What Hath God Wrought (25 page)

Denmark Vesey’s rebellion had surprisingly far-reaching consequences for a nonevent. It convinced white Charlestonians that “our NEGROES are truly the
Jacobins
of the country.”
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It led not only to tighter security measures but also to stricter limitations on black religious gatherings and on the ability of free Negroes to communicate out of state. Fearing subversives from outside, the state authorities decided to keep any arriving free black sailor locked up until his ship prepared to weigh anchor. This rule, when applied to British subjects, violated a treaty, and, when applied to northern citizens, violated the national Constitution. Defying repeated protests and the federal judiciary, Charleston harbor enforced the rule until the Civil War, and other southern port cities imitated it.
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In South Carolina politics, Vesey’s conspiracy had profound implications, which included influencing the momentous transformation of John C. Calhoun from a nationalist into the most famous champion of state rights.

When the state of Connecticut disestablished religion in 1818, the prominent revival preacher Lyman Beecher fell into depression and apprehension. He had fought hard to protect his faith from political defeat, and he had lost. “It was as dark a day as ever I saw,” he recalled. “The injury done to the cause of Christ, as we then supposed, was irreparable. For several days I suffered what no tongue can tell
for the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut.
It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.”
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As Beecher came to realize, the change in status proved an advantageous trade-off for organized religion.

Americans eventually came to think of the separation of church and state as one of the achievements of the Revolution, and as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Actually, these common beliefs are but half-truths. The Revolution separated church and state in those places where the Church of England had been established in colonial times. But in several New England states, Congregationalist religious establishments remained in place. Unlike the Anglican establishments, those of the Congregationalists had been on the winning side of the Revolution and did not seem discredited by American independence. The Bill of Rights, added to the national Constitution in 1791, read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Applying specifically to Congress, this First Amendment restricted the federal government only, not the states.
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The Congregational Standing Orders (as these establishments were called) persisted in Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. In Vermont the Baptists, resenting discrimination against their denomination, forced disestablishment in 1807, but in the other three the connection between church and state persisted. With slight variation from state to state, these establishments created a presumption that all citizens belonged to the Congregational Church and could be taxed for its support, unless they filed a statement that they were active members of a different Christian congregation in their locality.
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Any establishment of religion, even as democratic a religion as Yankee Congregationalism, violated the tenets of Jeffersonian Republicanism. The Republican Party in New England embraced the goal of disestablishment, which proved good politics as well as sound ideology. After the War of 1812, rallying a coalition of secularists and religious minorities, Republicans used the issue successfully to overcome the normal Federalist majorities in New Hampshire and Connecticut. The Episcopalians (as the Anglicans were called after the Revolution) had usually voted Federalist like the Congregationalists, but the disestablishment issue won them over, along with the other religious minorities, to the Republicans. By strengthening the Republican Party in New England, the politics of disestablishment made New England more like the rest of the country and helped set the stage for the “era of good feelings.” Under Republican leadership, New Hampshire separated church from state in 1817, and Connecticut in 1818, leaving Massachusetts the only state with an establishment of religion, which would endure until 1833.
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Ever since Constantine the Great had made Christianity the established religion of the Roman Empire, the Western world had typically connected church and state. Now, the Americans undertook to experiment with their separation: Religion would be purely voluntary. The results astonished both friends and foes of Christianity. “They say ministers have lost their influence; the fact is, they have gained” by disestablishment, Beecher observed. “By voluntary efforts, societies, missions, and revivals, they exert a deeper influence than ever they could by queues, and shoe-buckles, and cocked hats, and gold-headed canes.”
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Far from hindering religion, the American model of voluntarism hugely facilitated it, liberating powerful religious energies. Religion, which had played such an important part in the life of the American colonies, was reinvigorated and reawakened in the life of the American republic. Religious denominations and religious action organizations multiplied beyond number. Americans of this generation experienced widespread direct democracy through the creation, administration, and financing of churches and other voluntary societies. Indeed, the religious institutions they created sometimes displayed more democracy than the nation’s civic ones. Women, African Americans, and newly arrived poor immigrants were all participating in religion, often in leadership roles, before they participated in politics. The churches and other voluntary associations nurtured American democracy.
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II

No one illustrated the power of religious voluntarism better than the indefatigable Lyman Beecher. Son of a blacksmith, reared on his uncle’s Connecticut farm, Beecher’s attendance at the local Yale College did not get rid of the homespun rusticity of his accent and manner. But Lyman Beecher made himself one of the most influential of the many who labored to build Christ’s Kingdom in the young republic. His sermons proclaimed the universal appeal of the Risen Christ to people of every race, nation, sex, and class. From small-town pastorates in Connecticut and Long Island he moved to the big city (Boston in 1826) and then to the West (Cincinnati in 1832) to carry the message of the gospel. Wherever he went, his preaching manifested his physical vigor, sense of humor, and passionate conviction. Beecher took as his mission not simply the winning of individual souls but the transformation of society as a whole. “The great aim of the Christian Church in its relation to the present life is not only to renew the individual man, but also to reform human society,” he declared. Accordingly, Beecher not only preached revivals, he founded reform movements and the organizations needed to implement them. One who knew him well commented, “He had no small ambitions.”
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Beginning in 1812, Beecher embraced the cause of temperance, infusing it with his religious zeal. The problem he addressed was a real one. For centuries, alcohol had mitigated hardship, cold, and pain, helped celebrate harvests and festivals, and provided periodic relief from hard work. Along with the comforts of alcohol went its abuse and the toleration of its abuse. Americans in the early nineteenth century quaffed alcohol in prodigious quantities. In 1825, the average American over fifteen years of age consumed seven gallons of alcohol a year, mostly in the form of whiskey and hard cider. (The corresponding figure at the start of the twenty-first century was less than two gallons, most of it from beer and wine.) Workers typically took a midmorning break and a midafternoon break, both accompanied by alcohol, as well as liquor with every meal. To entertain guests meant to ply them with several kinds of alcohol until some fell down. All social classes drank heavily; college students, journeyman printers, agricultural laborers, and canal-diggers were especially notorious. Schoolchildren might face an inebriated teacher in the classroom. Although socially tolerated, drunkenness frequently generated violence, especially domestic violence, and other illegal behavior. In such a society, intemperance represented a serious issue of public health, comparable to the problems of drug abuse experienced in later generations.
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Making temperance a Christian cause constituted an innovation, for traditional Christianity had not discouraged drinking. Indeed, Beecher recalled, ministerial conferences during his youth had been occasions for heavy convivial drinking. Unlike a later generation of crusaders, Beecher never thought the legal prohibition of alcohol a practical solution; he relied purely on changing public attitudes. This was no mean feat. To take a stand against the strong social pressures to drink took real courage, especially for young men. To help them, temperance workers paid reformed alcoholics to go on speaking tours, published temperance tracts, put on temperance plays, and drove the “water wagon” through towns encouraging converts to jump on. Publicists and organizers like Beecher struck a nerve with the public. The temperance cause resonated among people in all walks of life, rural and urban, white and black. Although it began in the Northeast, temperance reached the South and West and exerted powerful and lasting influence there.
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At first the temperance advocates restricted themselves to encouraging moderation (hence the name “temperance”); in this phase they condemned only distilled liquors, not beer and wine. At the grassroots level, however, it became apparent that total abstinence made a more effective appeal. Beecher endorsed this shift in
Six Sermons on Intemperance
(1825). Those who signed a temperance pledge were encouraged to put a
T
after their names if willing to take the extra step of pledging total abstinence; from this derives our word “teetotaler.”
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This campaign to alter age-old habits and attitudes proved amazingly successful: consumption of alcohol, especially of hard liquor, declined steadily and dramatically after 1830, falling to 1.8 gallons per person over fifteen by the late 1840s.
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As important as this success, however, was the example the reformers set of organizing voluntary societies to influence public opinion. Beecher conceived the societies as forming “a disciplined moral militia.”
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The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, served as a model for other movements. Through such issue-oriented organizations, reformers transcended geographical and denominational limitations to wage nationwide campaigns. The voluntary associations became a conspicuous feature of American society from that time forward. They distributed Bibles and tracts, supported missions foreign and domestic, and addressed such varied social problems as poverty, prostitution, and the abuse of women, children, animals, convicts, and the insane. Most momentous of all their activities would be their crusade against slavery.
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Lyman’s wife, Roxana Foote Beecher, ran a school for girls. Her academy made an essential contribution to supporting their large family, for then as now the clerical profession was generally underpaid. The school also demonstrated the Beechers’ commitment to developing the intellectual potential of women. The five daughters in the family included Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novelist, Isabella Beecher Hooker, the woman suffragist, and Catharine Beecher, the founder of home economics. Among the eight sons were Edward, who worked for the abolition of slavery, Henry Ward, the most famous American preacher in the next generation, and Thomas, an innovative urban pastor.
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The elder Beechers taught their children to think for themselves, and in adulthood the daughters and sons staked out their own theological positions. But in a variety of ways they continued their parents’ work of trying to reshape American society along moral and religious lines.
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Taken together, the members of the Beecher family demonstrate how the heirs of the Puritans coped, not simply with the disestablishment of religion, but also with the demise of the Federalist Party and New England’s shrinking political influence in a growing Union. They devised new means of influencing public opinion outside of politics: education, literature, magazines, religious revivals, and organized reform. They engaged the energies of people in all walks of life, not simply a privileged elite. As a result their evangelical movement exerted a powerful social, moral, and cultural influence over the United States during the critical transition to industrialization and urbanization.
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When Lyman and Roxana were courting, they engaged in theological discussion. Lyman had taken up a strict form of Calvinist thought developed by Samuel Hopkins. Hopkins taught that God should be loved for His own sake, not for the sake of reward; therefore the highest and most disinterested virtue must consist in being willing to be damned to hell, if God so wished. Hopkinsianism provoked much discussion at the time, engaging as it did both the high seriousness and the love of logical argument characteristic of old-time Yankees. Lyman tried it out on Roxana, to no avail. “The disinterested love to God which you think is alone the genuine love, I see not how we can be certain we possess,” she replied; “our love of happiness and love of God are so inseparably connected.” Roxana’s was the conventional Christian position: One is not required to welcome the prospect of damnation. “Could any real Christian rejoice if God should take from him the mercy bestowed?” she demanded.
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Roxana had made her point. Lyman turned away from Hopkins to a different theological mentor, Nathaniel William Taylor of Yale. Taylor addressed problems of human moral responsibility in a way that many revival preachers found helpful. He reinterpreted the Reformation doctrine of original sin to mean that sinning was universal but not causally necessary. Although all human beings sinned, they possessed “power to the contrary,” that is, the moral power to refrain from sinning if they chose. Taylor designed his formulation to facilitate revivals, by encouraging the preacher to emphasize the importance of making a conscious choice for Christ. Applied by Beecher and other revivalists, Taylor’s teachings became known as “New School Calvinism.” In wrestling with the problem of reconciling human responsibility with divine foreknowledge and omnipotence, Taylor participated in a dialogue that stretched across centuries of Christian history. The answers he came up with, reconciling the free choices of the autonomous individual with the intellectual heritage of the Reformation, reflected concerns typical of his own time and place. Taylor’s New School of thought largely replaced Hopkins’s doctrines among the next generation of Calvinist revivalists in the North.
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Roxana Foote Beecher died of consumption (as tuberculosis was then called) in 1816 at the age of forty-one. She had borne nine children in seventeen years; with her dying breath she consecrated them all to God’s service, a charge they could never forget.
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Although Lyman remarried (twice, since he outlived his second wife too) he mourned for Roxana the rest of his life. He kept on trying to rally the diverse Protestant denominations in one crusade after another, first to prevent the spread of Unitarianism in the East, then to compete with the Catholics in founding colleges in the West. Theological conservatives called Old School Calvinists put him on trial for heresy in 1835. Beecher claimed his opponents were out to get him because of his antislavery stands; in any case, he won acquittal. Meanwhile, he had become president of Lane Seminary in Ohio. Beecher did not retire until 1850, at the age of seventy-five. When visiting the church of his son Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, the old man remained as strong in spirit as ever: “If God should tell me that I might choose…whether to die and go to heaven, or to begin my life over again and work once more (straightening himself up, and his eye kindling, with finger lifted up), I would enlist again in a minute!”
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