Orestes Brownson - Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism

After the demise of the Philanthropist in 1832, Brownson moved to Walpole, New Hampshire where he was a part of the Transcendentalist movement which swept through the Boston Unitarian community. He read in English Romanticism and English and French reports on German Idealist philosophy, and was passionate about the work of Victor Cousin and Pierre Leroux. In 1836, the year of Emerson's Nature, Brownson participated in the founding of the Transcendental Club. In 1836, he moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts to set up his own church which he called “The Society for Christian Union and Progress” and published his first book, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church, which combined Transcendental religious views with radical social egalitarianism, angrily criticizing the unequal social distribution of wealth as un-Christian and unprincipled.

In 1838 he founded the Boston Quarterly Review, and served as its editor and main contributor for four years. Other contributors included George Bancroft, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and Elizabeth Peabody. Brownson originally offered use of the Boston Quarterly Review as the vehicle for the transcendentalists; they declined and instead created The Dial.

Brownson's writing contributions were political, intellectual, and religious essays. Among these was a review of Thomas Carlyle's Chartism, separately published as The Laboring Classes (1840), which caused considerable controversy. The article is sometimes blamed for causing the incumbent Democratic President, Martin Van Buren, whom Brownson avidly supported, to lose the 1840 Presidency to William Henry Harrison. Also in 1840, Brownson published his semi-autobiographical work Charles Elwood; Or, The Infidel Converted. Through the protagonist, Brownson railed against organized religion and the truthfulness of the Bible. In 1842, Brownson ceased separate publication of the Boston Quarterly Review, and it was merged into The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, but his beliefs were once again evolving, and he found it necessary to break with the Review after a series of his essays created new scandal.