Fields of Blood (51 page)

The second assumption of Jefferson and Madison was that “religion” was an autonomous, private human activity essentially separate from politics and that mixing the two had been a great aberration. This may have been a self-evident idea to Locke, but it would have still been a very strange notion to most Americans. The Founders knew their countrymen: a federal constitution would never gain the support of all the states unless it refrained from making any single Protestant
denomination official, as many of the state constitutions had done. Precisely because most Americans still approved of religion in their governments,
therefore, uniting the several states would require religious neutrality at the federal level.
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Hence the first lapidary clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution in the
Bill of Rights (1791) decreed that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The state would neither promote nor obstruct religion but simply leave it alone.
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Yet there were political consequences even for that. During the bitterly contested presidential election of 1800, Jefferson the
deist was accused of being an atheist and even a
Muslim. He replied that while he was not hostile to faith, he was adamantly opposed to government meddling in religious affairs. When a group of his
Baptist supporters in Danbury,
Connecticut, asked him to appoint a day of fasting to bring the nation together, Jefferson replied that this lay beyond the president’s competence:

While such separation could be beneficial to both church and state, it was not, as Jefferson assumed, written into the very nature of things but was a modern innovation. The
United States was attempting something entirely new.

Jefferson had borrowed the image of the “wall of separation” from
Roger Williams (1604–83), founder of
Providence,
Rhode Island, who had been expelled from New England because of his opposition to the intolerant policies of the
Puritan government.
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But Williams was less concerned about the welfare of the state than that of his faith, which he believed would be contaminated by any involvement with government.
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He intended Rhode Island to be an alternative Christian community that came closer to the spirit of the
gospels. Jefferson, by contrast, was more concerned to protect the state from the “loathsome combination of church and state” that had reduced human beings to “dupes and drudges.”
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He seemed to assume—quite wrongly—that there had been
states in the past that had
not
been guilty of this “loathsome combination.” It remained to be seen whether the secularized United States would be less violent and coercive than its more religious predecessors.

Whatever the Founders wanted, most
Americans still took it for granted that the United States would be based on Christian principles. By 1790, some 40 percent of the new nation lived on the frontiers and were becoming increasingly resentful of the republican government that did not share their hardships but taxed them as harshly as the British had done. A new wave of revivals, known as the Second Great Awakening, represented a grassroots campaign for a more democratic and
Bible-based America.
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The new revivalists were not intellectuals like Edwards but men of the people who used wild gestures, earthy humor, and slang and relied on dreams, visions, and celestial signs. During their mass rallies, they pitched huge tents outside the towns, and their gospel songs transported the crowds to
ecstasy. However, these prophets were not pre-
Enlightenment throwbacks.
Lorenzo Dow may have looked like
John the Baptist, but he quoted Jefferson and
Paine and, like any Enlightenment philosophe, urged the people to think for themselves. In the Christian commonwealth the first should be last and the last first. God had sent his insights to the poor and unlettered, and
Jesus and his disciples had not had college degrees.

James Kelly and
Barton Stone railed against the aristocratic clergy who tried to force the erudite faith of Harvard on the people. Enlightenment philosophers had insisted that people must have the courage to throw off their dependence on authority, use their natural reason to discover the truth, and think for themselves. Now the revivalists insisted that American Christians could read the Bible without direction from upper-class scholars. When Stone founded his own denomination, he called it a “declaration of independence”: the revivalists were bringing the modern ideals of democracy, equality, freedom of speech, and independence to the folk in an idiom that uneducated people could make their own. This Second Awakening may have seemed retrograde to the elite, but it was actually a Protestant version of the Enlightenment. Demanding a degree of equality that the American ruling class was not yet ready to give them, the revivalists represented a populist discontent that it could not safely ignore.

At first, this rough, democratic Christianity was confined to the poorer Americans, but during the 1840s
Charles Finney (1792–1875)
brought it to the middle classes, creating an “evangelical”
Christianity based on a literal reading of the
gospels. Evangelicals were determined to convert the secular republic to Christ, and by the mid-nineteenth century, evangelicalism had become the dominant faith of the United States.
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Without waiting for guidance from the government, from about 1810 these Protestants began to work in churches and schools and established reform associations that mushroomed in the northern states. Some campaigned against
slavery, others against liquor; some worked to end the oppression of women and other disadvantaged groups, others for penal and educational reform. Like the Second Great Awakening, these modernizing movements helped ordinary Americans to embrace the ideal of inalienable human rights in a Protestant package. Their members learned to plan, organize, and pursue a clearly defined objective in a rational way that empowered them against the establishment. We in the West tend to evaluate other cultural traditions by measuring them against the
Enlightenment: the Great Awakenings in America show that people can reach these ideals by another, specifically
religious route.

In fact, American evangelicals had appropriated some Enlightenment ideals so thoroughly that they created a curious hybrid that some historians have called “Enlightenment Protestantism.”
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This paradox had been noted by
Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited the United States during the 1830s, remarking that the character of the country combined “two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other, but which, in America,… they have succeeded in incorporating somehow one into another and combining marvellously: I mean to speak of the
spirit of religion
and the
spirit of freedom.
”
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The Founding Fathers had been inspired by the so-called moderate Enlightenment of
Isaac Newton and
John Locke. The evangelicals, however, repudiated the “
skeptical” Enlightenment of
Voltaire and
David Hume as well as the “revolutionary” Enlightenment of Rousseau but embraced the “common sense” philosophy of the Scottish thinkers
Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746),
Thomas Reid (1710–96),
Adam Smith (1723–90), and Dugald Stewart (1753–1828).
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This taught them that human beings had an innate and infallible ability to see clear connections between moral causes and their effects in public life. Understanding things was simple, a matter of common sense. Even a child could grasp the essence of the gospel and figure out for herself what was right. Enlightenment philosophers had told people to cast aside the habit of tutelage and work out the truth
for themselves, without relying on authoritarian institutions and learned experts. American evangelicals, therefore, were confident that if they put their minds to it, they could create a society in the New World that fully implemented Christian values.
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The
Constitution had established a secular state but had done nothing to encourage the development of a
national culture; the Founders had assumed that this would evolve naturally in response to government action.
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Yet thanks to the evangelical welfare and reform associations, “Enlightenment Protestantism,” somewhat ironically, became the national ethos of the secular state.
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You can take religion out of the state, but you can’t take religion out of the nation. By dint of their energetic missionary work, reform organizations, and publications, the evangelicals created a
Bible-based culture that pulled the new nation together.

The Americans had shown that it was possible to organize society on a more just and rational basis. In France the leaders of the
bourgeoisie, the rising middle classes, watched these events very carefully because they too had developed ideologies that emphasized the freedom of the individual.
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They had a more difficult task, however, because they had to depose a long-established ruling class with a professional army, a centralized bureaucracy, and an
absolute monarchy.
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But by the end of the eighteenth century, traditional agrarian society was coming under increasing strain in Europe: more people were moving to the towns and working in nonagricultural trades and professions, literacy was more widespread, and there was unprecedented social mobility.

In the spring of 1789,
Louis XVI’s absolutist monarchy was in trouble. Profligate stewardship had plunged the French economy into crisis, and now the clergy and nobility (the First and Second Estates) were refusing a new regime of
taxation by the crown. To break the deadlock, the king called the Estates General to meet at
Versailles on May 2.
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The king wanted the three estates—clergy, nobility, and commoners—to deliberate and vote separately, but the Third Estate refused to allow the
aristocracy to dominate the proceedings and invited the clergy and nobility to join them in a new National Assembly. The first to defect to the Third Estate were 150 of the lower clergy, who came from the same background as the commoners, were weary of the bishops’ hauteur, and wanted a more collegial church.
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There were also defections from the
Second Estate: the rural gentry disdained by the
Parisian aristocracy and the wealthy
bourgeois who were impatient with the nobility’s conservatism. On June 17 members of the new National Assembly swore that they would not disperse until they had a new constitution.

The Assembly had intended to conduct a reasoned, enlightened debate on the American model, but it had reckoned without the people. After a bad harvest, food supplies were dangerously low, the price of bread rocketed in the towns, and there was widespread unemployment. In April five thousand artisans had rioted in Paris, and revolutionary committees and citizen militias had formed across the country to contain the unrest. During the Assembly’s discussions, delegates were booed and heckled from the public galleries, and the distraught crowds took to the street, attacking any representative of the Old Regime who crossed their path. In a crucial development, some of the troops dispatched to quell these riots joined the rebels instead. On June 14 the mob stormed the
Bastille in eastern Paris, released the prisoners, and hacked the jail’s governor to pieces. Other senior officials met the same fate. In the countryside, the famished peasantry were gripped by the “Great Fear,” convinced that the grain shortages had been engineered by the regime to starve them into submission. This suspicion was compounded by the arrival of impoverished laborers seeking work, who were thought to be the nobility’s advance troops.
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Villagers raided the châteaux, attacked Jewish moneylenders, and refused to pay their tithes and taxes.