American Romantic Reform
Wallace Brown describes how, during the decades before the Civil War, the United States abounded in religious reformers and perfectionists.
From the start the area that became the United States has been associated with perfectionism. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was placed there. The Puritans, ‘choice grain... sifted [from] a whole nation’, fled from the England of Charles I with no less a mission than the creation of a perfect Christian commonwealth leading to the regeneration of the world. As John Winthrop preached in 1630: ‘we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.’
Other groups such as the Quakers and the Mennonites in the seventeenth century and the Dunkers in the eighteenth century added to this religious tradition. Both religious and secular idealism can be seen in the founding of the Carolinas in the 1660s and Georgia in the 1730s.
The American Revolution strengthened beliefs in superiority over Europe and reflected the Enlightenment’s hope for the perfection which, it was thought, would come most readily in the young Republic. As the one dollar bill puts it: Annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum. Throughout American history success in colonization and nation-building has inspired hopes of greater, even unlimited, success.
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