| The Reformation of the World examines the literature of an age that Lawrence Buell has called America's "history-conscious period," which stretched from the appearance of Walter Scott's Waverly in 1817 to the decade before the Civil War. This period, which saw the first commemorations of the Revolutionary War generation, widespread resistance to Native American removal, and the growing push toward abolitionism by religious partisans in the North, not only built memorials, such as the one at Bunker Hill, but also revisited the early histories of the nation to condemn the first crimes perpetrated by the first settlers. Between the 1820s and the 1850s, three major trends merged in American culture: the self-conscious memorialization of these two "founding" generations, the Puritan and the Revolutionary; an intra-Congregationalist reformation that led to the establishment of a Unitarian church and, later, to the offshoot of the Transcendentalists; and the massive popularity of the Waverly romance, realistic narratives that combined historically accurate events, such as the Pequod War or the Battle of Bunker Hill, and wholly fictionalized characters.;This study looks at three distinct types of historiography in the works of America's antebellum historical romancers: the non-sectarian lament for broken national unity written by Scott's first American heir, James Fenimore Cooper; the liberal-Unitarian revisionism of the first authors to turn away from New England's Orthodox Calvinist traditions, such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Eliza Buckminster Lee, and Lydia Maria Child; and the second-generation schism from Unitarianism that eventually went by the name of Transcendentalism, best represented (though not wholly endorsed) in the romances and tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne. These romances fall into the same form as those histories written by the first "history-conscious" age of America, the second- and third-generation of Puritan settlers. On the one hand, conservative authors such as Cooper saw a falling away from earlier perfection into disunity and declension. On the other hand, liberal authors such as Sedgwick saw a move toward perfection, as America repented for its older Calvinist sins. In either of these historiographical models, the dispute over American history becomes a dispute over revelation that underlies all post-reformation religious movements. |
