America Aflame (6 page)

Joseph Smith discovering the Book of Mormon, 1827. (Courtesy of Robert T. Barrett, Bringham Young University)

Smith moved west with his growing band of followers, men and women much like himself with dreams to do well and good, though not yet blessed with success at either. They went first to Kirtland, Ohio, where he created a utopian settlement based upon principles of common property, and then to Missouri, where the Saints established a town, the Land of Zion, near Independence. But in this slave state, the Mormons' equanimity toward Indians and blacks roused suspicion, and their zealous industriousness generated rumors of a plan to take over Missouri. In 1833, mobs pushed the Mormons back across the Mississippi River into Illinois, where they regrouped yet again and built a new community, Nauvoo, which by the early 1840s boasted fifteen thousand inhabitants, making it the largest city in the state.

Their success and their disdain for the false religions surrounding them did not earn the Mormons their neighbors' admiration, but the greater trouble came from within the Mormon camp. When Smith revealed that God condoned polygamy, a group of Saints denounced him in a rival newspaper. Smith ordered the destruction of the newspaper, an action that resulted in his being arrested and taken to jail in nearby Carthage. A few days later a mob of two hundred murdered Smith and his brother and unleashed mayhem on his followers. The reduced Mormon band could no longer stay in Illinois. The decision fell to the new leader, Brigham Young, to lead the Saints to a land as far away from settlement as possible. Young concluded that the Mormons could not live among Gentiles. Separation was the only way. They would build their Zion, and to the devil with everyone else.

Young was forty-three years old at the time and looked like an unprepossessing Quaker farmer, a fairly short, stocky man with poor posture and long light brown hair. Not a charismatic presence, but, like Smith, he had a vision, and unlike his predecessor, he would make it a reality in the West.

Like many travelers west, Young had read up avidly on the territories. It appeared that the area around the Great Salt Lake was precisely the isolated oasis that the Saints sought. Towering mountains bordered it to the east, and deserts extended west and south. Guidebooks alluded to streams, good soil, and grass in the valley.

On February 17, 1846, Brigham Young stood on a wagon outside Nauvoo and informed the Saints of his plan to depart for this distant valley in a series of small parties, the first of which he would lead. He urged his followers to maintain order and be peaceful with any peoples encountered along the way. “If you do these things,” Young promised, “faith will abide in your hearts; and the angels of God will go with you, even as they went with the children of Israel when Moses led them from the land of Egypt.” Here on the flat plains of Illinois, the fulfillment of the dreams of Americans from John Winthrop forward would begin: the Chosen People going off to plant their City on a Hill.
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On the trail, they met up with mountain man Jim Bridger, who warned them that the Great Salt Lake rested not in a lush valley but in a desert. Bridger offered Young a thousand dollars for every bushel of corn he could grow there. Undaunted, an advance party arrived at the great valley on July 22, 1847. Their first glimpse of Zion was disappointing: “A broad and barren plain hemmed in by mountains, blistering in the burning rays of the midsummer sun. No waving fields, no swaying forests, no verdant meadows … but on all sides a seemingly interminable waste of sagebrush … the paradise of the lizard, the cricket and the rattlesnake.” But Jim Bridger would lose his bet. Almost immediately, the Saints planted crops, built a dam across what they dubbed City Creek, and watched the rain fall. When the first wave of migration ended that autumn, eighteen hundred Saints called the Great Salt Lake home. On this site, Young would build a great city and, as at Jerusalem, a great temple.
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Brigham Young was the latest in a long line of American prophets who held fast to the faith of a distinctive national destiny: that the United States was a resurrected Israel whose fulfillment was only a matter of time and the hard work of God's servants. These ideas permeated American society long before Young's odyssey. But not until the 1840s did the connection between westward migration and national destiny become an integral part of popular culture. And not until that time did the United States understand itself as an exemplar of faith and liberty—what Thomas Jefferson called a “standing monument and example”—and move to a more active role. An evangelical religion spawned an evangelical democracy.
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The Latter-day Saints demonstrated the creative possibilities of the Second Great Awakening. The movement's energy, however, could unhinge as well as bind together peoples and places. Its destructive potential was evident in the breakup of the major evangelical Protestant denominations beginning in the 1840s, an ominous portent of a larger national disintegration.

The Methodists, meeting in New York in June 1844, ordered Bishop James O. Andrew of Georgia to relinquish his office or his slaves. The demand touched off a bitter debate not ultimately resolved until 1854, but it effectively sundered the largest evangelical denomination in the country.

The Methodist breakup was not amicable, as sporadic violence drove dissenting ministers from pulpits in Missouri, Maryland, and Virginia. Each side accused the other of heresy. Southern Methodists charged their northern counterparts with “preaching what Christ never preached” in opposing slavery. Northern Methodists, in turn, alleged that southerners walked away from the church “to breed slaves for the market, to separate husband and wife, parents and children, in the face of the laws of God and nature.”
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The divorce of the Baptists resembled the breakup of the Methodists. The second-largest evangelical denomination foundered in 1844 when Georgia Baptists put forward the name of James Reeve, a slaveholder, as a missionary to the Indians. The Home Missionary Society rejected Reeve's nomination because he owned slaves. When the Baptist State Convention in Alabama demanded “the distinct, explicit avowal that slaveholders are eligible and entitled equally with nonslaveholders to all the privileges and immunities of their several unions,” the mission board replied that it could “never be a party to any arrangement which would imply approbation of slavery.” Southern Baptists, insulted by what they perceived as high-handed and un-Christian treatment, met in Augusta, Georgia, in May 1845 to create the Southern Baptist Convention. The other major evangelical Protestant denomination, the Presbyterians, split along sectional lines in stages, beginning as early as 1837 over a doctrinal dispute emanating from anti-slavery agitation among northern Presbyterians.
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For people of faith these internecine religious schisms were very troubling. If citizens could not get along within the fellowship of Christ, what did the future hold for the nation? South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun observed that the evangelical denominations “contributed greatly to strengthen the bonds of the Union.” If all bonds are loosed, he worried, “nothing will be left to hold the States together except force.” Kentucky senator Henry Clay wondered, “If our religious men cannot live together in peace, what can be expected of us politicians, very few of whom profess to be governed by the great principles of love?”
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The schism also ended the dialogue between sections. Former coreligionists split into hostile camps, each believing themselves the true bearer of the Gospel, and their former brethren its desecrator. Slavery, at the center of the denominational sundering, became the measure of all that differentiated North from South. For evangelical southerners, slavery was no sin and churches must not make social policy. For evangelical northerners, the belief in individual spiritual rights and personal religious activism made such involvement a Christian duty. Southerners now saw northern ministers and their churches as instruments of the abolition fiend, and northerners viewed southern clerics and their congregations as complicit in the sin of slavery. The sacred and secular were becoming much less distinct and poisoning each other.

It is difficult to measure the impact of the schisms across the body politic. The awakened were a minority, though their rhetoric, publications, and beliefs had impact far beyond their numbers. Issues of slavery, sectarian strife, and territorial expansion had a distinctive moral dimension and, in a Chosen Nation, it was hard not to invest all political questions with moral weight.

The two major political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, had revolved more around Andrew Jackson than Jesus Christ in the decade preceding the election of 1844. The Whigs were an ill-fitting (as it turned out) conglomeration united only in opposition to Jackson. If they had a philosophy, it was that of Kentuckian Henry Clay. Clay had an expansive vision for his country: to use the government and its wealth to enhance the nation's economy and strengthen the Union he dearly loved.

As Americans moved westward, Clay wondered, could democracy traverse a continent as easily as it had the eastern seaboard? As with most questions in the new nation, any answer was speculation. There were simply no precedents. But a country knitted together by internal improvements—canals and railroads—and by the commerce that would flow from such connections would have greater self-interest in staying intact. Clay called his program, appropriately, the American System, a scheme designed to make and maintain a nation.

Whigs described themselves as “sober, industrious, thrifty people.” Their ranks swelled with the awakened, for whom self-improvement and self-discipline were crucial values. The Democrats were wary of national government power and more supportive of individual liberties and states' rights than the Whigs; they did not support federal aid for internal improvements until the 1850s. They fiercely protected the wall between church and state, while the Whigs blurred the distinction. More egalitarian, more secular, and more open to immigrants, the Democrats benefited from the advance of universal white male suffrage in the 1820s and 1830s.
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By 1844, both parties had gotten religion. The fissures among evangelicals, the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, the slavery debates, and the settlement of the West placed religion at the forefront of American politics. Under normal circumstances, the Whigs, especially northern Whigs, would have been favored by most evangelicals. But Henry Clay, the Whig standard-bearer, was not the ideal presidential candidate for a time of evangelical agitation. Democrats seized on Clay's reputation as a duelist, gambler, imbiber of alcohol, and habitual violator of the Sabbath. According to Democratic sources, his “debaucheries and midnight revelries” were “too disgusting to report.” The Whigs attempted to balance the ticket by nominating New Jersey's Theodore Frelinghuysen, a devout and abstemious Methodist, for vice president. The Whigs also reminded voters of the Democrats' close ties to Romanism. Although the Whigs could hardly portray Clay as Virtue Incarnate, they larded descriptions of their nominee with an array of religious metaphors implying that he walked with the saints, even if he was not of their number. One broadside vowed that Clay was “in form a man … [but] LOOKED A GOD” and would be “the
redeemer
of the country.”
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James K. Polk, the Democratic presidential nominee, was not a religious man; his wife dragged him to church occasionally, but he never took membership. Polk's religion was work, and his work was to complete the continental empire begun by his idol, Thomas Jefferson, and advanced by his mentor, Andrew Jackson. Supporters, in fact, called him “Young Hickory.” If the Whigs could resurrect the errant Clay as the nation's redemptive angel, the Democrats could shape James K. Polk into a moral paragon with supra-mortal qualities.

Democrats staged mock baptisms, anointing the faithful “in the name of Andrew JACKSON, the Father! James K. POLK, the Son!! and TEXAS, the Holy Ghost!!!”—typically followed with copious sprinklings of whiskey or hard cider. Democrats, well aware of the importance of women in bringing indifferent husbands to Christ, offered the example of Polk's wife, the very Presbyterian Sarah Childress. They confided that Sarah served as a mentor of faith to her husband and ensured that he was “strictly a temperance man in everything—in liquor, tobacco, in eating, and in all respects.” Moreover, Polk found gambling abhorrent and was “an anti-duellist on Christian principles.” This marked one of the first occasions in American politics where the wife of a candidate became an active part of the campaign, an indication of how evangelical Protestantism helped to extend women's influence beyond the home. Democrats hoped that Sarah Childress's example would inspire women to evangelize their husbands to vote for James K. Polk.
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