American Experiment (90 page)

Religious teachings and methods had to change before they could appeal to the frontier men and women who often disdained church hierarchies, formal worship services, and an intellectual clergy. Yet settlers on the frontier yearned for the stability, community, and comfort of religion. Presbyterians were the first Protestants to minister to western settlers, sending missionaries to the West during the French and Indian War of 1756. To bring people together from scattered settlements to listen to ministers, Presbyterians created the camp meeting. Two Presbyterian
ministers, James McGready and Barton W. Stone, organized the famous Cane Ridge Revival in Kentucky.

It was the apogee of the Great Revival at the turn of the century—ten to twenty thousand people gathering in Bourbon County to hear dozens of preachers—Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist—all speaking together from platforms, wagons, stumps, and logs. Between one and three thousand people were “brought to the ground,” or experienced conversion, at Cane Ridge. Kentucky ministers carried the revival message and camp meeting method to the Western Reserve, where Baptists and Methodists, but not Presbyterians, drew the most converts from the Awakening.

The Presbyterians fell behind in the struggle to save souls on the frontier, but came to scorn the extreme emotionalism of the western revivals. Although the first to use the camp meeting, they required a trained and educated ministry and a rigid presbyterial polity. The presbyterial governance took disciplinary measures against ministers who led emotional meetings, and in 1837-38 Presbyterians split into Old School, or consistent Calvinists who clung to the doctrine of limited election, and New School, or Arminians who challenged the Old School on election and free will. Between 1834 and 1836, the church lost 27,000 members. Its influence, however, remained greater than its membership, for it appealed to the rising industrial and commercial classes.

Methodists and Baptists preached salvation for all. God would grant salvation if persons repented and pledged their lives to service. This emphasis on voluntary individual choice appealed to the independent frontiersmen, and found its most concrete and dramatic form in the revival, designed to stir sinners to repentance. The Methodists and Baptists had begun in America as dissenting churches, never enjoying state support. With clergy and workers from the frontier folk—Methodists employed itinerant ministers—they grew with the country.

The most visible churchman was the circuit rider. Of all the religious men on the frontier, he was among the best known and the best loved. With his wide-brimmed light fur hat, high collar, long waistcoat, short breeches, and stockings, he could be spotted a mile away as he galloped on horseback to cabins on his hundred-mile circuit. Each rider carried the Bible and Wesley’s
Sermons
, which he might read as he rode. Priding himself on being a graduate of “Brush College,” the school of practical experience, a rider boasted of knowing all the forests and streams of his area so that he could reach his destination on time. For four years, the devoted preacher had to ride his circuit, spreading the gospel and ministering to the people as he preached every day in the week, twice on
Saturday, and twice on Sunday. The presiding elder kept track of the rider’s punctuality, for a crowd might be waiting, a crowd that would not return if a rider were late.

During the “harvest time of Methodism,” 1820, circuit riders held one thousand camp meetings throughout the country. Multitudes, trying to escape the loneliness of the frontier, would gather to sit on planks laid across tree stumps at the meeting place. Bonfires illuminated the night as visiting clergy preached. “The uncertain light upon the tremulous foliage…the solemn chanting of hymns swelling and falling in the night wind; the impassioned exhortations” were not the reasoned, written sermons of the eastern ministers but electrifying appeals to people with deep spiritual needs.

Baptists recruited local persons as clergy to reach frontier people, in the form of farmer-preachers who had “received the call” and been “raised up” by their churches with a license to preach. The Council of Brethren would then examine a preacher and ordain him by prayer. The preachers were unpaid, self-supporting, and mobile, able to move with their congregations to new areas or back into the unchurched older areas without financial support or direction except from the Baptist regional associations. The principal difference from Methodism was the adherence to baptism by immersion, but frontier preachers debated election, grace, and free will, at times widening the difference between denominations.

Peter Cartwright, a famous Methodist circuit rider, ministered to Methodist and Baptist frontier people. Cartwright had grown up in the wilds of Logan County, Kentucky. Though his mother was a devout Methodist, he had loved horse racing, card-playing, and dancing until his conversion at a camp meeting. Soon after receiving an exhorter’s license at age seventeen, he became a traveling preacher, riding the Red River Circuit in Kentucky, the Waynesville Circuit in Tennessee, the Salt River and Shelbyville Circuit in Indiana, and the Scioto Circuit in Ohio. He continued in Kentucky and Tennessee until 1824, when he requested the Sangamon Circuit in Illinois, owing to his hatred of slavery. During his fifty years of preaching Methodism against rival sects, he was forty-five years a presiding elder, twice a member of the Illinois legislature, and in 1846 ran for the United States Congress against Abraham Lincoln on the issue of Lincoln’s “infidelism.”

Cartwright wrote in his autobiography of the time he was to preach in an old Baptist church. “When I came,” Cartwright remembered, “there was a very large congregation. While I was preaching, the power of God fell on the assembly, and there was an awful shaking among the dry bones. Several fell to the floor and cried for mercy. …I believe if I had opened
the doors of the Church then, all of them would have joined the Methodist Church.” But Cartwright had to ride on, and the Baptists sent three preachers to the place to retrieve Cartwright’s twenty-three converts. “For fear these preachers would run my converts into the water before I could come round,” the Methodists summoned Cartwright to return. He presented himself to the Baptist preacher for membership. “At the last moment, however, in the hearing of all, he declared that he still believed in infant sprinkling, forcing the Baptist minister to reject him. At the sight of his rejection, his twenty-three converts returned to the Methodist fold.” Theological controversy ran deep on the frontier. Evangelical Protestantism grew so strong on the frontier that by 1850 it was the national religion, claiming 4 million of a population of 27 million. The Methodists, with 1,324,000 members, were the largest denomination; the Baptists were second, with 815,000 members in primarily rural and southern areas—the ten most populous Baptist states were slave states in 1854. Presbyterians were third with 487,000 members; Congregationalists fourth with 197,000; Lutherans fifth with 163,000. In 1800, one of every fifteen Americans belonged to a church; by 1850, one of every six. New England experienced a Second Great Awakening, in the form of revivals, renewed spiritual seriousness, and new efforts at moral reformation. Settled ministers, not itinerants as on the frontier, conducted sober revivals before middle- and upper-class congregations. The region continued to produce brilliant ministerial leadership. Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the New England divine who had begun the first Great Awakening, served as president of Yale College from 1795 until 1817 and won Yale over from rationalism to Calvinism. As a student he had tutored at Yale and had devoted himself to the dignified asceticism of the earlier Puritan ministers, eating only two mouthfuls of food at dinner, sleeping on the floor, studying long hours each day. His harsh regimen may have contributed to his almost total loss of eyesight. For even this he was thankful, saying it helped him develop the powers of observation he used to describe the people and country in his
Travels in New England and New York
, and also caused him to shift emphasis in his lectures to Yale students from doctrine and scholarship to pastoral care. There is a certainty man will sin, Dwight preached, but he has the power not to. He asked for a simple yes-or-no conversion decision from his students, managing to convert over one-third of Yale students to a religious life.

Dwight’s students carried the idea of revivals to their own churches. Nathaniel Taylor and Lyman Beecher, Dwight’s most famous students, and others led a Calvinistic revivalism in the Congregational colleges of New England. Their teachings had political implications, as they sought to
preserve religion and morality against the threat they perceived in Jeffersonian Republicanism and the popular-democratic, egalitarian tendencies it embodied. Any change in the social order, according to Dwight, had to begin with the moral reform of the individual. He had founded what came to be called the New Haven theology to make Calvinism more approachable to those well versed in Christianity. Salvation, as Calvinism had stressed, was for the few.

Such doctrines had little appeal to urban workers, many of whom were Roman Catholic immigrants from Ireland. Catholics had numbered only about 25,000 at the time of the Revolutionary War. By 1850, the Roman Catholic Church in America numbered 1,750,000 adherents—preponderantly Irish, collected mainly in the great eastern cities, as the Irish, ravaged by land enclosure and the potato famine at home, emigrated to the United States.

Even Catholicism fragmented in the pluralistic American environment. In the early national period, the hierarchy of the Church was largely French owing to the influx of priests fleeing the French Revolution. The cultured, aristocratic French clerics distrusted the poor Irish immigrants who began to swell their congregations, and the Irish communicants liked French priests no better. They wanted their own clergy. Roman Catholic churches had followed the earlier Protestant model of putting parochial affairs—title to church property—under the control of the laity; Catholics felt they should also select their spiritual leaders. Rome refused to allow this “trusteeism,” but the Irish did not force the issue; their priests began to replace French clergy, in any case, as a consequence of their numbers. The hierarchy of the Church was a path of advancement to the ambitious Irish immigrant, with many an Irish man becoming a priest and many an Irish woman a nun.

Roman Catholics found religious freedom but not toleration in America. Native groups pressed them to assimilate, to abandon their alleged allegiance to a foreign potentate, even to renounce their Catholicism itself. In particular, the Irish immigrants—numerous, visible, filling the boarding-houses and tenements of the great eastern cities—were vulnerable to Protestant hoodlums. In 1831, a mob burned down St. Mary’s Catholic Church in New York City, and two years later another group attacked the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The convent included a popular school run by cultured Ursuline nuns that had attracted the daughters of a number of wealthy Protestant families, particularly Unitarians rebelling against the rigid Congregationalism of the public school system. The popularity of the Ursuline school had angered the orthodox ministers of Boston, especially Lyman Beecher, pastor of Hanover Street Church, who
directed such fiery sermons against Catholics that his church became known as the Brimstone Corner.

After a rumor circulated in Boston newspapers that a nun had tried to escape from the convent and been detained against her will, Beecher delivered three violently anti-Catholic sermons in three churches in Boston. Other clergy followed his lead. Next day a mob stormed the imposing brick convent school on Ploughed Hill in Charlestown and set it on fire. The following night the mob returned to burn fences and trees around the school. Troops were called in to prevent an assault on the nearby Catholic church.

Rioting against Catholics broke out in Philadelphia in 1844, leaving thirteen persons killed, many injured, a Catholic seminary, two churches, and blocks of Catholic homes in ruins. Outbursts continued into the 1850s; mobs killed ten men in St. Louis, Missouri, and one hundred Catholics on “Bloody Monday” in Louisville, Kentucky. The Know-Nothing political party was forming to oppose what they saw as the rise of Catholic influence in the schools and in politics.

Bigotry found other targets besides Catholicism. From the day that Joseph Smith, a moody teenager, told the clergy in his western New York town that he had seen a vision in the nearby woods, and had been instructed to join no church but wait for the fullness of the gospel to be revealed to him, he was treated with harsh words. In 1830 he established his own church with six members and published
The Book of Mormon
, reportedly drawn from golden tablets revealed to him from on high. As the little band slowly expanded amid the fast-changing, booming economy of the Erie Canal area, it aroused hatred for its doctrines and for its alien practices—baptism of the dead, marriage for eternity, rule by an ecclesiastical oligarchy, and above all its rumored polygamy. Moving to Kirtland, Ohio, and then to Missouri, the Mormons could not escape from persecution. The governor of Missouri announced that they must be treated as enemies and either driven from the state or exterminated. Now numbering 12,000 souls, the Mormons moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they built a large Mormon temple, mills, foundries, power and navigation dams, community farms, even hotels. Here Smith ruled grandly, and apparently took unto himself (though secretly) a number of wives. But his virile leadership began to deteriorate into megalomania, and when his private army destroyed the offices of a newspaper critical of the sect, he and his brother were thrown into a Carthage jail, surrounded by a mob, and shot dead. A year later a mob of 1,500 armed ruffians besieged Nauvoo and killed Mormons and non-Mormons alike. The surviving Mormons, now under the leadership of Brigham Young, fled as Illinois frontiersmen occupied
and looted the ruined town. Young, who had grown up in western New York among the fiery revivals of the Methodists and then converted to Mormonism, organized the survivors for the long trek west to Utah. Only in this final chosen land did the Mormons find some refuge from religious hatred.