A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (47 page)

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 communion 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

Scottish and French socialists Robert Dale Owen and Charles Fourier attracted American converts, but their experiments also failed miserably. Owen sought to eradicate individualism through education in New Harmony, Indiana, which he bought from the Rappites in 1825.
²⁶
Yet despite Owen’s doctrinal desires, individualism went untamed among the eight hundred unruly Owenites, whose children ran amok and who eagerly performed “head work” (thinking) but disdained “hand work” (physical labor of any sort). Predictably, New Harmony soon ran out of food. Promising to destroy the “Three Headed Hydra: God, marriage, property,” Owen himself was nearly destroyed. He poured good money after bad into the colony, losing a fortune calculated in modern terms to have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Likewise, twenty-eight separate attempts to establish Fourierist “phalanxes” (Fouriers’ utopian organizational scheme) from Massachusetts to Iowa from 1841 to 1858 also failed.
²⁷
Members were expected to live on eighty cents a week, a sum below even what contemporary Benedictine and Franciscan monks survived on.

Most of these utopians advocated greatly expanded rights (some would say, roles) for women. White women had gained property rights within marriage in several Ohio and Mississippi Valley states. Divorce became slightly more prevalent as legal grounds increased, and a woman was awarded custody of children for the first time ever in the precedent-setting New York State court case
Mercein v. People
(1842). At the same time, the emerging industrial revolution brought young women work in New England’s numerous new textile and manufacturing industries. Jacksonian education reforms and the growth of public schools opened up a new white-collar profession for females—teaching. Steadily, the woman’s sphere overlapped the men’s sphere in economic endeavor. As demand for teachers grew, women began to attend institutions of higher education; Oberlin, the radical abolitionist college presided over by Charles Grandison Finney, produced America’s first female college graduate. And during the Civil War, nursing joined teaching as a profession open to educated women.

Women also became involved in social activism through the temperance movement. As wives and mothers, females sometimes bore the brunt of the alcoholism of husbands and male family members. The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance was one of many women’s organizations educating the public on the evil of “strong drink” and seeking its eradication. The Washington Society, an antebellum equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous, was formed to assist problem drinkers. A single overarching theme emerged, however—solving personal problems through political means. Women helped pass the Maine Law (1851), which forbade alcohol throughout the entire state. Enforcement proved difficult, yet as society saw the implications of widespread drunkenness, thousands of Americans (including a young Whig named Abraham Lincoln) joined the campaign against “Demon Rum.” By 1850 the movement had slashed alcohol consumption by three fourths.

All of these causes combined to lead women, inevitably, toward feminism, a religio-socio-political philosophy born at the end of the Age of Jackson. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Lucy Stone, Frances Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others led a small, fiery band of Jacksonian feminists. These women gathered together in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, where they issued a proclamation—a Declaration of Sentiments—touching on nearly all of the issues (abortion is the notable exception) of today’s feminists. They decried the lack of education, economic opportunities (especially in medicine, law, and the pulpit), legal rights, marital power, and, most important, the “elective franchise” (the right to vote). “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman,” they declared, “having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”
²⁸

Abolitionism—the radical belief in the immediate prohibition of slavery—reached fever pitch during the Age of Jackson. It is important to distinguish at the outset the difference between abolitionists and those who merely opposed slavery: abolitionists wanted to abolish
all
American slavery
immediately
without compensation. Antislavery politicians (like some Whigs and Free-Soilers, and after 1854, Republicans) wanted only to keep slavery out of the western territories, while permitting it to continue in the South.

Quakers initially brought English abolitionist views to America, where they enjoyed limited popularity in the northern colonies. Revolutionary ideals naturally sparked antislavery sentiment, especially in Philadelphia and Boston. After the Revolution, the American Colonization Society was formed to advocate freeing and colonizing slaves (sending them back to Liberia in Africa). But the rise of the cotton kingdom fueled even more radical views. On January 1, 1831, a Massachusetts evangelical named William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of
The Liberator
, calling the slave “a Man and a brother” and calling for his “immediate emancipation.” The New England Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society formed soon thereafter. Garrison, joined by Lewis Tappan, Elijah P. Lovejoy, and Sarah and Angelina Grimké, gained a growing audience for the abolitionist cause. The Grimké sisters were themselves former slaveholders, but when they inherited their father’s South Carolina plantation, they freed its black workers, moved north, and joined the Quaker church. They created a minor sensation as two of the nation’s first female lecturers touring the northern states, vehemently speaking out against the evils of slavery.
²⁹

Former slaves also proved to be powerful abolitionist activists. Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Solomon Northrup, Harriet Tubman, and others brought their own shocking life experiences to the lecture stages and the printed pages of the abolitionist movement. Douglass, the son of a white slave master whom he had never even met, escaped Maryland slavery and headed north as a young man. In his autobiography,
My Bondage and My Freedom,
Douglass spoke eloquently of the hardships he had endured, how his slave mother had taught him to read, and how he rose from obscurity to become North America’s leading Negro spokesman. His story served as a lightning rod for antislavery forces. At the same time, Harriet Tubman devoted much of her effort to helping the Underground Railroad carry escaped slaves to freedom in the North. Tubman put her own life on the line during a score of secret trips south, risking recapture and even death.
³⁰

The abolitionists succeeded in putting great pressure on the major political parties and beginning the long process by which their radical ideas became mainstream ideas in a democracy. Abolitionists succeeded at provoking an immediate and violent reaction among southern slaveholders. Georgians offered a five-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who would kidnap Garrison and bring him south. Abolitionist Arthur Tappan boasted a fifty-thousand-dollar price on his head. In North and South alike, proslavery mobs attacked abolitionists’ homes and offices, burning their printing presses, and threatening (and delivering) bodily harm. Anti-abolitionist violence culminated in the 1837 mob murder of Illinois abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy.