A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Religion’s First Great Awakening

  A free market of ideas benefited American colonists in religion too. Affairs of the spirit in the English colonies, where religion was varied, unregulated, and enthusiastic, differed from those of the mother country, with its formality and stiffness. Sects multiplied, split apart into new divisions, and multiplied some more, due in part to the Protestant/Puritan emphasis on individual Bible reading and in part because of the congregational nature of the churches. Although Virginia, South Carolina, Connecticut, and Massachusetts retained official churches in varying degrees, the decentralization of religious denominations made them impossible to control. American Baptist ministers, for example, required no formal training in theology, much less a formal degree in divinity, to preach the Gospel. Instead, they were “called” to the pulpit, as were many new Methodists, radical Presbyterians, and other enthusiastic men of God. Both the presbytery system, which constituted a top-down hierarchical structure, and the Baptists’ congregational organization of churches (a bottom-up arrangement) met different needs of saint and sinner alike, all the while rejecting Anglican hierarchical control.10 American preachers displayed a thorough anti-intellectual bent in which sermons replaced written lectures with a down-home, oratorical religious style. Itinerant preachers roamed New England, western Pennsylvania, and the Piedmont and Appalachian frontiers, spreading the Word.11

  A major source of what Americans today call old-time religion originated in the First Great Awakening work of clergymen Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. At first glance, Edwards seems an unlikely candidate for delivering fire and brimstone sermons. Born in Connecticut in 1703, the third-generation Puritan was a brilliant, deep-thinking philosopher and theologian. After his 1720 graduation from Yale, he coupled a rational defense of biblical doctrine with a profoundly mystical teaching style that his Presbyterian parishioners found compelling. Edwards and others inspired unprecedented religious fervor in Massachusetts in 1735.

  When English Methodist George Whitefield—as much a showman as preacher—arrived on American shores in 1741, American ministers had already seeded the ground for the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening. Essentially, this movement was characterized by tremendous religious growth and enthusiasm, the first such upsurge since the original Puritan migration a hundred years earlier. As the waves of the awakening spanned America’s eastern shore, church attendance soared and ministers like Edwards and Whitefield hosted open air camp meetings to exhort true believers to accept the Lord and avoid the flames of hell. Throughout the Connecticut River Valley thousands flocked to the glow of this New Light Christianity, as it was called, camping out in the open air and enjoying the fellowship of their fellow devotees.

  George Whitefield’s dramatic preaching both frightened and inspired his audiences. Literally acting out biblical stories on stage, playing each of the major parts himself, Whitefield voiced the word of God to sinners. His impersonation of Satan and descriptions of the horrors of hell terrified audiences and evidently gave them much to think about. Edwards called this tactic “salutary terror.” His most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), remains a fire-and-brimstone classic in which he warned sinners that “God holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect.”12 The climax of any Whitefield/Edwards sermon was salvation. Parishioners came forward in tears and humility, confessing their sins and swearing to begin life anew as saved Christians. Thus, out of the old Calvinist tradition of saving grace, came a more modern, public, and theatrical American outpouring of religious emotion that remains common today, which elicited no small degree of condemnation from traditionalists.13

  By the late 1740s, the Great Awakening began to fade. Even Jonathan Edwards fell into disfavor and withdrew as a recluse to a small congregation of pioneers and Indians in western Massachusetts. Yet the First Great Awakening left an indelible legacy by further diffusing and decentralizing church authority. It fathered new Protestant sects—Baptist, Methodist, and New Light Presbyterian movements—and enhanced the role of the independent itinerant preachers. Like American doctors and lawyers, the clergy grew less intellectual and more pragmatic. Saving souls was more important to them than preaching doctrine, and a college education in theology became optional if not irrelevant or even, later, an impediment to sound doctrine. All of this fit perfectly into the large antiauthoritarian pattern in colonial America, giving the First Great Awakening a political as a well as social impact.

  Finally, the First Great Awakening foreshadowed another religious movement—a movement that would, during the first half of the nineteenth century, echo and supersede the first crusade’s fervency. The Second Great Awakening that followed gave birth to abolitionism as the true believers of the Second Great Awakening added slavery to their list of man’s sins and, in fact, moved it to the top of the list.

  Slavery’s American Origins and Evolution

  As Edmund Morgan has shown, African American slavery evolved slowly in the seventeenth-century American South.14 White Virginians and Carolinians did not come to America with the intention of owning slaves, yet that was precisely what they did: between 1619 and 1707 slavery slowly became entrenched. Opportunities in the economically diverse Northeast proved much more attractive to immigrants than the staple-crop agriculture of Virginia and the Carolinas, making for permanent labor shortages in the South. Increasingly, it became more difficult to persuade white indentured servants or Indian workers to harvest the labor-intensive tobacco and rice crops. This was hard physical labor best performed in gang systems under the supervision of an overseer. No free whites would do it, and Southerners discovered that the few Indians they put to work soon vanished into the forest. Southern tobacco planters soon looked elsewhere for a more servile work force.

  Yet why did tobacco and rice planters specifically turn to African slaves? In retrospect, one must conclude that Africans were more vulnerable to enslavement than white indentured servants and Indians. The African Gold Coast was open to exploitation by European sea powers and already had a flourishing slave trade with the Muslims. This trade was far more extensive than previously thought, and involved far more Europeans than earlier scholars had acknowledged.15 Thanks to this existing trade in human flesh, there were already ample precedents of black slavery in the British West Indies. More important, those African slaves shipped to North America truly became captives. They did not (initially) speak English, Spanish, French, or Indian language and could not communicate effectively outside their plantations. Even before they were shipped across the Atlantic, traders mixed slaves by tribe and language with others with whom they shared nothing in common except skin color, isolating them further. The first generation of slave captives thus became extremely demoralized, and rebellion became infrequent, despite the paranoia over slave revolts that constantly gripped plantation whites.

  How could these English colonists, so steeped in the Enlightenment principles of liberty and constitutionalism, enslave other human beings? The answer is harsh and simple: British colonists convinced themselves that Africans were not really human beings—that they were property—and thus legitimate subjects for enslavement within the framework of English liberty. Into English folk belief was interwoven fear of the color black, associating blackness with witchcraft and evil, while so-called scientists in Europe argued that blacks were an inferior species of humans. English ministers abused the Bible, misinterpreting stories of Cain and Abel and Noah’s son Ham, to argue for separate creation and an alleged God-imposed inferiority on blacks as the “curse of Ham.”16 When combined with perceived economic necessity, English racism and rationalization for enslavement of African people became entrenched.17

  Slavery’s institutionalization began in Virginia in 1619 when a small group of black slaves arrived. The term “slave” did not appear in Virginia law for fifty years, and there is evidence that even the earliest Africans brought over against their will were viewed
as indentures. Free blacks, such as “Antonio the negro,” were identified in public records as early as 1621, and of the three hundred Africans recorded as living in the South through 1640, many gained freedom through expiration of indenture contracts. Some free blacks soon became landholders, planters, and even slaveholders themselves. But at some point in the mid-seventeenth century, the process whereby all blacks were presumed to be slaves took root, and this transformation is still not well understood. Attempts by scholars such as Peter Kolchin to isolate race begs the question of why whites permitted any blacks to be free, whereas Edmund Morgan’s explanation of slavery stemming from efforts by poor whites to create another class under them is also unpersuasive.18 However it occurred, by 1676, widespread legalized slavery appeared in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and within thirty years, slavery was an established economic institution throughout the southern and, to a much smaller degree, northern American colonies.19

  English, Dutch, and New England merchant seamen traded in human flesh. West African intertribal warfare produced abundant prisoners of war to fuel this trade. Prisoners found themselves branded and boarded onto vessels of the Royal African Company and other slavers. On the ships, slaves were shackled together and packed tight in the hold—eating, sleeping, vomiting, and defecating while chained in place. The arduous voyage of three weeks to three months was characterized by a 16 percent mortality rate and, occasionally, involved suicides and mutinies. Finally, at trip’s end, the slavers delivered their prisoners on the shores of America.

  Every American colony’s legislators enacted laws called black codes to govern what some would later call America’s Peculiar Institution. These codes defined African Americans as chattels personal—moveable personal property—not as human beings, and as such slaves could not testify against whites in court, nor could they be killed for a capital crime (they were too valuable). Black codes forbade slave literacy, gun or dog ownership, travel (excepting special travel permits), gatherings numbering more than six slaves, and sex between black males and white women (miscegenation). However, as the development of a large mulatto population attests, white men were obviously free to have sex with—or, more often, rape—black women. All of the above laws were open to broad interpretation and variation, especially in northern colonies. This fact did not alter the overall authoritarian structure of the peculiar institution.20

  The vast majority of slaves in the New World worked in either Virginia tobacco fields or South Carolina rice plantations. Rice plantations constituted the worst possible fate, for Carolina lowlands proved to be a hot, humid, and horrible work environment, replete with swarms of insects and innumerable species of worms. Huge all-male Carolina work forces died at extraordinary rates. Conditions were so bad that a few Carolina slaves revolted against their masters in the Cato Conspiracy (1739), which saw seventy-five slaves kill thirty whites before fleeing to Spanish Florida; white militiamen soon killed forty-four of the revolutionaries. A year later, whites hanged another fifty blacks for supposedly planning insurrection in the infamous Charleston Plot.

  Slave revolts and runaways proved exceptions to the rule. Most black slaves endured their fate in stoic and heroic fashion by creating a lifestyle that sustained them and their will to endure slavery. In the slave quarters, blacks returned from the fields each day to their families, church and religion, and a unique folk culture, with music, dance, medicine, folktales, and other traditional lore. Blacks combined African customs with Anglo-and Celtic-American traits to create a unique African American folk culture. Although this culture did not thoroughly emerge until the nineteenth century, it started to take shape in the decades before the American Revolution. African American traditions, music, and a profound belief in Christianity helped the slaves endure and sustained their hopes for “a better day a comin’.”

  Although the institution of slavery thoroughly insinuated itself into southern life and culture in the 1600s, it took the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s to fully entrench the peculiar institution. Tobacco and rice, important as they were, paled in comparison to the impact of cotton agriculture on the phenomenal growth of slavery, but the tortured political and religious rationales for slavery had matured well before then, making its entrenchment a certainty in the South.21

  A few statistics clarify these generalizations. By the mid-1700s, Americans imported approximately seven thousand slaves from Africa and the Caribbean annually. Some 40 percent of Virginians and 66 percent of all South Carolinians in 1835 were black. Of these, probably 95 percent were slaves. By 1763, between 15 and 20 percent of all Americans were African Americans, free and slave—a larger per capita black population than in modern-day America. Yet 90 percent of all these African Americans resided south of the Pennsylvania line. Northern slavery, always small because of the absence of a staple crop, was shriveling, its death accelerated by northern reformers who passed manumission acts beginning late in the 1700s, and by the formation in 1775 of the world’s first abolitionist group, the Quaker Anti-Slavery Society—by Pennsylvania Quakers. Other Northerners routinely freed their slaves or allowed them to buy their own freedom, so that by 1830 there were only three thousand slaves left in all of the North, compared to more than two million in the South.22 When individual initiative did not suffice, Northerners employed the law. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 would forbid slavery above the Ohio River, and the Constitution would allow abolition of the slave trade by 1807.23

  Some Northerners envisioned, and prayed for, an end to American slavery, as did a small number of Southerners. George Washington would free all of his slaves following his death; Jefferson and Madison would not. They privately decried slavery as a “necessary evil”—something their fathers and they had come to depend upon, but not something they were proud of or aimed to perpetuate.24 Jefferson’s commitment to ending slavery may be more suspect than Washington’s or, certainly, Franklin’s. But virtually all of these men believed that slavery would some day end, and often they delayed confronting it in hopes that it would just go away. Until the invention of the cotton gin, their hope was not necessarily a futile one. After the advent of the Cotton Kingdom, however, increasingly fewer Southerners criticized slavery, and the pervading philosophy about it slowly shifted from its presence as a necessary evil to a belief that slavery was a positive good.

  Georgia: The Last Colony

  Unlike the Puritans, who wanted to create a “city on a hill,” or the Virginia Company, which sought profit, the founders of Georgia acted out of concern for Spanish power in the southern area of America. Although Queen Anne’s War ended in 1713, Spain still represented a significant threat to the Carolinas. General James Oglethorpe, a military hero, also had a philanthropic bent. He had headed an investigation of prisons and expressed special concern for debtors, who by English law could be incarcerated for their obligations. If he could open a settlement south of the Carolinas, he could offer a new start to poor English and settle a region that could stand as a buffer to Spanish power.

  In 1732, Oglethorpe received a grant from King George II for land between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers. Oglethorpe and his trustees deliberately limited the size of the landholdings to encourage density and, thus, better defense. Debtors and prisoners were released on the condition that they emigrate to Georgia; they helped found the first fortified town on the Savannah River in 1733. The trustees, though, had planned well by encouraging artisans, tradesmen, farmers, and other skilled workers from England and Scotland to emigrate. In addition, they welcomed all religious refugees—to the point of allowing a small group of Jews to locate in Georgia—except Catholics, fearing they might ally with the Spanish.

  Within a decade, Britain’s fears of Spanish aggression proved well founded. The European War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) spawned conflict in the Western Hemisphere when Spain and France allied with Indian tribes to attack the British. During the 1739–42 War of Jenkins’s Ear, General Oglethorpe led Georgians and South Carolinians in
to Spanish Florida to thwart a Spanish invasion. They enjoyed mixed success but failed to wrest Saint Augustine from Spain. Despite limited military success, Oglethorpe soon found that his colonists wanted to limit his power. Former convicts actively opposed his ban of rum (sobriety, they believed, would not expedite their rehabilitation!). Planters chafed at his prohibition of slavery. In 1750, Georgians repealed the ban on slavery, importing nearly ten thousand Africans by 1770. One year before its original charter expired, Oglethorpe’s group surrendered control and Georgia became a Royal colony.

  With the stabilization of Georgia as the thirteenth American colony, the final American adjustment to empire was complete. Britain’s colonies spanned the entire Atlantic seaboard, and the system appeared relatively sound. At the same time, on paper, the mercantile apparatus of the 1600s seemed to function satisfactorily. The king and Parliament handed down laws to the secretary of state who, with the Board of Trade, issued orders for commerce and governance of the New World. Britain deployed a small network of royal governors, officials, and trade and customs officers who were directed to carry out these laws.

  Ultimately, it would be up to these officials to prevent the American Revolution—a challenge well beyond them. The most common thread that connected the British colonies was their governmental structure: eleven colonies had an appointed council and elected assembly (with the franchise, or voting rights, bestowed on adult white male property owners); ten colonies had a governor selected by the king, in the case of a royal colony, or by the directors of the joint-stock company. The legislators’ right to vote on taxes, the governor’s salary, and all other revenue measures—the coveted power of the purse—constituted a central part of the rights of Englishmen the colonists enjoyed. Thus, citizens took even relatively minor local levies as serious business. As they grew more prosperous, wealth permeated through the greater part of the body politic, making inevitable the ascendancy of the legislative bodies over the executives. Despite resistance from the governors, virtually all the American colonies in 1770 had seen the elected legislative bodies supersede the governors’ offices, wresting almost all important decision-making power from the king’s proxies.25