Vermont During The Nineteenth-Century

When individuals imagine Vermont, they often envision a landscape of green fields with cows surrounded by colorful bright trees. Albers discuss the myth and reality about Vermont during the nineteenth-century in which Romantics very much so “believed in the ideal of an unspoiled American wilderness, its surface barely brushed by the hand of man” (Albers, p. 164). Many of these Vermonters wanted the land to appear “untouched” and natural yet due to economic necessities, operations such as lumbering and mining copper in areas including Vershire for example, the land experienced major unnatural changes. Vermont was depicted by State Geologist Albert Hager in his published “Report on the Geology of Vermont” in 1861 which captured Vermont as being wild, not very populated, and full of farms and villages” (Albers, p. 193).

In order to do so one must be “truly human and lead a life of virtue, must take part in public life as a fully autonomous being” (The Vermont Papers, 20). An individual goes beyond doing what they must do in order to survive and works towards helping and serving to those around them in order to improve society as a whole. One must have a material foundation, and Harrington and Jefferson associated a moral, and responsible being with one who owned property- property that allowed one to be productive and produce for others. Civic humanism encompasses many more in-depth aspects, and it is a way of living that I had not learned much about in the past yet it seems very interesting to continue learning how successful and satisfying this type of society would