During the Great Awakening, every established denomination cracked in two, youth veering new-side, parents clinging to old; unestablished sects like Baptists, known for spontaneity and enthusiasm, gained new members. Yet when the first swell of fervency subsided, the movement became a sustaining force in the lives of urban laborers and artisans and the tenants and smallholders on what, at the time, was frontier: the big Allegheny Valley of Pennsylvania and Virginia, the Carolina mountains, southern New Jersey, western New England’s Berkshires. The movement faced opposition from many quarters. Old-light ministers castigated what they saw as the Awakening’s preference for hysteria over doctrine. Liberal theologians too, trying to get Enlightenment ideas about human reason into churches, condemned the Awakening’s appeal to mere feeling. Bosses were dismayed to find fieldhands and factory laborers dropping work to pray and attend outdoor services.
Evangelical preachers didn’t disdain doctrine, reason, or work. They disdained duty imposed from outside and any expression of greed, and they believed that while reason is a particularly beautiful gift (many Evangelicals had a strong interest in natural science), human beings, inherently perverse, will warp reason to rationalization and self-deception: if Anglican liberals believed they could think their way into salvation, they were sadly mistaken. The Awakening confronted bosses and workers, creditors and debtors, landlords and tenants, ministers and worshipers, teachers and students, and men and women with the news that spiritual justification depends not on acts of devotion, nor on passive belief, but on acting, through God, with loving responsibility toward other people.
In 1739, when Herman Husband heard George Whitefield, the movement was undergoing a change. The Awakening began to see itself not as an amazing series of conversions but as the beginning of spiritual renewal for all creation, the impending millennium, prophesied for Christians in the Revelation of Saint John and certain books of the Old Testament. British and American preaching had long turned to interpretation of millennial prophecy, in which, after a period of human degradation, Christ returns unexpectedly with a heaven-splitting shout and conducts a horrible battle, known as Apocalypse, against the beasts and harlots of Satan and their earthly armies. Christ’s victory destroys the sinful kingdoms of the world and binds Satan in chains for a thousand years, during which Christ establishes his reign of perfect happiness for believers on earth. That millennium is followed by a brief, easily crushed rebellion by Satan; then Christ makes a last judgment of all souls living and dead and ends history by carrying the saved souls to bliss in heaven.
The story was familiar; it was also confusing. Generations of theologians had devoted much thought and writing to reconciling the internal contradictions in the book of Revelation and discrepancies between that book and the books of Ezekiel and Daniel. Theories about the millennium abounded.
Great Awakening preachers gave the millennium their own twist. A precondition of the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth had long been said to be the horrible Apocalypse, with its destruction of the earthly kingdoms and their unconverted worshipers of luxury and vice. New-light theologians switched the sequence of events. Apocalypse, they suggested, might not come until after the thousand years of earthly felicity. This sequence allowed time for the kingdoms of the world to be transformed. Last judgment might not be necessary. All might be brought into God’s love, gradually, without fire, flood, and horror. The removal of saints to heaven need not occur either, as the end of history might be accomplished in perfect, eternal happiness of life on earth. Even the Second Coming of Christ took on, in this rendition, new meaning. The Second Coming, while literal, didn’t necessarily refer to a personal manifestation of Christ on earth but to the infusion of Christ’s redeeming power in all people.
The best news, new-light preachers insisted, was that this universal renewal was already under way. The proof was the Awakening itself. The split between new and old lights was the real last battle; soon all would be new. Whitefield’s tours of the colonies, for example, were reversing the long-standing American trend in which sects forever subdivided themselves, each trying to be purer than the sect that spawned it. Whitefield had no interest in sects, or in superior purity: he preached to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Catholics, Quakers, Moravians. While many preachers were less ecumenical than Whitefield—especially regarding Quakers and Catholics—people from warring sects and mutually hostile colonies were growing united in a new, shared faith. There had long been a folk belief that in the last days, the sun would rise in the west. Now this prediction seemed to refer to the ascendancy of faith in North America. No longer the Puritans’ city on a hill, American society was the stage for a cosmic struggle, climaxing in this generation.
From the 1740s on, millennium in America was a call to action. Work would be consecrated, greed would die, union flourish, and the idea that God’s love is a particular love for you—though helpful as a step in accepting forgiveness—transcended: Salvation of the whole society was the goal. Passivity was error. Inclusion among the saved required taking on the work of redemption and actively pushing history toward the coming kingdom. Twenty years before the revolution, Jonathan Edwards predicted a union of American colonies under a charismatic leader. In the 1770s, the next generation of Evangelicals, increasingly committed to liberating the working class, would do more to realize that union than liberal theologians and university rationalists—natural allies of creditor-class revolutionaries—would ever admit. Evangelicals opposed greed and luxury, supported paper finance, and worked for general salvation. They viewed the American union as instituting freedom and equality for all people and George Washington as the avatar of a cosmic, not merely a political, change. In 1775, Continental troops mustered in Newburyport, Massachusetts, before marching to the Canadian Maritimes to solicit support for American independence. George Whitefield had died in Newburyport five years earlier. Before starting their mission, the troops went to Whitefield’s grave, dug up the coffin, and pried it open. On the bones, the clerical collar and cuffs were intact. The soldiers took the preacher’s clothing to carry as a standard in the struggle for liberty.
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In the 1740s, young Husband became convinced that schisms between old and new lights presaged the biblical millennium. The book of Daniel seemed to be saying that all dead churches would be redeemed by the spread of one small, enlightened church, which the adolescent Husband imagined resembling the primitive Christians after the Crucifixion. It was his duty to join that group.
The only problem was finding it. He split with his father’s Anglicanism to join the Presbyterians, split with old-side Presbyterians to join the new side, and then discovered the Quakers, to the horror not only of polite Chesapeake society but also of his new-side brethren. The theologian Jonathan Edwards warned against new lights’ unhealthy obsession with spiritual independence. For years Herman Husband, searching for what he described as the drop of leaven in the parable, which over time fermented a whole sea, embodied that obsession. The truth Husband yearned for was so uncompromising that it couldn’t be found.
Throughout his twenties and thirties, however, he did remain an active Quaker, a member of the East Nottingham monthly meeting near the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. Quaker theology was radical enough for Husband to embrace. Quakers described the Holy Spirit as indwelling love; that idea matched the blissful intimations Husband sometimes received of the holiness of creation. Too, Quakers resembled early Christians for having been horribly persecuted in England and New England. They had a conception of universal brotherhood that recognized people living, as Husband put it, even in China as children of God, and thus they strongly opposed slavery. Their worship indulged no ritual forms or shows, and while they defied conformity imposed from outside, they were pacifists, radically loyal to the precept to love one’s enemy. He served on management committees of the Society of Friends, the Quakers’ tightly structured organization, setting standards of conduct for the main meeting and its
local weekly subsidiaries. He married, had children, bought his own plantation in Maryland, and became rich, as many American Quakers did. He was a land speculator and part-owner of two copper mines and a smelting business, an investor in a Caribbean shipping firm. Those who later knew Herman Husband as the barefoot ancient of the Alleghenies would have been startled to get a look at him in his thirties, a diversified Maryland planter and businessman like his father, yet religious like his grandfather, owning no slaves, eschewing frivolity, and taking no public office. He managed all his operations with diligence and aplomb and made enormous profits. Meanwhile, with many others rich and poor, he prepared for the millennium.
Yet he would end his forties in tumult, a fugitive traveling under aliases, a radical leader of the people’s movement. The change began with a move to the backcountry. The western forests of North Carolina, at first barely settled but soon filling with homesteaders and squatters, became in the 1750s a site of intense land speculation. Husband first visited the area as a bargain hunter, buying up thousand-acre parcels for himself and other members of a Maryland consortium. Over the next few years, he visited Carolina again and bought more land. He would become one of the area’s largest landowners, with more than ten thousand acres along the Sandy Creek and the Deep River. Even before he moved there to live, the new, wild land seemed to Husband not merely a fine business opportunity but also a natural place to encourage human liberty, especially of the religious kind. He wrote to Lord Granville, who owned the upper half of the colony, importuning him to block the Anglican church from establishing itself as the legal religion of the backcountry and stifling, as it had in Maryland, religious freedom. He also hoped Granville would stop western landbuyers from bringing slaves into the backcountry. The abominable institution had practical detriments that Husband could explain from experience. He pointed out to Granville a grim irony: planters murdered American natives, forced African natives to work stolen land, and left poor whites unemployed. In the backcountry, Husband hoped for a new and better home. In 1762, following his wife’s death, he moved his children to western North Carolina—permanently, he thought. He joined the Cane Creek monthly meeting, and married a local Quaker.
Yet even as he established himself as a leading backcountry planter, his spiritual absolutism began reasserting itself. Husband’s first fight in North Carolina wasn’t with government but with the Society of Friends. He’d long been disturbed by the way every church, in the end, denies its members the right to voice revelations of the Holy Spirit when those revelations conflict with procedures of the church. Perpetuating itself as an institution, a church fails its original purpose and dies spiritually. Quakers’ roots were in the religious enthusiasms of seventeenth-century England, when the most extreme Puritanism had fractured. Back then, Fifth Monarchy Men proclaimed millennium, Levellers demanded wide access to the franchise, Diggers invited all to share goods and plant on common lands, and Grindletonians, a tiny sect from the village of Grindleton in Yorkshire, predicted heaven on earth. Ranters ranted, Baptists baptized, and Quakers, naked and daubed with shit, quaked as they invaded high Anglican services to call out the pharisees. Persecution inevitably followed, and the Society of Friends had spent a century developing a strict discipline to rein in violent enthusiasms. Quakers now enjoyed some toleration by respectable society. Pumped-up new lights of the Great Awakening, adding to Quaker numbers, glorified the old fervency and threatened to revive a ranting spirit that the society had worked hard to dispel.
At the Cane Creek meeting, Husband rose one day to condemn Quaker discipline. He confronted the assembled members with what he termed the impossibility of following the discipline while also following the dictates of conscience. He was expelled from the Society of Friends.
For twenty years, in accordance with his own intimations and the mysterious visions interpreted by Daniel, he’d hoped to live amid the one group that could bring on the millennium, the drop of leaven to ferment a sea. Midlife, he was unchurched. His excommunication placed him in a state of dejection. Even hopes of the millennium now seemed in doubt. He was forty.
While Husband suffered the pain of excommunication, Great Britain imposed the Stamp Act on the colonies. Backcountry people, hundreds of miles from the seaboard where colonial furor coalesced, had little to do with protest, petitioning, and assembly battles over the Stamp Act, but Husband, in his spiritual loneliness, read newspaper articles and pamphlets against the act and saw something that began to clarify all he’d been confused about. To his surprise, when anti–Stamp Act writers wrote of liberty, they evinced intense spirituality. They might not be talking about Christ, he thought, but they seemed inspired by what religious people call Christ. He’d always viewed civil government and religion—wrongly, he saw now—as separate entities: religion the force that gave true meaning to creation, civil government the small, dry offshoot, necessary, perhaps, but dismayingly corrupt, rightfully the province of kings, nobles, scholars, and lawyers, not of people possessed of revelation. He returned with excitement to the book of Daniel. Now he began to understand it. The book was about government. Daniel’s interpretations of mysterious dreams, the miry clay from which all vegetation grows, the beasts of the field and of the sea, the horns and the mountain—these gave a key to the history of government and described in symbolic form something Husband began thinking of as good government. Good government would, in itself, bring about the millennial climax of humankind. And the biblical authors knew this.
Wielding this new idea, Husband emerged as a powerful figure in a field he’d long avoided: public action. By the end of the sixties he was a folk hero, elected by his neighbors to the provincial assembly while carrying out a comprehensive politics of resistance. He led protests, wrote demands, and was repeatedly jailed. Despite the refreshing effect on him of the Stamp Act writers, Husband wasn’t protesting a remote British government’s interference in the colonies. His targets were local gentry who served as officials of a government no more distant than the East Coast, often those same anti-British Whigs whose words had inspired him. Oppression in the backcountry took the form of taxes levied by provinces, exponentially more unjust, from any objective perspective, than the imperial taxes on trade complained of so bitterly by rich merchants in port cities. In the backcountry, taxes drew maximum cash and physical effort (there were labor taxes for things like road building) from the mass of ordinary people for the flagrant benefit of a rich few. The rich were often exempted from taxes, which they had the job of collecting and at times liberally embezzling; they had the job of repossessing tax delinquents’ property, which they stole. All public positions were occupied, through a patronage system, by gentry compensated not by salary but by a multitude of high commissions and fees, supposedly defined by law yet often defined by the officials themselves, who had a captive market and benefited from eastern governments’ lack of interest in fairness for the backcountry. Every transaction required the services of clerks, registrars, notaries, and other officers who did little and charged what they wanted. Sheriffs repossessed property at many times the value of delinquent taxes. Town commissioners gave friends and family contracts for public improvements, which were always intended to improve life and trade for the few.
In response, Regulators, as Husband’s constituents began calling themselves, went beyond traditional blackface attacks and court riots. The Regulators’ rioting was indeed memorable, especially at one court session in Hillsborough, North Carolina, where they occupied the town for days, beat and dragged officials through the streets, conducted a mock trial, and destroyed all the property of the most reviled official, whose elegant house they dismantled brick by brick. Husband, having plunged headlong into public life, helped lead that riot. Yet he was still a pacifist. He struggled with his allies’ penchant for violence; he preferred confrontational petitions, speeches, and lawsuits, and in that context the Regulators articulated, in a series of petitions, a call for a complete economic restructuring of the province. They want
ed a public land bank for easy credit; they wanted currency emissions to let them pay taxes in paper; they wanted direct public scrutiny of sheriffs’ tax lists, collection records, and fee schedules. Land titles must be granted to improvers of land, not absentee landlords. Government must punish overreaching local officials. Court costs must be eased. Qualifications for voting and officeholding must be lowered. Most radically of all, they wanted taxes proportional to wealth. These demands were made not against the king but against a colonial government that, though operating under the king, the Regulators believed was violating the spirit of the English Constitution. Regulators wanted more government, not less, and they wanted it dedicated to protecting the liberties and opportunities of ordinary people.
Husband could irritate the Regulators. He still urged nonviolence; sometimes he made deals with the government, censoring himself to avoid jail time. But he also shuttled long distances to pursue the Regulators’ agenda, both as an elected assemblyman in the tidewater capital of New Bern, North Carolina, where he was becoming a striking and controversial figure, and as a leader of resistance action in the west. Quakerish ways made him immune to finery, even to grooming. His graying hair was famously a mess. In his forties he already had the authority of old age.
In one assembly session, Husband introduced a radical Regulator petition, but backcountry issues were forever being swept aside by eastern merchants’ struggles with the mother country. It was the governor, Lord Tryon, not merchants opposing British interference, who showed some sympathy for the plight of western settlers. Tryon visited their region and brought prosecutions against corrupt officials. In return, he wanted the Regulators to agree to disband. Husband and others were sure they were getting these weak concessions only by applying extreme and constant pressure. If anything, now was the time to escalate.
The Whiskey Rebellion Page 9
