77 William Cullen Bryant, Joseph Smith, Thomas Cole, and the early 19th-Century debate over Mound Builders

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an introduction to a few key artists associated with early American Romanticism, especially William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Cole. Like British Romanticism, this movement was not entirely unified. It’s a retrospective label that glosses over the complexity of the period. But it’s a helpful heuristic for identifying a movement that bridges the folklore sketches of Washington Irving and the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson–who is typically seen as ushering in a distinctively American flavor of Romanticism. Figures like Bryant were instrumental in transporting Romantic ideas, themes, and strategies to the U.S.

This chapter also focuses on a peculiar phenomenon during the early 1830s: the popular debate over the “Mound Builders,” presumed by many early 19th-century Americans to be an ancient North American civilization that had no connection with the contemporary natives. This phenomenon helps bring together many of the major thinkers during this era of Jacksonian Democracy, including Jackson himself, but also Thomas Jefferson, Bryant, Thomas Cole, and Joseph Smith. Tracking how the poetry of Bryant intersected with Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, Joseph Smith’s publication of The Book of Mormon in the same year, and meditations by Thomas Cole on the same debate helps appreciate how emerging artistic, political, and religious innovations all responded to the same exigence.

Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (1811, 1817) and the pantheistic current in American Romanticism

During the same years Washington Irving was drafting and preparing his Sketchbook stories for publication, another New Yorker was experimenting with innovations in iambic verse poetry, which had recently been popularized by the British Romantic poets. This American poet, William Cullen Bryant, was particularly fond of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude and eager to use that lyrical framework as a way to translate his own experience.

Bryant’s first great poetic contribution to the rapidly growing U.S. was “Thanatopsis,” first published in 1817, originally drafted around 1811. “Thanatopsis” is a meditation on death and sublimity that taps into the 18th-century Graveyard poets as well as more recent romantics such as Robert Southey.

In adapting the British pastoral and British Romantic aesthetics to the American experience, Bryant helped foster a burgeoning movement now called American Romanticism.

Bryant’s blank verse poem showed he was as comfortable adapting innovative verse as he was breaking from religious orthodoxy–as was true of the British Romantics as well. As Gilbert H. Muller explains, Bryant’s 1819 essay “On the Happy Temperament” offered a kind of defense of “Thanatopsis,” arguing for a stoical acceptance of transience and change.

Bryant’s later poetry would shift away from this sombre stoicism. In fact the quasi-pantheism of “Thanatopsis” offers a kind of liminal point for the movement, suggesting a religiously unorthodox path it might explore further, but one that Bryant no longer wished to take up. It feels utterly non-Calvinistic, more akin to the embrace of cosmic materialism of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius than meditations on natural imagery in Psalms.

Bryant’s “The Prairies” (1832), The Mound-Builders, and the March of Civilization 

Besides “Thanatopsis,” Bryant is most known for another blank verse poem “The Prairies,” published in 1832 after traveling from Washington to Illinois. “The Prairies” includes a number of strategies and allusions that will be particularly important at this moment in American literature.

One of the most relevant contextual factors is debates of the native peoples in antebellum America. Part of the debate was a broader political understanding about whether they were destined to play a role in the future of the U.S.

President Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act was announced just two years before Bryant’s publication of “The Prairies.” In his speech to Congress in 1830, Jackson argued that removing the natives from their Eastern lands to designated plots in the West was the best thing for both natives and white settlers:

It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation. …

It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.

What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?^[1]

This federal policy famously led to the “Trail of Tears” (Fig. 1).

Undergirding Jackson’s speech is a story–a trope–of progress, from savage “rude institutions” to the “Christian community” of our “extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms … .” A version of this narrative–the march of civilization–had already been fully articulated by Jefferson in his 1824 letter to William Ludlow:

let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky mountains, Eastwardly towards our seacoast. these he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subsisting and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. he would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. then succeed our own semibarbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilisation, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns this in fact is equivalent to a survey, in time of the progress of man from the infancy of nation to the present day.^[2]

Jefferson illustrates the march of progress geographically, from west to east, tracking the march of U.S. expansion. The edges of civilization were dominated by “savages,” then “semibarbarous” pioneers, then yeoman farmers, then seaport towns. Eventually, as the U.S. continued to expand, savages (who flourished in the untouched wilderness) would continue to give way to civilization.

Modern scholars tend to point out the obvious parallel between Puritan eschatology–the belief that their “city on a hill” project would usher in the Kingdom of God–and 19th-century narratives about progressive civilization. Jefferson, Jackson, and other 19th-century proponents of westward expansion can be interpreted as repurposing Puritan eschatology to help frame their “civilizing” policies. Many students are familiar with the term “manifest destiny.” That particular phrase was first used in 1845, but the actual concept has its roots in Jeffersonian civilization and Jacksonian ideas of progress.

How does this relate to “The Prairies”?

The same narrative of progress that fueled Jackson’s condescension towards present-day indigenous tribes also framed early 19th-century responses to emerging archaeological evidence that something akin to a civilization had permeated North America. Archeologists, poets, and politicians all became fascinated by large “mounds” and geographical “tumuli” dotting the landscape east of the Mississippi, congregating in places like Ohio.

Famous travelers, geographers, and archaeologists began to associate the mounds with an ancient “Mound-Builder” civilization that, they speculated, pre-dated Roman civilization. One of the most famous mound still visible today is the “Serpent Mound” in southeastern Ohio (Fig. 2).

Although Spanish colonizers knew of the Mound-Builders around the 16th-century, it wasn’t until around 1800 that these indigenous artifacts began to capture the broader American imagination.

A full introduction to the relationship between the Mound-Builders and American literature around this time can be found in the article, “Mound-Builders, Mormons, and William Cullen Bryant.” Similar information can be found on the open access website, “The Moundbuilders’ Art,” which I highly recommend. I’ll summarize some of the important points here:

How did this evidence of an ancient civilization (not “just huts”) mesh with 19th-century tropes about the march of civilization?

The solution, for most, was to separate the ancient civilization(s) from the natives they observed around them. Nearly all well-known writers argued the Mound Builders were dead and had no relation to the present natives, whom they considered “savage” and incapable of complex civilization. Many of the archaeologists concluded that the Mound-Builders must have been from a now-extinct race. Due to their beliefs about the present natives and the destiny of white settlers, many archaeologists and popular writers in the early 19th-century eagerly embraced the belief that the Mound-Builders were an ancient civilization that disappeared long ago, most likely due to savage aggression by the present natives.

Bryant’s poem: After Bryant visited the prairies of Illinois around 1832 and became familiar with the Mound-Builders, he wrote “The Prairies,” a poem that alludes to the mounds and the story of an ancient people being wiped out by savage natives.

In the passage above, the “race, that long has passed away” alludes to the Mound-Builders. The rest of the poem tells the story of how they were wiped out by a more brutal, more savage race.

“The Prairies” and the georgic mode: Although Bryant’s 1832 poem is considered “Romantic” and probably also a nature poem, Bryant taps into a classical tradition known as the “georgic mode.

According to Kevis Goodman’s very excellent Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism, the “georgic mode” flourished throughout the 18th-century and even informed much of early Romanticism. The georgic mode was rediscovered as a helpful technique for interrogating the past. Poets exploited the mode to toy with the relationship between the past and present. These poems also interrogated the relationship between labor and nature.

The term “georgic” gets its namesake from Virgil’s Georgics, published around 29 BCE. Whereas Virgil’s Eclogues established conventions related to the pastoral mode (more evident in “Thanatopsis”), depicting shepherds’ distance from urban toils as the ideal way to live, the Georgics embraced labor and agriculture as positive pursuits. They offer meditations on the relationship between human civilization and nature, as well as the past and the present. From a literary point of view, it’s often suggested that the pastoral mode tends to be ahistorical, while georgics are more historical and temporally focused.

At the end of Book I, Virgil contemplates the death of Julius Caesar and the profound impact it had on nature. The violence culminates with Roman legions being slaughtered, after which Virgil contemplates the future discovery of their battle:

The poetic image above depicts farmers unearthing the past, upturning relics such as “spear-heads,” signs of earlier battles. Goodman’s Georgic Modernity calls this image the “trope of overturning.” The contemporary world is overturned, furrowed into the ground, reappearing underneath as something different, refracted, and how seen from a distance–as past. The georgic mode allows the poet’s world to be examined with fresh eyes, differently or critically. Furrowing the present into the ground as past interrogates it

The role of the critic, Goodman argues, is to recover the poet’s present in the past they represent or mythologize. But Goodman also adds that, as history reappears (as “spear-heads” re-emerge), it emerges in a disturbing manner, almost sensorially. It feels noisome and prickly. In other words, the paradox of the georgic mode is that, in burying the present into the past and allowing it to then re-emerge, it becomes even more real that it was formerly. The georgic mode is how writers gain access to the present–always through this complex mediation. We might also add: critics should be on the lookout for what kind of future the poem implies.

In discovering the “ancient race” beneath the tumuli that dot the speaker’s gaze, what kind of present and future is Bryant arguing for in “The Prairies”?

Mound Builders in Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon

One of the most influential texts that seems to have responded to the mound-builder myths around this time was published just two years before Bryant’s “The Prairies” and in the same year as Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. The book was called The Book of Mormon, published by Joseph Smith. As with Irving and Bryant, he was a New Yorker from the “Burned-over district“–a place rife with possibility and religious pluralism in antebellum America that was highly affected by the Second Great Awakening.

Central to early parts of The Book of Mormon is the story of an ancient people who predate the contemporary natives. Smith’s account adopts many of the popular beliefs about the natives, some of which will feel very similar to Bryant. Here’s a broad outline of The Book of Mormon, as it relates to the present-day native peoples and more ancient civilizations.

Like Bryant and others, The Book of Mormon separates modern-day indigenous peoples from the ancient peoples who left only “heaps of earth upon the face of the land.” The New World populations are split between the lighter-skinned, superior Nephites and the darker-skinned, more sinful Lamanites. The Nephites represent the now-extinct civilization. The Lamanites are, according to most Mormon accounts, ancestors of the contemporary natives (although there continues to be debate over the finer details, especially those that relate to contemporary indigenous peoples).

The Book of Mormon perfectly captures the complexity of America in the early 1830s. As Robert V. Remini summarizes in his biography of Joseph Smith:

[The Book of Mormon] is … an American work of the early nineteenth century. It has a distinctly American character. It is a story about people who crossed an ocean and settled in a wilderness. It is a story of bringing the Gospel to the Americas. It is a story that people of the Jacksonian era could easily relate to and understand. … Moreover, it radiates revivalist passion, frontier culture and folklore, popular concepts about Indians, and the democratic impulses and political movements of its time.^[3]

Thomas Cole and the Mound-Builders

In 1836, Thomas Cole codified the Hudson River School’s Romantic approach to landscapes and scenery in his “Essay on American Scenery.”

We have many a spot as umbrageous as Vallombrosa, and as picturesque as the solitudes of Vaucluse; but Milton and Petrarch have not hallowed them by their footsteps and immortal verse. He who stands on Mont Albano and looks down on ancient Rome, has his mind peopled with the gigantic associations of the storied past; but he who stands on the mounds of the West, the most venerable remains of American antiquity, may experience the emotion of the sublime, but it is the sublimity of a shoreless ocean un-islanded by the recorded deeds of man.

Yet American scenes are not destitute of historical and legendary associations–the great struggle for freedom has sanctified many a spot, and many a mountain, stream, and rock has its legend, worthy of poet’s pen or the painter’s pencil. But American associations are not so much of the past as of the present and the future.

Cole mentions the sublime in connection with the mounds because, in European representations of the sublime, ancient ruins often stand in the distance, as though suggesting (in gothic form!) the present is somehow haunted by the past. Gothic cathedrals especially had this effect.

Cole suggests the “mounds of the West” perform a similarly gothic-sublime function. But then he qualifies: “but it is the sublimity of a shoreless ocean un-islanded by the recorded deeds of man.” What do you make of that statement?

What does become clear is that Cole next dismisses past relics as even worthy of serious consideration: “American associations are not so much of the past as of the present and the future.” This view of America as the future, unconstrained by ties to the past, usually seems liberating; but here, in the context of the mound-builders and the Indian removal policies of the Jackson administration in the 1830s, it might have a different flavor for some.

The painting “Kindred Spirits” (1849) (Fig. 3) depicts Thomas Cole standing next to William Cullen Bryant, in the Catskill Mountains–the same haunts of Washington Irving. In the background flows the Kaaterskill falls. Cole painted this location in 1826, with his painting Kaaterskill Falls (Fig. 4).

Bryant wrote his poem “Catterskill Falls” ten years later, in 1836. It begins:

In these opening stanzas, Bryant depicts the waterfall as an architect, constructing a place for itself in the midst of winter. Just as Bryant and others saw the mound-builder civilizations as fated to be lost to the past, they looked to nature for creative inspiration.

The dynamic of lamenting a lost race that’s preserved by nature while also suggesting only nature can serve as the poet’s muse is one of the more difficult paradoxes permeating 1830s American Romanticism. The nature of Bryant, Smith, and Cole is simultaneously pure/wilderness-like and a site of historical violence. It’s beautiful and sublime, but possibly haunted. It can serve as the backdrop for the artist’s imagination, but it’s also ingenious and creative.

The ambiguities and paradoxes emerging from the early 19th-century responses to the Mound-Builders would be echoed by debates over the “rawness” of nature in 20th-century nature writing.