These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

In the United States, the political debate about the world of people and the world of things contributed to the agonized debate about slavery: Can people be things? Meanwhile, the geographical vastness of the United States meant that the anxiety about the machinery of industrial capitalism took the form not of Marxism, with its argument that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” but instead of a romance with nature, and with the land, and with all things rustic. Against the factory, Americans posed not a socialist utopia but the log cabin. “It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin,” Webster, a three-time presidential aspirant, sighed, despairing of his biographical deficiency in the age of the log cabin presidency.109 But the most famous log cabin in nineteenth-century America was the one built in 1844 by Emerson’s twenty-seven-year-old friend Henry David Thoreau.