Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (104 page)

Some radical evangelicals even thought they could end what the young Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, called “this war of words and tumult of opinions” among the sects by appealing to the Bible, and especially the New Testament, as the lowest common denominator of Christian belief.
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The Scriptures were to be to democratic religion what the Constitution was to democratic politics—the fundamental document that would bind all the competitive American Christian sects together in one national communion. The biblical literalism of these years became popular religion’s ultimate concession to the Enlightenment—the recognition that religious truth now needed documentary proof. In that democratic age where all traditional authority was suspect, some concluded that individuals possessed only their own reason and the Scriptures—the “two witnesses,” said Joseph Smith’s grandfather, “that stand by the God of the whole earth.”
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Sects like the Shakers and later the Mormons came to believe that they needed some sort of literary evidence or written testimony to convince a skeptical world that their beliefs were, as the Shakers were anxious to show, not “cunningly devised fables” but rather manifestations of “the spirit of Eternal Truth.”
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All this emphasis on written evidence and fundamentalism gave the Bible special significance. As print was exploding in these years of the early Republic, it was inevitable that more and more ordinary people bought and read the Bible. No American editions of the entire Bible existed before 1782, yet by 1810 Americans were publishing over twenty editions of the Bible every year. Although by the early nineteenth century the Bible might have become merely a book among books, it was still the text most imported from abroad, most printed in America, and most widely read in all of America. Common people might have owned very few books, but those they did own usually included the Bible, which was read and known, often by heart.
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As early as 1798 the enterprising bookseller and future Washington biographer Parson Mason Weems pleaded with Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey to publish a Protestant version of the Bible. If he did not, other printers would beat him to it. “You hear of nothing here now but printing the Bible,” said Weems. “Everything that can raise a type is going to work upon the Bible.” By 1801 Carey had a Protestant Bible out, and over the next decade and a half he produced a variety of Bibles to meet a diverse market—some printed on different kinds of paper, others bound in different kinds of leather, others set in different sizes of type, and still others provided with various maps and engravings—all at different prices. “Good engravings are a luxury,” said Weems, “a feast for the soul. . . . The fame of them goes abroad and the Bible sells with Rapidity.” Indeed, Carey’s Bibles sold so well that he often had trouble keeping up with demand. Between 1801 and 1824 he brought out sixty editions of his Bibles and made substantial sums of money doing so.

As early as 1807 Carey had come to dominate Bible production in America. In addition to supplying booksellers everywhere, he furnished Bibles to common schools, Sunday schools, and in 1808 the Philadelphia Bible Society, the first of many such Bible societies to be founded in the United States. These societies soon began publishing their own Bibles in great numbers—hundreds of thousands of copies each year at vastly reduced prices.
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Reliance on the literalism of the Bible or on other literary evidence hardly stopped the confusion and fragmentation. Church publications and collections of testimonies proliferated, but there was no final authority, no supreme court of Christianity, to settle the interminable disputes among the sects over the Bible or any other testimony. And so the splintering went on, with many of the evangelist clergy desperately trying to bring the pieces together under some sort of common Christian rubric.

In some areas churches as such scarcely existed, and the traditional identification between religion and society, never very strong in America to begin with, now finally dissolved. Churches no longer made any effort to embody their communities, and the church for many came to mean little more than the building in which religious services were conducted. The competing denominations essentially abandoned their traditional institutional and churchly responsibilities to organize the world here-and-now along godly lines; instead, they concentrated on the saving of individual souls. Church membership was no longer based on people’s position in the social hierarchy but rather on their evangelical fellowship. Consequently, the new evangelical denominations were less capable than the traditional eighteenth-century churches had been in replicating the whole community and in encompassing a variety of social ranks within their membership. Instead, particular denominations became identified with particular social classes. While the Episcopalians (as the former Anglicans were now known) and the Unitarians (liberals who broke away from the more conservative Calvinist Congregationalists) became largely the preserve of social elites, the rapidly growing Baptists and Methodists swept up the middling and lower sorts of the population.
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Despite religion’s separation from society, some Americans thought that religion was the only cohesive force capable of holding the nation together—“the central attraction,” said Lyman Beecher in 1815, “which must supply the deficiency of political affinity and interest.”
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The traditional message of Christian love and charity came together with the Enlightenment’s stress on modern civility and commonsense sociability to make the decades following the Revolution a great era of benevolence and communitarianism. Figures as diverse as Samuel Hopkins, Thomas Campbell, and Thomas Jefferson told people that all they had to do in the world was to believe in one God and to love one another.
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Not only did the new religious sects and movements Christianize American popular culture and bring many people together and prepare them for nineteenth-century middle-class respectability, but they also helped to legitimize the freedom and individualism of people and to make morally possible their commercial participation in an impersonal marketplace. Of
course, not every evangelical Christian was a capitalist or even an active participant in the marketplace. But in some basic sense evangelical religion and American commercialism were more than compatible; they needed one another. As Tocqueville later pointed out, “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of the one without the other.”
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Conversion experiences did not leave most ordinary people incapacitated and unworldly; indeed, their “new births” seemed to fit them better for the tasks of this world. Religion increased their energy as it restrained their liberty, got them on with their work as it disciplined their acquisitive urges; it gave the middling sorts confidence that even self-interested individuals subscribed to absolute standards of right and wrong and thus could be trusted in market exchanges and contractual relationships.

Despite its strong repudiation of selfishness, even the New Divinity movement within New England Calvinism, in which many middling sorts like William Manning were involved, conceded that self-interest was no threat to a moral economic order; the movement even gave self-interest some moral legitimacy. Because the concept of universal disinterested benevolence made famous by the founder of New Divinity Calvinism, Samuel Hopkins, was grounded on the enlightened self-interest of people, it was able to set credible moral limits to their individualism and acquisitive behavior. Although Hopkinsianism declared that individuals could do nothing to bring about their own salvation and must work benevolently without hope of heavenly reward, nevertheless their benevolent character gave them some assurance that they were in fact saved and a higher sense of their own worth. The result was a moral benefit for the community without these self-assured individuals’ having to repudiate their self-interest.
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Many middling people—those who were most mobile, most involved in commercial activity, from market farmers to craftsmen to petty businessmen—discovered in evangelicalism a kind of counter-culture that
offered them alternative measures of self-worth and social respectability and at the same time gave them moral justifications for their unusual behavior. “Liberty is a great cant word with them,” complained a New Hampshire Federalist minister in 1811 of the local sectarians who were challenging the conservative Congregationalists. They tell their hearers, he grumbled—with more accuracy than sympathy—to cast aside “all their old prejudices and traditions which they have received from their fathers and ministers; who they say, are hirelings, keeping your souls in bondage, and under oppression. Hence to use their own language, they say, ‘Break all these yokes and trammels from off you, and come out of prison; and dare to think, and speak, and act for yourselves.’”
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It is not surprising that most of these radical evangelicals in New England and elsewhere became Jeffersonian Republicans: evangelicals and Republicans in the North were preaching the same message and drawing from the same social sources.

Being called by polite society “the scum of the earth, the filth of creation,” the evangelicals made their fellowship, their conversion experiences, and their peculiar folk rites their badges of respectability.
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They began to make strenuous efforts to bring their own passions and their own anarchic impulses under control and to create some order out of all the social disorder. To the horror of their unlearned itinerant preachers, some of them began proposing the establishment of seminaries to train their ministers. In the several decades following the founding of Andover Seminary in 1807, members of thirteen different Protestant denominations created fifty seminaries in seventeen states.
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They began to cease their mocking of learning and tried to acquire some of the gentility they were repeatedly told they lacked. They staffed the moral societies that were springing up everywhere and denounced the dissolute behavior they saw about them—the profanity, drinking, prostitution, gambling, dancing, horse racing, and other amusements shared by both the luxurious aristocracy at the top of the society and the unproductive rabble at the bottom. By condemning the vices of those above and below them, the evangelicals struck out at both social directions at once and thereby began to acquire a “middle class” distinctiveness.

O
THERS WERE EXPERIENCING
such radical disruption and bewilderment in their lives that they could only conclude that the world was on the verge of some great transformation—nothing less than the Second Coming of Christ and the Day of Judgment predicted in the Bible. Perhaps never before in the history of Christianity had the millennium seemed so imminent, and perhaps never before did so many people believe that the Final Days were upon them.

The turbulent decades following the Revolution saw a flourishing of millennial beliefs of various kinds, both scholarly and popular. Literally, millennialism referred to the doctrine held by some Christians on the authority of Revelation 20: 4–6. The traditional belief in the millennium usually had assumed that Christ’s coming would precede the establishment of a new kingdom of God. The literal advent of Christ would be forewarned by signs and troubles, culminating in a horrible conflagration in which everything would be destroyed. Christ would then rule over the faithful in a New Jerusalem for a thousand years until the final Day of Judgment. Those who held such pre-millennial beliefs generally saw the world as so corrupt and so evil that only the sudden and catastrophic intervention of Christ could create it anew.

Flowing out of the heart of seventeenth-century Puritanism, this pessimistic eschatological tradition was significantly altered in America by the great eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards. Edwards conceived of the millennium occurring within history; that is, the Coming of Christ would follow, not precede, the thousand years that would constitute the final age of man on earth. These thousand years would be a time of joy and well-being in preparation for Christ’s Final Coming. In the years following the Revolution, a number of important American ministers, including Edwards’s grandson Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, and Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins, evangelized Edward’s millennial views, which helped to justify and explain the great social changes of the period. In fact, Hopkins’s
Treatise on the Millennium
, published in 1793, became a handbook for a generation of American theologians.
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Although some fundamentalist sects rejected this new Edwardsian interpretation of the millennium and continued to cling to the older apocalyptic view, most of the leading American churches pictured the cataclysmic Second Coming of Christ following rather than preceding the thousand years of glory and bliss.
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Such an optimistic Adventist belief seemed much more appropriate for an improving progressive society that was undergoing a historic transformation.

By 1810, events of the previous fifty years, and especially those since 1789, had convinced the evangelical minister Jedidiah Morse that “God in his providence had been, and is preparing the world for some grand revolution, some wonderful display of his sovereign and almighty power.” Taking as his text the prophecy of Daniel (12:4), “Many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased”—a text used by other ministers as well—Morse went on to outline in typical fashion the signs of the coming millennium. Missionaries were spreading knowledge and Christianity to every corner of the world, even to the interior of Africa, and the collapse of both the papacy and the doctrine of Mahomet seemed to be “near at hand, even at the door.” People, said Morse, will know when the beginning of the thousand years is upon them by the disappearance of the multiple languages and the conversion and return of the dispersed Jews to the Holy Land. Realizing that the gospel was at present being diffused everywhere and would eventually reach “every creature under heaven,” Morse could only conclude that the prophecy of the coming millennium was “now fulfilling before our eyes.”
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