What Hath God Wrought (29 page)

The economic teachings of evangelical preachers contained much the same message whether their congregation was rural or urban, working or middle class, Calvinist or Arminian, white or black. Serve God in your calling. Work hard, be thrifty, save your money, don’t go into debt. Be honest in business dealings; don’t screw down the wages of those who work for you to the lowest possible level. (In that society, even people of very modest means might have a “hired man” helping on the farm or “hired girl” helping in the kitchen.) If you manage a surplus, be faithful stewards of your bounty, that is, be generous to the church and other good causes. It wasn’t bad personal advice, then or later. The message presupposed private property and a commercial order but not ruthless competition; it attempted to infuse the marketplace with moral meaning. In the South, the ministers admonished masters not to overwork or abuse their slaves and to respect their family ties. In other respects their teachings were the same as in the free states.
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Of all the social groups involved in the Awakening, perhaps none was affected more profoundly than women. Besides Phoebe Palmer, many other women evangelists emerged, despite the reluctance of most denominations to ordain them as ministers. Jarena Lee of the AME Church succeeded in getting permission from Bishop Richard Allen to become an itinerant preacher; she traveled as much as two thousand miles a year in the 1820s and published her spiritual autobiography.
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The best-known women itinerants included Clarissa Danforth, Nancy Towle, and Harriet Livermore; they all came from the “Christian movement” but preached in other churches too—Methodist, Free-Will Baptist, wherever they could get a hearing. Livermore attained such fame that she preached before a joint session of Congress and President John Quincy Adams in January 1827, taking as her text “He that ruleth over men must be just.” By defending the right of women to speak in public, the female evangelists took a preliminary but essential step in the direction of the next generation of women’s-rights activists.
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More typically, however, women occupied the pews rather than the pulpits. Joining in church activities with their “sisters in Christ” could be socially as well as spiritually rewarding, especially for women in isolated farm households. Often, wives and mothers led the way in joining a church and then encouraged male family members to convert too. A woman might welcome the discipline of a church community over the family as a limitation on the discipline of a tyrannical husband. Women outnumbered men by two to one in most antebellum congregations, regardless of denomination.
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(Women typically outnumber men in almost all churches, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, everywhere in the world.)

Countless thousands of women participated in church-related benevolent associations that acted as a training ground for fuller citizenship. Women distributed Bibles, tracts, and material help to the poor of cities and countryside. Frequently their organizations were officially “auxiliaries” to male associations, but middle-class women often had more time and energy to devote than their men. While men could be active in civic, political, and occupational associations, all women’s associations before the mid-1830s were religious in nature. “No other avenue of self-expression besides religion,” the historian Nancy Cott has written, “at once offered women social approbation, the encouragement of male leaders (ministers), and, most important, the community of their peers.” Religious benevolence could perform constructive social functions for women from a variety of social groups. For upper-class women, it might confirm their social position. For black or working-class women, it lent substance to their claims of respectability. Benevolent associations became important to middle-class women in somewhat the same way that getting paid employment mattered to working-class women, as a way of getting out of the house and into the larger world, taking responsibility and making decisions. The temperance movement in particular helped pave the way for the assertion of women’s rights because it so often took up the cause of wives against the abuse of alcoholic husbands.
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The laity, women and men together, saw to it that the Second Great Awakening exerted much of its influence through purposeful voluntary associations, typically headed by boards of directors on which laypersons appeared prominently. Because the associations were interdenominational and run by the laity, women could exercise many leadership functions even when clerical ordination remained closed to them. The list of evangelical benevolent associations is long and bewilderingly varied. They included the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (which also handled missions to Native Americans), American Home Missionary Society, Bible Society, Peace Society, Sunday School Union, Tract Society, Temperance Society, and the different societies into which the antislavery movement eventually split. Some, like the Peace Society, participated in international cooperation; others were distinctively American, like the Society for the Promotion of Theological Education at the West. Some had a wide remit, like the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor; others were highly specialized, like the American Seamen’s Friend Society, the Protestant Half Orphan Society, or the Ladies’ Association for the Benefit of Gentlewomen of Good Family, Reduced in Fortune Below the State of Comfort to Which They Have Been Accustomed. Many were local, like the New York Anti-Tobacco Society or the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants in New York. The Seventh Commandment Society and the Society for Returning Young Women to Their Friends in the Country both addressed the problem of prostitution. A few of the associations now strike us as grotesque (the Evangelical Alliance to Overthrow the Papacy) or ludicrous (the National Truss Society for the Relief of the Ruptured Poor).

Contemporaries called the interlocking, interdenominational directorates of these organizations “the Evangelical United Front” or “the Benevolent Empire.” It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the United Front aspired to transcend America’s sectarian diversity and create the functional equivalent of an established church. Its advocates declared that bringing souls to Christ and ushering in His Kingdom took precedence over the theological differences dividing the various Protestant sects. They therefore embraced interdenominational (“ecumenical”) cooperation in the service of a general “reformation of manners” both personal and institutional. Of course, their conception of cooperation did not include “unevangelical” denominations like Catholics and Unitarians.

The efforts of this benevolent empire had remarkable impact on American culture. The activities of the American Bible Society and American Sunday School Union, for example, held more importance than may at first appear. The American version of Protestantism was a religion of a book, and to practice the religion required being able to read the book. In many a log cabin, parents taught their children by candlelight the rudiments of reading in the only book they had: a Bible from the American Bible Society. In many a frontier community, the Sunday school arrived well before the more expensive public school, and in the meantime provided children with weekly instruction in literacy.
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The wide variety of voluntary organizations themselves provided their members practice in exercising civic responsibilities. What is more, the collection of small donations from far-flung contributors, which then had to be accounted for and safely invested so as to yield an income, actually pioneered techniques for pooling capital in a society with a chronic shortage of capital. Nonprofit corporations as well as business enterprises helped shape the development of American capitalism, and women participated fully in the nonprofit sector.
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The social reforms embraced by the Evangelical United Front characteristically involved creating some form of personal discipline serving a goal of redemption. Prison reform serves as an example: No longer would the prison be intended only as a place to hold persons awaiting trial, coerce debt payment, or inflict retributive justice. Reformers reconceived the prison as corrective in function, as a “penitentiary” or “reformatory,” in the vocabulary they invented. Besides prisoners, other people who did not function as free moral agents might become objects of the reformers’ concern: alcoholics, children, slaves, the insane. The goal of the reformers in each case was to substitute for external constraints the inner discipline of morality. Some historians have interpreted the religious reformers as motivated simply by an impulse to impose “social control,” but it seems more accurate to describe their concern as redemptive, and more specifically the creation of responsible personal autonomy.
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Liberation and control represented two sides of the redemptive process as they conceived it. Christians who had achieved self-liberation and self-control through conversion not surprisingly often turned to a concern with the liberation and discipline of others.

The Evangelical United Front had no more able servant or advocate than Robert Baird. After training for the Presbyterian ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary, Baird spent the rest of his life in the service of benevolent associations. He labored to distribute Bibles, to fund a state public school system in New Jersey, and to establish Sunday schools throughout the nation. Beginning in 1834, he spent most of the next thirty years in Europe as an agent for the American and Foreign Christian Union, working to promote literacy and the temperance movement and to secure rights for Protestants in countries with Roman Catholic governments. Baird crossed the Atlantic eighteen times in an age when few leaders felt at home, as he did, on both sides of the ocean. In response to requests from European colleagues, he wrote his monumental book,
Religion in America
, first published in Scotland in 1843, then in New York in 1844, and subsequently translated into French, German, Dutch, and Swedish. Baird intended it to introduce European Protestants of his time to American religion; the book remains to expound the worldview of the nineteenth-century Evangelical United Front to us. In it Baird explained religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and America’s extraordinary religious diversity for the benefit of readers to whom all these seemed strange. He defended revivalism (though taking account of its abuses) and the voluntary benevolent associations. While broad-minded by the standards of his day, he did not hesitate to rank-order other religions, rating Catholicism superior to Unitarianism and Judaism superior to Mormonism.
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Like many others of his generation, Baird saw evangelical Protestantism as the legatee of Puritanism, the core of American culture, the source of American democratic institutions, the primary engine of economic and political progress, and ultimately the hope of the world. The American version of evangelical Protestantism represented, for him, what God hath wrought.

The religious awakenings of the early nineteenth century marshaled powerful energies in an age when few other social agencies in the United States had the capacity to do so. Baird’s Evangelical United Front organized its voluntary associations on a national, indeed international, level, at a time when little else in American society was organized, when there existed no nationwide business corporation save the Second Bank of the United States and no nationwide government bureaucracy save the Post Office. Indeed, the four major evangelical denominations together employed twice as many people, occupied twice as many premises, and raised at least three times as much money as the Post Office. The extent to which evangelical religion dominated communication in the early republic is most vividly exemplified by the fact that, per capita, twice as many Methodist sermons were heard in 1840 as there were letters received.
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The historian Richard Carwardine, after carefully estimating that about 40 percent of the U.S. population was “in close sympathy with evangelical Christianity” (not the same thing as belonging to a church), concludes, “This was the largest, and most formidable, subculture in American society.”
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It could only be a matter of time before the energies generated by religion began to make themselves manifest in politics.

VI

Old Elias Hicks had a farm on Long Island. When a young man he had traveled as an itinerant Quaker evangelist between Vermont and the Chesapeake, preaching the Inner Light, “that lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9). His sermons were spontaneous, their emotional power reinforced by his transparent sincerity. A decade after his death they would still tell the story of how, in Virginia, he courageously called upon a planter who had threatened to shoot him for preaching against the sin of slavery, and after repeated visits persuaded the man to set his people free.
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Throughout his life Hicks rigorously defended the right as he saw it: the austere Quaker tradition of refusing to compromise with worldliness. He insisted that principled persons should avoid consuming the products of slave labor, such as sugar, rice, or cotton textiles. Besides slavery, he denounced banks, politics, and the Erie Canal. (“If the Lord had intended there should be internal waterways, he would have placed them there.”) As for scientific learning, he considered it as “trivial” as “ribbons on a young woman’s head.”
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Elias Hicks had little time for the modern world; nothing really mattered to the old man except moral integrity. In the 1820s, he became the focal point of a controversy that irreparably split the American Society of Friends.

Ever since the seventeenth century, the Society of Friends (nicknamed “quakers” for their occasional emotional trances) had conceived themselves as a people apart. Within Protestantism, they were super-Protestants. Where Protestants demystified and simplified the Eucharist, Quakers did not observe it at all, nor did they practice baptism. Their silent meetings had no order of service. They wrote no systematic theology. Since both women and men possessed the divine Spirit, the Inner Light, they practiced a substantial degree of gender equality. They did not ordain clergy, though they “recorded” the fact that God’s Spirit particularly spoke through designated individuals. They dressed plainly and spoke plainly, using “thee” and “thou,” the familiar form of address, instead of “you,” considered more polite. They refused to serve in the armed forces. They refused to take oaths in court, on the grounds that one should tell the truth all the time, not just in special circumstances. But the international evangelical movement affected them in ways that two hundred years of persecution had never done. First in England, then in the United States, nineteenth-century Quakers began to share in the religious currents of their age. They started associating with non-Quakers in philanthropic organizations. Sometimes they seemed more interested in cooperating with other white evangelicals than in bearing uncompromising witness against slavery. They emphasized evangelical biblical teachings more and the Inner Light of individual conscience less. They began to speak of Jesus as Redeemer, to celebrate his atonement for sin, and even considered adopting a creedal confession of faith similar to that of other evangelical Protestants. Elias Hicks stood out against these trends. He also criticized those Quakers, chiefly in Philadelphia, who had adapted sufficiently to the ways of the world to become successful merchants and entrepreneurs.
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