Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (98 page)

Some artists, like Allston’s closest friend, Edmund Trowbridge Dana, rebelled against this suffocating neoclassicism. In 1805 Dana protested the great deference paid to the ancients. “One is hagridden . . . with nothing but the classicks, the classicks, the classicks!” he complained. He yearned for a literature of feeling. “In our day of refinement,” he said, “very little is directed to the fancy or heart; for, from some cogency or other, it is unfashionable to be moved. . . . Establishment has crowded out sentiment,” and readers were stuck with Alexander Pope and sitting “primly with Addison and propriety” instead of devouring Shakespeare. Dana wanted writers to appreciate that “the untutored gestures of children are more exquisite than the accomplished ceremony of courts.”
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But Dana’s was an isolated voice. Everywhere most American critics and artists urged the suppression of individual feeling and, instead, earnestly insisted on the moral and social responsibilities of the artist, an insistence that flowed not simply from the Americans’ legacy of Puritanism or from their reading the Scottish moralists but from their Revolutionary aspirations for the arts. So deeply involved was the neoclassical commitment to society that most American writers and artists became incapable of revealing personal truths at the expense of their public selves, unwilling to regard beauty, as George Bancroft declared as late as 1827, as “something independent of moral effect.” Indeed, the young Bancroft, who studied in Germany, found Goethe “too dirty, too bestial in his conceptions, and thus unfit for American consumption.”
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These were the sorts of sentiments that gave birth to the genteel society of the nineteenth century.

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Republican Religion

Cultivated gentlemen like Thomas Jefferson may have relied on the arts and sciences to help them interpret and reform the world, but that was not the case with most average Americans. Nearly all common and middling people in the early Republic still made sense of the world through religion. Devastating fires, destructive earthquakes, and bad harvests were acts of God and often considered punishments for a sinful people. As they had in the mid-eighteenth century, people still fell on their knees when struck by the grace of God. People prayed openly and often. They took religion seriously, talked about it, and habitually resorted to it in order to examine the state of their souls. Despite growing doubts of revelation and the spread of rationalism in the early Republic, most Americans remained deeply religious.

As American society became more democratic in the early nineteenth century, middling people rose to dominance and brought their religiosity with them. The Second Great Awakening, as the movement was later called, was a massive outpouring of evangelical religious enthusiasm, perhaps a more massive expression of Protestant Christianity than at any time since the seventeenth century or even the Reformation. By the early decades of the nineteenth century American society appeared to be much more religious than it had been in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

The American Revolution broke many of the intimate ties that had traditionally linked religion and government, especially with the Anglican Church, and turned religion into a voluntary affair, a matter of individual free choice. But contrary to the experience of eighteenth-century Europeans, whose rationalism tended to erode their allegiance to religion, religion in America did not decline with the spread of enlightenment and liberty. Indeed, as Tocqueville was soon to observe, religion in America gained in authority precisely because of its separation from governmental power.

A
T THE TIME OF THE
R
EVOLUTION
few could have predicted such an outcome. Occurring as it did in an enlightened and liberal age, the Revolution seemed to have little place for religion. Although some of the
Founders, such as Samuel Adams, John Jay, Patrick Henry, Elias Boudinot, and Roger Sherman, were fairly devout Christians, most leading Founders were not deeply or passionately religious, and few of them led much of a spiritual life. As enlightened gentlemen addressing each other in learned societies, many of the leading gentry abhorred “that gloomy superstition disseminated by ignorant illiberal preachers” and looked forward to the day when “the phantom of darkness will be dispelled by the rays of science, and the bright charms of rising civilization.”
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Most of them, at best, only passively believed in organized Christianity and, at worst, privately scorned and mocked it. Although few of them were outright deists, that is, believers in a clockmaker God who had nothing to do with revelation and simply allowed the world to run in accord with natural forces, most, like South Carolina historian David Ramsay, did tend to describe the Christian church as “the best temple of reason.” Like the principal sources of their Whig liberalism—whether the philosopher John Locke or the Commonwealth publicists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon writing as “Cato”—the Founders viewed religious enthusiasm as a kind of madness, the conceit “of a warmed or overweening brain.” In all of his writings Washington rarely mentioned Christ, and, in fact, he scrupulously avoided testifying to a belief in the Christian gospel. Many of the Revolutionary leaders were proto-Unitarians, denying miracles and the divinity of Jesus. Even puritanical John Adams thought that the argument for Christ’s divinity was an “awful blasphemy” in this new enlightened age.
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Jefferson’s hatred for the clergy and organized religion knew no bounds. He believed that members of the “priestcraft” were always in alliance with despots against liberty. “To this effect,” he said—privately, of course, not publicly—“they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man, into mystery and jargon unintelligible to all mankind and therefore the safer engine for their purposes.” The Trinity was nothing but “Abracadabra” and “hocus-pocus. . .so incomprehensible to the human mind that no candid man can say he has any idea of it.” Ridicule, he said, was the only weapon to be used against it.
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Most of the principal Founders seemed to be mainly interested in curbing religious passion and promoting liberty. They attached to their Revolutionary state constitutions of 1776 ringing declarations of religious freedom, like that of Virginia’s, stating that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.” And they used this enlightened faith in liberty of conscience to justify disestablishing the Anglican Church everywhere.

The most lengthy and bitter fight for disestablishment took place in Virginia. Although the 1776 Virginia constitution guaranteed the “free exercise of religion” and the state legislature suspended the collection of religious taxes, the Anglican Church was not actually disestablished in 1776. Many Virginia leaders like Patrick Henry were willing to settle for some sort of multiple establishment, but others led by Jefferson and Madison wanted an end to all forms of state support for religion. They wanted to move beyond John Locke’s plea for religious toleration; they wanted religious liberty, a different thing altogether. Consequently, the state legislature remained deadlocked for nearly a decade. The impasse was eventually broken in 1786 with the passage of Jefferson’s famous Statute for Religious Freedom that abolished the Anglican establishment in Virginia.

With many of the Founders holding liberal and enlightened convictions, politics in the Revolutionary era tended to overwhelm religious matters. During the Revolution political writings, not religious tracts, came to dominate the press, and the clergy lost some of their elevated status to lawyers. The Revolution destroyed churches, interrupted ministerial training, and politicized people’s political thinking. The older established churches were unequipped to handle a rapidly growing and mobile population. The proportion of college graduates entering the ministry fell off, and the number of church members declined drastically. It has been estimated that scarcely one in twenty Americans was a formal member of a church.
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All this has led more than one historian to conclude that “at its heart, the Revolution was a profoundly secular event.”
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Many of the religious leaders themselves wholeheartedly endorsed this presumably secular revolution and its liberal impulses. Most Protestant
groups could think of no greater threat to religion than the Church of England, and consequently enlightened rationalists had little trouble in mobilizing Protestant dissenters against the established Anglican Church. Few clergymen sensed any danger to religion in the many declarations of religious freedom and in the disestablishment of the Church of England, which took place in most states south of New England. Even in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where religious establishments existed but were Puritan, not Anglican, Congregational and Presbyterian clergy invoked enlightened religious liberty against the dark twin forces of British civic and ecclesiastical tyranny without fear of subverting their own peculiar alliances between church and state. From all this enlightened and liberal thinking, the framers of the Constitution in 1787 naturally forbade religious tests for any office or public trust under the United States.

At the same time, the influence of enlightened liberalism ate away the premises of Calvinism, indeed, of all orthodox Christian beliefs. The Enlightenment told people they were not sinful but naturally good, possessed of an innate moral sense, and that evil lay in the corrupted institutions of both church and state. The rational deism of the Enlightenment could not be confined to the drawing rooms of the sophisticated gentry but spilled out into the streets. The anti-religious writings of Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, the comte de Volney, and Elihu Palmer reached out to new popular audiences and gave many ordinary people the sense that reason and nature were as important (and mysterious) as revelation and the supernatural. For a moment at least the Enlightenment seemed to have suppressed the religious passions of the American people.
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All this emphasis on popular infidelity and religious indifference in Revolutionary America, however, is misleading. It captures only the surface of American life. The mass of Americans did not suddenly lose their religiousness in 1776, only to recover it several decades later. Certainly, the low proportion of church membership is no indication of popular religious apathy, not in America, where church membership had long been a matter of an individual’s conversion experience and not, as in the Old World, a matter of birth.
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In traditional European societies affiliation
with a dominant religion was automatic; people were born into their religion, and that religion could continue to order their lives, in the rituals of birth, marriage, and death, even if they remained religiously indifferent. In such societies the significant religious decision for a person was to break with the religious association into which he or she had been born. Consequently, religious indifference could exist alongside extensive, though merely formal, church membership. But in America the opposite became true: religious indifference meant having no religious affiliation at all; the important decision meant joining a religious association. People who wanted religion had to work actively and fervently to promote it. Consequently, huge surges of religious enthusiasm could exist alongside low church membership, membership, of course, being very different from churchgoing; in the older traditional churches only members could participate in Holy Communion and vote in church affairs.
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Thus the relatively small numbers of actual church members in the population did not suggest that Americans had become overly secularized or unduly antagonistic toward religion. There were, of course, fierce expressions of popular hostility to the genteel clergy with their D.D.’s and other aristocratic pretensions during the Revolutionary years. Yet this egalitarian anti-clericalism scarcely represented any widespread rejection of Christianity by most ordinary people.

Indeed, the total number of church congregations doubled between 1770 and 1790 and even outpaced the extraordinary growth of population in these years; and the people’s religious feeling became stronger than ever, though now devoted to very different kinds of religious groups. Religion was not displaced by the politics of the Revolution; instead, like much of American life, it was radically transformed.

As the old society of the eighteenth century disintegrated, Americans struggled to find new ways of tying themselves together. Powerful demographic and economic forces, reinforced by the egalitarian ideology of the Revolution, undermined what remained of the eighteenth-century political and social hierarchies. As educated gentry formed new cosmopolitan connections in their learned societies and benevolent associations, so too did increasing numbers of common and middling people come together and find solace in the creation of new egalitarian and emotionally satisfying organizations and communities. Most important for ordinary folk was the creation of unprecedented numbers of religious communities.

The older state churches with Old World connections—Anglican, Congregational, and Presbyterian—were supplanted by new and in some
cases unheard-of religious denominations and sects. As late as 1760 the Church of England in the South and the Puritan churches in New England had accounted for more than 40 percent of all congregations in America. By 1790, however, that proportion of religious orthodoxy had already dropped below 25 percent, and it continued to shrink in the succeeding decades. More and more people discovered that the traditional religions had little to offer them spiritually, and they began looking elsewhere for solace and meaning.

While nearly all of the major colonial churches either weakened or failed to gain relative to other groups during the Revolution, Methodist and Baptist congregations exploded in numbers. The Baptists expanded from 94 congregations in 1760 to 858 in 1790 to become the single largest religious denomination in America. The Methodists had no adherents at all in 1760, but by 1790 they had created over seven hundred congregations—despite the fact that the great founder of English Methodism, John Wesley, had publicly opposed the American Revolution. The Methodists benefited from having uneducated itinerant preachers who were willing to preach anywhere, on town greens, before county courthouses, on racing fields and potter’s fields, on ferries, and even in the churches of other denominations.
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