United States

Whitman, WaltWalt Whitman, photograph by Mathew Brady.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.At home Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) included hundreds of words of local origin to be incorporated in the former “King’s English.” Webster’s blue-backed “Speller,” published in 1783, the geography textbooks of Jedidiah Morse, and the Eclectic Readers of William Holmes McGuffey became staples in every 19th-century American classroom. Popular literature included the humorous works of writers such as Seba Smith, Joseph G. Baldwin, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Artemus Ward, which featured frontier tall tales and rural dialect. In the growing cities there were new varieties of mass entertainment, including the blatantly racist minstrel shows, for which ballads like those of Stephen Foster were composed. The “museums” and circuses of P.T. Barnum also entertained the middle-class audience, and the spread of literacy sustained a new kind of popular journalism, pioneered by James Gordon Bennett, whose New York Herald mingled its up-to-the-moment political and international news with sports, crime, gossip, and trivia. Popular magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and Godey’s Lady’s Book, edited by Sarah Josepha Hale with a keen eye toward women’s wishes, also made their mark in an emerging urban America. All these added up to a flourishing democratic culture that could be dismissed as vulgar by foreign and domestic snobs but reflected a vitality loudly sung by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass (1855).

Bernard A. Weisberger

The people

American society was rapidly changing. Population grew at what to Europeans was an amazing rate—although it was the normal pace of American population growth for the antebellum decades—of between three-tenths and one-third per decade. After 1820 the rate of growth was not uniform throughout the country. New England and the Southern Atlantic states languished—the former region because it was losing settlers to the superior farmlands of the Western Reserve, the latter because its economy offered too few places to newcomers.

The special feature of the population increase of the 1830s and ’40s was the extent to which it was composed of immigrants. Whereas about 250,000 Europeans had arrived in the first three decades of the 19th century, there were 10 times as many between 1830 and 1850. The newcomers were overwhelmingly Irish and German. Traveling in family groups rather than as individuals, they were attracted by the dazzling opportunities of American life: abundant work, land, food, and freedom on the one hand and the absence of compulsory military service on the other. Edward Pessen

The mere statistics of immigration do not, however, tell the whole story of its vital role in pre-Civil War America. The intermingling of technology, politics, and accident produced yet another “great migration.” By the 1840s the beginnings of steam transportation on the Atlantic and improvements in the sailing speed of the last generation of windjammers made oceanic passages more frequent and regular. It became easier for hungry Europeans to answer the call of America to take up the farmlands and build the cities. Irish migration would have taken place in any case, but the catastrophe of the Great Famine (Irish Potato Famine) of 1845–49 turned a stream into a torrent. Meanwhile, the steady growth of the democratic idea in Europe produced the Revolutions of 1848 in France, Italy, Hungary, and Germany. The uprisings in the last three countries were brutally suppressed, creating a wave of political refugees. Hence, many of the Germans who traveled over in the wake of the revolutions—the Forty-Eighters—were refugees who took liberal ideals, professional educations, and other intellectual capital to the American West. Overall German contributions to American musical, educational, and business life simply cannot be measured in statistics. Neither can one quantify the impact of the Irish politicians, policemen, and priests on American urban life or the impact of the Irish in general on Roman Catholicism in the United States.

Irish emigrants departing for the United States.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproducution no. LC-USZ62-2022)

Besides the Irish and Germans, there were thousands of Norwegians and Swedes who immigrated, driven by agricultural depression in the 1850s, to take up new land on the yet-unbroken Great Plains. And there was a much smaller migration to California in the 1850s of Chinese seeking to exchange hard times for new opportunities in the gold fields. These people too indelibly flavoured the culture of the United States.