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Unity, Pluralism, and the Spiritual Market-Place: Interdenominational Competition in the Early American Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Richard Carwardine
Richard Carwardine*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Extract

Following independence, Americans’ sense of the special status of their new nation drew succour not merely from their republican experiment but from the unique character of the nation’s religious life. Even before the Revolution Americans had witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of sects and churches, to a degree unparalleled in any single European state, as ethnic diversity increased and the mid-eighteenth-century revivals split churches and multiplied congregations. The Congregationalist establishment in New England and Anglican power in the middle and southern colonies uneasily confronted energetic dissenting minorities, including Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, English Baptists, and German Lutheran and Reformed groups. After 1776 it took some time to define a new relationship between church and state. Colonial habits of thought persisted and prompted schemes of multiple establishment or government support for religion in general. The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786 and, five years later, the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution did not succeed wholly in eliminating state authority from the sphere of religion; indeed, residual establishments persisted in Connecticut until 1818 and in Massachusetts until 1833. Yet an important shift was under way towards a ‘voluntary’ system of religious support, in which governmental authority in religion was replaced by increased authority for self-sustaining denominational bodies. After 1790 ecclesiastical institutions grew at an extraordinary pace, shaping the era labelled by historians the ‘Second Great Awakening’. As Jon Butler has reminded us, some 50,000 new churches were built in America between 1780 and 1860, sacralizing the landscape with steeples and graveyards and creating a heterogeneous presence that drew streams of European visitors curious to evaluate the effects of America’s unique experiment in ‘voluntarism’. By 1855 over four million of the country’s twenty-seven million people were members of one of over forty Protestant denominations, most of them recognizable by name as churches with an Old World ancestry but with features which made them distinctively American. Additionally, there were over one million Catholics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 32: Unity and Diversity in the Church , 1996 , pp. 297 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1996

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19 Spicer, Autobiography, pp. 101-2.

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26 Nottingham, Methodism and the Frontier, p. 153; Cartwright, Autobiography, p. 386.

27 Foster, Charles I., An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790-1837 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1960), pp. 129, 132–7 Google Scholar, 179–207. Some of the most effective non-sectarian enterprises were the mariners’ churches strung out along the Atlantic coast from New England to South Carolina. CAJ, 26 June, 10 July 1829.

28 Foster, Errand of Mercy, pp. 131-2, 202-3, 214, 239-44; Cross, Burned-Over District, pp. 255-7. The campaign in the South achieved relatively little outside the few small urban centres which could function as hubs.

29 Billington, Ray Allen, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York, 1938)Google Scholar; Western Christian Advocate (Cincinnati; Methodist), 10 Nov. 1852. Cf.Clark, Rufus W., Popery and the United States, Embracing an Account of Papal Operations in Our Country, with a View to the Dangers Which Threaten Our Institutions (Boston, 1847)Google Scholar; Bushnell, Horace, Common Schools: A Discourse on the Modifications Demanded by the Roman Catholics (Hartford, Conn., 1853)Google Scholar; Fish, Henry Clay, The School Question: Romanism and the Common Schools: A Discourse … (New York, 1853)Google Scholar.

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31 Billington, Protestant Crusade, pp. 96-8, 166-8, 182-5, 244-56, 264-75. Cf.Wolffe, John, ‘Anti-Catholicism and evangelical identity in Britain and the United States, 1830-1860’ in Noll, Mark A., Bebbington, David W. and Rawlyk, George A., eds, Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, The British Isles, and Beyond, 1770-1990 (New York, 1994), pp. 179–97 Google Scholar.

32 Carwardine, Richard J., Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, Conn., 1993), pp. 231–3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Billington, Protestant Crusade, p. 280.

33 Stuart, E. E. to her son, 6 April 1858, in Helen Marlatt, S. M., ed., Stuart Letters of Robert and Elizabeth Sullivan Stuart, 1819-1864, 2 vols (New York, 1961), 2, p. 862 Google Scholar; NYO, 5 Aug, 1858; Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, pp. 63-79.

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37 See, for example, Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, pp. 24–5.

38 Cartwright, Autobiography, p. 66; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Southern Historical Collection William D. Valentine, ‘Diary’, 27 June 1853.

39 Joneshoro Whig. 12 May 1840, 22, 29 Sept., 20 Oct., 10 Nov. 1847, 14 June, 20 Dec. 1848; Coulter, E. M., William G. Brownlow: Fighting Parson of the Southern Highlands (Chapel Hill, NC, 1937), pp. 18–20, 26-34, 53-65Google Scholar; Graves, J. R., The Great Iron Wheel: or. Republicanism Backward and Christianity Reversed (Nashville, 1856), pp. vi–vii Google Scholar; Brownlow, William G., The Great Iron Wheel Examined; or, Its False Spokes Extracted, and an Exhibition of Elder Graves, Its Builder (Nashville, 1856), pp. xvi, 256–7, 276.Google Scholar

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42 Ibid., pp. 384-402.

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45 Graves, Great Iron Wheel, pp. 138, 142; Brownlow, Great Iron Wheel Examined, pp. 61, 91, 184; Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn., 1972), pp. 722-5. Graves drew especially on A Concise History of Foreign Baptists (1838) - the work of the English Baptist minister, G. H. Orchard - to sustain his understanding of Baptists’ unique historical role; he republished the work, adding his own introduction, in 1855.

46 Brownlow, Great Iron Wheel Examined, pp. xv-xvi, 19-26, 262-5; Knoxville Whig, 20 Sept., 4 Oct. 1851, 4 Sept. 1852.

47 Brownlow, Great Iron Wheel Examined, pp. 71-2, 88, 284, 303-4.

48 Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 719-20; Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, ‘The Antimission movement in the Jacksonian South and West: a study in regional folk culture’. Journal of Southern History, 36 (Nov. 1970), pp. 501–29 Google Scholar; Lambert, B. C., The Rise of the Anti-Mission Baptists: Sources and Leaders, 1800-1840 (New York, 1980)Google Scholar.

49 Brownlow, Great Iron Wheel Examined, pp. 55-6, 166-74, 305-8; Graves, Great Iron Wheel, pp. 500-13.

50 Brownlow, Great Iron Wheel Examined, pp. 193-203, 219-23.

51 Ibid., p. 194. Whether deliberately or not, Brownlow here misleadingly conflated the doctrinal position of the Regular Baptists, for whom baptism was not essential for the remission of sins, with that of the Campbellites, for whom it was.

52 Ibid., pp. 204-7, 227, 242.

53 Ibid., pp. 210-11.

54 Ibid., pp.231 and 271.

55 Graves, Great Iron Wheel, pp. 366-77; Brownlow, Great Iron Wheel Examined, pp. 21, 27-47, 73-4, 96-100, 256,282-3.

56 North Carotina Presbyterian (Faycttevillc), 24 July 1858.

57 For a stimulating but ultimately unpersuasivc statement of this view, see Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution: Jackonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991), pp. 137–8, 157-61, 164-5, 178, 299-300.Google Scholar

58 Primitive Baptist (Tarborough, NC), 5 (1840), pp. 70-1, 77-8, 120-1.

59 Graves, Great Iron Wheel, pp. 531-3; Brownlow, Great Iron Wlieel Examined, pp. 62, 160.

60 Brownlow, Great Iron Wheel Examined, pp. 99-100, 191, 202-3, 214-15; Springfield, Illinois State Historical Society, Leonard F. Smith, ‘Diary’, 1 Sept. 1860.

61 Gary R. Freeze, ‘The ethnocultural thesis goes south: religio-cultural dimensions of voting in North Carolina’s second party system’ (unpublished paper delivered at the Southern Historical Association Convention, Nov. 1988), pp. 2-18.

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63 Both Graves and Brownlow were drawn to the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party when it burst into being in the mid-1850s, but Graves quickly backed off when he realized how deeply involved were his Methodist adversaries in a party that quickly came to resemble the hated Whigs. Brownlow, Great Iron Wheel Examined, p. 292. The warfare in New Jersey between John Q. Adams (Baptist minister and Democrat) and John Inskip (Methodist preacher and Know-Nothing) took on the same religio-political aspect: Biblical Recorder (Raleigh, NC), 15 Jan. 1857. Adams’s short tract, Episcopal Methodism Anti-American in Its Spirit and Tendency (1854), depicted Methodist ‘despotism’ as enfeebling American republicanism, and opening the way for a Romanist take-over. Holt, Michael F., The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978), pp. 4-6, 8, 16–17 Google Scholar, and passim, regards Americans in that decade as particularly fearful for the security of republican institutions.

64 Finke and Stark, Churching of America, pp. 145-78; Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, p. 721. For the tension between ‘New School’ Baptists, especially in New England, on the one hand, and those of an anti-mission orientation, hostile to ministerial education and voluntary association, on the other, see Foster, Errand of Mercy, pp. 101-2, 190-1, 253-4.

65 Brownlow, Great Iron Wheel Examined, pp. xiii, 164, 192 (quoting Tennessee Baptist, 22 Dec. 1855). For similar unsentimental understandings of the Christian’s duty to promote church harmony, see, e.g., CAJ 9 Nov. 1829, 17 Dec. 1830.

66 Brownlow, Great Iron Wheel Examined, pp. 94–5, 217.

67 Dixon, Methodism in America, pp. 148-9.

68 Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, pp. 133-74, 245-8, 285-92.

69 The relationship between loyalty to church, section and nation deserves attention in its own right. Useful starting points are provided by Moorhead, James, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-1869 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1978)Google Scholar; Gilpin Faust, Drew, ‘Christian soldiers: the meaning of revivalism in the Confederate army’, Journal of Southern History, 53 (1987), pp. 63-190 Google Scholar; Silver, James W., Confederate Morale and Church Propaganda (Tuscaloosa, Ala, 1957)Google Scholar.