American Reformers, 1815-1860 - Softcover

Ronald G. Walters is Professor of History at The John Hopkins University. He is the author of The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 and editor of Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America and A Black Woman's Odyssey: The Narrative of Nancy Prince.

American Reformers 1815-1860
ONE The Missionary Impulse The report on a Kentucky girl in 1801 was dire: "She was struck down fell stiff her hand and arm also became as cold as Death heer fingers cramp'd recov'd heer speech in 2 hours and was haled home on a sled continues in a state of despare which has lasted 3 weekes." The girl was not ill. She had a religious experience. Hers was more extreme than most, although not unusual for Kentucky in 1801. Between the late 1790s and the Civil War, countless Americans like the Kentucky girl were caught up in outbursts of intense religious excitement. Few people outside the West had her kind of physical reaction, but men and women, girls and boys became convinced of their own sinfulness, went through intense emotional turmoil, and emerged with a belief that they had been saved. Whether it came in special camp meetings or from the pulpit of the local church, the evangelical message was proclaimed across the land and the public responded with explosions of spiritual zeal. These bore a special relationship to antebellum reform.  
Revivals in the early nineteenth century were so frequent and widespread that historians sometimes apply the phrase "Second Great Awakening" to the entire period from 1795 to 1837. (The first Great Awakening crested in the 1740s.) Within that long span of years therewere times and areas of greater and lesser enthusiasm. Between 1795 and 1810 much of the action was in Kentucky and Tennessee, in rowdy revivals presided over by Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. More sedate awakenings occurred in New York and among New England Congregationalists, but the vigor was in the West. From 1810 to 1825 the focus of revivalism shifted to the East, where influential clergy--Lyman Beecher most prominent among them--began preaching the gospel in revivalistic fashion while making important, often unacknowledged, modifications in New England theology. After 1825 evangelism reached a peak in the work of Charles G. Finney. His impact on reformers and reform, like Beecher's, would be great. In 1821 the twenty-nine-year-old Finney went through a typically agonizing conversion, after which he gave up a promising law practice in rural New York to study for the Presbyterian ministry. Although he distanced himself from "ignorant" Methodist and Baptist evangelists, he had less patience with formal theology than did Beecher and the New Englanders. His forte was using common sense, everyday language, and theatricality to drive his hearers to seek salvation. In drawing on such techniques, he was part of a much larger antebellum process of dissociating religion from doctrinal complexity and fusing it and popular culture in powerful ways. Soon after ordination Finney presided over remarkable revivals in western New York and was well on his way to becoming a major force in evangelical Protestantism. In 1832 he came to New York City to assume the pastorate of the Second Free Presbyterian Church, situated in a former theater. His arrival symbolized a closing of the gap between Western and Eastern, and rural and urban, revivalism. That is not to say Finney's triumph, or revivalism's, was complete. He and other evangelicals faced many critics, both from non-evangelical sects like the Unitarians and from within their own denominations. Finney eventually left the Presbyterians and Beecher, at first a Congregationalist, joined their ranks only to be put on trial by the Cincinnati Synod for heresy. He survived the ordeal, but the Presbyterian Church--the largest sect in the nation--split into pro- and anti-revival groups two years later, in 1837. Evangelicals also battled one another. In 1827 things reached such a bad pass between Western revivalists led by Finney, and Easterners clustered around Lyman Beecher, that they held a nine-day peace conference. It failed. With his customary vigor, Beecher warned Finney not to enter Massachusetts. He recalled saying, "As the Lord liveth, I'll meet you at the State line, and call out all the artillerymen, and fight every inch of the way to Boston, and then I'll fight you there." Despite hostility and dissension in its own ranks, revivalism was the core of antebellum Protestantism. It was the faith of people as far apart socially and geographically as rude Kentucky backwoodsmen and wealthy New York merchants. It flowed across denominational lines and appeared in all the major Protestant sects, muddling distinctions between them. In times of awakenings, Baptists, freewill Methodists, and predestinarian Presbyterians muted their disagreements and became brothers and sisters in spirit. Laypersons and clergy changed from one denomination to another, with little effort. What counted more to believers than creeds and doctrines was whether a church was for or against revivals. In some guise or another, evangelical Protestantism was the religion of most Americans. Connections between revivalism and reform were obvious at the time and have been much emphasized by historians ever since. Evangelical clergy and laity engaged in moral crusades of their own and led secular ones, for example, temperance and antislavery. Revivalistic institutions such as Lane Seminary and Oberlin College were breeding grounds for reformers, many of whom had been inspired by Beecher and Finney. In regions like the Western Reserve of Ohio and the Burned-Over District of New York, reform movements followed close on the heels of hellfire preaching. Even voting statistics bear out the correlation, with, for instance, the abolitionist Liberty Party doing best in areas where religious enthusiasm had run high. Still, it is possible to make too strong a link between revivals and reform. Of the hundreds of thousands of Americans converted between 1800 and 1860, only a minority felt compelled to engage in social action, and others were on the anti-reform side of all questions.Not only that: many reforms had strong support from such non-evangelical sects as the Quakers and Unitarians. Some crusades, notably communitarianism and spiritualism, were especially attractive to freethinkers and atheists. Deism, with its mechanistic God and skepticism about doctrine and clergy, had a following in labor reform, where an eighteenth-century tradition of artisan radicalism and rationalism remained vital. Even among evangelical reformers, Christianity was not the only source of intellectual and emotional stimulation. Many looked to science, natural law, and American political traditions, as well as the Bible, for inspiration. All reformers buttressed their arguments with enlightenment humanitarianism, the republican rhetoric of the American Revolution, and the sentimental conventions of the day. Yet it was evangelical Protestantism that provided much of the ideological and organizational foundation for antebellum reform.  
Beginning in the early twentieth century, popular critics of revivalism such as H. L. Mencken made it seem the simple-minded epitome of anti-intellectualism. This gulf between intellectuals and radicals on one side and revivalism on the other, however, made it easy to forget the complex and sophisticated role evangelical Protestantism played in the history of ideas. It grew out of--and produced--impressive theological debates and permeated much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social, moral, economic, political, and scientific thought. What mattered most for reform, nonetheless, was a handful of highly generalized beliefs, held in one form or another by all evangelicals. These were usually not formal doctrines (although they could be); more often, they were half-articulated assumptions about society, human beings, and the future. The Second Great Awakening raised expectations that the Kingdom of God on earth was imminent. Similar notions appeared during the first Great Awakening and had surfaced throughout the centuries, but the quickening of religious fervor after 1800 seemed a sure sign to many Americans that the new day was dawning. One variety of these beliefs, called millenarianism (also known as premillennialism), heldthat there would be a literal return of Christ, and a Day of Judgment, prior to the thousand-year reign of God predicted in Revelation 20. In the antebellum period its most numerous exponents were followers of a New England Baptist preacher named William Miller, who set the year of Christ's arrival as 1843 (it was postponed to 1844, then indefinitely). Several prominent reformers became Millerites--one of their leaders was an ex-abolitionist--but millenarians generally had an anti-reform cast of mind. They usually maintained that times would inevitably become worse until the reappearance of Jesus and that godly people must withdraw from the sinful world and await the Judgment. There was another way of thinking about the Kingdom of God, known variously as millennialism or, more clumsily and accurately, as postmillennialism. It was of much greater significance in antebellum reform than millenarianism. Postmillennialists disagreed over whether the reign of God was near or whether it would come gradually or swiftly, and whether it would begin with a cataclysm or quietly. But they agreed that it would be a real historical era occurring before the final Judgment--a thousand years of peace, prosperity, harmony, and Christian morality. That was a vision of the ideal society and an important one for reformers: the imperfections of their own day were stark by comparison with a time of God's justice. Postmillennialism assured them that a better world was possible (people have not always thought that to be the case) and gave them hope they might live to see it. Belief in the approaching Kingdom of God also had a darker side in its foreboding that the forces of light and dark would engage in a terrible final battle. But it broadcast the ultimate glad tidings: God would triumph. In these extremes of apprehensiveness and joy, postmillennialism gave reformers a language to express conflicting feelings about the direction in which the United States was heading. The troubled mood matched their fear of immorality, mobs, irreligion, political turmoil, sectional conflict, and similar signs of disorder and decay. The promise of a perfect future, on the other hand, embodied reformers' expectations that everything would turn out for the best. Millennial optimism was particularly strong because it interacted with other common attitudes. It merged with a belief that the UnitedStates was chosen by God to fulfill a great mission, an old notion given new life in the antebellum period by territorial expansion and religious revivals (sure marks of divine favor). This idea of national destiny was simultaneously accepted and used by reformers. They claimed that America's special place in God's design (a version of what scholars call American exceptionalism) meant that its sins were more heinous than those of other countries and that their reforms were urgently needed. The divine plan--the millennium--depended upon reform. Whatever the merits of the argument, it joined religious and patriotic fervor to make a case. In much the same fashion, postmillennialism converged with prevalent attitudes toward economic development. It was easy for reformers (and many other Americans) to feel that a new era was beginning in the antebellum years. Evidence of God's favor was not just in revivals or addition of territory to the Union: it was also apparent in a rising standard of living and in scientific and technological advances. At some points millennialism became almost indistinguishable from the secular idea of progress, the bourgeois Victorian faith that Civilization was marching onward and upward. In spite of its ability to adapt and survive, millennialism would not have been so influential in the antebellum period if clergymen had not told humankind it could help God usher in His Kingdom. Very much in tune with the activist spirit of their age, millennialists argued that people need not sit idle in anticipation of the glorious new day. Good deeds and improved public morality were omens of its approach and might well hasten it along. When nineteenth-century preachers made this claim that human effort could bring about the millennium, they were abandoning a line of theology stretching from John Calvin through early American Congregationalism and Presbyterianism. Calvin and Calvinists maintained that human beings were innately sinful and could, of their own free will, do nothing pleasing to God. Salvation came only as an arbitrary, predestined judgment from an omnipotent deity. By the end of the eighteenth century, Methodists and a few other sects in America had repudiated those propositions, preferring to think that people mightassist in their own salvation. As early as the seventeenth century, even Presbyterians and Congregationalists had been finding ways of mitigating the harshness of their theology without going over to the "free will" position later taken by Methodists. Beecher's generation softened Calvinism still further, and Finney, nominally a Presbyterian, overthrew it. Among the means he used was the concept of "disinterested benevolence," which he saw as the sum of all "holiness or virtue." The phrase itself had an honorable history in American Protestantism, going back to Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century. Finney, however, took any trace of Calvinist hellfire out of it and turned it into an inspiration for reformers. Edwards had believed humans incapable of disinterested benevolence while in their natural, sinful state. Like any other good thing, it was one of God's gifts to regenerate individuals. Finney was more concerned with results than metaphysics. Where Edwards's universe revolved around God, Finney's centered on what the believer did; and he was certain people could act virtuously if they wished. In a practical manner he tried to persuade them of the "utility of benevolence." Often his reasoning was more reminiscent of Ben Franklin than of John Calvin (he declared that "if we desire the happiness of others, their happiness will increase our own"), but there was a moral earnestness to Finney. He insisted that men and women not only could but should "set out with a determination to aim at being useful in the highest degree." So much the better that being useful would make them happy and please God in the bargain--Finney's call for benevolent action was more effective for having a greater degree of self-interest than disinterest to it. His theology may have been muddled, but its message was firm. Of true Christians, Finney wrote: "To the universal reformation of the world they stand committed." It is little wonder that his preaching spawned converts to antislavery, temperance, and other crusades, as well as to the Gospel. Finney (and most of his critics, for that matter) revised dramatically upward the old Calvinist estimate of human nature. The problem was deciding where to stop. Was it just that people could do good deeds of their own volition, even though remaining essentially sinful? Ormight human beings become completely free from sin while on earth? The Bible, after all, commanded: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." In that passage lurked a doctrine: perfectionism, or the notion that individuals could become sanctified while on earth. Finney himself arrived at a version of perfectionism in the 1830s and helped spread it among his peers. He and the great majority of evangelicals, however, accepted a moderate form of the doctrine while staunchly rejecting a dangerous implication in it--the possibility that sanctified persons could do no wrong. That would have freed believers from all worldly laws, a horrifying p...