UNIT 46

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: FROM

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE TO THE CIVIL WAR. MAIN REFERENCE NOVELS

0. INTRODUCTION
1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
1.1. Colonial America: Political History
2. A HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: FROM THE
WAR OF INDEPENDENCE TO THE CIVIL WAR
2.1. The American War of Independence
2.1.1 The confederation Era
2.1.2 The Constitution of the United States
2.1.3 The Industrial Revolution
2.1.4 The California Gold Rush (1848- 1855)
2.2. The Civil War (1861-1865)
3. MAIN REFERENCE NOVELS: THE SCARLET LETTER AND THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
4.1. Literary Background
4.2. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
4.2.1. The Scarlet Letter
4.3. Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
4.3.1. The Red Badge of Courage
3. CONCLUSION
4. BIBLIOGRAPHY
0. INTRODUCTION

This unit aims to introduce the historical development of the United States of America
from the War of Independence to the Civil War. This will help us to examine the link between
the changing social, economic, political, cultural and technological conditions of this period,
and the colonial literature of nineteenth-century in America, represented by two novels of
reference, namely The Scarlet Letter and The Red Badge of Courage.

In order to provide a whole account of the historical development of the United States
of America from the War of Independence (1778) to the Civil War (1861), it is essential to
build up a picture of the situation before 1778 which, not only takes us back nearly one
century and a half, but also moves us between two continents: America and Europe, that is,
between the New World Colonies (New England) and England. Thus, once the historical
context has been analysed, we shall address the literary context, which gave birth to
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Stephen Crane.

1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

1.1. Colonial America: Political History

The 1st Europeans to arrive in America were Spanish conquerors such as Juan Ponce
de Leó n in Florida in 1513. The first permanent British colony was established in
Jamestown (1607), Virginia (for the virgin queen) in 1607. Over the next several centuries
more colonies were established in North America, Central America, South America, and the
Caribbean.

In 1620, a group of Puritans established a second permanent colony, Plymouth

(1620), a Colony founded by a group of Puritan Separatists initially known as the Brownest
Emigration, who came to be known as the Pilgrims. It was the second successful colony to be
founded by the English in the United States after Jamestown in Virginia, and it was the first
permanent English settlement in the New England region.

The puritans were looking for other place to establish leaving Britain because they
considered its culture was becoming too permissive in terms of religion. Puritans were
dissatisfied with the limited extent of the English Reformation and with the Church of
England's toleration of certain practices associated with the Roman Catholic Church. The
Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the
Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had
not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. America was settled & many
native Americans were killed, died of disease or lost their lands.

The English colonies were thirteen: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode
Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Georgia. Although all these British colonies were strikingly different,
throughout the 17th and 18th centuries several events took place, bringing relevant changes,
such as the final separation from England.

2. A HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: FROM THE

WAR OF INDEPENDENCE TO THE CIVIL WAR

2.1. The American War of Independence

The Origins of the war

Until the 1760s, most Americans seemed content to be ruled by the British
government, for it rarely interfered in the colonial affairs. Each colony had become self-
sufficient with their own systems of governance.
The cordial relationship between Great Britain and the American colonies soured
shortly after the Seven Years war (1754-1763) when King George III’s ministers tried to
have a stronger grip on the Colonies’ economic and social life by aiming at raising money to
pay for the war outlay without their consent > Treaty of Paris (1763)
A series of taxes and acts that started being launched, such as the Sugar Act, the
Stamp Act (colonies slogan “No taxation without representation”) and the Townshend
Acts, created a wave of agitation, which worsened with the Boston Massacre in 1770,
where British troops fired on the crowd killing several colonists. In addition, in May 1773
another rather controversial law, the Tea Act, was passed. As a response, American Indians
dressed up as native Indians, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India
Company. They boarded the ships and threw the chests of tea into the Boston Harbor, the
Boston Tea Party (1770). In 1774, the British Parliament responded with the ‘Intolerable
Acts’, which ended local self-government in Massachusetts and closed Boston's commerce.
To support Massachusetts against these punitive actions, all the other twelve colonies sent
their delegates to decide together how to respond. Thus, the First Continental Congress
gathered in 1774 in Philadelphia. The crisis escalated, and the American Revolutionary
War began near Boston in 1775.

The War

When the Second Continental Congress met in May 1775, it voted to create a
Continental Army, debated over the strategy to be followed and chose George Washington
to command. After ten years of political, economic and social controversy, war between the
American colonies and England had broken out.
The 4th of July 1776, having been at war for one year, The Declaration of
Independence, which had been drafted by Thomas Jefferson, was approved by the
Continental Progress. It claimed that all men had a natural right to <life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness>. However, a long war had to be fought before actual independence
from England was achieved. The finale was at Yorktown in 1781, which meant the definite
defeat of the British: the Americans had won their independence.
The Americans achieved a diplomatic triumph in the Treaty of Paris (1783), which
recognized the independence of the United States, established its boundaries and stated that
America was now a federal system without a king. The British agreed to move all their forces
out of America. As a consequence, a generalised optimism started to grow.

The Rising of a nation

After the declaration of Independence, America underwent a considerable series of

events which shaped the new nation.

2.1.1. The confederation Era

The Declaration of Independence had transformed the colonies into 13 independent

states. What happened was that each former colony started writing a different constitution
and, when it came to creating a central government, the Congress could not agree on how
much power it should have. The leaders in most states guarded their independence and did
not cherish a strong national government. The document they finally came up with was the
Articles of Confederation (1777), which served as the United States' first constitution. It
created a single branch of government -the Congress. Each state had now a vote and there
was no president and no Supreme Court. The problem was that the central government was
left powerless since the states started behaving like individual and independent nations.

2.1.2. The Constitution of the United States

In May 1787, delegates from the 13 states met at Philadelphia’s State House with the
purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. After many disagreements, a new
constitution was signed (1789): a federal government with three branches was created to
ensure that no individual or group had too much power and to avoid individualistic behavior
again, namely the executive (the President), the legislative (Congress), and the judicial
(the courts).
The new Congress met again in 1789. Republican James Madison proposed several
amendments to the Constitution, ten of which were approved in 1791 by the 13 states and
named the Bill of Rights, thus securing the basic rights and freedom of the Americans.
The federalists dominated the government under the nation’s first two presidents:
George Washington and John Adams. Nevertheless, Washington’s program generated
strong political opposition and, by 1800, political parties were taking shape and John Adams
lost to Anti-Federalist, or Republican, Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809). Thus, the nation
began a new century.

2.1.3. The Industrial Revolution

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the country had developed a solid sense
of national unity, which was further strengthened by the growth of industry and the
advances in transportation. The development of American industry was greatly influenced
by the innovations of England’s industrial revolution. Amongst the many advances, we
may mention manufacturing and the extensive programme of road building, which meant
the knitting of towns and cities. Moreover, by 1830 thousands of miles of canals were built.
All of this led to a phenomenon of urbanization which increased the workforce.
However, the beginnings of this industrial system affected regions in different ways.
Whereas the Northeast was becoming the center of manufacturing, the South became
increasingly dependent on slave labour, which threatened the nation’s unity.

2.1.4. The California Gold Rush (1848- 1855)

The California Gold Rush began when some gold nuggets were found by chance in
northern California. Throughout 1849, the news of gold brought approximately 300,000
people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. The effects of the Gold
Rush were substantial: on the one hand, whole indigenous societies were pushed off their
lands by the gold-seekers; on the other hand, due to the huge number of migrants,
California’s population grew considerably. Since California’s constitution was abolitionist, its
entry into the Union steadied out the pro- and anti-slavery balance in the Senate. In other
words, the Gold Rush brought back the issue of slavery.

2.2. The Civil War (1861-1865)

By 1804, every state North of Delaware had abolished slavery but, although Jefferson
had abolished the foreign slave trade in 1808, he had not interfered with the internal slave
trade. As previously stated, the Age of Reform (1820-1850) had brought a marked
deterioration in American national unity: industry had developed at a fast pace in the North,
while the South relied on farming its plantations, thanks to slave labour, which many
Northerners opposed. The issue of slavery had erupted nationally and both North and South
started colliding.
 Decades of political controversy over slavery were brought back by the victory in the
1860 presidential election of Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865), who opposed slavery's
expansion into the west. His condemnation of slavery was rejected by the Southern states
and they left the Union to form the Confederate States of America. This immediately
divided the nation into supporters of the North, the Union, who were fighting for abolition,
and the South, the Confederacy, the secessionists who fought to preserve slavery.
The outcome of this event was the American Civil War (1861-1865), a particularly
bloody conflict that divided the American people.
After Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, freeing slaves in
the Confederate states, which was partly a strategic move to help the North win the war,
African Americans enlisted in large numbers in the Union.
The war became a lost cause for the Confederacy after the Battle of Gettysburg in
1863, although they fought until 1865, when general Lee, who commanded the Confederate
armies, was forced to surrender in Virginia, thus ending the war. On April 14, just five days
after Lee's surrender, Lincoln was assassinated.
The Union had been preserved, but a legacy of bitterness and hatred remained for
several years. After Lincoln was shot in Washington in 1865, Andrew Johnson became
president.
The main consequences of the civil war were:
 The destruction of the system and economy of the South. A great number of
plantations, railroads and cities were ruined.
 Newly freed slaves were now considered citizens and enjoyed a first taste of
political participation. However, these freedmen faced an uncertain future, for most
of them had no land or money and were illiterate.
 The White Backlash: many southern white people were bitter about the new rights
given to African Americans and aimed at restoring ‘white supremacy’. Eventually,
some joined secret societies such as the Ku Klux Klan, which aimed at suppressing
newly freed slaves.

3. MAIN REFERENCE NOVELS: THE SCARLET LETTER AND THE RED BADGE OF
COURAGE

3.1. Literary Background

Before introducing what, many scholars consider two of the reference novels of the
nineteenth century, it is paramount to at least briefly present the literary flourishing that
took place in the 1850s, for no other period of American literature was ever as productive as
this.
The American Renaissance, a landmark movement that started around the late
1830s and faded with the American Civil War in 1861, showed a sense of innovative
discovery that reached its peak by mid-century. Over five remarkable years between 1850
and 1855 appeared Emersons’s Representative Men (1850), Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
(1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Harriet B.
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Walt
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), all of which were a reflection of some of the most striking
events that had been taking place. For instance, Uncle Tom’s Cabin vividly dramatizes the
experience of slavery that had become the order of the day. It was the time of Dark
Romanticism and Transcendentalism, two movements that influenced, one way or
another, Hawthorne.
On the other hand, a few decades later in the 1890s, the influence of Naturalism on
American Literature took place, thereby shaping the writing styles of authors such as
Stephen Crane. Naturalism was a harsher form of realism. It emphasised scientific
observation of life without idealism or avoidance of the ugly. American literature naturalists
attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social
and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and heredity. It introduced
a different perception of human consciousness: man was now placed at the centre of an
aggressive reality, where survival depended on strength, and was ignored by nature.

3.2. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Novelist and short-story writer, he is regarded as one of the greatest fiction authors
in American literature. His two most remarkable works were The Scarlet Letter (1850) and
The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the scene of the famous witchcraft trial
of 1662. His ancestors had lived in Salem since the 17th century and, in fact, his earliest
American ancestor, a staunch defender of Puritan orthodoxy, was a magistrate who had
sentenced a Quaker woman to public whipping, which paved the way for The Scarlet Letter’s
plot and conditioned the author’s mood of sin and guilt. The novel made him famous and it
was eventually recognized as one of the greatest American novels.
Hawthorne’s prose style is remarkable for its directness and clarity. Furthermore, his
moral insight was extraordinary, for he was deeply concerned with the concepts of original
sin, guilt and evil, which he believed were the most inherent, natural qualities of humanity.
In this sense and as a dark romantic, he rejected what he saw as the Transcendentalists’
optimism about human nature. Instead, he looked more deeply into life, finding suffering and
conflict. Nonetheless, he also believed in the necessity for warm human relationships and the
redeeming power of love.
One further reason for Hawthorne’s eminence was his mastery of symbolism, which
was particularly effective in The Scarlet Letter.

3.2.1. The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Although it was frequently denounced as licentious, The Scarlet Letter was a literary
sensation in the US and Great Britain, and Hawthorne was proclaimed as the finest
American romancer.

Plot

The action is set in the 17th century Puritan community of colonial Boston, in New England.
The main character, Hester Prynne, gives birth to an illegitimate daughter, Pearl, and is
humiliated in the public square, after leaving prison, by being forced to wear the badge of
adultery, a scarlet “A”. She refuses to identify her lover, who happens to be the young pastor
of the community Arthur Dimmesdale, very much respected and admired by his
parishioners. At the same time, after several years abroad, Hester’s husband returns to the
community and witnesses his wife’s humiliation. In order to keep his identity secret, he
takes a false name, Roger Chillingworth, to torment the pastor, whom he rightly suspects to
be Pearl’s father. After many years of being psychologically devastated by his own sense of
guilt for not revealing the truth publicly, and due to Chilloingworth’s constant torment,
Dimmesdale gathers the courage to acknowledge his sin in public, after which he dies in
Hester’s arms. Only Hester can face the future bravely and begins a new life with Pearl, in
Europe. Years later, Hester returns to New England, where she continues to wear the scarlet
letter.

Critical commentary

The Scarlet Letter is a historical romance that focuses on adulterous love. The story
actually starts not with the love affair itself but with its consequence: adultery and public
humiliation. While it is true that Hawthorne was critical of the narrowness, intolerance and
cruelty of Puritanism, all of which explored in the novel, he did share the idea of man’s
partial depravity and also believed in the reality of sin and guilt, as we have previously
mentioned. With this novel, therefore, what he tries to do is penetrate the deepest levels
of human psychology, where conscience, guilt and sin function.
On the other hand, the book is also a moral allegory and a novel of signs and
symbols, concealments and revelations, hidden truths and public confessions. The
scarlet letter itself, for instance, appears in different places apart from Hester's breast:
inscribed upon the night sky, as seen by Dimmesdale, and on his own chest. To give another
illustration, we might argue that the literal and symbolic are intertwined and indivisible in
the wilderness, which is the setting for Hester and Dimmesdale's adultery where they meet
twice: the first time to commit adultery, the second one to plan their escape. For its part, the
town mirrors civilization, the province of God's law, where the scaffold dominates the scene:
it presides the beginning of the narrative with Hester bearing her punishment, its middle
with Dimmesdale speaking out in the secrecy of night, and its end with his final confession
and death.
As for the characters, Hester represents the natural liberty in conflict with Puritan
theocracy and its restrictive cruelty. Being a Puritan, she regards her action as sinful, and
willingly repents it; but her adultery is also an expression of love that she will never repent.
What is most honourable and human about her is the fact that she eventually manages to
transform the meaning of the letter from something humiliating into a symbol of freedom,
independence and personal growth.
Unlike Hester, Dimmesdale is unable to confess his sin, owing to a mixture of
cowardice and loyalty to his ministry. He prefers to spend years in secrecy to be exemplary
in front of his loyal parishioners. Thus, Hester is the epitome of morality and exemplary
behaviour which clashes with the sin of hypocrisy and cowardice embodied by the pastor.
For his part, Chillingworth is blinded by hatred and an undying self-consuming
revenge. He is a coldly scientist and intellectual who possesses no warmth and who is eager
to intrude upon the privacy of others so long as he achieves his goals.
Finally, Pearl is an ambiguous figure, at times innocent and others smiling with malice and
puzzling both Hester and Dimmesdale, for she’s a daughter of the devil for the contemporary
Puritans and a child of nature for the 19 th century Romanticism. On leaving for Europe,
marrying there and becoming a mother, she sends back a gleam of hope amidst the gloom.

3.3. Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

Born in New Jersey, Crane was the son of a Methodist minister but rejected religious
and social traditions and identified with the urban poor. He was a poet, a journalist, a social
critic, and a realist.
Crane spent less than two years at college and then went to New York City where,
while alternating bohemian student life and explorations of the Bowery slums in Manhattan,
he wrote his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a powerful picture of the New
York slums and a sympathetic study of an innocent and abused slum girl’s descent into
prostitution and her eventual suicide. Two years later, he came into fame with his
remarkable study of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage.
Following Maggie, Crane developed the technique of impressionism, which relied on
the subjective point of view of the characters and the depiction of sensory details to convey
an ‘impression’ of a person or event on the reader. His technique had a great impact on
writers such as Hemingway and the American fiction of the twenties in general.
Although he died at the age of 28, Crane left enough outstanding fiction to be placed
amongst the best American novelists and short-story writers of the 19th century.
3.3.1. The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

Plot

The main character, Henry Fleming, is a young man and recent recruit for the Civil War.
Henry is eager to demonstrate his patriotism in a glorious battle, but when the slaughter
starts, he is overwhelmed with fear and flees the battlefield. Ironically, he receives his “red
badge of courage” when he is slightly wounded by being struck on the head by a deserter.
Eventually, the courage of common soldiers cures him of his romantic notions. Back with his
regiment, in the heat of battle, he leads the charge. Thus, he becomes a hero and continues to
fight with true courage and without illusions.

Critical commentary

Although Crane had not witnessed war, the story was brilliantly elaborated due to his
readings of military memoirs and accounts of the Civil War. The novel marked the beginning
of modern American literature for it was the first non-romantic novel of the Civil War, which
had until then been handled with a sentimental tone. Crane, instead, described it with
criticism and objectivity, for he intended it to be a psychological and realistic portrayal of
fear. Following further naturalistic premises, the novel is based on a historical event and
provides an objective view of the facts, it reflects pessimism both in the characters and the
war, and, as for irony, the title itself is ironic, for the red badge of courage is just the
consequence of a cowardly act.
It is in the settings of the novel that we find a rich source of symbolism and traces of
Naturalism, for the author shifts from one fundamental naturalist setting, the city, to
another, the battlefield, which is a symbol of reality at its most extreme, an aggressive world
assaulting consciousness and existence. At the end, we are told that Henry comes to feel at
home in this world, which some critics read as the story of his initiation into manhood. On
the other hand, there are two simultaneous currents flowing in the story: a physical war,
with two sides of the same country fighting each other, and a psychological one, with two
parts of the human mind battling against one another to find their own identity, for Henry
wants to become the perfect hero but his unrealistic preconceptions of war’s nature are
betrayed by chaos and bloodshed.
Naturalism questioned moral values, dominant social assumptions, social and
political power and the limits of literary form. It was a literature of reportage and social
intervention that insisted on the exploration of fact. Influenced by all of this, the secret of
Crane’s success lay in his ability to master tensions between irony and pity, illusion and
reality together with hope and despair, as portrayed by Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of
Courage.