Mostly, however, the men who composed the Whig Party were united only by their hatred of Jackson. The three leading Whigs—Clay, Calhoun, and Webster—could not agree on the most pressing issue of the day, slavery. Webster hated it, attacking the peculiar institution at every opportunity, although he also embraced compromises that, he thought, might put slavery on the road to extinction. Calhoun, on the other end of the spectrum, defended slavery with the most radical arguments.2 Clay adopted a firm position: he was both for it and against it. One other thing they had in common was a shared view that the best men should rule—the notion that educated, landed elites were best suited to govern by virtue of their character. In the age of the common man, such views were doomed.
Clay emerged as the chief spokesman for the new party. He was clearly the most recognizable, had a sterling reputation as an influence in both the House and Senate, had drafted the famous Missouri Compromise, and represented the West or, at least, sections of the West. Clay argued that each part of his American system supported the other and that all sections benefited by pulling the nation together rather than tearing it apart. Internal improvements aided southerners and westerners in getting their crops to markets, including markets abroad. The tariff protected infant manufacturing industries, so that the workingmen, too, had their share of the pie. And the bank held it all together by providing a uniform currency and plenty of credit to both agriculture and industry.3
All of this seemed plausible, and might have been sufficient in other eras. In the 1830s, however, it seemed unrealistic at best to ignore the looming sectional divisions over slavery, none of which would be solved by Clay’s somewhat superficial proposals. Indeed, northerners argued, the presence of a bank would only perpetuate slavery by lending to plantation owners, whereas southerners countered that the tariff only benefited the industrialists and abolitionists. Most agreed on internal improvements, but disagreed over where the government should involve itself, and to what degree. Naturally, the sections split over the locus of the proposed largesse.
Swimming upstream against an increasingly egalitarian sentiment, the Whigs were throwbacks to the Federalists. While they still commanded the votes of significant sections of the country (and, on occasion, a majority), their music simply was out of tune with the democratic rhythms of the mid-1800s. This emphasis on expanding the franchise and broadening educational opportunities—all spearheaded by a polyglot of reform and utopian movements—characterized Jacksonian culture in the age of the common man.
Time Line
1836:
Martin Van Buren elected president; Alamo overrun by Santa Anna’s forces; Battle of San Jacinto makes Texas an independent Republic
1837:
Panic of 1837
1840:
William Henry Harrison elected president; Harrison dies; John Tyler assumes presidency
1841:
Amistad decision: Supreme Court frees African slave mutineers
1844:
James K. Polk pledges to annex both Texas and Oregon Territory; Polk elected president
1845:
Texas annexation
1846–47:
Mexican-American War
1848:
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends Mexican War; annexation of Oregon Territory and Southwest (California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah); Zachary Taylor elected president
1849:
Gold discovered in California
Buckskins and Bible Thumpers
The Jacksonian period ranks as one of the great periods of American social reform and cultural change. America’s Hudson River school of artists emerged, as did distinct and talented regional northeastern and southwestern writers. There were transformations of attitudes about social relationships, health, prisons, education, and the status of women and African American slaves. Advocates of communalism, vegetarianism, temperance, prison reform, public schools, feminism, and abolition grew into a substantial Jacksonian reform movement.4
Religious revivals washed over America in six great waves, ranging from the Puritan migration and Great Awakening of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the new millennialism of the late twentieth century. In between came the Age of Jackson’s monumental Great Revival, known to scholars as the Second Great Awakening. Throughout the 1815–1860 period, religious enthusiasm characterized American culture, from the churches of New England, to the camp meetings on western frontiers, to the black slave churches of the Old South.5
Why did this era foster religious fundamentalism? The emergent Industrial Revolution caused huge changes in the lives of Americans, an upheaval that, in part, explains the urgency with which they sought spiritual sustenance. Industry, urbanization, and rapid social shifts combined with the impending crisis over slavery to foment a quest for salvation and perfection. Hundreds of thousands of Americans found answers to their profound spiritual questions in Protestant Christianity. They adopted a democratic brand of religion open to all, featuring a diverse number of Protestant sects. Great Revival Christianity was also enthusiastic: worshippers sang and shouted to the heavens above. Together, believers sought perfection here on earth.
“Perfectionism,” or a belief that any sinner could be saved by Christ and, upon salvation, should pursue good works to ensure that saving grace, shifted the focus from the Puritan emphasis on the afterlife to the possibility of a sin-free world in this life. A few perfectionists were millenarians who believed that Christ’s second coming was imminent. The Millerites (named for their leader, William Miller), America’s most famous millenarians, actually donned white robes and climbed atop barn and house roofs in 1843 to meet Christ as he joined them on earth. He did not appear as the Millerites had prophesied—a nonevent they referred to as the Great Disappointment.6 Thousands left the faith, although a young woman named Ellen G. (Harmon) White (herself converted at a Methodist camp meeting and a protégé of Miller’s), a virtual American Joan of Arc, picked up the standard. She had several visions, and despite her sex and youth became a de facto leader of a group that, by 1860, had chosen the name Seventh-Day Adventists, referring to the impending advent of Christ. The church’s membership rolls swelled. Espousing a healthy lifestyle and avoidance of certain foods and meat, Adventists produced the cereal empire of John and Will Kellogg and influenced the career of another cereal giant, Charles W. Post.7
Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), who made her most important mark in American religious history slightly after the Jacksonian era, nevertheless rode the Second Great Awakening revivalist quest, adding to the health-food orientation of Ellen White the more radical doctrine of faith healing. Healed of great pain in her youth, Eddy founded the First Church of Christ Scientist (today known as Christian Scientists), in which spiritual healing depended heavily on mind over matter. Like others, she founded a college and an influential newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor.8
These new millennial groups differed from the traditional churches not only in their perfectionist doctrine, but also in their religious practice. In sharp contrast to the prim and proper Puritans, many of the new sects exhibited an emotionalism characterized by falling, jerking, laughing, and crying. And it worked. Where old-line churches like the Presbyterians scoffed at the enthusiasm of the camp meetings (which had started as early as 1801 at Cane Ridge, in Kentucky), they could not match the attractiveness and energy of the evangelists. The Methodists, whose songs John Wesley had adapted from English pub tunes, grew rapidly to become the largest church in the United States by 1844. Like the Baptists, the Methodists believed in revivals, in which the evangelical fires would be fanned periodically by hellfire-and-brimstone preachers who crossed the countryside. While the sects posed doctrinal challenges for the established denominations, no one could deny that they nevertheless added to a climate of religious excitement, leading to the establishment of theological colleges in nearly every state.9
Most perfectionists believed that Christ’s coming would be preceded by the millennium (Revela
tions 20:1–3), a thousand-year period on earth of perfection—peace, prosperity, and Christian morality. The Second Great Awakening was a time when perfectionists commenced this millennium of peace on earth. Perfectionists preached that although man was sinful, he did not have to be. Individuals possessed the power to save themselves and join together to create a perfect world order. “To the universal reformation of the world,” evangelist Charles Grandison Finney exhorted, “they stand committed.”10
The Second Great Awakening was thus a radical extension of the religious enthusiasm of the Puritan migration and the First Great Awakening. Down-to-earth Jacksonian preachers and laymen fanned out to convert tens of thousands of sinners and lead them to salvation. Baptists and Methodists, sects less than a century old, figured prominently, but so too did Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Mormons. The Erie Canal route of upstate New York, a scene of tumultuous economic and social change, became such a hotbed of religious fervor that it was dubbed the “Burned-Over District” because of the waves of religious fire that regularly passed through. Here a new figure strode onto the scene: Charles Grandison Finney, a law student who simply woke up one morning to a realization that he needed the Lord. When he appeared before the bench that day, Finney was asked if he was ready to try the case. He responded, “I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, I cannot plead yours.”11 Abandoning the passive Puritan view of salvation—one either was or was not saved—Finney initiated an activist, evangelical ministry that introduced many new practices that shocked the prim and pious churchgoers of the day. Among Finney’s new measures, as he called them, were allowing women to pray in mixed-sex meetings, camp services that ran for several days in a row, the use of colloquial language by the preachers, and praying for people by name. In 1827 the Presbyterians called a convention to investigate Finney’s methods, but they adjourned without taking any action against the new measures, and Finney’s revivals continued. The tall, athletic, spellbinding Presbyterian minister, whose popularity equaled that of Old Hickory himself, called on all Americans to “Stand up! Stand up for Jesus!”12
A much more radical sect appeared in Palmyra, New York, when Joseph Smith claimed that he had been visited by the angel Moroni. The angel showed him golden tablets, which he was allowed to translate through two mystical seer stones that broke the language code, dictating what was called the Book of Mormon (1830). Smith’s remarkable book related the history of the migration of an ancient tribe of Israel to the New World and the Indian tribes prior to the arrival of Europeans as well as the New World appearance of Christ. Smith quickly built a loyal following, and the group took the name Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, generally known as the Mormons. The members moved to Ohio, where they became entangled in a bank collapse, then to Missouri, where they were ensnared in the slavery debate, taking the antislavery side. Eventually settling in Nauvoo, Illinois—the largest town in the state—the Mormons posed a threat to the political structure by their policy of voting as a block. When the Whig Party in Illinois introduced a new charter, the Mormons supported it, and in 1844 Smith ran for the U.S. presidency as an independent on an abolition platform.13 At the same time, Smith had (according to revelation) laid down as church doctrine the practice of polygamy. Clashes with local anti-Mormon groups led to Smith’s arrest and then assassination while he was in a Carthage, Illinois, jail in 1844, so the Mormons prepared to move yet again, this time to the far West.14
Mormonism flourished on the frontiers of Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, but so did other churches. Itinerant Baptist and Methodist preachers answered the “call” to scour the Ohio and Mississippi valleys in search of sinners, and most found their share. Westerners flocked to camp meetings, staying for as long as a week to hear preachers atop tree stumps deliver round-the-clock sermons. In 1832, Englishwoman Frances Trollope witnessed a rural Indiana revival and recorded this word picture of the scene:
The perspiration ran in streams from the face of the preacher [as the camp meeting] became a scene of Babel; more than twenty men and women were crying out at the highest pitch of their voices and trying apparently to be heard above the others. Every minute the excitement increased; some wrung their hands and called out for mercy; some tore their hair…. It was a scene of horrible agony and despair; and when it was at its height, one of the preachers came in, and raising his voice high above the tumult, [e]ntreated the Lord to receive into his fold those who had repented…. Groans, ejaculations, broken sobs, frantic motions, and convulsions succeeded; some fell on their backs with a slow motion and crying out—“Glory, glory, glory!!”15
The religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening had not yet subsided even by 1857–58, the eve of the Civil War. That year city folk thronged to reach out to God. Philadelphians and New Yorkers witnessed a remarkable spectacle as thousands of clerks and businessmen gathered daily for prayer meetings in their cities’ streets. These meetings were purely lay events; no clergy were present. Observers witnessed the remarkable sight of wealthy stockbrokers and messenger boys kneeling and praying side by side.
With such a wide variety of religious experiences in America, toleration was more than ever demanded. Schools certainly had to avoid specific denominational positions, so they emphasized elements of Christianity that almost all believers could agree upon, such as the Resurrection, love, faith, and hope. That in turn led to a revitalization of the Ten Commandments as easily agreed-upon spiritual principles. This doctrinal latitude of toleration, which applied to most Christians with different interpretations of scripture, did not extend to Catholics, who did not engage in the same level of evangelization as the revivalist sects, yet competed just as effectively in more traditional church-building and missionary activity among the Indians (where the Jesuits enjoyed much more success than Protestants).16
The “Isms”
Perfectionists sought not only to revise the traditional understandings of sin and redemption, but also to reorder worldly social and economic systems. Communalism—systems of government for virtually autonomous local communities—emerged in “hundreds of utopian societies that dotted the landscape of American reform.”17 Jacksonian communalism did not in any way resemble modern socialist states with their machines of autocratic centralized economic control. Early American communalism was voluntary and local and represented the most radical antebellum reform ideas. The most successful of the communes were rooted in religious fundamentalism. Like Hopedale communalist Adin Ballou, religious utopians believed man was ruled by “the law of God, written on his heart, without the aid of external bonds.”18
Communalism in America began with the 1732 emigration of German Lutheran pietists, under Conrad Bissell, to Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Later, in 1805, George Rapp founded Harmony, in western Pennsylvania, moving to the Wabash River (in Indiana Territory) in 1815. Englishwoman Ann Lee brought her Shaker sect to upstate New York in 1774, where it grew and spread after her death. Like the radical Lutherans, Shakers experimented with property-sharing, vegetarianism, and sexual abstinence (their church membership thus grew only through conversion and adoption). They claimed private property was sinful and that sex was “an animal passion of the lower orders.” Shakers also took the radical position that God was both male and female. Frugal and humble, Shakers practiced wildly enthusiastic religious dances (from which the term Shaker is derived, as was the earlier Quaker) and spoke to God in tongues.19 Perhaps more significant, many of the new religious sects actually “had very ancient origins but it was only in the free air and vast spaces of America that they blossomed.”20
The Transcendentalists, a famous group of Massachusetts reformers, left an important legacy in the field of American literature, but their attempts at communalism proved fairly disastrous. Transcendentalists were Congregationalists run wild. Unorthodox Christians, they espoused, in varying degrees, God in nature (Deism), deep meditation, individualism and nonconformity, perpetual inspiration, ecstasy, and a transcendence of reality to reach c
ommunion with God. Among the transcendentalists stand some of early America’s greatest intellectuals and writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and others. To achieve their high goals, transcendentalists founded two utopias. Bronson Alcott’s and Charles Lane’s 1843 Fruitlands was a socialistic, agrarian colony whose members proved so inept at farming that they endured for less than a year.21 George Ripley’s Brook Farm and other communes likewise either buckled under the sacrifices or substantially modified their programs, leading Nathaniel Hawthorne to parody them in The Blithedale Romance (1852).22
The failure of one group seemed to have no impact on the appearance of others, at least in the short run. John Humphrey Noyes—an eccentric among eccentric reformers—founded one of the most famous American communes at Oneida, New York. Originally a millenarian, Noyes coined the term perfectionist in advocating what he called Bible Communism, which forbade private property, and instigated polygamous marriages. All the members, Noyes declared, “recognize the right of religious inspiration to shape identity and dictate the form of family life.”23
Noyes demonstrated the great danger of all the utopian thinkers, whose search for freedom led them ultimately to reject any social arrangements, traditions, church doctrine, or even familial relationships as expressions of power. Marriage, they held, constituted just another form of oppression, even slavery—a point upon which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would completely agree. Their oft-quoted ideals of liberty masked darker repudiation of the very order envisioned by the Founders, not to mention most Christian thinkers. Still other utopians abandoned social activism and turned to philosophy, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and his fellow Transcendentalists.24 Fittingly, Emerson described himself as a “transparent eyeball.”25
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 38