Freedom's Ferment - Phases of American Social History to 1860

Alice Felt Tyler

• Publisher: Case Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446547854
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Primordi della storia americana

PART ONEThe Faith of the Young RepublicCHAPTER 1: Dynamic DemocracyCHAPTER 2: Evangelical ReligionPART TWOCults and Utopias.CHAPTER 3: Transcendentalism.CHAPTER 4: Millennialism and Spiritualism.CHAPTER 5: The Stake in Zion.CHAPTER 6: Religious Communism in America.CHAPTER 7: The Shaker Communities.CHAPTER 8: American Utopias of Religious Origin.CHAPTER 9: Utopian Socialism in America.PART THREEHumanitarian CrusadesCHAPTER 10: Education and the American Faith.CHAPTER 11: Reform for the Criminal.CHAPTER 12: Wards of the State.CHAPTER 13: The Temperance Crusade.CHAPTER 14: Denials of Democratic PrinciplesCHAPTER 15: The Crusade for PeaceCHAPTER 16: The Rights of Women.CHAPTER 17: Like a Fire-bell in the Night.CHAPTER 18: A House Divided.

PART ONE

The Faith of the Young Republic

The time has come when the experiment is to be made whether the world is to be emancipated and rendered happy, or whether the whole creation shall groan and travail together in pain. . . . If it had been the design of Heaven to establish a powerful nation in the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, where all the energies of man might find full scope and excitement, on purpose to show due world by one great successful experiment of what man is capable . . . where should such an experiment have been made but in this country! . . . The light of such a hemisphere shall go up to Heaven, it will throw its beams beyond the waves; it will shine into the darkness there, and be comprehended – it will awaken desire, and hope, and effort, and produce revolutions and overturnings until the world is free. . . . Floods have been poured upon the rising flame, but they can no more extinguish it than they can extinguish the flames of Aetna. Still it burns, and still the mountain murmurs; and soon it will explode with voices and thunderings, and great earthquakes. . . . Then will the trumpet of jubilee sound, and earth’s debased millions will leap from the dust, and shake off their chains, and cry, “Hosanna to the Son of David!”¹

With this vision of the future as a new and glorious epoch Lyman Beecher a hundred years ago voiced the exuberant optimism of the young American republic in which he lived. In that time, if ever in American history, the spirit of man seemed free and the individual could assert his independence of choice in matters of faith and theory. The militant democracy of the period was a declaration of faith in man and in the perfectibility of his institutions. The idea of progress so inherent in the American way of life and so much a part of the philosophy of the age was at the same time a challenge to traditional beliefs and institutions and an impetus to experimentation with new theories and humanitarian reforms.

The period was one of restless ferment. An expanding West was beckoning the hungry and dissatisfied to an endless search for the pot of gold. Growing industrialization and urbanization in the East, new means of communication and transportation, new marvels of invention and science, and advance in the mechanization of industry, all were dislocating influences of mounting importance. And increasing immigration was bringing into the country thousands of Europeans who were dissatisfied with the difficult conditions of life in their native lands. Nor did religion place any restraint on the unrest; recurring revivals, emphasis on individual conversion and personal salvation, and the multiplicity of sects, all made religion responsive to the restlessness of the time rather than a calming influence upon it. The pious editors of the writings of a Shaker seeress asserted in their preface to her revelations:

Let any candid people, endowed with a common share of discernment seriously examine the signs of the times, and view the many wonderful events and extraordinary changes that are constantly taking place in the moral religious and political world, as well as in the natural elements, through the operations of Providence, and they cannot but consider the present age as commencing the most extraordinary and momentous era that ever took place on earth.²

Each in his own way the citizens of the young republic recognized the ferment of the era and made answer to its challenge. Itinerant revivalists and the most orthodox of clergymen alike responded with missionary zeal. For an influential few transcendentalism proved to be a satisfying reconciliation between the rationalism of their training and the romanticism of the age, while among the less intellectual, adventism, spiritualism, Mormonism, and perfectionism each won adherents who founded churches and preached their creeds with fervor. To these sects were added the cults and communities transplanted from abroad. The combination of religious toleration, overflowing optimism, and cheap lands caused Europeans of unorthodox faith or unusual social ideas to seek asylum in America. Each such sect, each isolated religious community, each social Utopia, was an evidence of the tolerant, eclectic spirit of the young republic, and each made its contribution to the culture of the land that gave it sanctuary.

The desire to perfect human institutions was the basic cause for each sect and community, and this same desire lay at the roots of all the many social reform movements of the period. The American reformer was the product of evangelical religion, which presented to every person the necessity for positive action to save his own soul, and dynamic frontier democracy, which was rooted deep in a belief in the worth of the individual. Born of this combination, the reformer considered reform at once his duty and his right, and he did not limit his activities to one phase of social betterment. Education, temperance, universal peace, prison reform, the rights of women, the evils of slavery, the dangers of Catholicism, all were legitimate fields for his efforts.

The American reformer knew that he did not work alone. He recognized that each cause he espoused was a part of a world of progress and aspiration, but peculiarly his was the freedom to experiment, for in his homeland there was room and hospitality for adventure. Happy in his privilege, he acknowledged his duty and accepted for his age the sign of his crusade. It is with him, his quest for perfection, and his faith in his right to be free that this story deals.

The sources for the story are many and varied. Such was the volume of contemporary material on the American scene that one hardy author introduced his own book with these verses:

O books! books! books! it makes me sick
To think how ye are multiplied,
Like Egypt’s frogs, ye poke up thick
Your ugly heads on every side.

If a new thought but shakes its ear
Or wags its tail, tho’ starved it look,
The world the precious news must hear
The presses groan, and lo! a book.³

In its first half century the United States was visited by scores of curious European travelers who came to investigate the strange new world that was being created in the Western Hemisphere. In their accounts of the experience they praised, or condemned, the institutions and national characteristics spread out before them, seized avidly upon all differences from the European norm, and worried each peculiarity beyond recognition and beyond any just limit of its importance. Americans themselves, with the keen sensitiveness of the young and the boasting enthusiasm natural to vigorous creators of new ideas and institutions, examined the work of their hands and, believing it good, reassured themselves and answered their calumniators in a flood of aggressive replies. Every American interested in a reform movement, a new cult, or a Utopian scheme burst into print, adding another to the rapidly growing list of polemic books and pamphlets. From this variety of sources it is possible to recapture something of the inward spirit that gave rise to the more familiar and more tangible events of America’s youth.^*

^* A general bibliography and the bibliographical notes for each chapter are given in a separate section, beginning on page 551.

CHAPTER 1

Dynamic Democracy

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It was a long process of democratization, begun before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, accelerated by the Revolution, and continued through the influence of the frontier, that made American society, in the words of the French traveler, Michel Chevalier, in 1834, “essentially and radically a democracy, not in name merely but in deed.”¹ At least a brief review of this vigorous, dynamic democracy must precede the story of the manifold movements, theories, and crusades of the early nineteenth century, for which it provided the fundamental background.

COLONIAL BEGINNINGS

It is perhaps doubtful whether the self-exiled Europeans who peopled the American colonies had chosen the braver course in attempting to solve their problems by escape to a new world, but it is impossible to doubt their independence of thought, their vigor of action, and their willingness to work hard to translate their dreams into the reality of new wealth and new institutions. For them the rights of the individual were axiomatic, and self-government was a natural assumption as well as a geographical necessity. Their philosophy was based upon the Calvinistic ideas of the Puritans and the teachings of the great English theorists of the Parliamentarian revolt of the seventeenth century, who had emphasized the importance of the individual and his union with other individuals in organizations based upon mutual consent.

The Calvinism of many of the early settlers tended toward republicanism and was democratic in its implications.² The Separatist movement that resulted in the Congregationalism of New England placed further emphasis upon the local church units and the individual members, and Congregationalism found its political counterpart in the New England town meeting, where democracy reached a high level. The followers of Roger Williams, who established both the colony of Rhode Island and the American Baptist church, added an element of great importance to American thinking in their insistence upon the complete separation of church and state and the absolute freedom of the individual to choose for himself in matters of religion. The Quakers of Pennsylvania contributed the pacifism characteristic of their faith and a deep-seated hatred of slavery that was to bear fruit in a later day.

Three thousand miles of sea, to be traversed in colonial days only with the danger and discomfort of a long and tedious voyage, caused the European individual transplanted in America to feel himself separated from his old world. He found it easy to accept the idea of a natural, “absolute, unrelated man” who existed and had acquired property before governments were developed to make demands upon his liberty and property. Since he must combine with other colonists to meet common problems and make use of common opportunities, he accepted without question the idea that government sprang from the people and is the agent of the people. It was natural, therefore, for American political leaders to accept John Locke, the great exponent of English constitutional development, as their spokesman, the interpreter of their ideas of natural laws, individual liberties, and the right of revolution when they were oppressed by an illegitimate use of authority.

The presence of the frontier was of tremendous importance in the development of American ideas of government. Each colony had “back-country” districts that were thinly populated, subject to Indian attacks, and far removed from the political and cultural institutions of the tidewater areas. The individualism of the frontier early came into conflict with the growing authoritarianism of colonial governments, and out of that friction came a continual pressure for further democratization and for greater representation for the newer and poorer districts. At the same time these frontier areas felt little need for formal governmental control and came gradually to believe that, beyond protection from Indian attack or foreign invasion and the securing of the liberties of the individual, there was no reason for elaborate government.

Without benefit of Darwin, survival of the fittest was the law of the frontier, and individual initiative, fortitude, and ability were more important than governmental forms. Owing to the very nature of his life, the frontiersman was a believer in laissez faire doctrines and in the limitation of government to the barest necessities for individual freedom. Neither tidewater aristocracy nor absentee imperial dictation was acceptable to the Westerners of any of the colonies. Although few frontiersmen had ever heard of John Locke, his philosophy was suited to the conditions of frontier life. The gradual development of political and cultural institutions in the tidewater areas served as a bridge between English ideas and forms and the isolation and independence of the frontier, but these institutions were subjected constantly to the leveling influence of frontier equalitarianism.

In the mid-eighteenth century the teachings of the French philosophes were added to this colonial heritage. The doctrines of Rousseau, in so far as they were known, fell upon well-prepared ground, for men closely in contact with nature could have found nothing incongruous in Rousseau’s arguments for liberty and equality. Montesquieu’s theories of the separation of powers were quite in accord with colonial ideas, for sharp divisions already existed between executive, legislative, and judicial functions, and the colonials delighted in imposing checks upon the authority of their royal governors. The doctrines of the physiocrats, too, seemed logical to a people whose livelihood was dependent upon the soil or the sea, and later the theory of laissez faire struck a sympathetic cord in those who were irritated by the mercantilistic restrictions of an absentee imperialistic government. In short, American conditions made possible and natural the creation of institutions more nearly in accord with the doctrines of Locke and the philosophes than Europe – or America – realized.

The mounting crisis in the relations between England and her colonies called forth these political ideas that had been latent in the minds of Americans, and their formulation in the Declaration of Independence was of vital importance to the new nation. The theory of the Declaration can be stated briefly: The individual existed before government and was endowed with natural rights, a part of which he delegated to government in order to protect the rest; therefore, when governments prove unsatisfactory, the people have a right to alter or amend them. The natural rights that are the basis of all political rights were explicitly stated: All men axe created equal; all have been endowed by God with certain inalienable rights, of which they cannot be deprived by themselves or by any other power; among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Looking about him at a world in which such rights were denied, Jefferson wished to have as the foundation stone of the democratic system he saw for the future the broadest possible statement of the rights of men as individuals and citizens. The Declaration impels acceptance of the idea that governmental power is derived from the consent of the governed and has no authority save that delegated to it by the people.

IN THE NEW STATES

The state constitutions drawn up to supplant the old colonial governments did not evidence a full acceptance of the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration. The very patriots who heartily applauded the sweeping equalitarianism of the Declaration proceeded to draw up constitutions in which political equality was denied. The principles to which they subscribed in theory were too advanced to be put into operation at once, and, after paying respect to them in well-turned phrases, the new state constitutions embodied many of the old distinctions between rich and poor, educated and ignorant, religious conformists and nonconformists, that had marked the colonial governments. Each state constitution contained some reiteration of the idea of government by consent and of the right to life, liberty, and property. Each stated that political power was “vested in and derived from” the people. Public officials were declared to be responsible to the people, and the civil liberties of the citizens were protected in bills of rights embodying the principles of cherished liberties won by countless straggles throughout English history. Both, from desire and from necessity great steps were taken in the liberalization of institutions. Many members of the old governing class had been Tories and had no part in making the new constitutions. It was necessary to make concessions to the masses of citizens in order to win allegiance to the new governments and support for the Revolution.

It was inevitable that everywhere the suffrage should be broadened to include all members of the middle class, which was bearing the brunt of the war. Nowhere was immediate manhood suffrage or the universal right to hold office introduced, but more men voted than ever before, and popular consent was widespread enough to root the new constitutions deep in the lives of the people. Further liberalization could be obtained by legal processes of amendment when the demand grew irresistible. In some states the suffrage requirement was on the basis of taxpaying, in others a specified income from freehold estates was required...