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

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Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 Page 117

by Gordon S. Wood


  59. James Thomas Flexner, The Light of Distant Skies: American Painting, 1760–1835 (New York, 1954), 152.

  60. Hopkinson, “Annual Discourse,” in Wood, ed., Rising Glory of America, 330; Oliver W. Larkin, Samuel F. B. Morse and the American Democratic Art (Boston, 1954), 31–32.

  61. Flexner, Light of Distant Skies, 84; David Meschutt, “John Durand,” in John A. Garraty and Mark Carnes, eds., American National Biography (New York, 1999), 7: 139–40.

  62. Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale, vol. 2, Later Life (Philadelphia, 1947), 329.

  63. JA to Marshall, 4 Feb. 1806, Papers of Marshall, 6: 425; to TJ, 13 July 1813, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill, 1959), 2: 349; Editorial Note, The Life of George Washington, Papers of Marshall, 6: 221.

  64. Emily E. F. Skeel, ed., Mason Locke Weems: His Works and Ways (New York, 1929), 1: 55, 132.

  65. Karen A. Weyler, Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789–1814 (Iowa City, 2004), 29–74.

  66. Rodney Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850 (Philadelphia, 2005), 23–43.

  67. Sellers, Charles Willson Peale, 2: 62–72; James Thomas Flexner, “The Scope of Painting in the 1790s,” Penn. Mag. of History and Biography, 74 (1950), 74–89 (I owe this reference to John E. Crowley); Flexner, The Light of Distant Skies, 103, 109–10; Nygren and Robertson, eds., Views and Visions, 25, 137–43.

  68. Miller, Patrons and Patriotism, 92; Flexner, The Light of Distant Skies, 159.

  69. Flexner, The Light of Distant Skies, 161.

  70. Harris, The Artist in American Society, 93–95; Miller, Patrons and Patriotism, 265.

  71. North American Review, 2 (1815–1816), 161; Harris, The Artist in American Society, 97.

  72. Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, MA, 1970), 191.

  73. Theodore Dehon, “With Literature as with Government” (1807), in Lewis P. Simpson, ed., The Federalist Literary Mind (Baton Rouge, 1962), 186.

  74. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 73–79.

  75. Ellis, After the Revolution, 155; William Dunlap, A History of the American Theater (New York, 1832), 1: 130, 125; Jean V. Matthews, Toward a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800–1830 (Boston, 1990), 132; Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 20.

  76. Flexner, “The Scope of Painting in the 1790s,” Penn. Mag. of History and Biography, 74 (1950), 84–87; Martin P. Snyder, “William Birch: His Philadelphia Views,” ibid., 73 (1949), 271–315; Snyder, “Birch’s Philadelphia Views: New Discoveries,” ibid., 88 (1964), 164–73.

  77. Flexner, The Light of Distant Skies, 191–92, 112; William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834; New York, 1969), 1: 417, 418.

  78. Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design, 1; 417; Joseph Stevens Buckminster, “The Dangers and Duties of Men of Letters” (1809), and Robert H. Gardiner, “The Multiplicity of Our Literary Institutions” (1807), in Simpson, ed., Federalist Literary Mind, 100, 71, 55, 101.

  79. Lewis P. Simpson, “Federalism and the Crisis of Literary Order,” American Literature, 32 (1960), 260; Joseph Stevens Buckminster, “The Polity of Letters” (1806), in Simpson, ed., Federalist Literary Mind, 260, 184.

  80. Port Folio, 4th Ser., 3 (1814), 35–38.

  81. Harris, The Artist in American Society, 97; Port Folio, 4th Ser., 3 (1814), 154.

  82. North American Review, 16 (1823), 102–3.

  83. Virgil Barker, American Painting: History and Interpretation (New York, 1960), 339–51.

  84. Edmund Trowbridge Dana, “The Works of Criticism” (1805), Simpson, ed., Federalist Literary Mind, 209–12.

  85. Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill, 2008), 201–2; Nye, Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830, 236; Russell B. Nye, George Bancroft (New York, 1964), 40.

  1. Nicholas Collin, “An Essay on those inquiries in Natural Philosophy Which at Present are most beneficial to the United States of America,” American Philosophical Society, Trans., 2 (1793), vii.

  2. Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), 72–73; [John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon], Cato’s Letters . . . (London, 1748,) IV, No. 123; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1695), bk. IV, ch. 19; Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 195–96, 214–15.

  3. TJ to Horatio Spafford, 17 March 1814, to James Smith, 8 Dec. 1822, in James H. Hutson, ed., The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations (Princeton, 2005), 68, 218.

  4. Russell B. Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (New York, 1960), 230; Franklin Hamlin Littell, From State Church to Pluralism: A Protestant Interpretation of Religion in American History (New York, 1962), 32.

  5. Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 195; John W. Chandler, “The Communitarian Quest for Perfection,” in Stuart C. Henry, ed., A Miscellany of American Christianity (Durham, NC, 1963), 58; William Warren Sweet, The Story of Religions in America (New York, 1930), 322; Douglas H. Sweet, “Church Vitality and the American Revolution: Historiographical Consensus and Thoughts Towards a New Perspective,” Church History, 45 (1976), 342, 344.

  6. On deism, see Kerry S. Walters, The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (lawrence, KS, 1992).

  7. Jon Butler stresses the low proportion of church members or communicants among the eighteenth-century colonists, while Patricia U. Bonomi and Peter R. Eisenstadt emphasize the high proportion of church attendance. Jon Butler, “Coercion, Miracle, Reason,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Religion in a Revolutionary Age (Charlottesville, 1994), 19; Patricia U. Bonomi and Peter R. Eisenstadt, “Church Adherence in the Eighteenth-Century British American Colonies,” WMQ, 39 (1982), 245–86.

  8. Bernard Bailyn et al., The Great Republic: A History of the American People, 4th ed. (Lexington, MA, 1992), 174.

  9. Stephen A. Marini, “The Revolutionary Revival in America” (unpublished paper); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2002), 166.

  10. William Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, D.D: Pastor of East Church, Salem, Massachusetts (Gloucester, MA, 1962), 3: 192–93.

  11. Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton, 2000), 76.

  12. James H. Smylie, “Protestant Clergy, the First Amendment and Beginnings of a Constitutional Debate, 1781–91,” in Elwyn A. Smith, The Religion of the Republic (Philadelphia, 1971), 149–50.

  13. Smylie, “Protestant Clergy in Smith, ed., Religion of the Republic, 117.

  14. Forrest Church, So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State (New York, 2007), 36.

  15. GW to The Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 18 Aug. 1790, Washington: Writings, 767; Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminski, eds., The Bill of Rights and the States: The Colonial and Revolutionary Origins of American Liberties (Madison, WI, 1992), 131–32.

  16. Church, So Help Me God, 41.

  17. Annals of Congress, 1st Congress, 1st session (Sept. 1789), 948, 949; Church, So Help Me God, 61, 64.

  18. Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York, 2006), 35; Church, So Help Me God, 46–47, 57.

  19. GW to Watson and Cassoul, 10 Aug. 1782, in Hutson, ed., Founders on Religion, 18.

  20. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, 1955), 159; TJ, Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom (1786), Jefferson: Writings, 346–48.

  21. Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York, 2006), 278; Church, So Help Me God, 188.

  22. Church
, So Help Me God, 227.

  23. Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York, 1970), 960.

  24. TJ to Messrs. Nehemiah Dodge and Others, 1 Jan. 1802, Jefferson: Writings, 510.

  25. James H. Hutson, “Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists: A Controversy Rejoined,” and Responses, WMQ, 56 (1999), 775–824.

  26. Johann N. Neem, “Beyond the Wall: Reinterpreting Jefferson’s Danbury Address,” JER, 27 (2007), 139–54; TJ to Benjamin Waterhouse, 26 June 1822, in Hutson, ed., Founders on Religion, 221.

  27. William G. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition (Boston, 1967); William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA, 1971).

  28. William G. McLoughlin, ed., Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754–1789 (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 61.

  29. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), in Eric Foner, ed., Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Library of America, 1995), 825.

  30. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston, 1995), 457, 475–76.

  31. Douglass Adair, “Was Alexander Hamilton a Christian Statesman?” in Trevor Colbourn, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair (Chapel Hill, 1974), 147–48n; Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, 1911, 1937), 3: 471–72; Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004), 708.

  32. M[arinus] Willet to Aaron Burr, 8 Mar. 1801, in Mary-Jo Kline et al., eds., Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr (Princeton, 1983), 1: 522; Adair, “Was Alexander Hamilton a Christian Statesman?” in Colbourn, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers, 149–59; May, Enlightenment in America, 326–34.

  33. MAY, Enlightenment in America, 331; Jean V. Matthews, Toward a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800–1830 (Boston, 1990), 30–31; Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York, 1995), 348–49; Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 163–83.

  34. John T. Horton, James Kent: A Study in Conservatism, 1763–1847 (New York, 1939), 190. By 1833 the distinguished jurist Joseph Story in his influential Commentaries declared that Christianity was part of the common law. Franklin Hamlin Littell, From State Church to Pluralism: A Protestant Interpretation of Religion in American History (New York, 1962), 48.

  35. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History From Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 1985), 102; Thomas T. McAvoy, A History of the Catholic Church in the United States (Notre Dame, 1969), 61–91.

  36. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, 109.

  37. Elwyn A. Smith, “The Voluntary Establishment of Religion,” in Smith, ed., Religion of the Republic, 177.

  38. Timothy L. Smith, “Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800–1850,” JAH, 53 (1967), 694; Smith, “Voluntary Establishment of Religion,” in Smith, ed., Religion of the Republic, 154–82.

  39. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989), 25.

  40. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 285, 268.

  41. John Caldwell, William Findley From West of the Mountains: Congressman, 1791–1821 (Gig Harbor, WA, 2002), 280, 331, 333–34, 336, 379.

  42. Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago, 1977).

  43. Andrews, Methodists and Revolutionary America, 80.

  44. Peter Cartwright, Autobiography, ed. Charles L. Wallis (New York, 1956), 68–69.

  45. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 173, 174; Church, So Help Me God, 292.

  46. Richard McNemar, The Kentucky Revival (1808), in Gordon S. Wood, ed., The Rising Glory of America, 1760–1820, rev. ed. (Boston, 1990), 88.

  47. Cartwright, Autobiography, ed. Wallis, 43.

  48. Mathews, Religion in the Old South, 50.

  49. Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge, UK, 1985), 225; Hatch, Democratization of Christianity, 78–80.

  50. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977); Elaine Forman Crane, “Religion and Rebellion: Women of Faith in the American War for Independence,” in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Religion in a Revolutionary Age, 80.

  51. Stephen A. MARINI, “The Revolutionary Revival in America” (Unpublished Paper), 28; Herbert A. Wisbey Jr., Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend (Ithaca, 1964); David Hudson, History of Jemima Wilkinson, a Preacheress of the Eighteenth Century; Containing an Authentic Narrative of Her Life and Character, and the Rise, Progress and Conclusion of Her Ministry (Geneva, NY, 1821); Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven, 1992), 43, 48–49.

  52. Andrews, Methodists and Revolutionary America, 88–89; Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2008).

  53. Monte Hampton, “Henry Evans,” American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark Carnes (New York, 1999), 7: 607.

  54. Hatch, Democratization of Christianity, 102–13; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978); Mechal Sobel, Travelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton, 1988); Sylvia R. Frey, “‘The Year of Jubilee Is Come’: Black Christianity in the Plantation South in Post-Revolutionary America,” in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Religion in a Revolutionary Age, 87–124, esp. 97, 99, 103, 112; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, 1984); Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullahs (New York, 1988); Paul E. Johnson, ed., African-American Christianity: Essays in History (Berkeley, 1994).

  55. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge, UK, 1994), 31–32.

  56. Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 158; Hatch, Democratization of Christianity, 129, 146–61; Andrews, Methodists and Revolutionary America, 77.

  57. Andrews, Methodists and Revolutionary America, 83.

  58. Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three Communal Experiments in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981), 31, 32.

  59. Dixon Ryan Fox, “The Protestant Counter-Reformation in America,” New York History, 16 (1935), 19–35; Clifford S. Griffin, “Religious Benevolence as Social Control, 1815–1860,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 44 (1957), 423–44; Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill, 1960).

  60. Church, So Help Me God, 268; Robert Edson Lee, “Timothy Dwight and the Boston Palladium,” New England Quarterly, 35 (1962), 234; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805–1809 (Boston, 1974), 373.

  61. Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833 (AMHERST, MA, 1998), 114.

  62. Field, Crisis of the Standing Order, 153; Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill, 2008), 184–215.

  63. Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings (Grand Rapids, MI, 1981); Field, Crisis of the Standing Order, 174; J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia, 2008), 76.

  64. Richard D. Shiels, “The Origins of the Second Great Awakening in New England: Goshen, Connecticut, 1798–1799,” Mid-America: An Historical Review, 78 (1996), 279–301.

  65. Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997), 23–27, 255–56. On the conservatism of Southern white laymen in the face of the radical evangelical appeal, see Rachel N. Klein, Unification of
a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill, 1990); and Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York, 1995). Of course, in time evangelical religion would flourish in the South.

  66. Ralph E. Morrow, “The Great Revival, the West, and the Crisis of the Church,” in John Francis McDermott, ed., The Frontier Re-Examined (Urbana, IL, 1967), 78.

  67. Daniel Walker Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System,” JAH, 77 (1991), 1216–39; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992).

  68. Hatch, Democratization of Christianity, 97, 272n. For some of the evangelical sects’ initial efforts at establishing order, see Marini, Radical Sects, 116–35; and Hatch, Democratization of Christianity, 201–6.

 

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