America Aflame (5 page)

Some northern whites feared the black migration was already under way. The black population in the North had grown faster than any other segment of the northern population between 1800 and 1830 to nearly 320,000. Restrictions on their civil liberties and employment accompanied this increase. States excluded them from basic rights of citizenship such as serving in state militias and voting. Laws and customs barred them from hotels and restaurants and relegated them to segregated schools. The pattern of segregation in the North extended to cemeteries, jails, and churches, where blacks sat in “nigger pews.” Most states outlawed interracial marriage and prohibited blacks from testifying in court against whites. Employment options narrowed, especially after the 1830s when immigrants crowded into northern cities and competed with native-born whites and blacks for work. Even domestic service, long a preserve of black women, became less available as the growing urban middle class in the North found prestige in hiring Irish girls to cook and clean for them. Some states in the Midwest banned free blacks from entering altogether.

As voting restrictions for whites fell away, blacks found less room under the broadened canopy of democracy. Every new state from the 1820s onward restricted suffrage to white males only, and in New Jersey and Connecticut, lawmakers amended constitutions to limit suffrage to white men. Barred from jury service in most states, either by custom or law, free blacks comprised a disproportionate number of prisoners and suffered wildly disparate sentences from whites for similar offenses. When the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, admitted black citizens to jury duty, the event became national news and elicited a warning from an Indiana congressman that such a precedent “would allow a white man to be accused of crime by a negro; to be arrested on the affidavit of a negro, by a negro officer; to be prosecuted by a negro lawyer; testified against by a negro witness; tried before a negro judge; convicted before a negro jury; and executed by a negro executioner; and either one of these negroes might become the husband of his widow or his daughter!”
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Although northern blacks organized and protested against these restrictions, only in Massachusetts did they achieve some success, as the legislature in 1843 repealed the state's ban against interracial marriage and railroad companies abandoned segregated seating. An English traveler at the time, noting the obstacles blacks confronted living in the North, concluded, “We see in effect, two nations—one white and another black—growing up together within the same political circle, but never mingling on a principle of equality.”
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African Americans' living conditions in the North reflected their limited work and educational choices. Housed in sheds, stables, run-down tenements, or not at all, dodging police who served more as tormentors than protectors, and targets of periodic violence—black life in the urban North may have been free, but it was not good. When southern whites countered anti-slavery arguments by pointing out that blacks' living conditions in the North proved their unfitness for freedom, they were half right.

Northern opposition to the gag rule and southern demands for a federal ban on abolitionist literature (and the arrest and extradition to the South of those responsible for the mailings) had much more to do with Revolutionary principles as embodied in the Constitution than with liberating slaves. Southern whites, in denying freedom for the black man, now threatened freedom for whites. As one northern white argued, southerners must not “require of us a course of conduct which would strike at the root of everything we have been taught to consider sacred.” The White Protestant Republic, as codified in the Revolutionary documents and ordained by God, had no room for those who threatened both the laws of God and those of man.
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The political process might have contained the sectarian and anti-slavery conflicts, as it had in the past, were it not for the changing landscape of America. It was not happenstance that Lyman Beecher and Charles Grandison Finney both left their eastern homes and sought converts in Ohio. Beecher authored a blueprint for this crusade,
A Plea for the West
(1835). The book exposed the alleged Catholic conspiracy in the West to defile the virgin land, working through the “dread confessional” to manipulate elections and “inflame and divide the nation, break the bond of our union, and throw down our free institutions.” The mission of America to guide the world to grace depended on “the religious and political destiny” of the West. And this destiny depended on capturing the West for Protestants and whites.
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Americans in the 1830s and 1840s were on the move—to the West, to the cities, to anyplace where they could pursue the main chance, a better life, more land, independence, or just a change of scenery. As God's rule knew no boundaries, so the American continent offered a limitless expanse of opportunity. Space, the ability to pursue it, get it, and own it, set the American apart from the European and from Europe, where land was the prerogative of the elite and often closed to certain classes, ethnic groups, and dissenting religions. Yet not all religions or races were welcome in the American West. Their exclusion would become a contentious political issue, a holy crusade, a cause to violence, and eventually a call to civil war.

The movement west seemed inexorable. Even the great contrarian Henry David Thoreau found himself drawn to a western route in meanderings from his home in Concord: “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.” For the awakened, the migration affirmed God's plan for America. The destiny of these transplanted Europeans lay in peopling a continent. They perceived this destiny as a fulfillment, not a conquest. “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,” wrote John Adams, “as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” The West was more than a place; it was a sacred trust that God held until His Chosen People arrived to spread His faith and His government over the land.
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Migration meant more than moving from one place to another; it became a holy work to turn virgin soil and to grow republican ideals and Christian virtues. Many nineteenth-century Americans believed they could discern the will of Providence in daily events, and in these migrations they perceived a divine destiny. As Americans settled new land, they expiated old sins and edged closer to the day of the coming of the Lord. These sentiments blended the sacred with the secular and transcended the evangelical community to engage most Americans. Thomas Jefferson visualized the providential nature of migration with his proposal for the Great Seal of the United States, a portrait of “the children of Israel, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night”—the new nation inexorably moving toward Canaan.
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Moving also offered an opportunity to perfect America, to synthesize the best of the old settlements to create a new, more perfect Union. In this western crucible “pride and jealousy gave way to natural yearnings of the human heart for society.… Take the Virginian from his plantation or the Yankee from his boat and harpoon,… and place him in the wilderness, with an axe in his hand and rifle on this shoulders, and he soon becomes a different man; his national character will burst the chains of local habit.” It was the process of casting off the provincialism of the past and becoming an American.
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John L. O'Sullivan, a Harvard-educated journalist, coined a phrase for this sense of geographic entitlement and providential oversight when he wrote in July 1845 of “our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” He did not mean it in a belligerent way, but rather as a sacred responsibility to spread America's government and religion far and wide in order to save all mankind.
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The westward trek was odyssey, ordeal, and mission. The Mormons offered the best proof of just how distinctively American was this journey, though O'Sullivan and most other Americans would not have singled them out as representative of anything except trouble. The Mormons sought the ultimate West: the establishment of a new Zion, a literal heaven on earth. From the first New England settlements, the building of a perfect society, defying the Augustinian dictum about the city of God and the secular realm as distinctive spheres, had burrowed into the national consciousness through the churches, political discourse, and literature. The Mormons would realize this dream.
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Of all the varied movements in American society during the first half of the nineteenth century, the Mormons perhaps best embodied the culture of that era: deeply spiritual in a religious age, hardworking in a nation where the work ethic assumed the proportions of an Eleventh Commandment, and willing to endure hardship in pursuit of their dream. While they cherished the importance of the individual conversion, the Mormons believed strongly in the group as both a shield of protection and an engine of advancement, principles that new settlements west of the Appalachians had enshrined. It was a most optimistic faith in the most optimistic country; its founding story was America's story: the progressive triumph of God's power over evil, and the belief that America was the Lord's Zion, and that this Zion would be located somewhere in the western Eden. Yet this most American group was also among the most persecuted. They stretched Americans' tolerance in religious affairs, but their primary “sin” was carrying nineteenth-century American culture to its logical conclusion. At what point did hard work become obsession? How much should communal cohesion overwhelm individual choice? When did religious freedom slide into heresy?

Their secondary sin was success. Mid-nineteenth-century America was a crucible for all sorts of ideas and beliefs. Learned individuals measured and counted bumps on peoples' heads to determine their personality, and they called it science. Leading literary lights left their comfortable homes and villages to establish rural communes where members exchanged work roles, money, and each other's spouses, and they called it utopia. Physicians advocated immersions in hot and cold water, emulsions of mercury, and diets heavy on crackers as body-cleansing regimens, and they called it therapy. Some people believed that biblical numerology predicted the end of the world—the date shifted, but 1843 seemed to be most likely—and they called this revelation. All of these movements crashed, most sooner, some later. Just as personal failure reflected an individual character flaw, so the failure of movements indicated their shaky underpinnings. Such, most assumed, would be the case with the Latter-day Saints. But they did not fail; and their detractors expressed both wonder and anger at their persistence. If the Mormons succeeded, then there must be something to their theology. Just as failure was the measure of men, so too was success. Even more.

In the 1820s, across western Vermont, into adjacent New York State, and on the shores of the Great Lakes into the Middle West, the fires of religious enthusiasm stirred thousands of residents, who carried the flames with them as they migrated westward. The western part of New York State was so singed by the phenomenon that people called it the “burnt” district. In catching this spirit, young Joseph Smith was not unlike myriad other youngsters, wrestling with changes in their bodies and the assault of new ideas on their minds, the wild blending of the occult and the Christian. Daniel Hendrix, a neighbor, thought young Joe “was the most ragged, lazy fellow in the place, and that is saying a good deal.” His very appearance portended failure: “I can see him now in my mind's eye,” Hendrix related, “with his torn and patched trousers, his calico shirt as dirty and black as the earth, and his uncombed hair sticking through the holes in his old battered hat.” In the dead of winter, young Joseph, so poor, or so oblivious, trudged through the snow and slush with paper-thin shoes. Yet he never seemed moody or resentful and made friends easily. Above all, everyone agreed, Joseph had “a fertile imagination. He never could tell a common occurrence in his daily life without embellishing the story with his imagination.”
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The story he told of one day in 1820 was about his sudden conversion—not a unique experience in the overheated religious environment—and the appearance of two bright angels who told him that all existing religious beliefs were false: “I asked the personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right.… And which I should join. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong, and … all their Creeds were an abomination in his sight.” It was a feeling many spiritual Americans experienced, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in his 1832 “Divinity School Address,” lamented the emptiness of the contemporary church. For Emerson, “God is, not was;… He speaketh, not spake,” and “the gleams which flash across my mind” were contemporary revelation. But when the fourteen-year-old Joseph confided his visions to a Methodist minister, “he treated my communication not only lightly but with great contempt, saying it was all of the Devil, that there was no such thing as visions or revelations in these days.”
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The angel Moroni told young Joseph where to find a book written on gold plates accompanied by special stones that would enable him to translate the tablets. The prophet Mormon and his son Moroni, survivors of a lost tribe of Israel, had written on the plates. The plates revealed the history of the tribe and predicted the emergence of a new prophet, Joseph Smith.

The prophet began modestly, conducting healing ceremonies in the neighborhood and offering predictions about politics and souls. He forecast that the United States would eventually fall into a civil war that would begin in South Carolina. Smith and his followers, like Emerson, sought perfection—to live the life that God commanded; to live the life of Truth as detailed in the Book of Mormon
,
the Bible (numerous passages of which appeared in the Book of Mormon), and Smith's writings. In common with other movements at the time, Mormons abstained from alcohol and tobacco as part of the personal regimen of moving toward perfection. Smith believed that his mission was to build a new Zion in America where the thousand-year reign of Christ would begin: “We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes, that Zion will be built upon this [American] continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth, and that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory.” Only by being perfect could the Mormons realize this promise. It was a difficult task that required the utmost discipline and adherence to the faith.
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