Blood from the Sky

Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic

Adam Jortner

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780813939599
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In the decades following the Revolution, the supernatural exploded across the American landscape—fabulous reports of healings, exorcisms, magic, and angels crossed the nation. Under First Amendment protections, new sects based on such miracles proliferated. At the same time, Enlightenment philosophers and American founders explicitly denied the possibility of supernatural events, dismissing them as deliberate falsehoods—and, therefore, efforts to suborn the state. Many feared that belief in the supernatural itself was a danger to democracy. In this way, miracles became a political problem and prompted violent responses in the religious communities of Prophetstown, Turtle Creek, and Nauvoo.

In Blood from the Sky, Adam Jortner argues that the astonishing breadth and extent of American miracles and supernaturalism following independence derived from Enlightenment ideas about proof and sensory evidence, offering a chance at certain belief in an uncertain religious climate. Jortner breaks new ground in explaining the rise of radical religion in antebellum America, revisiting questions of disenchantment, modernity, and religious belief in a history of astounding events that—as early Americans would have said—needed to be seen to be believed.

PART I

The Supernatural World

ONE

The Language of the Supernatural

“In every point of view in which those things called miracles can be placed and considered,” wrote Thomas Paine, “the reality of them is improbable, and their existence unnecessary.” A moral principle, to Paine, was true whether it came with miracles or not; indeed, since miracles were harder to accept than moral principles, adding the former to the latter made it less likely that hearers would become believers. But it was no mere moral system that Ezra Stiles and other clerics defended through recourse to godly intervention: “Jesus X and his apostles spoke Infallibility. This is proved by their Miracles.”¹

It is not surprising that Paine and Stiles took opposite views of religion; the shared assumption in their arguments, however, is more significant. Stiles took miracles as an uncomplicated proof of the supernatural origin of Christianity. Paine pulled at the thread of miracles for the same reason: if miracles could be disproved, religion would vanish with them—and good riddance, in his mind. The orthodox sage and the goading atheist both agreed that miracles made Christianity.

Miracles and the supernatural had become an incontrovertible test in the early republic—an all-or-nothing proposition about the truth of any particular religious claim. By 1858, Horace Bushnell classified three distinct schools of thought concerning the miraculous, namely, the parties of discontinuance, restoration, and denial: those who claimed that miracles had ended with the closing of the canon, those who claimed they still occurred, and those who claimed they had never occurred.² For all three, however, the question of miracles was central to the question of religion itself.

Miracles had not always been so crucial to Christian theology; like all aspects of Christian belief, the place of miracles changed over the centuries. By the end of the eighteenth century, miracles shone brightly in the Protestant firmament. The same Baconianism and Scottish Common-Sense philosophy in vogue in early America (a consequence of a long Anglophone debate and new American realities) made the “facts” of Christianity central to religious interpretation in the early republic. Miracles became the ultimate facts—obvious violations in the natural world that justified supernatural claims. Christianity was true because of its evidences—documented miracles and other supernatural events. Many American apologists limited miracles to the apostolic age—where biblical texts provided sure warrant for Christ’s miracles. Yet in making evidences central to Christianity, Anglo-American theologians provided the ideological origins of a new age of miracles. This move toward moderate empiricism—informed by the rise of legal skepticism, the end of state-sponsored witch trials, and the shift of natural philosophy away from the preternatural—inadvertently opened the door for new miracle reports to receive a thorough consideration in Jeffersonian America. The evidentialist turn—itself a historical development—made validating new miracles easier.

Miracles, as Paine observed, were easy to recognize: “Mankind has conceived to themselves certain laws, by which what they call nature is supposed to act; and that a miracle is something contrary to the operation and effect of those laws.” Paine took this definition as a starting point: the supernatural took place in this world but did not obey the known laws of this world. That notion was held alike by the party of discontinuance, the party of restoration, and the party of denial: if it was supernatural, it had a physical existence. Things that could take place in the mind alone, even when placed there by God, fell outside this definition. To be supernatural, the world and not the mind had to change.

Orthodox divines like Timothy Dwight told parishioners that only in the apostolic age had such things happened, and modern “pretensions to miraculous powers” could only provoke “in most men of sober thought, indignation and contempt.” Nevertheless, miracles had been given to the apostles, “to prove them inspired with a knowledge of the divine will.”³ Even if they had only occurred in ancient Judea, they gave the divine stamp to Jesus’s teachings. The miracles of Christ moved to become the validating proofs of Christ’s mission. Christianity was true because of its miracles.

That had not always been the case. Questions as to the purpose of and penchant for miracles in Christian theology and practice began within the Christian scriptures themselves. Early Christian writings suggest that distinguishing between true and false miracles—and assessing the authority of the miracle worker—caused headaches even for the apostles. In the Book of Acts, Simon Magus performs wonders and miracles through pagan gods. Simon earns Peter’s censure by offering to pay for the power to work healing miracles.⁴ In the apocryphal Acts of Peter, Simon and Peter produce dueling miracles; Simon’s magics slay several children, whom Peter then miraculously raises from the dead.⁵ The differences between true miracles and delusive magic were serious matters for the early Christian church. Peter needed to remind his listeners at Pentecost that the miracles of the disciples were not alcohol-induced hazes: “These are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.”⁶

Similar questions dogged the Church Fathers and their successors; even Augustine was of two minds on miracles. The bishop of Hippo recorded more than seventy miracles in two years after the bones of St. Stephen were moved to his North African diocese, and argued in City of God that the presence of miracles among Christian communities proved that God remained with them even though Rome had fallen.⁷ In an exposition on Jonah (and elsewhere), he had more cautious words, for “the pagans spread word of many of their miracles without any reliable source, even though demons, do some things like what angels do, not in reality, but in appearance.”⁸ Critics of the miraculous accounts of St. Martin of Tours wondered why, if he could repulse flames and raise the dead, had he also gotten a bad burn? Adam, biographer of Hugh of Lincoln, believed the holy intestines of the saint’s corpse were miraculously free of wastes, a trait other observers ascribed to dysentery. Nevertheless, miracles were commonly cited as proofs of God’s presence and employed as agents in the evangelization of pagan regions.⁹

Over the course of the Middle Ages, church officials developed increasingly rigorous standards of judgment for miracles. In the thirteenth century, Innocent III, Thomas Aquinas, and Caesarius of Heisterbach crafted ecclesiastical warnings about accepting reports of miracles at face value. The problem was again one of invisible agents; Christian thinkers knew angels and demons could affect the physical world, and mistaking a diabolical act for a divine one worried the theologians. Innocent III warned that “evidence of miracles . . . is on occasions misleading and deceptive, as in the case of magicians.” By the end of the thirteenth century, under rules inspired by Aquinas and Caesarius, miracles alone could not prove the case for a saint’s canonization, and a vigorous inquisition was established to test claims of saintly miracles.¹⁰ Proving a miracle in 1300 was no matter of mere popular belief; doubt was not an invention of the Enlightenment.

The Protestant Reformation is usually credited with ending miracles for at least part of Christendom. Historiography has often interpreted the Reformation as a kind of ironic doorway to secular modernity. With the end of a wonder-working church, Protestants could in theory begin to cull other forms of supernaturalism. Most works on the Anglophone supernatural begin with the Protestant doctrine of the cessation of miracles. Yet this doctrine, to paraphrase the historian Jane Shaw, is both overemphasized and understudied. As a Reformation Protestant ideal, the cessation of miracles served an important rhetorical purpose. Reformers insisted that miracles were necessary proofs of God’s mission only in biblical times—unnecessary after the establishment of the church. This interpretation possessed a confessional advantage: if miracles had ceased, Catholic supernaturalism was a sign their church was false.

That doctrine, however, was not a static prologue or unchanging “tradition” from which American religion emerged; even if the white-hot Calvinists of the sixteenth century passionately believed that miracles had ended centuries beforehand, their descendants had their doubts. As Alexandra Walsham points out, English Calvinists did not look for miracles, but they were perfectly happy to accept wonders and prodigies as evidence of God’s direct interference on behalf of his chosen church. Wonders were explicable events—the collapse of a floor, defeat in battle—which could be tied to the desires of God. Prodigies, on the other hand, were unusual happenings in the natural world—apparitions in the sky, monstrous births, multiple suns. Wonders and prodigies could be interpreted as portents: divine warnings or messages for the mortal world. God would no longer violate the laws of nature that he himself created, but he would allow extremely unusual things to happen that could indicate his will.

Protestants in England and the colonies sometimes missed the distinction; they still saw miracles even when their pastors told them not to. Jane Shaw points to the increase of “perfectly Protestant” miracle claims in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain. English Baptists made claims to divine healings, adhering to a literal reading of James 5 and other texts. Quakerism—at home and in the colonies—famously based its religious appeal on the “inner light,” and followers often fell into visionary trances and reported miraculous healings. The Quaker founder, George Fox, had numerous forays into the supernatural—so much so that he was once accused of being enchanted.¹¹ In New England, leaders sometimes had to remind the rank-and-file that miracles had ceased; John Richardson assured his militia in 1679 that “God works now by men and means, not by miracles.” Nevertheless, Increase Mather explained that some events in New England were indeed “of a miraculous nature.” He had seen wondrous cures and understood angels to have visited the earth. His son Cotton even saw an angel in 1693.¹²

The Mathers’ best-known encounter with the supernatural came in 1692, and it points to another region of the supernatural that remained a going concern even among the supposedly disenchanted Protestants of the seventeenth century—witchcraft. The doctrine of cessation of miracles said nothing about the power of witches. Major witch hunts broke out in England in 1612 and 1645, and in Scotland in 1590, 1649, and 1661. Meanwhile, in the New England colonies, more than 150 accusations led to more than twenty executions—before the excesses of Salem 1692 added many more. In the wake of Salem, legal caution and reform ended many of the trials—but not belief. Ten years after being accused of witchcraft in Salem, Abigail Faulkner was still trying to remove the stigma of witchcraft from her name. Grace Sherwood was sentenced (though not executed) for witchcraft in 1706 Virginia; witchcraft was suspected but not prosecuted in Pennsylvania in 1701 and Massachusetts in 1720.¹³

Many scholars now suggest that legal skepticism, rather than theological doubts about the supernatural powers of demons, brought the witch trials to their slow end. “The men responsible for stopping the trials took action . . . because the crime could not be proved in law, not because the crime was impossible to perform,” according to the historian Brian Levack. In the Basque territories of Spain, for example, the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías could not understand why, if so many witnesses confessed to witchcraft, he could not find a shred of physical evidence.¹⁴ Salazar believed in witchcraft but not in hearsay. He proposed a new series of evidentiary rules to govern witch trials, and his recommendations became law in 1614. In New England, the minister John Higginson (and others) claimed that witchcraft was a real phenomenon, “one of the most awful and tremendous Judgments of God that can be visited on the Societies of men,” but nevertheless questioned “whether some of the Laws, Customs, and Principles used by the Judges and the Juries in the Trials of Witches . . . were not insufficient and unsafe.”¹⁵ In Scotland, George Mackenzie’s theories about the inadmissibility of accusations by other accused witches found codification in the proclamation of April 1662, a legal reform that increased the number of dismissals and acquittals in witchcraft cases while reducing the incidence of legal torture. A similar correspondence between legal reform and the reduction of witch trials occurred in northern France (1624), Italy (1655), Sweden (1676), England (1736), and Hungary (1750).¹⁶

Legal rather than intellectual skepticism as the end of the witchcraft trials suggests a profound problem for assuming ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: History, Reality, and Miracles
• Part I: The Supernatural World
• Part II: The Sectarian Impulse
• Conclusion: Liberty and Theology
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index