“We visited one farm,” she says, “which interested us particularly from its wild and lonely situation, and from the entire dependence of the inhabitants upon their resources. It was a partial clearing in the very heart of the forest. The house was built on the side of a hill, so steep that a high ladder was necessary to enter the front door, while the back one opened against the hillside; at the foot of this sudden eminence ran a clear stream, whose bed had been deepened into a little reservoir, just opposite the house. A noble field of Indian corn stretched away into the forest on one side, and a few half-cleared acres, with a shed or two upon them, occupied the other, giving accommodation to cows, horses, pigs, and chickens innumerable. Immediately before the house was a small potato garden, with a few peach and apple trees. The house was built of logs, and consisted of two rooms, besides a little shanty or lean-to, that was used as a kitchen. Both rooms were comfortably furnished with good beds, drawers, etc. The farmer’s wife, and a young woman who looked like her sister, were spinning, and three little children were playing about. The woman told me that they spun and wove all the cotton and woollen garments of the family, and knit all the stockings; her husband though not a shoe-maker by trade, made all the shoes. She manufactured all the soap and candles they used, and prepared her sugar from the sugar-trees on their farm. All she wanted with money, she said, was to buy coffee, tea, and whiskey, and she could ‘get enough any day by sending a batch of butter and chicken to market.’ They used no wheat, nor sold any of their corn, which, though it appeared a very large quantity, was not more than they required to make their bread and cakes of various kinds, and to feed all their live-stock during the winter. She seemed contented, and proud of her independence; though it was in somewhat a mournful accent that she said, ‘’Tis strange to us to see company: I expect the sun will rise and set a hundred times before I shall see another human that does not belong to the family.’”
Travelers remark on the mirthlessness of the lives they observe. Even the school children play seldom at games. In the “triste little town of Cincinnati,” the theater is meagerly patronized. Young people preferred Dorfeuille’s Hell with its chamber of horrors and electrical shocks; their elders, the same gentleman’s “lecture on the Fifth (or Gallinaceous) Order of Birds, after which the Nitrous Oxide will be administered.”
In the larger cities, almost every report of social intercourse indicates a feebleness of imagination and a lack of grace. Except for dancing, upon which most of the churches frowned, almost all forms of entertainment were practiced by one sex in complete isolation from the other. Dinner parties were rare and at a small dinner, a family and friends, one ate or, if one talked at all, it was of business. Then the gentlemen gathered together “to spit, talk of elections, and the price of produce, and spit again; the women kept up a fluttering and feeble conversation about food and frivolities.”
Most common amusements were forbidden by law, frowned on by religion, or simply passed by. This does not, of course, apply to the very rich nor to artistic and intellectual circles. Such exceptional groups easily provided the quaintness and attractiveness of this period. We have records of crazes for European knickknacks and, in the Thirties, “the exquisite from Philadelphia” finds that even his delicate person can pass along the streets of a middle western town without offense or molestation, and that “an artificial butterfly big enough for Tom Thumb to navigate the heavens with” is considered quite the latest thing for ladies’ adornment.
But the very pleasures of society are so dreary, so unhappy and discouraged. A Frenchman, passing through a popular watering place in the 1830’s, exclaimed that American women must indeed be bored with home life to prefer the rattle without gayety and the noisy discomforts of Bedford Springs—bad meals, bad beds, noisy rooms, stuffy dances, and the overwhelming dullness. At another equally popular resort, an intelligent Englishwoman who was enchanted with the heartiness of village life in America saw “young ladies tricked out in the most expensive finery, flirting over the backgammon board, tripping affectedly across the room, languishing with a seventy dollar cambric handkerchief, starting up in ecstasy at the entrance of a baby, the mothers as busy with affectations of another kind; and the brothers sidling hither and thither . . . in no way imparting the refreshment of a natural countenance, movement, or tone. . . .” (The fathers, one suspects, were absent on business.)
Such was the society of this period. The tone was given by women who were always ill and, if not actively unhappy, were generally languid, adoring Byron and taking up collections for the Greeks under Marcos Bozzaris, but keeping themselves isolated from any reality and fleeing from the sinfulness and discomforts of their own nature. The mother of Susan B. Anthony, when she was pregnant, hid herself and never spoke of her condition to anyone, not even her mother. But the pioneering woman was different. As Arthur W. Calhoun has pointed out, fecundity in the early 19th century was the supreme virtue—he might have said the supreme occupation. Even in the plague-stricken swamps and the barren clearings, children had to be raised so that they might soon help in hoeing and planting and shooting game and defending the settlement when their fathers went down the river to the town, or were scalped by the Indians. The government encouraged marriage by giving a whole section of land to a married couple, and only half to a bachelor. In Tennessee, children gave additional claim to land: triplets entitled parents to take up six hundred acres. In North Carolina, there were grandmothers at the age of 27. Even later, when the pressure of an undeveloped country was somewhat slackened, women were considered old at twenty-five. “Sweet sixteen” (the phrase occurs early) was not the winsome age of prettiness and frivolity, but the appropriate period for love and marriage.
A propaganda for romantic love covered the brutal actuality but, as early as 1805, protests against the fictional doctrine that “love is all” were common in the literary magazines. On one side a false glamour was thrown over the forms of love-making: on the other, all the emotions of the sexual relation were beaten down by the mastering necessity of propagating in numbers. The American woman became artificial or cold. The texture of her sexual life was impoverished, or broken down under the burden of children. Stendhal (who never came to this country but obviously based his remarks on reports of other Frenchmen), is almost chagrined at the thought of American boys and girls going sleigh riding together and returning home still boys and girls.
“A little bundling” was customary in many parts of the country—in Pennsylvania, in the Connecticut valley, in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Among the Dutch and German settlers “parties of men and girls spend the night together at inns both sexes sleeping together. Such great control have the females acquired, that several who have bundled for years, it is said, have never permitted any improper liberties. Indeed, it is considered as not in the least indelicate.” In a variety of ways this delicacy and restraint were to be erected into an ascetic principle on which religions and communities were founded. It was a natural counterpoise to the unexpressed theories and the constant practice of breeding. Another counterpoise appears with startling frankness in advertisements for contraceptives, “intended for married ladies whose health forbids a too rapid increase of family,” and possibly used by women who went out in carloads along the westward routes to join unknown men who needed children beyond woman’s capacity to bear.
The hardihood of the pioneers made loneliness a positive pleasure. Many of them felt crowded when their fellowmen appeared and fled from their settlement of a dozen cabins to a further loneliness. Even those who stayed were scattered over vast holdings and their comings together were rare and brief. This was another side of the conquest of nature. It compelled as complete an absorption in material things as speculation in canal bonds or the invention of machinery, but its fruits were neither so full of promise nor so rapid in ripening. Both the commerce and the agriculture of the pioneer shrank and belittled the soul.
However tawdry and hysterical was the appeal made by the itinerant evan
gelist shouting “sin” and “hell,” after all, it was to the soul that he addressed himself. From the first, he touched on the very thing which made him successful: he invited more than two or three to gather together. The day of his coming was appointed far in advance, often as long ahead as a year. To make his rounds he had to be as hardy and as patient as the pioneer himself. In desolate regions of forest the word of his coming spread and from single cabins, or clusters of log houses, men and women and children traveled days and nights over trails and log roads, by fords and through swamps, to the wider clearing where the meeting was to be held. To these outlying regions the political rally could not penetrate; in fact it had not yet developed into a second great social phenomenon when the camp-meeting began.
Men and women who had perhaps seen no strange face in half a year, or had been huddled together in a group of twenty or thirty for many months, suddenly found themselves in crowds of thousands. This was in itself an excitement of the happiest kind. The timid and the arrogant both reacted to it. The change of setting, the mill-race of people, the prospect of novelty and adventure, touched nerves which had long been dormant. The unaccustomed contact sent a galvanic spark coursing from one to another and spasmodic shivers of apprehension mingled with a great anticipation of delight.
Before he began to speak, the preacher had already effected the release of his audience. He had set them free from loneliness and the burdensome companionship of their own troubles. He had moved them bodily, had changed for a moment the orbit of their lives. The strange wind that had blown them together swayed the multitude like a field of grain. The preacher had only to put in the sickle and reap.
What the traveling evangelist said was important enough, but the circumstances gave it a nervous intensity far more thrilling than arguments or threats or promises. He was a man violent in the cause of God which, in the forest, in spite of carefully guarded Bibles and prayers and observations, was a lost cause. Here was fervor in a land which required only obstinacy. It was a sort of elated confidence, almost joy, to those who lived, without exaltation of any kind, in continual fear and misgiving. For hours the preacher shouted to men whose speech was crabbed and confined. He gesticulated passionately to indifferent whittlers of sticks. His whole discourse was in the tradition of evangelism. The flood of his images swept over arid souls in which imagination had become a withered stalk. It was, as the evangelist called it, a “time of refreshing,” and a “copious out-pouring of grace.” Both the words and the tones of revivalism were foreign to the hard-bitten country upon which they fell. It is not remarkable that strange weeds sprouted.
To a world which was always moving, the evangelist brought news of another world where there was peace. He had eternity to offer as a compensation for the uncertainties of life. The theology of the frontier revival was more democratic than that of the colonial had been. A country which had given every man a vote on earth was unlikely to relish a theology according to which only a few of the spiritual nobility, the inheritors of great moral estates, were elected for everlasting mercy. The mechanism of election was becoming familiar. The ancient threat of damnation went further, but it was no longer tyrannical. It gave every man hope, provided he paid his moral taxes. Even the older order of Calvinists were almost as welcome as the Methodist revivalists. For they, too, gave the people a new direction for their thoughts. They also set the stammering and inexpressive and inhibited multitude in direct communion with the gentleness of Jesus and the magnificence of God. For two days, or five, or ten, the merciless inclosure of common unlovely tasks, of meager interests and unsatisfied emotions was broken through. For that brief time, the brutal requirements of physical existence were over-run. In their degree, men and women threw off the burden of living and thought about godliness or sin. They reached upward to the hem of Christ’s garment or threw themselves face downward in abasement before the Lord.
The psychology of the itinerant was inspiring. From the moment he spoke the name of God, he released his hearers from the exacting tyranny of Mother Earth. When he spoke of Christ he put an end to the terror of their loneliness and promised them a communion, an intercession, a friend, in their friendless lives.
While from these circumstances we may compile a credit side for the evangelical movement, the discredit is enormous. The revivals from 1800 to the 1830’s have been called the source of almost unimaginable evil in the United States. They settled on it the hysteria-system of approaching salvation. They were responsible for a state of nervous uneasiness which was reflected in politics, in domestic life, and in social practice. From the Tree of Life, as conceived by Edwards, they cut off all the noble branches: the intellectual fervor and honesty, the clear sense of logic, the ecstasy arduously gained and reverently cherished. They held fast only to excitement. Where the earlier revivalists demanded proof of conversion, and withheld their approval until they were persuaded that regeneration was genuine and promised to be permanent, most of the later winners of souls had no standard but numbers. How many were saved—not how they were saved, or how lasting their safety—was their great question. Their methods were ignoble, brutalizing. They made sick souls or intensified maladies which might have been cured. The testimony of contemporaries exempts only two or three evangelists from charges of the gravest nature.
To remember the other side, therefore, is all the more necessary; to recall that the very utterance of the name of the Lord by the revivalists smashed for a moment the systematic impoverishment of the American spirit. If we fail to see this, if we do not recognize the unconscious clamoring for release to which the evangelist was the living answer, we cannot understand fully the witches’ sabbath of religion which his labors created.
We shall come in a moment to contemporary descriptions of revival meetings so vivid in their delineation of hysteria and abnormality that they send a shiver through us. It is well to pause a moment and consider that in general there are two explanations. The enthusiast for religion says that the mouthings, the ravings, the convulsions, the singing in strange tongues, are the pure work of the Lord and that the slight evils which follow all revivals are amply justified by the grandeur of the souls that are saved. This is a justification which science has long since repudiated. The hater of religion, using the full battery of scientific or pseudo-scientific terms, counts the evangelist as a celebrant of the black mass, his followers the victims of mob psychology, and the marks of conversion as symptoms of libidinous desire. This is the current criticism and there is much truth in it, but we must not forget that, for all its presumable accuracy and the exactness of its scientific terms, this accusation merely implies that revivalism is witchcraft. It is not possible to combine these two interpretations and it is not needful to make a compromise between them. It is only necessary to give each its proper place. In a survey of the field of revivalism, which also includes the physical and emotional complexes out of which it sprang, we may think of it as a necessity and as a godsend no less than as debauchery and pestilence. Something was needed to break down the monotony of an exceptionally materialistic existence. Circumstances favored neither art, nor sport, nor intellectual, nor physical diversion of any kind. No release of the physical pressure was to be found even in immorality or perversion. There was no welcome intrusion into the pioneer’s solitude. The camp-meeting originally performed the function of a carnival, or a kermesse, or an orgy—festivals established by the wisdom of ages in three great civilizations to give release to the impassioned body or the tortured mind. In that view, it matters comparatively little that conversions were unsubstantial and fleeting. Possibly even the rapes and seductions and drunkenness, the loosening of tongues and the liberation of every carnality, contributed, in spite of the hysteria which accompanied them, to a healthy life.
[1] The passage of houses on rollers up Broadway, or through the new streets of Cincinnati, never failed to entertain Europeans.
†The new republic turned its eyes to the West. † French visitors marveled to see young gir
ls go driving with their sweethearts unchaperoned. † The fictional doctrine that “love is all” was condemned by literary magazines. †At girls’ schools the subjects were needlework, music, and moral instruction. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in Philadelphia and Eliza Southgate wrote to Moses Porter that not one woman in a hundred marries for love. Remedies for sexual ills and accidents were advertised in the press. †By the opening of the century, there were 2,000 miles of post roads traveled on horseback, by stage and by sulkies. †The first office for the disposal of public lands was established at Chillicothe, Ohio.
†The piano was manufactured domestically, and Jenner’s Vaccine was introduced by Dr. Waterhouse. † Carrots were scarcely used and the tomato was known as the “love apple” and considered poisonous. Salt was available, but had to be powdered. †Eli Terry began to sell wooden clock movements for $25. † Women’s skirts grew scantier and they abandoned almost all underwear. “Shepherds, I have lost my love” was parodied:
“Shepherds, I have lost my waist,
Have you seen my body?”
†Captain Elias Bunker announced a hundred-ton sloop sailing up the Hudson. Beds, bedding, food, and liquor were procurable on board.
†Foreigners complained that Americans are always in a hurry.
IV. Gasper River.
“IT is a glorious assurance, a whispering of the everlasting covenant, it is the bleating of the lamb, it is the welcome of the shepherd, it is the essence of love, it is the fullness of glory, it is being in Jesus, it is Jesus being in us, it is taking the Holy Ghost into our bosoms, it is setting ourselves down by God, it is being called to the high places, it is eating and drinking and sleeping in the Lord, it is becoming a lion in the faith, it is being lowly and meek, and kissing the hand that smites, it is being mighty and powerful, and scorning reproof. . . .”
The Stammering Century Page 8