What Hath God Wrought (28 page)

Clergymen like Allen and his friend Absalom Jones, founding priest of St. Thomas’s Episcopal in Philadelphia and like him a self-made former slave, established themselves as leaders and spokesmen for their community—a role the black clergy have never lost. In a world where they were shut out from so much else, African Americans found their churches a source of mutual strength and spiritual fulfillment. In a world where black talent was undervalued, their churches provided scope for it. African Americans formed evangelical moral reform associations analogous to their white counterparts, to support temperance and suppress vice, but with the added urgency of a desire for the collective “uplift” of the race as well of individuals.
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Friend and foe alike recognized the free black churches as bastions of opposition to slavery and havens for those escaping from it.

As Richard Allen’s account of his spiritual awakening illustrates, evangelical Christianity resonated powerfully among the slaves. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared Christianity a religion well suited to slaves because of its emphasis on humility. Nietzsche ignored the liberating strain in the Christian message, but many African Americans heard it. Allen’s religious metaphor expressed it well: “My chains flew off.” Missions to the plantations were among the many missions organized by the interdenominational evangelicals; however, Baptist and Methodist itinerants got there earlier and to greater effect. Ever since the First Awakening there had been preachers and exhorters among the slaves themselves, so the religion of the great antebellum revival did not come to them as an alien “white” intrusion. Slaves embraced evangelical Christianity as an affirmation of hope and self-respect, of moral order and justice in circumstances where these were scarce and precious.

Where a critical mass of participants could be assembled, as on large plantations, slaves often worshipped on their own, thereby provoking anxiety among whites who did not share Nietzsche’s estimate of Christianity. Despite such misgivings, black preachers and exhorters, both free and slave, continued to be licensed and black congregations to be organized in the antebellum South. Of course, many slave congregations existed informally and do not show up in ecclesiastical records. The semisecret, potentially subversive network of religious associations among the enslaved has been termed an “invisible institution.”
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In southern cities, slaves could also belong to congregations organized by free Negroes. One of these was the AME church in Charleston where Denmark Vesey and two of his closest associates served as class leaders; most of those executed with him belonged to it. The congregation traced its origins to Francis Asbury’s visits to Charleston between 1785 and 1797. Drawing inspiration and instruction from the new AME church in Philadelphia, in 1817 Charleston’s black Methodists founded an AME congregation of their own with over four thousand members, the majority of whom were enslaved. The harassment of this church by the local authorities could have pushed Vesey toward a decision to rebel.
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By 1820, one Methodist in five was black, and the percentage of black Baptists was probably even higher. In the South, most congregations held biracial services, with blacks and whites usually seated separately. Members of the two races heard each other’s preaching and caught each other’s forms of prayer and praise. The Second Great Awakening in the South fostered an extraordinary religious synthesis of African American and European American cultures. Preachers at camp meetings, of either race, might chant their sermons, punctuated with cries from the congregation: “Amen!” “Hallelujah!” “Lord, have mercy!” Out of this synthesis came a distinctive musical expression. From the European tradition came the practice of “lining out” the psalms: A leader sings a line, the congregation echoes it. The practice dovetailed readily with the “calland-response” pattern of African music. It suited a society possessing more singers than hymnbooks—and where not everyone could read music or words. A northern visitor to a camp meeting in Mississippi in 1816 observed, “They sung in ancient style, lineing [
sic
] the Psalm, and uniting in every part of the house, both white and black.”
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American Christians drew inspiration from the great European tradition of evangelical hymnody, of Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts. But the extraordinary creativity of the Second Great Awakening also stimulated the production of American folk music of unparalleled power: the black spirituals and the gospel music of both races. Richard Allen, who emancipated himself first from sin and then from slavery, expressed the spirit of the awakening in one of the Methodist hymns he wrote:

 

What poor despised company

Of travellers are these,

That’s walking yonder narrow way,

Along that rugged maze?

 

 

Why they are of a royal line,

They’re children of a King,

Heirs of immortal crown divine

And loud for joy they sing.

 

 

Why do they then appear so mean

And why so much despised?

Because of their rich robes unseen

The world is not appriz’d.

 

 

Why some of them seem poor distress’d

And lacking daily bread.

Heirs of immortal wealth possess’d

With hidden Manna fed.
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V

The closer one looks for the Era of Good Feelings in American politics the harder it is to find. By contrast, when one looks for evidence of religious awakening in this period, one finds it everywhere: not only in the astonishing variety of religious sects, both imported and native, but also in literature, politics, educational institutions, popular culture, social reforms, dietary reforms, utopian experiments, child-rearing practices, and relationships between the sexes.
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In terms of duration, numbers of people involved, or any other measure, the Second Great Awakening dwarfed the First. Because of its diversity, perhaps it should be called a multitude of contemporaneous “awakenings.”

While the number of religious options multiplied, so did the number of congregations and individual believers. The physical landscape reflected the formation of new congregations: Americans were erecting church buildings at the rate of a thousand a year.
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While the U.S. population increased from 7.2 million in 1810 to 23.2 million in 1850, the number of church members increased even faster—although since the census did not enumerate people by religious groups, their numbers have to be extrapolated from other data. By the middle of the nineteenth century, an estimated one-third of the population affiliated with organized religion, twice the percentage of 1776, even though church membership was often deliberately demanding and difficult to achieve.
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To be sure, this still represented a minority, and the evangelical movement would always be resisted in many quarters. But the Second Great Awakening put religious practice in the United States on an upward trajectory that would continue through the twentieth century. The contrast with Europe, where religious faith declined in the same era, is striking.

The evangelical revival inevitably provoked controversy. Even many religious people criticized its methods as manipulative and overly emotional, its theology as shallow and unorthodox. Major denominations that argued over the legitimacy of revivalism included the Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. And of course many people disliked religion altogether. From their point of view all the awakenings represented so much error, superstition, and meddlesome intrusion. Even the evangelists themselves disagreed with each other over issues of doctrine and practice. Some evangelical sects, including the Disciples of Christ and the Anti-Mission Baptists, promoted revivals of their own but disapproved of the interdenominational benevolent associations. Fundamental doctrinal differences excluded other religious bodies from interdenominational evangelical cooperation: Roman Catholics, Jews, and Unitarians. As time went by, disagreements over slavery would increasingly embitter relations among the evangelicals.
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Assessing the implications of such a diverse and wide-ranging phenomenon as the Second Great Awakening is complicated and therefore difficult. The Awakening had an uneven impact; for example, religious adherence seems to have been higher in small towns than in either rural areas or big cities. Some of the consequences of the Awakening seem ambiguous. For people to have so many choices about which religion to embrace (if any) enhanced individualism. On the other hand, religion also strengthened community ties among church members. Religion stimulated innovation in society, as believers tried to bring social practice more into conformity with religious precepts. On the other hand, religion also exerted a conservative influence, reinvigorating cultural heritages that various social groups were trying to preserve in a New World. The revivals sometimes encouraged interdenominational cooperation and a sense of collective moral responsibility, but they were also a divisive force that split denominations and even tore individual congregations apart. The sects could be authoritarian, yet many people found them personally liberating. It is not even obvious to what extent we should define the Awakening as American. Although the evangelical movement was unusually successful and varied in the United States, it had its counterparts all over the world, and evangelicals and revivalists in Britain and the United States cooperated closely.

American religion flourished in a society with a thinly developed institutional structure, enlisting the energies of the people themselves. The most important social consequences of the Awakening in America derived from its trust in the capacities of ordinary people. In the early American republic, the most significant challenge to the traditional assumption that the worth of human beings depended on their race, class, and gender came from the scriptural teachings that all are equal in the sight of God and all are one in Christ. Different revivals appealed to different constituencies, but taken together, the Second Great Awakening was remarkable for embracing (in the words of the Book of Common Prayer) “all sorts and conditions of men.” Including women, the poor, and African Americans among the exhorters and exhorted, the revivals expanded the number of people experiencing an autonomous sense of self. They taught self-respect and demanded that individuals function as moral agents. In this way the Awakening empowered multitudes.

The decision for Christ that the revivalists demanded had to be made voluntarily and responsibly. Having taken this decision, the believer, regardless of denomination, should accept self-discipline while also engaging in long-term moral self-improvement, sometimes called “sanctification.” The preachers urged people to search the scriptures for themselves and apply the lessons they found there to their own lives. In short, the believer was expected to remake himself or herself into a new person—to be “born again.” The new personal identity thus attained was both follower of Christ and rational, autonomous individual—paradoxical as that may seem.
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The evangelical movement brought civilization and order, not only to the frontier but throughout the rural and small town environments in which the vast majority of Americans then lived. Evangelical revivals rolled through the canal towns where Finney enjoyed his famous successes, through rustic Vermont, and through the booming cotton lands of Mississippi. All over the country, farmers and townspeople expressed by innumerable voluntary activities their commitment to republicanism and religious toleration along with their desire for spiritual sustenance and stable values. Some evangelicals committed themselves to the moral reformation of society as a whole; these tended to be the ones concerned with interdenominational cooperation. Others concentrated attention on the moral standards of their own membership as “islands of holiness” in a sea of infidelity and immorality. This distinction would turn out to be important when evangelicals chose sides in politics.
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Social classes were more sharply defined in the cities and new industrial towns than in most of rural America, and this reality affected evangelical activity. Despite Beecher’s working-class origins and Finney’s common touch, their versions of evangelicalism appealed primarily to middle-class people. But evangelical religion also appealed to the working class. Finney and a Methodist minister held revival meetings together in a textile mill on Oriskany Creek in 1826 where about fifteen hundred converted, many of them mill girls. In this case, the revivalists enjoyed the support of the mill owner, who stopped production to allow the revival to take place. Evangelical religion inculcated virtues that employers generally approved, especially temperance—though there is no indication that heavy drinking among the mill girls had been a problem for this employer.
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In general, evangelical religion was not foisted upon the industrial working classes, whether artisans or factory employees. When they embraced it, they did so voluntarily and for reasons that did not conflict with their self-interest. Hardworking journeymen who joined the Methodist Church did not find its social ethics particularly different from the behavior endorsed by the Mechanics’ Society. If some employers saw the temperance movement as a means to discipline workers, some of the workers themselves viewed it as a means of “mutual improvement” and a way of retaking control over their lives.
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When workers challenged their employers in collective protest, they could draw strength from their religion. Antebellum American labor organizers did not forget that Jesus had been a carpenter. In Finney’s Rochester, working-class people held their own version of the Awakening and did not allow employers or the middle class to monopolize the Christian message. Rochester’s artisan organizations and periodicals combined Christianity with labor agitation and a working-class legislative agenda of mechanics’ lien laws and an end to imprisonment for debt. Methodist and Presbyterian church members appeared prominently in the leadership of the Rochester labor movement. Evangelicalism played a part in the making of the working class, as it did in shaping middle-class consciousness as well.
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