America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  The movement west seemed inexorable. Even the great contrarian Henry David Thoreau found himself drawn to a western route in meanderings from his home in Concord: “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.” For the awakened, the migration affirmed God’s plan for America. The destiny of these transplanted Europeans lay in peopling a continent. They perceived this destiny as a fulfillment, not a conquest. “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,” wrote John Adams, “as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” The West was more than a place; it was a sacred trust that God held until His Chosen People arrived to spread His faith and His government over the land.24

  Migration meant more than moving from one place to another; it became a holy work to turn virgin soil and to grow republican ideals and Christian virtues. Many nineteenth-century Americans believed they could discern the will of Providence in daily events, and in these migrations they perceived a divine destiny. As Americans settled new land, they expiated old sins and edged closer to the day of the coming of the Lord. These sentiments blended the sacred with the secular and transcended the evangelical community to engage most Americans. Thomas Jefferson visualized the providential nature of migration with his proposal for the Great Seal of the United States, a portrait of “the children of Israel, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night”—the new nation inexorably moving toward Canaan.25

  Moving also offered an opportunity to perfect America, to synthesize the best of the old settlements to create a new, more perfect Union. In this western crucible “pride and jealousy gave way to natural yearnings of the human heart for society.… Take the Virginian from his plantation or the Yankee from his boat and harpoon,… and place him in the wilderness, with an axe in his hand and rifle on this shoulders, and he soon becomes a different man; his national character will burst the chains of local habit.” It was the process of casting off the provincialism of the past and becoming an American.26

  John L. O’Sullivan, a Harvard-educated journalist, coined a phrase for this sense of geographic entitlement and providential oversight when he wrote in July 1845 of “our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” He did not mean it in a belligerent way, but rather as a sacred responsibility to spread America’s government and religion far and wide in order to save all mankind.27

  The westward trek was odyssey, ordeal, and mission. The Mormons offered the best proof of just how distinctively American was this journey, though O’Sullivan and most other Americans would not have singled them out as representative of anything except trouble. The Mormons sought the ultimate West: the establishment of a new Zion, a literal heaven on earth. From the first New England settlements, the building of a perfect society, defying the Augustinian dictum about the city of God and the secular realm as distinctive spheres, had burrowed into the national consciousness through the churches, political discourse, and literature. The Mormons would realize this dream.28

  Of all the varied movements in American society during the first half of the nineteenth century, the Mormons perhaps best embodied the culture of that era: deeply spiritual in a religious age, hardworking in a nation where the work ethic assumed the proportions of an Eleventh Commandment, and willing to endure hardship in pursuit of their dream. While they cherished the importance of the individual conversion, the Mormons believed strongly in the group as both a shield of protection and an engine of advancement, principles that new settlements west of the Appalachians had enshrined. It was a most optimistic faith in the most optimistic country; its founding story was America’s story: the progressive triumph of God’s power over evil, and the belief that America was the Lord’s Zion, and that this Zion would be located somewhere in the western Eden. Yet this most American group was also among the most persecuted. They stretched Americans’ tolerance in religious affairs, but their primary “sin” was carrying nineteenth-century American culture to its logical conclusion. At what point did hard work become obsession? How much should communal cohesion overwhelm individual choice? When did religious freedom slide into heresy?

  Their secondary sin was success. Mid-nineteenth-century America was a crucible for all sorts of ideas and beliefs. Learned individuals measured and counted bumps on peoples’ heads to determine their personality, and they called it science. Leading literary lights left their comfortable homes and villages to establish rural communes where members exchanged work roles, money, and each other’s spouses, and they called it utopia. Physicians advocated immersions in hot and cold water, emulsions of mercury, and diets heavy on crackers as body-cleansing regimens, and they called it therapy. Some people believed that biblical numerology predicted the end of the world—the date shifted, but 1843 seemed to be most likely—and they called this revelation. All of these movements crashed, most sooner, some later. Just as personal failure reflected an individual character flaw, so the failure of movements indicated their shaky underpinnings. Such, most assumed, would be the case with the Latter-day Saints. But they did not fail; and their detractors expressed both wonder and anger at their persistence. If the Mormons succeeded, then there must be something to their theology. Just as failure was the measure of men, so too was success. Even more.

  In the 1820s, across western Vermont, into adjacent New York State, and on the shores of the Great Lakes into the Middle West, the fires of religious enthusiasm stirred thousands of residents, who carried the flames with them as they migrated westward. The western part of New York State was so singed by the phenomenon that people called it the “burnt” district. In catching this spirit, young Joseph Smith was not unlike myriad other youngsters, wrestling with changes in their bodies and the assault of new ideas on their minds, the wild blending of the occult and the Christian. Daniel Hendrix, a neighbor, thought young Joe “was the most ragged, lazy fellow in the place, and that is saying a good deal.” His very appearance portended failure: “I can see him now in my mind’s eye,” Hendrix related, “with his torn and patched trousers, his calico shirt as dirty and black as the earth, and his uncombed hair sticking through the holes in his old battered hat.” In the dead of winter, young Joseph, so poor, or so oblivious, trudged through the snow and slush with paper-thin shoes. Yet he never seemed moody or resentful and made friends easily. Above all, everyone agreed, Joseph had “a fertile imagination. He never could tell a common occurrence in his daily life without embellishing the story with his imagination.”29

  The story he told of one day in 1820 was about his sudden conversion—not a unique experience in the overheated religious environment—and the appearance of two bright angels who told him that all existing religious beliefs were false: “I asked the personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right.… And which I should join. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong, and … all their Creeds were an abomination in his sight.” It was a feeling many spiritual Americans experienced, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in his 1832 “Divinity School Address,” lamented the emptiness of the contemporary church. For Emerson, “God is, not was;… He speaketh, not spake,” and “the gleams which flash across my mind” were contemporary revelation. But when the fourteen-year-old Joseph confided his visions to a Methodist minister, “he treated my communication not only lightly but with great contempt, saying it was all of the Devil, that there was no such thing as visions or revelations in these days.”30

  The angel Moroni told young Joseph where to find a book written on gold plates accompanied by special stones that would enable him to translate the tablets. The prophet Mormon and his son Moroni, survivors of a lost tribe of Israel, had written on the plates. The plates revealed the history of the tribe and predicted the emergence of a new prophet, Joseph Smith.

  The prophet began modestly, con
ducting healing ceremonies in the neighborhood and offering predictions about politics and souls. He forecast that the United States would eventually fall into a civil war that would begin in South Carolina. Smith and his followers, like Emerson, sought perfection—to live the life that God commanded; to live the life of Truth as detailed in the Book of Mormon, the Bible (numerous passages of which appeared in the Book of Mormon), and Smith’s writings. In common with other movements at the time, Mormons abstained from alcohol and tobacco as part of the personal regimen of moving toward perfection. Smith believed that his mission was to build a new Zion in America where the thousand-year reign of Christ would begin: “We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes, that Zion will be built upon this [American] continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth, and that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory.” Only by being perfect could the Mormons realize this promise. It was a difficult task that required the utmost discipline and adherence to the faith.31

  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.32

  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.33

  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.34

  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.”35

  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.36

  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 togethe
r in peace, what can be expected of us politicians, very few of whom profess to be governed by the great principles of love?”37

  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.