The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War

From its first appearance in the Harvard catalog in the fall of 1941, Perry Miller's English 274, "Romanticism in American Literature", supplied its creator with a splendid vehicle for his own explorations. From a student's point of view, the course was successful as few courses ever are, and its graduates are now among the most distinguished scholars in American studies, holding professorial chairs from Harvard to Berkeley.

There is no way to know how many books or parts of books were inspired by the course. Miller himself published articles and several anthologies from its material, one of them, The Legal Mind in America, a classic example of the "creative" anthology; he also wrote one book, The Raven and the Whale, from these researches, but that was incidental to his main purpose. As a major work, he planned a continuation of his early books on the New England mind and Jonathan Edwards, to be called The Life of the Mind in America.

The subject was to be the grand subject that had possessed him so long, since his youthful vision on the banks of the Congo in 1926: the epic of the American mind from the first moment of its existence in Puritan New England to the Civil War. After his death in December 1963, manuscript for the first two sections of the projected book and part of a third section were found in his papers, and these have now been published under the original title.

To the non-specialist (and to many specialists) almost everything Miller has to say about the life of the popular intellect in the first half of the nineteenth century will be new. No one else has ever approached the American past quite as Miller did, and his method stands in greater relief in this fragment than in his other books, largely because so much of the conventional history is familiar to us. Standard histories rarely discuss--rarely mention--the events and personalities Miller so vividly presents to us: the Great Awakening of 1857-58, the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney's revivals, the codifying patriotism of David Dudley Field, the fierce Irish eloquence of William Sampson, or any of a host of others.

Nor do most intellectual histories go so deeply into the vagaries of the popular mind of an era. "The mind of man," Miller wrote eleswhere, "is the basic factor in human history." But he has not written a history of elections or famous books, for the life of the mind, as he sees it, is less intellectual and political than it is psychological. In his approach, the politics, the great literature are assumed, but not central; in one sense, they are even outside the course of history, as much determined by the fuller life of the country as determining it.

More and more in the nineteenth century, this life, as Miller reveals it, grew fatalistically preoccupied with the question of its own national identity. As he traces "the devious paths through which America made its way out of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth," it becomes clear that these are mostly paths of conflict. The two complete sections, "The Evangelical Basis" and "The Legal Mentality", describe endless conflict between emotional and intellectual factions at all levels of society.

Miller's outline shows that he would have treated the American battleground under several headings besides law and evangelicism, including Philosophy, Nature, Education, Theology, Political Economy, and the Self. In the published sections, specific opponents are ceaselessly pitted against each other (codification clashes with the Common Law, revivalism with orthodoxy, etc.) while more transcending combat takes place in the background (the head against the heart, union against division). Always a dramatist, Miller emphasizes again and again the outcome toward which these conflicts move, and a great heavy sense of the coming of the Civil War shapes the book's inexorable progress toward tragedy. Miller skillfully does not mention the war at all except as the denuement left unwritten, the climax which determines everything, yet arrives offstage.

The church, for example, in its revivalistic fervor betrays an almost hysterical ambition to prevent disunity among denominations. The people's hearts, once joined in Christian love, might battle successfully the sophistries of European religion (based ominously on both intellect and tyranny); the American churches, once laced with enough committees and missions, might achieve unity even out of extreme diversity; and a united America, presumably, would usher the rest of the world into the millennium. "The event of the century", Miller ironically notes, the revival of 1857-58, "lifted the populace to its most grandiose conception of unity just before slavery sundered the country."

History as well as religion challenged the future of the new nation, and to many it seemed certain that America, like another Rome, would follow the inevitable "course of empire" to destruction. To the legal mind, however, America seemed likely to fall only to its own barbarians. And if barbarians came from within, they would surely come from too much (or too little) democracy. So Justices Kent, Story, and the others struggled to create an American law capable of thwarting the course of empire, a system which could both fix and hold the American identity. "The Marshall court and Taney court", writes Miller, "thus kept their purpose fixed upon the idea of restriction, because, perhaps, if nothing were permitted, no violence would result." The brief chapter and the outlines on science suggest that in Miller's hands science and technology would also have spelled out their moral justification in terms of national unity, binding the nation with railroads and telegraph wires before it could shatter.

It is especially the moral side of American nationalism which Miller rediscovers for us, the side which the nineteenth century called "sublime." Miller devoted many lectures in English 274 to an analysis of the "sublime" in all its phases--moral, romantic, intellectual, egotistical. The word was so complex that capsule definition was impossible, though once to uncomprehending graduate students he explained that "Sandy Koufax is sublime; Don Drysdale is only beautiful." He had planned an introductory chapter on the sublime, but as it stands we can still appreciate something of the importance of the word from its role in the first two sections. The whole book, in fact, stands that way--so suggestive and rich a vein of history that other scholars will work it for years to come.