What Hath God Wrought (30 page)

In April 1827, dissension wracked the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (analogous to a synod in Presbyterianism). The followers of Hicks walked out and set up their own Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Other yearly meetings had to decide which of the two Philadelphia meetings to recognize, and in doing so they precipitated a schism throughout American Quakerism. The more evangelical branch took the name Orthodox; the Hicksites eventually called themselves the Liberal branch. The British Friends sided unequivocally with the Orthodox. In the United States, about 40 percent of the 100,000 Quakers, mainly Friends living in rural areas of the Mid-Atlantic states and Ohio, became Hicksites.
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The Hicksites continued to record ministers, as the orthodox Quakers did, and they commissioned “Public Friends” to spread the Word among non-Quakers. Sometimes these evangelists addressed camp meetings. But the Hicksite movement also represented a religious “revival” in another, perhaps more fundamental, sense. It revived the original kind of anti-institutional, “come-outer” Quaker piety, resembling that of the founder George Fox and the seventeenth-century Friends. Surprisingly, however, though Hicks himself despised the modern world, some of his followers turned out to constitute the cutting edge of modernity. If Lyman Beecher’s followers represented the conservative wing of evangelical reform and Charles Finney’s its liberal one, those of Elias Hicks contributed the radical vanguard, what contemporaries called “ultraism.” All three of these evangelical groups could agree on many issues, such as temperance, prison reform, and public support for elementary schools. But the Hicksites displayed a willingness to pursue causes that others thought quixotic. Hicksite Quakers provided a disproportionately large number of recruits to the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery. And when at last a movement endorsing equal rights for women surfaced, the little minority of Hicksite Quakers would make themselves conspicuous in its support.
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VII

In 1815 John Carroll, Bishop of Baltimore and the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States, died. A native-born American and cousin to Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence, he had been elected bishop by his clerical colleagues in 1789, the same year his friend George Washington was elected the first president. Rome (preoccupied with more momentous events closer to home) went along with the strange procedure. Bishop Carroll undertook to demonstrate to a skeptical public that his church could reconcile itself to republicanism. Staunchly patriotic and Federalist, Bishop Carroll made it clear that American Catholics embraced freedom of religion, which he grounded in natural law. To represent his irenic and rational faith, Carroll commissioned Benjamin Latrobe, architect of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, to design a neoclassical cathedral for Baltimore.
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The first Catholic Bishop of Boston, consecrated in 1810, was another cultivated gentleman, the French émigré Jean Cheverus. Respected even in that ultra-Protestant city as a broad-minded and conciliatory liberal, Cheverus remained at heart a European conservative, and in 1823 the restored Bourbon monarchy welcomed him back home, where he become Archbishop of Bordeaux and eventually a cardinal. In 1820, the pope appointed as Bishop of Charleston an Irishman named (ironically) John England. Bishop England carried the effort to Americanize the Catholic Church still further, creating a written constitution for his diocese that included participation by elected delegates, clerical and lay, in an annual convention. This experiment in representative government did not outlive the bishop who created it. But reciprocating such overtures, the houses of Congress invited Bishop England to address them in 1826 and in 1832 chose a Roman Catholic priest as their chaplain.
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The social situation faced by the Catholic church in the young republic resembled in many respects that faced by the Protestant denominations: dispersed populations, perhaps recently migrated from other parts of the country or the Atlantic world, and often long out of touch with organized religion. The church responded with what has been called “Catholic revivalism.” Priests of several religious orders (notably, Jesuits and Redemptorists) became traveling missionaries, carrying the divine word and sacraments to the thinly scattered 150,000 Catholics living in the United States in 1815. Like their Protestant counterparts these preachers warned of the flames of hell and encouraged hymn-singing; then they would exhort their hearers to the sacraments of penance and holy communion. The Catholic itinerants did not have to take their cue from Protestants; such missions had been known for centuries in Europe (where monarchs had sometimes banned them as subversive). Like the evangelical movement among Protestants, Catholic revivalism was an international movement, but one that matched the needs of the American environment particularly well. To observe the jubilee proclaimed by Leo XII, a Catholic evangelist from Ireland rallied crowds in frontier Ken tucky that resembled those at Protestant camp meetings. The emotional nature of such Catholic revivalism contrasted with the genteel piety exemplified by Carroll and Cheverus. To help the faithful carry on once the missionary had left, he would distribute prayer books containing devotions the laity could perform, privately or collectively, even without a priest.
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The extent to which the church should adapt to the American situation became a controversial issue among Catholics. In many areas the laity had taken the initiative in forming a parish and requesting a priest. In the meantime, laymen led public services (not the mass, of course). Sometimes they expected to be able to choose their priest. Furthermore, the laws of many states, reflecting Protestant assumptions, mandated that parish church property be held in the name of lay trustees, not by the clergy. Bishop England tolerated this system up to a point, but the other bishops did not, and meeting at their first council in 1829 they insisted that church property should rightfully be vested in the diocesan bishop. The lay trustees throughout the country did not always give up without a fight, however; conflicts between bishops and trustees occurred in Philadelphia, New York City, New Orleans, and Buffalo. Philadelphia had a particularly messy wrangle, which included the excommunication of a priest whom the lay trustees supported against his bishop. The trustee system had still not been entirely purged by 1848; its eventual elimination demonstrated the limits of Roman Catholic accommodation to American republican practices.
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A leading opponent of the trustee system was the redoubtable John Hughes, appointed bishop coadjutor (associate bishop) of New York in 1837, succeeding Jean Dubois as diocesan bishop in 1842, and promoted to archbishop in 1850. Very different from his aristocratic French predecessor, Hughes had immigrated from Ireland in 1817 and worked as a gardener to finance his education. Firmly asserting his ecclesiastical authority, the new bishop set a pattern for the American episcopate in the era of Catholic expansion. Hughes became known as “Dagger John,” ostensibly because the bishop’s cross he drew after signing his name resembled a dagger; more subtly, as an expression of respect for his militant toughness.

John Hughes labored to bring a largely working-class Irish constituency into a meaningful relationship with Catholic Christianity. Many of the immigrants had had scarcely any contact with the persecuted Catholicism of their homeland. At the same time, the bishop worked to conciliate middle-class Catholics and Protestant well-wishers whose financial support he needed for his amazingly ambitious program of building. Hughes conceived and commenced the great St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, hiring America’s leading architect of the Gothic Revival, James Renwick (a Protestant). Although no theologian, John Hughes ranks high for political judgment and in the significance of his accomplishments among nineteenth-century American statesmen, civil as well as ecclesiastical. He successfully coped with fierce party competition in New York, bitter battles over the public school system, revolutions in Europe, the rise of nativism across the United States, and soaring rates of immigration after the Irish Potato Famine. He encouraged his people to hard work, personal discipline (including temperance), acceptance of the American way of life, and upward social mobility. Reconciling Catholicism with Americanism presented no problem to the bishop; the church had always been the “schoolmistress of Liberty,” he declared. Hughes backed the nation’s war effort against Catholic Mexico and later the Union’s war effort against a Confederacy that had many sympathizers in both New York City and the Vatican. Crucially, he combined his staunch American patriotism with staunch devotion to a nineteenth-century papacy deeply suspicious of all liberalism, especially Americanism.

In the end, by knowing how and when to promote both assimilation and minority group distinctiveness, John Hughes succeeded in fostering a strong Irish American identity, one centered on the Catholic faith rather than on the secular radicalism of the Irish nationalists who competed with him for community leadership. While making the Irish Americans into Catholics, Hughes and other Irish bishops like England and Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia simultaneously made the American Catholic Church dominated by the Irish. They achieved this, however, at the cost of losing to the Irish-American community the Irish Protestant immigrants, some of whom even became nativists, a term for those who sought to limit Catholic and/or immigrant political influence.
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Thanks to the energetic devotion of the religious orders and the ecclesiastical statesmanship of Hughes and other bishops, the church kept pace with Catholic (or more accurately, potentially Catholic) immigration. Most immigrants during this period came from the British Isles and the German-speaking lands, with only a minority of them Catholic by heritage. Even in the case of Ireland, before 1840 a majority of migrants were Protestant—either Scots-Irish Presbyterians or Anglo-Irish Anglicans. Still, a quarter of a million prospective recruits for the Catholic Church arrived in the United States during the 1830s and three times that number in the 1840s. Largely because of its success in ministering to this immigrant constituency, the American Catholic Church grew (according to the best estimate) by 1850 to a million members, about the same as the Presbyterians. By comparison, the Methodists then counted 2.7 million and the Baptists 1.6 million. Not until after the Civil War did Roman Catholicism surpass Methodism to become the largest single denomination in the country.
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In the final analysis, the success of Roman Catholicism in spreading among immigrants to the United States reflected the way it met the needs of the immigrants themselves. It did so despite, rather than because of, the nineteenth-century papacy’s lack of sympathy for the American political experiment. History gets made from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Belonging to the church helped immigrants adjust to a new and unfamiliar environment while affirming the dignity of their own ancestral group and preserving an aspect of its heritage. Most of all, through the church they found fortifying grace, communion with the saints throughout the ages, and the presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar.

VIII

The evangelists of the various religious awakenings, Protestant and Catholic, adapted their message of salvation to different races, classes, occupations, regions, ethnic groups, and genders. As much as any previous generation of Christian missionaries, they followed the admonition of St. Paul to be “all things to all men.” The awakenings of religion in the antebellum United States took many forms. Revivalism was by no means the only method employed, despite its importance as a characteristically American type of Christianity. Indeed, a number of American religious leaders formulated critiques of the revival model and preferred such alternative evangelical approaches as Christian education, Christian nurture in childhood, reliance upon traditional institutions and creeds, dissemination of Christian literature (including fiction), and work for social justice. The variations and implications of Christian zeal will recur throughout our story. But whatever the differences in the evangelists’ methods and theology, and however momentous or complicated the temporal consequences of their undertakings, their goal was ultimately to bring souls to Christ. A great historian of American religion, Sydney Ahlstrom, put it this way:

No sooner was President Monroe reelected in 1820 than campaigning began for the election of 1824. By the spring of 1822, a journalist could already comment that the “electioneering begins to wax hot.”
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All the rival presidential candidates called themselves Republicans, and each claimed to be the logical successor to the Jeffersonian heritage. Ironically, what the campaign produced was the breakup of the party and the traditions everyone honored. One-party government proved an evanescent phase in American history.

The presidential campaign of 1824 reflected a clash of personal ambitions, to which issues of region, class, and political philosophy were secondary. Three of the five leading contenders belonged to the cabinet. The power brokers favored William H. Crawford of Georgia, secretary of the Treasury under both Madison and Monroe. A big man physically, Crawford had a jovial manner that disguised a strong mind and an even stronger ambition. He had deferred that ambition by standing aside and preserving party unity when Monroe was anointed in 1816. Now the Republican establishment felt Crawford’s rightful turn had come. Despite his embarrassing conflicts of interests, Jefferson and Madison supported him, perhaps influenced by his birth in Virginia. To reassure proslavery politicians alarmed by the Missouri controversies, Crawford pitched his campaign as a return to the virtues of Old Republicanism—state sovereignty, economy in government, and strict construction of the Constitution. To solidify their proslavery credentials, the Crawfordites succeeded in blocking implementation of a treaty Secretary of State Adams negotiated with the British to cooperate in suppressing the Atlantic slave trade.
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But Crawford’s candidacy turned out to have little popular appeal outside southern Radical circles. Only Martin Van Buren’s prototypical political machine in New York state loyally backed Crawford out of devotion to party regularity as the highest good.
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Secretary of War John C. Calhoun offered a clear ideological alternative. The South Carolinian was an energetic proponent of the new Republican nationalism and an architect of the Second BUS, the Tariff of 1816, and the vetoed Bonus Bill that would have promoted internal improvements. A lawyer and planter like Crawford, Calhoun had a more cosmopolitan background, having been educated at Yale and the famous law school in Litchfield, Connecticut (Lyman Beecher’s hometown). A “war hawk” in 1812, he remained convinced that defense imperatives dictated nationalist policies and internal improvements. At Monroe’s War Department he undertook fortifications and western exploration and had upgraded the Military Academy under the leadership of Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer. In person Calhoun was all business, dour, analytical, and intense.
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While the previous two candidates defined themselves in terms of policy, the next two defined themselves as regional favorites. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts enjoyed a solid power base in the East, as New England was then called, with additional support extending along the band of Yankee settlement across upstate New York. Legend has portrayed Adams as aloof and impractical; in reality he was an active and capable player in the political game. Though he started public life as a Federalist like his president-father, he had long since become a Republican, and the anti-British stands he had taken during his tenure at the State Department could not be exploited by an opponent trying to use his early past against him. Adams had wide experience in foreign affairs even before becoming secretary of state. Now, with his Transcontinental Treaty and the Monroe Doctrine as monumental achievements, Adams could lay a solid claim to the nation’s attention and respect. Although everyone found him austere and moralistic, these qualities did not hurt Adams much with the Yankee voters of his time.
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As Adams was the candidate of the East, Henry Clay of Kentucky proclaimed himself the candidate of the West. The resolution of the Missouri controversies had showcased his political talents. On economic issues, Clay of course embraced the new Republican nationalism just as Calhoun and Adams did. In sharp contrast to them, Clay was outgoing, charming, and witty, the life of any party. With so many contenders in the presidential race, most observers expected that no one would secure a majority in the electoral college, throwing the race into the House of Representatives for final decision. Clay welcomed this eventuality. As Speaker of the House, he expected to be in a strong position there.
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The one candidate running as an outsider was General Andrew Jackson, famous from Horseshoe Bend, New Orleans, and Pensacola, and since 1823 senator from Tennessee. Jackson possessed an appeal not based on issues; it derived from his image as a victor in battle, a frontiersman who had made it big, a man of decision who forged his own rules. Anyone with a classical education knew to regard such men as potential demagogues and tyrants; the word for the danger was “caesarism.” Jefferson delivered a straightforward opinion of Jackson’s presidential aspirations: “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.”
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In fact, no one liked Jackson for president except the voting public. Many of the latter, however, found in him a celebrity hero. The fact that only men could vote probably helped Jackson. Many men of voting age had served in local militia units and took pride in Jackson’s exploits as a commander of militia.
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At first, the established politicians did not take Jackson’s candidacy seriously. Adams wanted Jackson to take second place on his own ticket, figuring that he would balance its geography nicely. He expected Jackson would be grateful because Adams had saved his authority after the Florida invasion of 1818 and had sided with him again in 1821 when Jackson, during a short term as governor of Florida Territory, had characteristically defied another federal judge.
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The high point in Adams’s courtship of Jackson was the ball Louisa Adams staged on January 8, 1824, to celebrate the ninth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans. A thousand guests attended the Adamses’ house on F Street for the climax of the Washington social season. The general, however, had no interest in becoming a junior partner in someone else’s enterprise.

Jackson nursed a special grudge against Crawford and Clay for opposing his Florida actions. (Calhoun’s opposition remained a government secret.) When other candidates organized stop-Crawford movements, they sometimes enlisted Jackson for that purpose, since they did not feel threatened by him. Jackson was originally nominated for president by a resolution of the Tennessee legislature in 1822; ironically, this represented a stratagem by Clay supporters to stymie Crawford in their state. Once Jackson’s popularity became apparent, his nominators recoiled in horror, but it was too late.
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Calhoun made the same mistake in North Carolina. Jackson’s unexpected popularity there and in Pennsylvania, two states crucial to Calhoun, derailed the latter’s campaign. Early in 1824, Calhoun decided that he would settle for the vice presidency this time around; he was still young (forty-two) and could afford to wait for the big prize. Pleased to have him out of the race and hoping to pick up his supporters, both Jackson and Adams agreed to take him as their running mate. In the end, therefore, Calhoun received an overwhelming electoral vote for vice president.

Customarily, the Jeffersonian Republican Party selected its presidential candidate by a joint caucus of party members in the two houses of Congress. In the absence of a functional opposition, this nomination had become tantamount to election, as in Monroe’s case. Conventional wisdom held that Crawford, the insider, would prevail in the caucus. The other candidates denounced the caucus as a method of choosing the Republican nominee, both out of self-interest and because it seemed a system that did not necessarily reflect national public opinion. They boycotted it. Then fate intervened: Crawford suffered a mysterious illness, perhaps a stroke, in September 1823, though he was but fifty-one years old. The treatments of his doctors only made him worse. The seriousness of his condition was kept quiet, but it became unclear how well he would recover. His backers, not knowing what else to do, went ahead and nominated him at a caucus in February 1824. But only 66 out of 240 members showed up, shattering the myth that Crawford’s men controlled Congress. This proved the last such nominating caucus ever held. The American political community did not allow the congressional caucus to preempt the means of choosing the president.
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To have three members of his cabinet running for president against each other proved awkward for Monroe, who remained scrupulously neutral. The rivals sought to embarrass each other by planting scandal stories anonymously. Particularly troublesome was Crawford’s campaign, based on a state-rights Radicalism that clearly contrasted with the Republican nationalism of the administration as a whole. But Crawford had expected Monroe’s full support and felt betrayed. Relations between the president and his secretary of the Treasury gradually soured, though for the appearance of party unity Monroe did not remove him and even helped cover up the extent of his incapacity in the winter of 1823–24.
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In the nineteenth century it was not customary for presidential candidates to campaign overtly.
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Their supporters made speeches and wrote articles on their behalf; the candidates themselves directed matters by private correspondence but in public preserved the fiction that the presidential office sought the man, not the man the office. Jackson’s chief campaign document appeared anonymously under the pseudonym “Wyoming”; it was largely the work of his aide John Eaton. The
Letters of Wyoming
called for the election of Jackson to restore accountability and public spirit (then called “virtue”) to a republic whose government allegedly had lost touch with the people and become corrupt. While all the other candidates were intriguing in the capital, Jackson alone, claimed Wyoming, remained in touch with the “honest yeomanry” of the country. Jackson’s campaign marked the debut of a common and effective tactic in American politics: running against Washington, D.C. It took advantage of the unfocused resentments of people who had suffered from the hard times after 1819.
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The campaign of 1824 fell in the midst of a transition from one system of electing presidents to another. In the early days of the republic, the presidential electors had been chosen by state legislatures. However, public opinion throughout the country was shifting in favor of having the electors chosen by the voters, and since the last presidential contest in 1816, several more states, including all the newly admitted ones, had adopted a popular vote for presidential electors. Generous franchise laws, including the popular election of presidential electors, constituted one of the ways that new states bid for settlers. Old states, worried about losing population, felt pressure to adopt similar rules. By 1824, the number of states following the popular practice had grown to eighteen out of twenty-four. (Later in the century, a similar mechanism would spread women’s suffrage from west to east.) Meanwhile, a tradition was developing that presidential electors should pledge themselves in advance instead of exercising their individual discretion. But not all states cast their electoral votes as a block; five states awarded them by congressional district to the candidate who carried that district.
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The election of 1824 was the first in which it is possible to tabulate a popular vote for president, although it does not include all the states. Jackson’s cause, based on his personal popularity, exemplified and benefited from the changing nature of presidential campaigns and the more direct role of the electorate. All the other candidates were still playing the political game the old-fashioned way, assuming that opinion leaders could speak for their followers and act as power brokers.

As the returns gradually accumulated in the absence of a common date for states to choose their electors, it became apparent that Jackson had won a plurality of both popular and electoral votes, but no candidate had the required majority in the electoral college. Of popular votes, Jackson had 152,901 (42.5 percent), Adams 114,023 (31.5 percent), Clay 47,217 (13 percent), and Crawford 46,979 (13 percent).
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The small numbers indicate a low turnout, plus the fact that six states had no popular votes for president. The electoral votes stood as follows: Jackson 99, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37. Jackson had undercut Clay in the West, just as he had hurt Crawford among Old Republicans. Jackson owed his electoral college lead to the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which inflated the voting power of slaveholding states. Without it, he would have received 77 electoral votes and Adams 83.
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Under these circumstances, the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution provided that the House of Representatives should choose a president from among the three top contenders, with the delegation from each state casting one vote. Since Crawford was so far behind the other two, and his health still a question mark, Jackson and Adams were clearly the two most credible candidates. Adams had no intention of bowing out just because Jackson was the front-runner. Now came the round of lobbying congressmen, when Adams came into his own. He understood well this kind of politics, based on an “old-boy” network and implicit understandings. Adams held on to the delegations from the seven states he had carried in the general election and won over three more as well. In Illinois, the chief issue in state politics at the time was whether or not to introduce slavery. Illinois’s sole congressional representative, Daniel Cook, strongly antislavery, found no difficulty in preferring Adams to Jackson. To firm up support in Maryland, Adams promised not to exclude Federalists from the patronage. Meanwhile, Congressman James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a Jackson supporter, was trying to broker a deal in which Jackson would make Clay secretary of state in return for Clay’s support. Buchanan’s plan got nowhere; in fact, Clay had already made up his mind to support Adams.
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