Midcentury America: Life in the 1850s

by Carl Bode (Compiler)

Through his selection and organization of, and commentary on, the documents and illustrations in this anthology Carl Bode gives his readers a vivid picture of American civilization and popular culture of the 1850s. The twenty-eight selections from contemporary documents and thirty illustrations are divided into seven sections covering various aspects of the American experience—the character of the people and country, home life, work, education, religion, pleasures of life, and slavery. Americans in the 1850s, the documents show, were worse off physi­cally and better off mentally than they are today. They felt more secure because they had more absolutes than we do today. Men in the earlier era trusted in God and in the great social institutions of church, family, school, and country. Yet the 1850s were by no means a bucolic interlude before the Civil War, as Bode makes clear, and the revealing look at the period given here is both rich and rewarding.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1972

Reviews

[Edward]

I would like to share, however, some of his comments at the very beginning. In his introduction Bode writes, and I quote, “If you were the average American—and nobody ever is—living in the 1850s, you would, I think, be worse off physically and better off mentally than you are today. This is a paradox and an unprovable one, the sort that historians love to leap on with a yell. In a careful investigation of this interesting decade, a close look at its documents and artifacts, its gaudy mementos and odd paraphernalia leads pretty surely to that conclusion. You would be smaller and sicklier, but also more sanguine. You would probably be more superstitious, more ignorant. It is certain that you would be smaller. Such men’s clothing as has survived the attic and the moth looks shrunken to us. So do the women’s. The Smithsonian Institute has an exhibit of gowns worn by president’s wives and the further they go from our time, the smaller the gowns get. You would be sicklier since disease would be stalking you often. The deadliest of ills you would be exposed to would be tuberculosis, diphtheria and typhoid. If you become a parent in the 1850s in Massachusetts, the only state to keep life expectancy records then, your baby had a life expectancy of only about 40 years.”

Let me stop there and comment. The reason why a baby in Massachusetts in the 1850s would have a life expectancy of only 40 years was for the very simple reason that so many babies did not survive the ailments of childhood. There was a high death rate for small children. But if you survived childhood, your life expectancy was not that much different than it has been in our day.
Well, to get back to Bode.

“Still, you would feel more sanguine than you would today. Though few of us learn to take disease or death for granted, you would learn to live with it as we have learned to live with the hydrogen bomb. In fact, you would expect your children to catch certain diseases and be troubled if they did not knowing vaguely that it would be worse to catch them later. You would feel more secure in the present nor optimistic about the future because the history both of your country and your people had been one of spectacular progress. The only obstacle to continued progress, though a formidable one, slavery, you ignored if you lived in the north and refused to consider an obstacle if you lived in the south. You would feel more secure because you would have more absolutes than you do now. You would trust I the great social institutions of church, family, school and country. You would believe unwaveringly in God. You would have faith in the universe which he created and continued benignly to supervise. You would be certain that he family stood solid as a rock. Your Americanism would be unalloyed. You would speak sincerely about the rising glory of America.
“You would be more superstitious because you would probably still carry with you a baggage of old world belief to add to the new. You would be more ignorant because you would be less schooled. Though we all know that schooling does not necessarily abolish ignorance, the fact is that in 1850, slightly less than half of the school age population went to school.”

Now let me interject something. Again, that is true. But remember Lincoln only went to school for about three years and only a few weeks each year and he was highly literate. Most people at school age were out in the working world and could read and write and compute.
Well, getting back to Bode.

“Everything considered, you would probably be happier if you lived in the 1850s. All this, that is, if you were an average American, an average white American. If you were black you could never escape the brutal, miserable fact that some white man owned you. Though your owner would be apt to say loudly that you were better off than you would have been back in Africa.”

Well, Bode continues to say that, “Then men believed in doing more for themselves. But we are calling now on the government and the school to do more for us. And we are less sure about the future, less sure about the present, less sure about ourselves so that we have changed dramatically as a people.”

He does an interesting bit of work in digging up documents of the times, about machinery and inventions, agriculture, businessmen and clerks, lawyers, the American home, the art of homemaking, children, family affairs, women, the American mind, adult education, science, religion, Protestant and Catholic and much, much more, the social life, the pleasures of life, slavery from documents of the time. And all in all it is delightful reading.
I found it a refreshing look because it describes this country as people today are unwilling to recognize it.