Righteous Strife

Chapter 1

Holding Together:

A Righteous Nation

The U.S. presidential election of 1860 saw the country pivot on its political axis. For more than seventy years the republic’s federal government had propitiated slaveholders. Abraham Lincoln’s victory delivered presidential power for the first time to an antislavery party committed to extinguishing human slavery by containing it. This had shattering consequences for national unity. The election, and the secession crisis that it provoked, exposed how much the polarization of North and South owed to irreconcilable nationalist ideologies whose dynamism derived in large part from conflicting religious imperatives. Powerful majority interests in each section inhabited mutually incompatible moral realms shaped by their tailored recourse to biblical precepts and Christian principles.

The riven political nation that Lincoln inherited as president was not, of course, what the founders had intended; indeed, their deliberations had focused on how the new republic could best harness the patriotism and ambition of the Revolutionary struggle in the interests of harmonious national growth. Between 1776 and 1860 the nationalist sentiment to which they and their successors appealed, and which they continued to mold, took both secular and religious form; it achieved multiple expressions in the cross-fertilizing, interpenetrating worlds of church and state. Lincoln, as a party politician in the world’s first mass democracy, contributed to the nationalist themes voiced and developed before the Civil War by the Whigs and their Republican successors. As a result, he was in 1860 the chief political beneficiary of one potent form of religious nationalism. But equally, his most severe troubles as president would include challenges from hostile constituencies, North and South, driven by their own powerful religious imperatives.

How American religious institutions and animating faith came to wield such power is a rich story, traced here and in the next chapter. The immediate discussion considers the founders’ prescription of a national framework that separated church and state yet left ample space to honor the civic role of Christian values, and it identifies the potential of countrywide churches and religious pluralism for national integration. But, as the next chapter shows, that unifying potential succumbed to twin religious forces pulling the nation apart. We shall see the political standoff between “Puritan” religious culture and popular movements shaped by fear of “theocracy.” The other story is the fracture of mainstream churches over human bondage in a political nation constantly striving after righteousness. Taken together, these interlinked subjects explain how the strife between these explosive forces of religious nationalism came to blow the country apart.

Founding a Righteous Republic

The constitutional settlements of the 1780s detached government from religion. Bills of rights and church disestablishment statutes at state level included Jefferson’s celebrated Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia. The First Amendment to the federal constitution prohibited an establishment of religion by Congress. Together these measures erected a political order unique in Western history. Here was a radical departure from the confessional Christian states of Europe that prized religious uniformity and a legitimacy derived from the Constantinian revolution that had made Christianity the Roman Empire’s preferred religion. The Unitarians and deists influential in writing these documents couched them in broadly theistic language, or—like the Philadelphia delegates in 1787—chose not to invoke God at all. The founders’ modest anticlericalism and detachment from traditional Calvinism, their prizing human reason alongside (if not above) divine revelation, their faith in human solutions, and their belief that churches established by law would corrupt the polity might appear to have located them, in the sweep of history, closer to modern secular humanism than to the world of the traditional churches. What influential public role could there be for men of God in an officially godless nation?

Yet the nation was not godless, nor did the founders shun religion. The chief framers of the new order held diverse views: Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were freethinkers; John Jay and John Witherspoon, orthodox evangelicals; George Washington, a nonsectarian whose personal piety is hard to pin down; Alexander Hamilton, a man of fluctuating Christian convictions; James Wilson, loosely faithful to the Reformed tradition; John Adams, a Trinitarian Congregationalist turned Unitarian; and James Madison, near silent on his religious beliefs. But whatever their differences in faith, they were largely united in the conviction that the morality of reason essentially coincided with the morality of revelation. The First Amendment’s guarantee of “the free exercise” of religion was designed to protect religious liberty, not to open the door to the ferocious secularization that French revolutionaries would shortly unleash.

The founders’ separation of church and state followed as much from a hardheaded appreciation of religious realities as ideological conviction. The ideal of the confessional state, transplanted to the colonies by Anglicans and Calvinists, could not withstand the religious dynamism of persecuted dissenting churches, notably Baptists and Quakers. The astonishing proliferation of religious groups steadily weakened the standing of established churches and their privileges. Well before the Revolution, through religious revivals and immigration, colonial Christianity came to enjoy an institutional diversity unequaled anywhere in Europe. Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Anglicans challenged Congregationalist hegemony in New England. The Anglican establishment in Virginia met the defiance of Presbyterians and New Light Baptists (professing God’s “new light” through conversion). A striking ethnic mix in the middle and southern colonies nurtured Roman Catholic churches, as well as communities of German Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, French Huguenots, Dutch Reformers, Sephardic Jews, and Scottish and Scotch Irish Protestant traditions, including Keithian Quakers. Although Christian churches struggled during war, the 1780s and 1790s saw their diversity further expand, to include Universalists and Unitarians, Shakers and other millennialist groups, and, most significant for the future, New Light Baptists and Methodists.

The fusing of Christian piety with reverence for the new American republic followed naturally from the participation of Patriot clergy in the struggle for independence. Through a torrent of thanksgiving, fast-day, and election sermons, Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists, in particular, turned the events of the Revolution—the forging of intercolonial unity, the emergence of Washington as leader, the crushing of a mighty foe in an unequal contest—into hard evidence that the God who had guided their Puritan forebears toward their City on a Hill was now lavishing his favor on the new nation. The exodus narrative of Hebraic nationalism—Moses leading the people of Israel out of Pharaoh’s oppression—offered pertinent lessons about God’s judgment, providential victory, and divine purpose for the new nation. “It is abundantly evident, that the Lord hath been on our side, hath fought our battles, and delivered us from the hands of our enemies,” a Connecticut pastor declared on the return of peace. “Can the wonders done for our land be ascribed to fortuitous hits and accidents? no . . . they are the effects and productions of the wise and steady counsels of heaven.”Moreover, through America’s republican institutions—sacred and secular—God had established a model for the world that was designed, the Philadelphia Presbyterian Robert Smith insisted, “to prepare the way for the promised land of the latter days.”

The Religious Ligaments of

National Cohesion: Institutions

Patriot ministers of religion during the era of the American War of Independence often cited the prophet Isaiah: “Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day, or shall a nation be born at once?” They interpreted July 4, 1776, as more than a great historical caesura: it was the sacred day when God fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy. America—“free, sovereign and independent”—represented that prophecy’s literal accomplishment: “a nation born in a day.”

Naturally, it would take more than a day to cement a permanent union of states out of the pieces of the fragile republic of 1776. The federal constitution of 1787 established a political structure, but there was not yet a fully developed national consciousness or national culture within the loosely bound elements that made up “America.” The colonists’ unity was as much a response to an external threat as an expression of a self-conscious attachment to an American nation. Fierce localism, regional and ethnic interest, conflicts between backcountry and Eastern Seaboard, and other jealousies continued into the new nation, imposing limits on how far the inhabitants considered themselves American. In the historian John Murrin’s account, the constitutional arrangements provided “a roof without walls” for a fragmented political community whose “national identity was . . . an unexpected, impromptu, artificial, and . . . extremely fragile creation of the Revolution.”

Successive generations of political leaders built the walls to support Murrin’s roof, pursuing policies shaped by visions of the United States as a potent force in human history, a beacon of republicanism, a model of commercial activity and economic prosperity, and a locus of social opportunity and self-improvement. Political parties, though generally disparaged by the Constitution makers, soon emerged and in presidential elections drew citizens into nationwide contests. Celebrations of the Fourth of July, of George Washington’s birthday, and of other national landmarks acted to promote a distinctively American political culture. A sequence of inspirational events encouraged surges of nationalist adrenaline. They included the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, victory over the British in the War of 1812, and the overpowering of Mexican forces in a war that extended the nation’s continental boundaries close to those of today.

Economically, ordinary Americans entered, and mostly embraced, an expanding national market that promised material progress: one linking commercial agriculture to a burgeoning urban and manufacturing sector, held together by credit and a circulating currency stamped with national emblems. It was linked, too, by changes in communications. Canals, navigable waterways, plank roads, railroads, steam presses, and the telegraph collectively “annihilated space” and accommodated a threefold increase in territory and a population that grew by approximately one-third every decade between 1790 and 1860, from under four to over thirty million inhabitants. This was a people as diverse as it was youthful: a potentially unstable chemistry of white and black, of immigrant and native-born, and of plural ethnicities, languages, and religions, whose incorporation into the new nation provided the agenda for patriotic educators. Colleges, professional societies, and businesses, particularly those grounded in New England culture, sought to Americanize a heterogeneous people. And a powerful myth about the birth and meaning of the new country worked to create a shared sense of belonging among those who inherited the Revolution.

Religious agents played a potent role in building this new nation. Through their thousands of pulpits and vast apparatus of print, religious leaders encouraged American national self-consciousness and integration. They delivered nationwide structures and networks at a time when the federal government itself remained remote and relatively weak and anti-statism prevailed. There was, for instance, no federal police force, no public health administration, no federal education framework. The remarkable post office system and the network of army forts were striking but lonely exceptions in the general picture. The most potent national agencies were not agents of the government but the voluntary organizations sustained by private exertions and finance. These included political parties, which every four years harnessed local enthusiasm in the construction of national coalitions. Above all they included the religious denominations and the associated philanthropic agencies of the churches: regional and national networks that served to widen the horizons of individuals and localities.

The churches’ program of institutional expansion accommodated the massive increases in general religious adherence between 1790 and 1860. Sacralizing the landscape, almost fifty thousand church buildings sprang up, at a rate exceeding the growth of the general population. In total there were broadly enough meetinghouses in 1860 to accommodate the whole people, should that implausible need arise. Marked by countrywide pulses of revivals from the early nineteenth century—which reached their peak in the early 1840s and have often been described as a Second Great Awakening—the process is more usefully described as a sustained evangelical surge.Churches committed to a Christ-centered theology of the cross dominated the movement, emerging from a position of relative decline during the Revolutionary era, when they enjoyed little standing within the political class, to change the shape of Christianity in America over a few short decades. The potent ecclesiastical forces of the colonial era—Anglican, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Quaker—now yielded to the stunning advances of the more demotic evangelicals: the Methodists and Baptists. All sought to construct or reconstruct themselves as American denominations and, dependent now on their own voluntary efforts alone, engaged in ambitious institutional mobilization. Presbyterian synods and General Assemblies, Baptist district and state associations and (from 1814) national General Conventions, Episcopal dioceses and General Conventions: all linked local congregations to a larger arena beyond. None did so more effectively than the humming machinery of Methodism.

Methodists’ increasing engagement with ideas of sanctified nationhood was closely related to their evolution into a nationwide church. In 1789, Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury reflected on their challenge as American superintendents. “The difficulty of communication on this extensive continent,” they agreed, “obliges us to move on slowly.” Yet over the next two decades the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) outdid all rivals in building a remarkable nationwide, and easily expandable, system of local societies, quarterly meetings, and annual conferences. A four-yearly General Conference provided central direction, though the more powerful ligaments were the bishops, whose annual preaching tours ranged across the continent. Asbury above all enhanced Methodists’ sense of being “a people.” During four decades of ministry, he delivered more than ten thousand sermons, traveled well over 100,000 miles on horseback, consecrated thousands of local and traveling preachers, and became the most recognizable person, face-to-face, of his generation.The Methodist system drew its energy from those Asbury inspired: indefatigable, enterprising, dedicated circuit-riding itinerants who carried the gospel from their heartlands of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware into the wilderness settlements of the South and West, and into northern New England and Upper and Lower Canada. One early Methodist pamphleteer boasted, with good cause, that Methodism “in a remarkable manner contributes to the cementing of the union,” while Nathan Bangs, who completed the first history of the MEC in 1841, pertinently inquired, “What more calculated to soften . . . petty jealousies and animosities, than a Church bound together by one system of doctrine, under the government of the same discipline, accustomed to the same usages, and a ministry possessing a homogeneousness of character, aiming at . . . the salvation of their fellow-men . . . and these ministers continually interchanging from north to south, from east to west, everywhere striving to bring all men under the influence of the same ‘bond of perfectness’?” So, he asked, “Did not these things tend to bind the great American family together by producing a sameness of character, feelings, and views?”

Bangs rather overstated Methodist uniformity, but he rightly identified the powerful ethos of union in a movement that drew its adherents into an imagined countrywide community of the pious. Formal structure and a common doctrine played a part, but so, too, did such events as days of fasting or thanksgiving, and especially the proliferation of a celebrated element in the MEC economy, the camp meeting. By 1811, Methodists were organizing four or five hundred a year across the country, drawing average crowds of two or three thousand. Equally important in encouraging Methodists to locate themselves in the wider arena of faith were their church publications. Itinerant ministers carried for sale the experiential religious literature produced by the Methodist Book Concern, though an overdependence on British authors persisted until the 1820s, with the appearance of the instantly successful Christian Advocate. Founded in 1826, the New York weekly newspaper soon boasted a circulation of twenty-five thousand, the largest of any American serial. It delivered graphic “scenes in distant places,” broadening horizons. “Until after the period in which I became a subscriber for your useful and valuable paper,” a presiding elder explained, “my views were very different from what they now are: then they were entirely local.”

The agencies of all Protestant denominations, after the manner of connectional Methodism, spread the word of salvation. News of burgeoning revivals allowed converts to place their own personal journeys of faith into a wider story and to see themselves as inhabitants of a blessed, special, and even national community of the faithful. They learned that in the crucible of revivals their “brethren in Christ” embraced Americans of all stripes—black and white, male and female, young and old, “from every sect and denomination, whether Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist or Congregationalist.” “Great is the joy, great is the glory,” exulted the Methodist elder Philip Bruce during a sequence of powerful revivals in Virginia in 1789, foretelling their collective import: “Surely America will become the mart of nations for piety.”

The Religious Ligaments of National Cohesion:

Republican Faith

Suspicion of supernatural religion characterized the civic humanism of historic republican thought. This poses the question: How did the dominant Protestant religious culture of the American founding era, heavily evangelical and conventionally antagonistic toward the humanism of republicanism and commonsense moral reasoning, find shared ground with those secular elements in the process of nation building? The consensual outcome, which gave evangelicals an essential role in fostering the republican nation and its moral well-being, resulted from an “ideological bartering” between secular and religious cultures, with the result that key features of American evangelical Christianity helped make the founding fathers’ political ambitions work.

Following independence, most of the political founders embraced the position that George Washington famously expressed in his Farewell Address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. . . . And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”Christianity would be a welcome, even essential, means of promoting virtue among the people. For their part, American evangelical ministers warmly embraced the founders’ reformulation and, by abandoning their own earlier Calvinist understanding of virtue as exclusively dependent upon redemption, removed a key sticking point between the republican and the Reformed Protestant traditions. They no longer insisted on divine grace as exclusively necessary for virtue but agreed that ordinary people could by nature and common sense see what was true.

Republican language and reasoning consequently saturated the discourse of American Protestants during the three generations after the Revolution, sacralizing the Constitution as they did so and interweaving a variety of related themes: the role of Christian republics in thwarting proud, despotic ambition; their reliance on ideals of charity; their support of liberty and equality within the larger interests of the commonwealth; the defense of republican freedom during—or even by means of—military conflict; tyranny as the concomitant of vice; republicanism as God given, scriptural, and virtuous. These ideas were ubiquitous in the sermons and writings of evangelicals of the Calvinist or Reformed tradition, expressed well beyond New England and its diaspora.

But what of Methodists? Early on, their idea of the American nation contrasted starkly with the sanctified Puritan nationhood of Patriot Congregationalists and Presbyterians. During and immediately after the War of Independence few Methodist preachers felt a primary loyalty to the idea of America. John Wesley’s Calm Address to Our American Colonies in 1775 extolled the beneficence of British rule so that while the war raged, as the superintending preacher Francis Asbury put it, “there is not a man in the world so obnoxious to the American politicians as our dear old Daddy.”Even Methodist Patriots were tarred with the brush of British “Toryism,” a target for whipping, fines, imprisonment, and other forms of persecution. Postwar Methodism continued to be stigmatized as a foreign import. Preachers pushing into the outer settlements of New York and New England faced the charge “that the king of England had sent them to disaffect the people” and stir up another war. James O’Kelly, a radical Revolutionary veteran, anti-Federalist, and Jeffersonian Republican, who damned Coke and Asbury as tyrants and henchmen “on a stretch for power,” led a secession of twenty thousand members to form the anti-episcopal “Republican Methodists.” As late as the 1820s the smell of British tyranny attached to English-born Methodists.

Despite this, the Methodists had an evangelistic edge over disputatious Calvinists, whose key doctrines included the sinfulness of humankind and God’s predetermined choice of an “elect” who would alone secure salvation. By contrast, the Methodists’ Arminian doctrine meshed well with the emerging democratic, anti-elitist, and self-empowering culture of the age. It stressed the availability of God’s grace to all, through Christ’s atonement, and challenged the suffocating notion that anxious sinners should wait inactively for conversion. The early MEC consequently harvested converts by the thousand. As it did so, it showed little interest in championing American nationhood. Defining themselves as primarily citizens of “Zion,” the church militant, Methodists differed profoundly from Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Dutch Reformed churches, whose Calvinism instilled responsibility to the political nation.Asbury and his colleagues worked in the spirit of Wesley’s instruction, “that the Methodists are one people in all the world,” a transnational movement devoted more to building up “the Redeemer’s kingdom” than the country where they labored.Political geography was of secondary concern. Lorenzo Dow, the legendary charismatic, freewheeling, and ubiquitous itinerant, was a self-styled “cosmopolite,” blind to political boundaries. Francis Asbury spoke as much of the “empire” of Methodism, and the “continent” of North America, as he did of the American “nation.”

Yet forces were at work within Methodism that helped indigenize the movement and give it a role in sacralizing the nation. Admitting into the ministry American-born, Revolutionary Patriot soldiers helped erode the stigma of Methodist Loyalism, as did licensing the sons of Revolutionary militiamen. Methodists’ immediate postwar articles of religion in 1784 included a bold statement of loyalty to American rulers. Then, in May 1789, Coke and Asbury stole a march on other denominations by calling on George Washington at home, after his first inaugural, to congratulate him on his appointment to “the presidentship of these States.” Asbury, mixing his labor with the country’s growth, discovered that a new allegiance had stolen upon him. Traveling across the St. Lawrence River into Canada in 1811, he wrote, “My strong affection for the people of the United States came with strange power upon me when I was crossing the line.” When war with Britain broke out in 1812, a minority of grieving pacifist Methodists lamented the calamity of a bloody conflict between two Protestant nations. More remarkable, however, was the response of the Methodist majority in endorsing the war as a holy enterprise. Asbury was much less belligerent than many, but his prayers for President Madison and the U.S. government were consistent with other wartime examples of patriotic Methodist piety: the elder David Lewis’s trust in the “God of power,” Timothy Merritt’s ready identification of the new America with Israel of old, and—on the day of thanksgiving with the coming of peace—the full-blooded nationalism of the westerner William McKendree.

Methodists’ sanctifying of the American cause in 1812 marked the drawing together of existing strands of thought. Their 1789 address to Washington acknowledged God’s Providence, protection of the country, and “favour on the American people.” Their general fast and thanksgiving in 1796 conceived of America as a moral entity, a nation capable of sin and corruption. Independence Day sermons understood God’s goodness to operate on humankind as citizens, not mere private sinners. God, John Dow told his New Jersey congregation, had done “great things . . . for us . . . in our national capacity,” delivering Americans—as He had the people of Israel—“from the galling yoke of tyranny and oppression.” He had blessed the republic with “the sacred privilege of an equal representation . . . [and] of acting for [our]selves.” Under autocratic power, he declared, “vital piety . . . has ever groaned and languished, . . . but the equalizing system of republicanism is friendly to the interests of religion, and calculated to promote the cause of truth and virtue.” Americans, he warned, must never tolerate “regal power, a form of government which originated with impious heathens.” No unreconstructed monarchist merited the privilege of citizenship “in a free and independent country.”

With their evolving republican outlook converging with the tenets of Reformed Calvinistic nationalism, with their membership embracing women and men, of all ages, of all social ranks, both black and white, and in all parts of the country, Methodists could plausibly cast themselves as a primary agent of godly nation building. Indeed, in 1812, Methodists posed as the true patriots, since the chief religious opponents of the war, and ministerial sympathizers with the Federalists’ threat of secession from the Union, were the Calvinistic clergy of New England. The world had indeed been turned upside down when that year the Methodist Martin Ruter delivered at an Independence Day gathering in Maine what one newspaper called “such a supplication . . . as would have been made by the Whig Clergy in ‘the times which tried men’s souls.’ ” During the 1820s and 1830s Methodists—the nation’s biggest denomination—would become committed ambassadors of a Christian republic. A young Methodist minister, the well-educated and capable Benjamin Franklin Tefft, offered a shining example of this transformation in a funeral sermon on the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841 (of which more later). Tefft used the occasion not to focus, as an earlier generation of Methodist preachers would commonly have done, on the transient character of human life but to establish at length that “Christianity is the source of the beautiful and glorious conception of that form of national association which we style a republic,” and to show that “American civilization” comprised “a union of Christianity with the mental aspirations to liberty.” It was “neither merely Christian, nor abstractedly democratic,” but “a combination of the two, constituting a civilization purely republican.”