The "Natural" Origins of the Culture of Monumentalism

American monumentalism was exceptional from the start. Although other nations had erected colossal structures and had stretched across vast regions, America imagined itself to possess a natural innocence that distinguished its monuments from the swaggering productions of the Old World. The claim that American culture lacked antecedents bolstered the conception of antebellum politics, art, and literature as wholly original and American, capable of arising only from this nation. Who could equate the Bunker Hill Monument with the Pyramids, orators asked, if ancient Egypt lacked democratic forms of government? Nor did the Tower of Babel compare, for God had deemed that structure sinful and shattered that culture's prideful pretensions to unity. Though engaged in a similar project, antebellum America did not fear its grandiose expressions of unity would incur divine wrath. Whereas human arrogance built the Tower of Babel, nature cultivated American monumentalism. The vastness of the continent, its natural wonders, the richness of its resources, all bespoke a New World that dwarfed the tiny countries across the Atlantic. In Notes on the State of Virginia , Thomas Jefferson concluded that the ever expanding dominions of America provided ample likelihood for the existence of yet undiscovered mammoths that belittled diminutive European species. When Rembrandt Peale, best known for his portraits immortalizing George Washington, unearthed a mammoth skeleton, he seemed to have found an antediluvian record of America's destined monumental stature. The discovery of fossil traces convinced Jefferson that "the largest of all terrestrial beings" still roamed the aboriginal and unexplored territories of the western United States. Mammoths would be only a fitting complement to the already awesome topography of the New World that Jefferson found expressed by Virginia's Natural Bridge, "the most sublime of nature's works."^[8]

Artists of the nativist Hudson River School painted "the most sublime" landscapes, where endless vistas lay just beyond towering mountain peaks. The works of Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper F. Cropsey, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Cole depict an immensity of space out of which natural monuments arise. Certainly, European civilization had reared imposing cathedrals and castles, but such man-made expressions appeared as swaggering idols when placed next to the native innocence of American landscape. "You see no ruined tower to tell of outrage—no gorgeous temple to speak of ostentation; but freedom's offspring—peace, security, and happiness, dwell there, the spirits of the scene," wrote Thomas Cole in his "Essay on American Scenery" (1836). The pristine quality of the monumental produced a sense of nature that seemed innately American, unavailable to decaying countries of the Old World. Even the name, Hudson River School, fastened cultural expression to a particular non-European landscape, regardless of any similarities between American canvases and those from English artists such as J. W. M. Turner. Church "was immune to European influences, so at least it was believed," observes one critic. These nationalist associations coalesced into a tautological cultural logic: because the lakes of New Hampshire possess a character that, for Cole, was "truly and peculiarly American," they were sublime; and, because natural monuments preserved a homogeneous purity even within their grandeur, they deserved to be American. And because they were American, representations of nature transcended European creations; comparing the heavens of Italy and America, Cole declared: "For variety and magnificence American skies are unsurpassed."^[9] Nationalism effects a series of metonomies in which an exceptional natural landscape substituted for America, an ideological configuration that was already heralded as transcendent. The sublime attributes of an undefiled cultural history were readily transferable to the "magnificence" of the natural world. The self-enclosed structure of this tautology, built entirely of domestic experiences, ratified American nationalism by making it the culmination of native, independent resources. Democracy, like Niagara or the Natural Bridge, was seemingly organic to the scene. No foreign influence, so liable to tarnish the view, was required.

Jasper Cropsey's canvases gather clouds and the rising mist from cascading waterfalls to suggest the terrible and forceful beauty—

terriblità —of an American nature capable of pulverizing matter into air. His Niagara (1856), in which spray rises above crushed rocks, stands among many views of the falls that, along with scenes of Virginia's Natural Bridge, were popular among antebellum patrons and critics. Both as tourist site and visual representation, Niagara Falls rushed forth as the single most consumed image in nineteenth-century America. Not uncoincidentally, only portraits of George Washington rivaled the popularity of Niagara's representations. That a single natural icon acquired this preeminence was instrumental to the imagining of a nation. The icon transmitted a vital lesson that stemmed from its dialectical properties of geographic uniqueness and democratic familiarity—unity. For a scattered people in a diverse territory, Niagara offered a common point of reference, a shared narrative of the nation as innocent, onrushing, inexhaustible. The metonymic structure of nationalism that substitutes and interchanges America, the sublime, and homogeneous purity encourages this lesson of federal unity, coordinating diverse aesthetic, political, and spiritual experiences around a single ideological axis. Paintings, lithographs, and tourist memories of such scenes amounted to an iconic currency in which the incredible volume of water flowing at the nation's border gave shape to a New World revealed after the Flood. The circulation and repetition of images permitted a distant mecca like Niagara to transcend the limitations of time, place, and context. What once seemed only a feature of upstate New York entered the contours of the nation. The particular environment became an icon whose lack of context and homogeneity enabled citizens to envision, in Benedict Anderson's terms, an "imagined community." Reproduced in visual representations and visited as part of what John Sears calls "one of the primary rituals of democratic life," Niagara conveyed a narrative of fecundity and power to a wide range of consumers and citizens, despite differences in class, background, or location. A Boston preacher in 1860 could thus exhort his congregation: "look at Niagara. What does it represent? Does it not resemble our country,—our vast immeasurable, unconquerable, inexplicable country?"; he knew that his listeners had of course seen paintings of the falls, had received the lithograph of Church's Niagara , then a fashionable wedding present, or had traveled there on a northern tour. He asked his countrymen to participate in a collective imagining that was in effect a journey from the specific to the federal, from nature to nation.^[10]

Abraham Lincoln mused that the cataract's monumental stature and everlasting innocence made it an appropriate national beacon:

Niagara-Falls! By what mysterious power is it that millions and millions, are drawn from all parts of the world, to gaze upon Niagara Falls? ... When Columbus first sought this continent ... nay, even, when Adam first came from the hand of his Maker—then as now, Niagara was roaring here. The eyes of that species of extinct giants, whose bones fill the mounds of America, have gazed on Niagara, as ours do now. Cotemporary with the whole race of men, and older than the first man, Niagara is strong, and fresh today as ten thousand years ago. The Mammoth and Mastodon—now so long dead, that fragments of their monstrous bones, alone testify, that they ever lived, have gazed on Niagara.^[11]

Thinking of the falls and how they evoke "the indefinite past," Lincoln experiences the sublime primarily as a temporal wonder that commemorates human action even as it belittles the human historical record, exposing its inconsequential tenure and subordinate status. For American landscape painters, the sublime unveiled itself in the spatial dimensions of consciousness. In fact, for his painting, Church rejected traditional proportions, finding it necessary to enlarge the width in order to encompass the horizon of this national icon of Manifest Destiny. At the margins of Church's Romantic image of cosmic unity, human presence intrudes, only to be dwarfed by the incessant magnitude of the waters (see Figure 2). Lying prophetically within the arc of the rainbow of Niagara stands the United States border, with Terrapin Tower presiding over the scene. Only by using binoculars, as David Hunington notes, can the viewer who thus becomes the tourist at the falls glimpse the human figure on the tower's balcony. Diminutive figures also appear in Cole's Niagara Falls (1830), though with enough specificity to reveal they are Native Americans. One critic suggests that the Native Americans act as "surrogates" for the white viewer, but a more sinister economy is at work: their tragic and trivial aloneness—a convenient coincidence of Romantic aestheticism and Manifest Destiny—also presages their eventual and forced disappearance.^[12] In each formulation, human subjects have a precarious toehold in representation: for Lincoln, human history is little more than a few seconds of natural history; for Cole and Church, the distinct triumph of New World grandeur

remains connected to the marginal stature or inevitable effacement of individuals.

The object lesson of the preacher who asked his worshipers to "look at Niagara" was not to propel an examination of conscience; rather, the intent of the comparison was to acquaint people with an entity so large they could barely conceive it—not God, but a divine nation. In similar fashion, if Church's painting aimed to stir the individual's soul with the sublime, the quintessence of that experience was national. In The Vagabond (1859), Adam Badeau looked at Church's Niagara and recorded that its transcendent qualities emerged from its political representation of natural phenomena: "If it is inspired by Niagara, it is grand and sublime; it is natural to the nation.... it is a true development of the American mind; the result of democracy, of individuality, of the expansion of each, of the liberty allowed to all." Factoring the individual into an overarching unity is the goal of the sublime experience, whether emotional or political. Cole intended the depiction of a beautifully threatening environment to bow the viewer down before the colossal unity of nature: "In the terrible and the grand ... when the mind is astonished, the eye does not dwell upon the minute but seizes the whole. In the forest, during an hour of tempest, it is not the bough playing in the wind, but the whole mass stooping to the blast that absorbs the attention: the detail, however fine, is comparatively unobserved." Showing human figures shrouded by a looming torrent of water and represented by little more than a touch of paint, artists of Niagara Falls sketched how the terriblità of national landscape was supposed to force citizens to ponder their own insignificance and abstract themselves from restrictive localities in the experience of the sublime. Aesthetic experience encoded the lessons and imperatives of rearing a nation-state.^[13]

Elevated above the affairs of humans, the natural world was to impel the imagination toward a pure spirituality of the infinite. Overshadowed by natural immensity, the spectator experiencing the sublime at first senses his or her own ephemeral insignificance and then rises to a contemplation of divinity and creation. Unlike the haughty human project of the Tower of Babel, American monumentalism was properly reverential. "You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet, and peep over it," wrote Jefferson of the spectator's experience atop the Natural Bridge.^[14] The dynamic of the sublime seems paradoxical: at one moment, its awe-

some magnificence reduces human beings to the posture described by Jefferson, and at the next, such transcendental power uplifts the meditative subject to the heights of Emerson's "transparent eyeball." Yet this apparent contradiction between degradation and transcendence actually inspires a harmonious metaphysics. Only by sensing one's insignificant relation to the rest of the universe can a human properly begin to conceive of a transcendental unity; only by understanding his or her position in the earthly world of nature and society could the nineteenth-century American, in Emerson's words, be "uplifted into infinite space" and shot through with "the currents of Universal Being" (Nature , 10).

Preachers and poets like Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, or even Henry David Thoreau helped popularize the sublime, suggesting that the realm of transcendence was egalitarian, equally the province of the farmer and the philosopher. Paintings and illustrations from the Hudson River School testify that art and literature attended the same classroom of nature. Thomas Cole painted scenes of steep crags and unearthly mists dwarfing savages and swooning women to accompany Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans . Cooper's Leatherstocking tales likewise draw detailed, painterly descriptions of the natural world, constructing a backdrop against which characters sense the interplay of their own insignificance and divine infinitude. Humans wait upon the landscape, offering their small stature as a measure of the grandeur of nature. The details in Cooper's novels function in the same manner as do the tiny, human particulars of nature in paintings of Niagara; as Cole said, the "minutest parts" are "subordinate and administrative" to the sublime. Durand's Thanatopsis commemorates William Cullen Bryant's famous paean by the same title, and his Kindred Spirits (1849) places Cole and Bryant in humble contemplation of a spectacular gorge and the airy horizon beyond it. Holding a short staff, the persona of Cole in the painting gestures toward the extending horizon, leading the viewer beyond an eventually insignificant foreground to the hazy distance. While the trees and gorge in Kindred Spirits envelop and embrace painter and poet, the background horizon and distant mountains claim the viewer's eye and subtly dominate the scene. If the fleeting horizon encourages contemplation of infinitude, then this aesthetic "truth" of Romantic harmony also supplies a national lesson: the eye searching after the painting's horizon enacts the imperatives of an expansionist

discourse in which westward progress toward the setting sun and thoughts of greater unities outstrip the particularities of private, rooted localities.^[15]

In its imaginative expanse, the sublimity of nature evolved into the sublimity of the nation. In The Pioneers , Natty Bumppo's lamentations over the destruction of game and forests describe how American monumentalism was only ephemerally located in nature. Monumentalism that once found a home in the imaginative conception of the natural sublime, in the resilient optimism of an American like Jefferson, who insisted that great mammoths must be out there somewhere, was developed and refined by a nation embarking upon the course of empire within its own borders. The change in addressee of Melville's prefaces from Pierre , dedicated to "the majestic mountain, Greylock," to Israel Potter , in which the Bunker Hill Monument dominates the textual landscape, charts the translation of the American sublime from the natural to the national. Not more than three years elapsed between these prefaces, and yet the change in referent from mountain to fabricated structure registers a significant evolution in the sublime. The nation's political legacies, not just its landscape and natural phenomena, were taken to originate as transcendent entities, innocent, pristine, and seamless. To be sure, within reproductions of Niagara, the panoramic landscape is not natural but a cultural representation of nature; however, with the articulation and expansion of American nationalism, the sublime ceased to take nature as its referent. To identify this desire for political transcendence is not to say that aesthetic representation in landscape painting does not relay a political code—indeed, the manner in which details give way to a whole synthetic representation of nature no doubt reenacts the imperatives of federalism and unity central to an incipient nation-state.^[16] Instead, American culture, its institutions and historical narratives, became sublime. Cropsey's Niagara may have performed a political function and conveyed the nation's power and grandeur, but under this new configuration I am describing, the political realm itself becomes sublime. More specifically, the political history of the Revolutionary past is inscribed within the monumental mode as a magnificent narrative of homogeneity and unity. Memory becomes national.

The search for narratives of American national culture first began among literary nationalists. Sounding a call for literature to match the

divine destiny of America and challenging the country's authors to facilitate the transition of the monumental from nature to culture, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review asked of American writers in 1859:

When will they be inspired by the magnificent scenery of our own world, imbibe the fresh enthusiasm of a new heaven and a new earth, and soar upon the expanded wings of truth and liberty? Is not nature as original—her truths as captivating—her aspects as various, as lovely, as grand—her Promethean fire as glowing in this, our Western hemisphere, as in that of the East? ... Why, then do our authors aim at no higher degree of merit, than a successful imitation of English writers of celebrity?

The emphasis this editorial places on literature as a central component of Manifest Destiny underscores the interconnections between nationalism and literature. The storied expanse of the American novel proffered a discursive territory where the nation could be imagined. Moby-Dick , for instance, brings together the "staid, steadfast" Starbuck as the exemplar of New England morality, the "easy, and careless" Stubb as the archetype of the jaunty Westerner, and the hot-blooded and "hereditarily" minded Flask as the Southerner always ready to fight a duel to defend a "point of honor." The Spy likewise spins a unifying tale in its final visions of Southerner and Northerner as kin who surmount differences in geography and ideology to battle the British. The novel, as Benedict Anderson contends, thus served the needs of protonationalism by allowing authors, readers, and citizens to imagine themselves as part of a single community in which the mortar of synchronicity and homogeneity is fictive.^[17]

During the years called the American Renaissance, the national component of literature was by no means an unconscious drive or a latent ideology. Instead, the call for a literature to administer to the idea of the nation developed as a manifest duty for writers. A "native literature is essential to national patriotism—to the independence of the national mind," wrote Southern novelist William Gilmore Simms. Eminent literati complained of America's embarrassing indebtedness to European culture and urged literature to keep pace with the independence of the nation's political institutions. "Americanness" marked artistic originality and acted as the criteria of literary merit that faulted Melville's Pierre for its "Frenchified mode."

Writers and editors styling themselves Young America mandated the production of a national literature whose thematics and tone would distinguish it as a faithful aesthetic expression of the vast continent. Such literary nationalism paralleled the production of books with titles like Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound-Builders and Big Abel and the Little Manhattan or the writing of an epic sea voyage across the watery expanses in search of a monstrous leviathan named Moby Dick. According to Perry Miller, Young America operated under the "thesis ... that we should automatically create a big literature because we were a big country." As an instrument of national culture, literature promised to surpass visual representations of the wilderness because it marked the refinement of a nation that had evolved beyond simply tapping metaphoric resources of the natural environment. Literature appeared as a more potent medium capable of transmitting biographies and legends that would make up a shared culture, capable of instilling a specifically American political morality and distinctness. Melville's review of Hawthorne captured this transition in its vision of an American literary genius in whose "deep and noble nature, you will hear the far roar of his Niagara." During his association with Young America, Melville prophesied the historicization of the sublime even as, in gestures of profound ambivalence, he doubted such national bravado and questioned if it was promise or threat to articulate national history as transcendent.^[18]