let him visit the fine picture of “The Angels appearing to the Shepherds,” by COLE.… The subject…is suited to the peculiar state of every mind which has been agitated at the sight of the recent outbreakings of sin and war, and ill-will among brethren. Writing in the wake of the April 1834 election riot, a three-day affair that broke out around that year’s mayoral election in New York, the Commercial Advertiser critic championed Cole’s picture as a symbolic answer to the “stirring strife of political war.” The painting, in this argument, could work to “subdue” the violent “passions” at the root of the riots, bring peaceable “repose” to the agitated viewer, rebuild the bonds of good “will” joining the city’s “brethren,” and ultimately work to rebuild an orderly and harmonious “public.” In celebrating Cole’s picture as a vehicle for edification, pacification, and harmonization, the Commercial Advertiser review articulated the central themes of a broader aesthetic discourse that circulated widely in the antebellum period. This discourse, which I will call “republican aesthetics,” construed elevated painting as a medium through which an ideal mode of hierarchical republicanism might be articulated, realized, and sustained in the face of growing disorder and the accelerating process of democratization.

Proponents of republican aesthetics understood academic painting as an exemplary vehicle for the transmission of republican behaviors and attitudes, an engine for the reproduction of customary hierarchies, and a connective tissue that might rebuild civic bonds. As the review quoted above suggests, these arguments found expression in a wide range of cultural venues and maintained their force long after the political system began its radical shift toward popular democracy in the Jacksonian era. The review also affords a view of the pressures that this aesthetic discourse brought to bear on the production and consumption of elevated art at the time. Encouraging artists and audiences alike to focus on subjects that might reaffirm traditional civic ideals, republican aesthetic theory attempted to foreclose the possibility of representing alternative forms of civic expression and governance in paint--including mass democracy and politicized violence. Most artists accordingly chose to ignore the turbulent phenomena that threatened the republican polity and instead focused on rendering the spaces and figures of elite governance.

Painting the period’s endemic disorder in this highly charged context was a difficult and risky venture. In taking up the subject of upheaval, Cole had few precedents on which to draw, little critical support, and a difficult theoretical problem to surmount: how to represent the illicit phenomenon of violent turmoil in a medium ideologically aligned with order. This essay will examine Destruction as a pioneering effort to negotiate the pressures of republican aesthetics and open symbolic space for the representation of unrest within the visual field of academic painting. On its surface a depiction of a military battle set in an imagined ancient past, Destruction shapes a vision of roiling chaos that subtly invokes the rioting that surrounded the artist in New York in the early 1830s. To answer contemporary critical demands for stabilizing imagery, I will argue, Cole drew on the themes of the political jeremiad, a prophetic rhetorical mode that American conservatives employed to underscore the virtue of harmony and hierarchy. As he composed his jeremiad in paint, Cole strove to reaffirm the ideals of hierarchical republicanism and conjure up the dramatic energy of the upheaval around him. The arresting scene that resulted, however, points to an unresolved mixture of feelings at the heart of the jeremiadical tradition, a deep ambivalence about turmoil that complicated conservative arguments for order and authority. By reconstructing Cole’s negotiations with republican aesthetics and his carefully refracted engagement with Jacksonian unrest, this essay aims As a young artist working in New York in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Thomas Cole was confronted by a steady stream of political turmoil. The city was a major hub for the raucous culture of mass politics that had begun to develop around the Democratic Party. New York’s elections in the Jacksonian era were increasingly turbulent affairs in which contending factions employed mass demonstrations, acts of intimidation, and polling-place brawls in an effort to influence voting. In these years the city was also the site of frequent bloody riots, many political in nature; by one estimate, New York witnessed seventy-four riots between 1828 and 1836.l As we will see, Cole kept close tabs on the democratic tumult that surged around him.

At the height of this unrest, I will argue, he turned to the spectacle of upheaval for inspiration. Hard at work on his monumental cycle The Course of Empire (1834-36) even as the wave of Jacksonian violence crested, Cole inscribed the fourth canvas, Destruction (frontispiece), with a glowing vision of disorder that invoked and sensationally dramatized the riotous energies of the moment. Cole’s creative engagement with Jacksonian disorder entailed a daring departure from convention. Indeed, the artist’s viewers expected his work to function as a corrective to the turmoil of the era. An 1834 New-York Commercial Advertiser review of Cole’s painting The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds thus argued: The political excitement through which we have passed, seems to have absorbed all interests but one. Objects worthy of attentive study, and of real public interest have been forgotten.… We have now a breathing spell, and after such a stirring of the passions, what subjects can we fix upon to calm the feelings, and bring repose… than the silent yet eloquent lessons of the pictorial art? If anyone would feel this delightful calm, if he would have those passions which have been over-excited by the stirring strife of political war… subdued by to shed new light on the complex interconnections between aesthetic theory, painting, and political conflict in the early nineteenthcentury United States. I also hope to extend and redirect scholarly considerations of The Course of Empire, which have thus far concentrated on Consummation, the third and largest canvas of the series. More specifically, I seek to build on and complicate the insightful studies of Alan Wallach and Angela Miller, who have read Cole’s series as an allegorical critique of Jacksonian imperial ambition and commercial excess that posits an inescapably bleak fate for the nation. Diverging from these analyses, I will argue that Cole’s creative engagement with the political jeremiad opened space for the viewer to look beyond the surface narrative of inexorable decline and understand The Course of Empire as a cautionary prophecy of an unsettling but avoidable national future.

Republican Aesthetics Early nineteenth-century artists and critics regularly stressed the power of academic painting to sustain the fledgling republican polity by communicating its central ideals, making its structures visible and “real” to viewers, and establishing republicanism as the limit of political possibility for the new nation. Articulated by a variety of cultural commentators, these arguments gradually cohered into a consistent theoretical discourse that would profoundly influence the production and consumption of political art in the Jacksonian period and deeply complicate the painterly representation of popular democracy and violent discord. The first few decades of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of a hierarchical republican polity and its gradual displacement by the modern liberal-democratic system that would shape American life for the rest of the century. Laboring to contain the disorderly potential of the masses, the framers of the Constitution had designed a republican system of representation that delegated political authority, as James Madison argued in Federalist 10, to an elite “body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.” Taking shape in the following decades, this system featured a civic sphere defined by order, communal harmony, and rigid hierarchy. When navigating this arena, citizens of the early republic were expected to relinquish disorderly crowd traditions (such as rioting, skimmington rides, and tarring and feathering) and confine the expression of political opinion to peaceable practices (voting, debate, and petitioning), cede authority over public concerns to elected officials, and defer to the superior administrative capacities of these statesmen.

This early hierarchical republic was challenged from its inception by a variety of populist uprisings and democratic movements. A wide range of Americans still understood violent action as a legitimate means of political expression and an instrument of communal will. This lingering attachment to force fueled a string of bloody outbursts that culminated in the wave of rioting that swept the nation in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Workers, women, and northern freedmen simultaneously employed new forms of orderly collective action (such as parades, demonstrations, and public meetings) in an effort to widen the sphere of political agency, spurring the expansion of the franchise and the emergence of mass party politics.5 Early cultural spokesmen imagined academic painting and sculpture as key supports for the shifting and contested polity. These arguments rehearsed and renovated the central ideas of European aesthetics and especially the theories of Sir Joshua Reynolds and other neoclassical thinkers. As John Barrell has shown, Reynolds’s enormously influential Discourses construed art as a cultural vehicle capable of developing a virtuous citizenry by stimulating viewers’ higher faculties and civic inclinations. Extending Reynolds’s ideas, American thinkers emphasized painting’s capacity to communicate the central attitudes necessary for correct republican citizenshi p and to temper those impulses believed to promote disorder. Regularly affirming painting’s power to “enhance the charms of virtue” or offer concrete “incitement[s] to virtue,” aesthetic writers aligned the medium with a central civic trait associated with reasonable self-control and communitymindedness. Even as it stimulated those propensities necessary for partici pation in the political sphere, painting also worked to restrain the lower psychic impulses that purportedly gave rise to factionalism, mob violence, and other forms of unrest. In an 1813 article promoting the American Academy of the Fine Arts, for example, the lawyer John G. Bogert argued that artworks exhibited at the fledgling institution would “soften the fiercer passions… create an admiration of whatever is great and glorious, and… bring into exercise all the finer feelings of our nature.”6 In aligning painting with the development of virtuous self-disci pline and the defusing of the “fiercer passions,” Bogert and countless other aesthetic thinkers positioned the medium as a critical bulwark against the turbulence that threatened the early republic.

Just as they sought to define the ordering and harmonizing effects of academic art, early nineteenth-century arts advocates identified subjects they felt would most effectively communicate the tenets of hierarchical republicanism. Almost invariably, critics and cultural commentators urged artists to concentrate on the figures and practices of elite leadership. An 1816 North American Review article, for example, argued that art devoted to “the actions of our great and good men” would “prompt… citizens to illustrious deeds of heroism or benevolence.” In a contemporaneous academic lecture, the politician DeWitt Clinton called for the establishment of a gallery of “illustrious men” in New York, which might inspire visitors “to rouse the soul of generous emulation, and to catch