Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  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 gro
ups 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