Home > American History Through Literature > Boston

In 1869 the nation's greatest war needed a suitably grand symbolic closure. Where better than in Boston, the city associated with agitating for the abolition of slavery? So on the afternoon of 15 June, the Irish immigrant bandleader Patrick Gilmore, who had composed When Johnny Comes Marching Home in 1863, kicked off the Great Peace Jubilee, the world's largest musical event to date. Before an audience of over fifty thousand, he had assembled one thousand instrumentalists and ten thousand chorus members to accompany scores of soloists performing patriotic airs and European classics. Between pieces, distinguished speakers held forth. Oliver Wendell Holmes's "Hymn of Peace" acknowledged the surrounding sonic tsunami: "Let the loud tempest of voices reply,—/ Roll its long surge like the earth-shaking main!" (2:66). Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, there with his daughter, "was charmed with the spectacle, and with the great human voice of the chorus" (1:524). He was not alone. "I am for the present the fifty-thousandth part of an enormous emotion!" William Dean Howells reported in the Atlantic Monthly two months later (p. 247). He winced, however, at what others deemed a high point: in time to the famed "Anvil Chorus" of Verdi's opera Il Trovatore, a hundred red-shirted Boston firemen banged anvils while bells rang and cannons fired. "Brothers, once more," Holmes had proclaimed. After four years of war and as many of an ensuing uneasy occupation, Americans could resume hammering out their common destiny.

CITY OF ENTERPRISE

The Peace Jubilee crowned a half century of enterprise that had shaped Boston since its chartering as a city in 1822. "Our proper business is improvement," Daniel Webster had asserted in view of the city in his 1825 Bunker Hill Monument address. "Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests," he urged, with an eye toward linking the Revolution's civic achievements through war with his audience's socioeconomic ambitions in peacetime. Let us "see whether we also, in our day and generation," he concluded, "may not perform something worthy to be remembered" (p. 40).

What Bostonians accomplished was indeed memorable. An "enterprising elite" adventured worldwide commercial links during the late eighteenth century, pioneered integrated production in massive factories in the 1810s and 1820s, and inaugurated intensive rail service that would make the city the region's economic hub by the 1830s and 1840s. Drawing upon business loans from large capital pools secured in banks via eleemosynary trusts like the Massachusetts General Hospital, elite families expanded family fortunes at mid-century through nationwide investments. The elite held no monopoly upon enterprise, though. Much of the early impetus for public improvements in health, welfare, schooling, and firefighting and for massive real estate projects, like Faneuil Hall Market's renewal, emerged from the so-called middling interests who elected Josiah Quincy mayor successively from 1823 to 1829. Together, they and the elite combined aggressive wealth-getting with a commitment to social and civic betterment that made Boston world famous for its genteel beneficence.

Such public-spirited enterprise accompanied rapid growth. Migrants swarmed in, some escaping the overpopulation in Boston's rural hinterland and others fleeing famine and political turmoil in Europe. Beginning at 43,298 in 1820, the population soared by 1850 to 136,881 and by 1870 to just over a quarter of a million. How would they all fit into the tiny peninsular city, precariously tied to the mainland by a narrow neck? Already unhealthily overcrowded in the 1820s, Boston could only expand outward. To do this, city fathers first cut down hills to fill the shore-line's many coves, then in the 1850s steam-shoveled suburban gravel into the Back Bay, widening the neck out of existence. The new acreage still did not relieve population pressure and consequent environmental degradation. "Coughing, and the ancient pastime of hawking ...arethe principle amusements of this cold city," the satirist George Horatio Derby pronounced in 1865 (p. 139). Because of continued overcrowding, many in the middle class moved to the suburbs, commuting to and from work. Boston had become a thriving metropolitan hub with spokes jutting deeply inland.

THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF PRINT

In its growth the city far outpaced other New England municipalities by dominating intraregional and northern transoceanic information flows. Prior to transatlantic cable service (1866), ship-bound European news—intercepted out-of-harbor by news brokers in rowboats—often came first to Boston. From there European culture filtered out to the region via reprint vehicles like Littell's Living Age (1844–1896). Indeed, the information hegemony benefited publishing. During the 1820s the number of book-trade firms shot up by 123 percent, roughly three times faster than the population. As early as 1833 the book trade surpassed other industries in its capital investment in machinery, while it accounted for about 90 percent of the value of its region's publishing.

As publishing boomed, its character changed. Earlier, printing and bookbinding firms clustered downtown in small-scale artisanal shops that combined home, work, and retail operations. By 1845 printing workplaces had become factory-like; workers now lived on the periphery, often near bridges or railroad terminals, affording easy access to opportunities elsewhere. By mid-century most printing tasks had degraded into repetitive machine-tending, booksellers had moved into specialized retail stores, and publishers had become primarily investors in literary properties who might only hire jobbers for printing and binding work.

LITERARY ENTREPRENEURS

Out of the industrializing 1840s new literary entrepreneurs emerged who specialized in cheap American novels or other original pamphlets. The German-born Frederick Gleason manufactured engravings of American scenes before publishing regionally oriented original novels, many of them by native authors. A string of successful newspapers followed, including in 1846 the story paper Flag of Union and, in 1851, the Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, the country's first illustrated weekly. By contrast, George W. Redding emerged from retailing: he started as a news-boy, then became a New York newspaper distributor, periodical depot proprietor, and publisher of pamphlets like Easy Nat; or, Boston Bars and Boston Boys (1844).

Publishers like these looked upon their products as mere plastic beneath the entrepreneurial hand, as John Townsend Trowbridge, who wrote for them, made plain in his Martin Merrivale: His "X" Mark (1853). "You see, our readers want everything condensed, rapid, dramatic," a cheap editor advises the book's hero, an aspiring author. "Take any ordinary novel, and cut it down one-half, and it'll be twice as good as it was before" (p. 247). Real-life publishers like Gleason went even farther in shaping their properties, publishing them variously as pamphlets, newspaper serials, playbooks.

LITERARY GENTRIFICATION

Memory of Boston's cheap literary entrepreneurs has faded before that of their so-called genteel counterparts, exemplified by the Atlantic Monthly (1857–1932) and its contributors. Emerson, Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier—the persisting familiarity of many of the names testifies to Boston's enduring success in associating itself with the period's best literature.

It had not always been that way. Successful literary magazines were long in coming, for example. The North American Review (1815–1940), the most notable early one, staunchly imitated British essay-laden counterparts, while the Unitarian Christian Examiner (1824–1869) did only little better within its theological parameters. The promise of the New England Magazine (1831–1834), with its distinguished list of local contributors on the cusp of the American Renaissance, was cut short by its editor's untimely death in 1833. Among quickly fading successors were Nathan Hale Jr.'s Boston Miscellany (1842–1843), combining features of a ladies' magazine with a genteel literary monthly, James Russell Lowell's The Pioneer (1843), filled with high-minded contributions, and Emerson's The Dial (1840–1844), the flag-ship venue for the transcendentalists.

Literary book publishing fared little better. The city throughout the period ranked third behind New York City and Philadelphia—the "axis" (Charvat, p. 26) of nationally oriented literary book production versus the Boston parochialism that favored local talent. Samuel G. Goodrich gained a small fortune with his "Peter Parley" children's books, and money could be made from reference works (especially in law and medicine), textbooks, and histories, such as the scholar-politician George Bancroft's ten-volume national overview and the sometime western travelogue writer Francis Parkman's work on the English-French struggle for colonial North America. Less remunerative were controversial social and religious works, at least until 1852 with Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. By that time John P. Jewett, the book's publisher, was joined by other firms, like Phillips, Sampson, who aimed for a broader mass market but who eschewed the crass commercialism of the cheap publishers. Boston literary publishing was at last awakening, but under a banner of enterprising gentility.

No firm better represents the trend than Ticknor and Fields, founded in 1832. Partner James T. Fields slowly built a very "literary" list that catered to middle-class pretensions toward refinement as he eventually moved toward uniform edition binding, an early example of product branding. The African American schoolteacher Charlotte Forten recorded in her diary several gifts of the firm's imprints identified solely by their characteristic covers, as in her 7 March 1858 entry: "Miss U. came in, and very kindly gave me Mrs. Browning in blue and gold. Miss S. gave me Whittier, in the same" (Grimké, p. 291). The firm soared to prominence when it became Longfellow's publisher in 1846 and thereafter put Fireside Poets like him on the map. Though the firm did not venture as much into novel publishing, it scored a minor hit with Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter in 1850. Fields presided over these successes from his curtained room in the firm's Old Corner Bookstore, where he held lively court with Boston literati. The salonlike atmosphere extended to Fields's home, where Annie Adams Fields, after their 1854 marriage, used her influence to shape local literary culture.

PRESCIENT, BUT PREMATURE

For all this enterprise, the city's literary reputation remained higher than its receipts from publishing. Augustine Joseph Hickey Duganne hit at this in his Parnassus in Pillory (1851):

Of Fame's broad temple Boston keeps the portal,

 And Boston bards alone are dubbed immortal:

 Even though her dingy bookstores, it is said,

 Are one great sepulchre of "sheeted dead."

(P. 202)

In other words, despite Boston's imperative intellectual claims, most books by local authors stood on the shelves. Indeed, despite the mid-century Longfellow and Uncle Tom surge, Boston publishing hopelessly lost, as Philadelphia did, to New York City.

It is not hard to explain why, for New York simply used its advantageous transportation to dominate the national market. Stakes were always higher there than in Boston, which had increasingly to compete with New York in the western and southern parts of its own region. As if that were not enough, Boston tended to produce literature that was more "advanced" than could yet be widely accepted in other places, whether this emerged from Harvard moral philosophers, the city's many reformers, or, on the aesthetic front, from transcendentalists.

Yet the lag in acceptance somewhat accounts for the paradox of high regard with few sales: many avant-garde trends in antebellum Boston literary culture would move toward the postbellum national mainstream. After all, in 1865 abolitionism was written into the Thirteenth Amendment. The emergence of a liberal Protestant united front also made Unitarian moral philosophy more acceptable, as its social-science flavor came increasingly to inform (and moderate) earlier reformism. Even transcendental individualism seemed more at home among postbellum capitalists. Not to be overlooked either was New England's influence, through precedent and personnel, upon state school systems beyond the Hudson. That is how the Schoolroom Poets (William Cullen Bryant, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier, among others) got their collective name, after all. In short, Gilded Age America assimilated once-spurned antebellum New England as its own, but by that time the creative vigor was gone, as was Boston publishers' economic where-withal. Moreover, postbellum Boston's "gendering of letters" (Duffy, p. 91) as masculine had caused the reputations of once prominent local women writers to fade before that of their genteel male counterparts.

"SCRIBBLING WOMEN"

When Hawthorne complained in 1855 about the "mob of scribbling women" (p. 304) who competed with him in the literary marketplace, he necessarily targeted among them the numerous nationally reputed female authors who published in, hailed from, or had come to live in Boston. By the time Hawthorne wrote his now infamous words, Lydia Maria Child (Letters from New York, 1843–1845), Julia Ward Howe (Passion Flowers, 1854), Margaret Fuller (Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852), had made their mark upon American literature. The "mob" grew larger still when Caroline W. H. Dall (The College, the Market, and the Court, 1867), Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, 1868–1869), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (The Gates Ajar, 1868), and Mary Abigail Dodge (Country Living and Country Thinking, 1862) made their names during or after the Civil War. These eclectic and prolific authors, who were caught up at some time in their lives by the era's spirit of reform, are today regarded for their abolitionist and proto-feminist vision.

PUBLIC LECTURES

Beyond authorship, women exercised their intellectual might at Boston's many lyceum and lecture halls that began to emerge by 1830. "Ladies who have a passion for attending lectures," Charles Dickens wrote in his American Notes (1842), "are to be found among all classes and all conditions" (p. 65). With the "ladies," of course, came male escorts equally enamored with the sights and sounds of lecturing. As Dickens observed, audiences were diverse but mainly composed of upper and middling occupational groups in their forties or younger. So popular were lectures that the city provided at least twenty-six courses during the 1838–1839 winter season alone. This form of entertainment thrived until the Civil War, after which locally sponsored attractions eventually gave way to nationally syndicated affairs.

During the heyday of lecture-going, the most prestigious institutions included the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the Boston Lyceum, both initiated in 1829, and the Lowell Institute, begun in 1839. Together they sponsored, among well-known naturalists, lawyers, and clergymen, American literati such as Emerson, Lowell, Fields, Howells, and the novelist Richard Henry Dana Jr. Sundry speakers were featured by library associations, churches, and benevolent, mechanics', and mercantile societies that opened their doors to the public for a small fee or gratis, and also by entrepreneurs who rented halls and charged admission. Voices of mesmerists, phrenologists, botanists, spiritualists, and above all reformers filled the air. The abolitionists Theodore Parker and Angelina Grimké, the temperance advocate John B. Gough, and the women's rights activist Lucy Stone, among others, made themselves heard.

REFORM

A bustling platform for outspoken reformers, Boston nourished several influential related publications and institutions. Some underscored the city's commitment to intellectual uplift. As the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education established in 1837, Horace Mann published twelve widely received annual reports (1837–1848) and the Common School Journal (1838–1851), both reflecting his tireless efforts to rehabilitate the state's failing school system. Library reform culminated in state legislation in 1848 authorizing the city to support a repository, namely the Boston Public Library, which opened in 1854. Other reforms addressed social problems. The Boston Prison Discipline Society's reports (1826–1854), Dorothea Dix's A Memorial to the Massachusetts Legislature (1843), and Charles Spear's magazine The Prisoner's Friend (1845–1861) advocated more humane treatment of the insane and criminals. Bostonians also tackled alcoholism, from sponsoring the first Massachusetts Temperance Society meeting in 1813 to inviting Washingtonians to hold a spectacular parade in 1844—all publicized through print. Indeed, local publishers put forth more than thirty-five different temperance periodicals between the years 1820 and 1870, with titles like Zion's Herald (1823–1828) and National Philanthropist and Investigator and Genius of Temperance (1829–1830).

Above all, Boston became a center of abolitionism. William Lloyd Garrison, instrumental in founding the New England Anti-Slavery Society (1832) and the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833–1870), published The Liberator (1831–1865), a weekly calling for the immediate abolition of slavery. Soon after The Liberator's first issue, Lydia Maria Child, a novelist and founding member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society that published the gift annual The Liberty Bell (1839–1858), brought forth her own "immediatist" Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). Abolitionism thereafter streamed from Boston's presses.

OTHER BOSTONIANS

The racial discourses running through Bostonian debates over slavery touched upon two groups with diverging and sometimes opposing fates. These were African Americans and Catholic Irish immigrants.

Blacks had been in Boston since colonial days, but the population remained fairly small, hovering at around two thousand until 1860. Nominally free since 1783, black Bostonians still faced severe statutory, customary, residential, and economic discrimination. Some, like David Walker in his Appeal (1829), explicitly linked slavery with larger patterns of racism, as he called on his "coloured brethren" (p. 62) to act immediately toward ending both. Others, like the school-teacher Susan Paul in her Memoir of James Jackson (1835), a recently deceased seven-year-old pupil of hers, urged the rising generation to combat prejudice. By the time she wrote, several "black abolitionists" had emerged, notably William C. Nell, who assisted in editing The Liberator and campaigned to desegregate Boston's schools (1855). Despite civil rights successes like this and those concerning interracial marriages, segregated transportation, and voting blockages, as late as March 1860 John Swett Rock could still ask in The Liberator, "Is Boston anti-slavery?" (Levesque, p. 112). To make his case for the negative, he pointed to persisting ghettoization, unrelieved segregation in public accommodations, stereotyping on the city's two black-face minstrel stages, and rapidly worsening job prospects. The Civil War brought only halting advances, such as that which occurred in 1863 through the efforts of the influential Massachusetts secretary of state messenger Lewis Hayden (to be elected in 1865 as the nation's first black state representative) to commission an African American fighting unit.

Slow progress with symbolic gains also characterized Boston's Irish. In the wake of the 1846 potato famine, the arrival of impoverished and unskilled Irish immigrants on a heretofore unimaginable scale—by 1855 they accounted for about a third of the population—challenged beneficent Bostonian enterprise. How should the city deal with the perceived upsurge in urban maladies, not the least of which was being so stubbornly indifferent to Protestant norms? These perceptions fueled the powerful nativist movement that crested in 1854 with anti-Catholic "Know-Nothings" gaining control of state government. Their initiatives ultimately fell apart, as did the party, thanks partly to the success of Irish leaders—through churchmen, effective news organs like Patrick Donahoe's Pilot (1836–1857), and word of mouth in Irish social associations—in restraining community outrage. Separatism worked in this, but it would take the forced integration of Civil War military service finally to allow Boston's Irish to move toward acculturation.

It was, after all, an Irish bandleader who organized and led the 1869 Peace Jubilee before an audience that included blacks, immigrants, women, Yankee workers, middling folk, literati, and Brahmins alike. Clearly the local spirit of enterprise that helped rid the nation of slavery was giving way, however gradually, to a new civic pluralism.

See also Abolitionist Writing; The Atlantic Monthly; Book Publishing; Editors; Irish; The Liberator; Literary Criticism; Literary Marketplace; Lyceums; Transcendentalism

Ronald J. Zboray Mary Saracino Zboray