What Hath God Wrought (27 page)

The circuit rider—in effect a Christian Lone Ranger—stands among America’s most heroic western frontiersmen. He received a miserable stipend and often had difficulty collecting even that. The Discipline that Cartwright notes he carried and taught represented a code of behavior that reinforced family and community values in a violent society. The Discipline laid down rules against swearing, drunkenness, sexual license, and ostentatious dress and enforced John Wesley’s maxim, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” It provided a way for ordinary people to reorder their lives, even when living in hardship conditions. A man of the people, the circuit-rider brought moral order and civilization to the people.
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Methodism was still a new movement in the early national period, having originated in the eighteenth century within the Church of England under the leadership of an Anglican priest, John Wesley. Aided by the magnificent hymns of his brother Charles (most of them celebrations of Christ’s expected return), Wesley won many followers in all walks of life, but especially among skilled workers (artisans). His devotional regimen, called the Wesleyan “method,” gave his followers their name. At the time of the Revolution, Wesley’s Tory politics made his movement unpopular in the United States, and at the close of the war scarcely fifteen thousand Methodists worshipped in the new republic. American Methodism was rescued by the devotion and organizational ability of Francis Asbury, who died in 1816. During his lifetime Methodism established itself as a denomination entirely separate from Anglicanism, with bishops of its own (hence the name Methodist Episcopal Church). Building upon his legacy, the next generation of Methodist preachers made their institution the largest religious denomination in the United States. By 1850, Methodists in the United States numbered 2.7 million, including children.
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Soon after the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Methodists began to make use of “camp meetings.” These gatherings would last for several days, to make it worthwhile for rural families to spend a day or more traveling to attend. Obviously such events required extensive planning, organization, and publicity. Camp meetings took place not only on the western frontier but in rural areas throughout the United States. American Methodists held three to four hundred of them annually, drawing an attendance reliably estimated at about a million people a year. They provided welcome opportunities for socializing and the exchange of news to people leading lives of isolation. They also proved extraordinarily successful in winning converts to Methodism and were widely imitated by others—including Finney.
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To carry on between camp meetings or visits by a circuit rider, the Methodists organized their followers into “classes” of about thirty persons each. In 1815, some seven thousand of these classes met in the United States. They provided the indispensable grassroots structure of Methodism. The class leaders, responsible laypersons, led worship, collected financial contributions, and enforced discipline. Once every three months all the classes in a circuit would hold a quarterly meeting, a spiritual as well as administrative occasion. The Methodist system of organization demonstrated impressive effectiveness; no other association of any kind in the United States grew so dramatically and over so large an area in so short a time as Methodism. Membership of Methodist classes soared from 175,000 in 1810 to 1,247,000 by 1850, increasing by 168 percent between 1810 and 1820, and by 86.5 percent in the decade of the 1830s.
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Becoming a Methodist class leader could be an invaluable leadership experience for a person of humble origin. Circuit riders usually arose from the ranks of male class leaders. Women and African Americans could be class leaders; they could also become exhorters, the term for the laypeople who delivered what were in effect mini-sermons.
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African American men, free or slave, could also become licensed Methodist preachers, even in the South. Black preachers usually worked locally rather than on circuit—an obvious necessity in the case of those who were enslaved.
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Many early Methodists disapproved of slavery and even emancipated their own slaves at financial sacrifice. They did not generally agitate the issue publicly, however, until the 1840s.
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One of the most famous of the Methodist exhorters in this period was Phoebe Palmer, daughter of an English immigrant who had been converted by Wesley himself. In 1835, she began addressing a typical Methodist women’s prayer meeting in her living room in New York City; four years later, she opened her “Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness” to the public, including men. Palmer brought the practices of the Methodist class to bear upon the evangelical movement as a whole, for leading evangelicals of all denominations came to hear her. She always refused to hold the Tuesday meetings anywhere but in a home (her house had to be enlarged to accommodate them). She did, however, travel widely in the United States and Britain, and she addressed many a camp-meeting revival. Like Finney, she preached Christian perfectionism and “entire sanctification.” She continued her work until her death in 1872. Phoebe Palmer came to be recognized as a founder of the Holiness branch of evangelicalism and a precursor of the Pentacostal movement.
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The early Methodists devoted more attention to organization than they did to the study of theology. Most Methodist preachers declared the Bible to be self-explanatory, requiring no learned exegesis. Following Wesley, the great majority embraced Arminianism, that is, belief in free will, rather than the philosophical determinism of Calvinism. Early Methodist Arminianism was less an intellectual system than an affirmation of the competence and autonomy of the average person, in religion and life in general. Sometimes heated debates pitted Arminian against Calvinist spokesmen, and they attracted a widespread following that Americans today may find surprising. In evangelical practice, however, the distinction between Calvinism and Arminianism appeared less sharp than in doctrinal logic. Both taught that God extended grace to human beings, which they were morally responsible for accepting. John Wesley, for all his Arminianism, greatly admired his Calvinist evangelical contemporaries George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. There were even a few Calvinist Methodists, mainly from Wales, who took Whitefield as their theological mentor. (Historians still disagree about whether to classify Charles Finney as a Calvinist or an Arminian.)
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While Beecher’s and Finney’s kind of revival activity led to the formation of benevolent associations and reform movements, Methodist exhorters and preachers concentrated on creating classes, congregations, and churches. As a result of its enormous growth during the first half of the nineteenth century, Methodism gradually succeeded in replacing the system of itinerancy with local clergy. Many a circuit rider eventually settled down to married life in a conventional ministry. Methodists erected church and chapel buildings, making class meetings in houses unnecessary. The fifty Methodist congregations at the time of the Revolution became twenty thousand by the time of the Civil War.
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Starting in the 1820s, Methodists also founded colleges and theological seminaries, which began to train a more professional clergy. The nature of the laity evolved over time too. Early Methodists had come mainly from the ranks of skilled artisans and small farmers. As the decades went by, these people’s hard work and self-discipline paid off, and more and more Methodist laity joined the ranks of the middle class. When they did so, their characteristically austere way of life softened. The gradual refinement of Methodist homes and churches manifested personal and denominational success, but there were always “croakers” who mourned the transition and looked back fondly on the good old days of circuit riders and extreme simplicity. In the 1840s, some of those dissatisfied with the increasingly respectable character of the Methodist movement seceded to form the Wesleyan Methodist Church.
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Most Methodists, however, welcomed the innovations and saw them as the fulfillment of their (and their parents’) labors. The transformation of Methodism mirrored changes in other areas of American life, as it lost some of its rough-hewn pioneer edges.

Other Christian groups picked up where the Methodists left off, notably the Baptists. It is not easy to make generalizations about the Baptists, for they had a strong tradition of congregational independence and splintered into innumerable factions: Separate Baptists, Regular Baptists, United Baptists, General Baptists, Particular Baptists, Calvinist Baptists, Free-Will Baptists, Primitive Baptists, Anti-Mission Baptists, Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Baptists. But all these groups did agree in rejecting infant baptism and insisting that the rite be performed on consenting adults by immersion, not merely the sprinkling or pouring of a small amount of water. Adult baptism by immersion reinforced the dramatic importance of the conversion experience that revival preachers worked to provoke. Some of the divisions among Baptists reflected social class differences; middle-class Baptists were more likely to support interdenominational cooperation on behalf of temperance, for example, while the Primitive Baptists (also called “Hard Shell” Baptists) warned that such reform activities were distractions and corruptions of the pure gospel message. While New England Baptists supported institutions of higher learning (beginning with Brown University in colonial times), Baptist groups in other areas could be unashamedly anti-intellectual. Anti-Mission Baptists took the Calvinist doctrine of predestination so seriously that they declared missions to the heathen a waste of effort: If God intended to save a person, He would do so.
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The Baptists shared many characteristics with the early Methodists, except for the latter’s centralized organization. Like the Methodists, they provided scope for lay leadership, recruited from the common people, and numbered women and African Americans among their leaders as well as followers. They too enforced discipline among members of their churches. They too had their itinerant preachers, as heroic if less well organized, such as John Leland, who led the Baptist fight for religious disestablishment, first in Virginia against the Episcopalians and then in New England against the Congregationalists.
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While the Methodists evolved from a working-class to a middle-class constituency, the Baptists consistently recruited among all classes, but most especially among the rural poor. Many Baptist ministers in rural areas served as unpaid volunteers and earned their living as farmers. Among the most energetic in seeking converts on the frontier were Baptists from Virginia, who had a long tradition of resistance to the Anglican gentry of the tidewater. By 1850, it is estimated, the different kinds of Baptists together counted about 1.6 million members.
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The Baptists were the largest of many “restorationist” religious movements seeking to recover the New Testament faith and practice that they considered had been lost or corrupted. One of the most remarkable and successful restorationist movements emerged from the labors of Barton Stone, Elias Smith, and Alexander Campbell, among others. Stone had participated in the famous early camp meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801. Smith came out of a New England Baptist background; Campbell, from a Scottish Presbyterian one. Since doctrinal disputes had led to such bigotry and cruelty over the centuries, these leaders reached the conclusion that all theological and creedal formulations must be wrong; Christians should confine themselves to the language of the New Testament and affirm or deny no religious doctrines beyond that. They hoped by this means to transcend and indeed eliminate denominationalism altogether. For this reason, they rejected ecclesiastical organization in favor of local autonomy and refused any name save “Christian.” The rebirth of the primitive church was their objective; “no creed but the Bible,” their slogan. Well under way by 1815, the Christian movement won many converts in the South and West, particularly among people impatient with Calvinist theology; by mid-century it claimed more than 200,000 of them.
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The eventual outcome of the movement, however, renders a sobering judgment on human endeavors. The scriptures require interpretation, and restricting religious assertions to those of scripture proved no solution to the scandal of disagreement and division. In the end, the antidenomi-national Christian movement added to the number of denominations; indeed, they even wound up creating several: the Christian Connection, the Disciples of Christ, and the Churches of Christ.
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Among the new churches of the young republic were those of the free black people. Philadelphia, with a closely knit black community of twelve thousand in 1820, led the way. The first black Episcopal church (1794), the first black Methodist church (also 1794), the first black Presbyterian church (1809), and the first black northern Baptist church (also 1809) all appeared in that city. Often these congregations would remain part of their national denomination. But in 1816 the trustees of Philadelphia’s Bethel Methodist Church, after years of property disputes with the central Methodist authorities, secured legal recognition of their independence. Thus they created a separate denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the one institution in the United States at the time entirely under black control. In 1817, the AME Church adopted its own Discipline. Soon another independent African American denomination joined it, the AME Zion Church, founded in New York City.
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At the time of the American Revolution, a slave in Kent County, Delaware, named Richard Allen had undergone a classic conversion experience. “I cried to the Lord both night and day,” he recalled; “all of a sudden my dungeon shook, my chains flew off, and, glory to God, I cried.” From then on he felt confident: “The Lord, for Christ’s sake, had heard my prayers and pardoned all my sins.” The Methodists were already active in Delaware, and Allen’s owner, Stokely Sturgis, allowed him to join them. One day he even permitted Allen to bring them into the master’s house. There Sturgis heard a sermon by one of the greatest early Methodist preachers, Freeborn Garrettson. Sturgis too converted as a result, and expressed his new faith by allowing Allen to hire himself out and purchase his own freedom for two thousand dollars in depreciated Continental currency. It took five years of hard work and thrift, but Allen made the final payment in 1786. He had already begun to cooperate with Bishop Francis Asbury to spread Methodism among African Americans, and in 1794 founded Bethel Church in Philadelphia. When the AME Church declared its independence, Allen became its first bishop.
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