Paradoxes of Prosperity: Wealth Seeking in Pre-Civil War America

Epilogue

•• Epilogue Americans of the 1850s were troubled by the seeming contradictions between their marketplace lives and their Christian and republican values. They could not have known that the Civil War would come in 1861, any more than Americans of the 1930s knew for certain that World War II was just over the horizon. The Mexican War was over, adding vast new lands to the United States, there was gold in California, and the economy boomed. America was truly the land of opportunity, at least for white, English-speaking men, and for some women who managed, through effort and intellect, to find niches, notably in writing, nursing, and education. Until the Civil War, the prosperity-morality paradox was of great concern to Americans and was a major theme in the rapidly expanding print media of newspapers, magazines, and books. The paradox was communicated and amplified to the masses by the press. The two-decade-long transition from press-as-cottage-industry to publication institutions built formidable mass media. Newspapers, especially, fed Americans’ enormous interest in politics and were read avidly for news of what government was doing and politicians were saying. Eighty percent of all eligible voters went to the polls in presidential elections in the 1840s and 1850s, evidently with more confidence than twenty-first-century Americans that their votes would be counted accurately. The boom in magazine pub- 126 / epilogue lishing and book publishing in the 1850s broadened the national dialogue in the popular press. Arguably, Americans voted with their eyes on cultural issues of the 1850s, reading about issues that mattered to them, and the mass press responded with more reading matter that would sell, from uplifting moralistic tales to warnings about dangers to the spiritual health of the American republic. Writing to a mass audience about the prosperity-morality paradox introduced a new level of paradox. Explicating or elevating the ethical and moral perceptions of the masses might also mean pandering to their baser instincts.1 As mentioned in chapter 8,George Lippard walked a thin line between being a social critic and telling salacious stories. The broad prosperity-morality paradox was filtered through personal and cultural lenses and amplified by an array of writers who were important in the 1850s.These writers’ arguments flowed in many directions, often drawing on enduring themes in American culture. Agrarian and Jeffersonian themes were pursued, contrasting a rural Eden against evil Sodom-and-Gomorrah cities. Opportunities on the frontier for land and freedom were a Jeffersonian thought expanded upon by many authors . Christian values and hard work were celebrated repeatedly, as tales of pathos (and sometimes bathos) sold handsomely as a press thriving in a market economy merchandised publications expressing fears of the economy’s baleful effects. So the complex issue of the prosperity-morality paradox was made accessible to the masses. Then the Civil War came. In 1861, a number of northern newspaper editors welcomed the conflict as a way of resolving the paradox between marketplace and Christian and republican values and relieving the resultant anxieties. Horace Greeley insisted that the war would produce “a national regeneration.”2 The Springfield Republican in Massachusetts proclaimed that “men had grown mad for money” and that the war “has broken up the nightmare of commerce.” The Republican assured its readers that young men “could feel the genuine thrill of patriotism.”3 The Providence Journal observed, “It is a piece of good fortune to be a young man now and here. It is time for sacrifice.”4 Even the cynical James Gordon Bennett welcomed the war as a cure for the deficiencies of the American character. He declared, “Without war society would become steeped in luxury and effeminacy,” and noted that “the chief cause of the present war is excessive prosperity.” Bennett assured his readers “that the country will come out of the fire of war like gold purified of its dross, better and brighter than ever.”5 Editorializing epilogue / 127 in the Albany Evening Journal, Thurlow Weed promised that the war would “uplift the moral character of the people.”6 But these expectations that the war would rid Americans of their obsession with materialism and so resolve the paradox went unrealized. The Civil War sparked a dramatic surge in American economic growth. Critics could still be heard and read, but they had gone from speaking to and for a majority of the middle-class reading public to being dismissed as...