Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (103 page)

Yet in the end the efforts of the old Puritan churches to compete with the dynamic folk-like processes of the evangelicals were as ineffectual as the comparable efforts of the New England Federalists to out-popularize the Democratic-Republicans. Their static institutions based on eighteenth-century standards of deference and elite monopolies of orthodoxy were no match for the egalitarian-minded evangelicals.

In the slaveholding Old South social circumstances were different—more stable and more hierarchical; and there the spread of revivalism was complicated. At first the evangelical religions were not very successful in recruiting communicants. By 1790 only about 14 percent of Southern whites and fewer than 4 percent of blacks belonged to Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian churches, and much of this growth had come from the Scots-Irish migrations before the war and the collapse of Anglicanism following independence. The evangelicals did not gain much strength among the South’s large unchurched population, white or black. And the situation did not change much over the next quarter century. By 1815 the combined membership of Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians grew slowly to just 17 percent of the white population and 8 percent of the black.

Part of the explanation of slow growth in the Old South came from the social disorder created by the Revolutionary War and the subsequent migrations of settlers westward. But more important in limiting growth were the radical egalitarian and anti-patriarchal impulses of the eighteenth-century evangelical religions in a slave-ridden society structured to resist such impulses. In 1784 the newly constituted Methodist Episcopal Church climaxed more than a decade of fierce anti-slavery preaching in America by enacting a rigorous set of rules designed to rid its membership of slaveholders. But such egalitarian and anti-slave
sentiments could not be sustained: they did too much violence to the traditions and beliefs of both the slaveholding planters and ordinary Southern whites. It was only a matter of months, in fact, before stiff opposition from the Southern laity forced the Methodist leaders to repeal most of the new restrictions on slaveholding.

Even when the evangelical denominations made accommodations to slavery, their growth among common people in the Old South remained for decades slow and gradual. Ordinary Southern farmers resisted the appeal of evangelical preachers, frightened by the ways in which Baptists and Methodists challenged all those hierarchies that had lent stability to their daily lives. These Southerners wanted to maintain the deference of youth to the aged, the submission of children to parents and women to men, and the exclusive loyalties of individuals to family and kin. And they resisted the release of emotions that threatened these relationships. Because the Baptists and Methodists tended to undermine the ways in which ordinary people in the South structured their neighborhoods, their households, and their very being, these churches remained suspect in the minds of Southerners for decades. Many evangelical leaders eventually concluded, as a historian of Southern religion has put it, that “the ultimate success of evangelicalism in the South lay in appealing to those who confined the devil to hell, esteemed maturity over youth, put family before religious fellowship, upheld the superiority of white over black and of men over women, and prized their honor above all else.” Southern evangelicalism had to make numerous concessions to the region’s social and cultural realities, especially slavery.
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If social disorder was what lay behind the growth of evangelical religion, it was not something the system of slavery could long tolerate. Slavery, which necessarily shaped all dependency relationships in most Southern households, required a patriarchal social world that had little place for the disruptive effects of the wild and uncontrollable revivals of evangelical religion. Even Southern backcountry yeomen came to recognize the need for order. Consequently, wherever high proportions of black slaves were present in the Deep South evangelical religion tended to develop slowly.

But elsewhere, in places where the number of slaves was more limited or nonexistent, the situation was different. In the most disordered, dynamic, and fluid areas of the North and West the newly released religious yearnings of ordinary people often tended to overwhelm hierarchies of all sorts, including traditional religious institutions. Between 1803 and 1809, for example, more than half the Presbyterian clergy and church members of Kentucky, where slavery was less well established than it was in the Old South, were swept away by the torrents of popular revivalism.
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Of course, there were extensive efforts everywhere to reverse the extreme fragmentation, and in time these efforts at establishing some evangelical order would develop into middle-class discipline, self-improvement, and respectability.
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But because the accounts of most early denominational historians tended to telescope this growth of refinement and organizational coherence in their particular churches, it has not always been fully appreciated just how disorderly the denominations’ origins were.
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Evangelical authoritarianism and respectability were slow to develop out of the social confusion of the immediate post-Revolutionary decades. It was at least a generation, for example, before the Methodists were able to tame the evangelical camp meeting.
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A
S THE OLDER ARISTOCRATIC WORLD
of hierarchal churches fell apart (the growth of Roman Catholicism being the exception), the new revivalist Protestant clergy urged the common people to put their religious world back together on new democratic terms. The Scottish immigrant and renegade Presbyterian Thomas Campbell told the people in 1809 that it was “high time for us not only to think, but also to act, for ourselves; to see with our own eyes, and to take all our measures directly from the Divine standard.”
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Just as the people were taking over their
governments, so, it was said, they should take over their churches. Christianity had to be republicanized and made more popular. The people were their own theologians and had no need to rely on others to tell them what to believe. We must be “wholly free to examine for ourselves what is truth,” declared the renegade Baptist Elias Smith in 1809, “without being bound to a catechism, creed, confession of faith, discipline or any rule excepting the scriptures.”
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From northern New England to southern Kentucky, Christian fundamentalists called for an end to priests, presbyters, associations, doctrines, confessions—anything and everything that stood between the people and Christ. The people were told that they were quite capable of running their own churches, and even clerical leaders of the conservative denominations like Presbyterian Samuel Miller were forced to concede greater and greater lay control.
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The people were everywhere “awakened from the sleep of ages,” said the maverick Presbyterian Barton Stone—who was a product not of the frontier but of the American Revolution; and the people saw “for the first time that they were responsible beings” who might even be capable of bringing about their own salvation.
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Although the strict Calvinists still tried to stress predestination, limited atonement, the sovereignty of God, and the inability of people to save themselves, conversion seemed to be within the grasp of all who desired it—a mere matter of letting go and trusting in Jesus. By emphasizing free will and earned grace, the Methodists especially gathered in great numbers of souls and set the entire evangelical movement in a decidedly Arminian direction, with people, in effect, able to will their own salvation. After hearing a Methodist preacher in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the early 1790s attack the Calvinist notion that only a few elect went to heaven, one middling artisan listener exclaimed, “Why, then, I can be saved! I have been taught that only part of the race could be saved, but if this man’s singing be true, all may be saved.”
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The Universalists did promise salvation for everyone and consequently thrived. Between 1795 and 1815 the Universalists organized twenty-three churches in the Connecticut River Valley of rural Vermont, especially under the leadership of Hosea Ballou, who denied the divinity of Christ and became Universalism’s most important theologian. Although the
Universalists were widely condemned, in their acceptance of universal salvation they were only drawing out the logic implied by many other denominations. One of the ministers who opposed them was Lemuel Haynes, apparently the first black minister ordained by a major denomination. Ordained as a Congregational minister in Connecticut in 1785, Haynes moved to a conservative church in Rutland, Vermont, which he served for thirty years. As a devout Calvinist, he assailed the Universalists sprouting up everywhere around him in Vermont. In his 1805 sermon Haynes satirized Universalism and compared Ballou to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, which had also promised “Universal Salvation.” The sermon was widely republished and went through dozens of editions.
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Devout evangelicals still believed in Satan the harasser, but, unlike the Puritans of the seventeenth century, most no longer thought that the devil could possess the body of a person; only Christ and the Holy Spirit could possess, which made all the fainting, shouting, and bodily shaking of the suppliants acceptable. Sin was no longer conceived as something inherent in the depravity of human beings but as a kind of failure of a person’s will and thus fully capable of being eliminated by individual exertion. Even some of the Calvinist Presbyterians and Separate Baptists felt compelled to soften their opposition to Arminianism in the face of the relentless challenges by free will believers; and many of them came to believe that the external moral behavior of people—their “character”—was more central to religious life than the introspective conversion of their souls.
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With ordinary people being told, as one preacher told them in 1806, that each individual was “considered as possessing in himself or herself an original right to believe and speak as their own conscience, between themselves and God, may determine,” religion in America became much more personal and voluntary than it had ever been. People were freer to join and change their religious affiliation whenever they wished.
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They
thus moved from one religious group to another in a continual search for signs, prophets, or millennial promises that would make sense of their disrupted lives. With no church sure of holding its communicants, competition among the sects became fierce. Each claimed to be right; they called each other names, argued endlessly over points of doctrine, mobbed and stoned each other, and destroyed each other’s meetinghouses.

“All Christendom has been decomposed, broken in pieces” in this “fiery furnace of democracy,” said the bewildered Federalist Harrison Gray Otis.
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Not only were the traditional Old World churches fragmented but the fragments themselves shattered in what seemed at times to be perpetual fission. There were not just Presbyterians but Old and New School Presbyterians, Cumberland Presbyterians, Springfield Presbyterians, Reformed Presbyterians, and Associated Presbyterians; not just Baptists but General Baptists, Regular Baptists, Free Will Baptists, Separate Baptists, Dutch River Baptists, Permanent Baptists, and Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Baptists. Some individuals cut their ties completely with the Old World churches and gathered around a dynamic leader like Barton Stone or Thomas Campbell who promised the restoration of the original Christian church—which is why they came to be called Restorationists. Other seekers ended up forming churches out of single congregations, and still others simply listened in the fields to wandering preachers like the eccentric Methodist Lorenzo Dow, who in the single year of 1805 traveled some ten thousand miles.
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Dow was a force of nature. He preached to more people, traveled to more places, and attracted larger audiences at camp meetings than any other preacher of his day. In 1804, for example, he spoke at between five hundred and eight hundred camp meetings. He also wrote books, publishing between 1800 and his death in 1834 over seventy editions of his works. With long hair and flowing beard and disheveled clothes, Dow cultivated the image of John the Baptist. Yet he was no otherworldly mystic; he was in fact a radical Jeffersonian who railed at aristocrats and supported equality everywhere he went. He condemned the “gentlemen or nobility” who sought to “possess the country and feel and act more than
their importance.” Such elites thought of ordinary people as “peasants” whom they “put on a level with the animals, and treated as an inferior race of beings, who must pay these lords a kind of divine honor, and bow, and cringe and scrape.”
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T
HE DIVISIVE EFFECTS
of all this fragmentation were offset by a curious blurring of theological distinctions among the competing denominations. “In that awful day when the universe, assembled must appear before the judge of the quick and the dead, the question brethren,” declared James McGready, one of the leaders in Kentucky’s great revival, “will not be, Were you a Presbyterian—a Seceder—a Covenanter—a Baptist—or a Methodist; but, Did you experience the new birth? Did you accept of Christ and his salvation as set forth in the gospel?”
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Some extreme evangelicals urged the creation of a simple Christian religion based on only the fundamentals of the gospel. They denounced all the paraphernalia of organized Christianity, including even the existence of a ministry.