Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (101 page)

The nineteenth-century evangelical denominations knew Americans lived in a free country and could choose their religion at will; but this freedom and the lack of a traditional establishment did not mean that government had no responsibility for religion. The evangelicals repeatedly urged the United States government to recognize America’s basis in Christianity by providing chaplains in Congress, proclaiming days of fasting and prayer, and ending mail delivery on the Sabbath. The clergy had no intention of creating a new church establishment or of denying the rights of conscience, declared Nathaniel William Taylor of Connecticut, the most important theologian of the Second Great Awakening. “We only ask for those provisions in law . . . in behalf of a common Christianity, which are its due as a nation’s strength and a nation’s glory.”
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Even the nineteenth-century public school system became suffused with what were essentially Protestant religious values. Americans thus created what one historian has called the paradox of a “voluntary establishment” of religion.
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D
ESPITE
J
EFFERSON’S PREDICTION
, there was as little chance of ordinary Americans becoming rational Unitarians as there was of their becoming Federalists. Evangelical Christianity and the democracy of these years, the very democracy with which Jefferson rode to power and destroyed Federalism, emerged together. As the Republic became democratized, it became evangelized.

Once common middling people—the likes of William Findley, Matthew Lyon, Jedediah Peck, and William Manning—found that they could challenge deistic indifference and the older staid religions as completely as they were challenging the aristocratic Federalists, they set about asserting their own more popular versions of Christianity with a vengeance. Indeed, in Massachusetts and Connecticut the Baptists and other dissenters became Jeffersonian Republicans because they could see no difference between the Federalists and the Standing Order of Congregational and Presbyterian establishments. In 1801 a “Baptist” writing in Connecticut in the
The Patriot, or Scourge of Aristocracy
complained that hitherto he had been “duped to believe that we must follow the old beaten track laid down by our rulers and priests, without examining whether it was right or wrong.” But with the rise of the Jeffersonian Republican party those days were passing. This “Baptist” had now come “to suspect that every class of people have a right to shew their opinions on points which immediately concern them.”
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With such democratic views came a new revitalized religion. In Otsego County, New York, the Republican evangelical Jedediah Peck pushed for daily Bible reading in the schools and berated the Congregational and Episcopalian Federalists as closet deists who denied biblical revelation and as aristocrats who were contemptuous of the plain style and folk Christianity of the common people of the county.
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Middling people everywhere had a new heightened confidence to express their religious feelings publicly and politically. William Findley had been inducted as a ruling elder into the Reformed Presbyterian Church in 1770, and he remained a devout Presbyterian throughout his life. As a congressman from Pennsylvania, he promoted the interest of the Presbyterians and evangelical religion in every way he could. In 1807 he sponsored the incorporation of a Presbyterian church in the District of Columbia and throughout his many terms in office worked tirelessly to end mail delivery on Sunday.
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Although evangelical Christianity spread throughout America, it was most successful wherever authority and the social structure were weakest, wherever people were more mobile and separated from one another, and wherever the great demographic and commercial changes created the most anxieties and rootlessness. Out of the disintegration of authority and the resultant social turmoil and confusion, which could range from the severing of traditional social relationships to the more subtle sense that things simply seemed out of joint, many ordinary people became seekers looking for signs and prophets and for new explanations for the bewildering experiences of their lives. They came together without gentry leadership anywhere they could—in fields, barns, taverns, or homes—to lay hands on one another, to bathe each other’s feet, to offer each other kisses of charity, to form new bonds of fellowship, to let loose their feelings both physically and vocally, and to Christianize a variety of folk rites.
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From the “love feasts” of the Methodists to the dancing ceremonies of the Shakers, isolated individuals found in a variety of rites and evangelical “bodily exercises” ungenteel and sometimes bizarre but emotionally satisfying ways of relating to God and to each other. The various emotional expressions of the revivalists—fainting, trances, involuntary cries, shouting, and speaking in tongues—were new and perhaps were even intentionally designed to distinguish the evangelicals from the staid and stuffy religions of the elites.

Examples of this sort of ecstatic behavior were sometimes frightening to witnesses. At a Methodist revival in Baltimore in 1789 many of the participants, recalled one observer, “went out at the windows, hastening to their homes,” while others “lost use of their limbs, and lay helpless on the floor, or in the arms of their friends.”
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Sometimes the emotions got out of control. In an Ohio town in the early nineteenth century a middle-aged woman, who had been a Presbyterian, “got powerfully convicted” by the Methodism of her husband and children and, convinced by the devil that she was a reprobate, fell into a “black despair,” from which she emerged believing “that she was Jesus Christ, and took it upon her, in this assumed character, to bless and curse any and all that came to see her.” To the horror of her family and neighbors, she refused all food and drink, and two weeks later she “died without ever returning to her right mind.” Convinced that the Methodists had brought about her death, some members of the community, recalled the great Methodist evangelist Peter Cartwright, “tried to make a great fuss about this affair, but they were afraid to go far with it, for fear the Lord would send the same affliction on them.”
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When there were no trained clergy to minister to the yearnings of these often lost and bewildered men and women, they recruited leaders and preachers from among themselves, including women. The Baptists and Methodists were especially effective in challenging the traditional practice of having a settled and learned ministry, which was often Federalist. Indeed, the Baptists and Methodists scorned an educated clergy with their “senseless jargon of election and reprobation” and dismissed the traditional religious seminaries as “Religious Manufactories” that were merely “established for explaining that which is plain, and for the purpose of making things hard.” Cartwright, who assailed whiskey, slavery, and extravagant dress along with his constant berating of the orthodox churches, readily admitted that he and his fellow evangelical preachers “could not, many of us, conjugate a verb or parse a sentence and murdered the king’s English almost every lick, but there was a Divine unction that attended the word preached.”
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By 1812 Cartwright had become presiding elder of a district that extended into the territory of Indiana. While continuing to preach and hold quarterly conferences, he also supervised about twenty circuit preachers.

The most famous gathering of religious seekers took place in the summer of 1801 at Cane Ridge, Kentucky. There, huge numbers of people, together with dozens of ministers of several different denominations, came together in what some thought was the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit since the beginning of Christianity. Crowds estimated at fifteen to twenty thousand participated in a week of frenzied conversions. The heat, the noise, and the confusion were overwhelming. Ministers, sometimes a half dozen preaching at the same time in different areas of the camp, shouted sermons from wagons and tree stumps; hundreds if not thousands of people fell to the ground moaning and wailing in remorse; and they sang, laughed, barked, rolled, and jerked in excitement.

People “allowed each one to worship God agreeably to their own feelings,” declared Richard McNemar, who was one of the Presbyterian preachers present at Cane Ridge. (He later broke from Presbyterianism, created a universal church of Christianity, and ended up as a Shaker.) “All distinction of names was laid aside,” recalled McNemar of the camp meeting, “and it was no matter what any one had been called before, if now he stood in the present light, and felt his heart glow with love to the souls of men; he was welcome to sing, pray, or call sinners to repentance. Neither was there any distinction as to age, sex, color or any thing of a
temporary nature: old and young, male and female, black and white, had equal privilege to minister the light which they received, in whatever way the spirit directed.”
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America had known religious revivals before, but nothing like this explosion of emotion. Of course, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit was accompanied by the pouring out of lots of intoxicating spirits, and critics of the excesses of Cane Ridge claimed that the frenzied excitement resulted in more souls being conceived than converted. But the extraordinary number of conversions that actually did take place during that heady week convinced many evangelists that there were multitudes of souls throughout the country waiting to be saved. This gigantic camp meeting at Cane Ridge immediately became the symbol of the promises and the extravagance of the new kind of evangelical Protestantism spreading throughout the West.

Following this great Kentucky revival of 1801 evangelical activity went wild. Peter Cartwright described camp meetings at which “ten, twenty, and sometimes thirty ministers, of different denominations, would come together and preach night and day, four or five days together,” with the meetings sometimes lasting “three or four weeks.” He saw “more than a hundred sinners fall like dead men under one powerful sermon,” and witnessed “more than five hundred Christians all shouting aloud the high praises of God at once.” He was certain that “many happy thousands were awakened and converted to God at these camp meetings.”
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In the first twelve years of the nineteenth century the Methodists in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio grew from fewer than three thousand to well over thirty thousand. According to the reports of circuit riders, Methodists in some parts of the Southwest grew even faster, from forty-six thousand in 1801 to eighty thousand by 1807. The Baptists made similar explosive gains. In the short period between 1802 and 1804 the Baptists in Kentucky increased from 4, 700 to 13,500.
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In the fast-growing new areas of the West the need for some kind of community, however loose and voluntary, and the need for building barriers against barbarism and sinful-ness were most keenly felt.

Wherever the traditional structures of authority were disintegrating, new religious opportunities were opened up for those whose voices had not been heard before—the illiterate, the lowly, and the dependent. Both the Baptists and the Methodists encouraged public exhortation by
women, and powerful female preachers, such as Nancy Grove Cram of frontier New York and the black preacher Dorothy Ripley of Georgia, awakened numerous men and women to Christ. Cram, who died prematurely in 1815, spent nearly four years preaching and during that time recruited at least seven active ministers to the loose organization that called itself the Christian Church. Even the conservative Protestant churches began emphasizing a new and special role for women in the process of redemption.
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Religion was in fact the one public arena in which women could play a substantial part. By the time of the Revolution nearly 70 percent of members of the New England churches were women, and in the decades following the Revolution this feminization of American Christianity only increased.
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Some of the most radical sects, like Mother Ann Lee’s Shakers and Rhode Island native Jemima Wilkinson’s Universal Friends, even allowed for female leadership. Wilkinson’s disciples claimed that she was Jesus Christ. This so scandalized people that Wilkinson was forced to leave southern New England, going first to Philadelphia and then to western New York, where she gathered wealth from her followers. Her death in 1819 led to the rapid dissolution of the sect. The Shakers, who believed in celibacy and had to recruit all of their members, became the first American religious group to recognize formally the equality of the sexes at all levels of authority.
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The democratic revolution of these years made it possible for not only middling sorts but also the most common and humble of people to assert themselves and champion their emotions and values in new ways. Because genteel learning, formal catechism, even literacy no longer mattered as much as they had in the past, the new religious groups were able to recruit converts from among hitherto untouched elements of the population. Under the influence of the new popular revivalist sects, thousands of African American slaves became Christianized, and blacks, even black slaves, were able to become preachers and exhorters.

During the Revolutionary War serious money problems forced Stokely Sturgis, a Delaware owner of the black Allen family, to sell the parents and three young Allen children; Sturgis kept Richard Allen, a teenager, along with Richard’s older brother and sister. At almost the same time he broke up the Allen family, Sturgis converted to Methodism, and Richard Allen and his older brother and sister soon did the same. “I was awakened and brought to see myself,” Richard Allen recalled, “poor wretched and undone, and without the mercy of God, [I] must be undone.” After suffering for a long period, said Richard, crying “to the Lord both night and day,” and sure that “hell would be my portion, . . . all of a sudden my dungeon shook, my chains flew off, and, glory to God, I cried. My soul was filled. I cried, enough, for me the Saviour died.”