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In Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933), Luther Standing Bear recalls the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the time before his Lakota people were driven from their homeland in what is now South Dakota and Nebraska:

Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us. (P. 38)

As Standing Bear suggests, there is no "nature." There is only the inhabited planet—the land—which must be overlaid with specific cultural meanings to become natural or wild. In the United States in the nineteenth century, nature meant different things to different people, depending on who they were and what relation they bore to the powerful historical trends that were reshaping both the land and them, especially imperial expansion, industrialization, and urbanization.

INDIAN REMOVAL, ROMANTIC FICTION AND POETRY, AND NATIVE RESISTANCE

One of the most powerful uses of the word "nature" was to designate places and people not yet "civilized," not yet incorporated into the growing capitalist republic. During the decades after the Revolution, Euro-American settlers pushed across the Alleghany and Appalachian ranges onto land that would soon become the second and third tiers of states. As they did, they came into immediate conflict with the native peoples of the region. In addition to epidemic diseases, the settlers brought with them the well-tried strategy of negotiating piecemeal treaties with individual tribes, treaties that gradually squeezed the tribes onto smaller and smaller remnants of their former territories. One of the most powerful tribes was the Shawnee, led by the great orator Tecumseh (1768–1813). At an 1810 frontier meeting with William Henry Harrison (who was then governor of the Territory of Indiana), Tecumseh protested against American imperial expansion and articulated a radical vision of native resistance and communal ownership of nature:

The way, the only way to stop this evil is for the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be now—for it was never divided, but belongs to all. No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers. . . . Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? (Turner, p. 246)

Tecumseh hoped to bring together the northern tribes and lead them in a war to defend their homelands against the advance of the whites. But his plans were defeated during the War of 1812: he allied his forces with the British and was killed defending the rear of a retreating British column. The defeat of the Shawnee cleared the way for settlers to move into what was then called the Northwest, the vast reach of fertile hills and prairies below the Great Lakes.

Two decades later President Andrew Jackson made systematic displacement of the remaining natives into federal policy with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Jackson's annual addresses to Congress during the period are bluntly racist justifications of what we now call ethnic cleansing. He represents Native Americans as childlike primitives and argues that forcing tribes like the Cherokee to march the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma is a necessary part of America's mission to occupy and transform the wild continent: "What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms . . . and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?" Like most others who came to believe in white America's "Manifest Destiny" to settle the continent from sea to sea, Jackson recognized only one kind of liberty, the liberty to engage in the violent conquest of territory and profit.

American's transformation of its natural environment and the displacement of Native Americans formed the most central subject matter for some of its first "indigenous" literary texts, the early national historical romances. Modeled after the Highland romances of the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, these fictions set out to narrate a usable past for the new nation. James Fenimore Cooper's (1789–1851) The Pioneers (1823), for instance, tells the story of Judge Marmaduke Temple, who clears a vast estate and founds the village of Templeton in central New York State. Based on Cooper's family history, The Pioneers is a triumphal narrative of civilizing the wilderness, of hard work awakening the land from "the sleep of nature" so that it can "supply the wants of man" (1:233). At the same time, the text is marked by anxiety about the destruction of nature, an anxiety that is voiced most consistently by frontiersman Natty Bumppo, or Leatherstocking. Natty objects sorrowfully when Templeton's villagers gather in a clearing to kill tens of thousands of passenger pigeons for sport: "This comes of settling a country!" he says. "Here have I known the pigeon to fly for forty long years, and, till you made your clearings, there was nobody to skeart or to hurt them." Natty goes on to compare the pigeons to the region's natives who, he implies, are being slaughtered just as mercilessly: "There's Mr. Oliver, as bad as the rest of them, firing into the flocks as if he was shooting down nothing but the Mingo warriors" (1:248). Instead of calling on the villagers to stop firing, Natty responds to their indiscriminate destruction by demonstrating the more selective violence of his long rifle. As if to suggest that genocide would be more acceptable if more accurate, Cooper has his hero shoot a single pigeon, dropping it from a great distance after it becomes separated from the flock.

Cooper developed his characterization of Natty further in subsequent romances, especially The Last of the Mohicans (1826), which is set during the French and Indian Wars of the mid-eighteenth century. Here Natty plays an important liminal role: he is a colonial mediator between the overcivilized English and the noble savages of the New World. Raised by the Delaware chief Chingachgook, Natty has absorbed Mohican nature lore, but his blood remains safely European. By the end of the novel, he has come to embody a fantasized American identity that symbolically resolves national anxiety about genocide. By incorporating token elements of native culture while replacing actual natives, he represents an American republic that has connected itself with nature, thereby revitalizing itself in relation to degenerate European monarchies.

Cooper faced stiff competition in the production of historical romances. Both Lydia Maria Child's (1802–1880) Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's (1789–1867) Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827) take on the fraught subject of miscegenation, or interracial marriage between whites and natives. A liberal Unitarian and early abolitionist, Child allows her heroine, Mary Conant, who is overcome by grief at the drowning of an English suitor, to marry an exaggeratedly natural Wampanoag man, Hobomok. As in so many sentimental novels of the time, this transgressive marriage choice is simultaneously matter for moralistic punishment and a vicarious enactment of radical possibility. In the end, the plot enforces segregation of the biracial couple. Mary's suitor turns out not to have drowned as she had believed. He returns, and Hobomok quietly withdraws into the receding wilderness, leaving behind a couple whose white offspring will populate the wilderness his departure makes available.

In Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, however, it is a young man, Everell Fletcher, who must make a difficult marriage choice. The orphaned Hope Leslie, a passionate and independent girl, is his foster sister. Also living with his family is Hope's noble soulmate, Magawisca, the captured daughter of a Pequod warrior. She wears a naturalized costume—deerskin waistcoat, leggings, and moccasins, decorated with feathers and beads—that gives her "an air of wild and fantastic grace" (p. 23). And she speaks in elaborate figures meant to evoke the alleged natural poetry of native dialects: "My foot . . . is used to the wild-wood path. The deer tires not of his way on the mountain, nor the bird of its flight in the air" (p. 24). On visits to nature outside the bounds of the Puritan community, Magawisca teaches Hope the stories and lifeways of her people. Meanwhile, their friend Esther Downing, a pious Puritan girl, cultivates the silence, industry, and submissiveness expected of her. All three are potential love objects for Everell. His eventual marriage to Hope enacts the founding moment of the American nation and determines the future identity of its people. Like Cooper's Natty Bumppo, Hope is an intermediate figure, one whose white body is racially acceptable, but whose absorption of native self-reliance and culture through Magawisca has fitted her for the rigors of life in the natural New World. The plot drives Hope and Everell inevitably together while allowing Magawisca to nobly sacrifice herself and her own desires to their future prosperity.

Just as the first fiction writers in the United States patterned their work after British models, so too did the first American Romantic poets. William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), and other "Fireside Poets" wrote verse that was firmly rooted in the English accentual-syllabic tradition but that took up materials native to the American landscape. Bryant was known as "the American Wordsworth," and in his ode "The Prairies" (1832), nature is represented as a "magnificent temple" where the historical drama of the rise and fall of nations plays itself out. The poem stages an imaginary invasion in which red-skinned invaders wipe out a preexisting race of Mound Builders. Bryant remarks philosophically:

Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise

Races of living things, glorious in strength,

And perish, as the quickening breath of God

Fills them, or is withdrawn.

(Pp. 187–188)

Thus Bryant erases the violence of conquest and naturalizes genocide, suggesting that it is just one more of nature's cycles. He ends by comparing the noise of an "advancing multitude" of settlers to the "domestic hum" of the bee, an "adventurous colonist" who enlivens a wilderness made silent by the passing of the savage "red men" (p. 189).

As actual natives were driven farther and farther west, retrospective idealization of their culture became a staple of Fireside poetry, as in Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1855), a cycle of Ojibwa stories adapted in verse. This long poem begins by calling together its audience in lines that clearly reflect the cultural work that nature and naturalized people were being made to perform:

Ye who love the haunts of Nature

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple,

Who have faith in God and Nature,

Who believe that in all ages

Every human heart is human,

That in even savage bosoms

There are longings, yearnings, strivings

For the good they comprehend not,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Listen to this simple story,

To this Song of Hiawatha!

(P. 114)

Like Hobomok, Hiawatha is a primitivist caricature, a "noble savage" who quests mightily to defend his people. But in the end he paddles his canoe placidly into the western wilderness to make room for white men who will learn natural piety from the traditional stories of his tribe. In other words, as readers in the rapidly modernizing United States became conscious of their increasing distance from the frontier, poetry about native subjects offered a nostalgic vision of nature as a wellspring of uncomplicated morality and faith.

Native Americans did not acquiesce silently to being both literally and figuratively exiled into nature. They were extremely inventive in their efforts to use both printed literature and oratory to escape from the wilderness. In the late 1820s, Cherokee spokespeople dispatched several "memorials" to Congress. These highly formal documents ventriloquize the republican discourse of the Declaration of Independence in order to argue that the Cherokee are a sovereign nation seated on ancestral lands. The Cherokee leader Sequoyah invented an eighty-six-character syllabary that allowed for publication of a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. The Phoenix reported on the tribe's adoption of a constitution, the building of schools, and advances in agriculture. One of its editors, Elias Boudinot (c. 1802–1839), toured the country soliciting funds to pay for a new press. In a speech he delivered before hundreds of audiences, titled "An Address to the Whites" (1826), he resolutely distanced himself and his people from nature: "You here behold an Indian, my kindred are Indians, and my fathers sleeping in the wilderness grave—they too were Indians. But I am not as my fathers were—broader means and nobler influences have fallen upon me" (pp. 3–4). By demonstrating that he, as a representative Cherokee, had abandoned nature and become civilized, Boudinot hoped to convince his audience, and the nation at large, to negotiate with his people as equals.

William Apess (1798–1839) was less conciliatory. His fiery essay "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man" (1833) remains one of the most forceful native indictments of American racism and imperial expansion. Apess reaches a rhetorical pinnacle discussing the prohibition of miscegenation, denouncing "the ill-fated laws made by man to hedge up the laws of God and nature" (p. 159). Ironically, his hortatory conclusion draws an implied analogy between the settlers' conquest of nature and the defeat of racism: he calls for the "tree of distinction" or prejudice to "be leveled to the earth"; should this be done, "then shall peace pervade the Union" (pp. 160–161). That peace did not come. The last significant battle in the East came in 1832 when Illinois and Wisconsin militia attacked and defeated a band of Sauk and Fox Indians led by Black Hawk and drove the survivors into Iowa. By 1840 all of the significant eastern tribes had either been physically destroyed or removed beyond the Mississippi River, leaving room for Euro-American writers and readers to forge new imaginary relations with the land.

CAPITALISM, PASTORALISM, AND NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM

The Quaker poet and New York newspaper editor John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) was widely admired for his pastoral accounts of the New England countryside such as Snow-Bound (1866), a nostalgic portrait of his family at home on his childhood farm. He saw a firm link between natural piety and political radicalism, and in "The Tent on the Beach" (1867) he described his conversion to abolitionism as the moment when he decided to make "his rustic reed of song / A weapon in the war with wrong" (p. 243). In the Northeast, where native removal had been completed half a century earlier, and where industrialization and urbanization were moving forward quickly, the mid-nineteenth century saw important new applications of the very old idea that nature is a simple, innocent refuge from a degenerate civilization. A generation of northeastern intellectuals, many of whom, like Whittier, were just one generation removed from the farm, came to see nature as an idealized alternative to brawling capitalist cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where poverty and class conflict had become defining features of everyday life. The most visible manifestation of this pastoralism was a broad utopian socialist movement, Associationism, whose participants built large cooperative agricultural communities. George Ripley (1802–1880), for instance, founded the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841. In a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Ripley described his hope that a collective life of direct engagement with nature through manual labor would produce "a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can now be led amidst the pressures of our competitive institutions" (Frothingham, p. 307). Dozens of such pastoralist communities were founded across the United States and tens of thousands participated in the movement, mounting a direct ideological challenge to capitalism at the moment of its birth.

Ripley's close friend Emerson published an individualist's version of this challenge in an influential little book, Nature (1836), the central manifesto of what has since been dubbed New England transcendentalism. Emerson describes a pantheist divinity immanent in nature and announces that all people potentially can make direct contact with it. Doing so elevates us, for nature's "floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature" (p. 7). Emerson calls on his readers to transform themselves spiritually through contact with the eternal truths of nature and thereby to transform the social world: "As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit" (p. 48). Nature is structured in a somewhat mechanical, rationalist fashion that contrasts with its ideas, but Emerson also experiments with an accretive, sinuous style that he saw as natural; he would make his later essays grow like vines. Moreover, his natural idealism provided his readers, many of whom were elite liberals, with a secular warrant for participation in a wide range of reform projects directed at the growing urban working class, such as temperance and debt-relief campaigns, as well as prison and asylum reform.

The harp at Nature's advent strung

Has never ceased to play;

The song the stars of morning sung

Has never died away.

And prayer is made, and praise is given,

By all things near and far;

The ocean looketh up to heaven,

And mirrors every star.

Its waves are kneeling on the strand,

As kneels the human knee,

Their white locks bowing to the sand,

The priesthood of the sea!

They pour their glittering treasures forth,

Their gifts of pearl they bring,

And all the listening hills of earth

Take up the song they sing.

The green earth sends its incense up

From many a mountain shrine;

From folded leaf and dewy cup

She pours her sacred wine.

The mists above the morning rills

Rise white as wings of prayer;

The altar-curtains of the hills

Are sunset's purple air.

The winds with hymns of praise are loud,

Or low with sobs of pain, —

The thunder-organ of the cloud,

The dropping tears of rain.

With drooping head and branches crossed

The twilight forest grieves,

Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost

From all its sunlit leaves.

The blue sky is the temple's arch,

Its transept earth and air,

The music of its starry march

The chorus of a prayer.

So Nature keeps the reverent frame

With which her years began,

And all her signs and voices shame

The prayerless heart of man.

It also laid the groundwork for more radical ways of thinking about nature's transformative power.

Henry David Thoreau's (1817–1862) Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) enacts and extends Emerson's ideas, telling the story of two years Thoreau spent living in a small cabin he built on the shores of a pond outside Concord, Massachusetts. Walden begins by detailing the mechanical "lives of quiet desperation" that townspeople endure (p. 8). Sullied by the curse of trade and trapped by the unnatural logic of the marketplace, "the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day" (p. 6). Thoreau acts out an organic alternative to town life: he sheds artificial needs and communes with nature, giving himself time to appreciate life's "finer fruits" (p. 6). He arrives in the end at an optimistic conviction that a "beautiful and winged" future lies waiting to spring forth from the "the dead dry life of society" (p. 333). Walden also experiments with the naturalization of literary form, collapsing two years of experience into one and organizing it according to the cycle of the seasons, thus offering the transition from inert winter to glorious spring as a metaphor for individual and social rebirth. Because it so insistently represents nature as a sacred space threatened by a degenerate society, Walden also includes some of the first proto-environmentalist discourse in American literature: Thoreau complains that "the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned Walden" (p. 197). In essays like "Walking," he argues that "in wildness is the preservation of the world" (Collected Essays, p. 239). And in his natural history manuscript Wild Fruits (unpublished until 2000), he calls for the protection of large tracts of wilderness to be held by society as a "common possession forever" (p. 236). Protecting nature was not only an environmental issue for Thoreau but a social one, too. For like Whittier, he saw wild nature as the moral touchstone that inspired his own radicalism, including his commitment to the abolition of slavery and his staunch opposition to American imperial adventures in Mexico.

Nature operates as a utopian alternative to brutal modernity in many other important transcendentalist texts. Margaret Fuller's (1810–1850) travel narrative, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844), represents the West as a potential feminist republic where nature "did not say, Fight or starve; nor even, Work or cease to exist; but, merely showing that the apple was a finer fruit than the wild crab, gave both room to grow in the garden" (p. 26). Caroline Kirkland (1801–1864) describes the western territories as a classless society in her memoir A New Home—Who'll Follow? (1839). In her village "home on the outskirts of civilization" people live "in complete equality" and all "rise with the sun or before him—to breakfast with the chickens." For Kirkland, "this primitive arrangement" serves as an important reminder to those "who are apt occasionally to forget, when speaking of a particular class, that 'those creatures' are partakers with themselves of a common nature" (p. 4). Similarly, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804–1864) The Scarlet Letter (1850), it is only in the forest that Hester Prynne is free to respond naturally to her own physical and emotional impulses. Exiled there by the sexist Puritan theocracy, she is transformed into a wise woman, "self-ordained a Sister of Mercy," for whom the symbolic A has come to mean "Able" (p. 259). In the forest, she decides that "the world's law was no law for her mind" (p. 259), and she immerses herself in the revolutionary spirit of times when "the human intellect, newly emancipated" concludes that "the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew" (p. 260). Likewise, Emily Dickinson's (1830–1886) pastoral lyrics represent nature as a sacred retreat from the pressures of oppressive social institutions:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—

I keep it, staying at Home—

With a Bobolink for a Chorister—

And an Orchard, for a Dome—

(1:260)

Dickinson's poems are wild hymns, cracking the metronomic meter of Protestant church songs and celebrating a redeeming communion with an often feminized natural world.

The transcendentalist vision of nature was by no means universally accepted. For America's most intensively oppressed people, wilderness often seemed to be anything but a safe space. In much African American literature of the mid-nineteenth century, nature is represented as a terrifying wasteland populated by slave hunters and their dogs. Escaped slaves must pass through this anarchic, isolating landscape on their way to the North, where a truer freedom is protected by law and the organized black community. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), nature stands as a terrorizing obstacle to escape from the South. Imagining the road north, Douglass (1818–1895) envisions a wilderness of the worst sort: "after swimming rivers, encountering wild beasts, sleeping in the woods, suffering hunger and nakedness,—we were overtaken by our pursuers, and, in our resistance, we were shot dead upon the spot!" (p. 74). In Douglass's novella The Heroic Slave (1853), however, nature is a more ambiguous space. The hero, Madison Washington, first articulates his desire for freedom in a "dark pine forest" near "a sparkling brook" (p. 177). But after his escape, he spends five purgatorial years as a refugee in "dismal swamps," wandering "at night with the wolf and the bear" until an apocalyptic forest fire drives him out, forcing him to make his way north to Canada (p. 193). Similarly, in Harriet Jacobs's (1813–1897) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Linda Brent is forced to hide in "Snaky Swamp," passing a "wretched night" tortured by insects and paralyzed by fear. Even so, she remarks that the swamp's "venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized" (pp. 112–113).

A second alternative to the transcendentalist spiritualization of nature appears, paradoxically, in the work of the most wholly city-based writers of the period. A powerful ideological current among the developing working class focused on "free soil" as a solution to urban poverty. Radical figures like the newspaper editor George Henry Evans and the labor leader Stephen Simpson called on the federal government to distribute western homesteads to relieve chronic unemployment. Their crusade centered on the claim that access to productive soil was a natural right, commensurate with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Nature was not an otherworldly retreat or alternative moral order but a material necessity, the ground of a productive and independent livelihood. Herman Melville's (1819–1891) powerful indictment of labor relations under capitalism, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853), stages the consequences of workers' alienation from the physical earth. The protagonist is a tortured copyist imprisoned in a Wall Street workspace that is "deficient in what landscape painters call 'life'" (p. 636). Bartleby declares a solitary strike against this oppressively unnatural world. In the end, he finds peace by dying in a prison, the Tombs, next to an emblematic patch of grass, "a soft imprisoned turf" that has grown "by some strange magic" in the "heart of the eternal pyramids" (p. 671).

Similarly, in Walt Whitman's (1819–1892) Leaves of Grass (1855), nature is the physical ground of all human life, whether economic, spiritual, or political. Beginning from the egalitarian principle that "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (p. 27), Whitman offers a utopian alternative to the shallow utilitarianism and turgid piety of his contemporaries: "That I eat and drink is spectacle enough for the great authors and schools, / A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books" (p. 52). Whitman celebrates the irreducible physicality and naturalness of all things, including people, in breathless catalogs. His secular, democratic scriptures radically transvalue the mundane world of nineteenth-century capitalism, compelling us to see the natural beauty of the world's body and our own, showing us that "a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars" (p. 57).

Unstable and multivalent though it was, the idea of "nature" was absolutely central to the history and culture of the nineteenth-century United States. It authorized westward expansion by marking the unsettled continent as raw wilderness awaiting cultivation. Native Americans were represented as occupants of the unimproved state of nature, as primitive savages requiring civilization or displacement. They contested this designation, harnessing the power of print to argue that they were just as civilized, perhaps more so, than their hypocritical adversaries. Once the dislocation of the eastern tribes was complete, native culture was revalued, becoming the subject of compensatory nostalgia for a natural life on the land. Then, as capitalism radically transformed both social hierarchies and the physical environment, this pastoral vision of harmony with nature became a complex moral touch-stone for America's most powerful critics, the New England transcendentalists. The value of nature was challenged by the African Americans and women who were the subjects of the period's struggles for human equality; nevertheless, nature did much to inspire truly radical criticism of the young nation's most fundamental contradictions and discords.

See also Leatherstocking Tales; Nature; Romanticism; Transcendentalism; Wilderness

Lance Newman