American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  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.

  Clearly there were sharp limits to American tolerance of religious diversity, and boundaries to the effective reach of the First Amendment. Protestants beset Catholics; Methodists persecuted Mormons; the head of the Mormons assaulted an opposing newspaper; Protestant sects “stole” members from one another. Yet the vast number of Americans who attended church and camp meeting did so without harassment. The various sects seemed indeed to thrive amid competition—a competition, Sidney Mead wrote, “that helped to generate the tremendous energies, heroic sacrifices, great devotion to the cause, and a kind of stubborn, plodding work under great handicaps, that transformed the religious complexion of the nation.” Such competition could thrive only in an environment of liberty.

  There was as well a latent but powerful strand of egalitarianism in American Protestantism. By the 1830s and the 1840s this moral tradition was confronting slavery more and more directly. Theodore Weld, a zealous convert of Charles Finney’s, had traveled to Ohio in 1829 as an agent of the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions, looking for a site to build a western manual labor theological seminary. The place chosen in southern Ohio was Cincinnati, where the society established Lane Seminary and called as its first president Lyman Beecher.

  While Beecher was absent on a fund-raising tour in 1834, several Lane students, led by Weld, conducted an antislavery revival meeting to debate immediate abolition or colonization. The decision was for emancipation. When Beecher returned to find the trustees angered over the meetings, he dissolved the antislavery society, and Lane rebels withdrew in 1835 to found Oberlin College. Charles G. Finney was its first professor of theology and later president. Weld’s band of followers also founded the Ohio State Abolition Society and determined to “burn down by backfires the city.” So aroused was the populace by revival meetings against slavery that within one year the Ohio State Abolition Society swelled to 15,000.

  If to many church members slavery was a sin and an evil, for others abolitionism was worse. The issue began to divide churches into northern and southern wings, although the Roman Catholic Church stood largely aloof from the controversy. The main plank in the abolitionists’ platform asserted that slaveholding and even allowing slavery to persist were sins. “Faith Without Works Is Dead,” preached Weld, as abolitionists began to call more and more for action, for immediate repentance and immediate freedom for the slave. The Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier spoke for many church members when he wrote: “We do not talk of gradual abolition, because, as Christians, we find no authority for advocating a gradual relinquishment of sin. We say to slaveholders—Repent Now—today—Immediately; just as we say to the intemperate—‘Break off from your vice at once—touch not—taste not—handle not—from henceforth forever…’ Such is our doctrine of immediate emancipation. A doctrine founded on God’s eternal Truth—plain, simple and perfect.”

  SCHOOLS: THE “TEMPLES OF FREEDOM”

  The cultural change that touched and transformed most Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century was the emergence of a common, uniform, public school system. Two paradoxes marked this transforming change. It was an experiment in pure socialism, if socialism is defined as governmental ownership of certain facilities, and governmental hiring and firing of persons employed in those facilities, in order to carry out purposes of the state. The government was taking over not an impersonal service like a communications or transportation system, but the education of innocent and vulnerable children handed over by their parents to the tender mercies of Leviathan. In an era before socialism became an ideological issue within and among nations, this particular socialist experiment was conducted in other guises and for other purposes.

  But what purposes? Herein lies a second paradox. The political, educational, religious, and intellectual leaders who brought about this transformation had diverse goals, so that a conflict of purpose centrally affected the formative period of education and has affected it ever since.

  For some, common school education was intended to serve the political needs and purposes of the new republic. In his Farewell Address George Washington had urged the people to promote, “as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” Jefferson made the point more pithily: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Some leaders stressed the practical need to educate the “jurors, magistrates, legislators, governors” who would run the new republic. It was argued too that as a matter of republican principle, “the education of the whole becomes the first interest of all. ” Or as Governor Edward Everett said, “…the utmost practicable extension should be given to a system of education, which will confer on every citizen the capacity of deriving knowledge, with readiness and accuracy, from books and documents.”

  For others, however, education as part of the republican experiment raised a more profound question—what were the purposes of the republic? Those who answered with the classic goals of “liberty and equality,” as many did, believed that popular or universal education was vital to these purposes. Schoolhouses were seen as “Temples of Freedom,” as both the source and the guardian of liberty. Even higher hopes were held for education as a product and protector of equality, especially in the light of the educational privileges of the elites. William Manning, the Billerica tavernkeeper, went to the heart of the matter: “Larning is of the greatest importance to the seport of a free government,” he wrote, “& to prevent this the few are always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national aca-dimyes & grammer schooles, in ordir to make places for men to live without work, & so strengthen their party. But are always opposed to cheep schools & woman schooles, the ondly or prinsaple means by which larning is spred amongue the Many.” This view, which was too strong for even the Jeffersonian press to print, anticipated the egalitarian thrust of the 1830s.

  Still others looked on schooling as a means of achieving diverse goals or changes: as the way toward moral regeneration, o
r at least curbing vice; as an agency for inculcating patriotic values; as a training ground for republican leadership; as a practical preparation for earning a better livelihood. Education for leadership had a special appeal to early republicans, in the absence of the kind of aristocratic system that took care of the training of princes in monarchies. In providing for three years of elementary public education for all children, Jefferson’s “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” aimed at selecting potential leaders from the mass of the people.

  Still other Americans, usually Federalist or Whig, sometimes Republican or Democratic, had a less elevated view of the purpose of schooling. Their aim was to control and discipline the children of an unruly, democratic people. Heirs to the Framers, who feared faction, disorder, and turbulence, these persons saw the public school less as a means of expressing and realizing the aspirations of the people, more as a means of carrying out the purposes of the state. Some radicals of the time understood this basic purpose. Defining the attitudes of certain of the workingmen’s groups of the 1830s, Rush Welter wrote: “Whereas republican educational institutions had been intended to serve the needs of the people, democratic institutions were much more likely to respond to their wants.”Doubtless too, many parents were happy to let the schools take over the function of discipline, or at least of inculcation of proper values.

  The “Common School Awakening” of the 1830s reflected a sharp diversity of purpose. The upper-class leaders of the movement wanted to provide a free elementary education for all white children, to create a trained educational profession adhering to a single standard, and to establish state control over local schools. States could then create uniform criteria for buildings, curricula, and teachers. States could also enforce the attendance of children. While leaders wanted social control, supporters of the movement believed advancement would come with common schooling. In educational opportunity the lot of the worker had declined since colonial times. Colonial authorities had bound out orphans, children of indentured servants, and even four- and five-year-olds as apprentices to learn a trade with a master; but apprenticeship faded with the onset of mechanization in the North and slavery in the South. Finding their wages, businesses, and status undermined by industrialization, skilled workers and small shopkeepers wanted their children to attend better schools, if possible with the scions of the wealthy.