A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (22 page)

By that time, the American religious experience had developed several characteristics that separated it from any of the European churches. Americans deemphasized the clergy. Not only did states such as Virginia refuse to fund the salaries of ministers, but the Calvinist/Puritan tradition that each man read, and interpret, the Bible for himself meant that the clergy’s authority had already diminished. Second, Americans were at once both evangelically active and liturgically lax. What mattered was salvation and “right” living, not the form or structure of the religion. Ceremonies and practices differed wildly, even within denominations. And finally, as with America’s new government itself, the nation’s religion made central the personal salvation experience. All of this had the effect of separating American churches from their European ancestors, but also of fostering sects and divisions within American Christianity itself.

Above all, of course, America was a Christian nation. Jews, nonbelievers, and the few Muslims or adherents to other religions who might make it to the shores of North America in the late 1700s were treated not so much with tolerance as with indifference. People knew that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or others were a minority and, they thought, were going to remain a minority. So in the legal context, the debates never included non-Christian groups in the deliberations. At the same time, this generic Christian faith, wherein everyone agreed to disagree, served as a unifying element by breaking down parish boundaries and, in the process, destroying other political and geographic boundaries. The Great Awakening had galvanized American Christianity, pushing it even further into evangelism, and it served as a springboard to the Revolution itself, fueling the political fire with religious fervor and imbuing in the Founders a sense of rightness of cause. To some extent, then, “the essential difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution is that the American Revolution…was a religious event, whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event.”
¹⁶
John Adams said as much when he observed that the “Revolution was in the mind and hearts of the people; and change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.”
¹⁷

Consequently, America, while attaching itself to no specific variant of Christianity, operated on an understanding that the nation would adopt an unofficial, generic Christianity that fit hand in glove with republicanism. Alexis de Tocqueville, whose perceptive
Democracy in America
(1835) provided a virtual road map for the future direction of the young nation, observed that in the United States the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom “were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.”
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Americans, he added, viewed religion as “indispensable to the maintenance of the republican institutions,” because it facilitated free institutions.
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Certain fundamentals seemed unanimously agreed upon: posting of the Ten Commandments in public places was appropriate; prayers in virtually all official and public functions were expected; America was particularly blessed because of her trust in God; and even when individuals in civic life did not ascribe to a specific faith, they were expected to
act
like “good Christians” and conduct themselves as would a believer. Politicians like Washington walked a fine line between maintaining the secularist form and yet supplying the necessary spiritual substance. In part, this explains why so many of the early writings and speeches of the Founders were both timeless and uplifting. Their message of spiritual virtue, cloaked in republican processes of civic duty, reflected a sense of providential mission for the young country.

With no state boundaries to confine them, religious doctrines found themselves in a competition every bit as sharp as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market. Most communities put up a church as one of their first civic acts, and traveling preachers traversed the backwoods and frontiers even where no churches existed. Ministers such as Lyman Beecher (1775–1863) characterized this new breed of traveling evangelist. Beecher, a New Haven Presbyterian who later assumed the presidency of the Cincinnati Theological Seminary, gained fame for his essay against dueling after Hamilton’s death in 1803. Well before that, however, he pioneered American religious voluntarism. Like other westward-looking Americans, Beecher accepted the notion that the nation’s destiny resided in the west—precisely where the frontier spread people out so much that a revival was the only way to reach them. Beecher’s revivals took place in settings that enjoyed great popularity among evangelists—the camp meetings. At these gatherings, occasionally in the open air or in a barn, the traveling preachers spread the Gospel, occasionally emphasizing the emotional by urging the participants to engage in frenzied shouting, jerking, or falling, presumably under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

With each new congregation that the itinerant ministers formed, new doctrines and sects appeared. Regional differences in established churches produced reasoned differences, but also encouraged rampant sectarianism. Each new division weakened the consensus about what constituted accepted doctrines of Christianity, to the point that in popular references America ceased being a “godly” nation and became a “good” nation that could not agree on the specifics of goodness. In education, especially, the divisions threatened to undermine the Christian basis of the young country. Other dangerous splits in doctrine developed over the proper relationship with Indians. Eleazar Wheelock (1711–79), for example, a Congregationalist and a key influence in the Awakening movement, founded a school for Indians that became Dartmouth College in 1769. To the extent that Indians were offered education, it had to occur in segregated schools like Wheelock’s, though he was not the first religious leader to establish a school. Religious groups of all denominations and doctrines accounted for the majority of quality education, especially at the higher levels. Brown University, in Rhode Island (1764), was established by the Baptists; Princeton, in New Jersey, by the Revivalist Presbyterians (1746), which later became a theological institute(1812); Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut, by the Congregationalists (1701); William and Mary, in Virginia, by the Anglicans (1693); and Georgetown College in Washington, D. C. (then Maryland), by the Jesuit father John Carroll (1789); and so on.

Frequently, however, rather than reinforcing existing orthodoxy, colleges soon produced heretics—or, at least, liberals who shared few of their founders’ doctrinal views. At Harvard University, founded to enforce Puritanism in 1636 by the Reverend John Harvard, its original motto,
Veritas, Christo et Ecclesiae
(Truth, Christ and the Church), and its logo of two books facing open and one facing downward to represent the hidden knowledge of God, were ditched when the school slipped into the hands of liberal groups in 1707. The new motto, simply
Veritas,
and its symbol of all three books facing up aptly illustrated the dominance of a Unitarian elite that dominated the school, including such notables as John Quincy Adams and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By focusing on a rationalistic Enlightenment approach to salvation in which virtually all men were saved—not to mention the presumption that all knowledge could be known—the Unitarians (who denied the Trinity, hence the term “Unitarian,” from unity, or one) had opposed the Great Awakening of the 1740s. Henry Ware, at Harvard, and later William Ellery Channing, whose 1819 sermon, “Unitarian Christianity” established the basis for the sect, challenged the Congregational and Puritan precepts from 1805–25. At that point, the American Unitarian Association was formed, but much earlier it had exerted such a powerful influence in Boston that in 1785 King’s Chapel removed all references to the Trinity in the prayer books.
²⁰

Unitarians were not alone in their unorthodox views. Many sects strained at the limits of what was tolerable even under the broadest definitions of Christianity. Yet they still maintained, for the most part, a consensus on what constituted morality and ethics. Consequently, a subtle yet profound shift occurred in which the religious in America avoided theological issues and instead sought to inculcate a set of moral assumptions under which even Jews and other non-Christians could fit.

This appeared in its most visible form in education. Jefferson’s concern over state funding of a particular religion centered on the use of tax money for clerical salaries. Eventually, though, the pressure to eliminate any sectarian doctrines from public schools was bound to lead to clashes with state governments over which concepts were denominational and which were generically Christian. Church-state separation also spilled over into debates about the applicability of charters and incorporation laws for churches. Charters always contained elements of favoritism (which was one reason banks were steeped in controversy), but in seeking to avoid granting a charter to any particular church, the state denied religious organizations the same rights accorded hospitals and railroads. Even in Virginia, where “separation of church and state” began, the reluctance to issue religious charters endowed churches with special characteristics that were not applied to other corporations. Trying to keep religion and politics apart, Virginia lawmakers unintentionally “wrapped religion and politics, church and state ever more closely together.”
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The good news was that anyone who was dissatisfied with a state’s religion could move west. That dynamic would later propel the Methodists to Oregon and the Mormons to Utah. Meanwhile, the call of the frontier was irrepressible for reasons entirely unrelated to heaven and completely oriented toward Mammon. And every year more adventurers and traders headed west, beyond the endless mountains.

Beyond the Endless Mountains

The end of the American Revolution marked the beginning of a great migration to the West across the Appalachian Mountains. The migrants followed four major routes. Pennsylvania Germans and Scots-Irish moved south, down the Great Valley of the Appalachians, to settle in western Virginia and North Carolina. The Wilderness Road, blazed by Daniel Boone in 1775, led some of them into Kentucky and the Bluegrass region via the Cumberland Gap. One traveler described this route as the “longest, blackest, hardest road” in America. Carolinians traversed the mountains by horseback and wagon train until they found the Tennessee River, following its winding route to the Ohio River, then ascending the Cumberland south to the Nashville region. But the most common river route—and the most popular route to the West—was the Ohio. Migrants made the arduous journey over Forbes Road through the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh. There they built or bought a flatboat, purchased a copy of Zadok Cramer’s river guide,
The Western Navigator
, and launched their crafts and their fortunes into
le belle rivière.
If the weather and navigation depth was good, and fortune smiled upon them, the trip from Pittsburgh to Louisville took seven to ten days.
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During the decade following the Revolution, tens of thousands of pioneers moved southwest of the Ohio River. Harrodsburgh, Boonesborough, Louisville, and Lexington, in Kentucky, were joined by the Wautauga and Nashville settlements in the northeastern and central portions of what is now the state of Tennessee. Pioneers like Daniel Boone played an irreplaceable role in cutting the trails, establishing relations with Native Americans (or defeating them, if it came to a fight), and setting up early forts from which towns and commercial centers could emerge. Daniel Boone (1734–1820) had traveled from Pennsylvania, where his family bucked local Quakers by marrying its daughters outside the Society of Friends, through Virginia, North Carolina, then finally to explore Kentucky. Crossing the famed Cumberland Gap in 1769, Boone’s first expedition into the raw frontier resulted in his party’s being robbed of all its furs. Boone returned a few years later to establish the settlement that bears his name. When the Revolutionary War reopened hostilities in Kentucky, Boone was captured by Shawnee Indians and remained a prisoner for months, then had to endure a humiliating court-martial for the episode. Nevertheless, few individuals did more to open the early West to British and American settlement than Daniel Boone.
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Daniel Boone, Civilizer or Misanthrope?

 

As Revolutionary-era Americans began to move beyond the “endless mountains” into the frontier of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, they followed the trails blazed by Daniel Boone. Stories of Daniel Boone’s exploits as a hunter, pathfinder, Indian fighter, war hero, and community builder, loom large in the myth of the American West. Many of these stories are true. It is interesting to note, however, that the stories of Daniel Boone often portray him in two completely different ways—either as a wild, uncivilized frontiersman or as a leader of the vanguard aiming to tame and civilize that wild frontier. Was Daniel Boone running away from civilization, or was he bringing it with him? Was he a misanthrope or a civilizer, or both?

Born in Pennsylvania in 1734, Daniel Boone became a hunter at twelve years of age, soon staying away from home years at a time on long hunts. He worked his way down the eastern slope of the Appalachians before plunging into the unexplored regions westward. From 1767–69, he blazed the Wilderness Trail through the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky Bluegrass region, where, in 1775, he established Boonesborough, an outpost for his family and friends to settle the new West. He was subsequently captured and adopted by Shawnee Indians in 1778, fought Indian and Briton alike in the Revolutionary War, and was elected sheriff in 1782 and, later, to the legislature of the new state of Kentucky. During this time Boone also worked as a land company scout and land speculator. Drawn into protracted court battles over disputed land claims, Boone went bankrupt in 1798 and then moved his large family to the uninhabited expanses west of the Mississippi River. He died near St. Charles Missouri in 1820, having spent an eventful eight decades on the American frontier.

During the course of Daniel Boone’s life, stories of his exploits spread far and wide, and he became America’s first frontier folk hero. Thousands claimed to know the exact spot where Boone carved on a tree,
here d. boone cill’d a bar
(bear). Americans have told Boone’s stories for more than two hundred years, and his legend has appeared in formal artistic works ranging from James Fenimore Cooper’s novel
The Last of the Mohicans
(1827), and painter George Caleb Bingham’s rendering
Daniel Boone
(1851) to twentieth-century movies and television shows, the most famous being Fess Parker’s near-decade-long 1960s television role as Boone.

It is important to note the symbolic contrasts in the roles Daniel Boone takes on in the various famous stories about him. On the one hand, he is portrayed as a loner and a misanthrope who longs to escape society and live for years utterly alone in the wilderness. On the other hand, there is the Daniel Boone who was a husband and father, founder of Boonesborough, successful politician, and real estate developer. This Daniel Boone, another biographer wrote, was an “empire builder” and “philanthropist” known for his “devotion to social progress.”

Daniel Boone was above all else, an archetypal American. He loved the wilderness and the freedom that came with frontier individualism. Like all Americans, he simultaneously believed in progress and the advance of capitalism and republican political institutions. While he may have sometimes wished that America would always remain a sparsely inhabited wilderness, he knew that America could not and should not stand still.

Sources:
Theodore Roosevelt,
The Winning of the West
, 6 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889); John Mack Faragher,
Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer
(New York: Henry Holt, 1992).