The Hudson River school was based on an ideal of an idyllic natural paradise, very much like the Eden of the Judeo-Christian tradition. When the first European colonists came to American they found it more or less populated. However, the Native American population experienced cataclysmic pandemics due to contact with European strains of viruses and other diseases that they had no immunity for and millions of them were wiped out by such diseases. When the later colonization waves came to America they then found an uninhabited land, seemingly untouched by the presence of man and because they were unaware that the Natives had succumbed to diseases brought in by the colonists they fell to the illusion that America was a virginal land, a primordial paradise untouched by civilization.
The Hudson River School was an American version of pictorial Romanticism. They idealized the sublime of nature and thereby had a profound affection and respect for it. They saw it as a new Eden – untarnished by the evils of Europe - that had been given by God to Americans to preserve and where to live in happy communion with nature.
Considering that during the Gilded Age, industrialists used science to destroy nature in search for profit; such vision was in direct opposition to the Romantic ideals of the Hudson River School. During the Antebellum era, the South had remained a mostly Agrarian society, where nature was respected and protected as a source of both pleasure and profit. The North was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and even though Southerners envied their technological advantages they despised their extreme utilitarian materialism which translated in pollution, industrial ugliness and the exploitation of men (white men of course, Southerners were not concerned about the exploitation of black slaves).
After the Civil; Northern capitalist industrialists abandoned all restrained and imposed their model to the entire nation and exploited both nature and man. This worsened during the Gilded Age and the resurgence of the Hudson river schools was a reaction to the extreme abuses of capitalist industrialists.
