Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (102 page)

Although Allen never attributed his and his siblings’ conversion to the division of their family, the coincidence is compelling. His master, Sturgis, may also have suffered from having to sell some of the Allen family, for his conversion to Methodism led to his conviction that slavery was wrong. He allowed Allen and his two siblings to buy their freedom, which Richard did in 1780. Richard Allen caught the attention of Bishop Francis Asbury, the founder of American Methodism, and he became a Methodist preacher. Eventually he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church and became a dedicated opponent of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.
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In the 1780s and 1790s another black preacher, Andrew Bryan, organized several Baptist churches in Georgia, including the first Baptist church for whites or blacks in Savannah. Bryan was born a slave but in 1795 purchased his own freedom. In the early nineteenth century a free black named Henry Evans founded the first Methodist church for blacks in Fayetteville, North Carolina. At first Evans’s church was opposed by whites, but when his preaching led to a decline in the profanity and lewd behavior of the slaves, the whites began supporting it. By 1807 whites in increasing numbers were joining his church; by 1810 his congregation numbered 110 whites and 87 blacks.
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Initially the Baptists and the Methodists tended to condemn slavery and welcome blacks to full membership in their communion. In Wilmington, North Carolina, for example, the first Methodist congregation formed in 1784 was all black. By 1800 nearly one out of three American Methodists was
an African American. Mainly because whites eventually objected to integrated churches, African Americans like Richard Allen began organizing dozens of independent black congregations throughout much of America. During the first third of the nineteenth century, blacks in the city of Philadelphia alone built fourteen churches of their own, twelve of them Methodist or Baptist. Although historians know very little about the actual religious practices in the black churches, white observers emphasized praying, preaching, and especially singing as the central elements of black worship. The black churches in the North and the slave communities in the South stressed the expression of feelings, mixed African traditions with Christian forms, hymns, and symbols, and created religions that fit their needs.
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It was not just African Americans who brought more emotion to religion. Everywhere in America, among ordinary white folk, the open expression of religious feelings, along with singing, praying, and preaching, became more common than in the colonial period. The Revolution released torrents of popular religiosity and passion into American life. Visions, dreams, prophesying, and new emotion-soaked religious seeking acquired a new popular significance, and common people were freer than ever before to express publicly their hitherto repressed vulgar and superstitious notions. Divining rods, fortune-telling, astrology, treasure-seeking, and folk medicine thrived publicly. Between 1799 and 1802 a sect of New Israelites in Rutland, Vermont, claimed, according to a contemporary account, to be descended from ancient Jewish tribes with the “inspired power, with which to cure all sort of diseases”; the sect also had “intuitive knowledge of lost or stolen goods, and the ability to discover the hidden treasures of the earth, as well as the more convenient talent transmuting ordinary substances into the precious metals.” Long-existing subterranean folk beliefs and fetishes emerged into the open and blended with traditional Christian practices to create a new popular religious syncretism that laid the basis for the later emergence of peculiarly American religions such as Mormonism.
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New half-educated enterprising preachers emerged to mingle exhibitions of book-learning with plain talk and with appeals to every kind of emotionalism. Common people wanted a religion they could personally feel and freely express, and the evangelical denominations offered them that, usually with much enthusiastic folk music and hymn singing. The lyrics of the Methodists’ hymns were very sensuous, offering the congregations vivid images of Jesus’ bloody sacrifice in order to better encourage repentance and a turn toward Christ. In many of the hymns Jesus appeared as the embodiment of overpowering love, ready and willing to receive the heart of the suppliant sinner. Not only did the period 1775–1815 become the golden age of hymn writing and singing in America, but it was also the period in which most religious folk music, gospels, and black spirituals first appeared. The radical Baptist Elias Smith alone produced at least fifteen different editions of colloquial religious music between 1804 and 1817.
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Obviously this religious enthusiasm tapped long-existing veins of folk culture, and many evangelical leaders had to struggle to keep the suddenly released popular passions under control. Bishop Francis Asbury repeatedly warned his itinerant Methodist preachers to ensure that visions were “brought to the standard of the Holy Scriptures” and not to succumb to the “power of sound.”
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In the new free environment of republican America some enthusiasts saw the opportunity to establish long-desired utopian worlds in which all social distinctions would be abolished, diet would be restricted, and goods and sometimes women would be shared.

Many, like those who joined the celibate Shakers, founded by the English immigrant Ann Lee, feared that the entire social order had collapsed, and thus they had to reconstitute sexual and family life from scratch. The Shaker communities that sprang up initially in New England and the eastern Hudson Valley had men and women living together in “families” of thirty to one hundred and fifty under the same roof, but with all their activities strictly separated. They knew what they were fleeing from. “The devil is a real being,” said Mother Lee, whose followers considered her a “second Christ.” Satan was “as real as a bear. I know, because I have seen and fought with him.” Perhaps nothing is more revealing of the crisis of the social order in the early Republic than the growth of this remarkable religious group whose celibacy became an object of wonder to almost every foreign visitor. By 1809 the Shakers had established more
than a dozen communities throughout the Northeast and the Midwest, with their several thousand members all seriously waiting for the Second Coming of Christ, which they believed was near at hand.
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T
HIS
S
ECOND
G
REAT
A
WAKENING
, like the democratic impulses of the Revolution, was very much a movement from below, fed by the passions of ordinary people.
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To be sure, some Congregational clergy in New England saw in evangelical Christianity a means by which Federalists might better control the social disorder resulting from the Revolution. The Reverend Timothy Dwight even sponsored a revival at Yale to which a third of the student body responded. But these Federalist clergy, like Dwight and Jedidiah Morse, scarcely comprehended, let alone were able to manage, the popular religious upheaval that was spreading everywhere. Still, they did what they could to use evangelical religion to combat what they described as democratic infidelity and French-inspired madness.

On the eve of Jefferson’s inauguration as president, Dwight and Morse founded the
New England Palladium
with the aim of strengthening “the government, morals, religion, and state of society in New England,” and at the same time chastising “Jacobinism in every form, both of principle and practice.” The orthodox clergy believed that they had every right to meddle with public morals and politics. Like most Federalist political leaders, the clerics assumed that since they were honest and pious, “opinions formed by such men are apt to be right.” That was not the case with their Jacobinical enemies, wrote Dwight in one of his many articles for the
Palladium
. The Republicans were “men of loose morals, principles and lives. Are they not infidels . . . ? Men who frequent public places, taverns and corners of the streets?” Such remarks reveal just how difficult it was for the Federalist leaders to accept the political, social, and religious changes taking place all around them. The issue facing them, as they saw it, was fundamental and beyond compromise: it was between “Religion and Infidelity, Morality and Debauchery, legal Government and total Disorganization.”
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Despite their fear of Jeffersonian Republican infidelity, Morse and other mainstream New England Congregationalists soon came to realize that the most insidious enemy of their brand of Calvinism lay within their own Congregational ranks, within the Standing Order itself. Liberal Congregational ministers, who Morse thought were really infidels in disguise, had been growing in strength over the previous half century or more, especially in Boston and eastern urban centers of Massachusetts. Not only had the liberal clerics softened the confessions and rigors of Calvinism in the name of reason, but they had come to doubt and even deny the divinity of Christ. The appointment in 1805 of liberal clergyman Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard College brought this long-existing proto-Unitarian threat to mainstream Calvinism to a head. For the orthodox Calvinists this appointment of a professor who denied the divinity of Jesus to the only college in the state that trained ministers meant “a revolution in sentiment in favor of what is called
rational
in opposition to
evangelical
religion.”
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Morse and the “moderate Calvinists,” as they were called, were outraged by this liberal takeover of the principal institution for educating Congregational clergymen. In response, in 1805 they formed a new journal, the
Panoplist
, with an evangelical, Yale-educated board, that launched attack after attack against the “unprincipled and designing men” in control of Boston’s latitudinarian churches. Of course, the well-to-do liberal elites had their own journal, the
Monthly Anthology
, a sophisticated intellectual and literary publication that the evangelicals dubbed the “offspring of worldly ease and affluence.” Although created about the same time, the learned
Monthly Anthology
had little in common with the polemically evangelical
Panoplist
, except that both were products of Federalist Congregational ministers and both were published in Boston.
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So alarming was this liberal threat that the mainstream Calvinists were even willing to come together with the New Divinity Calvinists in 1808 to form an alternative to Harvard, the Andover Theological Seminary, the first graduate school of theology in the United States. The New Divinity theology had been created by Samuel Hopkins, Congregational minister in Newport, Rhode Island, and was often called “Hopkinsianism.” Drawing upon the ideas of Jonathan Edwards, the famous eighteenth-century Calvinist theologian, Hopkinsianism held to an uncompromisingly rigid
brand of Calvinism in which sinners could do absolutely nothing to bring about their salvation. Although the New Divinity ministers had strange and logic-spinning techniques of preaching, they nevertheless had grown rapidly in the quarter century following the Revolution. By 1800 they had captured control of half the Congregational pulpits of New England, most of which were located in rural out-of-the-way areas in western Massachusetts and northern Connecticut.

In 1810 this alliance of moderate and extreme Calvinists founded a new Calvinist church in Boston, the Park Street Church, which the liberal Congregational clergy boycotted and dismissed for its “bigotry, illiberality, [and] exclusiveness.” At the same time, Morse and the moderates joined the
Panopolist
with the Hopkinsian
Massachusetts Missionary Magazine
in order to bring Calvinist orthodoxy to the rest of America and to the world.
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W
HILE THE
N
EW
E
NGLAND
C
ONGREGATIONALISTS
were coming apart—the formal division into Congregational and Unitarian churches would not take place for another decade or so—swelling numbers of dissenting Methodists and Baptists were threatening to engulf the Standing Order. Despite the scrambling efforts of the Congregational and Presbyterian clergy to meet the surging emotional needs of people, their position in New England steadily weakened. Although the legally established clergy in Massachusetts and Connecticut rarely held camp meetings, they were eventually compelled to adopt some of the new revivalist methods.

Wherever there was social disorder and anxiety, revivals flourished, even in Connecticut, the traditional “land of steady habits.” Methodist preachers began entering the state in the late 1780s and increased their numbers over the next decade. Since the Methodists were Arminians, that is, believers in the possibility of striving to bring about one’s own salvation, they had considerable advantages in recruiting converts over the established Presbyterians and Congregationalists, who generally clung, with varying degrees of rigidity, to the Calvinist belief in predestination—that God alone determined one’s salvation. The Calvinists responded to the Methodist invasion of Connecticut with rocks and dogs, but eventually with revival efforts of their own.

In 1798–1799 in Goshen, Connecticut, Asahel Hooker, a New Divinity clergyman, with his strict Calvinist belief in the doctrines of total depravity and predestination, launched a series of revivals that over the following decade swept through the town. The converts came from no particular age group, gender, or social rank. What they did share was growing anxieties over the fact that many in the community were leaving for Connecticut’s Western Reserve in Ohio. Consequently, communicants in the congregation were asking themselves not only “What must I do to be saved?” but also “Shall I move to Ohio?” Even those who remained had reason to worry about broken family ties and the future of the community and to seek some assurance in religion.
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