Every Revolution Was First a Thought: The Civil War and Transcendentalism in Transatlantic Context . By Aren Lerner Craig

There has long been a barrier between Civil War Americans and those who study them. In the face of the brutality and modernity of America's most cataclysmic war, Civil War soldiers continued to express themselves in seemingly incongruent sentimental and romanticized terms. They responded to abstract symbols and patriotic rhetoric with a sincerity and willingness to sacrifice that often strikes the modern reader as quaint at best or delusional at worst. That divide, Aren Lerner Craig argues, is an intellectual one, and her new book seeks to provide the bridge.Without taking seriously the “philosophical framework” that Americans, specifically northerners, brought with them to the Civil War era, scholars will remain “uncomfortable” with the “emotional aspect of Civil War culture,” Craig insists (2, 112). She credits the American Transcendentalists for channeling and disseminating the key concepts about character, self-building, manhood, and nationhood that permeated northern society. Without tracing the roots and grappling with the substance of these ideas and the thought systems from which they sprang, Civil War culture will remain “almost incomprehensible,” she warns (245). Hence, Craig's goal is to “bring together these disparate ‘Romantic,’ religious, and cultural threads into a singular account that will present a unified look at the intellectual history of the era as a story of philosophy in action” (7).This book is very proudly a history of ideas, in the traditional sense, alternating between historical monograph and philosophical disquisition. In truth, the book is not really about the Civil War. Nor is it really about the Transcendentalists, at least not directly. For Craig, the Transcendentalists serve primarily as conduits for important European philosophical concepts, particularly those of the Scottish common-sense realists and, especially, the German idealists. Because the ideas of the American Transcendentalists “percolated throughout Northern culture,” Craig reasons, so too did those of Thomas Reid, Thomas Brown, Dugald Stewart, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, opening the way for an in-depth exploration of their philosophies (8). Explaining and unpacking those ideas is the book's primary focus, essentially tracing the intellectual roots of Transcendentalism. European concepts of character, intuition, self, gender, race, nature, and nation, and the debates surrounding them, all receive extensive treatments. The concept of “Bildung” is the intellectual core here, tying the German idealists to the American Transcendentalists and, by extension, the northern populace at large. Composing the bulk of the book, these chapters are impressive, dealing deftly with notoriously difficult thinkers.The Transcendentalists took these ideas and fused them into a “cohesive philosophical movement,” though in that synthesis the Germans clearly had the upper hand (11). When it comes to Transcendentalism, Craig focuses mostly on the usual suspects—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller—but she expands her field at times to include intellectually adjacent figures such as Walt Whitman, Horace Bushnell, Francis Lieber, and others. The Transcendentalists are not presented as overly original thinkers in themselves. Instead, they serve primarily as a delivery system, disseminating and popularizing these European ideas. Craig assigns enormous cohesiveness and influence to the Transcendentalists, crediting them for converting large swaths of northern society to their philosophical worldview.Contrary to previous scholars who have focused on a Transcendentalist moment in the 1830s and 1840s, Craig sees a Transcendentalist era that spanned much of the 19th century. The 1830s “was not by any means the high point of Transcendentalism but only the genesis of the movement,” she maintains (183). The subsequent involvement of Transcendentalist figures in reform, abolitionism, politics, and support for the Union cause in the Civil War was not a turning away from their Transcendentalist principles, as others have argued, but rather was driven by a consistent commitment to self-realization, properly understood. American Transcendentalism was alive and well by the time of the Civil War, Craig insists. Indeed, Union victory was “in some ways the culmination of the Transcendentalist movement,” whose “predominance . . . as a sole philosophical influence” only “began to fade in the early 1880s” (244).The book is at its best when dealing with the intricacies of great thinkers and their work. When it attempts to show how these very abstract concepts were absorbed and applied by regular people and demonstrate this “philosophy in action,” it becomes more speculative and tenuous. For this, Craig relies on the historical literature dealing with Civil War soldier motivations as well as anecdotal quotations drawn from letters and speeches. Here, more evidence would be required to demonstrate their representativeness and provide the necessary bolstering for these seemingly commonplace 19th-century colloquialisms to support the philosophical weight they are made to bear.The book's conclusions are bold and forceful, but talk of “singular” accounts, “unified” looks, “archetypical character,” and “sole” philosophical influences raises questions, especially when applied to peoples and eras (7, 6, 244). The direct line that the book traces requires that the Transcendentalists were the source from which Americans gained access to these philosophical concepts. Craig asserts a consistency to Transcendentalism that many at the time, and since, would find surprising. Radical individualism and cohesiveness rarely go together, and Emerson himself famously mocked that “hobgoblin” of consistency and refused to be bound by it. There is also a horse and cart question here. Yes, Civil War soldiers spoke about character and viewed war as a personal test, but can this be attributed primarily to the Transcendentalists or to the broader culture in which they were steeped? What if Transcendentalism was a manifestation, a reflection, of its larger cultural moment rather than its source and driving force? Must this story be unidirectional? That said, as “a sufficient demonstration that the philosophical undercurrents impacting the era's perspective provide greater richness and depth to the understanding of the period as a whole,” the book achieves its purpose, more than enough to prove its worth (248).