The Unvarnished Doctrine

The Unvarnished Doctrine

            In his 240-page defense of the Lockean liberal influence on the American Revolution, Steven Dworetz builds a strong levy against the high tide of classical republicanism. This school – originating around the third quarter of the twentieth century – attempted to unseat John Locke as the “prophet” of the American Revolution, relegating his classical liberalism to the margins of Revolutionary thought. In its stead this “revisionist” school sought to place the classical republicanism of “Cato” in the center stage, essentially pitting liberal “commerce” against republican “civic virtue” in an ideological struggle over the soul of the American Revolution. Originally published out of the Duke University Press in 1990, Dworetz claimed to explore a “critical examination of the republican revision” while reasserting the centrality of Locke’s liberalism in the Revolution (7). Quickly admitting that his book is insufficiently exhaustive to provide a final answer to the question of ideological centrality in Revolutionary American thought, his work does provide a valuable contribution to the, sometimes tense, scholarly exchange. This book is certainly not without its weaknesses, but Dworetz’s topics are well researched and his arguments are compellingly articulated. The criticisms that he provides cannot be easily overcome, nor should his questions be quickly dismissed if a rigorous academic investigation into the questions of the American founding is of any consequence.

             Dworetz begins his book by explaining that Western nations have a long history of tolerating – if not celebrating – critical reviews of political doctrine while, simultaneously, warning that this practice can behave as a corrosive force on a nation’s foundational political culture (3). It is precisely this danger that he charges the classical republican school of injecting into the American political discourse with their “revisionist” interpretation of the American founding (4). Claiming that the motivation of the classical republicans to remove Lockean liberalism from the American Revolution – primarily inspired by scholars such as J.G.A Pocock, Leo Strauss and C.B. Macpherson – was anti-commercial in nature, Dworetz subtly paints them with the brush of socialistic ideology (7). At this point, it would not be inappropriate to place these works within a greater historiographical timeline and, hopefully, provide an explanation for their respective points of view. The ideological clash between capitalism and socialism, instigated by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the member-states of NATO, not only prompted heated political and economic disagreements but also acted as a backdrop for critical new ways in understanding historical events and dramatic social changes. The 1960s and 1970s represented the “high tide” of socialist influence on the historical discipline and, from this, came the revised interpretation of the American founding that unsurprisingly discounted Locke – a champion of commerce and property rights – as a major influence of the period. It is also unsurprising that books like Dworetz’s – books that championed Locke’s bold return as a central figure of the American Revolution – were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Soviet Union was languishing in the throes of its impending demise and the West was celebrating the triumph of commerce, liberty and freedom. While it would be a mistake to over-politicize the nature of these kinds of research publications, it would also be a mistake to ignore the larger ideological and historiographical context that these books can be placed. Perhaps worse than charging the classical republican scholars with being motivated or blinded by their ideological leanings, is Dworetz’s later accusation that these researchers dismissed Locke out of a fundamental unfamiliarity with his writings, and that they “failed to grasp the very basics” of Lockean political theory (10). Moreover, he claims that the entire school of classical republicanism relied on the linchpin of a hostile interpretation of Locke and “some wishful thinking about Cato”, suggesting that the historians of the republicanism school superimposed a twentieth-century worldview onto an eighteenth-century implementation of Locke’s seventeenth-century political doctrine (12, 31). While these indictments against the classical republican scholars are weighty indeed, Dworetz claims that the true value of his project is in its attempt to reinforce the strong tradition and foundation of American liberalism, an attempt that he hopes will keep a political paradigm shift at bay (38).

            Thoughtfully devoting an entire chapter of his book to both the general methodological challenges of historical studies and critiques of political theory, as well as the interdisciplinary challenges of studying these two fields concurrently, Dworetz makes clear that he fully anticipates and welcomes a thorough critical examination of his research. While this chapter not only introduces the reader to the difficulty involved in the research for his book, it also does an excellent job of reminding his would-be critics that a certain amount of critical latitude must be afforded historians for making the best of what they are given. In this sense, Dworetz adequately reminds his readers that the modern historian bears a remarkable resemblance to a forensic investigator. With regard to The Unvarnished Doctrine, Dworetz relies heavily on political pamphlets, state papers, official documents, newspapers, correspondence, and even “circumstantial evidence” in order to capture the “character of the Revolution” (34, 54, 67). Rightfully suggesting that the most important thing a researcher can do is familiarize himself with the source material and the sources that those writings cite, he also admits that the selection – and, by implication, the exclusion – of one’s sources can go very far in determining the conclusions of a research project (51, 61). This reminder is a curious one since the extensive section of end notes in the back of the book would suggest that Dworetz has done considerable research for this project, whereas the obviously heavy reliance on New England clerical writings in the latter half of the book appears to betray or contradict his own warning on sources.

            By performing a reasonable exploration of “liberal” political theory of Locke in chapter three of The Unvarnished Doctrine, Dworetz establishes the that primary concerns of the colonists in the eighteenth century consisted of taxation, representation, property, consent and liberty – all topics that Locke had extensively written on (74, 98). He continues by arguing that the considerable protests of the American colonists against Parliament’s revenue policies found justification primarily in the writings of Locke and that Locke’s theory of limited legislative government provided a critical validation for resistance against Britain’s Declaratory Act (70, 93). These claims indeed supply a compelling refutation of the classical republican claim that Locke was simply a “bourgeois capitalist” and that his ideas were not influential in the mechanical development of American political theory. In addition to his reiteration of Lockean political theory, Dworetz also invests a considerable amount of space in his book to proving that “Cato” could not have been Locke’s would-be replacement as “prophet” of the Revolution. Not only is there an alarming lack of – what he refers to as “empirical textual evidence” – to suggest that Cato’s writings were important to the Revolutionaries, Dworetz also asserts that Cato would not have resonated with any of the founders and Revolutionary leaders for the following reasons: Cato believed in original sin and claimed that the “making of laws supposes that all men are wicked”, Cato’s political theory is Hobbesian in nature and believed that laws were needed to create terror and instill order, and, lastly, Cato believed that liberty and property were as linked as Locke did, thus making Cato no less of a “capitalist” with regard to liberty and property than Locke (41, 100, 101, 104, 109). While Dworetz does a particularly good job of showing that the writings and ideas of Locke were more in tune with traditional Revolutionary values than Cato, he leaves the overwhelming burden of proof for chapter five where he discusses the relationship between the New England clergy and Locke’s theological and political writings.

            Near the end of chapter four, Dworetz lays the foundation for the next chapter by claiming that Locke was “distinctively a Biblical Christian” (118). While the classical republicans did call into question Locke’s spirituality (and Locke’s religious predilections would certainly have an impact on the general acceptability of Locke’s theological arguments by the host of New England clergy), the suggestion that Locke was a “Biblical Christian” is problematic on many levels. The first question this raises is: what does Dworetz mean by “Biblical Christian”? It would not be inappropriate to suggest that Christianity remains a spiritual tradition without an overriding orthodoxy and yet Dworetz does nothing to qualify that label except to say that Locke believed that God existed and that he, evidently, was a powerful deity. This definition could just as easily describe a devout Jew or Muslim as much as it would a “Biblical Christian”. Unfortunately, this question is not resolved anywhere else in the text and it is upon this basic assumption that Dworetz proceeds to the most important chapter of his book: establishing a relationship between his ideas and writings, and those that would – ostensibly – serve to disseminate them to the public: the New England clergy. This element of Dworetz’s research is, perhaps, the most unique as he branches into the writings of the colonial religious culture to find explanations for the colonial political culture. This method can provide its own challenges, however, as you must first demonstrate that the New England clergy really were representative of the larger intellectual macrocosm in America while, simultaneously, demonstrating that the colonists themselves tended to “take their ministers seriously” (135). Arguing that the New England clergymen boldly broke the overwhelming clerical tradition of preaching “passive obedience” to a doctrine of revolution, Dworetz goes to great lengths to prove that these ministers – among the variety of religious controversies – all basically held that both reason and revelation were legitimate sources of knowledge (138, 159). From this essential foundation, Dworetz works to establish that the change in doctrines of obedience was directly influenced by Locke’s theological interpretation of Romans chapter 13. Linking old Calvinist theological principles such as the limited power of God to Locke’s principle of limited sovereignty in legislative government represents a particularly innovative interpretation in Dworetz’s book but not without the cost of exposing him to a lot of criticism (150, 154).

The connections that he establishes in this book, while excellently researched and convincingly argued, have a number of “moving parts” to them that cannot help but raise questions and inspire critical review. There are a number of places where his findings can break down. Dworetz claims to have found that, among the writings of New England clergy, Locke’s thoughts On Government were quoted more often than any other non-Biblical source, yet he doesn’t quantify this claim with actual counts or percentages, nor does he qualify it by explaining whether those citations were favorable or unfavorable (43). His suggestion that the New England clergy were a fairly representative microcosmic barometer of colonial attitudes and beliefs is not new, but it is certainly not closed off to critical analysis (59). The danger of relying on Locke’s orthodoxy as a “Biblical Christian” was already discussed, but so is his argument that the New England clergy found justification for placing reason and revelation on the same footing in Locke’s writings (147). Despite these weak points in his rousing defense of Locke’s position as vanguard of the Revolution, Dworetz delivers precisely what he aims for: to correct errors in some previous historical works on the American founding political doctrine while not seeking out a completely comprehensive explanation of the American founding (37). It is his parting advice, however, that may provide the most important contribution to this field: to leave the mutually exclusive approaches of the American founding “myth” in the past while seeking out new ways to understand how the formation of “American republicanism in the Revolutionary years was a distinctively liberal republicanism” (191).

The American Reformation

The American Reformation:

A Historiography of the Social History of Early American Christianity

            While reading the book Myth of a Christian Nation, by Gregory A. Boyd, I came across a passage where Dr. Boyd recounted a familiar scene in my own past experience: sitting in church during a service dedicated to Independence Day where an old rugged cross made of wood sat in the back corner of the stage with an American flag wrapped around it while the projector played video clips of fighter jets flying over the Capitol in Washington and the congregation sang the Star-Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. In my youth I thought nothing of the images, the sounds or the general spectacle of this kind in a church service. After reading Myth, however, I began to realize how peculiar and – in a way – how distinctly American this blending of patriotism, democracy and Christianity were. Many of the American Christians I’ve had the opportunity to know personally – whether conservative, moderate or liberal – believe that American political and social values are uniquely suited to host vibrant communities of evangelical Christianity and celebrate a marriage of American exceptionalism and Christian millenarianism. The courtship of this relationship in the early republic period of American history has come under renewed study and recent scholarship has attempted to fill in the gaps left my previous historians. Early modern contemporaries and modern historians alike have found themselves challenged in trying to understand not only one of the most significant political revolutions during this period but, arguably, one of the most important socio-religious transformations in Western history as well. While the greater body of research done on early American Christianity has been centered on the theology and biographies of prominent Puritans and evangelical ministers, recent scholarship on the subject has begun trending toward an understanding of this transformation in the context of social history.[1] In this sense, the democratic and populist changes that swept across America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are no different than other similarly researched events. As with most historical research, there is no significant consensus among the scholars on many ideas expressed in each of the studies I have researched for this essay. From ideas about socio-economic conditions to clerical abuse, political power struggles, and a developing hunger among contemporaries for a new kind of ethics, it is possible to come away from each text with more questions than answers. Having completed similar research on a related social movement, the European Protestant Reformation, it has become clear that many of the research techniques, scholarly approaches and even conclusions overlap significantly between the two periods. Just as European social historians very clearly claim that the religious nature of the Protestant Reformation contained significant political connotations, American historians surveyed in this essay suggest that the political revolution in the late eighteenth century accompanied, if not altogether responded to, a budding religious revolution in North America. It is within this transatlantic historical perspective that I refer to the changing religious landscape of the early republic as an “American Reformation”. It is understandable that some may object to my reference of this period of religious history as an “American Reformation” but – as I hope to show early in this essay – the reference is not only justified, but fitting. Moreover, this essay will attempt to trace the topical evolution of the American Reformation as a “social history” in order to understand the questions it has raised, the fresh viewpoints it has unveiled, and the significant contributions it has made to our understanding this groundbreaking movement.

            As mentioned previously, there are several shared themes, techniques and conclusions between the social historiography of the European Protestant Reformation and the American Reformation. The foremost and – hopefully – most obvious between these two historiographies is the attempt by social historians to place significant developments in religious history into a broader social, economic and political context. Social history surrounding the Protestant Reformation in Europe began in the mid 1960s by, mostly, German historians during a very troubled time in modern German history. As any historian might remember, Germany was divided into two separate nations – one communist, one democratic – and the clash of ideologies bled over into every facet of life, including historical research. Produced as a post-modern descendent of Marxist economic-historical critique, the new social history attempted to place new interpretations on previously settled historical questions like the German Reformation. Firstly, I would like to show that the social historians of the American Reformation not only shared similarities in technique and findings with their European counterparts, but also that there is a solid chronological continuity from the European studies to the analogous American ones. Whereas the bulk of European Protestant Reformation scholarship was published between 1979 and 1988, most of the current scholarship on the American Reformation was done between 1985 and 1994. There are, of course, a few outlying exceptions for both research fields on both sides of the timeframe, but, again, the large majority of published works fall into those timeframes. Researchers like Max Weber, Steven Ozment, Hans Hillerbrand, Peter Blickle and Lee Palmer Wandel – among others – took up the history of the common man’s Reformation with particular enthusiasm, exploring questions of increased involvement of local layman on the eve of the Reformation, the German Peasant War of 1525, Christian millennialism, iconoclasm, clerical antagonism, the notion of sola scriptura, local election of church pastors in conjunction with increased laity control over church administration and access to the Bible in vernacular German. As will hopefully become evident through the course of this essay, American and European social historians shared as much in common as the two religious cultures they studied.[2]

            Turning now to the research on the relationship between American Christianity and American democracy it seems appropriate to begin with Alexis de Tocqueville. Certainly, it feels suitable to begin with Tocqueville by the simple fact that he was among the first scholars to write extensively about the relationship between American Christianity and American democracy, or that he is quoted ubiquitously on the subject by twentieth-century historians, but it is also fitting that should begin a comparison of Protestant religious phenomena on two continents with the observations of a Catholic that had a foot in both. While it is true that Tocqueville was not an American, a Protestant or a “common” man, he does provide an important window into understanding this relationship during the early republic period. In the book Tocqueville’s Civil Religion, Sanford Kessler attempts to bring Tocqueville’s astute observations and claims about American “civil religion” into a context of the contemporary social history. Kessler’s understanding of Tocqueville, constructed from an analysis of the book Democracy in America, begins from the starting point that religion was the first of America’s political institutions. Claiming that Protestantism – from the very beginning with Luther – required a very real and present reliance on private judgment, Tocqueville draws an invisible, but direct, line from the events in America to the events in Reformation Europe. Not only is this reliance on private judgment a hallmark of Protestant confessions, it is – as he reminds us – a requirement democratic polity. Moreover, Tocqueville’s unique attunement to the contemporary cultural phenomena of democratic populism led him to claim, well ahead of his time, that religious authority had shifted dramatically after Jefferson’s election to become vested in public opinion for most Americans. This new democratic atmosphere not only fostered the Enlightenment and sectarianism, but also allowed religion to function as a practical apparatus for common people to access political franchise and even political power.

This is not to say, however, that Tocqueville believed that these changes did not come without considerable risk. Indeed, the principles of democratic equality, if implemented in daily life, had such a decentralizing and individualizing potential that he feared it might bring down traditional Christian institutions. As some modern historians would later argue, Tocqueville could not have been more correct. These dangers were born out of evangelical religious leaders and itinerant preachers – most of whom placed such a central emphasis on eternal salvation and eternal damnation – making the acceptance of Christianity dependent on self-interested motivations. Kessler, in his appraisal of Tocqueville’s study, finds few faults in this visionary observer, but primary among them is his most serious failure to anticipate or acknowledge the importance of American evangelicalism, which goes almost completely unmentioned in Democracy in America.[3] These conclusions and observations of Tocqueville on the effects of individualization and democratic values on American Christianity are similar, in many respects, to those that were made in European Reformation studies about the affirmation of the laity and the relationship between the Reformation and the German Peasant War of 1525 as a means to access power through the close-knit religious communities made by Gunther Vogel, Heiko Oberman and Peter Blickle. Where the German Peasants had failed in their revolt against oppressive ecclesiastical and feudal lords, the Americans succeeded and – in doing so – secured even more control over their local religious and political communities than the Reformation-era Germans were able to.

One topic that few other historians even attempted to seriously address in their research was the concept of evangelical millennialism. I found that the relatively surprising gap in this field of research was sufficiently and pleasantly filled with Ruth Bloch’s 1985 book, Visionary Republic. Millennialism, according to Bloch, returned with vigor to the forefront of Christian communities after the Protestant Reformation – especially among the more radical denominations – and, in response to magisterial persecution, these communities were forced to migrate to America bringing the millennialist expectation with them. For the English colonists, she claims that millennialism started mostly in the English Civil War in 1640 by the Whigs, and Radical Whig ideology came, in part, from some of the more radical elements of the Reformation. While the Puritans were especially attuned to this concept, Bloch believes that the French and Indian War on the eve of the American Revolution helped advance the belief that the end was near as it was the worst in a series of wars between England and France, Europe’s two largest and strongest powers. Moreover, the French and Indian War saw an uncommonly high increase in the employment of terms such as “liberty” and “tyranny” especially when drawing a distinction between English civil liberty and French monarchy, or Protestant and Catholic values. The American millennial vision was almost wholly centered on the American belief that these colonies had a special role to place in bringing about the end of days and the coming of the Lord, and soon after the French and Indian War charges of “Romish” behavior – which was synonymous in eighteenth century English society with antichristian – in the Church of England were also levied as veiled attacks against the English political institutions. The American Revolution, then, was not simply a political revolution, according to Bloch, but also may have been understood as Christians participating in a movement that would bring them one step closer to the coming of the Kingdom of God. After establishing that American colonists were abundant in comfort with Great Britain being paralleled with the Beast of Revelation, she outlines a very meticulous path among American evangelicals in the earliest years of the republic of disillusionment with the centralization of American government. This disillusionment translated, in Bloch’s research, to a direct religious change of Christianity’s enemy from the British Empire to moral and social reform at home. In other words, with the enemy from without subdued, American Christians turned their attention to the myriad of enemies within near the turn of the nineteenth century.[4] While Bloch’s survey of American millennialism stops, rather abruptly, around 1800, what she does provide is fascinating and enlightening. What she does appear to lack, however, is the permutation of American millennialism that inevitably came in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Her more than fifty pages of endnotes demonstrate both the extensive and diverse research she conducted for this book, much of which are primary sources ranging from sermons to hymns and even early modern prophetic pamphlets. Bloch’s work not only does much of the heavy lifting in drawing a thematic line between European religious phenomena and the American Revolution, but also sets up a perfectly acceptable foundation for understanding the kind of political, social and religious expectation that set the evangelical revolution in motion in the nineteenth century.

In his 1987 book, Faith of Our Fathers, Edwin Gaustad attempted to build, in some respects, upon those initial observations about the institutionalized nature of religion in America by analyzing not only the state of American religious sentiments in the early republic but also the doctrinal confrontations between evangelicals and the Founding Fathers. Gaustad argues that in the decades leading up to the Revolution, evangelicals began a socially intrusive campaign against ecclesiastical authority. This campaign, he claims, stemmed from the popular opinion among Americans that civil and religious authorities were co-conspirators in the effort to keep men in servility, thus the liberty of one necessitated the liberty of the other. This attack on religious authority did not happen in a vacuum, however. The Church of England went wherever England went, and to attack the legitimacy of the Church of England was to attack the legitimacy of England in whole. In the same way that the Reformation movement was a rebellion against papal and Catholic ecclesiastical abuses, so too was the rise of evangelical reform movements a rebellion – of sorts – against England in Gaustad’s opinion. After the success of the Federalist agenda in 1789, churchgoers in America found it more appropriate to become closely involved in both the administration both of their local church as well as government policy. The explosion of evangelicalism is in some respects, according to Gaustad, a response to Federalist success in government of keeping power both centrally located and in fewer hands than many Americans were comfortable with. It should be no surprise – in the way that Gaustad frames his message – that the explosion of evangelical religion in America coincided with the Jeffersonian presidencies. In simple terms, evangelicalism was most certainly an exercise in popular authority by lay churchmen. Gaustad’s conclusions are drawn, if not too heavily, on the overwhelming statistical data that illustrates just how quickly the Methodists and Baptists replace the Congregationalists and Episcopalians as the churches with the most members. Indeed, in just seventy years Methodism grew to be over 500,000 members and outnumbered Congregationalism, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Lutheranism combined. Like many of his contemporaries, he finds solid footing on the inter-related nature of the cultural transformation as he claims that the “age of volunteerism turned into an age of reform – an American revolution all over again, only this time not in politics but religion.”[5] In the epilogue of his book, Gaustad initiates what will become a recurrent theme in the study of Western Christianity, by claiming that religion, like politics, found itself torn between establishing liberty and equality via individualization and governing via community. Where Gaustad might earn some criticism is that his endnotes cite, so lopsidedly, secondary resources from the mid-to-late twentieth century in contrast to some contemporary works that do far more analysis of primary documents. This is not to suggest, however, that Gaustad did not perform an appropriate amount of research but the question of how much of his conclusions and arguments rely on other historians remains. I also found it curious that his analysis of the social dimensions of American evangelicalism were located in the beginning and the end, but the middle sections of his book – where one might find evidence of extensive and exhaustive research in the primary sources – were only biographic profiles of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and Adams. These chapters were not entirely unrelated to the central thesis of this book, but the unusual format certainly made it harder to follow the thread of thought from start to finish. In all, however, I think Gaustad’s argument that challenges to ecclesiastical authority in the eighteenth century paved the way for American challenges to English political authority are valid and deserving of further investigation.

The suggestion that evangelicals were the “principal subculture” and among the principal shapers of the larger American social, religious and political culture is the topic that occupies Richard Carwadine’s 1993 book, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. Focusing his research primarily on the larger denominations of the nineteenth century, he claims that there was considerable pressure from within the rank-and-file membership for ministers and organizations to throw their collective weight behind moral legislation during this period. Whatever prior objections Christianity had about getting into bed with politicians and governments had to be laid to rest quickly as, Carwadine claims, to abstain from political involvement would have been to swim against the current of mainstream American expectations, religious or otherwise. Providing an uncompromising tone to American politics, the visionary and idealistic evangelical Christian communities exercised a more active role in influencing the direction that American society took, after complaining from the political sidelines about corrupt electioneering by the party-driven system that flourished after Jefferson. The most important contribution that this hefty work of scholarship provides to the field is an explanation of the evolving relationship between evangelical denominations, especially Baptists and Methodists, and political parties, such as the Whigs, to deliberately and effectively influence the legislative process in America. Moreover, what is particularly significant about this relationship is that it was driven by pressure from within those denominations and it represents a radical change in status for the Methodists and Baptists who, until then, had been denominations that represented those on the disenfranchised margins of American society.[6] The similarities in the evolution of church-state relations between the Methodists and Baptists in America and the Lutherans and Calvinists in Europe are striking and, as with several other topics, are prime targets for further review.

Approaching the topic of early American evangelicalism from the rare perspective of gender studies, Susan Juster’s Disorderly Women strikes a delightfully balanced note between respecting the evangelical movement on its own terms while incorporating important questions about how masculine and feminine relationships influenced the dominant religious and political values of the time. While the gender perspective is both important to historical studies in general and to this topic in particular, I am particularly interested in the arguments that she raises with regard to the relationship between American religious communities and the political development of American democracy. This selective treatment of the text should not be interpreted as a lack of respect for the body of Juster’s research, rather it simply reflects the focus of this essay’s historiographical question. As Juster, herself, claims that this book is more about political discourse and the boundaries of power than simply gender in Christianity, I feel that my interpretation of the text for these purposes is within bounds. Juster’s overriding theme in Disorderly Women is that evangelicalism was a “particularly powerful way” to construct the relationship between self and community and, in light of that, New Light Puritanism can be understood as movement that facilitated a “relative egalitarianism” with regard to church government in colonial America. Perhaps more directly to the point, Juster claims that early American history can be understood as an “evolution of political ideology away from the consensual model of republican virtue to the mechanical mode of democratic self-interest”. It is precisely this theme of transference from republicanism to democratic ideologies. The Great Awakening overturned the hierarchy and structure of sacred space, while social arrangements and social orders were abandoned at revival camp meetings. Not only would you find the poor, the marginalized and the sinners, but you would also find the itinerant preacher providing access to the power of God. Drawing from a concept that the “feminine” element of society does not simply include women – but also the marginalized – her claims at evangelical egalitarianism begin to take sharp focus. These camp meetings had both religious and political significance in that the Puritan community was made up of highly ordered people and space, and the evangelical community was one of language: something everyone had equal access to and – at least theoretically – equal control over. It was this quasi-egalitarian “golden age” that was sacrificed during the Revolution as the cultural tide in America shifted to a hyper-masculine sense of independence, making a revolution for property rights and right of self-rule for proto-Victorian values against Britain more important than the retention of Christian communal equality. Turning to the question of the American Revolution, Juster claims that was radical in that evangelicals – especially Baptists – wanted to see the apparatus of church and state disappear, but less radical in that they sacrificed many of their “called out” values at the alter of political revolution. In the midst of the American Revolution, Evangelicals began to transfer their position from “outside” temporal and spatial arrangements of power to engage them from within and, in doing so, secured a powerful position in that alliance. Post-Revolutionary America, to Juster, represented the completion of a shift in values from the egalitarian qualities of primitive evangelicalism – an expression best seen in the Anabaptist communities of southeastern Germany – to a renewed affirmation of cultural masculinity. In the end, she we are asked to revisit the age-old question of “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?” as she argues that evangelicals sacrificed too many of the egalitarian principles that made them attractive to the “feminized” element of American society in order to become mainstream and acceptable within the new masculine-dominated social order.[7] Disorderly Women is a particularly well-researched book and the number of Puritan and Baptist church records books she pored over in order to write this book is overwhelmingly impressive. Her interpretation of masculinity and femininity in the negotiation of social power provides an altogether rare vision of American power politics and the role that evangelicals played in creating, then abandoning, a true vision of inclusion for all.

While there are many good questions yet to be raised over what the “spiritual center” of Christianity in America is, there are few scholarly discussions that take place on this question without Mark Noll’s extensive research coming to the table. His many books and papers on the topic of American Christianity are considered to be among the highest and most exhaustive secondary sources in modern historical research. One of the earliest papers Noll wrote on the subject of American Christianity was, titled “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776-1865”, wherein approaches the centrality of the Bible as a text of private as well as political significance in the early republic. To Noll, the Bible was not only used in private for personal “nourishment”, but ministers used it to explain and encourage the American vision that saw exceptionalistic potential and destiny. From the most unlikely success of the Revolution, ministers were able to claim that America had a divinely providential place in God’s plan to redeem the world and establish the Kingdom. In this way, the Bible was both a source of truth, the source of a narrative that could be replicated to produce prosperity and power. In a later paper, titled “Revolution and the Rise of Evangelical Social Influence in North Atlantic Societies”, Noll explores what he sees as a consistent relationship between evangelical revivalism and political revolution in North Atlantic countries. Market revolution was a very close ally to evangelicalism at “every state in its North Atlantic history”, Noll claims and suggests that Evangelical preachers “exploited” revolutionary environments in various regions. The success of evangelical revolution in America – among other regions – was due to the success of political revolutions. Noll claims that successful economic and political revolutions have the effect of destroying traditions. In the midst of disarray, the individualization of evangelical religion found it much easier to spread than under the more traditional – if not more repressive – social conditions. It does not take much to see how these observations are related to those arguments – made especially by Peter Blickle – that the German Reformation was a hand-in-hand collaborator of the German Peasant Revolt of 1525. It is in his 576-page tome, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, that Noll shows his most exhaustive research. In this book, he claims that there was – and some say there still is – a symbiotic relationship between American socio-political identity and American religious identity. Tracing the beginning of the major social changes to the population booms following the American Revolution, he claims that churches in America had to meet the needs of a growing and diverse communities, produce enough trained ministers to meet the demands of that growth, and expand their influence to the “hinterlands” of the colonies in response to the migration and expansion. The subsequent revivals that contributed to the Great Awakening saw the Gospel preached more to the socially outcast element of America more than any other time in history.  Instead of insisting that sinners come to church, the revival mentality saw that church came to the sinner. He also claims that the Great Awakening was America’s first truly “national” event: it facilitated an identification of individuals as Americans and fostered a growing distrust of European hierarchical order. The fear of centralized political tyranny after the French and Indian War led many Americans to affirm that the human being was responsible for his own conscience and this translated to religious beliefs as well, thus leading to the evangelical revolution. Noll attunes his argument about the values-smashing nature of revolutions in general to the American Revolution in particular and claims that it stimulated social changes of every kind, including the “new tide of democracy” that influenced the old denominations and created new ones. The result of these changes was that by the midpoint of the nineteenth century evangelicals were no longer the “outsiders” of American religion but, rather, occupied the greatest and highest positions of social and political recognition. This is not to say, however, that there were not still “outsiders” to reach – or exploit – as he turns, albeit briefly, to the question of Mormonism and Joseph Smith. Smith’s religion, Noll claims, drew upon culturally surging themes of democracy – the right of one to choose and think for himself – and republicanism – the distrust of power to corral a new congregation of followers for an entirely new dispensation: a topic that is brilliantly researched by the next author, John Brooke.[8]

In his book, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of a Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844, Brooke immediately introduces the reader to one of the most powerful differences between Mormonism – now referred to as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – and the rest of the Christian denominations that were created and flourished in the early nineteenth century: Mormonism was not a new denomination, but an entirely new dispensation – equal to the ones given to Moses and Jesus. Brooke, while on shaky ground according to some criticism he has received in response to this book, is insistent that the cultural “preparation” among the disenfranchised members of American society was linked, albeit via a rather ambiguous and confusing route, to the Radical Reformation movements of Europe. Similarly to Bloch’s arguments about the transmutation of expectant millennialism from the Radical Reformation communities to American evangelical groups, Brooke also claims that Mormon cosmology was influenced heavily by restorationist millennialism and occultism. Occult practices, Brooke claims, accompanied the migration patterns of communities that came over from Europe after magistrates started cracking down on Radical Reformation sects, though he does little to substantiate that claim. Where his argument does find stronger footing is in the area of social franchise. Mormonism gave radical Christians a place to belong and captured a popular need to restore authoritative polity to Christian religion in a very decentralized and fragmented faith, while not being strictly hierarchical. In this way, Brooke claims that the founding families of the Mormon faith were all “particularly prepared” because of the outsider and dejected social conditions they came from. Not only did Mormonism give outsiders ground-level access to a new community that promised both social and cosmically metaphysical power, but Smith also relied on the economic anxieties of these families. In the new faith debt was emphatically placed as a supreme enemy, but Smith also placed a premium on alchemical and counterfeiting practices that – according to Brooke – many of these families would have already been familiar with. Alchemy was important for these radical Christian sects, Mormonism included, because it was a vehicle of wealth for poor families and communities. The ability to change common materials to precious metals or stones was, as Brooke alludes to, the ultimate “get-rich-quick” scheme of the day. Moreover, the creation of a new money economy in America saw an unprecedented growth in counterfeiting, from coins to bills or – in Smith’s case – religious documents. These documents were worth more than money to those that needed to hear what was contained within and it was the content of those documents, rather than the dubious nature of their creation, that were valuable to the early Mormon families. In this way, Brooke argues that a “ church of miracles attracted a particular kind of convert”, with the implication being that those converts were either naïve, desperate or both. Whatever the case, Brooke’s book – despite some of the criticisms it received – does quite a bit not only to trace a line via similar cultural conditions between radical, post-Reformation American Christianity and radical, post-Reformation European Christianity, but he draws an intentionally direct one as well, linking the two research fields together as well.[9]

With his two books, The Sacred Cause of Liberty and The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch has shown why his is one of America’s leading scholars on the topic of the American Reformation. Tracing the symbiotic revolution of evangelicalism and populist democracy in America from the late eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century, Hatch has provided the kind of research and analysis that only a very few American historians of this period have ever reached. A fellow professor of history at Notre Dame with Mark Noll, Hatch’s work matches a similar quality and, in the process, has earned several prestigious awards in American history. In his earlier work, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, Hatch outlines how republican liberty came to be known as a cardinal Christian belief – thus necessitating a strong reliance on individual conscience – and how between 1740-1780 the clergy were asked to be ever-increasingly involved in the formation of a prosperous and republican nation. Among other topics, this book’s central area of focus is on American ministerial involvement in the Revolution via the vision of “God’s elect” against the “antichrist” of oppression and tyranny. Hatch claims that the civil millennialism of the Revolution grew directly from politicizing the millennialist expectations and experiences of New Englanders for the prior 20 years and that American ministers were convinced that they were to play a special role in the providence of the coming of the millennium. Hatch also claims that the “vision of history” in Revolutionary New England was that the success or failure of liberty was the single thread of events that connected the European Protestant Reformation to the Revolution. Once the Revolution was over and independence from Britain had been secured, the quest for virtue – the lack of which in history showed to be the death of the ancient republics – was the preeminent quest of American clerical and political patriotism, according to Hatch. The republic’s future was understood to be tied to the amount of its direct investment in American Christianity, both in public education an the promotion of public worship and which assisted in a developing belief, for many Christians, that “cosmic forces” were arrayed against liberty to continue seeking religious and civil oppression. Moreover, a sense of romantic patriotism provided ministers and churches with the solidarity of Christian unity that they required in a time of intense denominational splitting. It is the occasion of this intense fragmentation of American Christianity that occupies Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity, wherein he argues that democratization is the key to understanding American Christianity and suggests that an increasing value of populism changed both the political and social landscape. Claiming that the Revolution changed the dynamic of American society in all forms, he goes on to argue that people could take charge of their own lives not only in politics, but in their religious associations as well. In this wildly changing climate of religious associations, American Christianity suffered from a form of “withering” institutional establishments, as American congregants wanted their churches to come down to their level. Moreover, Hatch’s claims are pinned on the suggestion that the establishment of major print in America made all of these changes possible and this change shifted the power to produce information away from the elites of American society to commoners. What immediately becomes obvious, with Hatch’s expert help, from analyzing the papers produced by this print revolution is that there was a deep-seated animosity against the educated and highly-trained professionals in American society and that this anticlericalism was part of a larger movement of class struggle. Traditional institutions were portrayed as incompetent, there were ubiquitous comparisons of the educated clergy to an aristocracy or canonical tyrants and a general equation of “elite” professionals with the antichrist. The religious free-market principles that Hatch sees in the early nineteenth century lowered the quality of religious rigor as the population of America – then as now – favored the majority of individuals with little or no education over the elite few that received extensive educational training. Sermons of this time became very similar in nature to campaign speeches, with elements of demagoguery and party-style membership recruiting, where populism in religion borrowed from revolutionary ideas of dissent as well as fear of consolidated and “back-room” power. Hatch claims that there was a complete lack of uniform recognition in religious circles and that this coupled nicely with a cultural development that helped democracy and nationalism became the uniform idea that everyone could jump on board with. This is not to say, however, that there was a declension of religious zeal in favor for the political sphere, but rather that Hatch sees transference of popular assent from traditional institutions to the enthusiastic revival. This period, according to Hatch and many others, is characterized by an unprecedented buffet menu of Christian churches from which the average citizen could choose, and since the common man had a tendency to identify with itinerant and unschooled preachers, the solidification of evangelical populism became complete. Hatch’s work helps bring the question of the American Reformation back to a practical question of, “how did this period shape the landscape of American religion today?” He suggests that democratization has led to a complete, downward trend in the kind of men that American religion and statecraft produces reminding today’s Americans of the woeful fact that post-democratic America has not produced the kind of theologian as Jonathan Edwards or the kinds of statesmen as our Founding Fathers. The term “winning souls” has become an indicator of a capitalistic numbers game of quantity over quality in both American churches and American politics and, barring another epoch-splitting catalyst, it is unlikely to ever do so again.[10]

It is a common axiom among historians that a topic will receive as many unique interpretations as there are scholars researching it. The American Reformation, while able to be loosely grouped into a finite number of mildly contending groups, is no exception. Perhaps one of the strongest qualities of modern historical research is the diversity of viewpoints offered among scholars. There should be no doubt that the studies of social historians on topics of both European and American religious phenomena have irrevocably impacted the modern historical discipline and, by my estimation, for the better. What we may now see more clearly through the efforts of both historical fields is that each respective religious Reformation served not only to reinvigorate religious affections among groups of people that may have otherwise seen declension, but that they served another – perhaps even greater – purpose of providing those outlying members of society access to political, economic and social power that had been so long to them denied. Perhaps more importantly, with regard to the history itself, this socialization of historical research provided both the inspiration and the means for scholars to research the most underrepresented demographic in history: the everyday person. From comprehensive social studies, like A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, to gender-related research projects, like Disorderly Women, social history of the American evangelical revolution has cast an increasingly bright light into the shadows of our common past. Understanding such an important turning point in American history is crucial for understanding the world we currently live in. It is difficult to resist, in history, the dangerous temptation of an easy explanation and the potential overzealousness to draw direct causalities, especially on a subject so profoundly important as democratization. The rich heterodoxy of the American Reformation research provides generous material for not only understanding the nature of the movement itself, but also insights into the culture that produces the historiography.

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[1] Harry Stout, “George Whitefield in Three Countries,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies in Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1740-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 68.

[2] See attached bibliography for list of published works cited in German Reformation social history

[3] Sanford Kessler, Tocqueville’s Civil Religion: American Christianity and the Prospects for Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 2, 17, 50, 86, 93, 95, 98, 169.

[4] Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3, 4, 13, 37, 43, 47, 58, 68, 87, 107, 110.

[5] Edwin Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 13, 21, 110, 122, 123, 136.

[6] Richard Carwadine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), ix, xv, xix, 9, 17, 34, 61.

[7] Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), vii, 3, 4, 10, 11, 22, 24, 33, 108, 113, 144.

[8] Mark Noll, “Revolution and the Rise of Evangelical Social Influence in North Atlantic Societies” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies in Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1740-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 113-30.

Mark Noll, “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776-1865” in The Bible in America, ed. Nathan O. Hatch, Mark A. Noll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 41-3.

Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 83-243.

[9] John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of the Mormon Cosmology, 1644 – 1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[10] Nathan Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

The Democratization of American Christianity

  The Democratization of American Christianity

Book Review

            In his award-winning book, The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch explores the hypothesis and the process by which American Christianity was both influenced and overtaken by the rising spirit of democratic populism in the early years of the republic. Drawing from scores of primary and secondary sources, including such abstract sources as sheets of gospel music and the diaries of itinerant preachers, Hatch delivers a thoughtful and compelling synthesis, providing a window into the cultural phenomenon of popular religion. This phenomenal reshaping of American religion, in Hatch’s worldview, was not simply an evolution of religious ideas, but a revolution in values and cultural norms that Christianity needed to respond to in order to survive in the early republic.

            Hatch, approaching the subject of early American Christianity through the lens of social history, lays the foundation of all subsequent claims by suggesting that this era in American history is defined by the popular leaders it produced in all sectors.[1] The religious movements of the time are no different in this respect than intellectual, political, social, economic and commercial movements from this period. The religious leaders he investigates in-depth are: Baron Stone of the “Christian” movement, William Miller of the Adventists, Francis Asbury of the Methodists, John Leland of the Baptists, Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal church and Joseph Smith of the Latter-Day Saints. To Hatch, the key to understanding both the history and the future of American Christianity is in the exploring the process and the effects of democratization. Revealing his perspective as a social historian, he argues that all of Christianity can be read as a “dialectic between atomization and authority,” and the early republic-era of American Christianity can be seen as a time when centralized authority was subverted both in professional vocations as well as sacred ones.[2]

            Relying on a trans-Atlantic tradition of intellectual and social movements, Hatch traces the dramatic shift in American values, initially, to a post-Revolution population boom born from high land availability and massive immigration coupled with a contemporarily high birth rate. This population boom radically altered the religious and political climate of America. An increasing value shift toward populism assisted in the change of the religious, political and social environment in the United States, while the attitudes in American rural communities changed to favor itinerant preachers, “untutored” men that resembled the folk they ministered to. Hatch argues that the Revolution ushered in a new social order whereby increasing numbers of people could take charge of their own lives, and that paradigm shift in political and social theory bled over into the religious sphere of American life.[3] In the aftermath of the Revolution, Hatch suggests that American Christianity suffered from a “withering” institutional establishment claiming that, essentially, American congregants wanted their churches to condescend to their level. This was directly linked to a Reformation-era belief that the clergy were not, in fact, “set apart” from the laity of the congregation and was coupled with a developing populist cultural movement, the virtue of the volk was valued far above any concept of elitism. These two factors combined to commence the removal of an overriding orthodoxy to scrutinize the beliefs, traditions and practices of congregations.[4]

            What ranks as certain among Hatch’s arguments is the degree of importance he places on the emergence of major print. Publishing the journals and diaries of itinerant preachers not only aided in propagandizing the devotion and innovation of “unlettered” preachers, but these sectarian groups immediately recognized the importance of major print was profound and even part of divine providence. Hatch does a considerable job outlining the efforts of evangelical groups working to wrest the power of print away from elitists and into common hands, which enabled ordinary folks to produce religious tracts.[5] Furthermore, the ever-expanding presence and role of newspapers in this period worked to chip away at the foundation of credentialed elites by undermining and ridiculing those educated and highly trained professionals from all vocations.

            Getting to the heart of the argument, Hatch focuses most of his energy on tying the phenomenon of religious development of the early republic to the cultural movement of populism in post-Revolution America. Like their political, social and economic counterparts, Hatch argues that populist religious movements are created out of class struggles, egalitarianism, theories of equality and spirituality, putting a very popular and social spin on a field of research that has been traditionally dominated by research into intellectual elites, no easy task.[6] While much of Hatch’s argument is reliant on proving a hypothesis that common people believed that learned men were understood to be trying to mediate between God and men. His attempts to unveil an underlying antagonism between elites and commoners – while undeniably influenced by Marxist political and social theory – produces the interesting claim that American clergymen, historically and even currently, have been subject to democratic ideals even more than lawyers and physicians. Summing up this viewpoint, Hatch articulates that a “free-market economy continues in the field of religion, however, and credentialing, licensing or statutory control is absent… This stringent populist challenge to the religious establishment included violent anticlericalism, a flaunting of conventional religious deportment, a disdain for the wrangling of theologians, an assault on tradition, and an assertion that the common people were more sensitive than elites to the ways of the divine.”[7] The development of early republic Christianity was influenced as much by social and class issues as intellectual and theological ones and, with respect to that foundational thesis, these groups sought to develop new religious cultures that were devoid of traditionally educated theologians.[8] To Hatch, the thriving splinter-denominations of Baptists, Methodists, Latter-Day Saints and Adventists were not only successful in this venture, but that success ultimately ensured their survival in the competitive, free-market environment of American religion.

            After poring over the appendices and notes for this book, it becomes readily apparent that Hatch has done an overwhelming amount of research to prepare for this project. Mentioning earlier that Hatch had been able to draw from such obscure sources as gospel music and diaries, one should also count his investigation of the rise of Yale University scholarships for theology students as equally obscure and brilliant. In many ways, Hatch seems to have left no stone unturned in order to shift the paradigm of early American religious studies. No less important or useful to his research are the numerous sermons, speeches and pieces of artwork that helped inform his thesis. As if anticipating at least some criticism for not presenting very many in-depth analyses or micro-historical presentations of religious movements and leaders, Hatch preemptively admits that he will be focusing mostly on national, non-regional trends. Perhaps one of the earned criticisms for this project is that Hatch’s research emphasis is clearly on the “fringe” of contemporary religious movements. Assessing these fringe movements through the dual lenses of transatlantic and social history, Hatch comes away with a slightly incomplete appraisal of religious development. Perhaps nowhere is this better seen than in the conclusion he draws with regard to what these movements left as inheritance in American society. Hatch’s conclusion that the legacy of democratization in American Christianity is, partly, that there remains a considerable gap in the “vitality” of religious experience between the educated and the working classes.[9] Hatch perceives that “intellectually modern” is still as reviled today as it was during the populist social revolution of the early republic and that the line of religious “vitality” is drawn along seam of education.[10] His faith – no pun intended – in American religious culture is also negatively affected by his underlying worldview, claiming that the process of democratization has led to a downward shift in the quality of thinking and men that modern American religion produces.[11] The quality of a theological argument, in modern religion, is assessed by its popularity rather than the intellectual merits and the rigor of the methodology that produced it, confirming the stated fears of Lyman Beecher – which Hatch quotes early in his book.[12] Having unlocked the “key” to understanding both the history and the future of American Christianity, Hatch concludes that the landscape of American Christianity is one of unbridled individualism where the success of a church will continue to be measured by the size of its multi-media viewer- and membership.[13]

            This book stands both as a bridge and as a paragon of transatlantic and social history. The fact that Hatch has so brilliantly applied the discipline and techniques he developed in those two historical traditions to the study of religion is particularly noteworthy and it cannot be any surprise that Hatch has received the academic accolades that he has. Some of the most outstanding scholarship produced in the late twentieth century was produced from coming to a new social and popular understanding of religious movements, particularly the so-called “magisterial” and “radical” Reformation movements in Europe. Hatch, via this project, delivered as outstanding of an analysis of American populism’s effects on Christianity as any Reformation historian fashioned for their field of research.

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[1] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 13

[2] Ibid p. 15

[3] Ibid pp. 4-6

[4] Ibid pp. 7-10

[5] Ibid pp. 126, 128

[6] Ibid p. 14

[7] Ibid pp. 16, 22

[8] Ibid. pp. 35, 135

[9] Ibid p. 218

[10] Ibid p. 213

[11] Ibid p. 162

[12] Ibid pp. 162, 166, 182

[13] Ibid pp. 213-217

Garrison v. Stowe

Garrison v. Stowe

A Comparison of Moderate and Radical Abolitionism

            In the decades leading up to the Civil War the cause of abolitionism took many forms and a variety of opinions. Two of the most prominent figures of the abolitionism movement in America were William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another” says Proverbs[1] and, “He who is not against us is for us,” said Christ.[2] As much could be said of American abolitionism. Garrison, himself, was a fiery prophet calling America back to holiness, lest God should visit calamity on the nation. To him, slavery represented the cancer of sin. It so deeply threatened the whole American body that, in his mind, it must be mercilessly removed no matter the cost. Stowe, however, saw the evil of slavery in the way that it disturbed the divinely sanctioned familiar institutions and enabled the unchecked physical appetites of slave masters. These two individuals, while joined in common cause, are a compelling example of the diversity and heterodoxy of antebellum abolitionism.

William Lloyd Garrison became personally acquainted with servitude in the form wage-slavery from an early age.[3] This experience informed his conviction that forced labor was “not only a crime, but the sum of all criminality,”[4] and he resolved to vigorously work toward the demise of the institution in all of its forms. Garrison’s writings reflect a man possessed with the singular purpose of egalitarianism in America. With respect to his uncompromising nature and his radical – and unpopular – rhetoric, Garrison has been often compared to British MP William Wilberforce. It is with their common revulsion in regards to chattel slavery, however, that the comparisons might end. Whereas Wilberforce worked within the halls of government to achieve abolition, Garrison decried the Constitution of the United States – the very foundation of the American government – as a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”[5] Government, in the mind of Garrison, was inherently dependent on the practice of compromise. The Constitution, itself as a legally binding government document, and its particular injunctions on the institution of slavery were rife with compromise. These compromises not only represented acquiescence to evil but he also regarded the Constitution as “the infamous bargain which… virtually dethroned the Most High God”[6] and declared, while burning a copy of it, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!”[7]

While Garrison looked to the radical social ethics of the New Testament for inspiration, he drew most heavily from the Declaration of Independence. The rhetoric of this document led him to insist that the American union was founded on the belief that “all men are created equal” and that all men lay claim to the inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” including the African slave population. Garrisonian abolitionism was certainly the most radical variation of abolitionism. It required not only the immediate abolition, but also demanded the education of blacks and believed in the equality of the sexes.[8] For his time, William Lloyd Garrison was certainly on the fringe of the movement.

His crusade against slavery led him not only to denounce the whole of human government – claiming, “the governments of this world… they are all Anti-Christ”[9] – but also the American body of Christianity. “What has Christianity done, by direct effort, for our slave population? Comparatively nothing.”[10] He ridiculed American institutional Christianity by claiming that it could tame the foreign wilderness but was powerless to emancipate the African slaves of a Christian nation. Garrison also levels a finger at the so-called free states on the Union. “We are all alike guilty. Slavery is strictly a national sin.”[11] Later he even accuses the North of being even more prejudiced than the South, because the “criminal timidity” of the North in confronting Southern slavery was the enabling force behind the entire institution.[12] Garrison’s avant-garde rhetoric and style was unsettling, even to other abolitionists, and was especially alarming when he attacked the virtue of American life. “Before God, I must say, that such a glaring contradiction as exists between our creed and practice the annals of six thousand years cannot parallel. In view of it, I am ashamed of my country.”[13] Garrison’s views were delivered both in the way of editorial columns and sermon-esque public speeches. William Lloyd Garrison is a polemic demagogue, both in his critical evaluation of ecclesiastical behavior in regards to slavery, but also his hostile disputation of the political reality. His inflammatory rhetoric, his avant-garde style, and his uncompromising principles hearken to the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament. This convention lends itself to reinforce Garrison’s particularly confrontational tone and cloaks his abrasiveness in a mantle of prophetic authority. Noting, however, that his brand of abolitionism never enjoyed a wide popularity, it seems that his polemic style came with the cost of sharing the pariah status of the prophets as well.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of Protestant evangelical preacher Lyman Beecher, was never a stranger to abolitionism or prolific writing. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was a famous abolitionist theologian and her sister, Catherine Beecher, was also a noted abolitionist writer. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was not known for his sympathies to the abolitionist cause, but his contribution to the movement by way of progeny cannot be overlooked. Harriet’s own contributions – Uncle Tom’s Cabin chief among them – came to her audience in the form of the sentimental novel. This style of novel, also called “domestic fiction” was most prevalent in the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth and placed a high value on an appeal to the emotional virtues, directly contrasting the rationalist arguments of the time. Through this convention, we can see that Stowe’s attitudes toward slavery were not so radical as Garrison’s and were born of an entirely different host. Whereas Garrison’s chief concern in abolitionism was the utter equality of mankind and the fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence, Stowe was troubled by the effect the institution of slavery had on the institution of the family. In this respect, among others, Stowe was very much a moderate – or centrist – abolitionist.[14] In her popular and influential novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe portrays the chief sin of slavery as an interruption of the family. Slavery separated Uncle Tom from his wife Chloe; it separated George Harris from his wife Eliza and their son Harry and threatened to detach Harry from both of his parents. Slavery had orphaned poor Topsy, had divided Emily from her brother George, and Cassy from her daughter Eliza. Speaking directly to the issue Stowe states plainly, “The note-book of a missionary, among the Canadian [former slave] refugees, contains truth stranger than fiction. How can it be otherwise, when a system prevails which whirls families and scatters their members… These shores of refuge, like the eternal shore… may bring tidings of mother, sister, child or wife, still lost to view in the shadows of slavery.”[15]

Yet, in direct contrast to Garrison’s charge that every slaveholder is a “man-stealer,” Stowe offers us not only a spectrum of evil in slavery, but also “exploits the reader’s capacity for tenderness, compassion, or sympathy by presenting… an unrealistic view of its subject.”[16] In Stowe’s understanding of slavery, not all slaveholders were evil and not all expressions of the institution were malevolent. The slavery of Kentucky is called “the mildest form of the system” – a concession Garrison would have balked at – and Stowe also refers to the relationship between master and slave there as “goodhumored indulgence” and “affectionate loyalty.”[17] Both George Shelby and his son are presented as the paragon of Christian slaveholders.[18] They are kind, treat their slaves well – if perpetuating their slavery did not, in fact, contradict that estimation – and George, Jr. eventually frees the entire estate.[19] Augustine St. Claire, while not particularly religious, was also good-natured and treated his slaves well, some of them even sharing his own wardrobe and supply of little luxuries.[20] Certainly Garrison never conceived of this lax sort of environment in a Deep South plantation. These kind slaveholders are presented, in Stowe’s narrative, as men never willing to break up the stability and family of their African charges, but only forced to do so when confronted with hard circumstances. It was only in the last pages of the novel that the slaveholder of Garrison’s imagination was revealed for her readers in the form of Simon Legree. While far from relieving the institution of slavery of its earned reproach Stowe, unlike Garrison, was willing to acknowledge that there was a complex and heterogeneous reality that accompanied it. In this, Stowe must have been hoping to gain recognition from both camps by presenting herself as an honest purveyor of social reality. In this, she and Garrison could never have agreed.

Her attitudes on the equality of all mankind were, likewise, divergent. In her narrative, Stowe never outright challenges the legitimacy of the slaveholders nor does she give us a single African character that would be considered an equal to a white character. The slaves are described with intrinsically inferior labels, such as “loyal,” “favored,” or “petted” and only the radical George Harris insists on his right of being a freeman. George is certainly given the position of a protagonist, yet only as it pertained to the preservation of his family and the reclamation of his own unique manhood. Tom, on the other hand, is obviously the favored hero of the novel and is given very passive and acquiescent characteristics. It is in Tom, however, that Stowe intends to formulate her own imaginations of the African race.

Garrison describes blacks in terms of “complexion”, “hue”, “color”, and “clime” whereas Stowe readily assigns each man a “race.” This is, perhaps, the fundamental difference between the two. The clearest presentation of this belief is in George Harris’ speech given near the end of the novel. “To the Anglo-Saxon race has been intrusted [sic] the destinies of the world,” claims Stowe.[21] On the other hand, she trusts “that the development of Africa is to be essentially a Christian one. If not a dominant and commanding race, they are, at least an affectionate, magnanimous and forgiving one.”[22] Whereas she ordains the white race with the administration of the world’s governmental order, she proclaims that the black race will evolve along a path of Christian piety and be vessels of redemption, which shares the personality of Christ wherever they go.[23] The genre that Stowe utilizes is the novel. Prior to the naturalistic writers of the late nineteenth century, such as Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane, American novels were meant to be vehicles by which a series of didactic ethical lessons could be introduced. Intentionally sentimental novels, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, have the advantage of establishing their ethical principles within an allegorical framework. The persuasive efficacy of a novel like Stowe’s is dependant, almost solely, upon the skill of the author in cultivating a connection – via the characters and plot – with the readership. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, selling “more copies than any other book in the world except the Bible.”[24] While Mark Twain blames the Civil War on the romantic writings of Sir Walter Scott, Abraham Lincoln attributed it to Stowe. Upon meeting her at the White House, President Lincoln is claimed to have said, “So you’re the little lady that wrote the book that made this great war.”[25]

            There is no doubt that both William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted the unconditional abolition of slavery in America. But there can also be no doubt that they both wanted to achieve this end by incompatible means and for incompatible reasons. Garrison would see the governments of the world burn to the ground in order that all men and women be free, a truly liberal position. Stowe, however, would see slavery removed in order to preserve the more fundamental social institution of the family, a fairly conservative position. These positions are as different as their two conventions and it is illustrated in each of their writings. While both Garrison and Stowe are appealing to the more emotional sensibilities of their readership, one could hardly imagine Garrison parceling up his “truth” and hiding them among several hundred pages of domestic fiction. Likewise, we can see Stowe’s attempt to portray her views to American readers as anything but confrontational. Yet, despite their exclusive and unique ideologies, they found common cause together for the elimination of slavery in America.

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[1] Proverbs 27.17, NASB

[2] Mark 9.40, NASB

[3] A House Divided, page 327

[4] A House Divided, page 335

[5] A House Divided, page 335

[6] A House Divided, page 345

[7] A House Divided, page 335

[8] A House Divided, page 347

[9] The American Intellectual Tradition, Fifth Edition, page 267

[10] A House Divided, page 339

[11] A House Divided, page 342

[12] A House Divided, page 341

[13] A House Divided, page 340

[14] A House Divided, page 351

[15] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 372

[16] A House Divided, page 346; Encyclopedia Britannica, entry for “sentimental novel”

[17] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 7

[18] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 8

[19] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 380

[20] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 142

[21] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 376

[22] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 376

[23] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 156

[24] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page viii

[25] Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life, page 203