These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  New, steam-powered machines could also spin and weave—and even weave in ornate, multicolored patterns. In 1802, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a French weaver, invented an automated loom. By feeding into his loom stiff paper cards with holes punched in them, he could instruct it to weave in any pattern he liked. Two decades later, the English mathematician Charles Babbage used Jacquard’s method to devise a machine that could “compute”; that is, it could make mathematical calculations. He called it the Difference Engine, a giant mechanical hand-cranked calculating machine that could tabulate any polynomial function. Then he invented another machine—he called it the Analytical Engine—that could apply the act of mechanical tabulation to solve any problem that involved logic. Babbage never built a working machine, but Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and the daughter of Lord Byron, later prepared a detailed description and analysis of the principles and promises of Babbage’s work, the first account of what would become, in the twentieth century, a general-purpose computer.11

  The textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, on the banks of the Merrimack River, were the first in the United States to use power looms. In the United States, with its democracy of numbers, a calculating computer, a machine that could count, would one day throw a wrench in the machinery of government. But long before that day came, Americans devised simpler machines. Watt jealously guarded his patents. In 1810, an American merchant named Francis Cabot Lowell toured England’s textile mills and made sketches from memory. In New England, working from those sketches, he designed his own machines and began raising money to build his own factory. Lowell died in 1817. His successors opened the Lowell mills on the Merrimack River in 1823. Every step, from carding to cloth, was done in the same set of factories: six brick buildings erected around a central clock tower. Inspired by the social reformer Robert Owen, Lowell had meant his system as a model, an alternative to the harsh conditions found in factories in England. He called it “a philanthropic manufacturing college.” The Lowell mill owners hired young women, transplants from New England farms. They worked twelve hours a day and attended lectures in the evening; they published a monthly magazine. But the utopia that Francis Cabot Lowell imagined did not last. By the 1830s, mill owners had cut wages and sped up the pace of work, and when women protested, they were replaced by men.12

  Factories accelerated production, canals acceleration transportation. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, took eight years to dig and covered 360 miles. Before the canal, the wagon trip from Buffalo to New York City took twenty days; on the canal, it took six. The price of goods plummeted; the standard of living soared. A mattress that cost fifty dollars in 1815, which meant that almost no one owned one, cost only five dollars in 1848.13 One stop on the Erie Canal was Rochester, a mill town on the shore of Lake Ontario that processed the grain from surrounding farms. In 1818, Rochester exported 26,000 barrels of flour a year. Its mills were small, made up of twelve to fifteen men working alongside a master, in a single room, in the master’s house. There was, as there had been in such shops for centuries, a great deal of drinking: workers were often paid not in wages but in liquor. Work wasn’t done by the clock but by the task. By the end of the 1820s, after the completion of the canal, these small shops had become bigger shops, typically divided into two rooms and employing many more men, each doing a smaller portion of the work, and generally working by the clock, for wages. “Work” came to mean not simply labor but a place, the factory or the banker’s or clerk’s office: a place men went every day for ten or twelve hours. “Home” was where women remained, and where what they did all day was no longer considered work—that is, they were not paid. The lives of women and men diverged. Wage workers became less and less skilled. Owners made more and more money. Rochester was exporting 200,000 barrels of flour a year by 1828 and, by end of the 1830s, half a million. In 1829, a newspaper editor who used the word “boss” had to define it (“a foreman or master workman, of modern coinage”). By the early 1830s, only the boss still worked in the shop; his employees worked in factories. Masters, or bosses, no longer lived in shops, or even in the neighborhoods of factories: they moved to new neighborhoods, enclaves of a new middle class.14

  That new middle class soon grew concerned about the unruliness of workers, and especially about their drinking. Inspired by a temperance crusade led by the revivalist Lyman Beecher, a group of mill owners formed the Rochester Society for the Promotion of Temperance. Its members pledged to give up all liquor and to stop paying their workers in alcohol. Swept up in the spirit of evangelical revival, they began to insist that their workers join their churches; and they ultimately fired those who did not. In this effort, they were led, principally, by their wives.

  The tent meetings of the Second Great Awakening had much in common with Jacksonian-era political rallies, but, where men dominated party politics, women dominated the revival movement. Women led the temperance movement, spurred to this particular crusade not least because drunken husbands tended to beat their wives. Few laws protected women from such assaults. Husbands addicted to drinking also spent their wages on liquor, leaving their children hungry. Since married women had no right to own property, they had no recourse under the law. Convincing men to give up alcohol seemed the best solution. But the movement was also a consequence of deeper and broader changes. With the separation of home from work there emerged an ideology of separate spheres: the public world of work and politics was the world of men; the private world of home and family was the world of women. Women, within this understanding, were the gentler sex, more nurturing, more loving, more moral. One advice manual, A Voice to the Married, told wives that they should make the home a haven for their husbands, “an Elysium to which he can flee and find rest from the story strife of a selfish world.” These changes in the family had begun before industrialization, but industrialization sped them up. Middle-class and wealthier women began having fewer children—an average of 3.6 children per woman in the 1830s, compared to 5.8 a generation earlier. No new method of contraception made this possible: declining fertility was the consequence of abstinence.15

  Lyman Beecher wielded enormous influence in this era of reform, and so did his indomitable daughter Catherine, who advocated for the education of girls and published a treatise on “domestic economy”—advice for housewives.16 But the most powerful preacher to this new middle class, and especially to its women, was Charles Grandison Finney.

  Finney had been born again in 1821, when he was twenty-nine, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him, as he put it, “like a wave of electricity.” He was ordained three years later by a female missionary society. He held big meetings and small, tent meetings and prayer groups. He looked his listeners in the eye. “A revival is not a miracle,” he said. “We are either marching towards heaven or towards hell. How is it with you?” Women didn’t always constitute the majority of converts, but their influence was felt on many who did convert. Another female missionary society invited Finney to Rochester in 1830, where he preached every night, and three times on Sunday, for six months. He preached to all classes, all sexes, and all ages but above all to women. Church membership doubled during Finney’s six-month stay in Rochester—driven by women. The vast majority of new joiners—more than 70 percent—followed the faith of their mothers but not of their fathers. One man complained after Finney visited: “He stuffed my wife with tracts, and alarmed her fears, and nothing short of meetings, day and night, could atone for the many fold sins my poor, simple spouse had committed, and at the same time, she made the miraculous discovery, that she had been ‘unevenly yoked.’” By exercising their power as moral reformers, the wives and daughters of factory owners brought their men into churches. Factory owners began posting job signs that read “None but temperate men need apply.” They even paid their workers to go to church. The revival was, for many Americans, heartfelt and abiding. But for many others, it was not. As one Rochester millworker said, “I don’t give a damn, I get five dollars more in a month than before I got religio
n.”17

  If the sincerity of converts was often dubious, another kind of faith was taking deeper root in the 1820s, an evangelical faith in technological progress, an unquestioning conviction that each new machine was making the world better. That faith had a special place in the United States, as if machines had a distinctive destiny on the American continent. In prints and paintings, “Progress” appeared as a steam-powered locomotive, chugging across the continent, unstoppable. Writers celebrated inventors as “Men of Progress” and “Conquerors of Nature” and lauded their machines as far worthier than poetry. The triumph of the sciences over the arts meant the defeat of the ancients by the moderns. The genius of Eli Whitney, hero of modernity, was said to rival that of Shakespeare; the head of the U.S. Patent Office declared the steamboat “a mightier epic” than the Iliad.18

  In 1829, Jacob Bigelow, the Rumford Professor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at Harvard, delivered a series of lectures called “The Elements of Technology.” Before Bigelow, “technology” had meant the arts, mostly the mechanical arts. Bigelow used the word to mean the application of science for the benefit of society. For him, the “march of improvement” amounted to a kind of mechanical millennialism. “Next to the influence of Christianity on our moral nature,” he later proclaimed, technology “has had a leading sway in promoting the progress and happiness of our race.” His critics charged him with preaching “the gospel of machinery.”19

  The Welshman Thomas Carlyle, calling the era “the Age of Machinery,” complained that faith in machines had grown into a religious delusion, as wrong and as dangerous as a belief in witchcraft. Carlyle argued that people like Bigelow, who believed that machines liberate mankind, made a grave error; machines are prisons. “Free in hand and foot, we are shackled in heart and soul with far straighter than feudal chains,” Carlyle insisted, “fettered by chains of our own forging.”20 America writers, refuting Carlyle, argued that the age of machinery was itself making possible the rise of democracy. In 1831, an Ohio lawyer named Timothy Walker, replying to Carlyle, claimed that by liberating the ordinary man from the drudgery that would otherwise prohibit his full political participation, machines drive democracy.21

  Opponents of Andrew Jackson had considered his presidency not progress but decay. “The Republic has degenerated into a Democracy,” one Richmond newspaper declared in 1834.22 To Jackson’s supporters, his election marked not degeneration but a new stage in the history of progress. Nowhere was this argument made more forcefully, or more influentially, than in George Bancroft’s History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present. The book itself, reviewers noted, voted for Jackson. The spread of evangelical Christianity, the invention of new machines, and the rise of American democracy convinced Bancroft that “humanism is steady advancing,” and that “the advance of liberty and justice is certain.” That advance, men like Bancroft and Jackson believed, required Americans to march across the continent, to carry these improvements from east to west, the way Jefferson had pictured it. Democracy, John O’Sullivan, a New York lawyer and Democratic editor, argued in 1839, is nothing more or less than “Christianity in its earthly aspect.” O’Sullivan would later coin the term “manifest destiny” to describe this set of beliefs, the idea that the people of the United States were fated “to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given for the development of the great experiment of liberty.”23

  To evangelical Democrats, Democracy, Christianity, and technology were levers of the same machine. And yet, all along, there were critics and dissenters and objectors who saw, in the soul of the people, in the march of progress, in the unending chain of machines, in the seeming forward movement of history, little but violence and backwardness and a great crushing of men, women, and children. “Oh, America, America,” Maria Stewart cried, “foul and indelible is thy stain!”24

  STEWART HAD STUDIED the Bible from childhood, a study she kept up her whole life, even as she scrubbed other people’s houses and washed other people’s clothes. “While my hands are toiling for their daily sustenance,” she wrote, “my heart is most generally meditating upon its divine truths.”25 She considered slavery a sin. She took her inspiration from Scripture. “I have borrowed much of my language from the holy Bible,” she said.26 But she also borrowed much of her language—especially the language of rights—from the Declaration of Independence. That the revival of Christianity coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, an anniversary made all the more mystical when the news spread that both Jefferson and Adams had died that very day, July 4, 1826, as if by the hand of God, meant that the Declaration itself took on a religious cast. The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion.

  To say that this marked a turn away from the spirit of the nation’s founding is to wildly understate the case. The United States was founded during the most secular era in American history, either before or since. In the late eighteenth century, church membership was low, and anticlerical feeling was high. It is no accident that the Constitution does not mention God. Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush wondered, politely, whether this error might be corrected, assuming it to have been an oversight. “Perhaps an acknowledgement might be made of his goodness or of his providence in the proposed amendments,” he urged.27 No correction was made.

  An unidentified woman, about the age of Maria W. Stewart when she first wrote for the Liberator, posed for a daguerreotype, holding a book, an emblem of her learnedness. The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders. The Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a religion, James Madison having argued that to establish a religion would be “to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.”28 These were neither casual omissions nor accidents; they represented an intentional disavowal of a constitutional relationship between church and state, a disavowal that was not infrequently specifically stated. In 1797, John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, securing the release of American captives in North Africa, and promising that the United States would not engage in a holy war with Islam because “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”29

  But during the Second Great Awakening, evangelicals recast the nation’s origins as avowedly Christian. “Upon what was America founded?” Maria Stewart asked, and answered, “Upon religion and pure principles.”30 Lyman Beecher argued that the Republic, “in its constitution and laws, is of heavenly origin.”31 Nearly everything took on a religious cast during the revival, not least because of the proliferation of preachers. In 1775, there had been 1,800 ministers in the United States; by 1845, there were more than 40,000.32 They were Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Universalist, and more, very much the flowering of religious expression that Madison had predicted would result from the prohibition of an established religion. The separation of church and state allowed religion to thrive; that was one of its intentions. Lacking an established state religion, Americans founded new sects, from Shakers to Mormons, and rival Protestant denominations sprung up in town after town. Increasingly, the only unifying, national religion was a civil religion, a belief in the American creed. This faith bound the nation together, and provided extraordinary political stability in an era of astonishing change, but it also tied it to the past, in ways that often proved crippling. In 1816, when Jefferson was seventy-three and the awakening was just beginning, he warned against worshipping the men of his generation. “This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead,” he wrote: “. . . laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past. “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious
reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” Jefferson conceded. But when they do, “They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.”33

  Abolitionists adopted a different posture. They didn’t worship the founders; they judged them. In the spring of 1829, William Lloyd Garrison, who’d entered the evangelical movement as an advocate of temperance and had only lately begun to concern himself with the problem of slavery, was asked to deliver a Fourth of July address before a Massachusetts branch of the Colonization Society, at the Park Street Church in Boston. He declared that the holiday was filled with “hypocritical cant about the inalienable rights of man.”34

  This complicated position, a sense of the divinity of the Declaration of Independence, mixed with fury at the founders themselves, came, above all, from black churches, like the church where Maria Stewart and her husband were married, the African Meeting House on Belknap Street, in Boston’s free black neighborhood, on a slope of Beacon Hill known as “Nigger Hill.”35 Their friend David Walker, a tall, freeborn man from North Carolina, lived not far from the meetinghouse, and kept a slop shop on Brattle Street, selling gear to seamen; he likely traded with James W. Stewart, who earned his living outfitting ships. Walker was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. His father was a slave, his mother a free black woman. Sometime between 1810 and 1820, he’d moved from Wilmington to Charleston, South Carolina, probably drawn to its free black community and to its church. At the very beginning of the revival, in 1816, the African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in Philadelphia. Charleston opened an AME church in 1817; Walker joined.