The 19th Century: Selling Your Soul To The Devil

 The 19th Century: Selling Your Soul To The Devil

So after the rage-fueled upheavals of the 18th century, the 19th century steps in asking

“Okay okay okay... what if we just modernize a little bit... but keep the old hierarchies?”

This was the bargaining phase. And wow, did it try to have it both ways. The 19th century is the age of negotiation: not just between nations, but between eras. If the 18th century was anger, burning the old order to the ground, the 19th was what came after the fire: the moment when people looked around at the ashes and asked, “Can we rebuild this...but maybe keep some of the nice parts?” In the bargaining stage of civilizational grief, we try to have it both ways. It’s the century where we ask: “What if we didn’t have to fully let go?” And nowhere is this duality clearer than in the major transformations of the era.

Industrialization roared across Europe and North America, altering landscapes, labor, and lifestyles beyond recognition. But even as cities exploded and machines replaced hands, there was a simultaneous obsession with romanticism, nature, and the past. Poets longed for ruins. Painters wandered the countryside. Philosophers like Hegel and Kierkegaard gazed backward as much as forward. Civilization raced toward the future while constantly looking in the rearview mirror.

Bargaining in itself can also be quite literal and money and exchanges are often a huge theme in the 19th century. While the 18th century usually had events about fighting and refusing to make compromises, many 19th century events involve deals and making an agreement with someone. The most famous trope of this era is the faustian bargain also known as the deal with the devil. This is where someone sells their soul in order to gain fortune, fame, knowledge, power, or anything really. This was not only a common trope in 19th century literature, in fact it is where the term “faustian bargain” came from and is codified, with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Part I and Part II. Faust, a scholar, sells his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasure. A common interpretation of this story is that after years of pleasure, knowledge, and worldly achievement granted by Mephistopheles, Faust grows weary of empty indulgence. Just as he dies, believing he has finally found true, meaningful fulfillment, Mephistopheles claims his soul and Faust faces eternal damnation. While this agreement with the Devil himself may be a short term solution it often results in a worse outcome overall. Some may consider these deal with the devil stories cheesy as they may come off preachy and as a warning not to do this, the faustian bargain is often less that and more of a message about the innate human condition. It is human nature to long for an escape, in other words, these stories are not warning you that if you do this, bad things will happen, but rather when you inevitably make a bargain of some kind, there will be consequences. And you see this mentality not just in fiction but in the real world where bargains and compromises and treaties are signed for short term benefits but often face long term consequences…consequences that are felt to this day. It doesn’t even have to be that one party is evil, although a lot of historical treaties and deals are made by people with less than good intentions, you can also view it as a logical consequence. You play with fire, you get burnt, being burnt isn't a moral judgment, you are not a bad person because the fire touched you, it is just the logical outcome, an indifferent law. 

Slavery, the most brutal relic of the premodern world, was legally dismantled across much of the Western world in the 19th century. From Britain’s abolition in 1833 to America’s in 1865, there was a powerful and unprecedented reckoning with the inhumanity of the old system. Yet even as slavery ended, new forms of racial control were quietly negotiated into place: Jim Crow laws, segregation, and the replacement with convict labor and convict leasing. A bargain was struck: slaves were free, but only so far. 

Nowhere was this faustian bargain more evident than in colonialism. European powers continued to expand their empires. But the rhetoric changed. Colonized people weren’t just “heathens” or enemies, rather they were “our burden,” “our children,” “the unready.” The 19th century colonizer didn’t just conquer but they rationalized. This is the era of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, of “civilizing missions,” of schoolhouses next to army barracks. Empires were back and bigger than ever but now wearing a top hat and holding a science book. Britain, France, Belgium, and others said: “No no, this isn’t conquest, this is bringing order to the world.” It wasn’t less racist than prior centuries, it was simply more dressed up, more conflicted, more bargaining. The concept of bargaining for colonialism in the shock era of the 16th century was unheard of. To them, the native people were simply there to get conquered and slaughtered while seeing the places they explore as a mysterious unknown. But it was in the 19th century, colonists tried to make the locals bargain through treaties. Colonial powers often signed treaties with local rulers, sometimes under duress, misrepresentation, or differing interpretations. The Berlin Conference, for example, encouraged formal agreements with African rulers as a basis for claiming territory, which led to a wave of treaty making, many of which the locals did not fully understand. Colonial regimes relied heavily on local elites, chiefs, and intermediaries to administer colonies. The colonists encouraged them to bargain for land and titles, economic privileges, and exemption from certain colonial laws or taxes. In India, princely states like Hyderabad or Kashmir bargained for autonomy within the British Raj. King Lobengula of the Ndebele signed treaties with British agents, leading to colonization of Zimbabwe. The Dutch in Indonesia struck deals with Javanese rulers for control of trade and territory. Of course, like any deal, it has a price. These negotiations allowed colonial powers to expand control with limited resources, and local elites to retain some semblance of power but at the cost of the native people who had no voice in these bargaining. 

You see that in the 19th century, a lot of compromises emerged. For example, you'll see compromises between the North and the South in the United States before and after the Civil War. The Missouri Compromise, The Compromise of 1850, the Compromise of 1877. All compromises related to bargaining over the expansion of slavery and later over handling free slaves. The 19th century American compromises paralleled colonial dynamics elsewhere: Bargaining was often made between elites or factions, while lesser people bore the consequences. In both cases, whether it's colonial subjects or enslaved/free Black Americans, the central tension was about who had the power to make decisions, and who those decisions affected. Temporary political stability at the cost of entrenching injustice. 

                                          

In fact if the English Civil War encapsulates the denial stage of the 17th century, then the American Civil War is a perfect representation as well as an example of everything wrong with the bargaining stage. The American Civil War is often remembered in binary terms: North vs. South, slavery vs. freedom, Union vs. Confederacy. But beneath the sweeping narratives lies a more complex truth: the Civil War was, in essence, a war of bargaining. It was the culmination of decades of compromises, backroom deals, political chess, and moral ambiguity. The Civil War was shaped by the politics of negotiation. And like any major deal gone wrong, the consequences were devastating: both immediate and long lasting. Since the founding of the United States, the question of slavery has haunted the nation's politics. The Constitution itself was a product of compromise, dancing around slavery to ensure ratification. The Three Fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause were early signs that America’s commitment to unity would come at a moral cost. As the nation expanded westward, new territories threatened to upset the delicate balance between free and slave states. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 were all attempts to maintain that balance. These deals were not true solutions but temporary deferrals, each one kicking the can down a bloodier road. Politicians bargained over geography, state rights, and even human lives, trying to buy peace with political calculus rather than clarity. 

Abraham Lincoln’s role in this bargaining conflict is often mythologized as unwavering and absolute. But Lincoln’s journey was anything but static. Before the war, he focused not on immediate emancipation but on preventing the spread of slavery. He was willing to make peace with slaveholding states if it preserved the Union. He supported the Corwin Amendment which would have protected slavery in the South but by that time, the South already left. It isn’t a part of the country. It’s like China passing a law allowing America to keep using guns in America. In fact, in his inaugural address in March 1861, Lincoln explicitly stated he had "no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists." Lincoln was a pragmatist. He understood the Union was built on a fragile alliance, and his early goal was to preserve it at nearly any cost. And that means any cost. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, arrested journalists and political enemies, and instituted a draft. A very common depiction in political cartoons by critics of Lincoln at the time is the faustian bargain with Lincoln often showing making a deal with some devil or demon. And in a way he is making a very consequential deal, he’s willing to preserve the Union on the condition of war, devastation, censorship, and destruction. In fact, it isn’t just Lincoln. Most of the political and military leaders in both the North and the South were willing to use cruel underhanded tactics for the war effort. Both the North and the South suspended habeas corpus, introduced a draft, sent large numbers of people to their death, and committed war crimes such as total warfare devastating innocent people, although as we’ll see, the North has done the last part a lot more. They all think they’re these moderate figures merely doing this for things as reasonable as “state’s rights” or “preserving the Union”. When they really just come across as sociopaths willing to literally trample people over in order to accomplish their goals. What followed was a conflict that cost over 600,000 lives  a horrific price for the failure of decades of compromise.

Each side believed they were fighting for their survival. The South gambled that their economic leverage, primarily cotton, and the threat of European support would force a negotiated peace. The North, meanwhile, had to prove that the Union was indivisible and that rebellion could not be rewarded. There were peace talks throughout the war, but they all collapsed. Too much blood had been spilled, and the terms had become irreconcilable.

By 1864, the Civil War had become a grinding nightmare. Casualties mounted, Northern morale was waning, and re election for Lincoln was anything but guaranteed. The Union needed a decisive blow not just a military victory, but a psychological one to break the Confederacy’s will. It was in this moment of desperation that Abraham Lincoln effectively made his Faustian bargain. Lincoln authorized General William Tecumseh Sherman to carry out a campaign of “hard war”, a euphemism for destruction, looting, and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure. Sherman’s infamous March to the Sea, stretching from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, was not a conventional military operation. It was a scorched earth policy, a calculated act of terror designed to shatter the South’s ability and will to continue fighting. Sherman didn’t just destroy Confederate supply lines. His troops burned homes, looted food, dismantled railroads, and razed cities, leaving psychological devastation in their wake. Though Sherman claimed to distinguish between military necessity and wanton cruelty, the result was clear: the South burned, physically and spiritually. For many Southerners, the Union victory no longer felt like just a "war of aggression": it was conquest. Lincoln knew this would happen. And he allowed it.

Like Faust, Lincoln was a man who faced an impossible choice:  preserve his moral ideals or make a pact that could deliver victory. In endorsing Sherman’s campaign, Lincoln traded ethical restraint for strategic success. He allowed terror and destruction to become tools of policy, hoping that shortening the war would ultimately save lives. This was Lincoln’s deal with the devil: if the war could end quickly, if the Confederacy could be broken, the country could be saved, even if it meant burning it first. The ends would justify the means, but the cost was incalculable. Sherman himself was clear-eyed about his role. “War is cruelty,” he wrote, “and you cannot refine it.” Lincoln, too, seemed to accept this grim logic. This was total war and it worked. Sherman reached the coast in December 1864, and by the spring of 1865, the Confederacy collapsed. Lincoln won re election, the Union was preserved, and slavery was abolished. But the scars, both physical and psychological, remained. The South would never forget the fire.

The Civil War ended in Union victory, but it was not the end of bargaining. Reconstruction was another fraught negotiation,  an attempt to reintegrate the South while redefining citizenship and rights. And once again, deals were made. The Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction in exchange for the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes, effectively abandoned Black Americans to a century of segregation and violence. The South did not simply “lose.” It was humiliated, burned, and scarred. Cities like Atlanta were leveled. Its economy collapsed. The South’s sense of identity, and grievance, hardened. The Civil War was not simply a clash of ideologies or a foregone conclusion. It was the result of countless deals, some in smoke-filled rooms, others written into law, where American leaders negotiated with a figurative devil to try to balance power with principle. But like any deal where the stakes are human lives and moral integrity, there came a time when the bill had to be paid. And it was paid in blood, fire, and devastation.

Lincoln did not live to see the consequences of the bargain in full. He was assassinated just days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. But the deal he struck lingered. Reconstruction was brutal and chaotic. The South, embittered and resentful, resisted efforts at reform. Southern backlash took root. The Union had been saved, but the peace was far from just or stable.

Like all Faustian bargains, Lincoln’s deal brought both triumph and tragedy. He preserved the Union and ended slavery and created a legacy having the greatest moral act in American history. But to do so, he unleashed forces that tore the South apart and set the stage for new cycles of division. We still see the consequences of the Civil War today. Political polarization has increased now, almost like the two sides have different worldviews and are not meant to be together. Race relations are fractured and feel incomplete due to the abruptness over the end of Reconstruction. Conservatives deal with the government being more involved in their lives and heavily regulating, and liberals and progressives deal with having the descendants of Southern slave owners blocking, to the progressives, “basic human rights legislation”. And everyone, everyone, deals with a government who's allowed to look through your data and invade your privacy for “safety” or “in times of emergency”. 

The Civil War was a war of bargaining. Lincoln, like many leaders in times of crisis, had to choose between bad and worse. In the end, he chose to deal with destruction in order to save the soul of the nation.

But the lesson of the Faustian bargain is this: even when the goal is noble, the price is always high.

And the devil always collects.

I know that some religious people might find the concept of selling one's soul abhorrent but pleading to a higher power is something fundamental to religion and despite all my talk of the devil, the bargaining is not inherently satanic; Christianity is heavily present in the bargaining age and religion is used as bargaining during this century. In the original version of Faust, it doesn’t have Faust facing damnation; rather angels intervene and redeem Faust, declaring that "Whoever strives with all his might, that man we can redeem." as Faust has grown weary of his indulgence before being on his deathbed and turns towards socially constructive work. His soul ascends to heaven, symbolizing salvation through earnest living, even if the person has made a mistake. In the 19th century, as empires expanded, economies industrialized, and political revolutions reshaped the Western world, a quieter, but no less powerful, upheaval was taking place. In churches, tents, parlors, and muddy revival fields, new religious movements were emerging that did not aim to preserve tradition but to transform society. These were not just spiritual awakenings; they were moral campaigns, radical social visions, and deeply human struggles to redeem the world. If the Civil War was America’s Faustian bargain with destruction, these reformist faiths were the opposite, a deal with God, forged in fire and prayer, to bring heaven closer to earth.

In early 19th century America, the Second Great Awakening swept through the frontier like wildfire. It was not a movement born in cathedrals or elite seminaries, but in revival tents, rural churches, and the open fields of Kentucky and upstate New York. Preachers like Charles Grandison Finney proclaimed that salvation was not predestined but chosen and that individuals had a moral duty to reshape the world. This awakening democratized religion. It empowered women, the poor, and the disenfranchised to become agents of moral reform, not just passive recipients of grace. And crucially, this movement didn’t stop at the pulpit. It ignited the engines of abolitionism, temperance, women’s rights, and education reform. In towns across the Northeast and Midwest, believers didn’t just preach salvation, they also built schools, published pamphlets, and organized protests. To these reformers, God was not an abstract deity removed from the suffering of the world. He was a righteous force demanding justice. They didn’t bargain with devils; they bargained with God, pledging to fight sin not only in the soul but in society with the understanding that failure to act might be a failure of faith itself.

Across the Atlantic, Britain was experiencing a parallel religious and moral revival. The Industrial Revolution had created immense wealth but also urban poverty, child labor, and class exploitation. In this crucible, reform minded religious groups surged to the forefront of public life. The Evangelical movement within the Anglican Church, for example, played a central role in the abolition of the slave trade, led by figures like William Wilberforce. Their faith wasn’t confined to Sunday worship, it demanded political action. Similarly, Methodism, which had once been a fringe sect, became a mass movement that emphasized personal piety, social responsibility, and the dignity of the working class. Later, groups like the Salvation Army, founded in 1865 by William and Catherine Booth, took this mission directly into the slums. Their motto was clear: “Soup, Soap, and Salvation.” These religious reformers entered into a spiritual pact: if they followed God’s will by helping the least of society, they would help build His kingdom on earth. It was a harsh, idealistic, and sometimes naive vision, but it was deeply sincere. To them, social action was not a political choice... it was a divine calling.

The 19th century also birthed entirely new religious movements, fueled by the belief that existing faiths had failed to confront modern problems. In America, Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints or the Mormons in the 1830s, offering a restored gospel and a new vision of Zion, a holy society built on purity, order, and communal responsibility. To early Mormons, America was a chosen land, but only if it lived up to its divine potential. The Shakers, led by Mother Ann Lee, envisioned a celibate, communal society free of sin and selfishness. The Oneida Community experimented with radical forms of shared property and even complex marriage systems, believing that true Christian life meant transcending conventional social norms. In Britain, groups like the Christian Socialists emerged in the 1840s, fusing the Sermon on the Mount with critiques of capitalism, advocating for cooperative economies and labor rights. These movements believed that faith must confront injustice, not merely comfort the oppressed.

What united these movements, across continents, doctrines, and denominations,  was the belief that faith required action. They did not strike bargains for power, riches, or revenge. Their deal was with God, and the terms were clear: live righteously, fight evil, reform the world or else risk divine disappointment. This was not a passive piety. It was dangerous, idealistic, and sometimes fanatical. But it gave birth to some of the most powerful reform efforts in modern history. Slavery was challenged. Alcoholism was fought. The rights of women and workers began to be voiced in sermons and scripture. And in many ways, these movements planted the seeds of the modern idea that religion is not just a private belief system but a public force, a tool for justice, not just salvation. They believed, fervently, that heaven could begin here, if people had the courage to sign the contract and keep their word.

Monarchies and republics also struck uneasy truces. France alone switched between empire, republic, monarchy, and back again multiple times. Britain retained its king and later queen but slowly handed real power to Parliament. Even in the U.S., fiercely democratic on paper, an aristocracy of wealth quietly emerged. Everywhere, the old and new were stitched together, hoping the seams would hold. The 19th Century got railroads, telegraphs, steamships, steel. There was a genuine belief we could tame modernity: industrialize without chaos, have progress without sacrifice, have empire with “civilizing missions.” And inside those countries, things looked deceptively stable seeing both the emergence of both conservative and liberal values. Women still can’t vote, but they can read now. The factory is hell, but it’s better than the fields. Workers are in horrid conditions, but now they have unions. But if they strike the factory owners can send police to stop them.  

Everything was a compromise. Change in name, old power in function. You got your civil rights… slowly. You got your revolutions… with monarchs put right back in place later. Slavery was abolished in many places but then replaced with indentured labor, racial caste systems, and colonial exploitation. Even culture was bargaining.  Romanticism looked back to nature because the cities were choking with smoke. Nationalism rose in response to the loss of identity in industrial modernity. The 19th century desperately wanted to hold onto the emotional comforts of the past while riding the mechanical beast of the future. We’ll keep the thrones, but add railroads. We’ll give peasants newspapers, but not votes. We’ll build factories and write poetry about trees.

This century’s bargaining wasn’t always dishonest; often it was deeply sincere. Humanitarianism expanded as well as science, public education, women’s rights movements, and other reforms. But so too did nationalism, eugenics, and empire. Otto Von Bismarck was ultra conservative but also introduced universal healthcare. The West wanted both emancipation and order, change and familiarity. The 19th century wasn’t a betrayal of ideals, it was an attempt to make a deal with modernity, to control it, to keep its benefits while fending off its spiritual costs.

But as we’ll soon see in the 20th century, this fragile compromise wouldn’t hold forever. The storm was already brewing. And this fragile balancing act? It worked... for a while. You can’t bargain forever. The contradictions built up like dynamite, and by the time the 20th century rolled in…

Boom.

Our stages of grief continue...