Young America movement
Encyclopedia
The Young America Movement was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 political and cultural attitude in the mid-nineteenth century. Inspired by European
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 reform movements of the 1830s (see Young Italy, Young Hegelians
Young Hegelians
The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians, were a group of Prussian intellectuals who in the decade or so after the death of Hegel in 1831, wrote and responded to his ambiguous legacy...

), the American group was formed as a political organization in 1845 by Edwin de Leon
Edwin De Leon
Edwin De Leon was a Confederate diplomat, writer, and journalist.-Biography:De Leon was born in Columbia, South Carolina of parents Mordecai Hendricks De Leon and Rebecca Lopez...

 and George H. Evans
George Henry Evans
Born in England, George H Evans was a radical reformer, with experience in the Working Men's movement of 1829 and the trade union movements of the 1830s...

. It advocated free trade, social reform, expansion southward into the territories, and support for republican, anti-aristocratic
Republicanism
Republicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context...

 movements abroad. It became a faction in the Democratic Party in the 1850s. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas
Stephen A. Douglas
Stephen Arnold Douglas was an American politician from the western state of Illinois, and was the Northern Democratic Party nominee for President in 1860. He lost to the Republican Party's candidate, Abraham Lincoln, whom he had defeated two years earlier in a Senate contest following a famed...

 promoted its nationalistic program in an unsuccessful effort to compromise sectional differences.

Perhaps John L. O'Sullivan
John L. O'Sullivan
John Louis O'Sullivan was an American columnist and editor who used the term "Manifest Destiny" in 1845 to promote the annexation of Texas and the Oregon Country to the United States. O'Sullivan was an influential political writer and advocate for the Democratic Party at that time, but he faded...

 captured the general purpose of the Young America Movement in an 1837 editorial for the Democratic Review
The United States Magazine and Democratic Review
The United States Magazine and Democratic Review was a periodical published from 1837–1859 by John L. O'Sullivan. Its motto, "The best government is that which governs least," was famously paraphrased by Henry David Thoreau in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.-History:In 1837, O'Sullivan...

:
Historian Edward L. Widmer
Edward L. Widmer
Edward Ladd Widmer is a historian, writer, and librarian, who served as a speechwriter in the later days of the Clinton White House.His parents were Eric G. Widmer and Ellen B. Widmer...

 has largely placed O'Sullivan and the Democratic Review in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 at the center of the Young America Movement. In that sense, the movement can be considered mostly urban and middle class, but with a strong emphasis on socio-political reform for all Americans, especially given the burgeoning European immigrant population (particularly Irish-Catholics
Irish Catholic
Irish Catholic is a term used to describe people who are both Roman Catholic and Irish .Note: the term is not used to describe a variant of Catholicism. More particularly, it is not a separate creed or sect in the sense that "Anglo-Catholic", "Old Catholic", "Eastern Orthodox Catholic" might be...

) in New York in the 1840s.

Politics

Historian Yonatan Eyal argues that the 1840s and 1850s were the heyday of the faction of young Democrats that called itself "Young America." Led by Stephen Douglas, James K. Polk
James K. Polk
James Knox Polk was the 11th President of the United States . Polk was born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. He later lived in and represented Tennessee. A Democrat, Polk served as the 17th Speaker of the House of Representatives and the 12th Governor of Tennessee...

 and Franklin Pierce
Franklin Pierce
Franklin Pierce was the 14th President of the United States and is the only President from New Hampshire. Pierce was a Democrat and a "doughface" who served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. Pierce took part in the Mexican-American War and became a brigadier general in the Army...

, and New York financier August Belmont
August Belmont
August Belmont, Sr. was an American politician.-Early life:August Belmont was born in Alzey, Hesse, on December 8, 1813--some sources say 1816--to Simon and Frederika Elsass Schönberg, a Jewish family. After his mother's death, when he was seven, he lived with his uncle and grandmother in Frankfurt...

, this faction explains, broke with the agrarian and strict constructionist orthodoxies of the past and embraced commerce, technology, regulation, reform, and internationalism.

In economic policy Young America saw the necessity of a modern infrastructure with railroads, canals, telegraphs, turnpikes, and harbors; they endorsed the "Market Revolution
Market Revolution
The Market Revolution in the United States was a drastic change in the manual labor system originating in south and later spread to the entire world. Traditional commerce was made obsolete by improvements in transportation and communication. This change prompted the reincarnation of the...

" and promoted capitalism. They called for Congressional land grants to the states, which allowed Democrats to claim that internal improvements
Internal improvements
Internal improvements is the term used historically in the United States for public works from the end of the American Revolution through much of the 19th century, mainly for the creation of a transportation infrastructure: roads, turnpikes, canals, harbors and navigation improvements...

 were locally rather than federally sponsored. Young America claimed that modernization would perpetuate the agrarian vision of Jeffersonian Democracy
Jeffersonian democracy
Jeffersonian Democracy, so named after its leading advocate Thomas Jefferson, is a term used to describe one of two dominant political outlooks and movements in the United States from the 1790s to the 1820s. The term was commonly used to refer to the Democratic-Republican Party which Jefferson...

 by allowing yeomen farmers to sell their products and therefore to prosper. They tied internal improvements to free trade, while accepted moderate tariffs as a necessary source of government revenue. They supported the Independent Treasury (the Jacksonian alternative to the Second Bank of the United States) not as a scheme to quash the special privilege”of the Whiggish monied elite, but as a device to spread prosperity to all Americans.

The movement's decline by 1856 was due to unsuccessful challenges to "old fogy" leaders like James Buchanan
James Buchanan
James Buchanan, Jr. was the 15th President of the United States . He is the only president from Pennsylvania, the only president who remained a lifelong bachelor and the last to be born in the 18th century....

, Douglas' failure to win the presidential nomination in 1852, an inability to deal with the slavery issue, and rising isolationism and disenchantment with reform in America.

Manifest Destiny

When O'Sullivan coined the term "Manifest Destiny" in an 1845 article for the Democratic Review, he did not necessarily intend for American democracy to expand across the continent by force. In effect, the American democratic principle was to spread on its own, self-evident merits. The American exceptionalism
American exceptionalism
American exceptionalism refers to the theory that the United States is qualitatively different from other countries. In this view, America's exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming "the first new nation," and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty,...

  often attached to O'Sullivan's "Manifest Destiny" was an 1850s perversion that can be attributed to what Widmer called "Young America II." O'Sullivan even contended that American "democracy needed to expand in order to contain its ideological opponent (aristocracy
Aristocracy
Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...

)." Yet unlike Europe in the nineteenth century, America had no particular aristocratic structure against which Young America could define itself.

Culture

Aside from Young America's promotion of Jacksonian Democracy
Jacksonian democracy
Jacksonian democracy is the political movement toward greater democracy for the common man typified by American politician Andrew Jackson and his supporters. Jackson's policies followed the era of Jeffersonian democracy which dominated the previous political era. The Democratic-Republican Party of...

 in the Democratic Review, the movement also had a literary side. It attracted a circle of outstanding writers, including William Cullen Bryant
William Cullen Bryant
William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post.-Youth and education:...

, George Bancroft
George Bancroft
George Bancroft was an American historian and statesman who was prominent in promoting secondary education both in his home state and at the national level. During his tenure as U.S. Secretary of the Navy, he established the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845...

, Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....

 and Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...

. They sought independence from European standards of high culture and wanted to demonstrate the excellence and exceptionalism of America’s own literary tradition. Other writers of the movement included Evert Augustus Duyckinck
Evert Augustus Duyckinck
Evert Augustus Duyckinck was an American publisher and biographer. He was associated with the literary side of the Young America movement in New York.-Life and work:...

 and Cornelius Mathews
Cornelius Mathews
Cornelius Mathews , was an American writer, best known for his crucial role in the formation of a literary group known as Young America in the late 1830s, with editor Evert Duyckinck and author William Gilmore Simms....

. It was Mathews that adapted the name for the movement. In a speech delivered June 30, 1845, he said:
One of Young America's intellectual vehicles was the literary journal Arcturus. Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....

 in his book Mardi
Mardi
Mardi, and a Voyage Thither is the third book by American author Herman Melville, first published in 1849.-Overview:Mardi is Melville's first pure fiction work...

(1849) refers to it by naming a ship in the book Arcturion and observing that it was "exceedingly dull," and that its crew had a low literary level. The North American Review
North American Review
The North American Review was the first literary magazine in the United States. Founded in Boston in 1815 by journalist Nathan Hale and others, it was published continuously until 1940, when publication was suspended due to J. H. Smyth, who had purchased the magazine, being unmasked as a Japanese...

referred to the movement as "at war with good taste."

Hudson River School

Apart from literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, there was a distinct element of art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

 associated with the Young America Movement. In the 1820s and 1830s, American artists such as Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century...

 began to emerge. They were heavily influenced by romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

, which resulted in numerous paintings involving the physical landscape
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...

. But it was William Sidney Mount
William Sidney Mount
William Sidney Mount was an American genre painter and contemporary of the Hudson River School.-Biography:...

 who had connections to the writers of the Democratic Review. And as a contemporary of the Hudson River School, he sought to use art in the promotion of the American democratic principle. O'Sullivan's cohort at the Review, E. A. Duyckinck, was particularly "eager to launch an ancillary artistic movement" that supplemented Young America.

Young America II

In late 1851, the Democratic Review was acquired by George Nicholas Sanders
George Nicholas Sanders
George Nicholas Sanders was a former official of the United States who was believed to have some involvement in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Sanders was born in Lexington, Kentucky. His father was Lewis Sanders, and his mother was Ann Nicholas.During his early career he was involved in...

. Similar to O'Sullivan, Sanders believed in the inherent value of a literary-political relationship, whereby literature and politics could be combined and used as an instrument for socio-political progress. And although he "brought O'Sullivan back into the fold as an editor," the periodical's "jingoism
Jingoism
Jingoism is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as extreme patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy. In practice, it is a country's advocation of the use of threats or actual force against other countries in order to safeguard what it perceives as its national interests...

 achieved an even higher pitch than O'Sullivan's [original] dog-whistle stridency." Even Democratic Representative
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...

 J. C. Breckinridge remarked in 1852:
The change in tone and partisanship in the Democratic Review that Breckinridge referred to was mostly a reaction by the increasingly divided Democratic Party to the growth of the Free Soil movement, which threatened to dissolve any semblance of Democratic unity that remained.

Rise of Labor Republicanism

By the mid-1850s, Free Soil Democrats
Free Soil Party
The Free Soil Party was a short-lived political party in the United States active in the 1848 and 1852 presidential elections, and in some state elections. It was a third party and a single-issue party that largely appealed to and drew its greatest strength from New York State. The party leadership...

 (those who followed David Wilmot
David Wilmot
David Wilmot was a U.S. political figure. He was a sponsor and eponym of the Wilmot Proviso which aimed to ban slavery in land gained from Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. Wilmot was a Democrat, a Free Soiler, and a Republican during his political career...

 and his Proviso
Wilmot Proviso
The Wilmot Proviso, one of the major events leading to the Civil War, would have banned slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico in the Mexican War or in the future, including the area later known as the Mexican Cession, but which some proponents construed to also include the disputed...

) and anti-slavery Whigs
Conscience Whigs
The "Conscience" Whigs were a faction of the Whig Party in the state of Massachusetts noted for their moral opposition to slavery. They were noted as opponents of the more conservative "Cotton" Whigs who dominated the state party, led by such figures as Edward Everett, Robert C...

 had combined to form the Republican Party
History of the United States Republican Party
The United States Republican Party is the second oldest currently existing political party in the United States after its great rival, the Democratic Party. It emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas Nebraska Act which threatened to extend slavery into the territories, and to promote more vigorous...

. Young America's New York Democrats who opposed slavery saw an opportunity to express their abolitionist
Abolitionism
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...

 sentiments. As a result, Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley was an American newspaper editor, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer, a politician, and an outspoken opponent of slavery...

's New York Tribune
New York Tribune
The New York Tribune was an American newspaper, first established by Horace Greeley in 1841, which was long considered one of the leading newspapers in the United States...

began to replace the Democratic Review as the central outlet for Young America's ever-evolving politics. In fact, Greeley's Tribune became a major advocate of not only abolition, but also of land and labor reform.

The combined cause of land and labor reform was perhaps best exemplified by George Henry Evans
George Henry Evans
Born in England, George H Evans was a radical reformer, with experience in the Working Men's movement of 1829 and the trade union movements of the 1830s...

' National Reform Association (NRA). In 1846, Evans stated: Eventually, former members of the radical Locofoco
Locofocos
The Locofocos were a radical faction of the Democratic Party that existed from 1835 until the mid-1840s.  The faction was originally named the Equal Rights Party, and was created in New York City as a protest against that city’s regular Democratic organization .  It contained a mixture of...

 faction in the Democratic Party recognized the potential for reorganizing New York City's labor system around principles such as the common good
Common good
The common good is a term that can refer to several different concepts. In the popular meaning, the common good describes a specific "good" that is shared and beneficial for all members of a given community...

.

See also

  • Locofocos
    Locofocos
    The Locofocos were a radical faction of the Democratic Party that existed from 1835 until the mid-1840s.  The faction was originally named the Equal Rights Party, and was created in New York City as a protest against that city’s regular Democratic organization .  It contained a mixture of...

  • Wilmot Proviso
    Wilmot Proviso
    The Wilmot Proviso, one of the major events leading to the Civil War, would have banned slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico in the Mexican War or in the future, including the area later known as the Mexican Cession, but which some proponents construed to also include the disputed...

  • Popular Sovereignty
    Popular sovereignty in the United States
    The American Revolution marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context. With their Revolution, Americans substituted the sovereignty in the person of the English king, George III, with a collective sovereign—composed...

  • David Dudley Field II
  • Henry David Thoreau
    Henry David Thoreau
    Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...

  • Walt Whitman
    Walt Whitman
    Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...


Further reading

  • Danbom, David B. "The Young America Movement," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Sept 1974, Vol. 67 Issue 3, pp 294-306
  • Eyal, Yonatan. The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party 1828-1861. (2007) Cambridge University Press.
  • Eyal, Yonatan. "Trade and Improvements: Young America and the Transformation of the Democratic Party," Civil War History, Sept 2005, Vol. 51 Issue 3, pp 245-268
  • Lause, Mark A. Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005.
  • Varon, Elizabeth R. "Balancing Act: Young America'S Struggle to Revive the Old Democracy," Reviews in American History, March 2009, Vol. 37 Issue 1, pp 42-48
  • Widmer, Edward L. Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. (1999) ISBN 0-19-514062-1
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