Transcendentalism (1835 -1860)

A religious, philosophical, and literary movement, it arose in New England in the middle of the
19th century.
It began as a religious concept rooted in the ideas of American Democracy. When a group of
Boston ministers, one of whom Ralph Waldo Emerson, decided that the Unitarian Church had
become too conservative, they adopted a new religious philosophy, one which privileged the
innate wisdom in the human soul over church doctrine and law.
Among its followers: Emerson, Thoreau, M. Fuller, Walt Whitman and other social theorists and
reformers.
Authors N. Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe also felt its
influence.
Its no coincidence that this movement took off just as the American Literary tradition was
beginning to blossom. Though inspired by German and British Romanticism, it was a distinctly
American movement that primarily connected to beliefs about American individualism.
In addition to the theme of American democracy, transcendentalist literature promotes the idea
of nature as divine and the human soul as inherently wise. Transcendentalism also had a
political dimension and some writers put their transcendentalist beliefs into action through acts
of civil disobedience against taxation and the Fugitive slave law, which they found immoral.
The 19th century was a volatile one, beginning with the hope and promise of democracy and the
development of an American Identity and moving towards mass devastation and division.
Slavery and the Civil War, womens rights, growing industrialism and class division all of these
factors were influential and each had a role to play in the transcendentalist movement.