active role.[34] The bottom-up approach to intellectual history these historians model helps us see the thinking of white women workers, Northern Black activists, and enslaved people more clearly. In the North and South, from factory to convention, those at the seeming margins of antebellum society in fact helped to construct many of the intellectual and theological frameworks of early America. Ideas of Romanticism, nationalism, free labor, technological development, and Protestant thought all emerged from broad swaths of society. Moreover, in the mills of Lowell or at the Colored Conventions and in spaces like them, marginalized Americans not only developed ideas and coherent ideologies, but also used them to confront oppressive practices and violence against them and others. Their ideas matter because they were not merely abstract, but connected to concrete pushes for justice, equality, and freedom in the United States.
Most notably, women workers and Black activists offered an intellectual framework that emerged out of collective understandings, not just ones associated with the self. This stands in contrast to the Transcendentalists and other elite thinkers on whom Ratner-Rosenhagen primarily concentrates. Social commitment did not just arise from self-reflection, but also from lived experience and shared community action. Women workers and Black activists were transcendentalists in that they constructed collective visions of transcendence, but they differed from elites in that their visions were not just about the self. For example, in Lowell, workers produced their own understanding of the natural world and Christian theology to construct a working-class Transcendentalism aimed at collective improvement of living and working conditions in industrial cities. Workers and activists were thinkers who fashioned ideas embedded within hierarchies of race, gender, and class that often reinforced inequality and violence, but also lent Romanticism, Transcendentalism, ideas of technology and industry, and other theoretical questions power and meaning as popular forms of intellectual activity.
The ideas that made antebellum America cannot be separated from the structures that produced them. In navigating these systems, everyday people generated intellectual frameworks that allowed them to survive and make sense of a deeply unequal society. To place this type of thinking, this intellectual history, at the center of the story is to see how Transcendentalism was not just an idea among elites, but also, more crucially, a tool everyday people took up to fight for a better life for their families, neighbors, and communities.
About the Author
Hunter Moskowitz is a PhD Candidate in World History at Northeastern University. His work examines textile factories and workers in Lowell, Massachusetts; Concord, North Carolina; and Monterrey, Nuevo León during the early nineteenth century. He is also a research specialist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working on projects about how labor unions shape climate policy and the energy transition.
Notes
[1] Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 64.
[2] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 51.
[3] Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause : A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 1-2, 266.
[4] Karen Cook Bell, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 4-5, 14.
[5] Thomas L. Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 11-12.
[6] David A. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), quote on 4, see also 98, 113.
[7] Chad Montrie, “‘I Think Less of the Factory than of My Native Dell’: Labor, Nature, and the Lowell ‘Mill Girls,’” Environmental History 9, 2 (2004): 275–95.
[8] Montrie; for reasons workers came to Lowell see Caroline F. Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931), 217-218; Dublin, 71-73, 82, 103.
[9] Dublin, 93-95.
[10] Dublin, 92-93, 106.
[11] Dublin, 92-94, 125-127; Sinha, 275; Philip Sheldon Foner, U.S. Labor Movement and Latin America : A History of Workers’ Response to Intervention (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988), 5; For more on free labor and labor radicalism see: Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: Noonday, 1989); Eric. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
[12] Sylvia Jenkins Cook, Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7-8.
[13] Lori Merish, “Factory Labor and Literary Aesthetics: The ‘Lowell Mill Girl,’ Popular Fiction, and the Proletarian Grotesque,” The Arizona Quarterly 68, 4 (2012): 1–34.
[14] Julie Husband, “‘The White Slave of the North’: Lowell Mill Women and the Reproduction of ‘Free’ Labor,” Legacy 16, 1 (1999): 11–21.
[15] Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 2-3, 5; Robert K. Fitts, Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island (New York: Garland Pub., 1998), 12.
[16] Cook; Merish; Husband.
[17] Ware; Montrie, 221-222.
[18] Amber Shaw, “‘We Could Do, Perhaps, More Good There Than Here’: Harriet Farley and the Transatlantic Audience of the Lowell Offering,” Women’s Writing 27, 4 (October 1, 2020): 416–27.
[19] “The Red Cross Knight,” The Lowell Offering, vol. 5 (Lowell: Misses Curtis and Farley: 1845): 262-263.
[20] The Lowell Offering suggests this may be Mary Anne Spaulding, although it is unclear. See The Lowell Offering, vol. 5 (Lowell: Misses Curtis and Farley: 1845): III.
[21] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 74.
[22] Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Margaret Fuller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 264-265.
[23] Cook, 6; Lori Merish, Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 15, 23-25.
[24] Dublin, 139; Also see Lucy Larcom’s description of this: Lucy Larcom, An Idyl of Work (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1875), 168-169.
[25] See: Richard Archer, Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Equal Rights in Antebellum New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 7-9, 36; James Oliver Horton and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 111; Leslie M Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 120.
[26] Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 273; Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); For an overview of the new history of capitalism see: Seth Rockman, “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, 3 (2014): 439–66.
[27] Martin Delaney. “American Civilization,” The North Star, March 1849; For more on Delaney during this period see Tunde Adeleke, In the Service of God and Humanity: Conscience, Reason, and the Mind of Martin R. Delany (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021), 1-4.
[28] William Whipper, “Universal Liberty.,” The National Reformer 3, 1 (November 1838). For more on Whipper see Richard P. McCormick, “William Whipper: Moral Reformer,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 43, 1 (1976): 22–46.
[29] P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Black Organizing, Print Advocacy, and Collective Authorship: The Long History of the Colored Conventions Movement” in The Colored Conventions Movement : Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, eds. P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 21-26.
[30] “Proceedings of the Colored National Convention, Held in Rochester, July 6th, 7th, and 8th, 1853 (Rochester, NY, 1853),” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records; Frederick Douglass, “Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe,” March 8, 1853, in The Narrative and Selected Writings, ed. Michael Meyer (New York: Modern Library, 1984); Foreman, Casey, and Patterson, eds.
[31] Kabria Baumgartner, “Gender Politics and The Manual Labor College Initiative at National Colored Conventions In Antebellum America,” in The Colored Conventions Movement, 230–45.
[32] “Revolution of the Spindles,” The North Star, 23 June 1848.
[33] Peter Wirzbicki, “Black Transcendentalism: William Cooper Nell, the Adelphic Union, and the Black Abolitionist Intellectual Tradition,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, 2 (2018): 269–90.
[34] Patrick Rael, Black Identity & Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Harris; Douglas A. Jones, The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Horton and Horton.