Evangelical Movement and Politics in the North (1830-1860) PDF

The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System Author(s): Daniel Walker Howe Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Mar., 1991), pp. 1216-1239 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians Stable U...

The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System Author(s): Daniel Walker Howe Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Mar., 1991), pp. 1216-1239 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2078260 Accessed: 18-11-2024 23:28 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Organization of American Historians, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American History This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North during the Second Party System Daniel Walker Howe The prominence of evangelical Christian piety is one of the major continuities in American life from colonial to national times. Indeed, for all the attention that has been devoted to the so-called Great Awakening and its effects, it seems likely that its nineteenth-century counterparts were even "greater" in their impact on Amer- ican culture and politics. John M. Murrin once remarked that the Great Awakening and its legacy probably had even more to do with the Civil War than with the Revo- lution, and it is a perceptive comment.1 The later evangelicals became more self- conscious shapers of society and opinion than their eighteenth-century predeces- sors, for they increasingly strove to subject social institutions and standards to divine judgment and to "reform" that is, reshape - them accordingly. The purpose of this essay is to comprehend the impact of the evangelical movement on American polit- ical culture during the period of the second party system, from approximately 1830 to approximately 1860. I will argue that in the northern United States during that era, evangelical reli- gion interacted with economic development to polarize the population, creating the basis for two broad alliances. The members of the two alliances differed not only on questions of religion and religiously inspired reform efforts but also on questions of politics. Their disagreements shaped American society throughout the nine- teenth century and beyond because the alliances offered divergent visions of how individuals and society should respond to modernization. The evangelicals were in many ways the champions of modernization, that is, of changes in the structure of society and individual personality that emphasized discipline and channeled ener- gies by the deliberate choice of goals and the rational selection of means. Their op- Daniel Walker Howe is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford University during 1989-1990. The author would like to thank the many scholars whose comments and criticisms have helped in the making of this essay, some of whom disagree with some of what is said here. Among them are: Joyce Appleby, John Ash- worth, Ellen DuBois, William Gienapp, David Hall, Marc Kruman, Angus Macintyre, Mark Noll, Karen Orren, Donald Ratcliffe, the expert referees of the Journal of American History, and the members of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic who attended the 1988 annual meeting. ' John M. Murrin, "No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations," Reviews in American History, 11 (June 1983), 161-71. 1216 The Journal of American History March 1991 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1217 ponents were more skeptical about such transformations and the accompanying eco- nomic inequality and regimentation of human life.2 The northern and southern United States displayed sufficient differences in that period that I have chosen to deal only with the North. In doing so, however, I do not claim that the political culture of the South was totally different or that the evan- gelical movement had no important consequences there. I would expect that evan- gelical religion and the Whig party were agencies of modernization in the South as well as in the North, but that they were inhibited by slavery and the relative ab- sence of cities. To investigate this hypothesis properly, taking account of the large and complex historiography of the South, would have extended and complicated this essay unmanageably.3 While limiting my topic to one region, I have also tried to set it in a larger context by making occasional comparisons with contemporary British developments. This essay addresses the oft-expressed current desire for fresh syntheses in Amer- ican history. It draws upon existing knowledge instead of presenting new informa- tion, but my goal is to reconceptualize our knowledge, rather than simply to sum- marize or survey it, in a way that will help focus future inquiries. In developing my synthesis, I have been led to adopt a very broad definition of political culture. This broad view, discussed in the third section below, is part of the contribution I hope the essay will make. Democracy, Discipline, and Evangelical Reform In both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, revivalism and democracy were interrelated phenomena. Each asserted popular claims against those of the elite, pluralism against orthodoxy, charisma against rationalism, competitiveness against authority, an innovative Americanism against European tradition. Such is the thrust of a vast body of distinguished scholarship by authors from William Warren Sweet to Perry Miller, from Richard Bushman to Patricia Bonomi and Nathan 0. Hatch.4 2 On the concept of modernization as applied to American history, see Eric Foner, "The Causes of the Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions," in Beyond the Civil War Synthesis: Political Essays on the Civil War Era, ed. Robert P. Swierenga (Westport, 1975), 15-32; James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1982), 5-22; Daniel Walker Howe, ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia, 1976); and Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (New York, 1976). 3 In the South, where the ethnoreligious differences within the electorate were much less marked than in the North, historians find that regional differences between market and nonmarket production interacted with a wide- spread secular ideology of republicanism to shape political culture and party alignment. See Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978); and Harry Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the SecondParty System in Cumberland County, North Caro- lina (Baton Rouge, 1981). But even North Carolina had its religious politics: Anti-Catholicism was common among Whigs; the few Catholics almost unanimously voted Democratic; Primitive Baptists voted strongly Democratic, and Quakers, strongly Whig. See Marc Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 183 6-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1983), 15-16, 165-66; and Watson, Jacksonian Politics, 238. 4 William Warren Sweet, Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765-1840 (New York, 1952); Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, 1965); Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Characterandthe Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope ofHeaven: Religion, Society, andPolitics in ColonialAmerica (New York, 1986); Nathan 0. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989). For a somewhat This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1218 The Journal of American History March 1991 Indeed, the more active popular participation in American political life became, the more important moral and religious issues came to be in politics. It was no acci- dent that religion became a more potent political force in the era of the second party system than it had been at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. It was a natural consequence of the increasingly democratic nature of American politics.5 Yet, the popular quality of the evangelical movement was only one side of it. Revivals did not spring forth from the populace spontaneously; they were "worked up." Revivals took place not simply because there was a receptive audience but also because evangelists promoted them. These evangelists had on their agenda a refor- mation of life and habits, both individual and communal. They continued the historic concern for church discipline characteristic of the early Protestant Refor- mers. Voluntary discipline represented Protestantism's alternative to the authorita- rianism of traditional society. If popular enthusiasm was the "soft side" of the great evangelical movement, the new discipline was its "hard side."6 The new discipline of the evangelical movement had far-reaching consequences. It reshaped the cultural system of the Victorian middle class in Britain and America, and it also influenced the working class in important ways. The reforms it inspired profoundly affected society and politics in both countries. We remember its morality as strict, and indeed it was - most notably in the novel restraints it imposed on the expression or even mention of sexuality and the use of alcohol. But even its most punitive severity was redemptive in purpose, as the words reformatory and penitentiary suggested. The obverse of Victorian discipline was the proper develop- ment of the human faculties. Education, self-improvement, even liberation, went along with discipline. Imposing discipline on a drunken husband could be liber- ating for his battered wife; the husband was liberated too, since as a sober man he could regain the use of his moral faculties. The evangelical reformers characteristi- cally opposed physical violence, campaigning against corporal punishment of chil- dren, wives, sailors, and prisoners. They preferred such mental coercion as solitary confinement to flogging and hanging. Didactic would-be civilizers, they embodied their values in such institutional monuments as schools, universities, missions, hospitals, and insane asylums. Most consistent of all the Victorian reformers were the abolitionists and the feminists. They applied the principles of human self- different interpretation of revivalism as democratic and communitarian, rather than democratic and individualistic, see Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind. From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1966). 5 See Stephen Botein, "Religious Dimensions of the Early American State," in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Richard R. Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II (Chapel Hill, 1987), 315-30. 6 On the promotion of revivals, see Terry Bilhartz, Urban Religion and the Second Great Awakening (Ruther- ford, 1986); and Richard Carwardine, "The Second Great Awakening in the Urban Centers," Journal of American History, 52 (Sept. 1972), 327-40. On the disciplinary side of the evangelical movement see an account of efforts by the New Divinity clergy of Connecticut to impose stricter morality and higher standards for church membership on their laity in the early nineteenth century. The New Divinity became identified with the Federalist party and resistance to it with the Jeffersonian Republicans. Bruce Steiner, "The New Divinity's Impact upon the Laity: Lay Resistance and Resulting Change," paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Cincinnati, April 1983 (in Bruce Steiner's possession). This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1219 development, the fulfillment of noble potential and the repression of base passions, to various races and both genders.7 The usefulness of evangelical moral reform to the new industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century has not escaped notice, and a vast historical literature ana- lyzes it in terms of bourgeois "social control." Prosouthern and anti-evangelical historians have used that analysis to discredit abolitionists and other reformers for a long time. But the interpretation has taken on new vigor during the past genera- tion with the reception of neo-Marxism and the social thought of Michel Foucault in the American academy. Its recent advocates have included Michael Katz, David J. Rothman, Anthony F. C. Wallace, Paul Johnson, and -of its most sophisticated and broadly ranging form -David Brion Davis. Davis's monumental volumes on slavery and antislavery in the modern world accord full respect to the moral integrity of the abolitionists and the justice of their cause. But they also portray the aboli- tionists as inadvertently promoting the hegemony of bourgeois capitalism. Through natural human limitations coupled with a measure of self-deception, the reformers were blind to the full implications of what they were doing. Without their being aware of it, the antislavery crusaders provided a moral sanction for new capitalist methods of exploitation. Their critique of chattel slavery indirectly legitimated wage slavery. In this interpretation, social control, if no longer a conscious motive, is no less a consequence of the reformers' actions and helps explain their success.8 The interpretation of antebellum reform as social control, in both its non- Marxian and neo-Marxian forms, has provoked an enormous critical reaction. Typi- cally, this criticism has argued that the reformers were motivated by moral principle, rather than ambition for worldly power. Many critics of the social control thesis have sought to explain the evangelicals' behavior in psychological, frequently psychoana- lytic, categories. In this view, the goal of evangelical commitment was a new personal identity, rather than class interest.9 'American historians tend to exaggerate the extent to which features of evangelicalism (such as lay leadership) were peculiarly American. See Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London, 1976). Myra Glenn, Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany, 1984); Louis P. Masur, "The Revision of the Criminal Law in Post-Revolutionary America," CriminalJustice History, 8 (1987), 21-36; David Brion Davis, From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (New York, 1986), 17-40. 8 See, for example, Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1942); Charles C. Cole, The Social Ideas ofthe Northern Evangelists (New York, 1954); and Clifford Griffin, "Religious Benevolence as Social Control," Mississippi Valley HistoricalReview, 44 (Dec. 1957), 423-44. Michael Katz, The Irony ofEarly SchoolReform (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1968); DavidJ. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum (Boston, 1971); Anthony F C. Wallace, Rock- dale (New York, 1978); Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium (New York, 1978); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, 1975), esp. 251-54, 346-57. See also David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 109. A powerful statement of the social control thesis as related to English Methodism is E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1980). 9 MartinJ. Wiener, ed., "Humanitarianism or Control? A Symposium on Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Social Reform in Britain and America," Rice University Studies, 67 (Winter 1981), 1-84. See also Lois Banner, "Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation," Journal of American History, 60 (June 1973), 34-41; James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists andAmerican Slavery (New York, 1976); and Lawrence Frederick Kohl, "The Concept of Social Control and the History of Jacksonian America," Journal of the Early Republic, 5 (Spring 1985), 21-34. On the quest for identity among reformers, evangelical and nonevangelical, see Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill, 1984); Robert Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weldandthe Dilemma ofReform (New York, 1980); Lewis Perry, RadicalAbolitionism: Anarchy This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1220 The Journal of American History March 1991 The present state of historiography leaves unresolved two different perceptions of evangelical Christianity. The scholarship on the eighteenth century treats evan- gelical Christianity as a democratic and liberating force, whereas much of the litera- ture on the evangelical movement of the nineteenth century emphasizes its implica- tions for social control. Did some dramatic transformation of the revival impulse come about at the turn of the century? I would argue not; historians have concen- trated on the "soft" and "hard" sides of evangelicalism in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries, respectively, but both were consistently present. Evangelical Prot- estantism did not mysteriously mutate from a democratic and liberating impulse into an elitist and repressive one when it moved from the eighteenth to the nine- teenth century. Austerity and self-discipline were present even in eighteenth- century evangelicalism; individual autonomy was asserted even in nineteenth- century evangelicalism. The problem is that our idea of social control, implying one person or group imposing constraints on another, is appropriate for some aspects of the reform impulse, such as the treatment of the insane, but not all. It does not take account of the embrace of self discipline, so typical of evangelicals. The essence of evangelical commitment to Christ is that it is undertaken volun- tarily, consciously, and responsibly, by the individual for himself or herself. (That, after all, is why evangelicals, in any century, are not content to let a person's Chris- tianity rest on baptism in infancy.) If we can substitute the more comprehensive cat- egory discipline for social control, we will be in a better position to understand the evangelical movement and the continuities between its colonial and antebellum phases. We will also be able to deal with the important psychological issues of per- sonal identity that have been raised by the critics of the social control interpretation. Evangelical Christians were and are people who have consciously decided to take charge of their own lives and identities. The Christian discipline they embrace is both liberating and restrictive. Insofar as the discipline is self-imposed, it expresses the popular will; insofar as it is imposed on others, it is social control. The reforms undertaken by nineteenth-century evangelicals were typically concerned to redeem people who were not functioning as free moral agents: slaves, criminals, the insane, alcoholics, children, even -in the case of the most logically rigorous of reformers, the feminists-women. The goal of the reformers was to substitute for external con- straint the inner discipline of responsible morality. Liberation and control were thus two sides of the same redemptive process.10 The existing historical literature poses at least one other major problem. Conspic- uously absent from the historiography until recently has been an approach that would acknowledge a relationship between evangelical reform and modern capi- talism without using this connection to disparage reform. Davis, as we have seen, took the first step away from such a use, but he still regarded the connection with and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, 1973); and Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard (Princeton, 1965). 10 The tiny bands of supporters of free love and anarchy carried this logic to drastic extremes, rejecting the insti- tutions of marriage and government as coercing behavior that should come from inner discipline. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1221 capitalism as a tragic limitation of nineteenth-century reform. A significant break- through has been achieved by Thomas Haskell. In a subtle and persuasive pair of articles, Haskell argued that nineteenth-century humanitarianism was the daughter of the capitalist system and a child of the market mentality without being an instru- ment of social control, intended or unintended. Haskell linked humanitarian re- form with the experience of the marketplace and the ideology of possessive in- dividualism in two important ways: (1) the emphasis on covenants, or promise keeping, and (2) the emphasis on causal perception and planning far ahead. Both these cultural traits, he argued, encouraged people "to attend to the remote conse- quences of their actions." With their "cognition" thus expanded, the people living in the new world of capitalism developed a heightened moral sensitivity to sufferings beyond their immediate households, which fostered humanitarian reform. Where Davis saw humanitarianism helping capitalism, Haskell saw capitalism fostering hu- manitarianism. And where Davis linked the two through the mechanism of uncon- scious motivation, Haskell linked them through an expansion of conscious aware- ness."1 The new understanding of cognitive style supplied by Haskell would appear to supplement, but not to supplant, social control as an aspect of nineteenth-century reform. Haskell looked primarily at abolitionism, but the element of social control is undeniable in movements more closely connected with party politics than aboli- tionism was, such as temperance, penal reform, or the creation of asylums for the insane. The progression from self-discipline/self-liberation to the benevolent dis- cipline and liberation of others was natural. Indeed, the progression could also occur the other way around, notably in the case of women. To move beyond the confines of the social control paradigm should not be to throw out the baby with the bath water. We need a way to conceptualize humanitarian reform that can subsume an understanding of both social control and personal identity and make profitable use of Haskell's exploration of the positive impact of modern capitalism on moral ration- ality and cognition. The study of discipline in the evangelical religious tradition going back to Puritanism could provide the answer.12 Two works on the social history of Victorian Britain can serve as models for an understanding of evangelical reform in the United States as well: Brian Harrison's "1 Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1," American Histor- ical Review, 90 (April 1985), 339-61; and Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2," ibid. (June 1985), 547-66. See also David Brion Davis, "Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideo- logical Hegemony," ibid., 92 (Oct. 1987), 797-812; John Ashworth, "The Relationship between Capitalism and Humanitarianism," ibid., 813-28; and Thomas L. Haskell, "Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Antislavery: A Reply to Davis and Ashworth," ibid., 829-78. 12 On the way evangelical benevolent societies developed women's sense of their own identity, see Nancy E Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, 1977), 126-59; Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Mission for Life: The Story of the Family of Adoniram Judson (New York, 1980); and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, Eng., 1981). The impor- tance of "discipline" as a theme in nineteenth-century secular culture has been recognized, though it is generally treated as a form of social control. See E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present, 38 (Dec. 1967), 56-97; Herbert Gutman, "Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America," American Historical Review, 78 (June 1973), 531-88; and Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 144-68. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1222 The Journal of American History March 1991 study of temperance and Thomas Laqueur's study of Sunday schools. Both break free of the paradigm of social control by showing how the movements in question transcended class lines. These evangelical reform causes were as much the product of working-class self-help and the voluntary pursuit of order, dignity, and decency as they were of middle-class paternalism. The American counterparts of these works confirm the point: W. J. Rorabaugh has rightly emphasized the objective problem of alcoholism addressed by the American temperance movement; Anne Boylan's study of American Sunday schools includes a careful comparison with Laqueur's findings about Britain. Evangelical reform had a logic and appeal of its own in the modern world and was not merely imposed by employers on employees. Once the autonomy of evangelical reform and its supporters has been recognized, we can see how, in the nineteenth-century world, they would sometimes support or encourage capitalism and at other times criticize it or counteract its consequences.13 Haskell has shown that the capitalist rationality of the marketplace fostered hu- manitarian reform by enhancing the conscious powers of moral perception. The next step, if this conceptual breakthrough is to be properly exploited, will be to see how his analysis of the origins of humanitarianism relates to the Christian tradition. We will never understand nineteenth-century reform in merely humanitarian or polit- ical terms. We must link humanitarian reform with the Christian tradition and its discipline. For it was the explosive combination of humanitarianism plus Chris- tianity that gave the world the evangelical movement and its attendant reforms. The evangelical emphasis on conscious, voluntary decision and action represents a con- junction of Christianity with modernity. The evangelical attained a new personal identity as both follower of Christ and rational, autonomous individual - paradox- ical as that may seem to some historians today. And in the America of the nine- teenth century, it was the institutional and emotional resources of Protestant Chris- tianity that typically empowered humanitarian reform.14 Ecumenicism versus Confessionalism The evangelical movement in the antebellum United States was in many respects the functional equivalent of an established church. Although voluntary rather than compulsory in its basis, the evangelical movement shared with the traditional reli- gious establishments of European countries the goal of a Christian society. Nine- teenth-century evangelicals defined that goal as something to be achieved, rather than something to be maintained. To meet the goal entailed a gigantic effort of or- 13 Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians (London, 1971); Thomas Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture, 1780-1850 (New Haven, 1976); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic (New York, 1979); Anne Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880 (New Haven, 1988). See also Donald Yacovone, "The Transformation of the Black Temperance Movement,"Journal of the Early Republic, 8 (Fall 1988), 281-98. For a classic celebration of the autonomy of the evangelicals, though within the framework of a consensual approach to American history that now seems dated, see Timothy Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1957). 14 For example, religion was central to the antislavery position of virtually all white abolitionists. Blacks could formulate an antislavery position without invoking religion, but whites could not. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1223 ganization. The revival established what contemporaries called "a benevolent empire" an interlocking network of voluntary associations, large and small, local, national, and international -to implement its varied purposes. The objectives of these voluntary societies ranged from antislavery to temperance, from opposing dueling to opposing Sunday mails, from the defense of the family to the overthrow of the Papacy, from women's self-help support groups to the American Sunday School Union, from the American Bible Society to the National Truss Society for the Relief of the Ruptured Poor.15 The organization of Christian evangelism involved a whole new soteriology, that is, a new theory of the operation of divine grace. Earlier evangelists, even the great Jonathan Edwards, had waited upon the fluctuating action of the Spirit to create a revival. Nineteenth-century evangelists, typified by Charles G. Finney, institution- alized their revivals with an eye to making them permanent, efficient, and con- tinuous. Max Weber's theory of "the routinization of charisma" may help explain this process; in any case, it was an important early phase in the modernization of American society.16 At a time when little else in American society was organized, when there were no nationwide business corporations except the national bank and no nationwide government bureaucracy except the post office, the evangelical move- ment was organized, vocal, and nationwide. The evangelical organizing process was the religious precursor and counterpart of the so-called American System, the political program of Henry Clay and the Whig party. Both represented an imposition of system and direction on a formless society. Addressing religious and moral issues on the one hand, and banking, the tariff, internal improvements, and land sales on the other, the evangelical movement and the American System stood for conscious planning and collective purpose, rather than laissez-faire. What is more, both put their trust in the same leadership class of prosperous mercantile laity.17 The Whigs may have been slower than the Democrats to accept the legitimacy of political parties partly because the Protestant benevolent societies provided Whigs with an alternative mode of organizing in pur- suit of their social objectives. Certainly the Whigs were no less modern than the Democrats in their outlook, no less issue-oriented, and no less willing to make use of the new media of communication.18 But the rise of political parties could only 15 On the organizing effort, see Donald C. Mathews, "The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process," American Quarterly, 21 (Spring 1969), 23-44; and Robert Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York, 1984), 229-32. Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790-1837 (Chapel Hill, 1960); Richard L. Power, "A Crusade to Extend Yankee Culture," New England Quarterly, 13 (Dec. 1940), 638-53; Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 (New York, 1978). On the transatlantic dimension, see Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Con- nection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1959). 16 The best brief analysis of Charles G. Finney's philosophy and goals is James H. Moorhead, "Social Reform and the Divided Conscience of Antebellum Protestantism," Church History, 48 (Dec. 1979), 416-30. Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (3 vols., Berkeley, 1978), III, 1121-39. 17 See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery (Cleveland, 1969); Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality (New York, 1982); and Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). 18 See, for example, David Paul Nord, "Evangelical Origins of Mass Media in America, 1815-1835, Journalism This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1224 The Journal of American History March 1991 undercut the influence of voluntary associations, each focused on a single cause. The distrust of party organization that some historians have observed among Whigs was commonest among the evangelicals.19 One feature of the evangelical movement suggestive of an established church was its Protestant ecumenicism.20 Led by laymen and, in a remarkable number of cases, laywomen, the evangelical movement was largely emancipated from control by the denominationally organized clergy. The laity were disposed toward interdenomina- tional cooperation by considerations both practical and principled. In practical terms, ecumenicism made for efficiencies of scale. In ideological terms, it reflected a decline of interest in the theological distinctions that had often formed the basis for denominational differentiation accompanied by a rising sense of American na- tionality and national moral responsibility. For the American evangelical move- ment, the nation had taken on the character of a Christian community, within which members shared moral responsibility and a legitimate concern with mutual dis- cipline. Evangelical ecumenicism and the discipline that went with it were controversial. The Great Awakening had split Americans into New Lights and Old, and the Second Great Awakening was every bit as divisive. Just as some people objected to the imposition of political control by the Whig American System, some objected to the imposition of the religious and moral discipline of the evangelical movement. If the evangelical movement was the American religious "establishment," its oppo- nents were the American "dissenters." J. C. D. Clark has recently reinterpreted En- glish politics of the early nineteenth century in terms of the conflict of religious ideology between Anglicans and Dissenters.21 A somewhat analogous religious conflict was almost as central to political life in the United States. Many political issues of the second party system involved judgments of moral value. Among the moral issues that shaped the second party system as it emerged in the 1820s were anti-Masonry, sabbatarianism, antislavery, and the white opposi- tion to Indian removal (an opposition led by Presbyterian missionaries). Different ethnic or religious communities judged such issues differently. According to what has become known as the ethnoreligious interpretation of antebellum politics, those communities became the building blocks of party. Mutual antagonisms among the communities led them to regard each other as "negative reference groups." Voters lined up with the party opposing the party of their principal negative reference group. Thus Irish Catholic immigrants voted Democratic while their despised com- Monographs, 85 (May 1984), 1-30; and more generally, R. Laurence Moore, "Religion, Secularization, and the Shaping of the Culture Industry in Antebellum America," American Quarterly, 41 (June 1989), 216-42. 19 For a different perspective on Whigs' antiparty sentiments, see Lynn Marshall, "The Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party," American Historical Review, 72 (Oct. 1967), 269-87. The antiparty attitudes of the Whigs are some- times exaggerated and wrongly attributed to antimodern attitudes. 20 A possible British counterpart were the ecumenical and evangelical Anglican reformers described in Richard Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion, and Reform, 1830-1841 (Oxford, 1987). 21 J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice during the An- cien Regime (New York, 1985). See also John A. Phillips, Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England (Princeton, 1982). This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1225 petitors, the free blacks, voted Whig -prompting many Scots-Irish Presbyterian im- migrants to vote Whig in reaction against the Irish Catholic Democrats.22 In real life, of course, ethnoreligious hostilities did not exist in a vacuum; they were affected by the changing economic climate of the times. In the minds of con- temporaries, moral issues and economic issues were not entirely separate categories. Given the connection between evangelical moral discipline and the complex processes we have been calling modernization, it is logical that economic policies were judged by religious criteria. Even issues we think of as economic, such as bank notes, bankruptcies, and acts legitimating preemption of public lands, had their moral dimensions in antebellum America. Even movements we think of as ethnore- ligious, such as nativism, had their economic dimension: Irish immigrants were not only Catholics but also low-wage laborers; in both guises they seemed threatening to native Protestant workingmen. As historians have come to appreciate such interconnections, the ethnoreligious interpretation of antebellum politics has not replaced the economic interpretation (as some of its early advocates had expected) so much as it has been synthesized with it, creating what is best termed a cultural interpretation. Fine examples of such synthesis are William G. Shade's account of the banking issue in the Old Northwest and William R. Brock's synthesis of the political, moral, and economic issues of the 1840s. Brock, a leading British historian of the United States, demonstrates that an implicitly cultural approach can be presented in narrative form. His work deserves to be better known in this country. Most recently, Harry L. Watson has integrated the ethnoreligious issues into a broadly economic interpretation of the politics of Jacksonian America. Watson argues that the average voter "usually needed some means to relate the abstractions of far-off political debate to the texture of his own experience"; ethnoreligious loyalties and moral issues like temperance often sup- plied those means. As a result "cultural and economic concerns were closely inter- twined in the creation of party loyalties." Religious and moral values predisposed voters toward certain views of economic issues. The people we are studying, not the subsequent historians, brought economics and religion together. Nineteenth- century people did not typically oppose Christianity and culture, or morality and self-interest, the way twentieth-century people have come to do.23 22 Kathleen S. Kutolowski, "Antimasonry Re-Examined: The Social Bases of the Grass-Roots Party," Journal of American History, 71 (Sept. 1984), 269-93; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Prelude to Abolitionism: Sabbatarian Politics and the Rise of the Second Party System," ibid., 58 (Sept. 1971), 316-41; Richard R. John, "Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture,' Journal of the Early Republic, 10 (Winter 1990), 517-67; DavidJ. Russo, "Major Political Issues of theJacksonian Period and the Development of Party Loyalty in Congress, Transactions of the American PhilosophicalSociety, 62 (May 1972), 3-51. On negative-reference-group voting, see Lee Benson, The Concept ofJacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961). For the book's influence on the ethnocultural interpretation of Jacksonian politics, see Ronald P. Formisano, "Toward a Reorientation ofJacksonian Politics: A Review of the Literature:"Journal ofAmerican His- tory, 63 (June 1976), 42-65; and Robert P. Swierenga, "Ethnocultural Political Analysis," Journal of American Studies, 5 (April 1971), 59-79. The broadest application of the ethnocultural interpretation is Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century (New York, 1979). 23 William G. Shade, Banks orNo Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832-1865 (Detroit, 1972); Wil- liam R. Brock, Parties and Political Conscience: American Dilemmas, 1840-1850 (Millwood, N.Y., 1979); Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics ofJacksonian America (New York, 1990), esp. 175, 186. For other syn- This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1226 The Journal of American History March 1991 The supporters and opponents of the evangelical revival constituted the two largest of all the mutually hostile moral communities or reference groups identified by the ethnoreligious interpretation. The multiplicity of religious bodies sorted themselves out into two camps, prorevival and antirevival, that then meshed with the two-party political system. By the time of the classic Whig-Democratic confron- tation in 1840, the evangelicals were openly and actively enlisted in the Whig cam- paign, their opponents arrayed on the Democratic side.24 There is some reason to think that evangelical opinion leaders (like their counterparts on the opposite side) were more strongly partisan than their followers. If so, then the degree of involve- ment with the evangelical cause would correlate with the degree of support for the Whig party. The opponents of the revival may be characterized as confessionalists, people who attached primary importance to bearing witness to the truth as they saw it. Their interest in theological distinctions had not declined, and they were unwilling to sub- sume their differences under the ecumenical banner of the revival. Often their reli- gious loyalties were underscored by ethnic identifications. Among the confession- alists were Roman Catholics, Old School Presbyterians, Missouri Synod Lutherans, Dutch True Calvinists, Antimission Baptists, Latter-day Saints, and Orthodox Jews.25 It is not possible to define the opponents of the revival entirely in denominational terms, since its support was not defined in denominational terms either. In New England, where the establishment of religion was a literal, not a metaphorical, polit- ical issue until 1833, Methodists and Baptists were dissenters and Democrats. Else- where the pattern of local negative reference groups was different. In the Old North- west, southern settlers who arrived after 1830, regardless of denominational affilia- tion, generally resisted both the evangelical movement and the Whig party. For our purposes, the handful of avowed freethinkers in the United States count as confes- sionalists, since they too were critics of the revival. In the same camp were those of the unchurched whose only interest in religion was to resist intolerance and meddle- some moralism. What all these disparate groups - traditionalists, southerners, anti- clericals, and "nothingarians" had in common was a determination to preserve their independence in defiance of the evangelical juggernaut. To them evangelical ecumenicism looked like religious imperialism. As theJeffersonian Republicans had rallied deists and sectarians in opposition to the Anglican and Congregational estab- theses of economic and ethnoreligious factors, see James R. Sharp, The Jacksonians versus the Banks (New York, 1970); Daniel W. Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979); and Daniel Feller, "Politics and Society: Toward a Jacksonian Synthesis," Journal of the Early Republic, 10 (Summer 1990), 13 5-62. 24 See Richard Carwardine, "Evangelicals, Whigs, and the Election of William Henry Harrison," Journal of American Studies, 17 (April 1983), 47-53; and Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton, 1971), 102-36. 25 For the social and religious views of Protestant confessionalists, see Walter Conser, Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England, and America, 1815-1866 (Mercer, 1984). On the distinction be- tween confessionalists and evangelicals, there is a substantial literature. For its origins, see especially Benton Johnson, "Ascetic Protestantism and Political Preference," Public Opinion Quarterly, 26 (Spring 1962), 3 5-46; Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics (New York, 1970); and Richard Jensen, "Religious and Occupational Roots of Party Identification," Civil War History, 16 (Dec. 1970), 325-43. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1227 lishments of the late eighteenth century, the Jacksonian Democrats became the party of those opposed to the ecumenical evangelical "establishment" of the ante- bellum era.26 The very theology of the evangelical movement had important political implica- tions. Evangelicals often embraced postmillennialism, which teaches that the Se- cond Coming of Christ will occur at the end of the thousand years of peace foretold in Scripture. The implication is that human efforts on behalf of social justice form part of the divine plan to bring about the day of the Lord. Premillennialism, the more traditional doctrine, teaches that the Second Coming will occur before the thousand years of peace and is necessary to usher it in, implying a less optimistic view of human progress. Postmillennialism became a prominent feature of main- stream evangelicalism in the United States and Britain during the nineteenth cen- tury and brought a new sense of religious urgency to social reform. A recent study of British policy making and economic thought finds important differences in the political consequences of postmillennialism and premillennialism. Evangelical post- millennialists supported reforms to improve the world and the moral individuals within it: They opposed policies, such as the act of 1847 limiting factory work to ten hours a day, that they feared would undermine personal moral responsibility. British premillennialists were more conservative and authoritarian than postmillen- nialists in their general political outlook, but their paternalism could occasionally make them more humane, as on the issue of the ten-hour law. With traditions of paternalism weaker in the United States, Americans depended all the more on post- millennial moralism to motivate reform.27 Other theological issues had political consequences too. One of the most in- teresting and sophisticated features of "high" intellectual history in the United States in the nineteenth century was the debate over free will between Calvinists and Arminians. This debate cut across the evangelical-confessional division, and there were Calvinists and Arminians in both political parties. Nevertheless, posi- tions on a few public issues followed Calvinist-Arminian theological lines: for ex- ample, Arminians opposed capital punishment and orthodox Calvinists defended it. Differences in ecclesiology, or the theory of the church, were even more relevant to political values. Evangelicalism and its attendant impulse toward discipline and reform flourished most among Christian bodies that defined themselves as volun- tary, lay-controlled societies of committed believers; confessionalism was associated 26 Southerners migrating into the Old Northwest before 1830 included antislavery folk who could cooperate with Yankees in religion and politics. See Donald J. Ratcliffe, "Politics in Jacksonian Ohio: Reflections on the Eth- nocultural Interpretation," Ohio History, 88 (Winter 1979), 5-36, esp. 17. William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630-1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1970). 27 Ernest L. Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (Berkeley, 1949); James Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil WVar (New Haven, 1978); Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evan- gelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795-1865 (Oxford, 1988). Hilton argues that British postmillen- nialists encouraged belief in economic laissez-faire, whereas I see American postmillennialists as accepting more community responsibility. Perhaps in the British context, evangelicals were more eager to assert personal self- discipline against traditional authority, while the American context prompted them to assert corporate discipline against anarchic individualism. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1228 The Journal of American History March 1991 with a view of the church as a universal institution, bearing witness to objective truths, whose clergy dispense grace through sacraments. This distinction was classi- cally formulated by Ernst Troeltsch, who called the former bodies "sects" and the latter "churches." There is reason to believe that the sects have historically done more to encourage their members to politically active citizenship.28 The cultural approach to politics would lead us to view party affiliation as a func- tion of membership in a community sharing common values. Careful local studies indicate that such membership was often determined by a combination of mutually reinforcing moral and economic motives. Within a cultural interpretation, how much importance to attach to formal religious beliefs and traditions must vary with circumstances.29 One thing is certain: The cultural interpretation has not revitalized the consensus approach to American history; on the contrary, it has vindicated the perception of the Progressive historians that American history has been characterized by profound conflict. If the simple liberal versus conservative dichotomy of early Progressive historians is no longer satisfactory, if both Whigs and Democrats are now seen to have some "liberal" and some "conservative" aspects, it does not follow that the two parties were altogether nonideological, still less that both were namby-pamby "moderates" with similar programs. The antebellum parties disagreed sharply over a wide range of issues, and their partisans hated each other cordially. The cultural interpretation has, however, placed our understanding of Whig/Democratic con- flicts on a basis of world view broadly conceived rather than economic interest nar- rowly defined. It is as if the axis defining their polar opposition had rotated to a new position in our minds.30 Dedicated as they were to particularism and diversity, the confessional Democrats found doctrines of little government congenial. The natural rights philosophy of the Jacksonians asserted the individual's claims to be protected against interference from officious ecumenical reformers. An emphasis on the separation of church and state was the logical complement of this philosophy, for it removed everything 28 Arminians criticized the death penalty because they believed the purposes of punishment were deterrence and reformation; Calvinists, with a less optimistic view of human nature, defended the death penalty as mandated by Scripture and satisfying an intrinsic justice. See Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation ofAmerican Culture, 1776-1865 (New York, 1989), 141-59; Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (New York, 1960); the book was first published in German in 1911. 29 For motives of affiliation in northern cities, see Robert Doherty, "Social Bases for the Presbyterian Schism of 1837-38: The Philadelphia Case," Journal of Social History, 2 (Fall 1968), 69-79; David Montgomery, "The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844," ibid., 5 (Summer 1972), 411-46; and data on Rochester inJohnson, Shopkeeper's Millennium, 3-14, 89-94, 136-41. For a skillful balancing of the economic and ethnocultural aspects of antebellum politics, see Michael Holt, Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh (New Haven, 1969). 30 See Joel H. Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil WVar (New York, 1985). The classic Progressive interpretation of the second party system is Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age ofJackson (Boston, 1945). For recognition of the political dimension of the evangelical movement, see his chapter "The Whig Counterreformation," ibid., 267-82. The many studies confirming partisan division include Joel H. Silbey, The Shrine of Party: Congressional Voting Behavior, 1841-1852 (Pittsburgh, 1967); Herbert Ershkowitz and William G. Shade, "Consensus or Conflict? Political Behavior in the State Legislatures during the Jacksonian Era," Journal of American History, 58 (Dec. 1971), 591-621; and Donald J. Ratcliffe, "The Role of Voters and Issues in Party Formation: Ohio, 1824," ibid., 59 (March 1973), 847-70. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1229 having to do with religion from the potential interference of government. Thus, in place of the Puritan and evangelical religious tradition that the Whigs drew upon, the Democrats invoked the political ideas of the Enlightenment. On the whole, historians of the Democratic party have found less reason to discuss religion than historians of the Whig party. The political strategy of the Democrats - indeed their very raison d'Rtre - dictated a political secularism. Thus, for example, Jean H. Baker's study of the political culture of the antebellum northern Democrats scarcely mentions religion. Had she looked into the question, Baker would probably have been led to a view enunciated by Sean Wilentz. Stressing the diversity of religious opinion in the New York City Working Men's party, Wilentz concludes that "the artisans' disparate religious views provided a rough analogue to their democratic politics, opposed to all men of 'insolent morality' who would ratify their presumed social superiority with the Word of God."'31 When the Working Men's party did not succeed as a separate organization, it merged into the Democratic party. The freedom such people prized was "freedom from"; the goal of the Whigs was "freedom to." In the great competition between ecumenicists and confessionalists, the initiative lay with the evangelicals. One difference between that America and our own was the dominant culture-shaping power of antebellum evangelical Christianity. The ecumenical evangelicals then formed what Ronald P. Formisano has termed the "core" of the national culture; the confessionalists occupied the "periphery." The analogy already suggested with the Whig economic program (the American System) continues helpful: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., interpreted the politics of the Jackso- nian age as a conflict pitting the powerful "business community" against all the other interest groups in society, who were forced to make common cause to protect themselves. In the cultural interpretation, the evangelicals become the counterparts of Schlesinger's business community, and the confessionalists, the alliance of out- groups. This analogy should not compel us to regard the confessionalists as the heroes of the story. But it should remind us not to focus exclusively on the evangel- ical core, that the religions of the periphery have a fascinating cultural history (or rather, histories) of their own.32 The core/periphery metaphor has been applied to many other countries as well and lends itself to comparative study. For example, Robert Kelley has shown how the British Liberals, the Canadian Liberals, and the American Democrats were all parties of the ethnocultural periphery and therefore defenders of pluralism. An analogy between the American Whigs and the British and Canadian Tory parties can also be drawn, since they all endorsed national homogeneity and government 31Jean H. Baker, Affairs ofParty: The Political Culture of the Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Cen- tury (Ithaca, 1983); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City andthe Rise of the American Working Class (New York, 1984), 86. 32 Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation ofPolitical Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983). How several out-groups have reinforced their identities by using mainstream American society as a negative reference group is the theme of a model study that avoids idealizing either side: R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York, 1986). This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1230 The Journal of American History March 1991 intervention in the economy, but religion complicates the analogy. The established Church of England, overwhelmingly Tory in politics, had an evangelical wing, but many English evangelicals were religious Dissenters, part of the cultural periphery and aligned with the Liberal party. Throughout the English-speaking world, issues of religious establishment, whether formal or (as in most of the United States) in- formal, conditioned the political impact of the evangelical movement and the reac- tion against it. In the United States the cultural core was occupied by evangelical sectarian bodies that had usually been on the periphery in Europe, while churchly confessional religions like Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism, which had defined the core in their homelands, found themselves on the periphery here.33 Any major party in a two-party political system is bound to be a diverse coalition. The American Whig party included many voters who were not directly involved in the evangelical united front. Some of these Whigs, for example, Unitarians and Quakers, shared the perfectionist aspirations of the evangelicals but not their creed. These heterodox groups had derived from their evangelical past both individual and social perfectionist aspirations, which they had then magnified and radicalized. Sometimes excluded from evangelical organizations, these groups were particularly prominent in the more radical associations of the benevolent empire, addressing women's rights and antislavery. That such people became Whigs (and later, Repub- licans) confirms that it was the evangelicals' quest for discipline and perfection, rather than their theological orthodoxy, that had political implications. Signifi- cantly, however, the heterodox perfectionists did not display as high a level of Whig party loyalty as the evangelicals, and they were often drawn into minor reform parties. The Whig party also included some people who were not evangelical even in a generalized sense. Contemporaries were aware of this and took account of it; it be- came the basis for the important distinction they drew between "Conscience" Whigs and "Cotton" Whigs in the North. Cotton Whigs included groups that identified with the cultural core of bourgeois British-American Protestantism but remained critical of evangelical didacticism, especially the crusade against slavery. Epis- copalians and Princeton Old School Presbyterians provide examples of this cultural conservatism. In general, such groups were not so strongly Whig as the evangelicals were; many Episcopalians and Old School Presbyterians, for example, were Demo- crats. Some of them switched from Democratic to Whig or Republican affiliation only after large-scale Irish Catholic immigration had produced an important nega- tive reference group for them.34 33Robert Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 1969). Other important comparative works include Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and VoterAlignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York, 1967); and Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley, 1975). American Catholics were forced by the logic of their local situation to defend pluralism and the rights of private conscience in ways that European Catholics sometimes found difficult to understand; this problem lay at the root of the papal condemnation of the so-called Americanist heresy of the nineteenth century. 34 For the impact of Irish Catholic immigration on Scots-Irish Old School Presbyterian voters, see Kelley, Cul- tural Pattern in American Politics, 170-74; and Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853-1892: Politics, This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1231 Historically derived from the Anglican/Episcopal church and like it manifesting an ambiguous relationship to the second party system was the Methodist Episcopal church. The ambiguous political consequences of Methodism were related to am- biguities in the religion itself. Though evangelical in faith, the Methodists, like the Episcopalians, were more churchly than sectarian in Troeltsch's ecclesiological classification. In England, the Methodist leadership long remained Tory; though re- ligious Nonconformists, Methodists seldom joined political forces with the other English Dissenting sects. Methodism offered dignity and plenteous grace to ordi- nary people (thereby alarming some of the more authoritarian Anglicans), but it did not mobilize them politically. The Methodist separation from the established Church of England occurred slowly and reluctantly; neither there nor in the United States did Methodism identify clearly with either the core or the periphery. In ante- bellum America, party politics tended to be the last resort of evangelical reformers. Northern Methodists remained content longer with evangelical voluntarism and were slower than many other evangelicals to embrace political partisanship. Eventu- ally, however, northern Methodists began to behave politically like other evangel- icals. The Methodist clergy seem to have moved into the Whig party more readily than their laity. After the emergence of the third party system, the Republicans suc- ceeded in rallying northern Methodists more effectively than the Whigs had ever done. Postbellum Methodists, like other American reformers, turned even more than their predecessors toward political action and the state as an agency of dis- cipline.35 With the understanding we have gained of the evangelical movement and its di- verse opponents, we are now better able to appreciate the connection between style and substance in antebellum political culture. The hullabaloo of political cam- paigns in the second party era-the torchlight parades, the tents pitched outside town, the urgent calls for a commitment-was borrowed by political campaigners from the revival preachers. Far from being irrelevant distractions or mere recreation, the evangelical techniques of mass persuasion that we associate with the campaigns of 1840 and after provide a clue to the moral meaning of antebellum politics. Even the practice of holding national conventions, adopted by the parties, had been pi- oneered by the cause-oriented benevolent associations. Anti-Masonry, which held the first presidential nominating convention in 1831, was both an evangelical reform movement (a "blessed spirit" to its supporters) and a political party.36 Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill, 1979), 164, 174, 177, 186. Episcopalians included both traditionalist (high church) and evangelical (low church) factions. There is evidence that the former were Democratic and the latter Whig; see Formisano, Birth of Mass Political Parties, 314-16, citing unpublished work by Alexandra McCoy. 35 On the political ambiguities of American Methodism, see Formisano, Birth of Mass Political Parties, 153-55. On the political conservatism of English Methodism, see Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 385-440. Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality (Princeton, 1965). On Methodists as Whigs, see Richard Carwardine, "Methodist Ministers and the Second Party System," in Rethinking Methodist History, ed. Russell E. Richey and Kenneth E. Rowe (Nashville, 1985), 134-47. On Methodists as Repub- licans, see Kleppner, ThirdElectoral System, 73, 74, 148, 177; and Ralph Morrow, Northern Methodism andRecon- struction (East Lansing, 1956). After midcentury, British Methodists too became more politically assertive. See G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832-1868 (Oxford, 1977), esp. 195-96. 36 On anti-Masonry see Kutolowski, "Antimasonry Re-Examined"; Ronald P. Formisano and Kathleen S. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1232 The Journal of American History March 1991 From this perspective, we can see that issues of moral value did not arise in Amer- ican politics only with the decade of the 1850s, though they took on a more momentous urgency than ever then. It was not the emergence of moral issues as such that wrecked the second party system, but the emergence of two particular issues, nativism and the choice between restriction and expansion of slavery, that the leadership of the existing parties felt it necessary to avoid. These were not exclusively or narrowly moral issues - they combined self-interest and ideology, secular and reli- gious motives in the mutually reinforcing way that appealed so powerfully to the Americans of the day. They rose to salience during an era of prosperity (1844-1857) when the economic aspects of the old party debate seemed less urgent. Meanwhile the temperance movement too was becoming increasingly politicized, through the demand for prohibition by states on the model of the Maine Law. The temperance issue could readily have been accommodated within the existing Whig and Demo- cratic party structure. But that structure provided no framework to debate either the effects of immigration or the extension of slavery. The public, having become accustomed to expressing moral convictions (positive and negative) in political terms, asserted its independence of the second party system. The evangelical move- ment, and the values and feelings it aroused, proved stronger and more durable than the Whig party that had been associated with it for a generation. When the leaders of the Whig party proved insufficiently responsive to the demands of their constitu- ents, voters deserted the Whigs (and in some cases the Democrats) for the American and Republican parties.37 The fact that the American party drew so much more sup- port from Protestant working-class voters than the earlier workingmen's parties had done suggests that a political mobilization was more effective when it combined its economic appeal with an ethnoreligious one. Toward a Broader Conception of Political Culture One of the strengths of the cultural interpretation of history, as illustrated in our examination of the evangelical movement and its consequences, is its comprehen- siveness. The new cultural history makes no sharp opposition between ideas and daily life. It fosters the study of the subtle and intimate connections among values (including religion), social structure, family life, and ways of getting a living. The new cultural history of politics does not exclude a consideration of economic condi- tions and motives. In developing this cultural perspective, historians have turned to their sister disciplines in the social sciences. Students of the early American republic have been learning from sociologists such as Robert Bellah, Peter Berger, Kutolowski, "Antimasonry and Masonry: The Genesis of Protest," American Quarterly, 29 (Summer 1977), 139-65; William P. Vaughn, The Anti-Masonic Party in the United States (Lexington, Ky., 1983); Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England (New York, 1988); and Robert 0. Rupp, "Parties and the Public Good: Political Antimasonry in New York Reconsidered," Journal of the Early Republic, 8 (Fall 1988), 253-80. 37 The most authoritative demonstration of this process is William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party (New York, 1986). See also Paul Goodman, "Moral Purpose and Republican Politics in Antebellum America, 1830-1860," Maryland Historian, 20 (Fall/Winter 1989), 5-39. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1233 John L. Hammond, and Gerhard Lenski, from political scientists such as Michael Walzer, Samuel P. Huntington, andJ. David Greenstone, and from anthropologists such as Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and the oft-quoted Clifford Geertz.38 The cultural interpretation has enriched our understanding of antebellum poli- tics in several ways. First, it underscores the practical effects of ideas and moral values, making American political history seem more ideological than it was once the fashion to admit. Second, it demonstrates more clearly than ever the continuities between the second and third party systems, including those between Whigs and Republicans. This awareness strengthens the third contribution of recent scholar- ship, which is the new interest taken in the Whig party. No longer are the Whigs seen simply as the conservative opponents of Jacksonian progress. As Louise Stevenson puts it: Whiggery stood for the triumph of the cosmopolitan and national over the provin- cial and local, of rational order over irrational spontaneity, of school-based learning over traditional folkways and customs, and of self-control over self-expression. Whigs believed that every person had the potential to become moral or good if family, school, and community nurtured the seed of goodness in his moral nature.39 Such a description encompasses more than views on public policy; it depicts a value system with private as well as public aspects. The values that the evangelical Whig tradition sought to implement in the antebellum North derived from a con- junction of ancient Christianity with the cognitive expansion and disciplinary needs of the modern market society. Over its long history going back to the European Reformation, the Puritan/evangelical tradition did not simply adapt to, or borrow from, modernity and democracy; it actively helped form them.40 Individualism, voluntarism, and contractualism were features of the Reformed religious tradition in early modern Europe before they were taken over by the secular political philoso- phers of possessive individualism. In antebellum America, that tradition continued to contribute to shaping the culture of the modern world. 38 See, for example, Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, 1985); Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements ofa Sociological Theory ofReligion (Garden City, 1967); John L. Hammond, The Politics ofBenevolence: Revival Religion andAmerican Voting Behavior (Norwood, 1979); Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor: A Sociological Study of Religion's Impact on Politics, Economics, and Family Life (Garden City, 1963); Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass., 1965); Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), J. David Green- stone, "Political Culture and American Political Development," Studies in American Political Development, 1 (1986), 1-49; Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York, 1982); Victor Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (New York, 1978); and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973). 39 Louise Stevenson, Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830-1890 (Baltimore, 1986), 5-6. For the rewarding incorporation of ideology into the study of political history, see Major L. Wilson, Space, Time, and Freedom: The Quest for Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict (Westport, 1974); Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978); and Samuel P. Huntington, "Paradigms of American Politics," Political Science Quarterly, 89 (March 1974), 1-26. The continuities in party system are confirmed by the major studies of the early Republican party: Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil WJar (New York, 1970); and Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party. 40 There is no clear-cut date in American history for switching terminology from "Puritan" to "evangelical." I use both terms here because of the time span to which I refer. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1234 The Journal of American History March 1991 The nineteenth-century evangelical movement represents the modernizing phase in the history of Christianity. In the antebellum North, the modernization of reli- gion was a precursor of, a facilitator of, and a model for the modernization of poli- tics, economics, and the media of communication. Richard L. McCormick, in his impressive survey of what he calls "the party period" of American political history, comments that the driving force in nineteenth-century political life was a "new vi- sion" of an activist government advocated by Whigs and Republicans. That new vi- sion of government had been pioneered, I would add, by a new vision of a moral society advocated by Christian evangelists invoking historic Protestant doctrines of individual rebirth and community discipline.41 The evangelical movement of the early nineteenth century reflected a momentous change in the relation of Troeltsch's sects to the rest of society. In Europe, the sects had been peripheral to society, had struggled for independence from the state, and had frequently disavowed state power. In the United States, the sects were in a posi- tion to shape the culture for their society as a whole and embraced the opportunity. They enlarged their conception of discipline to include the legal coercion of non- members. In colonial and early national times, some of them enjoyed certain privileges of religious establishment; during the era of the second party system, they pursued something resembling a functional establishment of religion. Recently we have learned to attribute the public spirit of antebellum and colonial America to the classical republican tradition. That secular tradition was com- plemented in important ways by the Puritan/evangelical religious tradition, which often coexisted with it in the English-speaking world. Both traditions valued public virtue, private discipline, balanced government, and widespread participation. Much of the political debate of this era, partisan and sectional alike, was cast in the terms of classical republicanism. But it is not clear that the classical republican tradi- tion supplied motivation for political participation, so much as a rationale for it.42 Republicanism was a paradigm for understanding political life and a vocabulary for explaining it. Northerners and southerners, Whigs and Democrats, labor and cap- ital, modernizers and antimodernizers, evangelicals and confessionalists spoke the language of republicanism. Every group interpreted it in a distinctive way and claimed to be its rightful heir. Republicanism, invoking the body of classical knowl- edge common to all educated people in the nineteenth century, was readily synthe- sized with both the natural rights philosophy of the Enlightenment and the Protes- tant tradition of discipline.43 Since all sides in all debates made use of the classical 41 See Gregory Singleton, "Protestant Voluntary Organizations and the Shaping of Victorian America," in Vic- torian America, ed. Howe, 47-58. Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy (New York, 1986), 89-140, esp. 132. 42 Compare McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, 112. On republicanism the seminal work is J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Prince- ton, 1975). Republicanism and its relationship to liberalism-have been more thoroughly explored for the period before 1815 than after, but see Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s; Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs; Wilentz, Chants Democratic; Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: W'ar and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore, 1987); and Dorothy Ross, "Liberalism," in the Encyclopedia of American Political History, ed. Jack P. Greene (3 vols., New York, 1984), I, 750-63. 43 See James T. Kloppenberg, "The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1235 republican vocabulary, it is difficult to see how classical republicanism could have helped people choose sides -though it clearly helped them argue their cases once they had chosen. The evangelical movement and the resistance to it can help us understand the conflicting motivations that led people to choose the sides they did and hold onto them with tenacity. The political culture formed by the clash between the evangel- ical movement and its adversaries was one that generated a high level of excitement and participation. Twentieth-century commentators have sometimes felt that it generated altogether too much fervor, blaming this for moving the country toward bloody civil war. More recently, however, historians have looked back with nostalgia to a political system that involved the public so much more effectively than our own. Of course voters might have innumerable reasons for wanting an active (or inactive) government besides the implementation (or frustration) of the evangelical agenda. But at a minimum, the evangelical agenda, media, and institutions provided models showing how to influence people, how to involve them, and how to get things done.44 McCormick has called for more investigation into "the organizations to which nineteenth-century Americans turned for expression of their ideological goals." Such organizations were by no means all political parties. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, a host of issue-oriented voluntary associations connected individuals with public participation in antebellum America. The evangelical benevolent empire was by far the largest network of these. It fostered a sense of active purpose among groups who had never before experienced it, notably women and free blacks. What- ever its implications for social control, evangelicalism also contributed to social em- powerment, and the latter has been less thoroughly studied. Too often historians have taken it for granted that the Democratic party was the only agency for broaden- ing popular participation in antebellum public life. An innovative essay by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Cross and the Pedestal," is an example of how historians are breaking free from this limitation. She uses anthropological theory to describe the ways in which the great revival provided religious forms for female self-assertion in early capitalist America.45 The next step in the evolution of antebellum political history should be to define political culture to include all struggles over power, not just those decided by elec- American Political Discourse' "Journal of American History, 74 (June 1987), 9-33; Daniel W. Howe, "Classical Education and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America," Intellectual History Newsletter, 5 (Spring 1983), 9-14. 44 William E. Gienapp, "Politics Seems to Enter into Everything: Political Culture in the North, 1840-1860,' in Essays on American Antebellum Politics, ed. Stephen Maizlish and John Kushma (Arlington, 1982), 14-69. Voter turnout seems to have been highest when evangelical techniques of persuasion fed on economic discontents. See Michael F. Holt, "The Election of 1840, Voter Mobilization, and the Emergence of the Second American Party System," in A Master's Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald, ed. William J. Cooper et al. (Baton Rouge, 1985), 16-58. For a wonderful evocation of nineteenth-century participatory politics, see Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York, 1986), 3-41. 45 McCormick, Party PeriodandPublic Policy, 136; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, ed. Phillips Bradley (2 vols, New York, 1945), I, 198-205 and passim. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disor- derly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 129-64. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1236 The Journal of American History March 1991 tions. The women's movement, the struggles for racial justice and the rights of labor, conflicts for control of churches and voluntary organizations, even power struggles among members of the family-all these and more were relevant to the moderniza- tion of American life in this period. That the authority of government in the ante- bellum United States was so remarkably weak and decentralized is all the more reason to take account of other arenas in which power was contested. As Harry Watson has observed in studying the South, antebellum "state authority was medi- ated through so many local agencies of control that its influence appeared as a smooth extension of the other patterns that held every other aspect of neighborhood life in its place." Traditional political history, the history of government power, will be illuminated, not obscured, by being set in such a context. As military history has been illuminated by the insight that war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means, so the history of parties and governments will be illuminated by the recognition that electoral politics is only one possible form of struggle for power over others or autonomy for self. Indeed, in the antebellum United States, electoral politics was often only the last resort (as war usually is of diplomats) of movements that had failed to accomplish their objectives in other ways. And the broader the context in which political culture is studied, the more it will be found that religion was an important determinant of purposes and behavior.46 A generation ago, Lucien W. Pye pointed out that "political culture is the product of both the collective history of a political system and the life histories of the members of that system, and thus it is rooted equally in public events and private experiences." The study of political culture must take account of the study of person- ality, of what might be called political psychology. Drew R. McCoy's study ofJames Madison's postpresidential years deftly weaves together culture, personality, and pol- itics in its account of how the elder statesman brought his eighteenth-century values to bear on the problems of nineteenth-century America. McCoy's Madison not only defends the political culture of the Enlightenment in public, he personifies it in private. Not only groups, but also individuals, in the privacy of their own minds, struggle With issues of autonomy, order, and control. The people we are studying would not have found the concept of a political psychology unfamiliar. Americans in the early national period believed in a psychology of the faculties. Which faculty should control the individual, they demanded: Conscience, rational self-interest, passion, or unconscious habit? Taking account of the political psychology they be- lieved in can illuminate our understanding of their public political debate.47 46 Watson, Jacksonian Politics, 9. Daniel Scott Smith shows the decline in nineteenth-century United States fertility occurred first in ethnoreligious groups that also supported economic and political modernization. See Daniel Scott Smith, "Cultural Bases of 19th Century U.S. Fertility Decline," 1988 (in Daniel Walker Howe's pos- session). 47 Lucien W. Pye, "Political Culture," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (18 vols., New York, 1968-1979), XII, 218; Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison andthe Repub- lican Legacy (Cambridge, Eng., 1989). On political psychology, see Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (Middletown, 1988); D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience (Philadelphia, 1972); Dickson D. Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin, 1979); and (for an earlier period) Daniel W. Howe, "The Political Psychology of The Federalist," WVilliam and Mary Quarterly, 44 (July 1987), 485-509. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1237 For an understanding of evangelical humanitarian reform, the study of the inter- action between culture and personality is particularly rewarding. In the middle period of American history, as today, the goal of the evangelical Christian was to be born again in Christ, to become a new person. For this reason, the practice of evangelical piety has always been a form of applied psychology. A richly suggestive interpretation of New England Calvinism in the nineteenth century takes as its theme "the spiritual self in everyday life." Richard Rabinowitz's book, exemplifying the culture-and-personality approach to the history of religion, connects the life of the mind and the activities of moral reform with the social experience of ordinary people.48 The cultural and moral tradition of Reformed religion was carried on by the reformers in the antebellum Whig party. In that tradition, public policies were fre- quently concerned not only with society and politics but also with personality and personal discipline. Antebellum debates over public policy often addressed what had originally been private concerns. Political agitation for legal prohibition of al- cohol, for example, was an outgrowth of an evangelical disciplinary impulse that was originally voluntary and individual. In an earlier work, I tried to show how the private struggles of prominent Whigs to shape their own personalities mirrored the public conflicts of their time and the resolutions the Whig party offered for them. The model for this approach had been defined by Erik Erikson in his classic studies of Martin Luther and Mohandas Gandhi.49 A sophisticated exploration of the relationship between personality and ante- bellum political culture is LawrenceJ. Friedman's study of the abolitionists, as valu- able for its methodology and sources as for its analysis. Friedman is interested in "the blend of conviviality and austere piety at the roots of [the abolitionists'] social psychology," in their twin impulses toward communal activity and individual perfec- tionism. He studies three clusters of abolitionists (in Boston, New York City, and upstate New York) in the context of "the Northern middle class generally and the evangelical missionary community in particular."50 Friedman's little groups of mutu- ally supportive abolitionists resemble nothing so much as Troeltsch's Protestant sec- tarians, engaged in a collective quest for perfection through discipline, a quest leading to political involvement as a by-product of moral striving. A different model for the study of culture and personality has recently been tried out by Lawrence Frederick Kohl. Kohl applies David Riesman's sociological concept of contrasting "social characters" to antebellum political allegiance, arguing that the Whigs were "inner-directed" personality types while the Democrats were those who retained more elements of "tradition-direction."51 Whether tradition-directed will 48 Richard Rabinowitz, The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation ofPersonalReligious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England (Boston, 1989). Compare, on an earlier era, Charles Lloyd Cohen, God's Ca- ress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York, 1986). 49 Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs; Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York, 1958); Erik Erikson, Gandhi's Truth (New York, 1969). so LawrenceJ. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (Cam- bridge, Eng., 1982), 3, 5. 51 David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny, The Lonely Crowd.' A Study of the Changing Amer- This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1238 The Journal of American History March 1991 prove as adequate a description of the Democrats as inner-directed is of the Whigs remains unclear. The Democrats were a diverse coalition, and while the confession- alist religious bodies revered tradition, the Democratic party's formal ideology of Enlightenment natural rights for all white men was hardly traditional. Historians need to learn how to use social science models without being imprisoned by them. Still, Kohl's psychological paradigm has so much to commend it that one hopes more will be done with it -examining the socialization of individuals, broadening his data base, or taking account of the criticisms that have been made of Riesman's character types. The role of evangelical discipline in shaping what Riesman and Kohl call inner direction bears investigating. Recently, the sociologist George M. Thomas has addressed the role of revivalism in forging new identities for the individual and the state. The kind of religion promoted by nineteenth-century evangelicals - based on free will, rational moral capabilities, and perfectionism- helped transform individuals into citizen-activists, he argues. Nineteenth-century revivalism was a phase in the development of the market economy, but it did not simply strengthen the hand of capitalists. It was ''part of a new rationalized order that was much broader than any narrow economic interest located within that order." The "modernity" promoted by revivalism "re- makes individuals, empowering them to produce national development and growth within the competitive world." Revival religion encouraged people to transcend the private and immediate, mobilizing them in the service of the market and the state. Thomas's ambitious and illuminating (if abstract) sociology can be of use to historians setting political developments in the widest of cultural contexts.52 A broader conception of political culture can help illuminate not only partisan and sectarian conflicts but also sectional tensions. Some abolitionists rejected party politics and refused even to vote. But surely we would want to define their crusade in some broad sense as political; it was certainly perceived as such by the South. Besides slavery, another source of the cultural contrasts between the North and South lay in their different receptivity to changing gender relationships. The Whig and Republican modernizing culture placed a higher value on female self-expression than did the Democratic traditional one. Modernization of gender roles, bringing increasing autonomy to women, occurred faster in the North. Women were more active as leaders in the northern evangelical movement than in the southern resis- tance to it. (Conversely, the southern cult of honor - among both the gentry and the common folk-placed more emphasis on the expression of physical "manliness" than northern culture did.) Northern Whig women like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sarah Josepha Hale made popular literature an instrument of evangelical didacti- cism, in their own expression, a "moral influence." In fact, the relationship between ican Character (New York, 1961); Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York, 1989). 52 George M. Thomas, "Revivalism, Nation-Building, and Institutional Change," in Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, andthe Individual, ed. George M. Thomas et al. (Newbury Park, 1987), 297-314, esp. 308, 312. See also George M. Thomas, Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation-Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chicago, 1990). This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture 1239 the evangelical movement and the empowerment of women has been one of the most rewarding areas of historical research during the past generation.53 The middle period of American history was a time of dramatic innovation- economic, moral, and institutional, as well as political. The innovations were espe- cially obvious in the North, and the evangelical movement provided the motivation and the model for many of them. Far from being reactionary, as has sometimes been thought, the religion of the great revival was an engine driving rational change, a force for modernization. The conflicts-public and private, communal and individual - that this force unleashed were central to the political culture of the era.54 53 On women and the moral goals of literary culture, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (New York, 1985); and an enduring book, William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (Garden City, 1961). On the role of women in the Whig party, see Watson, Liberty andPower, 178, 182, 221-22. On women and the evangelical movement, see, for example, Cott, Bonds of Womanhood; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the City (Ithaca, 1971), 97-124; Ross Paulson, Women's Suffrage andProhibition (Glenview, 1973); Ellen DuBois, Femi- nism and Suffrage: The Emergence ofan Independent Women 's Movement in America (Ithaca, 1978); and Blanche Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist Abolitionists in Nineteenth Century America (Urbana, 1978). 54 For an earlier and substantially different formulation of these ideas, see Daniel Walker Howe, "Religion and Politics in the Antebellum North," in Religion andAmerican Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s, ed. Mark Noll (New York, 1990), 121-45. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:28:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms