Ohio History Journal

The three decades preceding the American Civil War appear in retrospect

as an era of intellectual as well as political turbulence. Everywhere the forces

of romantic subjectivism were gaining ground at the expense of long-

established modes of thought and behavior. In religion the revivalist spirit

placed the heart above the head and swept away the discipline imposed by

ecclesiastical formalism; in philosophy the mechanistic sensationalism of

Locke yielded to more intuitive approaches to the problem of human con-

sciousness; legal concepts of guilt and responsibility trembled before a

mounting pressure to redefine the limits of rational activity; novelists and

poets extolled the solitary hero who enforced his own set of values against a

NOTES ARE ON PAGE 89