16

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.

AT THE TIME OF THE REVOLUTION 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.”¹ 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.²

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.³

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.⁴ All this has led more than one historian to conclude that “at its heart, the Revolution was a profoundly secular event.”⁵

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.⁶

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.⁷ 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.⁸

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.⁹

By 1805 the liberal Congregational minister of Salem, Massachusetts, William Bentley, was astonished to learn how rapidly the Methodists had grown. They claimed one hundred twenty thousand “in fellowship” and one million “attending their ministry,” which, he exclaimed, was “a seventh of the population.” They had four hundred traveling preachers and two thousand local preachers and had been very effective in gathering communicants by holding two to three hundred of what Bentley called “extraordinary meetings.” And all this was accomplished, he declared with a certain amount of awe, in thirty-five years.¹⁰ Organized nationally into circuits and locally into classes, the Methodists soon overtook the Baptists to become the largest denomination in America. By 1820 they had well over a quarter of a million formal members and at least four times that many followers.¹¹

By the early nineteenth century enthusiastic groups of revivalist Baptists, New Light Presbyterians, and Methodists had moved from the margins to the center of American society. But even more remarkable than the growth of these religions with roots in the Old World was the sudden emergence of new sects and utopian religious groups that no one had ever heard of before—Universal Friends, Universalists, Shakers, and a variety of other splinter groups and millennial sects.

This Second Great Awakening was a radical expansion and extension of the earlier eighteenth-century revivals. It was not just a continuation of the first awakening of the mid-eighteenth century. It was more evangelical, more ecstatic, more personal, and more optimistic. It did not simply intensify the religious feelings of existing church members. More important, it mobilized unprecedented numbers of people who previously had been unchurched and made them members of religious groups. By popularizing religion as never before and by extending religion into the remotest areas of America, the Second Great Awakening marked the beginning of the republicanizing and nationalizing of American religion. It transformed the entire religious culture of America and laid the foundations for the development of an evangelical religious world of competing denominations unique to Christendom.

Most of these religious associations called themselves denominations, not sects, for they had abandoned once and for all the traditional belief that any one of them could be the true and exclusive church for the society. Each religious association, called or “denominated” by a particular name, came to see itself simply as one limited and imperfect representative of the larger Christian community, each equal to and in competition with all the others, with the state remaining neutral in this competition.

Although none of these denominations claimed a monopoly of orthodoxy, out of their competition emerged Christian truth and morality that worked to unify the public culture in ways that defied nearly two thousand years of thinking about the relation of religious orthodoxy and the state. “Among us,” wrote Samuel Stanhope Smith, the Presbyterian president of Princeton, “truth is left to propagate itself by its native evidence and beauty.” It could no longer rely on the “meretricious charms” and “splendor of an establishment.” In America, the clergy, “resting on the affections, and supported by the zeal of a free people,” had to earn their way by vying with each other in being useful, and this competition turned out to be good for the society. “A fair and generous competition among the different denominations of Christians,” said Smith, “while it does not extinguish their mutual charity, promotes an emulation that will have a beneficial influence on the public morals.” Competition, emulation—these were the processes that justified much of what was going on in early nineteenth-century American society, including arriving at the truth and rightness of a religious opinion that no one controlled.¹²

AT FIRST MOST OF THE FOUNDERS and other enlightened gentry showed little awareness of what was happening. Although they assumed that organized religion would become more rational and enlightened, they hoped in the meantime to enlist it on behalf of their republican Revolution, especially since most of them viewed religion as the best means for fostering the virtue and public morality on which republicanism was based. The enlightened declarations on behalf of the rights of conscience in the Revolutionary state constitutions did not initially signify a separation of church and state. Since the First Amendment at that time applied only to the federal government, prohibiting only Congress, and not the states, from interfering with “the free exercise” of religion, the states felt free both to maintain establishments and to legislate in religious matters. Not only did Connecticut and Massachusetts continue their tax-supported Congregational establishments, but the Revolutionary constitutions of Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia authorized their state legislatures to create in place of the Anglican Church a kind of multiple establishment of a variety of religious groups, using tax money to support “the Christian religion.” Many of the states outlawed blasphemy, which they defined as attempts to defame Christianity, and they sought to retain some general religious qualifications for public office. Five states—New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia—required officeholders to be Protestant. Maryland and Delaware said Christians. Pennsylvania and South Carolina officials had to believe in one God and in heaven and hell; Delaware required a belief in the Trinity.¹³

Although the federal Constitution was very much a secular document, not mentioning religion at all except for the reference in Article VII to “the Year of our Lord,” 1787, other important documents of the period, including the Northwest Ordinance, did recognize the importance of religion to good government. The peace treaty with Great Britain in 1783 opened with language familiar to British statesmen and to the devout Anglican ear of John Jay, one of the negotiators of the treaty, “In the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity.” In 1789 some New England ministers expressed to President Washington their dismay over the fact that “some explicit acknowledgment of THE TRUE ONLY GOD, AND JESUS CHRIST whom he has sent,” had not been “inserted somewhere in the Magna Charta of our country.” Washington told the clergymen that “the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.”¹⁴

Washington was about as ecumenical as any American of the time. Following his inauguration as president, he exchanged salutations with twenty-two major religious groups and continued the practice he had begun earlier of attending the services of various denominations, including Congregational, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, and Roman Catholic. He expressed toleration for all religions, including the religions of Muslims and Jews. Except for an unknown number of African slaves who may have been followers of Islam, there were not many Muslims in America at the time of Washington’s inauguration—perhaps only a small community of Moroccans in Charleston, South Carolina. But in 1790 several thousand Jews lived in the country, most of them in the cities of Newport, New York, Savannah, and Charleston.

Washington went out of his way to make Jews feel they were full-fledged Americans. In his famous letter of August 18, 1790, he thanked the members of the Touro Synagogue of Newport for their warm welcome during his tour of New England. He assured them that “happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” America, he said, was as much their home as anyone’s. “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land,” he wrote, “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”¹⁵

Washington’s ecumenical spirit, however, did not flow from any indifference to the importance of religion to America’s civic culture. Indeed, his first inaugural address conveyed more religious feeling than any of the subsequent presidential inaugural addresses in American history, except for Lincoln’s second.¹⁶ In November 1789 Washington quickly acceded to Congress’s recommendation that he proclaim a National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving to acknowledge on behalf of the American people “the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a Constitution of government for their safety and happiness.”¹⁷ For all their talk of reason and enlightenment, Washington and the other leading Founders were more religious than they sometimes seem. Most of them had no quarrel with religion as long as it was reasonable and orderly. Washington was a member of his Anglican, later Episcopal, church vestry, and he remained a frequent churchgoer—though unlike his wife, Martha, he never became a member of his church, meaning that he did not partake of the Eucharist on communion Sundays. Washington, the perfect Freemason, considered himself enlightened in religious matters (“being no bigot myself to any mode of worship”), and he almost never knelt in prayer and seems never to have purchased a bible. Yet Washington, unlike Jefferson, had no deep dislike of organized religion or of the clergy as long as they contributed to civic life; indeed, as commander-in-chief in the Revolutionary War he had required all troops to attend religious services and had prescribed a public whipping for anyone disturbing those services.¹⁸

In his Farewell Address Washington stressed the importance of religion and morality for republican government and emphasized especially the religious obligation that lay behind the swearing of oaths. For all of his deistic-like talk of God as “the Grand Architect of the Universe,” Washington was sure that the Architect intervened directly in human affairs; indeed, he thought that during the Revolution Providence had looked after not only the prosperity of the United States but also his personal well-being. He and Franklin, and, in fact, most of the Founders, believed in the efficacy of prayer as well as in some sort of afterlife.¹⁹

Jefferson took the possibility of an afterlife seriously. Despite his intense dislike of orthodox Christianity, he remained outwardly an Anglican and then an Episcopalian throughout his life. He was a regular churchgoer, was baptized and married in his parish, served on his local vestry, and sometimes attended church services in government buildings in Virginia. Jefferson was known for hypocrisy, but in this case his outward display of religious observance seems to have come from his deep aversion to personal controversy.

He learned his lesson about what not to say publicly about religion from his early indiscretions. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he had written that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Then in the preamble to his 1786 bill for religious freedom in Virginia, Jefferson had stated, to the astonishment of many, “that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”²⁰ Since these public comments were drastically out of line with the opinions of ordinary people as well as most elite gentry, they raised a storm of criticism. Thereafter, Jefferson confined his derisive criticisms of Christianity to private letters and to those he believed would not object to his views.

In the election of 1800 these earlier awkward public comments led to his being called “a French infidel” and an “atheist”—certainly the most damaging charge his opponents ever made against him. “Should Jefferson prove victorious, there is scarcely a possibility that we should escape a Civil War,” warned lawyer Theodore Dwight, in a typical Federalist outburst that appeared in the Connecticut Courant in 1800. “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, the nation black with crimes.”²¹

Although Jefferson, like all the Founders, had no doubt of the existence of God, he publicly suffered these charges of atheism, infidelity, and immorality in silence, privately dismissing them as the characteristic carping of bigoted Federalist clerics. He expected nothing but “the extreme of their wrath” from New England’s clergymen. “I wish nothing,” he said, “but their eternal hatred.”²²

Yet Jefferson very much wanted to win over to his Republican cause all those ordinary religious people who had voted for his opponent. To do so he knew he had to offset the Federalist accusations that he was an enemy of Christianity. Consequently, to the surprise of many Federalists, he had good things to say about religion in his first inaugural address. He also knew very well what effect he as president would have when in January 1802 he attended a church service held in the chamber of the House of Representatives. His attendance attracted wide public notice and astonished the Federalists. Even though other churches were available, Jefferson continued to attend church services in the House chamber and made available executive buildings for church functions. Sometimes the U.S. Marine Corps Band supplied music for the religious services. As president, however, Jefferson held to his vow never to call for any days of fasting and prayer as his two predecessors had done.

In 1803 upon receiving a copy of Joseph Priestley’s Socrates and Jesus Compared, Jefferson was encouraged to set down his own similar thoughts in what he called his “Syllabus of an Estimate on the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, compared with Those of Others.” He sent copies of this thousand-word essay to Priestley, to Benjamin Rush (who had asked him about his religious views), to a friend, John Page, and to members of his cabinet and family. He followed up this essay with an edited version of the New Testament in which he cut out all references to supernatural miracles and Christ’s divinity and kept all the passages in which Jesus preached love and the Golden Rule. He called this collection “The Philosophy of Jesus.” He told a friend that these works, which came to be called the Jefferson Bible, were “proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel.”²³ Although he never published these works, word did get out that Jefferson had changed his religious views, a rumor that Jefferson was at great pains to deny.

In 1802 he sent a letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, declaring that the First Amendment of the federal Constitution erected a “wall of separation between church and state.”²⁴ It is unlikely that Jefferson had in mind the kind of high and often impenetrable wall between church and state that modern jurists have maintained. It is more likely that he had an exclusively political object. (In fact, he attended church services in the House of Representatives two days after writing this letter.)²⁵ For Jefferson the wall of separation may not have been the crucial point of his message anyway. For him, the wall was simply a means toward a larger end. It would give time for reason and free inquiry to work its way to the ultimate enlightenment he favored. In other words, the wall might protect the Baptists from the Standing Order of Connecticut Puritans in the short run, but Jefferson thought that in the long run both the Baptists and the Standing Order, like all religions based on faith and not reason, were slated for extinction. Indeed, as late as 1822 Jefferson continued to believe that “there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.”²⁶

Of course, he could not have been more wrong. Jefferson did not understand the political forces behind his and Madison’s success in getting his bill for religious freedom through the Virginia legislature. He may have thought that most Virginians accepted the enlightened thinking in his preamble, but the bill would never have passed without the overwhelming support of growing numbers of dissenting evangelical Presbyterians and Baptists in the state who hated the Anglican establishment so much that they did not care what the preamble said. It was not enlightened rationalism that drove these evangelicals but their growing realization that it was better to neutralize the state in matters of religion than run the risk of one of their religious opponents gaining control of the government.

Ultimately, an enlightened thinker like Jefferson could not speak for the popular Christian world of the early Republic. But someone like the New Light Separate Baptist Isaac Backus could. The separation of church and state that emerged in the early nineteenth century owed much to evangelical Christians like Backus. Born in Connecticut in 1724, and receiving only seven years of elementary education, Backus served his Middleborough, Massachusetts, parish for over sixty years, all the while defying the state’s Congregational establishment. Throughout his career he preached, wrote, and traveled (a thousand miles a year) on behalf of the Baptist cause.²⁷

To Backus true religion was vitally important to society, but it nonetheless had to rest ultimately on “a voluntary obedience to God’s revealed will” and not on the coercive power of the government. Liberty of conscience for Backus was not, as it was for Jefferson, a consequence of the rationalistic and pagan Enlightenment. Backus and the Baptists came to their belief in the separation of church and state out of the exigencies of being a minority sect within tax-supported established church systems and out of the pietistic desire to create gathered voluntaristic churches of individual believers.

Although Backus and most other Baptists became good Jeffersonian Republicans, their support for the disestablishment of the Puritan churches did not signify the end of what Backus called the “sweet harmony” between church and state; it meant only that Christ’s kingdom should be free to evangelize the society through persuasion aided by sympathetic but nonsectarian governments. Although Backus wanted no governmental interference with religion, he did expect government to help religion create a climate in which Christian truth might prevail. Hence he and other Protestant evangelicals could support laws compelling church attendance and respect for the Sabbath and religious tests for governmental office even while advocating the separation of church and state.²⁸

ALTHOUGH JEFFERSON MAY HAVE REMAINED oblivious to the increasingly religious character of the country, many other members of the elite soon realized what was happening; indeed, some of them developed a belated interest in religion themselves. Even when they privately scorned Christianity, they accommodated their outward behavior to the religiosity of the general populace. Franklin was only being wise in advising a friend in 1786 not to publish anything attacking traditional Christianity. “He that spits against the wind,” he said, “spits in his own face.” Thomas Paine destroyed his reputation in America with his scathing comments about Christianity in his Age of Reason (1794).²⁹

It was one thing to denigrate Christianity in the privacy of one’s home, but Paine spoke openly to common people in the streets. Upon his return to America from Europe in 1802, he was attacked everywhere in the press as a “lying, drunken, brutal infidel.” Even former friends and sympathizers like the aged Samuel Adams grieved over what they took to be Paine’s efforts to “unchristianize the mass of our citizens.”³⁰ The great spokesman for the common sense of the common people had seriously misjudged the religiosity of that people.

During the Revolutionary era Hamilton had shed his youthful religious inclinations and had become a conventional liberal with deistic inclinations who was an irregular churchgoer at best. People even told stories about his joking references to religion. During the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 Franklin proposed to call in a minister each day to lead the delegates in prayers “to the Creator of the universe” in order to calm the rancor of the debates. Hamilton is supposed to have replied that the Convention did not need any “foreign aid.” When Hamilton was later asked why the members of the Convention had not recognized God in the Constitution, he allegedly replied, “We forgot.”

A decade or so later it was not so easy to forget God, and during the 1790s Hamilton began recovering his earlier interest in religion, partially in reaction to what he perceived to be the atheism of the French revolutionaries and their supporters in America. By 1801 in the aftermath of his fall from power he became increasingly devout. In 1802 he proposed the establishment of a Christian Constitutional Society—a network of interstate political clubs that would promote good works and the Federalist party. By the time of his death in 1804 he had become a true believer, desperate on his deathbed to receive Holy Communion from an Episcopalian minister.³¹

Many leaders came to realize that they had to make concessions to the growing evangelical religious atmosphere. In 1801 when the heir of several generations of Presbyterian divines Aaron Burr had become vice-president, he was criticized for not having been “in any place of public worship for ten years.” Concerned about Burr’s future career in politics, a close political associate reminded him of the Presbyterian vote and warned: “Had you not better go to church?”³²

Other leaders also began thinking about going to church. In 1806 jurist St. George Tucker of Virginia, although a lifelong deist, became frightened enough by the social chaos that infidelity presumably was causing that he was willing to support state subsidies for Christian teachers regardless of their denomination. So too did Noah Webster, William Wirt, and John Randolph set aside their youthful deism in favor of the evangelical religion of the early nineteenth century. By 1806 William Cooper, who earlier had been contemptuous of churches, had come to believe “that our political Welfare depends much on adhering to the rules of religion,” and he began encouraging and subsidizing the new churches of Otsego County, or at least those churches that were orthodox and conservative. Even enlightened Freemasonry became much more of a religious institution in the early decades of the nineteenth century.³³

In 1811 the distinguished jurist James Kent, the chief justice of the New York supreme court, actually acknowledged in a notable blasphemy case, The People of New York v. Ruggles, the legal connection between his state and religion. Although Kent recognized that New York had no formally established church, that its constitution guaranteed freedom of religious opinion, and that the state had no statute prohibiting blasphemy, he nevertheless declared that to revile with contempt the Christian religion professed by almost the whole community, as Ruggles had done, was “to strike at the roots of moral obligation and weaken the security of the social ties.” That Kent was willing to declare Christianity to be part of the common law of the state of New York when he despised religious enthusiasm and in private called Christianity a barbaric superstition is a measure of just how intimidating the popular evangelical climate of the Second Great Awakening could be.³⁴

Still, the proliferation of competing evangelical religious groups coupled with the enlightened thinking of the gentry soon eroded what was left of the idea of a European-like coercive state church. In the decades following the Revolution the remains of traditional church-state connections and establishments were finally destroyed: South Carolina in 1790, Maryland in 1810, Connecticut in 1818, New Hampshire in 1819, and Massachusetts in 1833.

ROMAN CATHOLICS on the European continent were certainly accustomed to church-state establishments, but in America any semblance of a Catholic establishment was impossible. Numbering about thirty-five thousand in 1790, they were still a tiny minority in all the states. Even in Maryland, which had the largest proportion of Catholics, they numbered only about fifteen thousand out of a Maryland population of nearly three hundred and twenty thousand at the time of the first census. All the colonies had politically discriminated against Catholics, but the Revolution created an atmosphere of greater tolerance. In 1783 Rhode Island repealed its 1719 statute preventing Catholics from voting and holding office. (The state eliminated similar restrictions on Jews in 1798.)

By the time John Carroll of Maryland became the first Catholic bishop in 1790, the Catholic Church of America had begun adapting to the republican climate of America. In the 1780s Carroll had worked to make the Catholic Church an “independent national church” rather than simply a Catholic mission dependent on the Vatican. He argued that the American Revolution had given Catholics “equal rights and privileges with that of other Christians” and that Catholicism deserved to be independent of “all foreign jurisdiction.” Carroll established a Catholic college in Georgetown, created a Sulpician seminary in Baltimore, promoted the use of English in the liturgy, and urged the publication of an English translation of the Catholic version of the Bible, which the Irish-born immigrant and devout Catholic publisher Mathew Carey undertook in 1790.

At the same time, Catholic laity began to participate actively in the organizing and the running of their churches, replicating the process that many of the Protestant groups had experienced in the colonial period. The practice of laymen forming trusteeships elected by people in the parish began in the cities but soon spread to the frontier areas. Without benefit of clergy Catholics banded together and formed religious societies, elected their leaders, purchased land for a church, and assumed responsibility for governing their church.³⁵

Already Catholics were coming to accept the idea of separation of church and state and to think of themselves as just another Christian denomination—a position that the Roman Catholic Church as a whole did not formally endorse until the Second Vatican Council of 1962. In Maryland in the 1780s Catholics had opposed the proposal of a multiple establishment with tax money going to all Christian denominations out of fear that such a measure would be the first step toward reestablishing the Protestant Episcopal Church in the state. Carroll believed that the religious experiment of religious liberty, “by giving a free circulation to fair argument, is the most effectual method to bring all denominations of Christians to an unity of faith.”³⁶

Although fear of the anti-religious message of the French Revolution compelled Carroll and the American Catholic Church in the 1790s to revert to the use of Latin liturgy and the hierarchical appointment of priests, the process of local church government and lay control of the congregational parishes survived, largely because of the shortage of priests and bishops. And because Catholics remained everywhere a small minority in a sea of Protestants, they enthusiastically supported the idea of separation of church and state. In spite of continual pressures to become more like the Catholic churches of Europe in organization and character, the American Catholic Church essentially developed as just another Christian denomination among many.

The number of Catholics grew rapidly. In 1808 Bishop Carroll secured the creation of four new dioceses—in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, Kentucky. This western outpost of Bardstown, the bishop of the diocese claimed, contained by 1815 nineteen Catholic churches and at least ten thousand communicants. With the acquisition of Louisiana and the addition of the diocese of New Orleans, Spanish and French Catholics became part of the United States. In 1819 two more dioceses were established in Richmond and Charleston, and by 1820 the number of Catholics in the country totaled nearly two hundred thousand.

Despite this rapid growth, the country remained overwhelmingly Protestant. Although most of the competing Protestant denominations were formally separated from the state, they tended to identify themselves with the nation. Most of the Protestant clergy were determined to prove that America’s separation of church and state would not result in the infidelity and religious neglect that Europeans had expected. The evangelicals continually emphasized that America, although lacking a state-supported church, was nonetheless a nation of God, a Christian God, and a Protestant Christian God at that.

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.”³⁷ 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.³⁸

DESPITE JEFFERSON’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.”³⁹

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.⁴⁰ 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.⁴¹

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.⁴²

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.”⁴³ 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.”⁴⁴

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.”⁴⁵ 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.”⁴⁶

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.”⁴⁷

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 13,500.⁴⁸ 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.⁴⁹

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.⁵⁰ 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.⁵¹

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.”

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 1793.⁵²

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.⁵³

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.⁵⁴

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.⁵⁵

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 1817.⁵⁶

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.”⁵⁷ 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.⁵⁸

THIS SECOND GREAT AWAKENING, like the democratic impulses of the Revolution, was very much a movement from below, fed by the passions of ordinary people.⁵⁹ 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.”⁶⁰

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.”⁶¹

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.⁶²

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.⁶³

WHILE THE NEW ENGLAND CONGREGATIONALISTS 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.⁶⁴

Yet in the end the efforts of the old Puritan churches to compete with the dynamic folk-like processes of the evangelicals were as ineffectual as the comparable efforts of the New England Federalists to out-popularize the Democratic-Republicans. Their static institutions based on eighteenth-century standards of deference and elite monopolies of orthodoxy were no match for the egalitarian-minded evangelicals.

In the slaveholding Old South social circumstances were different—more stable and more hierarchical; and there the spread of revivalism was complicated. At first the evangelical religions were not very successful in recruiting communicants. By 1790 only about 14 percent of Southern whites and fewer than 4 percent of blacks belonged to Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian churches, and much of this growth had come from the Scots-Irish migrations before the war and the collapse of Anglicanism following independence. The evangelicals did not gain much strength among the South’s large unchurched population, white or black. And the situation did not change much over the next quarter century. By 1815 the combined membership of Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians grew slowly to just 17 percent of the white population and 8 percent of the black.

Part of the explanation of slow growth in the Old South came from the social disorder created by the Revolutionary War and the subsequent migrations of settlers westward. But more important in limiting growth were the radical egalitarian and anti-patriarchal impulses of the eighteenth-century evangelical religions in a slave-ridden society structured to resist such impulses. In 1784 the newly constituted Methodist Episcopal Church climaxed more than a decade of fierce anti-slavery preaching in America by enacting a rigorous set of rules designed to rid its membership of slaveholders. But such egalitarian and anti-slave sentiments could not be sustained: they did too much violence to the traditions and beliefs of both the slaveholding planters and ordinary Southern whites. It was only a matter of months, in fact, before stiff opposition from the Southern laity forced the Methodist leaders to repeal most of the new restrictions on slaveholding.

Even when the evangelical denominations made accommodations to slavery, their growth among common people in the Old South remained for decades slow and gradual. Ordinary Southern farmers resisted the appeal of evangelical preachers, frightened by the ways in which Baptists and Methodists challenged all those hierarchies that had lent stability to their daily lives. These Southerners wanted to maintain the deference of youth to the aged, the submission of children to parents and women to men, and the exclusive loyalties of individuals to family and kin. And they resisted the release of emotions that threatened these relationships. Because the Baptists and Methodists tended to undermine the ways in which ordinary people in the South structured their neighborhoods, their households, and their very being, these churches remained suspect in the minds of Southerners for decades. Many evangelical leaders eventually concluded, as a historian of Southern religion has put it, that “the ultimate success of evangelicalism in the South lay in appealing to those who confined the devil to hell, esteemed maturity over youth, put family before religious fellowship, upheld the superiority of white over black and of men over women, and prized their honor above all else.” Southern evangelicalism had to make numerous concessions to the region’s social and cultural realities, especially slavery.⁶⁵

If social disorder was what lay behind the growth of evangelical religion, it was not something the system of slavery could long tolerate. Slavery, which necessarily shaped all dependency relationships in most Southern households, required a patriarchal social world that had little place for the disruptive effects of the wild and uncontrollable revivals of evangelical religion. Even Southern backcountry yeomen came to recognize the need for order. Consequently, wherever high proportions of black slaves were present in the Deep South evangelical religion tended to develop slowly.

But elsewhere, in places where the number of slaves was more limited or nonexistent, the situation was different. In the most disordered, dynamic, and fluid areas of the North and West the newly released religious yearnings of ordinary people often tended to overwhelm hierarchies of all sorts, including traditional religious institutions. Between 1803 and 1809, for example, more than half the Presbyterian clergy and church members of Kentucky, where slavery was less well established than it was in the Old South, were swept away by the torrents of popular revivalism.⁶⁶

Of course, there were extensive efforts everywhere to reverse the extreme fragmentation, and in time these efforts at establishing some evangelical order would develop into middle-class discipline, self-improvement, and respectability.⁶⁷ But because the accounts of most early denominational historians tended to telescope this growth of refinement and organizational coherence in their particular churches, it has not always been fully appreciated just how disorderly the denominations’ origins were.⁶⁸ Evangelical authoritarianism and respectability were slow to develop out of the social confusion of the immediate post-Revolutionary decades. It was at least a generation, for example, before the Methodists were able to tame the evangelical camp meeting.⁶⁹

AS THE OLDER ARISTOCRATIC WORLD of hierarchal churches fell apart (the growth of Roman Catholicism being the exception), the new revivalist Protestant clergy urged the common people to put their religious world back together on new democratic terms. The Scottish immigrant and renegade Presbyterian Thomas Campbell told the people in 1809 that it was “high time for us not only to think, but also to act, for ourselves; to see with our own eyes, and to take all our measures directly from the Divine standard.”⁷⁰ Just as the people were taking over their governments, so, it was said, they should take over their churches. Christianity had to be republicanized and made more popular. The people were their own theologians and had no need to rely on others to tell them what to believe. We must be “wholly free to examine for ourselves what is truth,” declared the renegade Baptist Elias Smith in 1809, “without being bound to a catechism, creed, confession of faith, discipline or any rule excepting the scriptures.”⁷¹ From northern New England to southern Kentucky, Christian fundamentalists called for an end to priests, presbyters, associations, doctrines, confessions—anything and everything that stood between the people and Christ. The people were told that they were quite capable of running their own churches, and even clerical leaders of the conservative denominations like Presbyterian Samuel Miller were forced to concede greater and greater lay control.⁷²

The people were everywhere “awakened from the sleep of ages,” said the maverick Presbyterian Barton Stone—who was a product not of the frontier but of the American Revolution; and the people saw “for the first time that they were responsible beings” who might even be capable of bringing about their own salvation.⁷³ Although the strict Calvinists still tried to stress predestination, limited atonement, the sovereignty of God, and the inability of people to save themselves, conversion seemed to be within the grasp of all who desired it—a mere matter of letting go and trusting in Jesus. By emphasizing free will and earned grace, the Methodists especially gathered in great numbers of souls and set the entire evangelical movement in a decidedly Arminian direction, with people, in effect, able to will their own salvation. After hearing a Methodist preacher in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the early 1790s attack the Calvinist notion that only a few elect went to heaven, one middling artisan listener exclaimed, “Why, then, I can be saved! I have been taught that only part of the race could be saved, but if this man’s singing be true, all may be saved.”⁷⁴

The Universalists did promise salvation for everyone and consequently thrived. Between 1795 and 1815 the Universalists organized twenty-three churches in the Connecticut River Valley of rural Vermont, especially under the leadership of Hosea Ballou, who denied the divinity of Christ and became Universalism’s most important theologian. Although the Universalists were widely condemned, in their acceptance of universal salvation they were only drawing out the logic implied by many other denominations. One of the ministers who opposed them was Lemuel Haynes, apparently the first black minister ordained by a major denomination. Ordained as a Congregational minister in Connecticut in 1785, Haynes moved to a conservative church in Rutland, Vermont, which he served for thirty years. As a devout Calvinist, he assailed the Universalists sprouting up everywhere around him in Vermont. In his 1805 sermon Haynes satirized Universalism and compared Ballou to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, which had also promised “Universal Salvation.” The sermon was widely republished and went through dozens of editions.⁷⁵

Devout evangelicals still believed in Satan the harasser, but, unlike the Puritans of the seventeenth century, most no longer thought that the devil could possess the body of a person; only Christ and the Holy Spirit could possess, which made all the fainting, shouting, and bodily shaking of the suppliants acceptable. Sin was no longer conceived as something inherent in the depravity of human beings but as a kind of failure of a person’s will and thus fully capable of being eliminated by individual exertion. Even some of the Calvinist Presbyterians and Separate Baptists felt compelled to soften their opposition to Arminianism in the face of the relentless challenges by free will believers; and many of them came to believe that the external moral behavior of people—their “character”—was more central to religious life than the introspective conversion of their souls.⁷⁶

With ordinary people being told, as one preacher told them in 1806, that each individual was “considered as possessing in himself or herself an original right to believe and speak as their own conscience, between themselves and God, may determine,” religion in America became much more personal and voluntary than it had ever been. People were freer to join and change their religious affiliation whenever they wished.⁷⁷ They thus moved from one religious group to another in a continual search for signs, prophets, or millennial promises that would make sense of their disrupted lives. With no church sure of holding its communicants, competition among the sects became fierce. Each claimed to be right; they called each other names, argued endlessly over points of doctrine, mobbed and stoned each other, and destroyed each other’s meetinghouses.

“All Christendom has been decomposed, broken in pieces” in this “fiery furnace of democracy,” said the bewildered Federalist Harrison Gray Otis.⁷⁸ Not only were the traditional Old World churches fragmented but the fragments themselves shattered in what seemed at times to be perpetual fission. There were not just Presbyterians but Old and New School Presbyterians, Cumberland Presbyterians, Springfield Presbyterians, Reformed Presbyterians, and Associated Presbyterians; not just Baptists but General Baptists, Regular Baptists, Free Will Baptists, Separate Baptists, Dutch River Baptists, Permanent Baptists, and Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Baptists. Some individuals cut their ties completely with the Old World churches and gathered around a dynamic leader like Barton Stone or Thomas Campbell who promised the restoration of the original Christian church—which is why they came to be called Restorationists. Other seekers ended up forming churches out of single congregations, and still others simply listened in the fields to wandering preachers like the eccentric Methodist Lorenzo Dow, who in the single year of 1805 traveled some ten thousand miles.⁷⁹

Dow was a force of nature. He preached to more people, traveled to more places, and attracted larger audiences at camp meetings than any other preacher of his day. In 1804, for example, he spoke at between five hundred and eight hundred camp meetings. He also wrote books, publishing between 1800 and his death in 1834 over seventy editions of his works. With long hair and flowing beard and disheveled clothes, Dow cultivated the image of John the Baptist. Yet he was no otherworldly mystic; he was in fact a radical Jeffersonian who railed at aristocrats and supported equality everywhere he went. He condemned the “gentlemen or nobility” who sought to “possess the country and feel and act more than their importance.” Such elites thought of ordinary people as “peasants” whom they “put on a level with the animals, and treated as an inferior race of beings, who must pay these lords a kind of divine honor, and bow, and cringe and scrape.”⁸⁰

THE DIVISIVE EFFECTS of all this fragmentation were offset by a curious blurring of theological distinctions among the competing denominations. “In that awful day when the universe, assembled must appear before the judge of the quick and the dead, the question brethren,” declared James McGready, one of the leaders in Kentucky’s great revival, “will not be, Were you a Presbyterian—a Seceder—a Covenanter—a Baptist—or a Methodist; but, Did you experience the new birth? Did you accept of Christ and his salvation as set forth in the gospel?”⁸¹ Some extreme evangelicals urged the creation of a simple Christian religion based on only the fundamentals of the gospel. They denounced all the paraphernalia of organized Christianity, including even the existence of a ministry.

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.⁸² 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.”⁸³ 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.”⁸⁴

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.⁸⁵

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.⁸⁶

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.⁸⁷

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.”⁸⁸ 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.⁸⁹

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.”⁹⁰

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.⁹¹

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.’”⁹² 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.⁹³ 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.⁹⁴ 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.

OTHERS 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.⁹⁵

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.⁹⁶ 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.”⁹⁷

But the Federalist Morse was hardly unusual in his prophesying; indeed, there was scarcely a clergyman in these years, especially in New England, who did not read the signs of the times and predict that something momentous was happening. Baptist and Republican Elias Smith thought that the struggle for liberty and individual rights throughout the world set the present age apart from all previous ages in history. The rule of kings and priests was passing, led by the example of the republican government of the United States. In a sermon preached in the immediate aftermath of Jefferson’s second inauguration as president in 1805, Smith suggested that Jefferson’s re-election foretold the coming of the millennium. He believed that “Thomas Jefferson is the angel who poured out his vial upon the river Euphrates, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.” The people of the world would know when Christ’s favorite government was upon them. It would be America’s: it would consist of “liberty, equality, unity and peace.”⁹⁸

Other clergy also thought that the approaching age of perfection was beginning in America. The wandering Methodist Lorenzo Dow was convinced that just as “The Dawn of Liberty” was taking place in America, so too would the millennium begin in the United States. “America lay undiscovered for several thousand years,” said Dow, “as if reserved for the era, when common sense began to awake her long slumber.” It was “as if the Creator’s wisdom and goodness” were waiting for “a ‘NEW WORLD,’ . . . for a new theatre for the exhibition of new things.”⁹⁹

Since the United States was itself leading humanity toward the earth’s final thousand years of bliss, millennial hopes inevitably came to focus on contemporary events occurring in America as signs of the approaching age of perfection—a perfection that would be brought about, some said, “not by miracles but by means,” indeed, “BY HUMAN EXERTIONS.”¹⁰⁰ Although Samuel Hopkins’s consistent Calvinism discouraged the sinner’s hope of promoting his or her own salvation, nonetheless his Treatise on the Millennium offered a rosy view of the future. After emphasizing the usual spiritual resurrection that would occur at the onset of the millennium, Hopkins soon got to the part of his book that must have been especially appealing to many readers—his description of the concrete earthly benefits people could look forward to during the millennium. The thousand years preceding the apocalypse, he wrote, “will be a time of great enjoyment and universal joy.” Family members will love one another, lawsuits will disappear, intemperance and extravagance will decline, and good health will be had by all. Men will learn how to farm more efficiently and smoothly. Artisans will improve their mastery of the “mechanic arts,” with the result that “the necessary and convenient articles of life, such as all utensils, clothing, buildings, etc., will be formed and made, in better manner, and with much less labour than they now are.” Men, Hopkins claimed, will learn how to cut rocks, pave roads, and build houses in new labor-saving ways. They will invent machines to level mountains and raise valleys. The millennium, he concluded, will bring about “a fullness and plenty of all the necessaries and conveniences of life, to render all much more easy and comfortable in their worldly circumstances and enjoyments, than ever before.” Hopkins admitted that it was tricky making all these predictions, but he hoped he had not made too many mistakes. Besides, he said, he was probably erring on the side of caution. By stressing that things were likely to be even better than his predictions, Hopkins guaranteed that his millennial message would be popular.¹⁰¹

This new post-millennial thinking represented both a rationalizing of revelation and a Christianizing of the enlightened belief in secular progress. Hopkins’s predictions of a new world of “universal peace, love and general and cordial friendship” were not much different from those hopes for the future held by Jefferson and other secular radicals. This post-millennial thinking was optimistic and even at times materialistic; it promised not the sudden divine destruction of a corrupt world but a step-by-step human-directed progression toward perfection in this world. Every move westward across the continent and every advance in material progress—even new inventions and canal-building—was interpreted in millennial terms. Such millennial beliefs identified the history of redemption with the history of the new Republic. They reconciled Christianity with American democracy, and they explained and justified the anxious lives and the awakened aspirations of countless numbers of ordinary Americans for whom the world had hitherto never offered much promise of improvement.