Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War

by Philip F. Gura

Overview

Banks failed, credit contracted, inequality grew, and people everywhere were out of work while political paralysis and slavery threatened to rend the nation in two. As financial crises always have, the Panic of 1837 drew forth a plethora of reformers who promised to restore America to greatness. Animated by an ethic of individualism and self-reliance, they became prophets of a new moral order: if only their fellow countrymen would call on each individual’s God-given better instincts, the most intractable problems could be resolved.

Inspired by this reformist fervor, Americans took to strict dieting, water cures, phrenology readings, mesmerism, utopian communities, free love, mutual banking, and a host of other elaborate self-improvement schemes. Vocal activists were certain that solutions to the country’s ills started with the reformation of individuals, and through them communities, and through communities the nation. This set of assumptions ignored the hard political and economic realities at the core of the country’s malaise, however, and did nothing to prevent another financial panic twenty years later, followed by secession and civil war.

Focusing on seven individuals—George Ripley, Horace Greeley, William B. Greene, Orson Squire Fowler, Mary Gove Nichols, Henry David Thoreau, and John Brown—Philip Gura explores their efforts, from the comical to the homicidal, to beat a new path to prosperity. A narrative of people and ideas, Man’s Better Angels captures an intellectual moment in American history that has been overshadowed by the Civil War and the pragmatism that arose in its wake.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674978140
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/10/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Philip F. Gura is William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction 1. George Ripley, Transcendentalist Dreamer 2. Horace Greeley and the French Connection 3. William B. Greene and the Allure of Mutualism 4. Orson Squire Fowler: Reading the National Character, for a Price 5. Mary Gove Nichols: Individual Health and Sovereignty 6. Thoreau’s Nullification 7. John Brown and the Bankruptcy of Conscience Notes Acknowledgments Index

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/13/2017
In this absorbing and lucid study, Gura, a professor of American literature and culture at UNC–Chapel Hill, examines the reform movement in the quarter century before the outbreak of the Civil War. Focusing on both well-known figures, such as Henry David Thoreau and Horace Greeley, and less familiar ones, such as Mary Gove Nichols and William B. Greene, Gura depicts these individuals as struggling to make sense of the drastic economic and social changes that were reshaping the U.S. in this era, particularly the Panic of 1837. In Gura’s view, these intellectuals contributed to “the bankruptcy of an American liberalism” in the mid-19th century, as they attributed even nationwide financial crises to the moral failures of individuals rather than structures and institutions. This failure to distinguish between personal and societal agency rendered these well-intentioned people’s writings incapable of contributing to the resolution of their nation’s problems, and also resulted in John Brown’s tragic raid on Harpers Ferry. Reformist intellectuals believed so deeply in the power of a single person to produce social change that they were willing to give moral and financial support to Brown’s bloody and futile crusade. Gura’s book is deeply pessimistic about individual efficacy in response to social crises, which remains relevant in the 21st century. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

With keen insight and in lucid prose, Philip Gura explores the antebellum crisis through the lives and thought of leading reformers as they clung to the innate goodness of human nature while struggling to cope with the structural power of slavery and capitalist finance, ending with John Brown, who sought to purge the land through blood and violence.

Alan Taylor

Scholars interested in the antebellum United States will find this highly readable book engaging and informative. Gura provides a fascinating window into one aspect of the antebellum United States.

Canadian Journal of History - Lesley J. Gordon

[An] elegant volume…Read after the 2016 election, Gura’s intriguing book, written before it, does shed a kinder light on his benighted reformers, whose commitment to free expression, individual dignity, and social justice reminds us of the importance of dissent—all manner of dissent—and of the power inherent in the individual’s ability to say no. Yet Man’s Better Angels also highlights the willful political ignorance and purposeful childishness with which so many of these reformers confronted, at least in the 1840s, the grievously unfree world in which they lived.

The Nation - Brenda Wineapple

Gura wrote this book in the wake of America’s 2008 financial crisis, which made him well attuned to the question of how individuals and institutions can be complicit in national trauma… In a moment where both national political parties seem poised for realignments and self-reflection, Gura’s work can help point us toward the long history of that very dilemma.

Civil War Monitor

Man's Better Angels is the most original and important book on antebellum reform to appear in years. Philip Gura shows how the Panic of 1837 functioned as a kind of centrifuge, inspiring new visions of reform in all directions, pushing the nation further and further from its cultural and institutional center. A magisterial work and a pleasure to read.

John Stauffer

This book provides the best interpretation to date for the origins of this golden era of American cultural and economic experimentation, whose eclecticism and vision, he rightly asserts, have gone unappreciated.

Journal of the Early Republic - Tim Roberts

When democracy itself seems to go off the rails, do you give up and compromise your principles or double down on them? With the impeccable timing of a master historian, Philip Gura invites us to reconsider the costs of self-righteousness as a response to structural injustice. By reconsidering seven reformers who doubled down in the decades before the Civil War, Man's Better Angels will make you rethink your own responses to the worst of times.

Scott A. Sandage

Gura…brilliantly connects the harsh privation of the 1837 depression to the intellectual and spiritual reform movements that emerged in the 1840s and ’50s. He does so by offering us seven roughly sequential portraits of American reformers in which he tethers their idealism to real suffering and their very tangible awareness of the ways their community had failed its members. Linking the cultural and intellectual ferment in the 1840s to the economic failure of 1837 is particularly appropriate at a time when only the oldest Americans can remember pre–New Deal America. Softened by Social Security, Medicaid and the various federal handouts that are now on the chopping block, contemporary Americans can barely imagine how an old-fashioned depression smacked people sideways with bankruptcies, penury, displacement and biting shame.

Wall Street Journal - Carol Bundy

Lucid and engaging…Man’s Better Angels should be a valuable introduction for students new to the study of antebellum reform. I imagine its claims will also fuel hearty debate in graduate seminars.

Journal of Social History - Patrick Mulford O’Connor

A lively and engaging jeremiad on the failure of individualism as a source of social reform. Gura's examination of antebellum reformers' efforts to address economic and social dislocations speaks to our own moment as well.

Robert S. Levine

Philip Gura has written a provocative and timely examination of the spectrum of antebellum reform advocates and initiatives that flourished during the years between the nation's first major economic crisis and the Civil War. Confronting the era's most glaring ills—runaway capitalism and plantation slavery—a strikingly variegated brew of men and women, holding to high-minded but quixotic principles, proved impotent to correct the country's course.

Lawrence Buell

Lucid and engaging…Man’s Better Angels should be a valuable introduction for students new to the study of antebellum reform. I imagine its claims will also fuel hearty debate in graduate seminars.

Journal of Social History - Patrick Mulford O’Connor

★ 03/01/2017
Gura (The Life of William Apess, Pequot) offers captivating portraits of antebellum reformists George Ripley, Horace Greeley, William B. Greene, Orson Squire Fowler, Mary Gove Nichols, Henry David Thoreau, and John Brown, along with their somewhat fanciful programs for national improvement. These characters ostensibly took aim at the time's principal evils: capitalism and slavery. According to the author, they were convinced that remedies to America's moral challenges should largely follow a natural progression from individual to community to country. Their introductory self-improvement schemes included restricted dieting, utopian communities, water cures, and more. Particularly interesting are the trials and triumphs of Ripley's Brook Farm, Greeley's devotion to French social theorists, Greene's war on acquisitive capitalism, Nichols's torturous personal water regimens, and Thoreau's school of individualism. Gura concludes that most of these social programs did little to nothing to avoid or correct the confounding political, social, and economic challenges which would beset the United States, beginning with the Panic of 1857 and the Civil War. VERDICT An invaluable contribution to U.S. Middle Period scholarship. Recommended for social, intellectual, and Civil War historians, students of America's sundry reform movements, and general readers.--John Carver Edwards, formerly with Univ. of Georgia Libs.

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