"YOUNG AMERICA"

"YOUNG AMERICA," a popular and widespread phrase culturally linked to the period 1840–1852, referred to anything that exhibited the youthful spirit of energy and enterprise characteristic of the times. Fundamentally an attempt to construct issues apart from sectional controversy, the phrase combined democratic universalism and aggressive nationalism with the notion of manifest destiny. Young Americanism was articulated by literary figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson as an elevated nationalism and by political figures in the Democratic Party such as George Nicholas Sanders as uniting all sections on a platform of free trade, access to foreign markets, and annexation southward. After culminating in the amorphous Young America Democratic faction (1851–1856), the movement lost momentum and disappeared.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curti, Merle E. "Young America." American Historical Review 32 (1926): 34–55.

Gienapp, William E, ed. Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840–1860. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982.

Grant, Susan-Mary. North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.

S. F. Riepma/ H. R. S.

See also Democratic Party; Manifest Destiny; Nationalism; Sectionalism.