The American Revolution: A History (15 page)
In the North, slavery of a less harsh sort than existed in the South had been widespread but not deeply rooted in the society or economy. Slavery in the North was thus susceptible to political pressure in a way that was not true in the South, and it very slowly and haltingly began to recede. In the decades following the Revolution the northern states moved to destroy the institution, and by 1804 every northern state had committed itself to emancipation in one form or another. In many cases blacks themselves took the lead in using the Revolutionary language of liberty to attack slavery. By 1810 the number of free blacks in the northern states had grown from several hundred in 1770 to nearly 50,000. The Revolutionary vision of a society of independent freeholders led Congress in the 1780s specifically to forbid slavery in the newly organized Northwest Territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The new federal Constitution promised, in 1808, an end to the international importation of slaves, which many hoped would cripple the institution. In fact, all of the Revolutionary leaders, including southerners like Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Henry Laurens, deplored the injustice of slavery and assumed that it would soon die away. This was perhaps the most illusory of the several illusions the Revolutionary leaders had about the future of America.
At first, it seemed that slavery might be eliminated even in the South. More antislavery societies existed in the South than in the North, and manumissions became very frequent in the immediate post-Revolutionary period; in Virginia alone the number of free blacks increased from 3,000 in 1780 to 13,000 by 1790. But in the end, slavery in the South was too entrenched to be legislatively or judicially abolished. Southern whites who had been in the vanguard of the Revolutionary movement and among the most fervent spokesmen for its libertarianism now began developing a self-conscious sense of difference from the rest of America that they had never had to the same degree before. By the 1790s the South was living with a growing fear, fed by the Negro insurrections in Santo Domingo, of the newly invigorated American presumption that people everywhere, white or black, yearned for freedom.
REPUBLICAN RELIGION
In the New World that Americans were building—a republican world of “comprehensive benevolence” expressing “every divine and social virtue”—religion had an important role to play. After all, delivering America from sin and luxury was precisely what republicanism called for. Thus, unlike the church in Europe, American churches perceived no threat from revolution or republicanism. Except for the Anglicans, Protestant ministers were in the forefront of the Revolutionary movement. In fact, it was the clergy who made the Revolution meaningful for most common people. For every gentleman who read scholarly pamphlets and delved into Whig theory and ancient history for an explanation of events, there were dozens of ordinary people who read the Bible and looked to their ministers for an interpretation of the millennial meaning of the Revolution. The Puritans’ “city upon a hill” now assumed a new republican character, becoming, in Samuel Adams’s evocative phrase, “the Christian Sparta.”
It is true that many of the distinguished political leaders of the Revolution were not very emotionally religious. At best, they only passively believed in organized Christianity, and at worst they scorned and ridiculed it. Most were deists or lukewarm churchgoers and scornful of religious emotion and enthusiasm. Washington, for example, was a frequent churchgoer, but he scarcely referred to God as anything but “the Great Disposer of events,” and in all his voluminous papers he never mentioned Jesus Christ. Yet this was not true of the great majority of common people. Most ordinary Americans were very religious, and they still conceived of the world in religious terms. As they gained in authority in the course of the Revolution, they brought their religiosity with them.
From the outset of the Revolutionary controversy Americans argued that the dark forces of civic tyranny and religious tyranny were linked. All the new Revolutionary constitutions of 1776 in some way affirmed religious freedom. Yet the constitutional declarations, like that of the Virginia Bill of Rights, that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience” did not necessarily mean that the government would abandon its traditional role in religious matters. To be sure, the official establishment of the Church of England that existed in several of the colonies was immediately eliminated. But the Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia Revolutionary constitutions authorized their state legislatures to create in place of the Anglican Church a kind of multiple establishment of a variety of religious groups, using tax money to support “the Christian religion.”
Virginians especially were divided over the meaning of their 1776 declaration of religious liberty. Liberals like Jefferson and Madison joined growing numbers of Presbyterian and Baptist dissenters to oppose the Anglican clergymen and landowners in a fierce but eventually successful struggle for the complete disestablishment of the Church of England. In 1786 this Virginia struggle climaxed with the passage of Jefferson’s memorable Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, with its extraordinary assertion “that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than on our opinions in physics or geometry.” This statement went much further than most ordinary Americans were willing to go. Many of the states retained some vague or general religious qualifications for public office, and both Connecticut and Massachusetts continued to recognize the modified but still official status of the established Congregational church. But the days of such traditional elite-dominated orthodox establishments were numbered.
In the years following the Revolution all the old eighteenth-century monarchical and aristocratic hierarchies, enfeebled and brittle to begin with, fell apart. In thousands of different ways connections that had held people together for centuries were strained and severed, and people were set loose in unprecedented numbers. The Revolution shattered traditional structures of authority, and common people increasingly discovered that they no longer had to accept the old distinctions that had separated them from the upper ranks of the gentry. Ordinary farmers, tradesmen, and artisans began to think they were as good as any gentleman and that they actually counted for something in the movement of events. Not only were the people being equated with God, but half-literate plowmen were being told (even by aristocrats like Thomas Jefferson) that they had as much common or moral sense as learned professors.
As ordinary people became more conscious of their semienlightenment, they thought that they had suddenly become wise. Through newspapers, almanacs, tracts, chapbooks, periodicals, lectures, and other media, common people acquired smatterings of knowledge about things that previously had been the preserve of educated elites. And at the same time, they were told that their newly acquired knowledge was as good as that possessed by those who were “college learnt.” Under such egalitarian circumstances, truth itself became democratized, and the borders the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had painstakingly worked out between religion and magic, science and superstition, naturalism and supernaturalism, were blurred. Animal magnetism seemed as legitimate as gravity. Dowsing for hidden metals appeared as rational as the workings of electricity. Popular speculations about the lost tribes of Israel seemed as plausible as scholarly studies of the origins of the Indian mounds of the Northwest. And crude folk remedies were even thought to be as scientific as the bleeding cures of enlightened medicine.
The Enlightenment’s stress on modern civility and commonsense morality came together with the traditional message of Christian charity to make the decades following the Revolution a great era of benevolence and communalism. Figures as diverse as Jefferson, Samuel Hopkins, and Thomas Campbell told people that all they had to do in the world was to believe in one God and to love other people as themselves. But many of the enlightened leaders and liberal deists scarcely understood what was happening. While Jefferson, for example, continued as late as 1822 to predict that everyone in America would soon become a Unitarian, popular evangelical Christianity was sweeping the country.
The older state churches that had dominated colonial society for a century and a half—the Anglican, Congregational, and Presbyterian—were suddenly supplanted by new and in some cases unheard of religious denominations and sects. As late as 1760 the two great European-like establishments—the Church of England in the South and the Puritan churches in New England—had accounted for more than 40 percent of all congregations in America. By 1790, however, that proportion of religious orthodoxy had dropped below 25 percent. Throughout the country traditional religions were on the defensive.
Everywhere countless numbers of common people were creating new egalitarian and emotionally satisfying evangelical religious communities. While nearly all of the major colonial churches either declined or failed to gain relative to other groups in the years between 1760 and 1790, Methodist and Baptist congregations grew by leaps and bounds. The Baptists expanded from 94 congregations in 1760 to 858 in 1790 to become the single largest religious denomination in America. The Methodists had no adherents at all in 1760, but by 1790 they had created over 700 congregations to rival in numbers the older Congregational and Presbyterian churches. It would not be long before the Methodists, organized nationally into circuits and locally into classes and served by uneducated itinerant preachers, became the largest church in America.
By 1790 enthusiastic groups of revivalist Baptists, New Light Presbyterians, and Methodists had moved from the margins to the center of American society. But even more remarkable than the growth of these Old World religions was the sudden emergence of new sects and utopian religious groups that no one had ever heard of before—Universal Friends, Universalists, Shakers, and a variety of other splinter groups and millennial sects. Almost overnight the entire religious culture was transformed and the foundations laid for the development of an evangelical religious world of competing denominations that was unique to Christendom.
By destroying traditional structures of authority, the Revolution opened new religious opportunities for the illiterate, the lowly, and the dependent. Both the Baptists and the Methodists encouraged public preaching by women, and even the more conservative Protestant churches began emphasizing a new and special role for women in the process of redemption. Religion was in fact a major public arena in which women could play a substantial role. By the time of the Revolution nearly 70 percent of church members of the New England churches were women, and in the decades following the Revolution this feminization of American Christianity only increased. Some of the most radical sects, like Mother Ann Lee’s Shakers and Jemima Wilkinson’s Universal Friends, even allowed for female leadership; the Shakers, in fact, became the first American religious group to recognize formally the equality of the sexes at all levels of authority.
The democratic and egalitarian revolution of these years made it possible for the most common and humble of people to express their emotions and values in ways they could not have earlier. Genteel learning, formal catechisms, even literacy no longer mattered as much as they had in the past, and the new religious groups were able to recruit members from among hitherto unchurched people in the society. Under the influence of the new popular revivalist sects, thousands of African-American slaves became Christianized, and blacks, even black slaves, occasionally emerged as preachers and exhorters. In the 1780s and 1790s a black preacher, Andrew Bryan, organized several Baptist churches in Georgia, including the first Baptist church that whites or blacks in Savannah had ever seen. Both the Baptists and the Methodists at first condemned slavery and welcomed blacks to full membership in their communion. In fact, in parts of the South the first Methodist adherents were black slaves. By 1800 nearly one out of three American Methodists was an African American.
Although we know very little of the actual religious practices in the black churches, white observers emphasized praying, preaching, and especially singing as the central elements of black worship. The black churches in the North and the slave communities in the South stressed the expression of feelings, mixed African traditions with Christian forms, hymns, and symbols, and created religions that fit their needs on their own terms.
But it was not just African Americans who brought more emotion to religion. The Revolution released torrents of popular religiosity and passion into American life, and everywhere ordinary white folk as well as black openly revealed their religious feelings as never before. Visions, dreams, prophesyings, and new emotion-soaked religious seekings acquired a new popular significance, and common people felt freer to express their hitherto repressed popular and superstitious notions. Divining rods, fortune-telling, astrology, treasure-seeking, and folk medicine thrived publicly as they had not since the seventeenth century. Long-existing subterranean folk beliefs and fetishes emerged into the open and blended with traditional Christian practices and the literary culture of the gentry to create a new popular religious amalgam.
In the confusion of post-Revolutionary America, many ordinary people came together anywhere they could—in fields, barns, taverns, or homes—to lay hands on one another, to bathe each other’s feet, to offer each other kisses of charity, to form new bonds of fellowship, to lay bare their feelings both physically and vocally, and to Christianize a variety of folk rites. From the “love feasts” of the Methodists to the dancing ceremonies of the Shakers, isolated individuals found in the variety of evangelical “bodily exercises” ungenteel and sometimes bizarre but emotionally satisfying ways of relating to God and to one another. When there were no trained clergy to minister to their inchoate yearnings, they recruited leaders from among themselves. New half-educated, enterprising preachers emerged to mingle exhibitions of book-learning with plain talk and appeals to every kind of emotionalism. Their revivalist techniques were effective because such dynamic folklike processes were better able to meet the needs of rootless egalitarian-minded men and women than were the static churchly institutions based on traditional standards of deference and elite monopolies of orthodoxy. These common people wanted a religion they could personally feel and freely express, and the evangelical denominations offered them that, usually with much enthusiastic folk music and hymn-singing.