An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States 9780812208252

Citation preview

An Age of Infidels

EAR LY AMER ICAN STUDIES Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

An Age of Infidels The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States

Eric R. Schlereth

U n i v e r si t y of Pe n ns y lva n i a Pr e s s Ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-4493-9

Contents

Introduction. Remaking Religion

1

Chapter 1. Boundaries

18

Chapter 2. America’s Deist Future

45

Chapter 3. Citizen Deists

77

Chapter 4. Partisan Religious Truths

110

Chapter 5. America’s Deist Past

142

Chapter 6. Free Enquiry

171

Chapter 7. Political Religion, Political Irreligion

202

Epilogue. The Origins of American Cultural Politics

237

Notes 243 Index 283 Acknowledgments 293

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Remaking Religion

James Ross thought Christianity was for the dogs. After all, he had mockingly administered the Lord’s Supper to several furry, four-legged communicants. At least these were the rumors about the Federalist candidate for governor of Pennsylvania in 1808. The state’s Republicans spread this story throughout Pennsylvania and beyond. Ross’s supposed irreligion had been a political issue for nearly a decade. This latest irreverent act, his opponents warned, was another example of why Ross’s unchristian sentiments left him morally bereft, thus unfit for political office. Ross’s supporters agreed, for if the accusations were true they indicted Ross of “a crime that must excite horror and detestation in every virtuous heart, and must exclude the perpetrators of it, not only from public confidence, but from private friendship and society.” Both sides in 1808 found it difficult to ignore rumors about Ross because they raised vexing questions about how best to reconcile religious belief and political life. Indeed, concerns about the relationship between religion and politics proved urgent to many Americans in the generations following the Revolution.1 History allowed no sure guarantees that the new United States would avoid the mire of religious and political conflict that gripped much of the European world for three centuries. Religious disputes had fractured Christian Europe along sectarian lines. More recently, the French Revolution amplified perceptions that atheism and violence were often grim companions to political change. From the mid-1770s onward, broad-ranging debates erupted in the United States about how or even if long-standing religious beliefs, institutions, and traditions could be accommodated within a new republican political order that encouraged suspicion of inherited traditions, institutions, and ideas. Things sacred did not seem automatically or

2

Introduction

entirely compatible with America’s new political culture. Public life in the early United States thus included contentious arguments over how best to ensure a compatible relationship between diverse religious beliefs and the nation’s recent political changes. In the process, religion and politics in the early United States were remade to fit each other. Specifically, religious conflict became safe for American politics. Explaining how early national Americans remade religion and politics in such ways is the central focus of this book. Doing so elucidates interconnections between debates over religious knowledge and developments within American political culture. The history of religious knowledge in the early national United States is, in important respects, a political history. I define religious knowledge in broad terms to include historical definitions of religious truth; the standards by which individuals determined what was or was not a true religious belief; and the means by which individuals expressed and circulated, thus communicated, the religious beliefs they held as true. The rough-and-tumble world of early national politics offers great insight into the changing public authority of religious knowledge in the decades following the American and French Revolutions. The advent of partisan institutions including parties and elections; an increase in political communication, especially through newspapers; and the creation of political spaces such as voluntary associations within civil society each expanded opportunities for Americans who held competing notions of religious truth to pursue their beliefs in ways that would hopefully avoid the sectarian controversies of recent historical memory.2 As a result, the context in which people expressed religious opinions and the implications of these expressions became more controversial than the beliefs themselves. Thomas Jefferson recognized this shift from content to context as the source of religious controversy when, in the 1780s, he wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” This shift had lasting influence. Decades later, the author of an 1834 article in the New Hampshire Gazette smeared a Boston politician for his supposed acquaintance with the infamous freethinker Abner Kneeland. “In stating these facts,” he clarified, “we wish to be understood as casting no reproach upon any man for his belief or want of belief—for we regard men’s actions more than their faith.”3 Attention to context over content had intellectual and political implications. Intellectually, it marked a growing acceptance that notions of

Introduction

3

religious truth were ultimately matters of opinion, thereby open to public debate. Moreover, it allowed people of various beliefs to argue politically with each other about religion’s influence in American public life while avoiding debates over the relative truth of private religious opinions, debates that had become politically and culturally untenable in the revolutionary age. Both developments were evident in actions taken by citizens in Ithaca, New York. There, in the winter of 1830, some of the town’s residents met to debate faith’s influence in American politics. This was an urgent topic, made especially so by recent calls for Congress to end Sunday mail delivery. In a resolution submitted to their congressman, the people of Ithaca deemed efforts to suspend Sunday mail an organized plan by a “religious sect in the United States to coerce the government into measures tending to establish their peculiar construction of the law of God, and ultimately to establish a particular religion as the religion of the State.” The language of the resolution adopted in Ithaca exemplifies how religion and politics were remade to fit one another, and the contentious nature of this change. The petitioners did not challenge religious truth per se, or the rights of others to believe as they pleased. What troubled them was how apparent religious truths, now reduced to debatable propositions, were used politically. The residents thus disagreed with the “peculiar construction of the law of God” held by the opponents of Sunday mail delivery.4 James Ross’s experience provides an even more provocative lens on debates over the context of religious expression rather than the content of belief. Republican Simon Snyder defeated Ross in Pennsylvania’s 1808 gubernatorial election by nearly twenty-eight thousand votes. Like many Federalist politicians of the era, Ross stopped pursuing public office. He spent the rest of his life practicing law in western Pennsylvania. Although Ross was not defeated only because of his purported disdain for Christianity, Pennsylvania Federalists exerted considerable energy defending him. Rumors such as those surrounding dogs, James Ross, and the Christian sacraments thus suggest more than a heated partisan political culture. The accusation against Ross in 1808 was but one episode in the early republic’s larger history of infidel controversies. In a strict sense, infidels were non-Christians, specifically Muslims and Jews, according to traditional Christian usage of the term. Attacks on Ross intimate a more capacious and protean view that an infidel was any person whose religious expressions seemed politically or culturally subversive. Infidel controversies in the early United States are illuminating because they raised questions about the

4

Introduction

political and cultural consequences of religious opinions more generally as well as the meaning of religious difference in a republic. During infidel controversies, Americans performed the heavy intellectual lifting necessary to render deep differences of religious belief politically tolerable and even useful, but not dangerous. A broader historical overview is necessary to fully understand the origins of infidel controversies in the political and religious life of the early United States. Within Christian Europe, orthodox authorities of various confessional backgrounds distinguished infidels from heretics. Christian authorities and the general populace often found Muslim and Jewish beliefs repulsive, but the threats to Christian society posed by infidel Muslims and Jews seemed relatively evident and manageable to the Christian authorities who devised ways to keep these groups physically separated from the Christian populace among whom they often lived. The advent of the Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice was one such solution. Heresy posed a different problem. Heretics were disbelievers within Christian communities. Heretics had received the sacrament of Christian baptism only to reject Christian truths that they once accepted. Heretics were traitors to their faith. Of course charges of heresy or “unorthodoxy” were always subjective despite the clarity or force with which “orthodox” authorities issued them. A heretic to one person is a devotee of true religion to another. Nevertheless, societies throughout the early modern Christian world, including British North America, had laws to punish heresy. Although infidels and heretics were viewed as threats to Christian community, heresy often seemed more subversive because it operated in presumably clandestine ways. By the eighteenth century, especially in England, these two forms of disbelief had merged in larger cultural discourses.5 This fusion of infidelity and heresy occurred largely in response to the advent of deism. English writers beginning with Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury in the early seventeenth century but including others such as John Toland, Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston, and Matthew Tindal articulated the most influential forms of a deist philosophy. Like all religious systems, individual proponents of deism stressed different principles, although nearly all deists agreed on two basic points. They accepted the existence of a God in one form or another, but they rejected Trinitarian theology. Jesus, in their view, was only a human, not the son of God. Second, all deists denied that the Christian Bible contained a special, divine revelation of God’s

Introduction

5

will. At its core, deism was a complete rejection of supernatural revelation in favor of reason as the only source of true religious knowledge. Some deists used these positions to offer moderate calls for the reformation of Christianity. Yet others hoped that deism would entirely overturn Christianity; indeed they believed that deism would destroy all religious systems that included supernatural or metaphysical teachings. Deism’s cultural and intellectual profile grew in England, as did its perceived threat to Protestant orthodoxy, at the same time that English society was becoming more tolerant of Christian dissenters. Together, these developments rendered heresy as a theological concept increasingly redundant. Within this context, deism’s opponents increasingly labeled it as a form of “infidelity.” Yet they attributed the traditional characteristics of heresy to deism—specifically a tendency toward internal religious and political subversion.6 English antideists thus responded to deism in part by developing a more protean concept of infidelity. In their hands, infidelity was an umbrella term to denigrate deism by conflating it with all forms of religious disbelief, doubt, and anti-Christian sentiment. So, for example, infidelity might describe a spectrum of opinions from unabashed atheism—outright denials of God’s existence—to the most moderate deistic views. Moreover, infidelity still contained elements of its earlier identification with Muslims and Jews, an association that certainly amplified the term’s polemic power in a society with a Protestant establishment. Of course deists opposed such acts of intellectual conflation by arguing why their respective position was distinct, especially from atheism. Such protestations usually availed little. By the mid-eighteenth century in England, and in its North American colonies as well, infidelity was a well-established polemic shorthand used in diverse contexts by defenders of majority religious opinions.7 Infidelity had a similar meaning and usage in the early national United States. The term was part of the republic’s colonial inheritance. It was used for various reasons—both principled and opportunistic—by writers who understood their own beliefs as broadly Christian but viewed their opponents’ beliefs as decidedly anti-Christian. This certainly describes the actions of the Pennsylvania Republicans who attacked James Ross in 1808. Such accusations of irreligion were controversial in their own right, however. Newspaper editor Denis Driscol noted that the term “Infidel, means many things.” When those who used the word were queried about its meaning “they will answer in the true conjurer’s style, it means this, it means that,” it is “an unbeliever, a Pagan, a miscreant, one who rejects Christianity.” In

6

Introduction

every instance, Driscol maintained, such charges reflected “the taste, or zeal, or rancor, or bigotry, or ignorance, or superstition of a Christian.” Driscol was not a neutral observer, but a vocal Irish deist living in the United States during the early 1800s. In his experience, avoiding “the odious name of infidel” required an unwavering belief “with one sect, that a piece of thin bread, is a substantial and real God! And with all; that three Gods, and one God, are one and the same thing!” Driscol’s deist views aside, he characterized usage of the term “infidelity” in ways that would have certainly seemed familiar to English readers several decades earlier. Moreover, he responded to accusations of infidelity in ways long familiar to deists.8 As suggested by the Ross incident and Driscol’s commentary, infidel controversies in post-Revolutionary America were, at their most common, published and public disputes between deists and antideists. Such conflicts were waged using terms and methods that originated in early modern Europe. However, they unfolded in specific ways shaped by unique legal and cultural changes that affected religion’s place in public life after independence. Recounting the story of America’s infidel controversies requires constant attention to developments in the early modern Atlantic world that preceded them as well as the unique course they followed as the nation changed politically and culturally. Understanding infidel controversies also requires an explanation of the reasons and assumptions that drove conflicts between deists and their opponents. Ross’s opponents attacked him by stoking fears of what I label “ambient infidelity.” Driscol’s actions as a deist editor are examples of what I term “lived deism.” The former captures a largely cultural product deployed by individuals or groups of broadly Christian beliefs, typically one of the nation’s dominant Protestant denominations. Conversely, the latter encompasses the activities of individuals or groups who opposed Christianity on deistic grounds. The two terms describe phenomena that were deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing. “Ambient infidelity” and “lived deism” are thus conceptual devices intended to provide greater specificity and deeper analytical reach to the history of early national infidel controversies. Because these concepts play a central role in this history, they deserve fuller explication. “Ambient infidelity” describes a prevalent assumption in the early republic that anti-Christian opinions had strong appeal and growing influence even in the absence of large numbers of identifiable infidels. Congregationalist minister John Foster of Cambridge, Massachusetts, expressed a relatively

Introduction

7

mild version of this view in an 1802 sermon titled Infidelity Exposed, and Christianity Recommended. According to Foster, “I do not believe that a very considerable portion of my countrymen have any disposition to discredit or discard the religion of their fathers: but I do verily believe, that they are in great hazard of being unwarily seduced and led astray.” As a cultural sense or concern, fears of ambient infidelity had erupted periodically in the Anglo-American world since the late seventeenth century. It was especially evident in the English deist controversies of the 1600s. Worries about ambient infidelity also shared a logic similar to that of anti-Catholicism in the Anglo-Protestant world, which was raucously expressed during Pope’s Day celebrations. Such concerns also reflected persistent suspicions of conversos in the Iberio-Atlantic world. In response to this latter preoccupation the papacy authorized Inquisition tribunals to prosecute heresies such as cryptoJudaism. Fears of individuals or groups undermining Christian societies from within were thus embedded in popular culture as well as state and church policy throughout the early modern world.9 Much like anti-Catholicism or suspicion of conversos, concerns about ambient infidelity underpinned the conceptual vocabulary early moderns used when debating larger questions about the limits of religious tolerance, about civil society’s finite capacity to accommodate conflicting religious ideas, and about the sources of religious truth. Yet ambient infidelity, like its corollaries, was not a generic or stable cultural framework for use in similar ways across time and place. Context gave ambient infidelity its resonance. Concerns over ambient infidelity ignited passionate debates and stirred deep fears in American culture of an altogether different scale following the Revolution. Not without cause. By all accounts, infidelity was on the rise. Specifically, more, not fewer, Americans publicly announced their deism between the 1770s and 1830s.10 Thomas Thompson was one such deist. He was born in 1775 on the eve of American independence and by 1829 had abandoned Christianity. Perhaps he embraced deism after reading Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, published in 1794 when Thompson was nineteen. Or maybe Thompson reacted to Federalist attacks on Thomas Jefferson’s piety during the contentious election of 1800 by committing himself to the very opinions that the Federalists feared. Thompson may have even found the emotional highs of evangelical revivals and their demands for new birth experiences too psychologically taxing. Regardless, by 1829 he was moderator at the Hall of Science, a prominent twostory building with Greek columns on Broome Street in New York. Located

8

Introduction

in a former church, the Hall of Science was a venue for critics of Christianity to debate their ideas and a site where Sunday morning gatherings were held as alternatives to church services. The hall’s proprietors adorned its windows with pictures of Thomas Paine and William Godwin in order to taunt visitors and employees of the Bible repository located directly across the street. Before Thompson died in Brooklyn in 1852, he had attended “infidel conventions” in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1836 and much larger ones in New York City in 1845 and 1846, where he was appointed manager of the organization that hosted the meetings. Thompson also served as treasurer of the Paine Monument Fund, and as trustee and treasurer of the Free Enquirer’s Library Association. The latter organization formed to counter Christian tract societies by publishing and circulating inexpensive editions of writings critical of Christianity, including The Age of Reason and atheistic works by eighteenth-century French philosophes.11 Thompson’s life offers a window into the larger world of “lived deism,” or the circles of deist writers, readers, and observers who figure prominently in the story I tell. These individuals often identified themselves with a host of different titles including “free enquirers,” “moral philanthropists,” and, depending on their relish for conflict, sometimes even infidels. Members of these circles shared basic deist opinions, so I will refer to them collectively as “deists.” Clearly these deists held strong beliefs on religious matters, but they also disbelieved in Christianity. Thus deists are described as “disbelievers” and deism is described as a form of “disbelief” at various points in this study. Historian James Turner has argued that atheism and other forms of disbelief became intellectually conceivable in America during the late 1700s but gained real power only in the next century. However, the growing public profile of American deists after the Revolution demonstrates that the intellectual resources to disbelieve in Christianity and the opportunities for individuals to publicly proclaim their disbelief expanded well before the late nineteenth century. From the late 1700s onward, American deists formed voluntary associations and debate clubs, and they issued a flow of orations, pamphlets, and periodicals. The advent of institutions to support deist circles—the infrastructure of lived deism—thus marked a shifting center of acceptable belief and expression in American public life.12 This shift was evident in, but also brought about by, the new opportunities to publish and associate in early national life. As Americans in general printed and joined more frequently, so too did deists. In 1800 there was

Introduction

9

one deistic newspaper in the United States, Temple of Reason. By 1830 New York City alone had two, and others were published in Boston, Philadelphia, Poughkeepsie, and St. Louis over the course of the decade. Some of these newspapers circulated widely. The Free Enquirer, for example, had subscribers in over one-half of the states and in Canada. The same held true for societies. In the 1790s a handful of deistic clubs and societies were established. By the 1830s most cities with deist newspapers also hosted associations whose members organized debates and celebrated Thomas Paine’s birthday.13 Though relatively few in number, these deists profoundly influenced how Americans viewed the relationship between religious belief and political actions. Deist involvement in public life inspired a large literature by their opponents. These texts compose a body of religious polemic concerned with infidelity’s presence, real and imagined, in American culture. In these texts, and through the public controversies they engendered, the realm of “lived deism” fueled ever-widening concerns about “ambient infidelity” and how best to combat it. Deists often responded by seeking ways to expand their public power. Conflicts between deists and their opponents, or over the larger implications of deism’s presence in American life, occurred in an array of settings. These included the formal political realms of constitutional deliberation, legislative enactments, and electoral competition, but also in civil society: specifically in the press, associations, and public celebrations central to the nation’s civic life. Mapping the world of lived deism and its relationship to ambient infidelity thus illuminates the implications of abstract changes in religious epistemology by anchoring them firmly in the early republic’s political culture.14 For participants and observers, infidel controversies in the early republic ultimately registered both optimism and anxiety about Christianity’s prospects in the new United States. Contemporaries clearly believed that the implications of deism reached broadly throughout American society. For this reason alone, infidel controversies deserve to have their story told. Yet the history of these controversies also provides opportunities to reconsider larger developments in early national religion and politics. Evangelical Protestantism has dominated the attention of scholars who explore the relationship between religion and politics in the revolutionary era. Historians have argued for dissenting evangelicalism’s contribution to the development of opposition ideas and republican ideology before the Revolution. Others have extended these arguments into the nineteenth

10

Introduction

century by identifying the influence of republicanism and the Revolution’s broader intellectual and political legacy on American religion—including theology and ecclesiology, but also popular religious experience.15 The activities of a Thomas Thompson or the rumors about James Ross are largely unaccountable in religious histories that emphasize democratization. This, however, largely reflects an assumed narrative within much of this scholarship about the relationship between political developments and religious change. Arguments for the democratization of early national religious life take for granted that over time religious disestablishment—at both federal and state levels—led fairly seamlessly to expansions of religious liberty for all. With these legal and political changes as the backdrop, popular evangelical movements propelled by expanding opportunities for the faithful to organize and believe can easily be viewed as the driving force behind early national religious change. The Thompson and Ross examples thus seem largely anomalous or distinctly marginal when viewed from this interpretive perspective. The history of public and published infidel controversies suggests an alternative understanding of religious change in the early republic. By highlighting the presence of disbelievers in Christianity, these conflicts cast the history of American religion along a spectrum of belief and disbelief. Recognizing this, historians should not view deism as a minor exception to larger religious trends, but as constitutive of these developments in key ways. Specifically, the actions of early national deists and the larger discourse surrounding infidelity helped create a sturdy cultural boundary between acceptable and unacceptable religious expression in a largely Protestant culture. Against this boundary, virtually any set of Christian beliefs or practices could gain the protection of religious liberty, even those that may have seemed radical in earlier periods. Individual denominations or believers who set themselves apart from or against infidelity’s spread, and the deists who contributed to it, found a crucial way of achieving public legitimacy and acceptance. In an era of expanding religious liberty, infidelity was a political liability. Opponents challenged infidelity in order to police the moral content of public life. Infidel controversies thus highlight how the expansion of religious freedom created its own forms of religious intolerance. In developing this central theme, An Age of Infidels incorporates insights from several recent studies of religion in early modern Europe that distinguish between religious “tolerance” and religious “toleration.” As this scholarship demonstrates, tolerance describes the ways that people of differing

Introduction

11

religious opinions behaved toward each other. Cultural sentiments often guided tolerance in practice. Religious tolerance was related to but fundamentally different from religious “toleration,” which was a state policy of indulgence toward religious dissenters from the established church in a given nation. Recent scholarship on early American religion has benefited from this capacious definition of religious tolerance. Historians of religion during the colonial and early national periods have demonstrated that the faithful of various denominations often prioritized civil order over limitless religious expression. Legal historians have developed this interpretation even further by demonstrating that understandings of religious liberty in the early republic were fully compatible with means for coercing religious conformity and practicing religious intolerance.16 An Age of Infidels expands but also qualifies this basic insight. Deists and their opponents were equally willing to take action in order to limit the ability, if not the right, of their opponents to publicly express their religious opinions. I see early national politics as the arena in which Americans deployed arguments and utilized institutions in efforts to enhance the public power of their respective religious opinions. Because infidel controversies often involved participants seeking ways to expand or limit religious tolerance on cultural and social terms, they erupted in states with very different religious histories. So, for example, infidelity proved equally troublesome in Massachusetts, where established religion existed until 1833, as it did in North Carolina, which ended its religious establishment without controversy in 1776. However, arguments for a “moral” or an “informal” establishment largely assume that Americans of dominant faiths reached fairly easy agreement about what “Christianity,” a “Christian” moral code, or “Protestantism” meant. This too was a product of historical circumstances in need of explanation.17 Such agreement was difficult to achieve during the colonial period and only relatively less so as the nineteenth century progressed. The early republic’s infidel controversies often forced agreement on matters of faith. Infidelity—as a limit to tolerable expression, as the periphery of the acceptable—helped believers of various denominations define themselves in more general or generically “Christian” terms. Belief and disbelief were symbiotic in this way. Through opposition to infidelity, general concepts of “Protestantism” or even “Christianity” provided the faithful a meaningful identity and an effective source of public engagement amid rapid social and religious changes. Even notions of a “Christian nation” seemed desirable to

12

Introduction

the pious of many denominational backgrounds, despite centuries of sectarian divisions within Christianity, if the alternative might be an “infidel nation.” Rather than understanding changing ideas about religious tolerance and intolerance as primarily legal developments, infidel controversies show these changes under way in the larger culture as shaped and experienced by people who might never directly encounter the legal system. In these more popular settings, Americans put their varied ideas about religious tolerance into practice. New latitude for religious freedom thus amplified Americans’ commitments to using political means—especially the republic’s expanding webs of print and associations—to publicly bolster and promote their particular version of religious truth. Understanding infidel controversies as a mode of politics thus illuminates how competing notions of religious truth and acceptability were invented, redefined, and pursued in public life. Two interconnected developments worked to push infidel controversies firmly into the political arena. The first concerned a broad intellectual change: the redefinition of religion as a concept in the early modern West whereby faith became a matter of opinion. The second involved the relationship between a redefined concept of religion and changes within American political culture. Contemporaries clearly recognized that both developments transformed religious knowledge into a product of early national politics. “Religion,” Pennsylvania editor George Kline quipped in 1808, “seems to be made up of the whole soul and body of Proteus, who could change himself into any shape as need required.” Religion could be whatever belief or necessity demanded. Religion as a concept stripped of common principles, absolute truths, sacred texts, doctrines, or shared beliefs seemingly had the greatest political purchase in the early republic. Kline issued his observations during the same gubernatorial campaign in which James Ross’s deism was a central issue. However, Kline’s reference to the protean nature of religion reflected monumental epistemological changes that originated in early modern Europe.18 With the advent of Protestantism, religion was increasingly defined in terms of propositions as well as piety or practices. In this view, religious knowledge was equivalent to all other forms of knowledge in that it was open to discussion, exploration, and either personal acceptance or rejection. This change occurred through Protestants’ attempts to defend their faith against deist critiques, but also as an outgrowth of Protestantism’s spiritual emphasis on personal salvation. From the seventeenth century onward, Christian apologists and theologians, especially in England, viewed deism as a threat

Introduction

13

and defended their faith accordingly. In particular, deist opponents pushed Christians to defend the Bible’s veracity and Christian revelation on rational grounds. Empiricism, inductive reasoning, and an aversion to metaphysical speculation defined Christian attempts to assert the reasonableness of their faith in light of deist critiques. The rising appeal of Arminianism in the Anglo-Protestant world also changed religious knowledge. As a doctrinal alternative to predestination, Arminianism posited that people could work effectively toward salvation. American understandings of religion were affected by this change because Arminianism became a dominant influence on Protestant theology and religious experience as the nineteenth century progressed.19 These developments in Christian thinking overlapped with and were influenced by broader intellectual changes in the early national United States. In various settings, individual judgment and public opinion became the arbiters of personal truths. The origins of this cultural theme were already evident by the mid-1700s. During this period, provincial Americans were dazzled, bemused, amused, and challenged by a succession of charismatic figures who traveled throughout North America offering public demonstrations of scientific and technological devices. Ebenezer Kinnersely was an eighteenth-century Baptist minister and scientific experimenter originally from England who entertained and educated colonials by demonstrating the workings of electrical power. His exhibitions famously sacrificed the lives of unfortunate hounds for the sake of science. In the early 1800s, entertainer John Rannie traveled the United States using ventriloquism to amuse his audience, but also to undermine Christian teachings by demonstrating that signs of demons and the supernatural were easily re-created by humans, often as a form of trickery. Ordinary Americans thus encountered public critiques of knowledge, including religious knowledge, in a context that encouraged participation and questioned traditional intellectual authorities. As general knowledge claims became products of public debate and spectacle, so too did religious beliefs.20 This development was both liberating and highly disconcerting. In terms of religion, this change allowed new possibilities for religious association and new latitude for religious belief; but it also caused a dizzying proliferation of religious sects and opened new conceptual spaces for religious doubt. New levels of religious uncertainty accompanied religious freedom. People became freer to determine their own religious truths, but this increased the demand to engage public life in defense of one’s beliefs.

14

Introduction

Americans developed their politics of religious controversy in order to accommodate personal religious opinions to a culture in which the meaning of religion was not fixed.21 Uncertainty over the meaning of religion forced individuals of all opinions to pursue their religious beliefs differently in the public sphere. As Robert Dale Owen—editor of the deist weekly Free Enquirer and future congressman from Indiana—expressed in 1829, “When I speak of the times being more liberal, I do not mean that men differ less in opinion, but that they are learning how to differ.” Many Christians of various denominational backgrounds also adopted the view that private beliefs, or even disbelief, were sacrosanct. As Americans in the early republic distinguished personal religious opinions, and the individuals who held them, from religion as a social or political phenomenon, religion became less personal. A commentator in Western Examiner, a deist weekly published in St. Louis, acknowledged as much. Expanding Owen’s general observation, “It is with Christianity and not with Christians, we would war,—with the system, and, further than fair discussion may go, not with its supporters.” Religious controversy therefore lost much of its potential for violence as religious knowledge became a political commodity open to debate according to the prevailing standards of civil discourse. Of course religious conflict did not subside, yet those engaged in such disputes were forced to do so in ways compatible with the era’s larger political changes.22 New standards of political legitimacy also influenced early national religious conflicts. In the postrevolutionary United States, public deliberation replaced sacred authority as the measure of legitimate government and politics. In a public sphere premised on persuasion, absolute religious truth lacked the moral or political sway that had existed in a political system premised on the authority of divine right or sacred texts. Persuasion was the public sphere’s dominant value, exercised in its core institutions— newspapers and voluntary associations. Religious knowledge thus also became subject to persuasion and popular opinion in a public sphere where appeals to metaphysical authority increasingly rang hollow. Deists and their opponents alike sought ways to convince the majority of their fellow citizens not involved in their disputes that their respective religious opinions were both true and consequential. The protagonists in the republic’s infidel controversies also hoped to persuade enough Americans that their opponents’ religious views could not be tolerated, or at least denied popular approbation. As Boston minister Hubbard Winslow recognized in 1835, “[I]t is

Introduction

15

public opinion, that is to elevate our civil institutions to the throne of God, or to sink them and us into heathenism.”23 Winslow’s observation highlights how the history of infidel controversies contributes to a better understanding of religion’s fit within a concept of the public sphere. Religion is noticeably absent in Jürgen Habermas’s initial theorization of the public sphere. Scholars have recently sought to correct this oversight, especially by focusing on the history of religious controversy. David Zaret and James Van Horn Melton have demonstrated that postReformation religious controversies in Europe not only mirrored but also advanced the values and institutions around which Habermas described the emergence of a critical public sphere within civil society. Reason, critical investigation, and public opinion as a political and cultural arbiter articulated within associations and the press were all crucial components of Habermas’s public sphere. Writing about religious controversy in early modern England, Zaret argues that “[p]opular developments in Protestantism created a public sphere in religion that cultivated nearly the same critical, rational habits of thought that Habermas locates in the public spheres of politics and letters.” Moreover, Van Horn Melton describes theological controversies over Pietism in eighteenth-century Germany in which protagonists increasingly attempted to persuade and convert their opponents rather than judge or condemn them. This, Van Horn Melton argues, shows a fusion of religious belief with largely secular ideals of public deliberation.24 Of course the early American republic was markedly different from either Reformation-era England or eighteenth-century Germany, but these scholars offer suggestive insights for understanding the relationship between religious controversy and developing civic life in the early United States. This is especially relevant considering E. Brooks Holifield’s detailed argument for deism’s role in pushing Christian writers to publicly defend their beliefs through stronger appeals to reason and persuasion. Deist attacks on Christianity proceeded in much the same way. Early national controversies between deists and their opponents thus provide an ideal window into the ways Americans pursued their religious opinions within an expanding public realm of newspapers and associations. As John L. Brooke has demonstrated in exhaustive detail, civil society in the early republic differed most significantly from its European counterparts by the degree to which it developed in cooperation with the state rather than in opposition to it. In its cooperative potential, civil society was an important site of political reform and self-governance. Indeed civil society was largely a creation of

16

Introduction

the state through laws passed by national and local governments. Religious controversies within civil society thus often involved efforts by individuals or groups to impress their moral views on the exercise of state power at the local and national levels. As a result, religious controversies within civil society were pursued on behalf of larger moral aims that could turn coercive and intolerant as each side used the press, associations, and appeals to public opinion on behalf of their combined understanding of religious truth and national destiny. As An Age of Infidels demonstrates, infidel controversies reveal moments when religious power and religious intolerance were especially evident and operative in early national public life.25 This study explores infidel controversies from the 1770s to the 1840s. The first four chapters cover the period from 1770 to 1810. Together they address the federal Constitution’s relative silence on matters of religion, a silence that transformed philosophical questions about sources of religious knowledge into contentious political questions about the social and cultural limits of acceptable religious expression. The remaining three chapters cover the years from 1810 to 1840 and explain how and why Americans promoted and enforced notions of religious truth by engaging civil society. Due to the public and published nature of the infidel controversies studied during this period, many of the events discussed in An Age of Infidels took place in northern towns and cities where population densities were higher and print networks more developed. Moreover, the forms of Christianity that deists most opposed were often those that were strongest in the North, such as institutional moral reform. Despite the local focus of many infidel controversies, those involved on all sides often attached national importance to the issues at stake. One additional caveat is necessary about the scope of An Age of Infidels. I have decided not to address early national religious controversies surrounding Catholicism or Mormonism in any sustained way. There is already a voluminous literature on these relatively well-known subjects. Far less has been written on the subject of infidel controversies. However, the early republic’s infidel controversies do reveal larger themes relevant to both. Two of the era’s most infamous acts of religious violence suggest why. In August 1834, two days of anti-Catholic rioting in Boston resulted in a Protestant mob burning down the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. A decade later and farther west, a mob in Carthage, Illinois, pulled Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, from his jail cell and murdered him. Part of the animus toward Smith stemmed from fears about his political ambitions and

Introduction

17

the perceived public power of Mormonism from its base in Nauvoo, Illinois. The shift from content to context as source of early national religious controversy is evident in both of these events. Participants in the Charlestown and Carthage events did not use violence to change the minds of individual believers. In both instances intolerance for unpopular religious opinions generated action against the highly public, physical manifestations of these opinions. By the 1830s, America’s infidel controversies had already demonstrated the efficacy of, and need for, such reactions.26 Religious controversy, as a constellation of ideas and practices, allowed Americans to maintain the public authority of religious belief within early national civic life. Important changes in the relationship between religion and the public sphere in the early United States thus did not occur only or even largely through legislation or in the courts. Rather, these changes occurred in the less rarefied realm of popular politics and civil society. Although church and state were legally separated by 1840, religion and politics were recombined in powerful and lasting ways.

Chapter 1

Boundaries

Writing constitutions and creating governments were among the most important political acts of independence undertaken by citizens in the new United States. Ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 wrought fundamental changes to the scope and power of the country’s federal government, and by the early 1790s, many states had revised or replaced their original constitutions as well. These developments at both the national and state levels had profound implications for the relationship between religious belief and public life in the new nation. Perhaps most significantly, Virginia’s 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom completely disestablished religion and prohibited all religious tests for political office. Theoretically, Virginians of any religious opinion or of none at all could hold political power in the state. The federal Constitution applied similar principles to the national government, through both the First Amendment and Article VI, which banned religious tests for public office. In the decades following independence, constitutional developments trended toward greater religious liberty. Contemporary reactions to this trend were not universally positive. Writing in 1786, Philadelphian John Swanwick warned local clergy that government in Virginia could now be controlled and “administered by men professedly atheists, Mahometans, or of any creed, however unfriendly to liberty or the morals of a free country.” This held true for the national government as well. During North Carolina’s ratification convention, delegate Henry Abbot, an itinerant Baptist minister, noted that opponents of Article VI “supposed that if there be no religious test required, pagans, deists, and Mahometans might obtain office among us, and that the senators and representatives might all be pagans.” Congregationalist Ezra Stiles feared that citizens of the United States may have actually preferred the outcomes

Boundaries

19

described by observers such as Swanwick and Abbott. According to Stiles, growing popular sentiment held that “deists, and men of indifferentism to all religion are the most suitable persons for civil office.” Thus to these observers both in and out of government, legal expansions of religious liberty might actually diminish Christianity’s political power. This view suggested that new religious liberties could not be considered without defining the boundaries of acceptable religious belief for those who governed, and ultimately for the governed themselves. As a result, in the first decades of the nation’s history, traditionally philosophical questions about the nature of religious knowledge were transformed into contentious political questions about the social and cultural limits of tolerable religious expression.1 In this period Americans expressed and debated concerns about Christianity’s vitality in response to revolutionary political theory that emphasized private conscience and the authority of individual common sense. With private belief sanctified in the new constitutions, public religious expressions became problematic in entirely new ways. Constitutional debates suggested that political independence and republican self-government enhanced the need for nonstate mechanisms to limit religious tolerance. Ordinary Americans defined and enforced these limits as they interacted with those who believed differently, most obviously during conflicts between deists and their opponents. Participants in these conflicts developed a powerful political grammar for debating the practical limits of religious liberty in the new nation.2 Throughout the late eighteenth century, Americans of various beliefs gradually rejected religious toleration in favor of religious liberty as the ideal relationship between belief and public life. Toleration was generally understood throughout the early modern world as a legal indulgence for dissenting beliefs. As state policy, governments exempted certain believers from punishments designed for those who differed from the official church. The state could revoke this exemption at will. Moreover, religious toleration often pertained only to private religious expressions; public religious expressions could still be prohibited under policies of toleration. Religious liberty entailed broad natural rights, both to freedom of conscience and to public expression, the free exercise of belief.3 The shift in American society from toleration to religious liberty accelerated following the Revolution. Constitutional developments emphasize the speed and nature of this change. Nearly every state constitution written

20

Chapter 1

between 1776 and 1800 initially expanded religious liberty or did so during subsequent constitutional revisions. By 1800, every state south of New England ended single-church establishments, occasionally after experiments with multiple establishments. In New England, however, multiple establishments prevailed into the nineteenth century. Many states initially limited religious liberty to Christians, and often specifically Protestants. Catholics and non-Christians such as Jews suffered civil debilitations for their beliefs, which state governments lessened by 1800. State governments increasingly offered citizens the free exercise of religion. Eventually during this period, states largely abolished religious tests for office. Virginia’s Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, adopted in 1786, exemplifies many of the changes toward greater religious liberty occurring in the states during the postrevolutionary era. Provisions in the U.S. Constitution inaugurated similar changes at the national level. Article VI of the Constitution prohibited religious tests for federal office. The Constitution’s First Amendment recognized free exercise of religion while establishing that the federal government would not interfere with conscience or pass laws respecting any religious matter. Federal constitutional provisions on religion strongly influenced developments in the states. As the eighteenth century closed, religious liberty increasingly became a feature of American constitutional law, especially for the nation’s Protestants.4 As governments in the United States expanded religious liberty, the implications of these changes came under scrutiny. From these debates emerged counter concerns about the level of tolerance Americans should exhibit for the diverse religious opinions around them. Tolerance, as articulated in this context, was distinguishable from toleration as it was not a state policy but rather concerned social practices and cultural sentiments. If religious liberty was enshrined in law, it prompted some Americans to rethink their commitments to religious tolerance. This tension was first evident in debates over religious tests for public office. These occurred in regard to provisions in various state constitutions, but also in response to the absence of a religious test in the U.S. Constitution.5 Pennsylvania’s constitutional history exemplifies the uneasy relationship between legal expansions of religious liberty and popular understandings of religious tolerance. Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution is often touted for creating the most radically democratic frame of government to emerge during the American Revolution. The constitution’s provisions included an annually elected, unicameral legislature; an expansion of representation and

Boundaries

21

the franchise; a twelve-member council rather than a single executive; and a provision stipulating that all laws passed by the legislature had to appear in print and receive popular approval before enactment. A religious oath required members of the unicameral assembly to declare a belief “in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked.” The oath continued, “And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration.”6 The 1776 constitution reflected the political commitments and ideas of individuals fairly new to Pennsylvania politics. When the Quakerdominated assembly refused to act on independence from England, political radicals asserted their influence in the Committee of Inspection and Observation, the organization responsible for revolutionary activity in Philadelphia. The committee orchestrated the creation of a provincial conference to draft a new state constitution. The conference leadership included some of Philadelphia’s most democratic political writers along with a smattering of sympathetic elites including Timothy Matlack, a moderately successful merchant; Thomas Young, a deist physician; James Cannon, a mathematics professor at the College of Philadelphia; and Thomas Paine, whose popularity soared after authoring Common Sense. Benjamin Rush also participated in the convention. Benjamin Franklin served as its president. A combination of delegates from western Pennsylvania and Philadelphia successfully introduced the religious oath against the opposition of convention leaders such as Cannon and Young. The latter were concerned that this oath imposed sectarian principles on Pennsylvania’s new government.7 Delegates vigorously disagreed over the details of Pennsylvania’s religious oath, but people outside the government debated its full implications in autumn 1776. After the constitution was introduced to Pennsylvanians, its religious oath figured prominently at a public meeting in Philadelphia and in subsequent newspaper polemics. Protagonists in these exchanges shared many common views. Proponents and opponents of the oath rejected stateestablished churches. Moreover, both sides maintained that Pennsylvania’s religious oath ultimately raised issues inseparable from the larger Revolution unfolding around them. Pennsylvania’s independence, indeed the independence of the new United States, seemed at stake. Although beginning with shared principles and reaching similar conclusions, those who debated Pennsylvania’s religious oath in 1776 drew from fundamentally different understandings about the relationship between religion and public life. In October 1776, local lawyers and other Philadelphia elites organized

22

Chapter 1

a public meeting to address Pennsylvania’s new constitution. Wealthy merchant John Bayard presided. These notable Philadelphians speculated aloud that Christianity might become a casualty of their new state government. Participants unanimously condemned the religious oath because the “Christian religion is not treated with proper respect.” At issue was the absence of any reference to the divinity of Jesus Christ. Moreover, those in government had to acknowledge a God rather than profess belief in the Christian God. Bayard argued that Pennsylvania’s constitution did not recognize Christianity’s central theological tenets and that the state’s elected officials were not required to do so either. “What a fine back door was here left open for heathen men and Mahometans to slip into the house, and blow up the christian religion,” warned those attendees who supported the meeting’s organizers. Critics of the meeting argued that the actions of Bayard and others posed a greater threat to Pennsylvania than the oath itself. They impugned the meeting’s leadership for manipulating conventions of social deference and local authority, arguing that it “was very unbecoming your gentry to collect a crowd in an hasty manner, and by a few flourishing speeches to raise a tumult among plain people, on whom they had influence.” The meeting’s leadership rang the tocsin of irreligion to promote their own interests, as “ill designing men” often did “to mislead the honest part of society.” The meeting was veritably seditious; it threatened to divide the Philadelphia Associators, which would likely “give up the cause to the tories.” Competing positions announced at the October 1776 public meeting were amplified and expanded in the following weeks.8 Defenders of the new constitution and its relatively general religious oath praised the moderation and pragmatism that produced both. One apologist celebrated Pennsylvania’s constitution as an expression of “true Protestantism.” The oath acknowledged a single God who created the universe and who implemented a system of eternal rewards and punishments, and it recognized that both the Old and New Testaments were divinely inspired. Pennsylvania’s constitution rested on an exclusively Christian foundation, albeit in a strictly Protestant sense, which ensured that government officials affirmed the “basis and foundation of our holy religion, laid by our great reformers from Popery.” Pennsylvania’s convention thus not only avoided the corruptions of Catholicism but also eliminated sources of religious conflict that had recently plagued Protestant countries such as England.9 The convention’s prudence was especially evident if Pennsylvania’s religious oath was read in light of Europe’s history of religious violence.

Boundaries

23

Historical perspective explained why those who authored the oath excluded an explicit statement about God’s triune nature. The oath’s defenders argued that belief in the Trinity fell into the category of personal opinion rather than fundamental truth, a distinction reflected by the doctrine’s contentious place in Christian history. The triune conception of God arose during a specific political and intellectual moment in the early history of Christianity. As a result, “the Christian world was early deluged in blood contending about this mystery.” More recently, faith in the Trinity was not elevated above all other Christian doctrines as the one religious proclamation necessary for the benefits of civil and political life because it had inherent theological value, but because of its role in the politics of religious dissent over the previous century. From the Glorious Revolution through the 1770s, contests between dissenters and state churches in England, Scotland, and Ireland were fueled in part by debates over the meaning and interpretation of the triune God. Whereas the Apostle Paul declared that Christ’s resurrection was the paramount doctrine in Christianity, efforts by the English government to bolster the state church granted artificial political legitimacy to the doctrine of Christ’s divinity. As one polemicist noted, “[T]he doctrine of the Trinity had been drawn into eager dispute in the latter part of last century, and because of this, it was, as usual, made a touchstone of orthodoxy.”10 This political history of the Trinity ratified the judgment of those Pennsylvania politicians who wrote and supported the oath. Convention members “knew this article had so divided the Christian world” and “acted wisely in leaving every man to think for himself in these high and difficult points, without making their beliefs of this doctrine a religious test for holding offices in the government.” Because the Trinity was a concept so deeply influenced by the vagaries of history and politics, Pennsylvania, indeed any government, would suffer dire consequences if “comments and expositions of Scripture, made by fallible men” determined whether or not an individual enjoyed “rights in civil society.” Defending orthodoxy for political gain undermined the fragile revolutionary government. Securing independence thus required that the state tread cautiously when incorporating religious principles into its constitution. For defenders of Pennsylvania’s religious oath, the convention successfully reached this balance.11 Those opposed to the oath because it lacked specificity argued that the convention had overturned the state’s historical relationship to Christian teachings. One critic detected a conscious design by the constitution’s authors to purposefully remove the guidance and authority of Christianity

24

Chapter 1

from the foundations of the new government. State support for specific doctrinal opinions or sectarian perspectives was anathema to this writer, but no less harmful were efforts “to expel Christianity out of the State, or at least, to put it but on an even footing with Paganism.” Whereas Pennsylvania had long enjoyed a harmonious relationship between Christianity and civil authority, the new constitution gave state sanction to deism, enforced by a “deistic test” and promulgated by a “deistic Convention.” Deism had become Pennsylvania’s new religious establishment, opponents of the oath argued. One critic even equated Pennsylvania’s religious oath with another controversial example of apparent religious establishment central to America’s revolutionary grievances. Was Pennsylvania’s oath not, this writer asked rhetorically, “in fact a firmer establishment for Anti-christ, and all damnable errors, than the Quebec bill for Popery?”12 Pennsylvania’s independent future seemed at stake. Critics of the oath believed that the new constitution provided “no bar against professed Deists, Jews, Mahomedans, and other enemies of Christ” from holding political office. The oath suggested that Pennsylvania’s citizens accepted that Christianity was “unfriendly to civil society.” One writer warned of divine retribution if Pennsylvanians assented to a government not influenced by Christianity. God’s disfavor toward Pennsylvania would certainly benefit the state’s enemies, thus jeopardizing Pennsylvania’s revolutionary struggles. The oath also posed geopolitical risks to Pennsylvania. The Bible provided the moral authority for legal testimony, oaths, and the right of governments to govern; a state’s very legitimacy thus rested on its affirmation of specific Christian beliefs. Without such affirmation, Pennsylvania’s political alliances with neighboring Christian states in North America would attenuate, thus imperiling the state’s sovereignty in a world dominated by foreign Christian nations. “If blasphemers of Christ and the holy blessed Trinity, despisers of Revelation and the holy bible, may be Legislators, Judges, Counsellors and Presidents in Pennsylvania, Wo unto the city! Wo unto the land,” lamented one observer. Ultimately, critics of the oath called for a new convention to rectify the constitution’s deficiencies.13 Debates over Pennsylvania’s religious test subsided in autumn 1776 as broader revolutionary demands gained importance. Yet within a decade, Americans in Pennsylvania and beyond were presented with a federal constitution that renewed questions about the necessity of religious tests for public office. Article VI, section 3 of the Constitution prohibited all religious

Boundaries

25

tests for public office in the federal government. This provision was far more tolerant than what existed in many states before 1788 or elsewhere in the Christian world. It also exceeded widely accepted views that those who held the public trust should believe as the majority of the citizenry did, which meant Protestantism in the United States during the 1780s. Still, article VI, section 3 engendered little opposition at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Delegates from North Carolina opposed it, and their colleagues from Connecticut and Maryland divided over the issue. Delegates from the remaining states supported the article. Marylander Luther Martin commented on the lack of debate over article VI at the federal convention when he quipped that “there were some members so unfashionable as to think that a belief of the existence of a Deity, and of a state of future rewards and punishments, would be some security for the good conduct of our rulers, and that, in a Christian country, it would be at least decent to hold out some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity or paganism.” During state ratification debates, delegates who perceived moral and religious deficiencies in the federal Constitution often reiterated Martin’s view.14 Reaction to article VI was strong in certain state ratification conventions. In the North Carolina convention, delegate Charles Johnston agreed with Henry Abbot’s prediction that future congresses may be dominated by “Jews, Mahometans, pagans, &c.” According to Johnston, this outcome was lamentable but unavoidable according to the principles of fair political representation if indeed a majority of the country’s population were not Christian. Abbot’s and Johnston’s predictions left James Iredell unmoved. Iredell, an attorney and future Supreme Court justice, argued that religious oaths, either for political office or to testify in court, did not bind only Christians. Iredell held that any individual regardless of sectarian affiliation who believed in a future state of rewards and punishments and a “Supreme Being” could take an oath that was true to his or her conscience while still meeting the qualifications of law and government. To stress his point, Iredell cited an example from earlier in the eighteenth century in which an East Indian had suit in a British chancery court, and “though he was a heathen . . . his answer upon oath to a bill filed against him was absolutely necessary. Not believing either in the Old or New Testament, he could not be sworn in the accustomed manner, but was sworn according to the form of the Gentoo [Hindu] religion, which he professed, by touching the foot of a

26

Chapter 1

priest.” Iredell delineated a legal context and suitable set of procedures in which the boundary of acceptable opinion was broad enough to accommodate religious beliefs often considered beyond the pale.15 Article VI also divided delegates at the Massachusetts ratifying convention in January 1788. Delegates opposed to religious tests welcomed the article for its potential to keep divisive debates over Christian theology and, more broadly, the relative moral truth of Christianity over other religious beliefs, out of national politics. Unitarian minister David Schute argued that moral, upstanding people adhered to a range of religious opinions including “Papists” or “those who have no other guide, in the way to virtue and heaven, than the dictates of natural religion.” Theophilus Parsons, a Newburyport attorney, went further than Schute, arguing that religious tests for office were fundamentally useless because people who were not Christians, say “an atheist or pagan,” would have no qualms about lying. Even among Christians there was no clear agreement on theological tenets or the meaning of scripture. Instead, the only way of determining “the sincerity of a man’s religion is a good life.”16 Other delegates, however, argued that the Constitution would force the people of Massachusetts to abandon the historical legacy of their Puritan ancestors. Charles Jarvis warned that prohibiting religious tests was a “departure from the principles of our forefathers, who came here for the preservation of their religion.” Whereas New England social life had rested on the moral influence of overlapping civil and religious authority, article VI would undermine this relationship at the national level by admitting “deists, atheists, &c., into the general government.” Massachusetts delegates who supported this position did not suggest that their state would elect deists to office; instead they expressed a more generalized unease about the moral influence of a distant national government. These delegates feared replacing the moral authority of local governments with the moral uncertainty of a faraway and potentially awe-inspiring state. This argument rested heavily on assumptions about social deference. Massachusetts need not elect deists or atheists to prominent office in the federal government, yet the “people being apt to imitate the examples of the court, these principles would be disseminated, and, of course, a corruption of morals ensue.”17 Despite differences of time, place, and context, ratification debates regarding article VI and the earlier controversy surrounding Pennsylvania’s religious oath centered on similar opposing arguments. In this way, these events illuminate larger themes. Defenders of Pennsylvania’s constitution

Boundaries

27

and supporters of article VI emphasized the importance of religious opinions that virtually any Christian, or at least Protestant, could agree were true while avoiding those practices and teachings that might engender social discord. This was a distinction between the “fundamentals” of faith and those “circumstantial” practices and teachings that seemed less important. Theologians of multiple confessions in early modern Europe developed this distinction in calls for Christian unity following the religious violence caused by the Reformation. In colonial North America, this distinction served religious and secular writers, beginning in the 1750s, as they increasingly came to terms with and addressed their society’s religious pluralism. For proponents of Pennsylvania’s oath, this distinction allowed them to maintain a general Christian moral influence in state government without requiring religious establishments, indeed even allowing expanded religious liberties. Nonetheless, this did not prevent them from securing Pennsylvania’s present and future independence by denigrating opinions that seemed threatening or undesirable. In this instance, religious intolerance was a source of revolutionary unity. Defenders of article VI at the Massachusetts convention echoed similar views, but took them even further. What mattered most in choosing candidates for public office, observers such as Theophilus Parsons argued, were commonsense judgments about a candidate’s morality not mandated professions of religious belief.18 Such positions defined dominant Federalist opinions on religion and public life in 1788. Benjamin Rush witnessed this position in action during a 1788 July Fourth parade in Philadelphia commemorating independence and celebrating Virginia ratification. Seventeen clerics of differing faiths participated in the procession, and at one point two Christian ministers and a rabbi walked arm in arm. Rush exclaimed optimistically, “There could not have been a more happy emblem contrived, which opens all its power and offices alike, not only to every sect of christians, but to worthy men of every religion.”19 Strong evidence suggests that Anti-Federalists who criticized the U.S. Constitution for its lack of a religious test subscribed to limited notions of religious tolerance first advanced by critics of Pennsylvania’s weak religious oath. At issue were questions about the political necessity of defining clear distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable religious belief. A range of legal, political, or cultural measures could determine this distinction, but its purpose was to ensure that the sphere of religious tolerance and free inquiry was ultimately finite. It set the limit beyond which the common good would

28

Chapter 1

disintegrate into social discord. Advocates for a circumscribed boundary of acceptable religious opinion cited a similar rogues’ gallery of religious outsiders. Included among the undesirable religious opinions were deism, paganism, atheism, popery, “eastern religions,” Judaism, and Mahometism, the eighteenth-century term for Islam. Often critics grouped these labels together under the umbrella term “infidelity” when highlighting the moral deficiencies of a specific constitution. When critics doubted a constitution’s ability to organize society in ways that provided the necessary religious and moral support for the common good, they often used this menagerie of religious outsiders to articulate a set of practical or vernacular limits to legally established religious freedoms.20 This approach is evident in the writings of Anti-Federalists who objected to article VI. Religious tolerance was not limitless according to William Petrikin, an Anti-Federalist writer from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who supported religious tests to ensure the virtue of political leaders. Petrikin claimed that a majority of those at the convention were deists, so they “dexterously provided for the removal of every thing that hath ever operated as a restraint upon government in any place or age of the world.” Specifically, he accused the Constitutional Convention of drafting an intentionally deist document in order to weaken Christianity, but most importantly Protestantism, which had historically provided the people with a moral check on government power. “Federal Farmer,” likely New York’s Melancton Smith, disdainfully wrote that Christians could hold office in the United States, but so could “Pagans, Mahometans, or Jews.”21 Such lists of religious outsiders were ubiquitous to early modern polemics, but they held unique political valence in the revolutionary United States. As recently as 1753, Parliament issued an act enabling Jewish naturalization, called the “Jew Bill” by its detractors. Opposition polemics warned English readers that the bill threatened to allow a range of “prohibited sects,” including deists, to assume political power. These writers believed that the bill undermined England’s status as a Protestant nation. An opponent of the Pennsylvania constitution warned much the same when he exclaimed that “Deists, Jews, Mahometans, and Indians, by putting their own gloss or equivocation on the foregoing ‘acknowledgement’ may hold the first offices of profit and trust in our free and blessed state.” Similarities between the polemic rhetoric of midcentury England and Revolutionary Pennsylvania only go so far. Context and circumstance informed how writers understood the significance of each pejorative label. In the Pennsylvania

Boundaries

29

example, non-Christianity was the most obvious similarity among deists, Jews, presumably Indians, and Muslims. This fact alone made them suspect. Especially in a political culture where a range of civil, social, economic, and political rights and obligations rested on oaths, trust, and good morals. The rationale behind this view was that only individuals who believed in eternal punishments administered according to the judgment of a Christian God could meet citizenship’s high demands. Whether writing from Pennsylvania or anywhere else in the nation, deists, of all the undesirable outsiders, seemingly posed the most acute threat to social order after 1776.22 This was so for several reasons. Demographics alone suggested that the relatively small population of American Jews and a nonexistent population of free Muslims would produce few or no national political candidates. Moreover, religious tests in various states prevented all believers but Christians, often Protestants, from holding local public office. However, religious tests were increasingly removed from state law following the prohibition of similar tests at the federal level. This legal change combined with expanding religious liberty for Jews and even Catholics in the late eighteenth century suggests that associations of infidelity with Judaism and Catholicism were increasingly tenuous. The history of violence between Euro-Americans and Indians in western regions and references to their “savage” nature in revolutionary documents such as the Declaration of Independence certainly made Native Americans unlikely if not impossible candidates. The threat of elected Indians was purely polemic hyperbole. This left only deists, and of the religious groups listed as potential legislators, they seemed most likely to be elected. Fears of infidelity were thus essentially attacks on deism.23 Within constitutional discourse, infidelity meant seditious disbelief. Writers who labeled infidelity seditious pursued their commitments to limited tolerance within a political order shaped by expanding religious liberties. Undesirable religious opinions were less open to challenge on theological or intellectual grounds in the new United States, but individuals who held such opinions could be denied the privileges of full civil membership if their opinions seemingly had seditious implications. Writers could deny infidels civil power while upholding their belief in religious liberty. This understanding of infidelity was protean enough for people to invoke it at different times and in significantly different places. Delegates to the North Carolina ratification convention deployed it even though their state had taken some of the earliest legal steps to expand religious liberty. North Carolina’s religious establishment was eliminated without controversy in

30

Chapter 1

1776. On the contrary, Massachusetts delegates stoked similar fears of infidelity even though the religious establishment was entrenched enough in their state to persist until 1833. Pennsylvania ratified the federal constitution with no serious debate over article VI. Moreover, in 1790 Pennsylvanians adopted a new state constitution that included a more generic religious test than the one it replaced, and it also expanded religious freedoms.24 References to a broadly defined infidelity within formal and popular constitutional debates highlight contemporary relationships between distinct understandings of religious tolerance, a democratizing political culture, and changes to state power. Critics who cited the possibility of undesirable religious outsiders entering politics opposed non-Christians becoming full participants in civil society. In places such as Pennsylvania, democratic constitutional provisions made its religious oath especially controversial. Opponents feared that the 1776 constitution granted ordinary Pennsylvanians new political power while also eliminating safeguards that existed under Pennsylvania’s colonial charter to prevent non-Christians from serving in the government. A disbelieving citizenry was tolerable, but a constitutional framework that provided disbelievers a political conduit through which personal opinions could be translated into electoral decisions was altogether unacceptable. According to the constitution’s detractors, religious tolerance in Pennsylvania accommodated private unbelief, but it should not grant it civil status. The federal constitution’s prohibition on religious tests for public office raised the possibility that the nation as a whole needed informal limits on acceptable religious expression. This perspective explains the concern over infidelity in constitutional debates from the 1770s through the 1780s. These concerns reflected underlying anxieties about the potential power of new governments and the character of those who governed. Ultimately, however, these debates addressed infidelity as an abstract political category and infidels as a potential rather than an actual presence in American life. The usage of infidelity as an idiom for political discussion did not end with the adoption of the U.S. Constitution or with the revision of state constitutions toward greater religious liberty. Moreover, fears of infidelity were exacerbated when actual deists publicly denied Christianity. Speculative concerns raised in constitutional deliberations during the 1770s and the 1780s were reiterated and expanded in the early 1790s during local controversies caused by the actions of self-avowed deists. Arguments that had once provided theoretical boundaries of acceptable religious expression thus underwrote the construction of tangible limits

Boundaries

31

to religious expression in everyday life. When these conflicts occurred, protagonists often argued their position in reference to constitutional principles or provisions, which they interpreted and applied to fit their ends. Popular “constitutionalism” of this sort influenced not only ideas of tolerance but also practices of tolerance in daily life. This occurred in various places throughout the United States, including Philadelphia. Here, disputes over the limits of tolerance occurred within the context of federal constitutional changes, and with heightened political significance since Philadelphia was the national capital during the 1790s.25 For a few weeks in early 1792, heady disputes over the truth of Christianity moved into Philadelphia’s streets and press. When deist pamphleteer and orator Elihu Palmer placed a notice in the National Gazette for a speech “against the divinity of Jesus Christ” that he intended to deliver in Philadelphia on a Sunday morning, he incited a print war and a mob. Philadelphian John Fitch anticipated this reaction to Palmer, recording in the pages of his autobiography that he believed Palmer’s actions were “very imprudent.” Fitch knew of what he spoke; he was also a deist and an active member in the Universal Society, a small deist debate club he helped establish in 1790. During the society’s two-year existence it had never aroused popular opposition on the streets or in the press. Unlike Palmer, Fitch and the members of the Universal Society understood where and how to express provocative religious opinions without attracting community ire.26 Different reactions to Palmer and Fitch elucidate an informal boundary between acceptable and unacceptable religious expression in early national Philadelphia. This line was not a legal one, but rather a cultural construct that reflected local religious sensibilities maintained through local strategies for policing public order. Although the boundary of acceptability was fluid, it influenced where and how individuals expressed controversial religious opinions. It was discernible in the geography of the city and in the content of local print culture. Members of the Universal Society expressed their deism in the semiprivate realm of a debate club, where radical ideas and conversation would be heard by and shared with only willing participants. As a result, Fitch’s society was accommodated spatially in the city, and its presence was tolerated within civil society. On the contrary, Palmer’s proposed oration was controversial because he announced it in a local newspaper, publicizing deism in a way that the Universal Society never did. Philadelphians therefore challenged his presence in the city and in the local public

32

Chapter 1

sphere by deploying social and political mechanisms that ordered urban life in the 1790s. The 1792 Palmer controversy reveals the daily exchanges that solidified and enforced Philadelphia’s boundary of acceptable religious expression.27 Early national Philadelphia seemed a likely site for arguments over religious knowledge, but an ostensibly unlikely place for these arguments to generate popular opposition to unorthodox belief. In the 1790s, local luminaries mingled with French visitors, each group admiring Philadelphia’s climate of religious freedom and its progressive social and intellectual institutions. The city was home to the American Philosophical Society, and between 1790 and 1800 it was the republic’s capital. Even the orderly grid of city streets suggested enlightened rationalism to Philadelphia’s visitors. The existence of the Universal Society and Palmer’s initial expectation that Philadelphia would offer “a more extensive field for the display of his talents” complemented this perception of early national Philadelphia.28 Concern about the possibility of religious violence and strife always lurked beneath proclamations of religious tolerance. Thus Philadelphia in the 1790s was also characterized by community imperatives to police the sites where controversial religious opinions could be expressed, shared, and propagated. The order and stability of Philadelphia’s enlightened urban culture depended on this discipline, which was an extension of practices and debates that first emerged in Pennsylvania politics during the 1770s. The experiences of Fitch and Palmer reveal that Philadelphia was a place with commonly understood and agreed-upon spaces to express disbelief in Christianity. This shared understanding shaped how religious tolerance was actually practiced. In a city such as Philadelphia, religious ideas could be expressed in myriad ways, from fleeting personal exchanges on the street to published philosophical treatises. The cumulative result of these discussions, however, was a concept of religious tolerance that was a social and political construct rather than merely a normative concept or a legal doctrine. Polemicists and rioters in 1792 all subscribed to a resonant political fiction that American civil society had only a finite capacity for dealing with conflicting religious opinions. Although adoption of the federal Constitution advanced an intellectual shift toward understanding religion as a matter of opinion and a legal shift toward freedom of expression, this process moved only haltingly. As a result, religious tolerance persisted in practice even though guarantees in the new Bill of Rights and the federal Constitution encouraged the acceptance of more expansive ideas of religious freedom.

Boundaries

33

During the Palmer controversy, early national Philadelphians defined the religious standards of their community by attempting to limit religious difference. They did so using newspaper debate and crowd action as opposed to legal pronouncements or abstract philosophical treatises. For their part, Palmer and Fitch were not unabashed advocates of religious liberty or broad tolerance. They were wary of sectarian appeals in public life, so they argued that religious ideas grounded on anything beyond reason were sure to result in social strife. Palmer and Fitch thus advanced notions of tolerance in which deism determined the ideal boundary of acceptable religious opinion; revealed religion transgressed this boundary.29 John Fitch came to his definition of religious tolerance and the public good within postrevolutionary Philadelphia’s rationalist climate. Born in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1743, Fitch found his way to Pennsylvania after stints as a clock maker, a silversmith, and a land surveyor and speculator. There he began work on a steam engine in 1785. Fitch developed his idea for a deist society while acquainted with Henry Voight, his business partner and a self-professed deist. In his autobiography, Fitch recorded details about the origins and history of the Universal Society. Fitch was sensitive to context and audience when he discussed his deist opinions. He relayed moments of mild drunkenness in which he and Voight shared their religious views with the many visitors to Fitch’s steamboat. Fitch acknowledged the imprudence of sharing unpopular beliefs but also stated that he and Voight quickly learned “that large bodies of people were of our belieff altho too delicate to confess it.” His presumption that deism had popular, if often unstated, appeal supported his belief that expressions of religious opinion were often circumscribed by social and political considerations. Fitch was interested in forming a deist society where “all questions should be freely discoursed even to the denial of the divinity of Moses Jesus Christ or Mahomet.” Yet, he also recognized that popular aversion to religious strife and the persistence of informal social limitations on the expression of deism posed a practical challenge to his endeavor. Fitch concluded that critical investigations of religion should be grounded in the normative foundations of debate-club sociability.30 Fitch’s proposal, outlined in his autobiography, sought to temper disruptive forces of religious sectarianism by offering a model of sociability that did not rely upon revealed religion and professions of faith as its primary adhesives. Instead, Fitch wanted his society to instill moral obligation in its members through mutual respect. This society would enforce moral

34

Chapter 1

discipline by publicly expelling members who offended other members or even nonmembers. Fitch argued that his secularized notions of honor and shame would influence behavior more effectively “than all the Tormants of Damnation preached by the ablest divines.” Fitch desired to prove that his society could remain amicable and its members moral while still rejecting divinely ordained forms of eternal punishment. He hoped to gather in his association “a large body of people in whome Religion or rather Christian Creeds had no weight to induce them to behave as good Citizens.”31 When the time came to organize the society, Fitch recruited Voight, who readily approved of the ambitious plan. Within days they persuaded others to join. Voight was the chief coiner at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, which explains in part why Isaac Hough, a mint clerk, became an early member of the society. An engraver named Robert Scott also joined, as did a Mr. Parrish. The society nominated the latter, along with Voight, to draft its constitution. Fitch claimed that the society had upward of forty members by the winter of 1790. Based on available membership information, the Universal Society largely attracted artisans and mechanics, the same sort of people who gravitated toward Philadelphia’s Universalist Christian churches.32 Fitch envisioned an organization, once established, that was more than a mere “Deistical Society,” but rather a forum for open public discussion between deists and Christians. Fitch wanted deists and Christians to distinguish themselves during meetings by wearing the society seal attached to their clothing with a blue or a red ribbon, indicating one’s belief in either deism or Christianity. Fitch’s attention to the implications of adorning a society seal suggests his hope to channel what were historically socially disruptive distinctions between infidelity and sectarianism into literal badges of identity. Members would wear or remove them within a realm of sociability and free inquiry without being held to categorical professions of faith. Fitch had lofty goals for his proposed society; it was established “for the benefit of mankind and support of Civil Government,” not just in the United States but also internationally. He ultimately argued for a cosmopolitan sensibility as an outgrowth of deistic free inquiry. The Universal Society marked a first step toward replacing an often local or sectarian religious identity with that of membership in a global community of free thinkers.33 The Universal Society operated according to values and principles common to the larger eighteenth-century world. Fitch’s desire to investigate religious subjects in search of essential truths without relying on divisive

Boundaries

35

speech or shattering social feelings was an aim already central to influential fraternal orders such as the Masons, a group that had expanded throughout the 1700s with a membership of political and economic elites. The society recorded its proceedings in ways that paralleled similar efforts during the French Revolution. They demarcated time and recorded history without references to the sacred or Christianity, but rather with a temporality suitable to the aims of the society and a broader sense of national identity. Fitch initiated this practice by arguing before the society that “as we denied Jesus Christ I thought it improper to date our writings after the Christian Era.” The members agreed, and from that point forward their transactions were dated from the “1st year of the Universal Society and of the Independence of America fifteen.” The society’s decision to jettison the Christian calendar emphasized its commitment to free inquiry and its utopian aspirations. This commitment was evident also in the questions submitted for debate. They covered a wide range of topics, from the appropriateness of polygamy, capital punishment, and dueling to questions about physics and meteorology. The society also broached questions about central tenets of Christianity. William Goodfellow, a watchmaker, asked whether belief in an afterlife was conducive to human happiness. Mathew Burch, a cabinetmaker, posed the question, “Are the Prayors of finite Creatures of any avail with Deity?”34 Ultimately the Universal Society did not fulfill Fitch’s ambitious hopes. It was a semiactive debate club with a relatively small following. Still its existence offers an illuminating counterpoint to the reaction engendered by Palmer’s proposed oration. Although members of the Universal Society held religious opinions wholly aligned with Palmer’s, they expressed them in a private setting that did not invoke concerns about the limits of religious tolerance. The Universal Society had an undisturbed existence even though its members were avowed deists participating in regular meetings at locations outside its various members’ homes. The Universal Society likely had a public profile. Neighborhood residents and local officials were certainly aware of it. Yet in its organization and in Fitch’s founding principles, the society did not challenge the “pretenses” of secrecy and private religious belief that allowed communities to permit fairly open expressions of religious difference and still maintain the semblance of a coherent religious identity. In the case of early national Philadelphia, deism could be tolerated if all interested parties agreed that it must only be expressed in contexts removed from arenas of public power. The Philadelphia to which Palmer arrived in 1792 was one

36

Chapter 1

where a strong intellectual bent toward Enlightenment sympathies persisted amid the presence of cultural practices that patterned how communities accommodated religious difference within civil society.35 Palmer’s penchant for publicly deriding Christianity upset local notions of piety even before he arrived in Philadelphia. Palmer was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1763 where he spent his first twenty-one years on his father’s farm. He graduated from Dartmouth College an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1787. By the early 1790s, Palmer had jettisoned his fairly heterodox Christian faith for an unabashed adherence to deism. Palmer’s path to public infamy in Philadelphia—by way of western Massachusetts, Long Island, and Augusta, Georgia—was dotted with several small rows over what New York printer and Palmer admirer John Fellows characterized as Palmer’s liberal sentiments: his disdain for “expatiating upon the horrid and awful condition of mankind in consequence of the lapse of Adam and his wife.” Palmer would never abandon his zeal to proselytize that he learned at Dartmouth, but his energies promoted ideas certain to cause chagrin among the college’s orthodox benefactors.36 Augusta provided Palmer with a community of fellow thinkers. A group of deistically inclined local elites welcomed Palmer to Augusta in 1790. Palmer remained in the city for nearly a year. There he taught oratory to local youth at Richmond Academy and actively participated in the town’s public life. The academy’s corporate charter stipulated that the school’s trustees were also to function as Augusta’s town commissioners, devolving city governance into the hands of the academy administration. The quasigovernmental role of Richmond Academy suggests that Palmer’s “liberal” sentiments, which caused a stir in other communities, earned him the support of Augusta’s prominent citizens. Practices of religious tolerance that eventually prevailed in places such as Philadelphia worked very differently in Augusta. Palmer had access to the courthouse, probably gained through his elite patronage, where his frequent lectures “commenced upon the broad base of Deism.” The city seemed open to public discussion on subjects deemed unacceptable elsewhere.37 According to Fellows, Palmer first openly embraced deism while in Augusta. Palmer’s private correspondence from Augusta recorded his intellectual transformation. In a letter to Congregational minister Jedidiah Morse of Charlestown, Massachusetts, Palmer confessed that he “openly avowed the universal and Socinian doctrines. I believe them both & think I can maintain them by conclusive arguments.” By embracing “universal and

Boundaries

37

Socinian doctrines,” Palmer acknowledged that he did not believe in Christian notions of original sin, eternal damnation, or the Christian Trinity. He also questioned the power of prayer to facilitate humanity’s relationship with God. “Tell a man that he shall be punished according to his crimes; or, if he be not elected that he shall be damned to all eternity, let him do what he will, which of these has the greatest tendency to good order in society?” Palmer asked Morse. For Palmer the answer was evident: original sin and eternal damnation discouraged social order and community happiness. Palmer believed his ideas were popular and widespread. He boasted to Morse that “light & liberality are gaining ground rapidly, & it must be something more than the prayers of superstitious mortals that will stop the progress of information.”38 By early 1791 Palmer left Augusta for Philadelphia due to his wife’s poor health, and he refuted charges that he relocated because his religious opinions were unpopular. Palmer noted to Morse that his beliefs were completely aligned with local opinion, as “there are four universalists to one damnationist in the town of Augusta.” Once in Philadelphia, according to Fellows, Palmer became displeased “with preaching from pulpits, where the morose, vindictive, and uncharitable tenets of Calvin were generally inculcated, and expected by the hearers.” Whereas Palmer was inclined toward pulpit messages imbued with conceptions of a benevolent and rational deity, Fellows surmised that “it is probable also, that he failed to give satisfaction to those pious souls, whose ears had become habituated to the awful denunciations of the Christian God.” This experience turned Palmer toward Philadelphia’s Universalists, who shared his conception of a benevolent God.39 Throughout early 1792, while associated with Philadelphia’s Universalists, Palmer delivered talks on religious subjects that combined polemic anticlericalism with deistic dismissals of Christian revelation. He did so, however, without provocative public statements that could raise questions about the political and social liabilities of his opinions. Palmer’s lectures did not violate an existing spatial or political boundary of acceptability. An announcement for Palmer’s orations in John Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser from early March sought the attention of “Friends of liberal sentiments,” but otherwise described Palmer as a “preacher” of universal salvation. Palmer delivered his lectures in the Long Room in Philadelphia’s Church Alley, where he leased space from a member of Fitch’s Universal Society. Fitch attended these gatherings and recorded his impression of the events in his autobiography. Palmer delivered his “sermon,” as Fitch described it,

38

Chapter 1

before a crowded room. He drew from biblical passages centering on moral instruction and emphasized the benevolence and justness of God. Palmer also denied the divinity of Christ throughout his lectures.40 The message of Palmer’s “sermons” remained consistent, but his turn to the press was new. Palmer’s decision to announce his oration in the newspaper precipitated his break with Philadelphia’s Universalists. By early 1792, Palmer already found the Universalists’ adherence to aspects of Christian theology and biblical interpretation stultifying. His discontent with Universalism in part contributed to his decision to criticize Christianity more broadly and to publicize his views. Palmer’s use of newspapers divided they city’s Universalists, prompting some to support him and others to banish him from their movement. Philadelphia’s Universalists accepted Palmer’s increasingly open deism throughout 1792 as long as he preached carefully; a published announcement in the local press struck a faction within the Universalist movement as anything but prudent.41 Fitch was also taken aback by Palmer’s poor judgment, in part because his lectures already drew large audiences, but also because Palmer’s new strategy disregarded the circumspection that allowed the Universal Society to meet undisturbed. Indeed, had information about Palmer’s lectures continued to circulate informally through private communications instead of appearing in the press, they may have garnered only passing interest and provoked only personal challenges, as had happened a few years prior in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Palmer had preached a similar message on a stateproclaimed thanksgiving day. He did not admonish his Sheffield audience to reflect upon their souls and repent their sins, but rather urged them to spend the day in festive pursuits of happiness. This blatant rejection of New England tradition and subtle denial of Christian theology drew the ire of just a single local attorney, expressed in a private meeting with Palmer, rather than a public outcry.42 Palmer’s published announcement in March 1792 for a proposed oration, which he in fact never delivered, elicited a reaction stronger than any caused by his previous lectures. This unprecedented response was likely influenced by context and place. First, Palmer’s announcement appeared in a newspaper associated with coalescing partisan alignments. Philip Freneau’s National Gazette carried the announcement, but it never appeared in John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States. This absence may be attributed to Fenno’s overriding editorial agenda to promote the image of an effective national government and to create a sense of national identity rather than

Boundaries

39

to advertise local happenings in Philadelphia. Yet during the same month that the Palmer controversy erupted, Fenno printed an excerpt from a letter cautioning Philadelphia editors against printing “infidel” texts because they caused “great injury” to “those superficial readers, who derive the greatest part of their knowledge, both in politics and religion” from the newspapers. When editors allowed critiques of Christianity into their pages, according to this anonymous critic, newspapers became tools for “cramming impiety down our throats” rather than reliable sources of political information. This writer identified another provocative aspect of Palmer’s public announcement. By placing a notice in a newspaper, Palmer increased the potential reach and legitimacy of his ideas. Last, location was important. Palmer publicly denied the divinity of Christ in the nation’s capital, well within the shadow of the new federal government still working to establish its own authority.43 Palmer’s announcement cut to the center of concerns about whether the new American state could meet its obligation to promote a common public good and prevent religious subversion, especially in light of open infidelity. Opposition to Palmer included a mob that gathered to prevent his speaking engagements, pressure on the proprietor of the Long Room to suspend Palmer’s lease, and a series of print reactions—in Philadelphia papers and a South Carolina journal. Palmer’s opponents reiterated concerns expressed in arguments against Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution, but more important, they used political strategies and arguments advocated by Pennsylvania’s Anti-Federalists in the late 1780s such as William Petrikin. Petrikin had advanced notions of democracy premised on localism and the power of juries, militias, and even crowd action as the most effective sources of popular political action. Such views held that extraconstitutional means were necessary for maintaining public standards of religious expression. In particular, views such as Petrikin’s represented a move toward enforcing religious uniformity on nontheological terms. Anti-Federalist arguments against deism, such as Petrikin’s, were, however, rural critiques written by western Pennsylvanians suspicious of distant political authority in Philadelphia and the supposed urbane impiety of the city’s political elite. Philadelphians of diverse political positions and beliefs—religious leaders, mechanics, and newspaper editors alike—unmoored arguments from their origins in rural Anti-Federalism and used them to address the peculiar problem of religious authority within their city.44 It is unclear who organized or led the crowds against Palmer. Fellows

40

Chapter 1

described a mob consisting of Universalists, upset by Palmer’s denial of Christ’s divinity and especially his advertisement in the National Gazette, which promised to bring unwanted attention and criticism to Philadelphia’s nascent Universalist movement. People from other unspecified denominations also joined the mob against Palmer. Fellows speculated that the group was “instigated probably by their priests,” but popular crowd action in the early republic was not simply directed from above. Instead, mobs often assembled in American cities during the 1790s to defend community mores against egregious violations by individuals or groups.45 The 1792 mob in Philadelphia typified other forms of urban mobbing in the postrevolutionary United States that were organized to regulate the community and to enforce uniformity of religious opinion. The dynamics of the Philadelphia mob were markedly similar to those of the “bawdyhouse riots” of 1793 and 1799, in which New Yorkers used mob action to police violations of local moral standards and to uphold local conceptions of the public good. Mob action to prevent Palmer from speaking also resembled actions taken by New Yorkers during the 1790s to harass Catholics and evangelical Protestants. Even though Palmer had delivered lectures in Philadelphia critical of Christianity since at least 1791, his turn to the press in March 1792 publicized his message in ways that offended local religious sensibilities. Philadelphians tolerated but did not condone Palmer until he sought to expand the reach of his deistic ideas. When Philadelphians could no longer countenance Palmer’s discourses, they policed their community through popular mobbing. Mob participants likely believed that Palmer’s intent to publicly deny a divine Christ required a community response because it insulted locally shared standards of religious belief and social order.46 Elite Philadelphians also exerted pressure. According to Fitch, Bishop William White was actively involved in the protest. White was minister of the Protestant Episcopal Christ Church, an ornate two-story Georgian structure with a steeple that dominated the Philadelphia skyline. Christ Church and the Long Room both occupied space on Church Alley. Fitch claims that the proprietor of the Long Room dissolved Palmer’s lease after White intimidated him. The two men likely knew each other, and it is also probable that White viewed himself as his neighbor’s superior. However, familiarity and social deference cannot fully explain why White may have pressured the Long Room’s proprietor. White was committed to restrained piety, and he was suspicious of religious opinions that he believed disrupted the common

Boundaries

41

good. White disdained popular evangelicalism, but open deism was equally problematic and warranted its own criticism.47 The exercise of community pressure to deny Palmer a forum reflected an underlying agreement among diverse Philadelphians about the need to prohibit controversial religious expression. Palmer’s troubles occurred while Philadelphia’s artisans were joining the ranks of an inchoate political opposition against Federalist economic policies. Although skeptical of a national Federalist establishment, some of Philadelphia’s artisans shared the religious concerns of local Federalists like White. Members of Fitch’s Universal Society and the audiences at Palmer’s lectures inhabited the same artisan social world as those who mobbed Palmer. Artisan Universalists were among both Palmer’s supporters and detractors. Universalism provided Philadelphia’s artisans with a form of Christianity that disavowed predestination and the harsher elements of Calvinism without asking them to reject their faith wholesale. Furthermore, aspects of Universalist belief appealed directly to artisan economic and cultural values. Universalists who opposed Palmer did so because his denunciation of Christ’s divinity undermined a religious viewpoint that justified their vocation and social status amid Philadelphia’s changing political and economic culture. The Palmer controversy thus occurred at a politically fluid moment in which elite Philadelphians such as White pursued a similar set of religious priorities as the city’s increasingly radical workers. Opposition to Palmer in 1792 resulted in an array of Philadelphians defending a broadly defined understanding of religious decorum that transcended emerging class, political, and sectarian differences.48 Whether restrained from below by a mob of neighborhood locals or from above by Bishop White, opposition to Palmer was not inconsistent with at least some understandings of good citizenship in early national Philadelphia. Writing in 1787, Robert Annan, a local Presbyterian minister, concluded a broad-ranging pamphlet on the theological and political dangers of Universalism by arguing that “the man of no religion is the most dangerous, and in fact is not a fit subject of moral government.” According to Annan, the growing appeal of Universalism, which denied Christian notions of future rewards and punishments, undermined civil society and government in the United States. A republican political order rested on oaths, trust, and a moral citizenry, all of which were meaningless without belief that God ultimately punished or rewarded humanity for its actions. From Annan’s perspective, “civil communities and their rulers, will therefore find, that to cultivate moral sentiments, or promote the practice of virtue, which

42

Chapter 1

is founded on the knowledge and fear of God, is essentially necessary to the preservation of government among them.”49 Universalism was especially problematic for Annan as he believed that “deistical principles prevail much already; and this doctrine is calculated to give them greater force and a wider range.” Anticipating the reaction to Palmer in 1792, Annan suggested that “in the case of crimes against the state the perpetrators must be punished.” Annan’s enumeration of Universalism’s political dangers and how best to prevent them justified popular opposition to Palmer. Annan himself, however, did not specifically advocate mobbing as a way to police civil society. The Universalists who joined the mob against Palmer fulfilled the expectations of a Philadelphian unlikely to support them. By doing so, Philadelphia’s Universalists also attempted to include their fairly heterodox beliefs within the fold of tolerable religious expression.50 In the end, crowd mobilization and direct personal coercion were essentially efforts to compel community order over free inquiry, to uphold popular notions of piety rather than formal protections of belief lodged in the federal Constitution. These were local solutions premised on the democratic authority of local public opinion. By enforcing a local understanding of acceptable expression, the mob, and potentially White, effectively altered where and how deism could be expressed. Their actions shaped the physical and intellectual geography of Philadelphia’s religious landscape. Following the mob’s activities, Palmer and his critics articulated very different understandings of religious freedom. Palmer derided crowd action regardless of its popularity when used to defend what he considered were superstitious beliefs and outmoded institutions. He asserted that the mob threatened the Long Room’s proprietor with “temporal injury” if he did not comply with their demands. Palmer further protested the closure of the Long Room in the pages of Benjamin Franklin Bache’s General Advertiser. “Notwithstanding the legal and nominal freedom that obtains in this country,” Palmer announced, “the law of opinion, and the internal spirit of persecution, bear hard upon the rights of conscience.” Palmer later accused his opponents of wielding coercion and the threat of violence to force consensus on religious questions rather reaching agreement through “fair argumentation.” If Christian theology, the “old fabric” Palmer added, could not withstand rational criticism, then “it ought to fall to the ground.” Palmer thus believed that legal protections for conscience extended beyond mere thoughts and opinions to include individual rights to openly investigate and

Boundaries

43

challenge religious claims. Still, his ideal of fair argumentation harbored its own coercive potential. Palmer was certain that open discussion would eradicate religious attachments based on faith and revelation by exposing their irrationality. This conclusion bolstered Palmer’s unease with sectarian plurality, revealing his own opposition to expansive concepts of religious tolerance. Palmer deviated from supporters of religious establishments by replacing a uniform religious confession with “reason,” thereby justifying religious intolerance in the language of commonsense appeals to a universal rationality.51 Unrestrained pursuits of “truth” were not without consequences, responded Palmer’s opponents. They maintained that constitutional protections of religious liberty must always be balanced with a concern for the implications of “fair argumentation.” One critic cautioned Palmer to “avoid saying much about the rights of conscience, because that phrase has been late pretty much used to signify no conscience at all.” This assertion rejected formal constitutional protections of belief as potential masks for private moral turpitude. A South Carolinian developed this theme in fuller detail. This writer was dismayed that the National Gazette carried Palmer’s announcement, yet he was especially troubled by the implications of Palmer’s pronouncement for the national government. A government was inseparable from the religious beliefs that provided its moral foundation. Papers that carried Palmer’s announcement “might as well have advertized that the Christian religion is but a fairy tale, and the members of congress are a set of fairies.” This writer further contended that Palmer’s public announcement severely damaged the image of Congress as a capable and wise legislative body by discrediting basic Christian principles, its only guide to improvement. Without that underpinning, Congress could no longer command public assent or exercise its authority and government would cease to exist. The South Carolina writer concluded that Palmer’s public announcement was an attack on Congress tantamount in ferocity to that which “the most inimical tribes of Indians would attack them, if the seat of government was fixed on the frontiers.” An allusion to frontier racial violence grounded the implications of religious heterodoxy in outcomes deeply resonant to the American imagination.52 Palmer’s anonymous critics had the final word on the events of 1792, partially because Palmer fled to western Pennsylvania. Combined, their arguments highlighted the problem of “infidelity” specific to the American political context. Federal provisions for religious freedom and open

44

Chapter 1

discussion would be for naught because denials of Christianity threatened the very government intended to uphold these laws. In other words, Palmer’s published announcement was a seditious threat to the state. Robert Annan had announced a similar position regarding the political dangers posed by unorthodox religious beliefs. The same fears were raised even earlier during constitutional debates over the theoretical boundaries of religious tolerance. The contentious religious politics of the 1790s originated in the earliest years of the American Revolution. Political independence required Americans to reconcile religious beliefs and church institutions from their colonial past with a new set of republican political principles, in particular religious liberty, which increasingly ordered their lives. This tension was evident in debates over the religious implications of Pennsylvania’s constitution of 1776, in state ratification conventions, in the writings of some Anti-Federalists, and in the popular reaction to Palmer’s proposed oration. These were all examples of intellectual and cultural efforts to uphold notions of religious tolerance as state power over religion declined. Although church and state were separating throughout the late eighteenth century, it was a process that varied by state and time. More important, the outcomes of changes in the relationship between religion and the state were far from apparent. As Americans lacked a ready vocabulary to assess this change and where it might lead their culture, they developed one anchored in references to infidelity. With growing religious liberty and cultural tolerance for Jews and Catholics over the late eighteenth century, such references to infidelity often specifically meant deism. This notion of infidelity allowed its opponents to deploy an array of cultural touchstones that held popular weight and appeal otherwise unavailable if they had relied only on formal constitutional discourses concerning rights. Such a framework was also useful for establishing cultural boundaries to police religious expression without using direct state power. Early efforts to control the religious implications of political independence became increasingly urgent in the wake of global events during the 1790s.

Chapter 2

America’s Deist Future

Throughout the late eighteenth century, believers in the Anglo-Protestant world wrote and thought about Christianity’s future with renewed urgency. The era’s political changes inspired broad speculation about religious events yet to come. Ministers and theologians prophesied Christ’s return with scholarly precision according to conventions of biblical exegesis. For others, often ordinary men and women, millennialism was visceral. Prophets in England and North America experienced and understood the unfolding of providential history through dreams, trances, and voices. Republicanism’s ostensible advance in the United States during the 1790s spurred political predictions about Christianity’s future that were less overtly providential but no less pressing.1 Abigail Adams was one such political prophet of Christianity’s fate in the new republic. Writing in winter 1794, Adams openly worried in a letter to her daughter “that there is, in the rising generation, a want of principle. This is a melancholy truth. I am no friend of bigotry; yet I think the freedom of inquiry, and the general toleration of religious sentiments, have been, like all other good things, perverted, and, under that shelter, deism, and even atheism, have found refuge.” Adams feared that republican principles—specifically, freedom of conscience and religious liberty— contained within them sources of Christianity’s demise. By holding the “rising generation” responsible for what would come, Adams revealed the larger political implications of a possible deist future. Within only a few years, groups of self-proclaimed “Theophilanthropists” had organized themselves for the stated purpose of advancing deism over time. Their efforts were inspired by a French society of the same name. For these American deists, Christianity’s eventual decline was a prospect rich with promise.

46

Chapter 2

Abigail Adams and the Theophilanthropists all agreed that a foundation for the republic’s deist future was being set in the world around them.2 Adams and her contemporaries used the term “generation,” in its broadest understanding, to describe relationships between past and future. This might concern lineage or ancestry, both of which identified individuals within the family. This understanding of generation entailed ideas about parental authority and family governance as well as the relationship between children and adults. Contemporaries also understood generation as a collective concept that described groups of individuals who belonged to a larger entity, be it a nation, a society, or even a religious movement. In its collective understanding, the term “generation” entailed considerations about origins and persistence. Why, for example, did a nation exist, and how could its people ensure its existence over time? Both understandings of the term “generation” contained assumptions about responsibility—of individuals to their families, citizens to their country, or believers to their confession. Quite often individual and collective understandings were combined and conflated in the era’s generational discourses. Generational discourses intrigued political writers and observers during the American and French Revolutions. In the 1780s and 1790s, individual and collective aspects of generational thought were combined in ways that raised contentious political questions about the relationship between the past and the future. These debates centered on the meaning of generational rights. Edmund Burke believed that the rights of a living generation were bound by obligations to respect the actions of previous generations and to consider the welfare of future generations. As Burke argued in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, society was “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Writers such as the French political theorist the marquis de Condorcet and Thomas Paine disagreed. As Condorcet declared, “One generation does not have the right to bind a future generation by its laws, and any form of hereditary office is both absurd and tyrannical.” In his Rights of Man, Thomas Paine rejected Burke’s view, declaring that Burke’s philosophy elevated “the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living.” Thomas Jefferson viewed the rights of generations in terms very similar to Condorcet and Paine, but he was especially concerned with future generations, concluding that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” Jefferson calculated that a generation lasted nineteen

Deist Future

47

years. According to him, existing laws and debts should expire after nineteen years so that each new generation could adopt its own laws and contract its own debts.3 Although debates surrounding generational rights reflected largely philosophical concerns, generational discourses were culturally resonant during the 1790s. Americans in this period had recently experienced a significant break with many traditional institutions and assumptions. In a society pervaded with broad ideas about religious freedom, the term “generation” provided a conceptual vehicle for introducing moral considerations about how best to balance tradition and progress into political discussions about the relationship between the past and the future. Those Americans troubled by the possibility of a deist future hoped that rising generations would make decisions regarding their faith in accordance with understandings of obligation and responsibility as described by writers such as Burke. Parents, educators, political leaders, and the clergy were expected to instill such values. Americans who welcomed a deist future, however, believed that no generation was under obligation to accept the religious opinions of those who came before it. Deists and their opponents alike thus used competing notions of generational rights in their efforts to curtail or advance deism over time. Generational rights as defined by writers from Burke to Condorcet incorporated basic assumptions about political consent and legitimacy. Who could grant their consent to the government and law and what constituted this grant were essential political concerns. John Locke, the leading early modern theorist of consent, argued that both conditions were met if consent was “informed.” Locke’s seventeenth-century writings on politics, epistemology, and education all explored the meaning of informed consent. As Locke explained, informed consent to government required reason, which was innate in most adults, but reason required cultivation for its effective use. Childhood was the period when individuals could develop their reason through education. Locke’s philosophy thus held that only reasonable adults could grant informed consent. Abiding by and fulfilling the social contract—in ways express, such as voting, and in ways tacit, by simply obeying the law—constituted informed consent.4 By the eighteenth century, Anglo-American law and political thought were heavily indebted to Lockean understandings of consent. Indeed, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education, two works that outlined conditions necessary for children to become reasonable, consenting adults, were available and widely

48

Chapter 2

read in England and its North American colonies before 1776. The independence movement in British North America and the French Revolution propelled existing ideas about the consent of the governed to the fore of political debate. By the late eighteenth century, belief that political legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed had fueled revolutions but also was firmly entrenched in the intellectual firmament of readers and writers throughout the Atlantic world. Events during the 1790s, however, raised troubling questions for observers on both sides of the Atlantic about the nature and limits of consent. In its theoretical expression, consent, especially as defined by Locke, implied a fairly sturdy confidence in society’s ability to continually produce reasonable adults capable of giving their informed consent. Governments organized according to principles of popular sovereignty would remain legitimate indefinitely as the “the people” propagated themselves. Despite this confidence, a concept of consent premised on the development of reasonable adults was unable to control or account for the myriad social and cultural influences that might limit a person’s ability to express informed consent. This was especially true during childhood, the period that prepared people to grant their consent as members of the body politic. According to Locke’s epistemology, external sensations provided children their early ideas, thus also a basis for their thoughts and rationality. Because children were initially “weak and helpless, without Knowledge or Understanding,” as Locke noted, parents were responsible—with the aid of education, religion, and moral instruction—for ensuring that children were exposed to only those sensations conducive to future political membership. Locke himself recognized that this process was not without faults; there were plenty of adults with misguided opinions and deficient reason. Virtue figured prominently in eighteenth-century political discourse in part as an indication of larger anxiety about the prospects of ensuring a consenting citizenry on Lockean terms. Debates in the United States surrounding the proper basis of a republican education in the decades following independence also exemplified underlying concerns about how best to guarantee the creation of a future citizenry capable of informed consent.5 Global events during the 1790s suggested to some observers that the conditions necessary for exercising informed consent were vanishing. The French Revolution’s hostility toward Christianity in particular struck its American opponents as the unavoidable outcome of misguided consent and distorted reason. Moreover, the same pernicious forces appeared to be

Deist Future

49

working in the United States. Predicting religion’s future on generational terms seemed largely inescapable as the eighteenth century ended. No concept was better suited for integrating diverse religious beliefs into political debates about the nature of consent and the sources of legitimacy. A focus on generational change thus justified inferences about religion’s future drawn from investigations into contemporary society, politics, and culture. Publication of The Age of Reason and events in Revolutionary France provided touchstones in American debates over the relationship between religious change and the future legitimacy of the republic. Writing in 1795, just one year after Abigail Adams, Jeremy Belknap warned about the cultural prevalence of “vulgar infidelity.” Belknap was a Congregational minister at Boston’s prominent Federal Street Church who had an abiding interest in history. As no time before, a majority of the world’s Christians were safe from violent mobs of other faiths and suppression by hostile magistrates, Belknap acknowledged. Still he believed that Christianity in general was no safer; he believed it was threatened by critics of the Bible and their gullible followers who confused mockery and “profane wit” for erudition. This vulgar infidelity, Belknap warned, was “insinuating itself into the minds of the thoughtless; and the most sacred truths rejected and ridiculed.” Whereas Adams lamented deism’s potential advance, Belknap described the ways that deism was actually adopted and propagated. The year separating their observations witnessed the publication of The Age of Reason. Belknap outlined the workings of vulgar infidelity in response to Paine’s book. As other Americans read, or read about, The Age of Reason, they refined vague worries about deism’s presence into specific analyses of how the United States had become or was becoming a nation of deists.6 No book published in the 1790s outraged and frightened readers quite like The Age of Reason. From 1794 onward, a succession of lathering clerics, demagogic politicians, and harassed booksellers testified to the fury sparked by The Age of Reason. American editions of the first part of The Age of Reason appeared in the shops of booksellers from Boston to Philadelphia during the summer of 1794. Paine’s work went through twenty-one American editions before 1800, yet it was available in only a fraction of the country’s libraries during the 1790s. The Age of Reason’s provocative cultural profile thus cannot be attributed solely to worries about the democratization of deism since it was never an American best seller. Rather, Paine’s opponents read his work with a complex set of concerns.7

Figure 1. The Age of Reason or the World Turned Topsyturvy Exemplified in Tom Paines Works!! (1819), by George Cruikshank. Hand-colored etching. Although created in 1819, this image vividly captures the dominant views of Paine’s critics following publication of The Age of Reason. For American critics, this etching reiterated their fears that Paine’s compelling political arguments against monarchy and established churches too easily led to atheism and social chaos. The central figure holding the spear is Richard Carlile, a British radical and bookseller who was Elihu Palmer’s main promoter in England. A group of “infidels” on the left and Satan on the right cheer Carlile’s actions. (© The Trustees of the British Museum.)

Deist Future

51

Paine’s American audience discovered one of The Age of Reason’s most controversial passages in the book’s opening pages. Paine dedicated his work “to my fellow citizens of the United States of America,” and he informed his American readers that The Age of Reason was “under your protection.” Such dedications were steeped in power and significance. The relationship between authorship and readers changed dramatically in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world as writers increasingly relied on the market and booksellers to earn a living. Nevertheless, older practices of literary patronage persisted, including in England, where Paine learned that successful writing required powerful supporters. Dedications were crucial devices allowing authors to recognize their benefactors. In addition, most authors and their patrons throughout early modern Europe understood that literary dedications implied reciprocal relationships. In an era that predated fully developed copyright laws or extensive press freedoms, writers often depended on monarchs, merchants, rural aristocrats, or colonial nabobs for everything from income to protection from physical violence and political attack. This was the culture of early modern letters and ideas in which John Locke gained support and social promotion by living with Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl of Shaftsbury and a powerful promoter of English colonization in Carolina. It was also the culture that inspired Jean-Jacques Rousseau to dedicate his Second Discourse to the city of Geneva in 1755. Both instances highlight that literary patronage entailed protection. When Paine began his dedication by requesting the protection of America’s citizens, he wanted them to literally care for The Age of Reason as Cooper cared for Locke. But Paine also assumed that Americans’ commitments to freedom of opinion reflected The Age of Reason’s basic ideas just as Rousseau believed that Genevans embodied the spirit of his Second Discourse.8 Ignoring Paine’s dedication overlooks a part of his book that captured the attention of his American readers. Of the twenty-one critical responses to The Age of Reason that American writers authored by 1800, ten mentioned or addressed in some detail Paine’s dedication. This proportion is even larger when considering only responses to The Age of Reason’s first part, in which nearly every writer commented on Paine’s dedication. Paine’s American opponents strenuously objected to his dedication because they understood its full implications. According to the conventions of early modern literary patronage, the citizens of the United States assumed a lofty burden as dedicatees of The Age of Reason. With his dedication, Paine announced to readers throughout the world that the collective American public was his

52

Chapter 2

patron, and that Americans endorsed The Age of Reason’s intellectual, literary, and political merit. True to Paine’s belief in popular sovereignty, he could not have imagined a more authoritative imprimatur for his work than that of the American people at large. Many of Paine’s American critics worried that their fellow citizens would enthusiastically accept their roles as The Age of Reason’s patrons. American critics eagerly joined the transatlantic chorus of opprobrium incited by The Age of Reason in order to distance the United States from any association with Paine and his recent writings. Paine believed that he labored to salvage world republicanism from the moral and political pitfalls of atheism, but his American opponents worked a broad offensive to convince their fellow citizens that maintaining republicanism in the United States required them to reject Paine’s endorsement of unabashed deism and their obligations as patrons. Opponents devoted hundreds of pages in response to Paine’s theological and philosophical claims. In addition to critiquing Paine’s work on intellectual grounds, his American critics leveled a political challenge to The Age of Reason by responding in kind to his dedication. In introductions and dedications of their own, Paine’s critics combined intellectual disputation with political and social commentary. Paine’s dedication thus set the terms on which American readers understood The Age of Reason’s concrete social and political implications. The Age of Reason focused attention on the American Revolution’s more disturbing implications. If Paine’s political writings early in the war cemented his place within the Whig leadership, how then to explain his attack on religion in light of his contribution to the republic? Paine argued that intellectual revolutions followed political revolutions, thus The Age of Reason completed the promise of Common Sense. From Paine’s perspective, no people better deserved his dedication than the citizens of the United States. Paine’s earliest American critics feared that he was correct. Perhaps America’s Revolution would be complete only after its citizens cast aside Christianity. As with that of Common Sense, perhaps The Age of Reason’s radicalism stemmed from Paine’s ability to articulate political and cultural changes under way around him. Moreover, the very reasons why Common Sense brought Paine lasting fame potentially ensured that The Age of Reason would have an instant American audience. Some of Paine’s American critics raised these possibilities only to highlight their wrongheadedness. The author of a 1795 pamphlet published in New York reassured his readers that Americans would reject the “pre-meditated poison” delivered in Paine’s dedication by refusing to countenance Paine’s ideas or protect his

Deist Future

53

book. Virginia Episcopalian turned Baptist Andrew Broaddus elaborated further. Like so many of Paine’s American critics, Broaddus acknowledged that Paine was an especially able political writer. Broaddus also detected efforts by Paine to introduce deism on the coattails of his political fame. Paine’s dedication was “a long stride towards presumption and arrogance,” which exposed his condescending view that “the Citizens of America would swallow any food their friend Thomas Paine should give them.” Nevertheless, Paine’s hubris would be his downfall, Broaddus announced, because abiding faith underwrote powerful cultural and political commitments to religious freedom in the United States.9 Other critics were more pessimistic. Ebenezer Bradford, minister to a Congregational church in Rowley, Massachusetts, immediately recognized the implications of Paine’s public profile. The Age of Reason was not the product of an obscure writer, but rather of the prominent pen that issued Common Sense. If virtually anyone besides Paine had written The Age of Reason, then “there would not be the thousandth part of the danger of corrupting the minds of young republicans; because our youth, in this country, have looked up to Mr. Paine, as a staunch friend to liberty.” Cambridge minister John Foster acknowledged that a “very considerable portion of my countrymen” had no “disposition to discredit or discard the religion of their fathers: but I do verily believe, that they are in great hazard of being unwarily seduced and led astray.” Elias Boudinot, director of the U.S. Mint and former president of the Continental Congress, detected a clear design to propagate deism by tricking unsuspecting readers into adopting deism. Boudinot recognized that Paine was “generally plausible in his language, and very artful in turning the clearest truths into ridicule.”10 Paine’s dedication prompted his more pessimistic American critics to read The Age of Reason as part history and part prophecy. They lamented the recent past or fretted over what the future likely held should the American people take The Age of Reason’s dedication seriously. Bradford primarily concerned himself with preventing The Age of Reason from exacerbating irreligious tendencies already evident in American life. Bradford was convinced that deism appealed to Americans long before Paine wrote The Age of Reason. Invoking images associated with France’s rather than America’s revolution, Bradford described deistic Whig leaders encouraging Americans to discard their Bibles. During the Revolution and following its successful outcome, patriotism had provided a foothold for deism, “once a stranger to this happy clime,” Bradford argued. As such, Paine’s earlier contributions

54

Chapter 2

to the American cause could certainly earn The Age of Reason the plaudits of revolutionary patriotism. In dedicating The Age of Reason to the United States, Paine thus exerted the grip of the Revolution’s deistic Whig leadership on a rising generation of post-revolutionary republican leaders. Boudinot, for his part, plumbed The Age of Reason’s frightening potential to influence future generations. Boudinot claimed to witness Paine’s influence operating in far more intractable ways. Boudinot’s pessimism about The Age of Reason’s potential influence ran deeper than Bradford’s largely because he believed deism had wider appeal. He was “much mortified to find, the whole force of this vain man’s genius and art, pointed at the youth of America, and her unlearned citizens, (for I have no doubt, but that it was originally intended for them) in hopes of raising a skeptical temper and disposition in their minds.” As Boudinot warned, “[O]ur country should be preserved from the dreadful evil of becoming enemies to the religion of the Gospel, which I have no doubt, but would be introductive of the dissolution of government and the bonds of civil society.”11 Critics first encountered The Age of Reason in unique ways that often colored their responses. Broaddus’s newly adopted Baptist faith informed his conclusion that Paine may dedicate his work to America and publish it there, but he should not expect its citizens to protect it. The dissenting origins of Broaddus’s beliefs created certainty in his own mind that freedom of conscience and Christianity’s timeless truths were sufficient to combat Paine’s infidelity. Bradford read Paine’s book as solely a product of a radicalized republic of letters. His ministerial position in rural Massachusetts confirmed, if nothing else, that at least a Congregational order still persisted to challenge lurking infidelity. Providing moral guidance to the republic’s future leaders thus prevented the Revolution’s more undesirable outcomes. Boudinot learned of Paine’s attack on Christianity while tending to the daily business demands that beset Philadelphia’s finer residents. This congressman from New Jersey overheard discussions of deism and doubts about Christian truths in “the many conversations that daily took place, when that artful book was first handed about in this city.” Boudinot’s experience begged broader questions about deism’s cultural underpinnings that Reverend Bradford was spared from asking in the relative comfort of a statesupported pulpit. Bradford and Boudinot both agreed, however, that Paine’s dedication was not presumptuous, as Andrew Broaddus had reassured his readers, but prescient.12 Children and youngsters were especially susceptible to The Age of

Deist Future

55

Reason’s influence for reasons obvious to many Americans. The era’s dominant epistemological and pedagogical theories suggested why. By the 1790s most observers took for granted ideas about childhood and education developed over the previous century by John Locke and the Scottish moral sense philosophers. According to these writers, the right education and moral training—provided in large part by parents—cultivated children’s inherent rationality and increased their knowledge as they grew older. Because all experiences shaped knowledge, parents and custodians had special obligations to control a child’s intellectual influences. “The little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences,” Locke wrote. Locke warned against the “foolish maid” instilling superstitious ideas in a child. In the age of Paine, however, the stakes of early impressions were even higher. As Simeon Doggett explained in a 1796 discourse on education, “imitation and habit” shaped a child’s intellectual and moral capacities, which could thus be improved by a “well-education, and due attention” but “by neglect and vicious indulgence depressed, enervated, if not finally destroyed.” The minds of children were, however, no less susceptible as they grew toward adulthood.13 As a life stage between childhood and adulthood, the youth of the nation were also a concern in larger discussions about infidelity’s influence in American society. Adulthood began with marriage or upon acquiring the means of self-support, yet this rhetorical, conceptual, and legal change occurred at widely different ages. Thus in the early republic the term “youth” typically referred to people in their mid-teens through their mid- to late twenties. Moreover, conceptions of youth underwent important changes in the early republic that originated in the 1790s. From demographic pressures and economic changes to newly salient ideas about parenting, education, and family authority, American culture presented young people, male and female alike, with new sets of expectations and freedoms. Changing ideas about youth also created new concerns about how best to educate, monitor, and control the country’s young people. Writers in the early republic became more concerned about the role of young people and their moral character within a democracy. Hosts of early national reformers and moralists feared that new choices available to young people brought more pronounced and dangerous opportunities for seduction into immoral behavior in every realm from sexuality to religion. Reactions to The Age of the Reason clearly held that Paine’s pernicious influence stemmed from his writing’s seductive power, which was enhanced by his early political fame. Boudinot even

56

Chapter 2

worried that his adult widowed daughter, Susan, might suffer from a youthful appeal to Paine. He feared that she “might take up this plausible address of infidelity.” Indeed he dedicated his critique of Paine’s work to Susan as a prop for her Christian faith when confronted with arguments from The Age of Reason. Demographic changes taking place in the early United States further compounded concerns about the seductive power of Paine’s writings over actual youth as well as those who only seemed young in their parents’ eyes. Nearly 30 percent of the country’s population was between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine by the early nineteenth century. Should Paine’s influence reach far into the minds of children and youth, America’s deist future was a demographic certainty.14 Education, however, might prevent the rise of a deist future. Early modern theories of epistemology and pedagogy that had already shaped thinking about political consent and childhood during this period gained new resonance in discussions about republican citizenship following the American Revolution. A proper education would instill morality, civility, and virtue in impressionable children thereby creating generations of future citizens fit for political life in a republic. By the 1790s, many Americans believed that education was the best method for creating a society and culture suitable to the demands of a republican political order. The stakes of education involved nothing less than national survival, a view evident in the writings of prominent early nationals including Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster. Yet an educated person, even of the best intentions, could not expect that learning alone would preserve his or her piety. As Congregational minister John Foster warned, “Even in retirement, where we may think ourselves most safe and invulnerable, books under the titles of history, travels, biography, philosophical discussions, poetical effusions, and even moral essays, without the utmost caution on our part, may insensibly infuse the poison of infidelity!”15 Cautionary lessons about infidelity’s dangers appeared in early national textbooks, especially during the 1790s when observers invested education with such deep moral and political weight. Jedidiah Morse, the republic’s most prominent geographer, detailed and described the world from his various ministerial posts at Congregational churches throughout New England. Although not destined to become his best-selling or most widely circulated book, Morse designed his Elements of Geography, written and published in 1795, specifically for children between the ages of eight and fourteen. “In France, Deifts are very numerous,” Morse’s young audience learned with great authority, “and in England, and other European countries; and in the

Deist Future

57

United States, their number is not inconsiderable, and is probably increafing.” According to this lesson, deism’s advance was a fact of contemporary political geography. A textbook author’s desire to pronounce the dangers of infidelity could force seemingly overwrought links between anti-Christian views and a given subject. Even mathematics was not immune to revolutionary excess or distinct from nationalism according to Erastus Root. He explained in 1796 that the United States’ moderate republicanism and virtuous independence were evident in its gradual rejection of older standards of measurement and numeracy. The French demonstrated a similar inclination toward a measured revolution in numbers only to find themselves swept away with enthusiasm. According to Root, as the French nation has “carried their republicanism too far, so have they stretched decimal simplicity beyond its proper limits, even into decadary infidelity.” This was Root’s attack on the French Republican Calendar of 1793, which instituted a ten-day week and abolished Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. Morse’s and Root’s messages potentially reached a widening audience of teachers and pupils. Geography and arithmetic were subjects that gained newfound importance in the curricula of early national primary schools, institutions that educated boys and girls between the ages of five and ten.16 Young girls received even more specific educations about the dangers of infidelity. Donald Fraser’s Mental Flower-Garden, or Instructive and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex reproduced poetry, dialogues, and writing pieces that contained pedagogic and moral lessons for girls and young women. This book emphasized that doubts about Christianity might appeal to females as well as males. “Let no mistaken girl fancy she gives a proof of her wit, by want of piety; or that a contempt of things serious and sacred, will exalt her understanding or raise her character, even in the opinion of the most avowed male libertines and infidels.” In this view, girls risked losing their faith in pursuit of male attention and possible male suitors, an especially dangerous possibility in a culture where traditional constraints on courtship were rapidly dissolving.17 Concerns also mounted about infidelity’s appeal to youngsters who left home for advanced education. College officials were exposed to religious opinions of the nation’s young men and immediately commented on Paine’s influence. In Princeton, College of New Jersey officials warned that infidelity was “spreading its dominion far and wide.” Paine’s devotees were also found among students at Harvard College, the College of William and Mary, and the University of North Carolina. Harvard authorities responded by giving

58

Chapter 2

every incoming student a copy of Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible, a refutation of The Age of Reason. Others took broader steps. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, worked during the 1790s to protect his young scholars and their school from the perceived influence of deist legislators in the Connecticut government. Although students at these institutions were supposedly rife with disdain for Christianity, presumably their opinions could improve so long as pious and authoritative administrators exercised their corrective influence. The republic’s colleges thus had an ambivalent place in popular perceptions about deism’s generational advance and the religious future it might create.18 Paine’s dedication may have exposed the Revolution’s dangerous intellectual underside, yet the Revolution produced other figures to inspire the nation’s youngsters of all ages. Andrew Broaddus went dedication for dedication with Paine by placing The Age of Reason & Revelation under George Washington’s protection. Washington’s actual reticence on religious issues notwithstanding, Ebenezer Bradford’s preface lauded him for maintaining “the most unequivocal demonstrations of a firm and constant faith in Revelation” throughout the Revolution and his presidency. Washington’s piety was even more remarkable, Bradford continued, because his office forced him to keep company with American and European leaders who believed it “fashionable, for distinguished patriots and politicians, secretly or publickly to avow” deism. For Bradford, then, Washington’s life exemplified a pious moral course around infidelity’s pitfalls, especially for the nation’s elite young men whose rejection of Christianity would have the greatest political consequence for the country.19 Popular perception held that the country’s future political leaders, its young men, especially needed such guidance in the 1790s, whether through Washington’s example or not. Bradford did his part by reminding the young men likely destined to college campuses that they were the “pride of America, and on whom, in a sense, the rising glory of church and state depend.” By Bradford’s measure, patriotic youth should emulate Washington’s piety. Otherwise, “deistical writers” would corrupt college students, rising attorneys, and young physicians—the educated males destined for positions of political and cultural authority upon adulthood. Benjamin Rush would have concurred. Rush’s prominence as a physician, a reputation gained in part by his reliance on the curative powers of bleeding, matched his stature as an educational theorist. His writings about medicine and education emphasized the relationship between Christian principles and republican virtue. Rush

Deist Future

59

firmly believed that morality created healthy bodies, both corporeal and politic. Rush’s own experiences taught him that physicians had specialized medical knowledge about the nature of human life that revealed the workings of a benevolent creator. Rush believed that physicians could be especially virtuous political leaders, but he also recognized that too often visceral contact with life and death made doctors immune to the awe of God’s power. “If it be a fact, that physicians are more inclined to infidelity, than any other body of men, it must be ascribed chiefly to this cause,” Rush lamented. Patriotic hagiography, like that developed in Bradford’s hands, might provide a necessary political and cultural brake on America’s descent into deism following the Revolution, a descent led by the republic’s educated elites.20 Revolutionary patriotism, properly directed, might prevent the nation’s leaders from bringing forth a deist future, but only if they rejected Paine’s critique of Christianity’s past. Paine held that divine revelation provided untrustworthy and inadequate evidence for belief. For Paine, only witnesses to or recipients of God’s revelations were obligated to believe them. No other proof was sufficient, not the testimony of Jesus’ later apostles or the inherited word of the Bible. Americans in 1794 were free of biblical commands because no one alive could attest to their historical accuracy. Contemporary understandings of history cautioned that Paine’s larger point might have merit. One concept of history developed during the eighteenth century posited that historical change occurred as societies progressed from savagery to civilization. According to this view, not every society in the world would become civilized, but those that did would resemble the eighteenth-century’s modern commercial nations, especially Great Britain. Practitioners of this conception of history understood the past as it served philosophical claims or revealed underlying social and cultural laws. Religion’s place in this theory of history was mixed. In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume argued for religion’s irrational origins in “primitive” societies, which explained monotheism’s propensity toward dogmatism and intolerance. Historical understanding, thus for Hume, complemented his philosophical skepticism. Influenced by the same philosophy of history, Edward Gibbon argued that Christianity was invented by man and responsible for the collapse of Rome in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which was published in 1776. On the other hand, Henry Home, Lord Kames argued for a natural theology that explained God’s existence in order to challenge Hume’s skepticism. Kames’s confidence in reason provided one hallmark of civilized society as outlined in his Sketches of the History of Man. A similar

60

Chapter 2

view of history also influenced writers such as Adam Smith and John Millar, and they too articulated an understanding of change over time in which the divine presence was largely absent.21 Another conception of history in the eighteenth century explained change in cyclical terms. This idea originated in the study of ancient republics, and it proved central to the political thinking of Anglo-American Whigs. Republics were especially fragile and susceptible to social decay, according to this view. Virtue and morality, in religious as well as more secular iterations, were central to forestalling the decline of republics. As historian and Congregational minister Jeremy Belknap observed, “Every species of human government contains the seeds of dissolution, which will some time or other work its ruin.” Influential modes of historical understanding in the eighteenth century thus taught conflicting lessons. Religion’s extrication from social life and disbelief in God’s guiding providence might be the cost of social progress, but progress in this form seemed to weaken the republic’s moral foundation. Progress begat decline, or so the eighteenth-century’s philosophies of history would suggest.22 With independence secured, Americans began writing its history from the 1780s onward. In the following decades, Mercy Otis Warren, David Ramsey, and Jeremy Belknap, among others, chronicled recent events. Historians in the early republic often deployed the latest scholarly methods and aspired to the era’s scholarly standards. Documentation and textual analysis were central to their narratives. This emphasis on sources drove early efforts to preserve documents from the U.S. Revolutionary and colonial past. The Massachusetts Historical Society was established in 1792, and Americans began to publish works of historical compilation and editing during this period. The first volume of William Waller Hening’s Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the year 1619 was published in 1809. In addition to scholarly rigor, early national historians wrote narratives that conveyed moral lessons. Histories were supposed to serve didactic ends; many historians dedicated their work to the republic’s children. American historiography also served nationalist ends following the Revolution. Historians strived to provide their readers in the new republic a unified national past and hopefully a sense of national purpose in the future as well.23 Ringing moments such as the publication of The Age of Reason cast the ambiguous religious lessons of eighteenth-century historiography in sharp relief, especially for historically minded Americans. In several instances,

Deist Future

61

such writers entrusted their Christian faith to contemporary historical methods. Befitting his role as a founding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Jeremy Belknap marshaled his interest in documenting the past in support of his ministerial vocation. Unlike Paine, Belknap argued that testimony regarding Jesus’ resurrection came from enough witnesses of good character to make it plausible. Had individuals in the early history of Christianity seriously doubted Jesus’ resurrection or the writings of the Apostle Paul, they could have questioned the many living witnesses to the event. Moreover, later generations could assuredly believe in Jesus’ resurrection because witnesses to the event took pains to carefully record its details in writing and to set aside a day of commemoration. Historical evidence was the source of accurate knowledge about the past and, by extension, about the truth of Christianity. Without accepting sturdy historical evidence—in the form of documents, testimony, and tradition—when determining religious truth, Christian faith rested on nothing but “conjecture and probability.” Historical knowledge thus contributed to religious certainty. Samuel Stilwell, writing from the far reaches of Bloomingdale, New York, agreed, but he drew more dire conclusions. According to him, “If nothing is to be believed but what we have ocular demonstration of, the present harmony that subsists in our religion and government” would disappear.24 These writers and others detected a form of historical agnosticism in Paine’s critique that threatened Christianity and the United States equally. Stilwell ridiculed Paine’s argument for religious proof by equating it to a legal system in which prior testimony from people who were deceased or absent from the trial was inadmissible in court. Under such circumstances, courts could not settle contested wills, for example, without having all of the individuals who originally witnessed the document present. Such a principle applied to religious matters, Stilwell argued, required that “Christ must come every year, or every day, to satisfy the incredulity of man.” Elhanan Winchester, a Boston Universalist minister living in Philadelphia, drew a political comparison to further disparage Paine’s critique. If Paine’s standards for religious belief were applied to political life in the republic, Winchester submitted, then “[a]ll the inhabitants of the whole continent, men, women, and children, must assemble from year to year at the seat of government, and must be actually present at the pass of the laws.” Belknap also challenged the absurdity of Paine’s argument. If firsthand accounts from witnesses and written testimony in matters of religion were incredible many hundreds of years later, then, Belknap noted, Americans in the 1790s should have no

62

Chapter 2

confidence that future citizens of the United States would believe that the Continental Congress actually declared Britain’s North American colonies independent. Never mind appeals “to public records, or to approved histories, or to the annual celebration of the day on which the act was passed,” later Americans would lack sufficient evidence to prove without reservation that the events of the country’s founding moment actually occurred.25 All three critics ultimately concluded that Paine’s standards of evidence and consent, if applied to civil matters, would render constitutional government illegitimate and encourage law breaking as well. They all insisted, like many other political commentators in this period, that legitimate constitutional government in the United States rested on assumptions about popular sovereignty whereby the people consented to political authority and followed the law even though they did not directly institute the law or government themselves. Winchester warned that Paine’s understanding of evidence and biblical legitimacy was tantamount to a political principle “that no one is under any obligation so much as to believe the laws of their country to be genuine, still less so to obey them, except only those persons who were actually present when they were passed.” In this scenario, political confusion would reign, disobedience would flourish, and government would ultimately collapse. Moreover, Paine’s argument suggested that America’s revolution and its recent constitutional settlement, premised on social contract theory and popular sovereignty, did not deserve the obedience of current or future generations because most Americans did not and, in the future, would not be able to express their direct consent.26 Paine’s critics also opposed The Age of Reason by justifying brakes on democratizing changes under way in the United States. Ebenezer Bradford argued that the Bible exercised its weakest hold over the nation’s future political elite, a group whose piety was crucially important because they were responsible for granting political consent as citizens while securing it as legislators. Bradford challenged Paine’s attack on Christianity by emphasizing honor and emulation, two ideals with great currency in the political culture of the 1790s. Pious leadership begat a pious people, Bradford concluded. Elias Boudinot believed that The Age of Reason broadly appealed to those who would never hold elected office or exercise political power. Potential deists included “children, servants, and the lowest people” who “had been tempted to purchase” a cheap edition of Paine’s book, Boudinot worried. Patriotic emulation and the promise of fame could not bolster the piety of such people because Boudinot never expected them to enjoy their benefits. For

Deist Future

63

Boudinot, the privileges of express consent—voting and leadership—should be severely circumscribed to secure the nation’s future political legitimacy. In light of The Age of Reason’s perceived influence, elites such as Boudinot cast suspicion on the overall political capacities of the masses. Labeling individuals or entire groups as potential deists rendered significant portions of the population unfit for formal political participation. Political power in this formulation should remain in the hands of solidly Christian leaders.27 If theories of political consent and legitimacy provided compelling reasons for challenging deism’s influence, they did so at considerable cost to even the most basic notions of timeless religious truth. By demanding that Paine assess religious claims according to the same standards that he employed to assess political systems, Elhanan Winchester and Samuel Stilwell introduced an element of uncertainty into religion. They emboldened and encouraged ordinary people to accept or reject religious opinions as they would government authority. Jeremy Belknap contributed to this process by justifying biblical evidence on more rigorous historical standards. Belknap thus opened religious claims to wide interpretive latitude. By reading the Bible as they would the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, a will, or a history, Winchester, Stilwell, and Belknap defended Christianity’s central text by reducing it to political and legal terms amendable to change and ratification as the people thought fit. The people could thus choose to accept or reject Christianity on terms remarkably similar to popular sovereignty in politics. Publication of The Age of Reason and Paine’s dedication stoked in those who noticed broad ranging speculations about deism’s looming presence in the nation’s future. In some locales this deist future had seemingly arrived, however. Virtually all of the issues raised by Paine’s American opponents in the abstract seemed manifest and operative in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. James Wallis was a minister in one of the county’s towns, New Providence. He read The Age of Reason with a familiarity of deism’s influence. Wallis’s response to Paine began with his recognition that the 1790s marked an age “in which infidelity is so prevalent” that no Christian could escape attacks on their faith. Wallis aimed to provide his readers intellectual and rhetorical armor against critiques from Paine and his American sympathizers. Like Paine’s opponents throughout the United States, Wallis believed that the faithful should exercise special vigilance in checking The Age of Reason’s influence. According to Wallis, “I fear from the celebrity of his political productions, some may be disposed to implicitly receive his

64

Chapter 2

theological opinions also.” The propensity of Americans to accept deism, especially when extolled by a prominent figure such as Paine, confirmed Wallis’s recent experiences. Wallis assumed his pulpit in 1792, and he published his critique of Paine in 1797. In the interim, however, Wallis had joined forces with fellow ministers in Mecklenburg County to challenge deism’s presence in books but also in members of their community. Between 1792 and 1797, “men of wealth and talent” in and around New Providence had formed a Society for the Propagation of the Principles of Rousseau and Voltaire, what their opponents called an “infidel debating society.” Members of this society critically discussed Christianity with the aid of a circulating library that contained the eighteenth century’s leading deistic writings. Mecklenburg’s “infidels” were leading citizens such as brothers Ezra and Charles Alexander, along with Ezekiel Polk, future president James K. Polk’s grandfather. All of these men exercised local influence to match Paine’s international fame. Wallis’s concern for the power of imitation to spread deism thus grew from his conflicts with deists in his neighborhood. Here was a place where the culture’s seeming propensity toward deism became evident in the actions of self-announced deists. The Age of Reason did not introduce deism to the residents of Mecklenburg County, yet its appearance helped pious locals such as Wallis develop strategies to better challenge the deists in their midst.28 If a deist present rather than a deist future seemed evident in at least one community, international events threatened to spread this development as the 1790s progressed. Episcopal clergyman Uzal Ogden responded to Paine by turning his attention to European affairs. Ogden opened his reply to Paine by noting the prevalence of deism in France, and, more important, the danger that French deism could influence the United States. France and the United States shared a common revolutionary experience based upon a similar set of political principles. Ogden believed it “rational to conclude, from our connection with that republic, and from our familiarity of political opinions, attempts will be made, by some of its citizens, to disseminate among us their deistical principles.” The Age of Reason marked the vanguard of these efforts while recent American editions of d’Holbach’s Christianity Unveiled demonstrated that other anti-Christian works were soon to follow. Ogden was ultimately optimistic that American readers would reject The Age of Reason and other similar books. Despite presuppositions that some Americans were already attracted to deism, Ogden was assured that most Americans still revered their Bibles and the lessons it contained. For Ogden,

Deist Future

65

“the Religion of wisdom and virtue which they have received from God, [Americans] will not exchange for a system of Infidelity, of vice and folly from France.”29 The French Revolution’s prominent place in Ogden’s critique, particularly its religious implications, is not surprising. By the mid-1790s, events in France influenced American thought on a range of political, cultural, and intellectual questions. The French Revolution was not, therefore, a static international backdrop for dynamic domestic events in the United States. Instead, it was an event that presented American observers with a constantly changing constellation of developments, ideas, and debates. This calls into question Ogden’s assessment about the limits of political sympathy between France and the United States on matters of religion. Ogden published Antidote to Deism amid a turning point in the French Revolution that ultimately belied his own prediction that imported deistic works lacked an American audience. Perhaps, then, Paine’s dedication was wholly appropriate. The French Revolution changed course significantly in 1794 with the overthrow of Robespierre and the creation of a new constitutional regime established to stop the excesses of the Terror. To many outside observers, formation of the Directory, the centralized five-man executive that governed France between 1795 and 1799, marked France’s return to moderation. Establishment of the Directory changed intellectual fashions in France that in turn introduced new books into the American market. The rise of the Directory temporarily strengthened American political sympathies with France and presented Americans with more rather than fewer opportunities to read deistic works. The Directory’s influence on the United States was apparent not only in newly available books, however. American deists responded to the Directory’s adoption of a civil religion devoid of Christianity. From the Directory’s efforts, American deists gained understandings of history, generational change, and consent that supplied intellectual authority for their work to bring about a deist future. American deists also formed societies modeled on state attempts in France to redefine public life and individual belief along deistic lines. American deists ultimately developed an understanding of religion’s generational sources that directly opposed concerns raised by critics of The Age of Reason.30 After 1795, Americans with deistic leanings had access to new books by French-speaking authors that offered historical arguments for doubting Christianity. Some of these works were authored by prominent French

66

Chapter 2

philosophes who had run afoul of the government under Robespierre. Others were penned by philosophers from the Old Regime whose ideas underwrote the revolutionary events of 1789. Beginning in 1795, these works appeared in the United States in English translations and in new American editions. The most important of these writings included the first American editions of Rousseau, and the Comte de Volney’s Ruins; or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires. Originally published in 1791, Volney’s Ruins was later translated into English, a project that Thomas Jefferson started and Joel Barlow finished. A posthumous American edition of Condorcet’s Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind was published in 1796. Condorcet and Volney understood historical inquiry in the same ways that Hume and Gibbon did, thus American deists found in their writings historical interpretations that linked human progress to Christianity’s decline. In Outlines, Condorcet described all of the necessary preconditions for reason to prevail and bring about limitless moral and social improvement in a world absent the influence of divine power. Volney was France’s foremost authority on Middle Eastern history and culture. This scholarship informed Volney’s treatment of religion in Ruins. Volney’s survey of the world’s revealed religions highlighted irreconcilable contradictions in theology and core beliefs, which he concluded were evidence that all religious systems were products of history and culture rather than the hand of God. He implored his readers to discard sectarian attachments and religious beliefs unsupported by reason. Volney’s argument appealed to deists throughout the Atlantic world, including those in the United States, for its reliance on a cosmopolitan framework that reduced religion to a culturally constructed phenomenon open to scientific and comparative inquiry. Condorcet’s and Volney’s writings potentially bolstered the doubts American deists had about Christianity by justifying them according to the powerfully persuasive conventions of eighteenth-century historiography. Moreover, historical interpretations such as these were inseparable from the concept of generational rights endorsed by writers such as Condorcet. Both entailed a fundamental rejection of tradition and past beliefs. Writings newly published in the mid-1790s offered American deists fresh opportunities for conceptualizing deism’s past and its future. Since Christianity’s veracity dissolved under historical investigation, Condorcet and Volney concluded, deists had all the more hope for its certain disappearance in the foreseeable future.31 Not only were English translations of Condorcet’s and Volney’s writings

Deist Future

67

published in the United States during the mid-1790s, but the Directory dispatched Volney on a diplomatic mission to America in 1795. Volney resided in Philadelphia for only three years, but his reputation as the author of Ruins preceded him, especially among a readership of American and exiled English intellectuals. Contests over the religious implications of the French Revolution quickly involved Volney in a local print war against Joseph Priestly, the eminent English scientist and Unitarian. Although both held sympathies for the French Revolution, they viewed its religious implications rather differently. Volney and Priestly were at odds over whether deistic suspicion of revealed religion could provide a republic’s moral foundation. Priestly was concerned that writings by “modern unbelievers,” including Volney’s Ruins, harmfully misinterpreted the Revolution. Priestly viewed the French Revolution as a political opportunity to rationalize Christianity rather than abolish it completely. Volney answered Priestly that “religious quarrels” were irresolvable so long as “the prejudices of infancy and education” excluded “impartial reasoning.” Citing Lockean epistemology, Volney argued that any “system of revelation” could not persist so long as people embraced the principle “with us infidels, that every one has the right of rejecting whatever is contrary to his natural reason.”32 Volney’s philosophy echoed developments in French politics before he left for the United States. Under the Directory, French officials worked to create a democratically legitimate state invulnerable to the social disruptions and excess of previous years. One approach involved the advent of a viable civil religion. Louis-Marie de la Révellière-Lépaux, the director in charge of interior policy, believed that France needed a rational form of civil religion in order to bind the individual to the state. This civil religion would be authoritative because it was rational, rather than mysterious, and universally applicable instead of sectarian or local. French authorities thus adopted Theophilanthropy, a movement that combined deism with the ceremony and fraternity of organized religion. Theophilanthropy, which meant lovers of God and Man, formed in the mid-1790s. Its main sponsor was Valentin Haüy, a member of the government during the Terror. J. B. Chemin-Depontés was Theophilanthropy’s primary theorist. Both men believed that Theophilanthropy would curtail political violence by restoring a moral foundation to public life that was not sectarian or based solely on political considerations. A strong desire to avoid social and political disruptions in every form was evident in nearly all aspects of Theophilanthropy. To this larger end, Theophilanthropy upheld deistic beliefs and rituals that

Figure 2. New Morality; or The Promis’d Installment of the High-Priest of the Theophilanthropes, with the Homage of Leviathan and His Suite (1798), by James Gillray. Etching with engraving, hand-colored. Gillray created this etching for an English audience, but it documents the advent of Theophilanthropy under the Directory while illustrating the pejorative associations it raised in the minds of critics. Louis-Marie de la Révellière-Lépaux, depicted on the right as the “Pontiff” of the “Theophilanthopic sect” after his installation in London, receives a warm reception from British admirers of various radical political and religious opinions. Theophilanthropy was thus a subversive French import with potentially broad domestic appeal, a view certainly shared by its opponents in both England and the United States. (Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

Deist Future

69

were intended to provide a moral center that bound individuals, families, and communities in pursuit of social and political order.33 Theophilanthropy’s guiding text was the Manual of the Theophilanthropes. This document took for granted the view that revealed religions consisted of unfounded, historically contingent opinions instead of categorical, divinely ordained truths. In the past “religious societies have been formed upon opinions,” but Theophilanthropy offered an alternative organizing principle based on the acknowledgment and adoration of a singular God knowable solely through reason. The manual juxtaposed a rational Theophilanthropy with Christianity’s divine revelation and metaphysics. The latter provided a flimsy foundation, according to the manual, because “men loved or hated; were friends or foes, for the sake of the most absurd opinions; for believing or disbelieving abstract propositions far beyond the sphere of human knowledge.” Theophilanthropists believed not only that Christianity was bad for society but also that the ravages wrought by sectarian differences defied God by destroying his creation. Theophilanthropy promoted basic moral axioms of natural religion in order to avoid sectarian distinctions, because “[a]lready, under the pretext of religion, there has been too great an effusion of blood.” According to its theorists, Theophilanthropy reunited “those which exist in one sentiment only, that of piety, of charity, of concord, and of tolerance.”34 The manual also outlined a fairly ambitious program for organizing life across days and years. Theophilanthropic principles accounted for virtually every social relation. Ceremonies were designed to commemorate childbirth and rearing, marriage, and death. Theophilanthropist parents, for example, were expected to participate in a ceremony similar in purpose to the infant baptisms practiced in Catholic and many Protestant churches. Once a child was named, the father lifted his infant toward the sky while promising to educate the child in the doctrines of Theophilanthropy “from the dawn of his reason” onward. Theophilanthropy was patriarchal; fathers or related males were charged with guiding their family’s daily conduct and with presiding over ceremonies that marked life’s major turning points. Theophilanthropy also focused heavily on educating children. This was one of the movement’s “first duties” especially toward children between the ages of nine and twelve. Theophilanthropy thus placed great emphasis on creating, sustaining, and propagating deism across generations by instilling deist opinions early in life.35 American observers noticed French Theophilanthropy soon after its

70

Chapter 2

creation. Geographer Nathaniel Dwight was one of the first to mention it in his textbook, A Short but Comprehensive System of the Geography of the World: by way of Question and Answer, published in 1795. One of Dwight’s queries concerned the nature of religion in contemporary France. The answer Dwight provided to his young readers referenced “[t]he scheme of religion lately introduced by the National Convention, is a mixture of deism and heathenism. They profess to worship God under the title of the Supreme Being, and worship also their ancestors, certain virtues, public opinion, liberty, equality, &c.” Newspapers from Philadelphia to Portland, Maine, began circulating descriptions of Theophilanthropy as an arm of the French state in 1797. A Lancaster, Pennsylvania, writer using the pseudonym “Layman” even produced a pamphlet in 1799 titled Theophilanthropy: or, the Spirit of Genuine Religion that summarized and explained the Theophilanthropist position. Layman made no mention of the French Theophilanthropic movement. However, the pamphlet’s combination of Christian-like rituals and deism suggests that the author was familiar with the French society’s foundational text, its manual. A French version of the manual must have circulated throughout eastern Pennsylvania in the late 1790s, as it provided the organizing document for a Society of Theophilanthropists formed in Philadelphia in 1800.36 The city’s deists organized this society with inspiration both in name and in organizing principles from French Theophilanthropic societies formed under the Directory. Philadelphia’s Theophilanthropists translated and published the Manual of the Theophilanthropes. The manual was originally published in response to political chaos, and in anticipation of potential religious violence apparent in the early phases of the French Revolution. By adopting the manual, Philadelphia’s deists announced that they viewed similarities between the French context that produced Theophilanthropy and American society in 1800. For Philadelphia’s deists, Theophilanthropy offered counterarguments to every moral charge against deism and its social and political consequences raised by Paine’s American critics. Philadelphia’s deists adopted its manual in attempts to prove these counter arguments in practice.37 Promoting deism and creating deists were thus the central aims of Philadelphia’s Theophilanthropists. They sought financial support for the construction of a Temple of Reason in 1801 and 1802, which they envisioned as a place to encourage “deserters from errors and superstition,” adults and children alike, “to rally round the same standard of Reason.” This building was

Deist Future

71

not intended to be “a house of prayer; nor a house of any sort of ceremony; but it is to be a house of Reason, and the one God is to be the sole object of mental worship and veneration in it.” Such efforts mirrored state attempts in Revolutionary France to support a Temple of Reason, albeit by deploying voluntary networks rather than direct government power. Promoters of the temple celebrated its benefits for deists of all ages; however, they paid special attention to educating children and youngsters. The temple would serve as a school for youth during the week. Children with parents who helped finance the temple would gain first and best access to the institution. Indeed deistic parents were pressed to share deism’s benefits with their children, to give a “sound and wholesome instruction to their offspring.” Only with the attention of concerned adults at home and at Theophilanthropic institutions would the nation’s “youth receive those early notions of one God and pure religion.” Deist parents were remiss otherwise, for they risked their children becoming “corrupted by priests, or contaminated by superstition.”38 Regular discourses were central components of the Theophilanthropist’s educational aims. Only one of the discourses delivered before the Philadelphia society appeared in print. Denis Driscol, an Irish deist, newspaper editor, and partisan Republican, delivered it. The society’s organizational structure and the promise it suggested for the future inspired Driscol. He argued that Philadelphia’s Theophilanthropists, including himself, demonstrated to “doubting Christians” that “the bonds of society are not dissolved by the elucidation of truth,” meaning deism, “or preserved by the propagation of lies,” meaning Christianity. Driscol’s oration echoed generational themes, and his audience was the ubiquitous nation’s youth, in particular young men. Driscol declared, “Let the attention of these young men be drawn from the inconsistent work, called the Bible, and their whole mind and soul fixed upon the great book of Nature; they will soon be reconciled to life, to their fellow-men, and to the whole creation.” Yet Driscol also warned his audience that time would not wait for them. This “favorable moment must not be lost,” Driscol declared, “for the hour is arrived, when the monster superstition may be overcome; when the next generation may be relieved from its shackles.”39 From a deist’s perspective the times seemed propitious indeed. Philadelphia’s Theophilanthropists inspired deists in other cities. A Theophilanthropic Society formed in Baltimore about the same time, and New York deists “had it in agitation . . . to open a subscription for erecting a Temple of Instruction.” This resulted in the Theistical Society of New York, formed

72

Chapter 2

in 1802, which collected New York’s circle of active deists including Elihu Palmer, veterinarian William Carver, and prominent Republicans who were members of the Clinton family. The first article of the society’s constitution declared its intention to “promote the cause of moral science, and general improvement, in opposition to all schemes of religious and political imposture.” New York’s deists also pursued efforts to construct a Temple of Nature that would house worshipers of “One God Supreme and Benevolent Creator of the world.” They raised $600 in subscriptions, necessary capital in the broader effort to advance their vision of America’s deist future. In the face of many altars to “the cause of superstition,” Palmer emphasized the necessity of an altar “reared in honor of the true and living God . . . to promote the exalted cause of a pure and incorruptible morality!” Developments within France’s public culture under the Directory thus inspired American deists in Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore to organize in pursuit of ending Christianity’s influence in the United States.40 America’s deists, much like their opponents, understood changes to religious life in the United States in relationship to the problem of political consent and legitimacy. Put simply, they held that informed consent entailed a critical approach to revealed religion if not outright rejections of Christianity. Paine established this in the very title of his book. The phrase “age of reason,” according to eighteenth-century law and political theory, designated that point when a person developed the rational faculties, usually around the age of twenty-one, necessary to deliver his or her informed consent. Paine’s identification of the age of reason declared that society as a whole could not achieve political maturity, thus become free, without rejecting Christianity. Elihu Palmer expressed a similar sentiment in 1804, arguing that “[s]ocieties will be considered as a fortuitous aggregation of children until they shall emancipate themselves from the degrading bondage of a belief in the stupid nonsense of witchcraft, sorcerers, dreams, ghosts and a thousand other phantoms of which religious superstition is the legitimate parent.” Arguments that skepticism produced consent informed Volney’s writings as well. In his exchange with Joseph Priestly, he reminded the English chemist of his maxim “that, whether under a political or a religious aspect, the spirit of doubt is friendly to all ideas of liberty, truth, or genius, while a spirit of confidence is connected with the ideas of tyranny, servility, and ignorance.” Christians, for example, could never express legitimate informed consent because one could not accept unequivocal religious truths and still attain an age of reason. As Volney argued, most religious systems

Deist Future

73

invited “the spirit of dogmatism and immovable belief, limiting our progress to a first received opinion.” The present and continued legitimacy of the American government required deism, its proponents in the United States suggested.41 Theophilanthropic societies were thus institutions designed to instruct future citizens in deistic principles necessary to grant their informed political consent. Denis Driscol not only argued that deistic principles created an individual’s rational capacity for granting consent, but that these same principles informed how and when individuals should grant or withhold their consent. In his discourse before Philadelphia’s Theophilanthropists, Driscol reminded his audience that on a range of questions about the nation’s domestic and international affairs, members of this society must always ask whether they were “the mere passive engines of men, who may chance to be in power; or, on every occasion, determine our conduct by the dictates of sound reason and the good of mankind.” Driscol’s discourse tied deism to a radical notion of direct consent as the only source of political legitimacy, a position that put him at odds with more moderate political opinion in the United States and in Europe. Indeed, popular perceptions of infidelity as symptomatic of the socially disruptive and irrational basis of direct consent, as evidenced in the religious violence of the French Revolution, heightened the concerns of deism’s opponents in the United States.42 Critics quickly realized that Theophilanthropic and Theistic societies were institutional mechanisms to create present and future deists who would expect direct participation in American society and politics. France’s recent history provided a glaring example of this progression. Just as Americans first encountered Theophilanthropy, Alexander Addison—a Pennsylvania jurist, Federalist, and staunch opponent of the French Revolution’s “infidelity”—connected the rise of deist associations to the generational decline of Christianity. Addison devoted much attention to the role of public opinion in politics and government. He was particularly interested in how the press and associations shaped public opinion. He recognized that public opinion had a legitimate place in free governments, but he warned his readers that public opinion was easily corrupted, often in ways harmful to religion. Addison recounted how public opinion in pre-Revolutionary France was harnessed to the cause of “philosophy and reason,” after which “all prejudices in favor of religion and government were gradually sapped.” Clubs, societies, and the dispersal of books and pamphlets combined to push public opinion in this direction. As a result, popular French opinion viewed

74

Chapter 2

religion as “but a state trick, and its author and ministers but imposters.” Once revolutionaries overthrew the French monarchy, the French republic lacked the moderating moral influence of Christianity. Social and political chaos ensued, Addison concluded. France’s history during the 1790s offered American observers clear lessons about the political and social costs if Christianity suffered generational decline. The District of Maine’s chief justice shared Addison’s concern, which concrete evidence of American deism only heightened. In 1802 the judge warned about plans for “erecting in Philadelphia, a large house of instruction, where all the horrid doctrines of infidelity, atheism and licentiousness, will be publicly disseminated among our citizens, our youth, and our children.” The justice echoed common understandings that deism advanced across generations through voluntary associations and personal emulation. The Theophilanthropists’ presence in the republic’s metropolis only amplified their potential influence.43 Philadelphians confronted Theophilanthropy firsthand. In December 1802, Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker recorded news from a friend “that a Subscription was handing about for erecting a Temple of Reason for the Deists,” adding “Poor Philadelphia how art thou altered!—and where will this all end[?]” Drinker’s diary entry suggests what most troubled Theophilanthropy’s critics. Theophilanthropists presented an argument for the cultivation of consenting citizens that was deceptively and dangerously simple. They merely had to build enough institutions to propagate deism among impressionable children and misguided adults by convincing them that reason unaided by biblical revelation was the source of legitimate consent. This message would spread easily in a culture already riddled with ambient doubts about Christian truths and under the patriotic encouragement of Thomas Paine. Consent based in piety required seemingly great moral fortitude, especially considering Christian notions about man’s propensity for sin and rebellion. The deism of Theophilanthropy thus appealed to the depraved because it offered them intellectual cover through overconfidence in their own rational faculties. Hubris of this sort seemed impervious to the moral influence of parents, educators, ministers, or political leaders. Should infidelity gain hold in the United States, its critics worried, then the people’s ability to express informed consent would be dramatically weakened and the nation’s political survival imperiled. Thus every step, even the smallest, that indicated the culture’s drift toward deist principles in the present as well as the future compounded the political threats posed by deism. A deist future for the United States must have seemed imminent to observers such

Deist Future

75

as Drinker. After all, she penned her diary entry less than a decade after Abigail Adams wrote her daughter in 1794. In the intervening years, deism, which Adams had viewed as a dangerous side effect of republican religious tolerance, gained enough popularity that its adherents solicited support in the streets of the republic.44 In controversies during the 1790s surrounding the prospect of a deist future for the United States, participants on all sides placed great emphasis on the contexts in which religious ideas were sustained or discarded. Publication of The Age of Reason and developments in Revolutionary France pushed controversies over deism in this direction. Of course confident Christians regardless of denomination still adhered to the aspects of their faith that deists rejected. Nevertheless, those who responded to Paine’s book and the deists who embraced Theophilanthropy devised ways to support their religious opinions according to social and political considerations often removed from matters of theology. In the process, deists and their opponents replaced theological wrangling with political consent as the measure of merit for religious claims. Religious beliefs and practices most conducive to expressions of informed political consent deserved to advance across generations, both sides concluded. There seemed no other way of ensuring the republic’s legitimacy and long-term survival. Both sides thus found prevailing assumptions about informed consent useful in explaining why the political power and rights of people with opposing religious views could be curtailed. Individuals who held religious opinions deemed incompatible with popular sovereignty and political consent were incapable of effective civic engagement. Each side held that certain religious opinions allowed individuals to express their informed consent and could thus be tolerated while other forms were intolerable because they did not allow expressions of informed consent. Such realizations raised fundamental questions about the relationship between religious opinions and the legitimacy of the U.S. government. Controversies over a possible deist future ultimately concerned two of the era’s pressing political problems: how to ensure the long-term viability of republican political institutions and how best to create a moral citizenry. Paine’s critics had identified the multiple ways that Americans could be seduced away from Christianity. The importation of Theophilanthropy was evidence of this seduction at work. Both suggested the possibility of a deistic citizenry in the United States. Whereas deism had provided a useful

76

Chapter 2

rhetorical device in earlier efforts to define the constitutional and cultural boundaries of religious tolerance, the term increasingly corresponded to the presence of actual deists in public life. This forced considerations about whether or not a person could reject Christianity yet still maintain his or her intellectual and moral capacity for patriotic citizenship.

Chapter 3

Citizen Deists

Throughout the 1790s, questions surrounding national citizenship in the United States were addressed in several settings. This occurred in the courts, in state and federal governments, and in the larger society. When Americans expressed basic understandings of national citizenship, they often did so in relationship to diverse aspects of life, including religious belief. Thus in 1797, Tennessee congressman William Claiborne declared that it was “no more binding for citizens born in the United States to continue citizens of the United States, than it was for a Roman Catholic or Protestant to continue of that opinion, when he arrived at years of maturity, and could judge for himself.” Claiborne drew this provocative comparison while arguing the merits of a House bill regarding expatriation, or the rights of individuals to exchange citizenship in one nation for that in another. Debates in the House of Representatives over expatriation captured the attention of observers on the outside, some of whom feared the dangerous implications of views such as Claiborne’s. “Patriot” told readers of the Albany Centinel that support for expatriation by the republic’s political leaders, on the floors of Congress no less, was a sign of the times, after all “this is the age of reason.”1 Although only one of the many public exchanges over the meaning of national citizenship in the 1790s, Claiborne and Patriot still expressed larger positions. Claiborne recognized a radical contingency at the center of both political loyalty and religious faith; individuals could willfully change either. Patriot inferred that such a view destroyed political stability and religious tradition, thus expatriation’s popularity in a nation influenced by Thomas Paine. Both Claiborne and Patriot understood the implications of national citizenship within a religious frame of reference. During the same period, other American commentators of diverse viewpoints further explored the

78

Chapter 3

relationship between citizenship and religion. As this occurred, patriotism became a measure of both good citizenship and tolerable religious beliefs. Ultimately, then, the politician and the polemicist announced two opposing but broadly shared views of patriotic citizenship, each of which authorized fundamentally different forms of religious expression in the public sphere. The religious implications of the era’s divergent understandings of patriotic citizenship became especially pronounced in controversies between deists and their opponents. Patriotism provided a more specific, and a more politically acceptable, way to debate limits to religious tolerance and the generational implications of belief. Both were, after all, the larger issues at stake in public conflicts over deism from the 1770s onward. As ideals of religious freedom gained ground, debates over the meaning of patriotic citizenship provided an alternative way to express deep religious disagreements. Moreover, American critics who worried that the United States contained a vast pool of potential patrons for Thomas Paine and his ideas found especially strong reasons to concern themselves with larger debates over citizenship. This was a response to the broadening opportunities in American culture available for individuals to fashion a public deistic identity, to become “citizen” deists, thus further warranting the decade’s generational hopes and generational laments alike. Theophilanthropy had provided one such opportunity. Christianity’s vocal opponents such as Elihu Palmer would come to embody a deistic citizenry. By the early 1800s, controversies surrounding the advent of “citizen deists” gained a partisan edge. Appeals to patriotism thus also became a powerful means for waging partisan religious controversy in a society where civic membership was not legally tied to a specific confession. The eighteenth century’s political upheavals turned heavily on debates over citizenship and patriotism. Citizenship entailed basic understandings about the legal and political terms of membership in a given community. Patriotism described a citizen’s behavior within that community. In reality, citizenship and patriotism were intertwined and notoriously slippery concepts. Moreover, both concepts were frequently contested, always in flux, and prone to partisan manipulation, as evident in the revolutionary histories of France, Saint-Domingue, Latin America, and also the United States.2 Protestantism defined civic inclusion and patriotism for many British North Americans before the Revolution. Colonial print culture and public life had taught free provincials to love their Protestant monarch and to

Citizen Deists

79

identify themselves as Britons within a Protestant empire. At the very least, civil membership for the colonies’ white, Protestant majority had the semblance of a unified source of political and religious allegiance. It was, however, difficult to escape the fact that notions of a Protestant realm meant different things to different people. Powerful opinion in England held that Protestantism referred specifically to the Church of England. Because of this, a person’s allegiance and patriotism was suspect to the extent that he or she dissented from Anglican orthodoxy. Catholics and, to a lesser extent, infidels—the latter in this context meaning Jews and Muslims, but also deists—were viewed with the greatest suspicion. In the colonies, Protestant diversity was slightly less contentious, non-Christian populations were small, and Catholic empires shared the continent, so anti-Catholicism became the primary vehicle through which Protestant subjects expressed their patriotic affection for their Protestant king and disdain for their king’s papist enemies. Protestantism thus bound colonists to the empire.3 In the aftermath of rebellion, the meaning of membership and allegiance changed dramatically for people in the new United States. Citizenship not subjecthood was the basic category of full civic membership, and citizens owed allegiance to the republic not the monarch. Simultaneously, American Protestantism further splintered into competing denominations. Many Americans still assumed that religious belief corresponded to patriotic civic membership in a republic, but exactly how remained a contentious issue in the decades following the Revolution. Clarifying the sources of patriotic citizenship, including those derived from religious beliefs, thus emerged as a central political and cultural concern in the early national United States. Controversies over the meaning of American citizenship unique to developments in the 1790s were immediate responses to this concern. Within this context, “infidelity,” and specifically deistic challenges to Christianity, rivaled, and to some extent eclipsed, Catholicism as the religious opinions about which Americans debated the meaning of patriotic citizenship. The conclusions reached in this decade set patterns that persisted well into the nineteenth century.4 Debates over American citizenship beginning in the 1790s focused on two interrelated problems. The first concerned the national government’s ability and its right to police the character of immigrants who might become U.S. citizens. Congress addressed this issue in the three progressively more restrictive and partisan naturalization laws that it passed in 1790, 1795, and 1798, the last coming with the Alien and Sedition Acts. Each of these laws

80

Chapter 3

extended the residency requirements for citizenship—from two, to five, and eventually to fourteen years. The laws also extended the length of time between an individual’s public declaration of intent to become a citizen and the moment when the government became obligated to grant this request, which was five years at its longest. Finally, each of these naturalization laws imposed more rigorous standards for assessing the “good character” of potential citizens.5 The second problem concerned the meaning of American citizenship, and in particular the nature of allegiance. American jurists, politicians, and pamphleteers addressed this issue in debates over expatriation, or whether or not American citizens could exchange their American citizenship for that in another country, thus willfully and unilaterally dissolving their allegiance to the United States. Legal and political opinion remained sharply divided over whether or not American citizens could willfully abandon their citizenship in all instances. Both issues regarding citizenship were inseparable during the 1790s because proponents of expatriation argued that it was an implied right according to the country’s naturalization laws.6 Differences over naturalization and expatriation often involved competing, and long-standing, perceptions of cosmopolitanism. Early modern writers who celebrated cosmopolitanism did so because it taught individuals to replace local, parochial allegiances with commitments to a single world community bound together by sensibility and affection. Cosmopolitans jettisoned national prejudices to become citizens of the world. As LouisCharles Fougeret de Montbron declared in his 1750 treatise, Le Cosmopolite, “All the countries are the same to me” and “[I am] changing my places of residence according to my whim.” A correspondent to an American newspaper in 1798 expressed the same ideal in less rarefied language: “To contend then that every man must invariably feel an exclusive attachment, or owe exclusive duties, to the soil which has brought him into existence, is as absurd as to say, that because a man is born in a stable, he shall always delight in the smell of horse dung.”7 Cosmopolitanism attenuated national allegiance, which troubled its eighteenth-century critics. According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, cosmopolitans “boast that they love everyone, to have the right to love no one.” Plaudits to world citizenship masked a self-serving and reckless pursuit of individual interests over the common good of the body politic. In a more benign but no less critical assessment of cosmopolitan ideals, lawyers in a Supreme Court case in 1795 concerning American citizens and French privateers compared

Citizen Deists

81

“a citizen of the world” to “a human balloon, detached and buoyant in the political atmosphere, gazed at wherever he passes, and settled wherever he touches.” In this view world citizens were curious beings ill equipped for membership in a republican political community because they lacked personal autonomy or individual will. Critics of world citizenship thus viewed it as equal parts immoral and dangerous.8 Cosmopolitanism’s Janus-faced morality also underpinned competing early national opinions about expatriation. Various newspaper polemicists defended the right to expatriation, asking, rhetorically, “[W]hy should accidents of birth limit one’s political rights to form or live in a political society most suitable to themselves?” or “Where is the immutable tie, which binds us to the spot of earth that gave us being?” South Carolinian Charles Pinckney argued that “the law of nations gives to every one, as it ought, the right of living where he thinks proper; instead of being fixed to one spot, of becoming, if he pleases, a citizen of the world.” Others questioned expatriation’s legitimacy and its standing as a natural right by characterizing world citizenship in bleaker terms. Connecticut Federalist Uriah Tracy described expatriates as “a kind of political mulatto, without real attachment to any government.” Moreover, Tracy argued that expatriation encouraged a capricious and fickle view of national membership; for its proponents changing citizenship had all the significance of “pulling off a pair of mittens.” A selfprofessed “Patriot” asked rhetorically, “Supposing a man may throw away his Americanism, as he would his old shoes, why do we prate about love of country?” For this writer, proponents of expatriation stripped citizenship of its obligations and duties; individuals enjoyed the protection of government yet they owed little in return.9 Competing understandings of expatriation underwrote alternative views of patriotism. Expatriation’s critics adhered to notions of patriotism rooted in affections for locality, institutions, culture, and tradition. One hallmark of “true patriotism” was the impossibility of “a virtuous mind, whatever may be his society, or in whatever distant land he may be thrown, to forget the country of his own and of his family’s birth.” Another writer who opposed expatriation on the grounds that allegiance and protection were mutually required and irrevocable on the part of citizens and their government declared that “[a]n attachment to the place of our nativity, to the institutions of our ancestors, to the glory of our country may be a prejudice; but the being unconscious of these feelings is unworthy the name of man.” Changing national allegiance at will severed such affections because it allowed

82

Chapter 3

individuals to abandon their obligations to the government that protected them and to their society and neighbors who might need assistance during wars or other national crises. Critics illustrated this point with corporeal metaphors. Expatriation enervated the body politic whereas love for one’s country added “nerve to National Energy.” Expatriation also hobbled the body politic, for if Americans embraced this doctrine there would be “no ligament to connect society together.” Rather, an expatriate, by “putting on and putting off his relationship to Government, according to his own whim and caprice” certainly entailed “upon his country all the horrors of dreadful anarchy and endless confusion.”10 Those who defended expatriation as a natural right argued that patriotic duty stopped at obeying the laws of one’s society. As one defender of expatriation explained, individuals do have “a common claim for protection upon the society in which he lives. The duties he owes it in return consist in a due observance of its laws.” Conversely, “[w]hen one deliberately quits a society, without having transgressed its laws, his subjection to them ceases, and his connection with, in the aggregate, is dissolved.” This concept of patriotism rejected the notion that tradition, nativity, or family obligations necessarily carried moral weight. Americans who endorsed the right to expatriation specifically attacked the concept of perpetual allegiance, a common law doctrine that held that British subjects owed lifelong obedience to the nation of their birth. Perpetual allegiance doctrine originated in “ancient barbarity,” its critics argued. Those opposed to expatriation were indebted to a “slavish doctrine of the feudal law” or to “slavish principles” that exert the power of past generations on the present. According to this view, a person’s patriotic obligations should not be dictated solely by the fact that one’s grandparents, or even one’s parents, happened to reside in a given nation.11 Religious concerns were never far removed from discussions regarding allegiance and patriotism. This is unsurprising considering the centrality of “character” in the law and politics of American citizenship. Maryland jurist Luther Martin wrote of expatriation in highly acerbic terms. It was “a doctrine, first conceived in the womb, and nurtured by the disciples, of that accursed atheism, which hath long struggled to eradicate every principle of religion and social order, and to reduce the human race to the dignity of more than savage barbarism, loosing their vices and passions from all the restraints of morality, law, and religion, in order thereby to crumble away the very cement of society.” Expatriation’s defenders were understandably less vexed. “An American, I trust, is a freeman, the world is his house; and he

Citizen Deists

83

has a right to search after terrestrial happiness wherever he pleases. The God of nature has given him this privilege, and not confined him, like the grass, to wither on the spot he first grew on,” one writer argued. Some Americans also believed that patriotism required individuals to transcend differences, including competing religious opinions. The orator at an 1809 July Fourth commemoration reminded his audience of the example set by the republic’s founders, “the greatest and best men of all political parties and religious sects” who “sacrificed their prejudices on the alter [sic] of patriotism.”12 Yet, religion and citizenship shared more than a rhetorical connection during the 1790s and the early 1800s. Debates over expatriation raised concerns over the moral implications of cosmopolitanism and the limit, or extent, of voluntary allegiance in the political realm. Cosmopolitanism and voluntarism also figured in the spiritual realm as well. To one degree or another, these concepts were relevant to a host of questions regarding the meaning of religious obligation: whether between individuals and God, believers and their respective religious communities, believers and the government, or churches and politics. As a result, competing views about the nature of citizenship corresponded closely to some of the era’s central religious divisions. Opponents of established churches in New England frequently combined religious imperatives with a specific conception of citizenship. They attacked Congregationalism’s traditional pillars using language shared by those who defended the rights of citizens to freely choose political allegiance. In an 1809 July Fourth oration at Taunton, Massachusetts, Elias Smith, who viewed himself as simply a Christian, challenged his audience that “[m]any are republicans as to government, and yet are but half republicans, being in matters of religion still bound to a Catechism, creed, covenant, or a superstitious priest. Venture to be as independent in things of religion, as in those which respect the government in which you live.” For New England dissenters, assumptions about citizenship that entailed the right to expatriation provided strong political justification for a religious case against combinations of civil and clerical authority.13 At a broader level, both in New England and beyond, several popular Christian movements in the early republic incorporated voluntary impulses into their theology and their ecclesiology, which echoed political assumptions about the right to expatriation and transferable patriotism. Widely shared beliefs in free will, political commitments to freedom of conscience, and the contractual underpinnings of religious communities and churches

84

Chapter 3

all rested heavily on individual choice and discretion. This emphasis on individual choice in spiritual matters fueled early national debates over the foundations of religious authority. Aspects of Baptist ecclesiology strongly emphasized voluntarism, which paralleled a similar thrust within early national concepts of citizenship. For some Baptists, local congregations stemmed from voluntary arrangements between similarly committed individuals who organized themselves to encourage mutual piety and conversion. Individual consent and conscience underwrote this ideal of Baptist community. The idealization of choice further influenced Baptist groups who incorporated free will into their theology. As a Freewill Baptist in Vermont expressed in verse, “Know then that every soul is free / To choose his life and what he’ll be; / For this eternal truth giv’n, / That God will force no man to heav’n.” For those in the Freewill sect, salvation, like citizenship, resulted largely from personal choice.14 Cosmopolitanism as contemporaries understood the term underpinned the early Methodists’ teachings and their organization. The movement’s emphasis on itinerancy discouraged Methodist evangelists from attaching virtue or sentiment to a specific location. This characteristic came from Francis Asbury’s injunction to seek converts far and wide, which he did over forty-five years of near constant travel and preaching throughout the United States. Asbury’s missionary work set the standard for the thousands of Methodist circuit riders in the early nineteenth century, single men who embodied the movement’s rejection of a settled clergy. Itinerancy prevented the circuit riders from developing the family, economic, and social ties that created affections for a given place. Some Methodists consciously identified themselves as world citizens. In 1814 Lorenzo Dow, the early republic’s most recognizable and colorful Methodist itinerant, published History of Cosmopolite, which included portions of his journal as well as accounts of his missionary travels. Dow even reprinted a copy of his passport issued in 1805 by Secretary of State James Madison. Moreover, although movement throughout the world was a condition of life for Methodist preachers, they also viewed it in accord with biblical teachings. New England Methodist George Roberts argued that parishes and settled ministers may have been “practical and traditional” but were not scriptural. Like all other geographic designations, Roberts thus concluded, parishes were little more than legal acknowledgments of local prejudices.15 One person’s local prejudices were another’s bulwarks of tradition and public comity, however. In contradictory ways, itinerants threatened local

Citizen Deists

85

order gained from stable families and patriarchal authority. These predominantly young, single men seemingly exercised untoward influence, sexual and otherwise, over other men’s daughters and wives, yet their masculinity remained in doubt. The experiences of evangelicals in the South and West document this. Yet itinerancy proved uniquely contentious in New England. There, Methodists’ commitments to spreading the word by traveling about challenged established Congregational ministers whose authority rested on their ties to a specific church and community. The vestiges of covenant theology remained compelling enough in this region that many Congregational ministers and laypeople associated social order with the mutual obligations and duties that existed between ordained clergy and their parishioners. From this perspective, familiarity and local sensibilities carried moral currency and political power. “Strangers,” as Congregational minister Nathan Williams of Tolland, Connecticut, labeled Methodist itinerants in 1793, upset this balance. At least one Congregationalist minister feared that cosmopolitan ideals threatened more than Christian unity. In an 1802 sermon before his church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, John Foster derided the “philosophy” of infidelity in which “[w]e are called upon to extend an undistinguishing affection to all mankind; and, at the same time, forbidden to cherish and express any appropriate kindness for our parents, our children and other relations, beyond what we feel for utter strangers.” Preferences for family, community, and, by implication, tradition were those parts of life that made moral obligation and religion meaningful. Foster thus exclaimed that “visionary cosmopolitanism” was irreconcilable with Christianity.16 When Congregationalist ministers preached about the dangers of infidelity, their theological views often overlapped with distinct concepts of citizenship. Foster’s critique of cosmopolitanism suggests the sources of Congregationalist ideas about civic membership. Boston minister Joseph Eckley reiterated the New England belief in God’s covenant with the American people in a 1798 Thanksgiving discourse. In the context of the 1790s and debates over expatriation, however, the language of providence and covenants mirrored the arguments of more secular writers who denied that Americans could abandon their citizenship at will. God granted unwavering protection to the faithful just as government provided unwavering protection to its citizens. Reciprocal relationships of protection and obedience thus defined religious and civil covenants. As Eckley described humanity’s relationship with God, “if we do not forsake him, he will not forsake us.” Individuals who abandoned Christianity were forced to accept the implications

86

Chapter 3

of their decision, which Eckley described in vivid detail. Infidels were destined “to float, as a mariner, on a wide ocean of billows, where no inviting land is ever found to meet his inquiring eye, and there are no soundings for his lead and line.” Eckley described the perils of infidelity in metaphorical terms very similar to those used by critics of cosmopolitanism to describe world citizens. They lacked personal moral guidance, and they were denied the benefits of community. Infidels were spiritual expatriates.17 Spiritual expatriation was no less politically devastating than civil expatriation. Foster maintained that “infidel philosophy” taught its followers to denigrate tradition and custom as nothing more than the dead hand of “antiquity.” Infidels naively believed that “all the usages of antiquity are insidiously represented as a system of tyranny, calculated to enslave both the minds and the bodies of men, and deprive them of that freedom, to which they have a natural claim.” Such a view had immediate consequences. For Eckley, infidelity threatened America’s “civil and religious liberties.” John Lathrop, another Boston minister, warned that disbelief in Christian teachings eliminated effective moral checks on human behavior, thus eventually requiring despotic power to hold society and government together. Individuals were however free to choose infidelity or piety, but doing so had implications that reached far beyond private belief. These were ultimately patriotic choices about whether or not Americans would have a republic governed in a godly manner. Indeed, choice was the operative principle in the view of each of these ministers. They all recognized freedom of conscience and the undesirability of legal prohibitions on anti-Christian opinions. Eckley expressed a shared perspective when he acknowledged that the “dark lantern” of skepticism provided infidels “the least ray of hope, beyond the grave,” but “we have not right to rob him of his system.” Thus in their own ways, these ministers preached messages that sought to curtail unchristian beliefs not through theological disputation alone or with the coercive force of law, but with sentimental appeals to patriotic duty.18 Ultimately, these Congregationalist clerics endorsed an ideal of patriotism shared by expatriation’s critics in Congress and the press. Foster advised simply, “We are to accommodate our feelings and pursuits to the situation, in which God and nature have placed us.” Such a view had compelling political virtues according to Eckley. He implored his congregants that as Christians “we must love our Country—reverence its institutions—respect its laws—come forth in its defence—and stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.” Lathrop argued that love for country could not

Citizen Deists

87

exist without a belief in eternal rewards and punishments. Because good citizenship required obedience to laws and moral duties, only fear of God’s judgment could ensure patriotism. He bluntly warned that “missionaries of atheism” zealously circulated books and newspapers designed “to render both the Government and the religion of the country despicable.” It was the patriot’s duty to defend piety, tradition, and nation by mobilizing against infidelity’s source, revolutionary France, and with arms if necessary.19 Such ministerial guidance certainly seemed timely to early national observers who noticed arguments for an altogether different relationship between citizenship and religious opinions. American readers could find examples of writers who maintained that deism provided religious opinions most conducive to patriotic citizenship. Philadelphia printer Benjamin Franklin Bache published an oration on the topic of religious worship by Henri François Godineau, a French priest turned revolutionary. Delivered in 1793, Godineau argued that the entirety of Jesus’ message derived from two maxims: love for God and love for neighbors. This conclusion was obvious from “the clear and natural deductions which reason readily makes, when unfettered by prejudice.” Godineau referred to the prejudice of intellectual habit whereby early church thinkers imported their metaphysical precepts into “the pure and simple system of morality” articulated by a deistic Jesus. This resulted in doctrines such as the Trinity, the incarnation of the word, and divine miracles, all of which over time had become culturally entrenched and intertwined with civil authority. Catholicism under the Old Regime was tyrannical, thus the citizens of the French republic needed a religion suitable to their political status. Their model, Godineau concluded, was Jesus’ original deism and the actions of the first Christian community, “the true Sans Culottes.” American Robert Coram’s 1791 treatise on education maintained that religious instruction was unnecessary for effective public life. According to Coram, “No modes of faith, systems of manners, or foreign or dead languages should be taught in these schools. As none of them are necessary to obtain a knowledge of the obligations of society.”20 Self-professed deists went further. Denis Driscol confidently announced that deists were “the best of citizens” because the sources of their morality and virtue came from within. “The more the deists despise the superstitions that surround them, the more they impose upon themselves the agreeable task of being just and humane.” Driscol was not alone in this view. America’s deists increasingly justified their attacks on Christianity as acts of patriotic citizenship. Specifically, they adopted concepts of citizenship that

88

Chapter 3

incorporated a rejection of tradition and archaic institutions as well as voluntarism in matters of political and religious allegiance. According to this view, rejecting Christianity was crucial to fulfilling one’s republican civic duties. Deism was thus patriotic.21 One of the most notable citizen deists in the United States began his rise to national prominence in Philadelphia, during its deadly autumn of 1793. That season, Philadelphians in numbers became weak, feverish, and racked by the “[f]requent vomiting of matter resembling coffee grounds in colour and consistence.” Healthy residents with means fled Philadelphia. Many of the city’s African Americans treated the sick. The jaundiced, unfortunate of all races died of painful kidney and liver failure. Samuel Hodgdon provided the macabre report that “[w]hole families have been swept away,” and that “the dying groans has filled our ears.” The stench of rotting corpses contaminated the fall air: yellow fever had struck Philadelphia, eventually killing four thousand people. Elihu Palmer returned to Philadelphia earlier in the year, and he too contracted the disease. Although he survived, the virus permanently blinded him. Eminent Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush attended to Palmer during his illness. Palmer refused Rush’s standard treatment for the fever, which included a regimen of bleeding and purging. Rush believed that Palmer’s decision cost him his sight.22 This ostensible misfortune embellished Palmer’s stature as a polemicist. His blindness became the physical characteristic that most defined him as deism’s chief American proponent. This image countered dominant eighteenth-century theories of the body and perception that elevated sight to the pinnacle of human senses. In an ocularcentric epistemology, reason required information about the world, from words to nature, which only vision provided. Other senses were superstition’s handmaidens because they misled the mind, but the eyes were the organs of empirical observation and accuracy. This cultural understanding of vision suggests that Palmer’s blindness should have diminished his authority to deploy the rhetoric of reason and illumination. Instead, Palmer’s supporters highlighted his perspicuity despite his blindness as evidence that his writings and orations warranted serious attention. New York printer John Crookes prefaced his 1797 edition of a Palmer oration with a statement about Palmer’s “peculiar situation.” Although “[n]ature has become a blank” to Palmer, Crookes assured readers that his ideas “will be found strong and vigorous, and frequently original— a proof that loss of sight does by no means impair the energy of the contemplative faculties of man.” Several years later, John Fellows—a New York

Figure 3. Elihu Palmer, Copied from the Best Likeness That Appeared in America (ca. 1820). London bookseller Richard Carlile sold this engraving of Palmer during the 1820s. This is the only known image of Palmer. His blindness is portrayed as essential to both his appearance and his intellect. (The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Simon Gratz autograph collection.)

90

Chapter 3

printer and bookseller, and an ardent Palmer supporter—noted in his 1824 memoir that Palmer may have been blind, “[b]ut his courageous mind rose superior to the obstacles that appeared to have closed his usefulness forever.” Richard Carlile sold an engraving of Palmer at his London bookstore in the 1820s that depicted him with closed eyes, grasping a walking cane, above the lines: “The darkness drear obscured his visual ray / His mind, unclouded felt no loss of day; / In reason’s cause his nervous thoughts combined / Flow to the world and harmonize mankind.” Palmer’s blindness evidently sharpened his rational faculties.23 Publication of The Age of Reason sparked the dramatic rise in Palmer’s public profile. Before 1794, Palmer’s notoriety rarely reached beyond the places where he incited local religious controversies, as in Philadelphia in 1792. After 1794, Americans who wanted to define religious authority along deistic lines celebrated Palmer as their American Paine. Palmer’s initiative only enhanced this perspective. He wrote The Examiners Examined: Being a Defence of the Age of Reason, the most extensive American apology for The Age of Reason. He published this work anonymously in 1794 in New York. Palmer specifically targeted American orators and pamphleteers, six in total, who denounced The Age of Reason. Palmer borrowed his title from religious polemics published earlier in the eighteenth century, a literary nod to a mode of religious controversy that he wished to emulate.24 Palmer’s defense of The Age of Reason set the stage for his career as a polemicist. Following The Examiners Examined, he published three orations, a book, Principles of Nature, and a newspaper, Prospect; or, View of the Moral World. This paper existed for fifteen months, from December 1803 through March 1805. Though it is difficult to determine Prospect’s readership or its circulation, interested subscribers could locate the paper’s agents in Orange County, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York City. After 1794, Palmer resided primarily in New York but traveled often to deliver lectures and orations, with occasional sojourns upstate to Newburgh and south to Baltimore and, more frequently, to Philadelphia, where he died of pleurisy in 1806. During this period he delivered orations on a weekly and, sometimes, a biweekly basis. Their content can be gleaned from newspaper announcements. In September 1797, Palmer delivered a Sunday evening lecture in which “the errors and pernicious effects of what are called revealed and supernatural systems of religion are exposed,” and a Thursday evening lecture titled “Investigation of Truth . . . on Subjects moral, philosophical, and deistical.” In addition, Palmer’s orations, both those delivered weekly and

Citizen Deists

91

those given on special occasions, provided material for Principles of Nature. Chapters on biblical stories and comparisons of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism were all themes Palmer previously addressed in his weekly orations. His Original Sin, Atonement, Faith, &c. A Christmas Discourse Delivered in New-York, December 1798 appeared as the fifth chapter in the book’s third edition.25 Palmer could not have undertaken the daily work of religious controversy without assistance. A crucial person in this regard was Mary Powell, Palmer’s second wife whom he married in 1803. Mary Powell was likely related to Benjamin Powell, proprietor of the boardinghouse where Palmer lived in the late 1790s. She quickly became indispensable to Palmer’s work. Because of his blindness, Elihu dictated and Mary Palmer actually wrote all of the text “authored” by him during their marriage, including his weekly newspaper and later editions of Principles of Nature. Although committed to Elihu and his work, Mary gained few worldly benefits for her labors. She wrote Robert Hunter of Manchester, England, in September 1806 to report the loss of “My dearest My best of husbands.” She also mentioned that poverty had forced her to sell her furniture in order to pay rent. Palmer could not have propagated deism, either through orations or in print, without the support of people sympathetic to his ideas and, in some instances, willing to suffer hardship on his behalf.26 Enthusiastic supporters provided material support for Palmer’s polemic endeavors. Palmer was influenced by the writings of Paine, Joel Barlow, Volney, Condorcet, and William Godwin, the “philosophers and philanthropists of the present day.” New York printer and bookseller John Fellows issued American editions of works by all of these writers, thus providing Palmer ready access to the works of English radicals, and the French philosophes who enjoyed a renaissance under the Directory. More important, Fellows published The Examiners Examined as well as Palmer’s later orations. Philip Freneau, a close associate of Thomas Jefferson and an operative in the emerging Republican coalition, published advertisements for Palmer’s weekly Sunday morning and Thursday evening discourses in his newspaper the Time Piece. Supporters also secured lecture space for Palmer. He had steady New York venues, such as the Union Hotel. John W. Francis attended several of these orations, which were characterized by Palmer’s “deep, sonorous, and emphatic utterance.” Around 1805, Palmer gained access to the Universal Church founded by John Foster, a fairly radical Universalist minister, and his followers. Palmer celebrated this in a letter to Robert Hunter,

92

Chapter 3

noting that most of the congregants were “very friendly to our cause” and receptive to his “Deistical Discourses.” Palmer predicted optimistically that “this augurs well to the holy cause of truth and furnishes at least in this country a well founded hope that superstition and revealed nonsense must be destroyed.”27 Effective religious controversy required good publicity and patronage. This was evident in the print history of An Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement of the Human Species, Palmer’s 1797 July Fourth oration. Supportive editors publicized Palmer’s oration in advance. Freneau did more. He placed an announcement in the July 3 issue of Time Piece that promoted Palmer’s ideas with an added appeal for financial support on behalf of Palmer’s “peculiarly unfortunate situation.” A combination of Freneau’s endorsement and Palmer’s profile among New York’s deistically inclined residents contributed to what the editor of the Diary; or, Loudon’s Register described as the “respectable auditory” assembled to hear “Citizen Palmer,” a moniker befitting his sympathies with the French Revolution. The Diary’s editor hoped that “the public will be granted with a full view of this elegant and interesting oration.” A broader public indeed gained access to Palmer’s oration. It was printed three separate times in 1797: once as a pamphlet by John Crookes, once by Freneau in the Time Piece, and finally by John Fellows, who sold it at his store for two shillings.28 On two occasions, prominent figures from American military and political life received appeals to support Palmer’s endeavors. In 1798, Fellows sought donations from Revolutionary War general Horatio Gates to help defray Palmer’s living expenses. Fellows enclosed a copy of Palmer’s 1797 July Fourth oration in his letter to Gates as evidence for the worthiness of Palmer’s cause. Palmer wrote President Jefferson on his own behalf in September 1802 with a message that combined partisan support and self-promotion. Palmer gave Jefferson a copy of the second edition of Principles of Nature to recognize Jefferson’s political victory, “an event consoling to the feelings of every true Republican,” and as a token of his “sincere attachment” to the president. Palmer admitted that his book contained no arguments unfamiliar to Jefferson, yet it was a worthy gift precisely because it contained ideas “for which you have contended.” Neither Gates nor Jefferson responded, although the president kept his copy of Principles of Nature. In their efforts to promote deism from the early republic’s intellectual margins, Palmer and his supporters thus cultivated loose support networks of mixed effectiveness that nevertheless enhanced Palmer’s public persona.29

Citizen Deists

93

Although Palmer’s career as a polemicist benefited from social connections in several communities, the era’s salient cosmopolitan values sharpened his deism’s critical edge and set its political scope. World citizenship elevated humanity’s general interests over local and national prejudices. For proponents of world citizenship, civic membership in a specific nation still put demands on people to act in ways that had a benevolent influence on the larger world. Cosmopolitanism extended the moral reach of patriotic national citizenship. For Palmer, wrong religious beliefs created the most pernicious and intractable prejudices. Palmer developed his cosmopolitanism’s critical and political implications in two important and interrelated ways. First, he critiqued the Bible in order to discredit Christianity in its entirety, and, second, he heralded deism as the moral passport to virtuous world citizenship. The Bible had been translated multiple times and printed in many editions by the late eighteenth century, primarily by scholars in England and Protestant Germany. Christian writers in Britain, some Catholic but mostly Protestant, responded to deist critiques by calling for new and more rigorous translations of the Bible. An expansive understanding of philology provided the methodological centerpiece of this biblical scholarship. English scholars used historical, social, political, and even topographical and botanical information to lend their translations greater authority and authenticity. This scholarly approach was well developed by the 1780s and early 1790s. Biblical scholar Alexander Geddes, a Scottish Catholic and Britain’s leading proponent of the philological method, vowed to subject the Bible to a “severe rational critique” in order to produce an authoritative translation that could withstand the same criticism and judgment that all books deserved. With careful scholarship, Geddes argued, the Bible, like every other text, could be “corrected.”30 Developments within eighteenth-century biblical scholarship nevertheless exposed the Bible to withering critiques. In 1742, Robert Ross wrote A Complete Introduction to the Latin Tongue, which he intended for grammar school students who might attend the College of New Jersey. Ross promoted his book by noting that “[m]any of the objections and cavils of infidels are founded on the translation, which, though they may puzzle a mere English reader, yet immediately vanish as soon as the original is carefully consulted and understood.” By the 1790s, infidelity seemed so threatening that defense of the Bible could not rest solely on a sound education in ancient languages. The French Revolution produced a backlash in England against the scholarly

94

Chapter 3

approaches of Geddes and others whose writings replaced theology with culture, broadly defined, as the Bible’s primary source of legitimacy. For many observers, events on the continent called for more transcendent, and traditional, justifications of biblical truth. Geddes’s English opponents labeled him a “Painist” and a “Reformist,” among other pejoratives, because they quickly recognized the troubling implications of his scholarship and that produced by others like him. Palmer’s writings and those of his critics exhibited the influences of current English biblical scholarship as well as the weaknesses it inadvertently exposed in biblical authority.31 In one instance, Palmer emphasized discrepancies between various editions and translations of the Bible, some printed in the very same year, as part of his broader argument about the pernicious historic overlap between religious and civil authority. Palmer believed that the political history of the Christian world revealed lurking fears about the Bible’s capacity to secure assent and reverence in light of its textual inconsistencies. This problem became particularly acute following the Protestant Reformation, a fact long recognized by European biblical scholars. As a result, Palmer claimed, “The internal excellence and credit of the bible itself have been so far suspected that it has been frequently thought adviseable [sic] to place it under the protection of civil law.”32 In Examiners Examined, Palmer argued that a combination of linguistic diversity and historical vagaries riddled the eighteenth-century Bible with interpretive problems that compounded his doubts about the veracity of revelation. “It is next to impossible,” Palmer argued, that the Bible “could have been transmitted down to the present time pure and uncontaminated, even if there had been but one nation and one language upon earth.” And at the most basic level, contemporary Bibles failed to achieve simple didactic functions because they lacked clarity and historical accuracy. Believers were thus commanded to accept a text that would be rejected under any other circumstances merely because the faithful revered it as God’s revealed word. William Wyche wrote an entire pamphlet repudiating The Examiners Examined in which he defended the Bible on grounds not markedly different from those Palmer used to dismiss it. Despite multiple translations, editions, and the vagaries of time, core Christian truths were easily discernible in the text. Wyche concluded, “Though there are thirty thousand readings, yet no material corruption has been discovered.” What Palmer viewed as the Bible’s greatest weakness, Wyche viewed as its enduring strength.33 Despite their best efforts to defend the Bible, the era’s biblical scholars

Citizen Deists

95

rendered it especially vulnerable to attack on cosmopolitan grounds. The Bible contained evidence for Christianity’s transcendent claims but also its origins in the world. Believers read the Bible as their source of God’s teachings but it was just a book to its critics, a book inseparable from history, parochial traditions, ancient customs, culture, and human tampering. In other words, the Bible seemed imbued with the very prejudices that world citizens were supposed to overcome. Palmer had long opposed prejudices rooted in family ties, community, or the nation. Moreover, he rejected nationalist sentiments and local allegiances, religious or otherwise, that insisted “I should love the spot of earth on which I was born, in preference to any other part of the globe,” or claimed “that my own nation is superiour to all others in science, virtue, and happiness.” Palmer’s larger intellectual commitments to world citizenship amplified his critique of biblical authority. Palmer’s commentary on the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus exemplifies this point. In this chapter, God allowed the Israelites to enslave “heathens” and “strangers” but prohibited them from enslaving their own people. Palmer characterized this passage as religious justification for “national distinctions,” which served “only to generate national hostility, and destroy that sentiment of universal philanthropy” upon which world happiness rested. Assertions of divine providence, false understandings of God’s character, and a proliferation of religious sects all contributed to national prejudices. Thus, for Palmer, it followed that the various world religions, each with its own theological systems, sacred texts, and devout believers, were accidents of geography and history not examples of God’s influence. Palmer brought cosmopolitan judgments to bear on the Bible in order to initiate a broader inquiry into “the conflicting opinions by which the world has been agitated.”34 Palmer’s cosmopolitan exegesis had strong political valence. Bible stories such as that in Leviticus violated natural rights to freedom. Furthermore, Palmer argued that Christianity’s essential doctrines destroyed “every principle of distributive justice.” Original sin, for example, “makes the intelligent beings who are now in existence accountable for the errors and vices of a man who lived six thousand years ago.” “That this idea of hereditary original sin was engendered in the flighty imagination of fanatics, must appear evident,” Palmer concluded. Palmer suggested that the Christian God behaved no differently than a monarch who demanded perpetual allegiance. Christianity thus opposed natural rights enshrined in the “American constitutions” and acknowledged by “free citizens of all countries.” The Bible endorsed outmoded political theory; Christianity was incompatible with a

96

Chapter 3

revolutionary age. From this point of view, rejecting Christianity and opposing its influence across the globe provided the moral ballast of citizenship in one’s country and the larger world. Recognizing this, Palmer’s critique of original sin relied on assumptions deeply resonant to contemporary debates over the nature of American citizenship. Critics of perpetual allegiance subscribed to a similar logic concerning the injustice of past decisions entailing obligations on present generations. Palmer ultimately argued that deism, rather than Christianity, provided religious principles that were “universal, and which would dissolve those national prejudices by whose influence monarchs have deluged the world in blood.” Deism, Palmer held, taught the only religious opinions truly conducive to effective citizenship in one’s nation, and, therefore, the world.35 Recent history and the anticipation of future events defined the field of deistic world citizenship, which Palmer explored in his July Fourth orations. A salient theme of An Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement of the Human Species was Palmer’s argument that deistic world citizenship required “moral and political liberty” and an end to “civil and religious despotism.” On another occasion, Palmer argued that moral and political liberty stemmed from two sources. The first were revolutions modeled on those in the United States and France that promoted “the absolute reign of reason, and the triumph of republican glory” and augmented “the felicity of the world.” The second source operated on an individual level through the workings of free inquiry. Palmer argued that the moment had arrived “[w] hen man shall have no fears relative to the investigation of knowledge, and no obstacle to obstruct the beneficial activity of his faculties.” As a result, individuals would feel free to openly and rationally inquire into all concerns and matters of social and intellectual life. Palmer believed that free inquiry would “dissipate the ignorance and alleviate the misfortunes of associated existence.” By participating in a series of ostensibly nationalist political revolutions, freethinking citizens would ultimately advance a cosmopolitan sensibility premised on a shared commitment to universal reason. As a result, free inquiry provided an epistemological lingua franca. It would, Palmer believed, undermine local combinations of civil power and sectarian preference that divided nation-states, thereby ensuring moral order throughout the world.36 During the 1790s, a host of Americans imagined alternative concepts of citizenship as the decade’s events prompted urgent discussions about social order and cultural cohesion. Still, Palmer admitted at least once that

Citizen Deists

97

his notions of deistic world citizenship rang of “delirium.” This quip elides the extent to which he and members of New York’s more prominent literary and intellectual circles trod similar ground. Playwright William Dunlap read An Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement of the Human Species. “This oration gives me a higher idea of the man Than I had; indeed, it is energetic, philosophic & benevolent,” he proclaimed. Dunlap, himself a deist of growing conviction, belonged to the Friendly Club, a coterie dedicated to polite conversation. Physician Elihu Hubbard Smith actively participated in the Friendly Club, and he was a deist as well. Godwin and Condorcet counted among the most influential authors for members of the Friendly Club, but Smith and Dunlap also admired Volney’s writings. In addition to shared reading habits, Smith and Dunlap both believed that open intellectual inquiry and the unfettered flow of knowledge would spread comity and justice throughout the United States and the world. As Dunlap concluded in a 1797 essay critical of national patriotism, the time had come “when to state anything short of the whole truth, is known to aid the cause of falsehood; when to prefer anything but for its superior worth, is acknowledged for injustice.”37 Like Palmer, Dunlap and Smith placed cosmopolitan sensibilities and deism at the center of their ideas about citizenship, a concept not limited to politics or membership in a particular state but one focused on challenging the presumed restraints of tradition and outmoded beliefs. However, Dunlap, and especially Smith, held Federalist political sympathies that put their disbelief in Christianity at odds with larger Federalist alliances between civil and religious authority. They also feared that critical investigations into all subjects required heavy responsibilities that everyone in society could not be trusted with. Thus Dunlap limited his praise for Palmer to the pages of his diary, and Smith endorsed established churches as bulwarks of social order until ordinary people had the mental ability to safely jettison Christianity.38 Comparing the role of deism in the concepts of world citizenship developed by members of the Friendly Club and Palmer highlights the controversial nature of the latter’s polemic career. Dunlap and Smith consciously developed their thoughts about citizenship distinct from specific political concerns, thereby separating their deism from the immediate exercise of power. Palmer’s concept of citizenship seemed far less politically neutral in light of mounting evidence that he influenced others to become citizen deists by defining political membership and patriotism along deistic lines. John Fellows adopted the language of deistic citizenship in his letter to Horatio

98

Chapter 3

Gates. According to Fellows, Palmer labored tirelessly “for the amelioration of mankind, by the destruction of the greatest enemy of his felicity, that of the tyrant, prejudice” but “without a prospect of emolument amidst the reproaches of civil and religious bigotry.” “From the bigot and the enemies of civil improvement no aid in this case could be expected; but from the liberal, from the Philanthropist  .  .  .  from the friend of liberty Mr. Palmer ought to expect aid and encouragement,” Fellows appealed. Gates would surely support Palmer because all good patriots favored political and intellectual progress, Fellows suggested in his letter. Dunlap and Smith understood deistic citizenship on solely normative terms, as an ideal of membership and allegiance that should prevail under the right circumstances. Palmer and his supporters promoted deistic citizenship as a form of civic engagement that Americans should embrace immediately. Palmer’s polemic career thus highlights the networks of sociability, print, and communication through which deists might enter the public sphere as citizens, of both their nation and the world.39 By some accounts, a disturbing number of deist citizens already lived in Orange County, New York. Like those of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, local histories of Orange County report that it had a reputation for hostility toward Christianity. This was especially true for Newburgh, a thriving port on the Hudson River sixty miles north of Manhattan. Only fourteen years earlier, the Continental Army was headquartered in Newburgh during the waning months of the Revolutionary War. Here disgruntled officers devised a plan to overthrow the republic and anoint George Washington king of an American monarchy. The coup was foiled, and by the 1790s residents were more likely to hear the buzz of Newburgh’s fourteen sawmills than the murmurs of revolution. Newburgh’s residents eagerly felled trees in the surrounding forests, which the mills transformed into ship timber, barrel staves, and planks that were sold in New York markets. Newburgh also developed a shipbuilding business, and in short order the town’s vessels bobbed in ports from the West Indies to Liverpool. In 1797 Newburgh acquired one of the era’s most promising symbols of civic vibrancy: a fire company that Newburgh’s boosters insisted was indispensible in light of the town’s growth. Nevertheless, Newburgh’s more pious citizens had reason to worry even amid the promise around them. As the Reverend John Johnston warned, Newburgh had “infidelity, and organized infidelity.”40 This distinction aptly describes what Americans found if they looked closely at the world of Paine, Theophilanthropy, and Palmer. Johnston

Citizen Deists

99

expressed the difference between personally doubting or criticizing Christianity and using these beliefs as the basis for larger public endeavors. “Infidelity” referred to relatively harmless private opinions. “Organized infidelity” referred to the social networks whereby deists entered public life as citizens committed to spreading their beliefs. Organized infidelity had far greater implications; it was potentially treasonous thus deeply unpatriotic. Beginning in 1797 there was a growing consensus among many in Newburgh, and in surrounding towns, that organized infidelity, advanced by citizen deists, was spreading. Palmer frequently visited Newburgh to deliver orations that supportive locals such as physician Phineas Hedges hosted and attended. Hedges was a member of a deist club in Newburgh, but his disregard for Christianity was even more pronounced in light of his prominence in the region. He delivered a July Fourth oration before the Republican Society in neighboring Ulster County. He also published medical writings, including a critical appraisal of Scottish physician John Brown’s Elementa Medicinae and a case report about pediatric scrofula that appeared in the Medical Repository, a scientific periodical that Elihu Hubbard Smith helped found. Jonathan Hedges, another Newburgh physician, was the Orange County agent for Prospect; or, View of the Moral World in the early 1800s. Likely related, the two Hedges shared not only a family aversion to Christianity but also community stature. Jonathan Hedges’s name appears on the initial list of directors for Newburgh’s first bank, founded in 1811. However, local editor David Denniston was Newburgh’s most infamous resident deist in the late 1790s.41 Denniston was one of Newburgh’s more notable citizens. He was a bookbinder and printer by trade, and by birth a member of the extended Clinton family. The latter connected Denniston to one of New York’s most powerful political clans. In 1797 Denniston began editing the Mirror, a local newspaper. His reputation for deism was not without merit. Denniston had reprinted a copy of Thomas Paine’s defense of English booksellers prosecuted by their government for selling The Age of Reason. He also published Paine’s speech before the Society of Theophilanthropists in Paris. Even worse, in autumn 1797 Denniston invited Palmer to lecture on deism in Newburgh. Denniston even helped Palmer navigate Newburgh’s streets and “entertained” him in his home. Denniston’s behavior drew the ire of his neighbors in Newburgh, but also from people in nearby communities.42 Readers in Montgomery, twelve miles west of Newburgh, canceled their subscription to the Mirror because Denniston was “an avowed enemy to

100

Chapter 3

Revealed Religion.” The Mirror’s former subscribers lodged their accusation in a letter to Denniston. True to the early republic’s superficial distinction between private communications and public statements, the Montgomery letter was reprinted in the Goshen Repository within in a month. The controversy between Denniston and his former patrons in Montgomery became politically salient in entirely new ways once it entered the press, ultimately sparking a minor print war. In December 1797 editor John G. Hurtin expended ink, paper, and labor on a supplemental issue of the Goshen Repository largely dedicated to reprinting recriminations exchanged between Denniston and his opponents. The controversy extended into 1798 with publication of an anonymous pamphlet defending Denniston.43 Although fundamental differences of religious opinion sparked the Newburgh controversy, those involved did not raise theological concerns, or even question the intrinsic truth of their opponents’ religious opinions. Denniston’s critics were little troubled by his personal irreligion. As one former subscriber expressed, “We do not wish to disturb your repose in the enjoyment of your private sentiment concerning religion.” The Montgomery critics also denied personal animus toward Denniston. Rather, they claimed that their opposition stemmed from larger considerations, those “motives of sincere regard to our country, ourselves, and our rising families.” Denniston responded with a general statement of deism’s moral virtues. However, he defended himself on grounds noticeably distinct from obvious religious principles. His work, Denniston pronounced, adhered to a “first duty . . . to assist in promoting truth” and to the “unprejudiced examination of every principle relative to the happiness of man.”44 The Newburgh controversy highlights the ease, but also the necessity, whereby early nationals subsumed religious differences within the language and assumptions of citizenship. The concerned people of Montgomery believed that patriotic citizenship corresponded to local traditions or prevailing opinions, including commonly shared religious beliefs. This reflected one of the dominant ideas about citizenship current in the 1790s, which defined patriotism in broad cultural terms. According to this view, civic obligation required individuals to measure the virtue of their actions by their contribution to local values and political order. Denniston threatened both. His opponents reminded him “that the principles of the gospel lie at the foundation of our civil constitutions, and the laws of our country.” Any “attempt to remove that main foundation stone, endangers the whole fabric.” Denniston’s promotion of deism, especially his hospitality toward Palmer,

Citizen Deists

101

affected the larger community; Denniston was “like a canker-worm” who preyed “on the very vitals of religion, and the dearest interests of our country.” His former subscribers thus publicly declared that “we cannot number you among our patriots, as we consider your principles and practice subversive of man’s highest and most dear interests.” With this emphasis on citizenship and patriotism, it follows that Denniston’s critics justified their views by lengthy reference to a decidedly political text, George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address. Denniston’s critics quoted Washington’s views on the importance of “religion and morality” as the foundation for “political prosperity” and his conclusion: “In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of Human happiness.” Denniston’s opponents cited the Bible too, but as an afterthought. Toward the end of their letter they asked Denniston, “in an hour of respite from business,” to read Job 15, which warned against speaking ill of God.45 A very different concept of patriotic citizenship influenced Denniston’s defense. He deployed assumptions about obligation current in the broader debates of his contemporaries who defended the natural right to expatriation as a cornerstone of American law. A person who clashed with local standards or popular opinions in a given community was nevertheless patriotic if he or she engaged in otherwise legal behavior. Denniston’s disregard for tradition and precedent allowed him to project his actions as serving the good of humanity as a whole, thus his frequent appeal to “human happiness.” His patriotism was inherently cosmopolitan because actions on behalf of one’s community and nation served global ends. Ultimately, Denniston embodied the ideal of deist citizenship taught by Palmer. According to Denniston, deism and patriotism were not incompatible because deism entailed qualities such as vigilance and industriousness “in every measure tending to the prosperity of his country, submissive to all constitutional laws.” “May not a man do these things,” Denniston asked, “without believing one particle of Christianity?” Moreover, wedding patriotism to a specific religious doctrine that believers held on faith fueled intolerance, according to Denniston, which had effects that any true patriot should want to avoid. Denniston argued that “no durable peace can exist in society where people are so irascible and irritable to the personal enjoyment and profession of opinions . . . the body politic is liable to be shaken by every sentiment not in unison with every individuals feeling.” By upholding a notion of acceptable or commonly held religious opinion as the standard against unpopular views, the people of Montgomery invited social discord.46

102

Chapter 3

The inhabitants of Montgomery, New York, like those in Philadelphia a few years before, found ways to police religious expression in their community using local political resources. The Montgomery signatories elevated their protest to a patriotic cause fueled by the power of an eighteenth-century economic boycott. They believed that their country would fall if future generations rejected the Bible, so Montgomery’s signatories withdrew patronage from the Mirror, thereby closing their homes and their town to Denniston’s influence. Unlike Palmer’s earlier experiences in Philadelphia, however, Denniston’s opponents did not threaten him with violence. Instead, they used the social resources increasingly available in the Hudson Valley, capital and their ability to withhold it, in order to limit deism’s reach and bolster their understanding of Christian truth. Denniston’s opponents viewed this as a noble political act of popular will in defense of religion. The Mirror’s former subscribers thus acted according to important changes taking place in the relationship between religion and public life in the 1790s. Violent religious persecution was legally impermissible and growing evermore culturally unacceptable. But appeals to the Bible or theology also had limited political traction. Questioning a person’s patriotism thus provided a powerful tool for policing religious expression, a tool well suited to the political climate of the 1790s.47 The controversy between Denniston and his neighbors in Montgomery ended by early 1798. Later that year, however, Denniston published an edition of Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation: or The Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature. Originally published in 1730, Tindal’s book was an infamous and widely known defense of deism. So perhaps the earlier charges against Denniston were not entirely false. In addition, Denniston’s later publishing career bore the initial judgment of his neighbors in 1797. After departing Newburgh for New York City, he became involved in political controversies over infidelity in the early 1800s. At a broader level, the Newburgh controversy highlights a moment when Americans publicly bolstered their religious beliefs using principles that were decidedly political, not theological. Events such as the Newburgh controversy foreshadowed the advent of patriotism as a measure of religious character in partisan religious controversies over infidelity that soon engulfed national politics in the United States. The distinct combinations of religious belief and citizenship first expressed in the 1790s quickly gained a strong partisan dimension. As suggested by

Citizen Deists

103

the views of Congregationalists such as Eckley and Lathrop, Federalist ideas about citizenship rested on restrained voluntarism and a suspicion of cosmopolitanism. Federalist notions of good citizenship incorporated mutual obligations, respect for tradition, and legal precedence. Cultural affection was the substance of patriotism. Federalist understandings of citizenship were powerful political weapons to use against opponents whose popularity and ideas seemed influenced by foreign émigrés and French radicalism. Republicans tended to view citizenship as the rejection of those traditional restraints that curbed natural rights, largely for white men. Rather, their meaning of citizenship derived from good laws devised by rational citizens. Patriots, from this view, merely obeyed the laws if doing so did not violate natural rights, to expatriation or conscience, for example. Republican conceptions of citizenship were ideally suited to challenging those Federalists who increasingly tied religious orthodoxy and patriotism to a politics of place that extolled New England virtues and tradition. Differences over citizenship and patriotism further explain why many evangelicals joined themselves politically with Republicans and why representatives of more established denominations supported the Federalists. Competing understandings of citizenship and patriotism thus shaped alignments between religious opinions and partisan preferences.48 Political developments in New England exemplify the formation of these coalitions. Republicans achieved national victories in part by diminishing Federalist strength in New England. Clergy from established churches in Connecticut and Massachusetts, who were overwhelmingly committed to maintaining the Standing Order in their states, strongly supported Federalist politicians. Republicans garnered support from religious dissenters such as Methodists and Baptists. These groups believed that the intermingling of religious and civil authority was theologically suspect. Christian revelation did not need worldly support, dissenters argued. New England’s dissenting denominations found useful political allies within the Republican coalition, and Republican operatives worked diligently to mobilize religious dissenters. John C. Ogden, a New England Episcopal minister and Republican pamphleteer, and New Haven’s Abraham Bishop were two such operatives. Although New England Federalism did not topple with national Republican victories in 1800, New England Republicans had by this time honed arguments that would eventually help undermine the region’s Standing Order. The endeavors of Bishop and Ogden illustrate the opposition practices of New England Republicans.49

104

Chapter 3

New England Federalism violated the shared principles of political and religious allegiance that Republicans valued. Whereas the Congregationalist clergy and their Federalist political allies “boasted of ancestral piety” in New England, Bishop saw a region in the grip of parochial religious institutions backed by state power. The “political clergy” controlled Connecticut’s Standing Order whereby they governed “multitudes who are learnt to consider this combination the main-guard of the church.” Congregationalism persisted not because its lessons were especially meritorious but because it bore the weight of custom and intellectual inheritance. New England Congregationalism had no inherent values to secure its existence, rather it survived on established habits, not sincere belief. As Bishop noted, “If the father worshipped the apis, or adored the crocodile, or bowed at the foot of an emperor’s throne, or kissed the pope’s slipper, so must the son, and the son’s son, to the latest generation.” When Federalists extolled religion, Bishop argued, they did not mean or intend to celebrate simple, Christian truths, but instead a “fashionable religion” that suited their tastes and needs, especially for power. Federalists, Bishop concluded, have a “religion of their own making, and that church and state religion is exactly fitted to this eagerness.” To challenge this, Bishop, and also Ogden, endorsed “a connection between God and man” unhindered by tradition, local religious practice, and state influence.50 Bishop and Ogden adhered to a version of Christian cosmopolitanism. Jesus’ true message, as Bishop understood it, operated by “bettering the heart, regulating the affections, moralizing the life,” it then “flows out in love to man, and love to God, and looks through good actions, proceeding from the best motives.” Its bounds were not constrained by place. “If revelation is to be our guide, we are not to seek the subjects of the Saviour within the limits of this or that class of professors; but in every nation he, who feareth God and worketh righteousness, will be accepted of him,” Bishop concluded. Ogden shared Bishop’s sense of Christian cosmopolitanism, arguing that similar “principles and sentiments” are “intimately connected with the happiness of man, and ordained by his maker for this purpose. They are received as just and ratified as true, by the united sentiment of men of every faith and every clime.” Of course, a cosmopolitan impetus partly shaped how Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, had historically understood their evangelical obligations and Christ’s universal message. The charged political environment of the early 1800s, however, caused partisans to emphasize this component of their faith in different ways.51

Citizen Deists

105

Shared principles allowed for easy combinations of Christian cosmopolitanism with specific ideals of citizenship. For Bishop, true Christian adherence and republican citizenship both required only voluntary obedience. Indeed, Bishop maintained, there was a strong “resemblance of the government, for which we professed to fight, to the religion, which we professed to approve.” Ogden delivered this point in more polemic language by using terms associated with the doctrine of perpetual allegiance to explain the threats posed by New England Federalism. Should the Federalist “politicians and religionists . . . confederate with some usurper,” the danger seemed real that a monarch would assert control over the United States, forcing “obedience to his religious, as well as his political opinions.” As such, New England Congregationalism exemplified the worst tendencies of local interests, tradition, and church-state institutions when justified in the pretense of true Christianity and wedded to Federalist political strength.52 Since New England Federalism destroyed the sources of true religion and citizenship as Republicans understood these terms, Republican partisans challenged the patriotism of their Federalist opponents. In 1799, Ogden published A View of the New England Illuminati, which asserted that New England’s clerical elite, in particular Timothy Dwight and Jedidiah Morse, along with their Federalist allies had created a politically subversive relationship between civil power and religious authority. Far more than Thomas Jefferson, the Republicans, or the European Illuminati, New England clergy posed the true threat to political and religious freedoms, Ogden argued. Republican editor William Duane supported Ogden’s campaign in the pages of his prominent Philadelphia Aurora, amplifying Ogden’s critique far beyond New England. A political toast in New Jersey during the summer of 1800 included “the Clerical Illuminati of New-England—May their ambitious views in forming a union between church and state, never be realized.” After Jefferson’s election to the presidency, Abraham Bishop built Connecticut’s Republican Party in part by using arguments similar to Ogden’s. Moreover, Ogden and Bishop frequently emphasized that they and the Republicans were not anti-Christian crypto-deists but rather they opposed political corruptions of God’s word and the Protestant church. They denounced clerical authority but not the piety of ordinary Congregationalists or Federalists. Federalist religious politics, not their beliefs, were unpatriotic, they concluded.53 Although unintentionally, New England Republicans developed a political strategy that accommodated deistic critiques of Christianity. There was precedent for such alignments between evangelical dissenters and

106

Chapter 3

politicians of deistic opinions. During Virginia’s disestablishment debates in the 1780s, the political power of Baptist organization and theology became evident. There, evangelical Baptists maintained that the spiritual realm was distinctly separate from things civil. According to this view, believers maintained genuine piety when they voluntarily contracted together to seek salvation in the ways they saw fit. Evangelical Baptists in Virginia thus linked religious community to powerful currents in republican thinking about the constitutive role of the social contract in shaping political life. This connection between religious belief and political theory allowed evangelicals in Virginia to find common cause with Virginia elites of markedly different religious views such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Indeed, in his “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison expanded the role of choice in religious matters to cover a spectrum of opinion from belief to disbelief. “It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him,” Madison argued. Because personal choice was an ideal that informed arguments for religious disestablishment while also underwriting membership in civil society, events in Virginia demonstrate how certain understandings of citizenship provided a political source of cooperation for people of vastly different religious opinions.54 This trend became more pronounced by the election of 1800 when Jefferson gained widespread support from the nation’s Baptists and other popular evangelical movements. Shared understandings of citizenship explain how deists and evangelicals formed a temporary political coalition. Patriotism bound this coalition together, but religious tolerance was its operating principle. New Yorker George Eacker recognized this as a victory. In an 1801 July Fourth oration, he announced that Americans should be proud of themselves and their nation. By electing “the man of the people” Federalists could no longer legitimately stigmatize support for religious tolerance “with the imputation of Atheism.” Such arguments against the Federalists had a potential consequence that observers such as Eacker, Ogden, and Bishop may not have fully realized. These challenges lessened the political liabilities of deistic arguments against Christianity, which were overshadowed by the ease with which deistic ideas fit within dominant Republican understandings of citizenship and patriotism. Deists thus might provide a small constituency within a larger political coalition opposed to Federalism.55 Prominent American deists were ready to join this coalition. Indeed throughout the 1790s, Elihu Palmer’s partisan arguments consistently

Citizen Deists

107

incorporated those understandings of citizenship and patriotism that Republicans turned against the nation’s governing Federalists. In 1793, Palmer declared that “King-craft and priest-craft, those mighty enemies to reason and liberty, were struck with death by the genius of 1776.” The Revolution severed Americans’ allegiance to the monarchy and the church. American citizens were now free to fully examine “the cause of human wretchedness” and were obligated to take patriotic stands against the twin “pillars of despotism.” A “system of moral and political liberty” arose in their place, which along with developments in France were quickly subsuming the globe. Palmer boasted that people of all nations would soon be able to freely choose their beliefs and their government without the weights of tradition, custom, or culture: antiquity, in other words. As 1800 neared, Palmer warned that antiquity’s arch American defenders, the Federalists, still posed a dire threat to the republic. Jefferson’s victory in 1800 did not change this fear among America’s deists. Writing in 1801, Denis Driscol characterized Federalists as unabashed monarchists and defenders of state religion. According to Driscol, Federalists wanted to revive common law statutes against blasphemy in order to prosecute people “in the true spirit of holy religion, and agreeably to the benevolent mind of our sovereign lord the king.” In one charge, Driscol cast Federalists as opponents of American sovereignty, republican citizenship, and religious freedom. Had Driscol and Palmer stopped with conclusions such as this, they would have shared the same position as many other Republicans. They went further, however. For them, and for other deists, Christianity in general was the source of political despotism that patriotic citizens were obligated to challenge. Deism, citizenship, and patriotism were inseparable in a republic, they concluded.56 Federalist commentators were eager to explain the relationship between anti-Christian opinions and civic membership in Jefferson’s America. In an era of Republican ascendancy, as one newspaper announced, the “native American” who “expatriates himself by bating the habits, manners and institutions of his ancestors,” who “curses the clergy,” was sure “to get bread, and fame, and office.” Maryland Federalist Luther Martin’s attack on expatriation as an atheistic Republican doctrine came in 1813 during a war with Great Britain that Federalists blamed on Republican belligerence. In light of negative Federalist opinions connecting Republican notions of citizenship to infidelity, it is perhaps unsurprising that some Americans wanted to know more about the lives of individuals such as Elihu Palmer. In 1803, a correspondent to the Albany Centinel wrote with familiarity about Palmer’s

108

Chapter 3

itinerant orations, his Principles of Nature, and his social ties to other deists in New York. Still, this correspondent sought more details about Palmer’s biography, especially “his earlier history, and his gradual progress to democracy and infidelity.” This correspondent knew a great deal about Palmer’s life, an indication of Palmer’s public profile as an infidel, but this writer was primarily interested in Palmer’s biography for what it revealed about the presence of deists in public life. Federalist partisans provided a resounding answer to inquiries such as this. The presence of even one high-profile citizen deist such as Palmer gave Federalists even stronger evidence to denigrate the piety and patriotism of the entire Republican movement.57 As Americans defined and debated the relationship between citizenship and religion during the 1790s and the early 1800s, they actually fashioned a new vocabulary of religious intolerance. The advent of citizen deists and the controversies this sparked between deists and their opponents highlight this development. Both sides drew on broadly held conceptions of political allegiance and patriotism. To their critics, citizen deists brought subversive religious opinions into public life, thereby threatening the nation’s very being. Citizen deists were treasonous, not because of their beliefs alone but how they expressed them. Even pious believers may have felt pressure to tolerate those who held un-Christian opinions, but it was unpatriotic to accept traitors. Citizen deists such as Palmer and Denniston accepted this basic logic. For them, Christianity’s power stemmed from ancient traditions and entrenched prejudices. It had benefited from common law and monarchy. Christianity was incompatible with republicanism, thus Christians were potentially traitors. Deists had no choice but to tolerate Christians, still they argued that Christianity was unpatriotic by judging the public actions and expressions of Christians against the standards set by deist ideals of patriotic citizenship. Deists and their opponents thus contributed equally to the development of patriotism as a powerful concept in the language of early national religious controversy. Although this development gained momentum because of circumstances unique to American public life in the 1790s, it persisted well into the nineteenth century. This was immediately apparent in the charged partisan atmosphere following the election of 1800. American writers often bundled patriotism and piety as components of individual character. Within a partisan context, however, piety was a thin concept measured by public expressions of fairly generic religious beliefs. Assessments of a candidate’s personal character,

Citizen Deists

109

and thereby his capacity for political leadership, were no more than composite sketches produced from a series of public utterances and actions. The relationship between actual belief and public perceptions of a candidate’s beliefs was tenuous at best, but also largely irrelevant in a political culture premised on religious freedom. Partisans preferred it this way. Accusations of infidelity were easier to make, on both ethical and theological grounds, but also more difficult to refute. The same held true for declarations of piety. Thus, paradoxically, religious claims gained a renewed viability in American politics once they were judged according to their patriotism rather than theological rigor.

Chapter 4

Partisan Religious Truths

Autumn 1800 was a season of severe partisanship in the United States. The looming presidential election spurred Republican attacks on the monarchical ambitions of John Adams and his Federalist administration. Federalists responded by defending themselves as the true protectors of American republicanism against Jacobin threats to the nation’s political and religious foundations. Speculations about a possible deist future for the United States issued throughout the 1790s gained new significance in conflicts between Republicans and Federalists. Into the early 1800s, key newspaper editors on both sides pursued partisan strategies that made these predictions seem far more imminent and tangible. In their respective newspapers, editors such as the deist Republican Denis Driscol and the Federalist William Coleman reinforced a similar message to their readers. Every vote in every election, in both state and national contests, could conceivably spread deism in the United States. Promoting or forestalling this outcome was a central ambition of editors who participated in partisan religious controversies. Driscol, Coleman, and editors like them had differing reasons for seeking partisan gain by engaging the culture’s larger concerns for a deist future, reasons tied directly to the political changes wrought by the election of 1800. By endowing electoral outcomes with such mighty existential importance, religious opinions, just like political opinions, further became a species of the partisan public sphere. Although troubling to believers who argued that their faith suffered as a result, partisan religious controversies actually helped ensure that religious arguments remained viable in American politics. Indeed, partisan editors fashioned new ways for readers of various beliefs to argue politically with each other about religion’s influence in public life while avoiding debates over the relative truth of individual

Partisan Religious Truths

111

religious opinions, debates that were becoming politically and culturally untenable. Partisan religious controversy developed most fully in places where divisions between Federalists and Republicans were deep or divides within Republican ranks were evident. Pennsylvania and New York were two such places. The careers of editors in these places, and elsewhere, open a window into the invention of partisan religious controversy and its implications for the changing nature of religious knowledge in the early republic. Editorial polemics concerning infidel threats eventually circulated throughout the larger political culture. They were informed by local and national political issues. In their development and publication, these polemics highlight the partisan process by which defenses of religious truth became subject to the persuasive mechanisms of public opinion rather than the metaphysics of faith and revelation.1 Early in President Jefferson’s first term, the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut issued an address expressing their gratitude for his long commitment to religious liberty. Jefferson responded to his Baptist supporters in New England by assuring them that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had created “a wall of separation between Church & State.” This statement would prove deeply controversial in twentieth-century jurisprudence and popular debate, but its import was not lost on Jefferson’s contemporaries. In November 1802, newspaper editor Denis Driscol reprinted this exchange between Baptists in Danbury and Jefferson. Perhaps no editor besides Driscol interpreted Jefferson’s statement more accurately or held religious opinions closer to Jefferson’s own. Driscol had good reasons for citing Jefferson’s now well-known letter to Danbury’s Baptists. Despite Federalist charges, Jefferson was not an atheist. Jefferson described his religious views on two separate occasions in the early 1800s as those that “ought to displease neither the rational Christian nor Deists” and that Jesus taught the “principles of pure deism.” Driscol’s newspaper, the Temple of Reason, was the first decidedly deist journal published in the United States. Moreover, when Jefferson used the “wall of separation” metaphor, he expressed his view that religion, unaided by state support and political power, would be subject to the investigations of free inquiry in civil society. Should this occur, Christianity would be purified to its more deistic origins in reason rather than faith. Driscol could not agree more. Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists was a testament, Driscol argued, that under

112

Chapter 4

Jefferson’s administration “every vestige of religious tyranny and superstition will be done away . . . through a liberal and enlightened spirit of reason and philosophy, which must finally triumph over ignorance and bigotry.”2 The president and the editor shared partisan ambitions in addition to their religious opinions. Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists was a political statement, in this case securing support in Connecticut from a denomination often at odds with the state’s Federalist-Congregationalist authorities. Driscol was an ardent Republican. He established Temple of Reason in November 1800 to help Jefferson win the election and to continue serving the Republican cause thereafter. Driscol also courted the Baptists; he praised them as committed defenders of “civil and religious liberty.” Ultimately, however, Driscol focused his partisan ambitions on advancing deism in the United States and throughout the world. Driscol maintained that challenges to a traditional political order entailed explicit challenges to the truths of revealed religion. He declared it “a contradiction in terms, to find men renounce King-craft, and still remain enchanted by Superstition and Priest-craft.” Thus Driscol, much like Jefferson, sought partisan relationships with religious groups whose beliefs he did not hold and even hoped that deism might replace.3 The shared religious opinions that brought Driscol to laud and publish Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists highlights the existence of a singular deist voice within Republican editorial ranks. Recognizing this voice illuminates two larger themes. For one, it provides further details about the religious dimensions of the Jeffersonian coalition. Moreover, it offers evidence for reassessing Federalist attacks on Republican infidelity. Both themes suggest the potential of an emerging deist faction in Republican politics. The possible workings of this faction are sketched in outline by the markedly different ways that Jefferson and Driscol combined their religious opinions with partisanship. Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists only intimated the deist opinions that he typically reserved for more private correspondence. Driscol’s deism figured at the center of his public activities as a partisan editor. Deism informed his work on behalf of Jefferson’s administration and his related efforts to challenge Christianity’s existence. Driscol hoped that his paper would mobilize the nation’s citizen deists. Driscol made deism politically operative in a way that Jefferson never imagined. Global events had prepared Driscol for his role in American politics following the “revolution” of 1800. The era’s other revolutions produced exiles in large numbers. These revolutionary refugees migrated to places throughout

Partisan Religious Truths

113

the Atlantic world, including the United States, where they often continued their political activities. Driscol was one such revolutionary exile. Born in 1762, Driscol led a tumultuous political life in his native Ireland. Driscol studied for the Catholic priesthood in Spain only to become curate of an Anglican church in Cork, Ireland, in 1789. During this period he also edited the Cork Gazette. In the early 1790s Driscol renounced Christianity for deism, championed the French Revolution and Irish nationalism, and advocated agrarian reforms. Driscol’s association with Cork radicals and his foray into political journalism led to his arrest and conviction and a two-year prison sentence for seditious libel. Once released in 1796, Driscol participated in Irish politics for the last time: he joined the ultimately unsuccessful Irish Rebellion of 1798, an event inspired by the intellectual and political currents of the revolutionary Atlantic. Irish radicals fled the jurisdiction of British authorities in the wake of their failed rebellion. Many émigrés sought asylum in the United States, including Driscol, who arrived in New York City in 1799. In November 1800, Driscol began publishing Temple of Reason.4 Driscol’s relish for religious controversy and political dispute helped launch his editorial career in the United States. Both piqued the attention of David Denniston and James Cheetham, editors of the American Citizen. Their daily newspaper served the political interests of New York Republicans, especially the faction of DeWitt Clinton, who was then a member of the New York State Senate. Denniston’s support for Elihu Palmer in Newburgh in 1797 suggests that he and Driscol shared similar religious opinions. The same was true for Cheetham. He hailed from Manchester, England, where he had helped establish a working-class reading and debate club that distributed and discussed Thomas Paine’s writings. Cheetham’s writings on religion and politics also exhibited clear deistic sympathies. Driscol began publishing Temple of Reason on a borrowed press from Denniston using type that he purchased with a $60 loan, probably advanced by Cheetham.5 In February 1801, Driscol relocated Temple of Reason to Philadelphia. Although an apparent dispute with Cheetham and Denniston prompted Driscol’s relocation, he cast his move south in a highly positive light, stating that Philadelphia’s more central locale would increase access to his paper. “The more widely Truth is diffused, the more advantages must accrue to mankind,” Driscol boasted. Driscol eventually left Philadelphia in 1802 to edit newspapers elsewhere—first in Baltimore and later in Augusta, Georgia. Before departing Philadelphia, Driscol handed over control of Temple of Reason to “gentlemen of independent minds; and, as far as abilities are

114

Chapter 4

wanting to the support of such a paper, of independent fortunes too” with “nothing to fear or to hope from the minsterialists, or anti ministerialists.” They were “neither holders nor expectants of office.” John Lithgow, a Scottish immigrant and fellow deist, handled the daily editorial tasks. The paper folded less than a year after Lithgow became editor because of insufficient financial support, a fate typical to newspapers in the early republic.6 When viewed within the broader context of the early national press, Temple of Reason is fairly representative in several regards. In terms of editorship, Driscol and Lithgow joined other exiled radicals from the British Empire including William Cobbett, Joseph Gales, and William Duane, who all edited newspapers in the early republic, further strengthening ties between the United States and the larger revolutionary Atlantic world. As for Temple of Reason’s circulation, a November 1802 issue cited a readership of “500 good deists” even though many of these patrons were unwilling or unable to pay their subscriptions. Temple of Reason was published for just over two years, from November 1800 until February 1803. Its readership and duration were typical in an era when most newspapers had only a few hundred subscribers, and fewer than one-third were published for more than three years.7 Many early national newspapers were also highly partisan. Temple of Reason was representative in this regard as well. According to Driscol, “Deism and Liberty should go hand in hand.” Recent history confirmed his claims. In the first issue of his paper published in 1801, Driscol reflected on the previous year’s events, announcing, “As the cause of despotism has declined, the cause of Republicanism has advanced with steady and rapid strides in both hemispheres.” As “triumphs of liberty,” Driscol cited French military victories in Europe and his belief that Thomas Jefferson would prevail after the electoral confusion of 1800. Responsibility for these events, Driscol argued, rested largely on the endeavors of those “Apostles of Deism and religious liberty” whose “publications in Europe and America, have stemmed the torrent of superstition, and checked the progress and audacity of Priests.” Driscol may have celebrated deism’s eventual march throughout the world, but the political changes necessary for this to occur were decidedly local. Deism first needed a foothold in the United States. Electoral politics provided the means for expanding deism’s influence in American public life. Indeed, Driscol was convinced that deism’s fortunes in the United States rested with the success or failure of a still coalescing Republican Party. To this end, Driscol worked to incorporate Temple of Reason into the party’s

Partisan Religious Truths

115

developing partisan institutions without threatening Republican prospects for electoral success.8 Most important for his aims, Driscol found a place for Temple of Reason within the Republican Party’s expanding print networks. Throughout his career in the United States, Driscol established personal and patronage relationships with more influential Republican editors who had an affinity for, or at least no aversion to, associating their papers with a deistic journal. Driscol’s relationship with Denniston and Cheetham revealed this pattern. Cheetham regularly corresponded with Thomas Jefferson while he was president, and Cheetham and Denniston’s American Citizen was widely recognized as the most influential Republican newspaper in New York City. Denniston and Cheetham still printed advertisements for Temple of Reason even after they parted ways with Driscol. Moreover, Driscol and William Duane, editor of the Aurora, reached an agreement that allowed readers of Temple of Reason who lived south of Philadelphia to send their subscription payments to the Aurora’s office. Duane also promoted the activities of Philadelphia’s deists in the Aurora. When efforts were afoot to collect subscriptions for a place where “deserters from error and superstition” could hold weekly Sunday lectures on moral philosophy as an alternative to church attendance, announcements for the venture appeared in Temple of Reason, a driving force behind the project, but also in the Aurora. The Aurora was an important Republican paper and a central link in the network of editors and local operatives crucial to Jefferson’s election in 1800. Driscol’s association with Duane, Cheetham, and Denniston bestowed the Republicans’ political imprimatur and distribution capabilities on Temple of Reason.9 The factionalism engendered by Republican successes also increased Driscol’s opportunities to promote deism. It is unsurprising that Driscol published his paper in New York and then Philadelphia instead of New Haven or Boston. Both mid-Atlantic cities were home to established Republican newspapers, growing divides within the local political culture, and existing coteries of deists. New York and Philadelphia had receptive audiences who were potential patrons for his paper. Driscol relied upon the resources within local political communities to cultivate an audience for Temple of Reason. Driscol’s association with Duane indicates how Republican factionalism benefited his paper. After the election of 1800, latent divides between Philadelphia’s Republicans erupted into open political disputes. Factious competition pitted radical Republicans such as Duane and Michael Leib, a physician and leader of Philadelphia’s mechanic and German communities,

116

Chapter 4

against moderate Republicans such as Tench Coxe and Alexander Dallas, both supporters of Governor Thomas McKean. As internal partisan divides solidified, Driscol gained a foothold into Philadelphia’s fractious politics. Driscol allied Temple of Reason with Duane and the Philadelphia radicals. Since his days in Ireland, Driscol had championed agrarian reforms and democratization. Driscol’s gravitation toward Duane was a likely course. He promoted the interests of Philadelphia radicals while supporting Republican advances at the national level as well as in other states. He printed positive reports on legislation championed by Jefferson during his first year in office such as reforms to the tax system, repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts, and reductions in the financial burden of newspaper distribution through the nation’s postal system. Driscol also wrote approvingly of Republican success in state politics elsewhere, marking George Clinton’s election to the New York governorship as an unqualified victory. Later issues of Temple of Reason, under Lithgow’s editorship, reveal an even more marked preference for the economic policies of radical Pennsylvania Republicans.10 In a political culture structured around local coalitions as much, if not more, than national organizations, Driscol was politically connected just enough to provide his paper an institutional base. He managed to remain within the margins of local Republican networks. This pattern continued throughout Driscol’s career as he edited a series of decidedly Jeffersonian but less overtly deistic newspapers. In 1807, Georgia senator James Jackson persuaded Driscol to leave Baltimore in order to edit a Republican newspaper in Augusta. Driscol’s reputation as a deist was already cemented in political and journalistic circles by then; Jackson hired Driscol because he was a skillful political editor. Ultimately, Driscol’s newspaper career advanced with support from Republican leaders, either politicians such as Jackson or operatives such as the party’s more influential editors. Driscol’s patrons likely found ideological and practical reasons for allowing critiques of revealed religion in a political arsenal directed largely toward Congregational, Federalist power in New England.11 Although Republicans drew electoral support from a constituency largely committed to limiting the state’s power over religion, Driscol’s appeal among ordinary Republicans remained questionable. Deism and Republicanism were not inherently compatible in 1800. Unbridled denunciations of Christianity had limited popular appeal within a political coalition that included large numbers of pious supporters. To address this problem, Driscol worked to persuade readers and potential patrons that deism offered

Partisan Religious Truths

117

religious ideas and moral principles particularly conducive to effective political life in a republic. Similar to Elihu Palmer and David Denniston, Driscol understood patriotic citizenship according to dominant Republican understandings of the term, specifically, a strong belief that civic obligation must be wholly compatible with but also limited by universal, natural rights. Driscol especially emphasized expanded religious tolerance and rights to freedom of conscience. Deists, Driscol thus argued, were ideal citizens but also important voters because they endorsed liberties that benefited everyone regardless of belief. This conclusion risked implicating the entire Republican coalition if deism gained greater popularity. Should this occur, more pious Americans might abandon the Republicans, causing the party to suffer politically. When necessary for the sake of partisan coalition building, Driscol willingly reduced deism to one set of religious opinions among many joined by respect for private religious beliefs and the protection of public religious expressions from state interference. He did so by relying on concepts and language that originated in a broader legal discourse concerning religious liberty certainly familiar to many American readers. Under this conceptual umbrella, deism, like any religious opinion, was protected by law from “the audacity of any christian sectarists, who should take upon them to reprobate those men, who worship the great creator, in spirit and in truth.” Deism, Driscol concluded, was a barometer to measure broader American commitments to religious freedom and tolerance. If deism was attacked in the United States, Driscol suggested, then no religious expression was safe from persecution. Once the religious rights of deists were violated, the legal protections for unpopular Christian beliefs also became tenuous.12 Such efforts to minimize deism’s radical implications for the sake of partisan alignments had mixed implications for someone of Driscol’s point of view. Deism was, of course, a narrow set of principles directly opposed to Christianity. However, Driscol took advantage of a capacious legal and philosophical definition of rights that transcended sectarian interests to create conceptual space for deism within the language of religious liberty. Conversely, this forced Driscol to often settle for a definition of deism largely devoid of its most critical components, as expressed in his conclusion that the federal Constitution recognized “[d]eism or the belief in one Eternal Power, as the only test for office, and the solid basis on which every public man is to rest on.” Nowhere does this statement indicate a denial of Jesus’ divinity or an attack on the divine authorship of the Bible, for example. Instead,

118

Chapter 4

Driscol’s conception of deism excluded virtually no one from political life, certainly not monotheists of any persuasion or even those who might define “Eternal Power” along materialist or atheistic lines. In this sense, Driscol’s political attack on Christianity’s public power did not require a fully articulated deistic philosophy. He and deists like him merely needed political alliances with Christians who shared their commitment to religious freedom. If such an alignment could be nurtured, Driscol, much like Jefferson, believed that political change would create conditions within civil society for reasoned attacks to undermine Christianity’s public power and personal appeal. Political victory thus entailed Christianity’s eventual demise.13 Ultimately, Driscol understood and embraced electoral politics as a field in which deism established its patriotic value by defending larger ideals of religious freedom. In Driscol’s hands, deism was a source of political participation, and potentially power. On practical terms Driscol’s editorial strategy worked. He brought Temple of Reason into the Republican press network and brought deism into the party’s intellectual orbit, if only on the margins. Driscol’s early newspaper career illuminates the intellectual and political workings of the Republican coalition circa 1800. Briefly during this period, evangelical Christians and unabashed deists found common ground within a capacious definition of religious liberty. Assuming popular opinion and democratic change were the means to advance deism, Driscol needed Christian political allies such as the Baptists. Dissenting Republican Christians were far less politically dependent on a few vocal deists, but initially a deist presence in the Republican ranks proved relatively uncontroversial to those Republicans more concerned with Federalist combinations of political power and religious belief. In light of Driscol’s career as a Republican editor, John Adams’s 1807 reflections on the reasons for his political defeat seven years earlier seem strikingly accurate. According to Adams, Americans in 1800 would sooner have had “an Atheist or Deist [for president] or any thing rather than an establishment of Presbyterianism.” Adams recognized that his loss may have resulted in some measure from political cooperation between a presumably pious electorate and a party willing to tolerate deists in its leadership. Other Federalists reached similar conclusions and, by 1807, had already taken steps to exploit the weaknesses of this arrangement. Indeed, they commenced their activities almost immediately after Jefferson’s victory was certain through a systematic campaign to exaggerate Driscol’s influence within Republican ranks far beyond any power he exercised in reality.14

Partisan Religious Truths

119

In autumn 1800, Federalist partisans used especially horrific and visceral terms to describe what would befall the United Sates if Republicans gained national political power. According to “Burleigh,” who wrote for a New England audience, Jefferson and his supporters were infidel Jacobins, who “in all countries, are destitute of religion and morality.” Should the Republicans achieve political victory, the bonds of affective, patriotic citizenship would sever. “Parental ties, filial duty, conjugal tenderness and fidelity, and social intercourse” would all fall to contempt and ridicule. Burleigh asked his readers, “Are you prepared to see your dwelling in flame, hoary hairs bathed in blood, female chastity violated, or children writhing on the pike and the halbert?” This would certainly occur, for the country’s Jacobins were like a “ravening wolf, preparing to enter your peaceful fold, and glut his deadly appetite on the vitals of your country.” To Federalists such as Burleigh, political choices had existential implications for the republic and Christianity. Patriotic vigilance and a vote for the right candidate were crucial to ensuring that Americans would never suffer under a Republican administration.15 Burleigh issued a hyperbolic expression of long-standing Federalist views that were quickly becoming outmoded. During the 1790s Federalists turned political campaigns to the service of bolstering their traditional sources of social and religious authority. This strategy traded heavily in speculative laments about infidelity’s dispersal in American culture and its pernicious influence over the unassuming masses. After 1800, this strategy no longer fit the truths of American politics. Voters throughout the United States in 1800, including some in the Federalists’ New England stronghold, ignored the warnings of Federalist clergy and opinion-shapers about the dangers of granting political power to suspected infidels. Their position as an opposition party became the basic fact of political life for Federalists following the 1800 elections. Once Republicans held national power, Federalists changed their assumptions about infidelity’s relationship to American politics. Defeat forced Federalists to think differently about political strategy if not their attitudes or beliefs, at least for those Federalists who hoped to reclaim national power. Many Federalists in the age of Jefferson still loathed democracy and disdained partisan competition. They still valued social deference and religious tradition, especially as the substance of patriotic citizenship. Federalists continued to doubt the morality and intellect of ordinary voters. Natural aristocrats such as themselves expected to instruct and lead their social inferiors who in turn owed Federalists their due respect. Massachusetts Federalist Josiah Quincy explained that in political matters the

Figure 4. The Providential Detection (ca. 1800), artist unknown. Etching. This image illustrates the Federalist view of Thomas Jefferson as an infidel with strong allegiances to Revolutionary France. Jefferson is about to sacrifice the Constitution and American independence on the “Altar to Gallic Despotism.” Writings by Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Rousseau, and Volney fuel the flames as does William Duane’s Aurora. Although Satan looks on approvingly, God guides the American eagle, a widely recognized symbol of liberty and freedom, to spoil Jefferson’s designs. This image anticipates the Federalist opposition strategy after 1800 to shift attention from conspiratorial accounts of Jefferson’s irreligion to identifying the sources and partisan workings of Republican infidelity. (The Library Company of Philadelphia.)

Partisan Religious Truths

121

people should defer to men of “talent and integrity . . . reflection, judgment and information.” Nevertheless, in 1804 Quincy was elected to the House of Representatives, where he became a leading Federalist voice in favor of electioneering and campaigning. For observers such as Quincy in the early 1800s, Federalists needed to adopt aspects of democratic politics in order for them to return the nation to its traditional moorings.16 Newspapers played a prominent role in the partisan activities of Federalists who wanted to create an effective opposition party. Although established in 1798 while the Federalists still held national power, the Trenton Federalist was the party’s first decidedly partisan journal. In 1801 Alexander Hamilton started the New York Evening Post, perhaps the Federalist’s most important opposition paper. All total, during Jefferson’s two terms Federalists throughout the United States established nearly one hundred newspapers. Federalist editors often shared the views of their patrons. They too were suspicious of democracy and disdainful of the political and intellectual capacities of those beneath the natural aristocracy. Moreover, Federalist editors and their patrons believed that newspapers exercised powerful influence over public opinion. Such influence could obviously work for good or for ill. Republican editors had already demonstrated the press’s corrupting power when put in the hands of democrats and infidels. Under their editorial oversight, however, Federalists could use newspapers to guide public opinion in morally and politically safe directions. For Federalists attuned to political changes taking place around them after 1800, newspapers proved an ideal medium in which to adapt long-standing criticisms of their Republican opponents to a democratizing political order.17 Federalist fears of Republican infidelity certainly did not diminish following Jefferson’s election. The Federalist opposition, however, faced a double-sided dilemma shaped by the growing cultural power of appeals to both democratic public opinion and freedom of conscience. To this end, Federalism’s new generation, in particular its editors, sought to mobilize public opinion against the activities of deist Republicans while avoiding disputes over deism on theological grounds. Charles Prentiss and John Cole, Federalist editors of Baltimore’s Republican; or, Anti-Democrat, described how such a strategy might work. According to them, the election of 1800 had been “not altogether a contest for office, but in great degree a contest of principles.” Federalists may have lost the competition for the presidency, but the competition of ideas blazed on. Effective Federalist challenges to Republican power could still ensure that “modern philosophism,” including

122

Chapter 4

deism, would not prevail on the coattails of Jefferson’s victory. Prentiss and Cole outlined their strategy for winning the contest of principles, one ideally suited to the strengths of the partisan press. They would keep philosophism’s “violent abettors” always in view where “they may be useful as objects of terror and beacons of warning.”18 The efficacy of this editorial strategy required the presence of avowed deists active in American politics. Otherwise, Federalist editors would have been left to reiterate conspiratorial accounts of secret infidel machinations or unspecified rumors about Jefferson’s irreligion, neither of which had prevented Jefferson’s election in 1800. Warnings such as Burleigh’s availed little political gain, so savvy Federalists ceased trading in them. Instead, these editors focused their attention on Temple of Reason, and its editor Denis Driscol, to exemplify deism’s role in the Republican Party. Both were tangible examples of Republican infidelity: or the actual involvement of deists within the Republican Party. Enterprising Federalist editors could use such examples to reiterate attacks on infidelity that were traditionally intended to limit democracy and assert elite control, but in ways amendable to a partisan public sphere defined by persuasion and a religious culture increasingly committed to freedom of conscience. Such a strategy channeled traditional Federalist concerns and values into partisan attacks on Republican infidelity.19 By focusing attention on Republican infidelity, Federalist editors reserved for themselves and the politicians they supported a position of moral authority to speak on behalf of the republic’s natural aristocracy in defense of social order and tradition. William Coleman explained that his chief editorial priority was “inculcating just principles in religion and politics as well as in morals,” which he announced while criticizing Temple of Reason. Despite their patrician righteousness, in practice most Federalist editors merely informed their readers about the actions of an infidel Republican leadership. They placed ultimate responsibility for challenging them on the electorate.20 The Federalist editors most preoccupied with Driscol as the representative of Republican infidelity shared much in common. All were sons of New England. Charles Prentiss was a Harvard graduate from Reading, Massachusetts, whose father was a Congregational minister. As editor of the Washington Federalist and Republican; or, Anti-Democrat, Prentiss worked in the republic’s new capital, the symbolic center of partisan power, as well as within the competitive partisan world of Baltimore politics. Joseph Dennie was a Harvard graduate and attorney from Boston. He established the Port

Partisan Religious Truths

123

Folio in 1801 in Philadelphia, after working on Federalist newspapers there and in Walpole, New Hampshire. William Coleman was also a lawyer as well as a politician who hailed from Massachusetts. He represented Greenfield in the state legislature before financial ruin forced him to seek better fortunes elsewhere. In New York he edited the Evening Post, the paper outfitted and supported by Alexander Hamilton and dedicated in part to challenging the city’s powerful Republicans. Coleman’s partisanship turned violent on two occasions. He killed New York’s Republican harbormaster in a duel and a subsequent caning paralyzed him below the waist. Finally, Harry Croswell was a clergyman from West Hartford, Connecticut, before starting the Balance, and Columbian Repository in Hudson, New York. Here he entered sustained partisan combat with local Republican editor Charles Holt. Each of these Federalist editors thus eventually worked in places where partisanship was more advanced and religious traditions differed sharply from the region of their youth.21 Most of these editors interacted directly with actual deists. Dennie covered the activities of Philadelphia’s Theophilanthropists, including their efforts to build temples of reason. Prentiss established the Republican; or, Anti-Democrat partly to challenge Driscol’s editorial venture in Baltimore. Coleman’s editorial career in New York began at the same time that Elihu Palmer was active there. Even more, in February 1802 Coleman unknowingly accepted payment for publication of three advertisements “intended to aid the newspaper called, The Temple of Reason.” Upon recognizing this, Coleman announced that abetting the paper would certainly, and justifiably, subject him to the “reproaches of every man of a correct mind and virtuous habits.” Coleman returned the money rather than publish the advertisement. Croswell’s encounters with deists were less direct but likely no less formative. Croswell had family connections to the Hartford print shop that issued the Connecticut Courant, the newspaper that first published the Burleigh essays in 1800. Perhaps Croswell began thinking differently about how best to challenge Jefferson after witnessing firsthand the deficiencies of earlier Federalist attempts.22 Although Driscol established Temple of Reason at the height of a presidential campaign in which charges of infidelity were rampant, partisan tropes were conspicuously absent from the first Federalist reports to note the paper’s publication. In November 1800, an announcement in the Philadelphia Gazette and Boston’s Columbian Centinel relayed that “a blasphemous periodical publication, has just been issued in the city of New-York, by one

124

Chapter 4

D. Driscoll.” “The declared object of the Editor of this work, is to attack the doctrines of Christ,” this announcement continued. Editors of the Philadelphia Gazette and the Columbian Centinel were fairly confident that Driscol’s deism was too unpopular to support a weekly paper, let alone contribute to the workings of electoral politics. American “infidels” were so few that Driscol’s effort “to annihilate the invaluable bonds by which human society can alone be preserved” would certainly fail. In the waning months of 1800, Driscol’s religious ideas still seemed distinct from political developments. Within a few years important Federalist editors collapsed this distinction.23 As the reality of a Jefferson presidency replaced the electoral uncertainty of the campaign, Federalist editors during the early 1800s brought an image of Republican infidelity into ever sharper focus. In 1801 Joseph Dennie diagnosed the republic’s new political order by illustrating the political mechanics behind Temple of Reason: Jefferson was “a confirmed atheist, and in the hope of his patronage and protection, no doubt a paper has been just established in America, for the avowed purpose of propagating deistical principles.” In 1802, Angier March, Federalist editor of the Newburyport Herald, warned his readers in northeastern Massachusetts that Temple of Reason was “devoted to the cause of Deism—to Jefferson—and the ruling party, encouraged and wholly supported, by those who claim to themselves, exclusively, the name of republicans.” This impression of Driscol in the Federalist press followed him to Baltimore, a city fiercely divided by partisanship, where he began editing the American Patriot in 1802. John Cole and Charles Prentiss announced the pedigree of Baltimore’s newly established journal in no uncertain terms, referring to the “American Patriot, alias The Temple of Reason” as well as Driscol’s editorial work “[u]nder the auspices of Duane and others in Philadelphia.” John Hewes of the Federal Gazette, and Baltimore Daily Advertiser declared Driscol editor of a “ministerial mouthpiece” and warned, “We know no greater disgrace the nation could suffer than the humiliating degradation of its President, in his association with such fellows as Duane, Campbell, Cheetham, &c.”24 Taken collectively, Federalist editors offered readers a narrative of national political and cultural decline under the yoke of an infidel president served by cadre of deist editors. Prentiss and Cole offered the most elaborate profile of Republican infidelity. They illuminated an entire cast of “deistical democrats,” which included members of Jefferson’s cabinet such as Levi Lincoln as well as a litany of Republican editors and local political organizers. If any doubts existed that Republicans were out to dismantle Christianity,

Partisan Religious Truths

125

Prentiss and Cole reminded their readers to look “at Abraham Bishop, at Duane, at Paine, at Cheetham, at Denniston, at Palmer, at the ‘Temple of Reason’ blasphemer, and hundreds of others; courting Jefferson all, and all I believe caressed by him.” The argument that Jefferson or even Republicans in the federal government supported Driscol was clearly a partisan fiction propagated by Federalist editors, but one with traction in the pages of an opposition press.25 It would be a mistake to view Federalist attention on Republican infidelity strictly through the lens of opposition politics, however. The partisan fiction fashioned by editors undoubtedly expressed genuine Federalist fears that people became deists at the same rate that Republicans gained votes. Editors John Russell and James Cutler of the Federalist-leaning Boston Gazette warned readers that the partisan preferences of the American electorate brought with them increased tolerance for heterodox religious opinions. What had been unacceptable public utterances only a few years earlier were now weekly pronouncements in Temple of Reason, a paper “patronized by democrats, (alias republicans).” Driscol printed “blasphemies . . . not only without any interference of the civil authority, but even without the pointed and vigorous opposition of every class of honest and sober citizens.” The Temple of Reason flourished in a morally apathetic society. These symptoms of civic decay and turpitude were in part caused from above. According to George Sherman, editor of the Trenton Federalist, those “men in high office” who encouraged “newspapers and publications, tending to deny the gospel of our blessed Saviour” were perpetrating “a systematic design to prostrate the foundations of Christian religion” in the United States.26 Focusing on infidelity as an operative force in the Republican Party reflected both sincere Federalist concerns for religious tradition and also justification for Federalists to exercise their role as moral arbiters in public life. Driscol’s hand on the press posed no direct threat to residents of Newburyport, Massachusetts, for example. Inhabitants of Essex County would probably never attend one of Palmer’s lectures or even receive an issue of Temple of Reason. However, Angier March cited both as reason to bolster New England ways. The frequent violation of Sabbath regulations, such as increased travel and stage traffic between Boston and Ipswich on Sundays, supplied evidence that Christian teachings and Massachusetts law were held in low regard in his community. The Herald’s editor attempted to curtail disrespect for the Sabbath by showing that it stemmed from the same sources as Temple of Reason: the Republicans’ ascent to national political power, and,

126

Chapter 4

at the broadest level, “the seed of French atheism planted in the pure soil of New England.” Prentiss and Cole described a similar chain of events in Baltimore, but they also recognized the absence of legal authority to enforce piety there. They thus appealed to their readers, men of standing like themselves. “Will we suffer the poisoned javelin to be thrown into the social retirements of our families?” the editors asked their readers. “Will we suffer the morals of our children and domestics to become contaminated with the principles of that infidel Driscol?”27 In most instances, Federalist editors attacked only the Republican leadership as full-blown infidels. As Prentiss and Cole stated confidently, “[T] he leading democrats in this country are violent enemies to the christian religion.” By isolating infidelity as a problem of the Republican Party leadership, Federalist editors could avoid impugning the private beliefs or personal morality of ordinary Republican voters. In 1805, Augustine Davis, Federalist editor of the Virginia Gazette, published “Democracy and Infidelity,” a polemical history of the Republican Party. This history recounted “the efforts of our leading democrats in America . . . as it respects the encouragement they have given to works and to men of deistical and atheistical sentiments,” including Driscol. That said, the author had no “intention of imputing infidelity generally to the great body of the democrats in the union,” but only that the “most influential democrats” disbelieved in Christianity. By adopting this view, Federalist editors resolved that disbelief in Christianity was most problematic when it was connected to political power; they should largely abandon attempts to curtail personal disbelief. This was a necessary concession since ordinary Republican voters often emphasized the primacy of individual religious choices and voiced skepticism toward combinations of civil and religious authority. Federalist editors attempted to rehabilitate their political fortunes and develop as an opposition party by attacking the Republican leadership on terms that would not alienate large parts of the electorate. Federalist editors thus hoped to undermine a relatively fragile coalition of deists who read Temple of Reason and evangelicals, such as Massachusetts Baptists.28 Individuals such as William Baker gave Federalist editors reason to believe their opposition strategy might succeed. Baker was a physician in Prince George’s County, Maryland, who was deeply concerned about infidelity’s influence in the Republican Party. He publicly condemned Jefferson for encouraging Paine’s return to the United States, he attacked William Duane for supporting the French Revolution, and he criticized the formation

Partisan Religious Truths

127

of “temples of reason assigned in our large towns for Palmer and others, to lecture against Christianity.” Baker was, however, a stalwart Republican in principles and policies. By making deism’s influence in American politics fully evident, Federalists hoped to persuade pious Republicans such as Baker to abandon their allegiance to Jefferson. If their opposition strategy succeeded, Federalists believed, devout but unwitting voters would stop supporting a party whose leadership was supposedly populated by infidels.29 Throughout Jefferson’s first term and well into his second, Federalist editors periodically revived partisan efforts to establish indelible links between deist editors and Republican politicians. The newspaper’s function in early national politics explains why Federalist editors so frequently returned to this form of opposition. Although newspapers contributed to the advent of a national political system, they also served a constitutive role in the development of localized public spheres. Events that took place anywhere in the country or in the world could become issues of immense local importance. In cities and towns far removed from Driscol and his press, enterprising Federalist editors made Temple of Reason a concern in local affairs. This strategy served Federalists in local political conflicts. Federalist editor Davis of the Virginia Gazette published “Democracy and Infidelity” in order to harass Thomas Ritchie, Republican editor of the Richmond Enquirer. “Democracy and Infidelity” recorded a litany of offenses dating back to the earliest years of the Democratic-Republican opposition. Beginning in 1794, Benjamin Franklin Bache, then editor of the Aurora, published and distributed inexpensive editions of The Age of Reason. America’s “democrats” were also blamed for issuing the first American edition of English radical William Godwin’s Political Justice. Moreover, “most of the leading democratick papers are conducted by known infidels” including Driscol, Duane, Cheetham, and Denniston, and, apparently, Ritchie, damning proof that infidelity and democracy were tantamount. Ritchie deservedly shared such ignominious company. An anecdote buried in the middle of this essay recounted a celebration in March 1805 at Richmond’s Eagle Tavern honoring Jefferson’s reelection. Ritchie supposedly participated by toasting Thomas Paine and The Age of Reason.30 Federalists in Pennsylvania deployed similar tactics. In 1808, radical Republican Simon Snyder, a state legislator and rural tanner, won the governorship of Pennsylvania by defeating Federalist James Ross. Pennsylvania Federalists issued their must substantive claims to Snyder’s deism in 1809 after his victory. George Helmbold, Jr. led the charge. He relished mocking

128

Chapter 4

democracy and Republican politicians in his satirical newspaper the Tickler, which he published from 1807 to 1809. Helmbold frequently criticized “Simple Simon” Snyder and “the Dastardly Duane,” and he published an article titled “Our Religious Governor” that claimed Snyder was anything but pious. The evidence included subscription lists for Palmer’s newspaper Prospect; or, View of the Moral World kept by Isaac Hall, a Philadelphia tavern keeper and local agent for the paper, that included the names of several Pennsylvanians, including Snyder. That such a prominent citizen “supported with his purse and his patronage” a paper characterized by “gross blasphemy and infidelity” should have concerned devout Pennsylvanians of all political opinions. The extent of Snyder’s agreement with Palmer’s religious opinions paled in importance to the fact that an elected official had helped propagate deism. Pennsylvania Republicans were forced to respond because they fully recognized the political consequences of this charge. A Republican editor attempted to refute stories in several “federal papers” about Snyder’s support for Palmer’s deist newspaper by explaining that he had merely asked one Aaron Levy of Philadelphia “to subscribe for any new periodical publication of merit which might appear.” Levy did so, but Snyder disapproved of the Prospect’s content and canceled his subscription after receiving only two issues. Snyder’s supporters ultimately dismissed the accusations against him as another example of Federalist efforts “to pull down the fair fame of any sound and respectable republican, and give currency to the most notorious lies to effect the same purpose.”31 Federalist editors also sought ways to give their opposition strategy national reach. Their most creative attempt resulted in the advent of partisan primers that enumerated Republican offenses. “A Help for a Bad Memory” first appeared in the New York Gazette in August 1802, and another appeared in Harry Croswell’s Balance, and Columbian Repository in November 1805 under the heading, “Things which should be kept in continual remembrance, and which every editor of a newspaper should be able to find at any moment.” Both were created specifically for reproduction in Federalist newspapers. “A Help for Bad Memory” appeared in the Olio and the Republican; or, AntiDemocrat, Federalist papers in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, respectively. In January 1806 Federalist editor Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, Massachusetts, printed Croswell’s piece in his Massachusetts Spy.32 Each list contained similar charges, suggesting that one provided the model for the other as part of a developing partisan strategy. Both lists included indictments of Republican governance. Both also attacked the

Partisan Religious Truths

129

political machinations of DeWitt Clinton. Also noteworthy were instances such as postmaster general Gideon Granger’s removal of local Federalist postmasters following the 1800 election. This was an act of partisan patronage and party building that infuriated Jefferson’s enemies as a blatant abuse of political power. Driscol’s proposal to publish Temple of Reason in New York was one of twenty-one “curious and important papers” listed in the 1802 primer. Three additional items were relevant documents from the Newburgh controversy that erupted in 1797 after David Denniston invited Elihu Palmer to town, including the letter from Denniston’s subscribers in Montgomery and his response. Jefferson’s invitation for Thomas Paine to return to the United States on a government ship neared the top of the 1805 list. Further down were references to Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature, to Paine’s Age of Reason, and to Driscol and Temple of Reason. And finally, the list included “[p]apers relating to Elihu Palmer and his deistical congregation at Newburgh in the state of New York.”33 The authors of both lists assumed that their audiences and any editor who might reprint their pieces would be perfectly familiar with their references. Driscol, Temple of Reason, Palmer, and the existence of deistical societies as well as seemingly isolated local controversies over infidelity were all introduced with no greater description than were Granger and Clinton. Moreover, both authors equated Palmer’s and Driscol’s partisan deism with all Republican political offenses. In the hands of both authors, Palmer’s and Driscol’s fairly marginal deistic orations and writings were as egregious, and as familiar, as perceived governmental corruption and abuses of political power within Jefferson’s administration. By now readers presumably had details drawn from a popular repository of knowledge about Republican infidelity so that these primers completely dispensed with elaborate narratives about its origins. Readers and editors already knew the partisan narrative implied within. The form and the content of the Federalist primers were equally important. Both precluded systematic theological critiques of deism. In fact, the issues at stake in the Newburgh controversy or the intellectual content of Temple of Reason, and deism in general, ultimately faded in importance next to the political context in which they appeared. These primers were politically efficacious precisely because they treated religious beliefs and political positions as equal categories within a partisan framework. The very act of reducing complex religious ideas to isolated references within a list of political charges elevated partisan efficacy over theological disputation.

130

Chapter 4

Partisan primers thus distilled the Federalist opposition strategy formulated since 1800. During Jefferson’s administration, Federalist editors thus developed an entirely new image of Driscol. They portrayed him as a political operative crucial to the ascendant Republican coalition instead of the editor of a marginal newspaper dedicated to promoting a maligned religious system. Driscol’s new image in the Federalist press did not reflect actual advances in his political power, but rather structural changes within Federalist politics, notably among its newspaper editors. Federalist editors, especially the generation who established papers after 1800, accepted the capability of the press to mobilize ordinary readers as political actors. These editors formed explicitly partisan Federalist newspapers, which distinguished them from editors of Federalist-oriented journals. These editors lived through events in the 1790s during which infidelity’s advance seemed to threaten the republic’s future and patriotism became a powerful measure of Christian piety. As such, Federalist editors opposed Temple of Reason primarily for its harm to American society and politics. These Federalists opposed Republicans without resorting to conspiracy theories about secret infidel cabals, or even sustained theological arguments against the perils of disbelief. These editors prompted their readers and their patrons to uphold religious tradition by deferring to those leaders best suited to protecting it. They deployed this strategy in local political conflicts or in the months preceding national political elections. Developments in New York reveal the Federalist opposition strategy in action. In the summer of 1802, John Wood published A Full Exposition of the Clintonian Faction, and the Society of the Columbian Illuminati. Wood was a Scottish émigré and fervent Republican who had allied himself with Aaron Burr’s faction of New York Republicans. This put him at the center of internal Republican conflicts that pitted Burr and his supporters against the influential Clinton family, which in 1802 included Governor George Clinton and DeWitt Clinton, a New York State senator. His Exposition added a new dimension to the Clinton-Burr rivalry. As the title suggests, Wood promised to reconstruct the Clinton family’s connections to the Illuminati, an international conspiracy of atheist philosophers to overthrow Christianity and government in Europe. Wood’s pamphlet described the “Theistical Society” organized by New York City’s Theophilanthropists. This society patterned itself on the European Illuminati, Wood argued. It emphasized secrecy, which the society maintained by dividing its members into various

Partisan Religious Truths

131

grades with separate oaths and constitutions. The Theistical Society also disseminated publications to spread its influence in the United States and to correspond with kindred Illuminati in Europe. Elihu Palmer, its president, was purportedly in contact with Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Its members, including David Denniston, all supported DeWitt Clinton. Wood claimed that the society had ninety-five members, but he named only those who were already known from their work as local editors, writers, and political operatives. Wood concluded that the Columbian Illuminati’s “principles in politics corresponded with their ideas of religion, viz. the rankest jacobinism with the vilest deism.”34 Wood provided specific details about the Theistical Society that made his pamphlet difficult to ignore. Its members were the most undesirable sort of radicals, “[t]he imported scum of the Edinburgh Convention, and the refuse of the banished rebels of Ireland, joined also their hearts and hands with the Infidels of New York, in planning this society.” Wood described a secretive initiation ceremony in which a seated President Palmer whispered details about the society into the ears of new members. Palmer’s exact utterances were unknown, Wood admitted, but he surmised from the society’s only printed constitution that new members should consider themselves not only enemies of “christianity, but of every christian; that he was forever to renounce all form of government but what was strictly democratical.” More troubling yet, Wood provided examples of the questions debated at society meetings. On one occasion, a member supposedly queried, “Wherein does the moral turpitude of incest consist?” And at another meeting members debated “ought the man commonly called Jesus Christ, to be regarded a bastard or the son of Joseph?” Wood noted Driscol’s departure for Philadelphia and William Duane’s support for Temple of Reason as further proof that the Republican Party included unabashed deists. Finally, Wood identified Temple of Reason as the Columbian Illuminati’s “grand literary journal,” formed under the assumption that weekly doses of deism would gain more adherents than the publication of a single treatise.35 Rumors of the European Illuminati’s conspiratorial designs that had first circulated in France during the early 1790s reached the United States by decade’s end. Wood’s pamphlet, however, was an innovative contribution to American discourses surrounding the Illuminati. His account diminished the role of conspiracy, and extraordinary cabals, by implicating the Columbian Illuminati in the open, ordinary workings of American politics. Society members were well known to anyone familiar with New York’s political and

132

Chapter 4

intellectual circles. Wood emphasized this point, arguing that his pamphlet contained “no tale, no visionary dream or artful fabrication—Dr. Morse will have no occasion to write to foreign professors to obtain information as to the reality of the Illuminati.” Concerned readers could easily verify that individuals such as Elihu Palmer and David Denniston actually existed and that they, along with “zealous Clintonians, have been members of a society, first termed the Philosophical, and afterwards the Theistical, for the avowed purpose of propagating Deism and opposing the christian religion.” Although Wood’s account still contained speculation and sensationalism, it was plausible because he populated it with enough references to actual people and organizations.36 Wood’s pamphlet was a political boon for Federalist editors. After all, the Theistical Society, by Wood’s account, exemplified a range of issues that defined Federalist opposition to Jefferson and his party—the dangers of radical émigrés, moral decline, and plots against religion—all substantiated with direct references to key operatives in the Republican coalition. Wood’s defense of a minority faction within New York’s Republican Party actually highlighted the national Republican Party’s alignment with deism. He provided a historical account to explain how this relationship developed. Ultimately, Wood attributed coherency and lucidity to exaggerated claims about a deistic influence within the Republican Party, a politically expedient story for Federalists. William Coleman was the first Federalist editor in New York to acknowledge Wood’s pamphlet. Within days of its publication, Coleman issued a two-part review of Wood’s pamphlet, including a reprint of the Constitution of the Theistical Society as it had appeared in Wood’s original. He concluded his review by vouching for the truth of Wood’s claims. Wood had attached his name to the pamphlet and thus exposed himself to charges of libel and legal prosecution should his claims prove false. This, Coleman concluded, “must completely satisfy the understanding of every reader, both of the existence of this infidel society, of its pernicious designs, and of its destructive effects upon the minds and morals of this community.”37 Coleman worked to ensure that Wood’s claims would achieve the greatest partisan gain for Federalists. When discussing Full Exposition, Coleman largely refrained from theological dispute, be it appeals to biblical passages or to Christian doctrine. Indeed, Coleman showed little concern that publicizing the Columbian Illuminati’s activities and ideas might inadvertently spread deism among unwitting, impressionable readers. Without such

Figure 5. William Coleman (ca. 1810), attributed to William Dunlap. Oil on wood panel. This portrait captures Coleman’s gentility without a hint of his career as the partisan editor of the New York Evening Post, a leading Federalist newspaper. At the time this portrait was completed, Coleman had already killed New York’s harbormaster in a duel and within less than a decade he would suffer a political assault that left him severely injured. Described as an “able editor,” Coleman helped the Federalists develop new political strategies for challenging the Republicans on religious grounds. (Collection of the New-York Historical Society.)

134

Chapter 4

restraints, Coleman’s review extracted, reorganized, and then expanded upon Wood’s original text to greatly sharpen its polemic edge. Wood’s Full Exposition rambled. Coleman distilled Wood’s ideas and presented them in a way that placed the Columbian Illuminati and its close ties to New York and to national Republicans in the foreground while omitting any information from Wood’s text that muddled this connection. Coleman was a skilled polemicist, and in a separate article about Full Exposition he described how he edited Wood’s work to maximize its potential to inflict harm on his Republican opponents. Wood’s essay threatened to lose its readers before they arrived at its most important points, Coleman believed, so his review corrected that error by focusing specifically on “the principal subject: the anti-christian society.” Coleman believed that his review should allay any reservations about whether or not “the principal persons concerned at least are zealous and active democrats . . . if not every individual member and those to whom they apply for patronage are Democrats.” By reworking Wood’s text in the pages of the Evening Post, Coleman hoped “to induce the most serious apprehensions if the system of religion called theistical, and the system of politics called democratic continue to receive support and encouragement in our community.”38 Coleman had various reasons for devoting several issues of his paper to Wood’s pamphlet. He seemed sincerely concerned about the deleterious effects of deism on American culture and also the New York deists’ close ties to local Republican leaders. In his conclusion he stated that it was the obligation of the press to challenge “all those institutions which, corrupting political, moral, and religious principles, have a baneful effect on the society in which we live.” Yet Coleman’s partisan interests may have rivaled his religious qualms. Wood’s pamphlet was one salvo in a very public break between Burr and the Clintons. James Cheetham and David Denniston, both allegedly prominent in the Theistical circle, instigated this rupture by attacking Burr in the pages of the American Citizen. Following this, Jefferson and other prominent Republicans supported the Clintons. Many New York Federalists believed it was in their interest to support Burr. Some Federalists even argued that Burr was a possible ally in their efforts to solidify a coalition of New York and New England politicians against the Virginia influence in national politics. Hamilton obviously did not support this plan, so it is unlikely that Coleman did, but Federalists had an interest in stoking the conflict if it would weaken Clintonians, both in New York and nationally.

Partisan Religious Truths

135

Coleman’s interest in Wood’s pamphlet thus reflected larger Federalist efforts to regain power by exacerbating Republican divisions.39 Republicans elsewhere were deeply worried about conflicts in their New York ranks. Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s treasury secretary, believed that Federalist meddling caused Republican troubles in New York. Gallatin did not directly reference Wood’s pamphlet, but Republican editor Francis Blake, of Worcester, Massachusetts, did when confirming a similar suspicion. In September 1802, Blake published a satirical article in the National Aegis about the inflated fears of organized infidelity that consumed the New York press. The controversy was ultimately “much ado about nothing,” Blake concluded, but it was certainly generated to keep “New York in an uproar and perhaps to influence an election.”40 The stakes seemed much higher to New York Republicans. This was especially true for Clintonians. George Hopkins of the Spectator recognized clearly that Wood’s Full Exposition was intended to discredit the leadership of the Clinton faction with a “detail of facts which, if true, surely ought to sink them forever, in the estimation of the wise and virtuous.” For James Cheetham, Coleman’s review had personal implications that ran much deeper than politics. Cheetham was coeditor of the American Citizen, an early Driscol supporter, and a named Illuminati. Cheetham responded directly to Coleman. He dissected Coleman’s editorial choices, protesting that Coleman selectively excluded aspects of Wood’s pamphlet that countered Coleman’s broader goals and those of his fellow Federalists. From Cheetham’s perspective, Coleman was concerned not about defending Christian piety but instead forestalling the further expansion of a popular political movement. Coleman endeavored “to whelm every man in the Union who is faithful to the Constitution and sincerely attached to the present wise administration of the Government.” Coleman acted as Federalists always had; their “party, as one of the ‘arts’ of delusion, have never ceased to ring the tocsin of infidelity through the land.” His review was thus “a cunning device . . . one of the ‘arts of an able editor.’ ” Coleman’s editorial choices were especially harmful, Cheetham argued, because of newspapers’ presumed influence over public opinion. Newspapers advanced sentiments, informed perceptions, persuaded their readers, and mobilized constituencies. Federalist editors had thus become the new priests because they assumed the power to enforce religious beliefs that the clergy in the United States were quickly losing.41

136

Chapter 4

Federalist editors in New York and beyond quickly printed accounts of the Columbian Illuminati. Coleman ultimately proved to be an even abler editor than Cheetham realized. The Evening Post’s prominent position among Federalist journals helped ensure this. Many Federalist editors simply reprinted Coleman’s review in its entirety or excerpted it with little or no commentary. Others added their own partisan spin. Harry Croswell, editor of the Balance, and Columbian Repository in Hudson, New York, declared that Wood’s “pamphlet ought to be read by every citizen of the United States, as it serves to expose the machinations of a clan of infidels, who had associated together for the purpose of subverting the Religion and Government of our country.” The editor of the Trenton Federalist prefaced his excerpt with a pithy, party-line summary: “This Society of Deists, formed in New-York for the purpose of undermining the Christian Religion, is composed of the Democratic Party, especially the Clintonians—Its members correspond with Tom Paine and Mr. Jefferson—They swear an oath of secrecy when admitted to the Society, and also of enmity to Christianity.” Ultimately, between September and December 1802, Coleman’s review, or excerpts of it, appeared in newspapers from Maine to Virginia, barring Rhode Island and Delaware. Coleman’s version of the Exposition’s thesis likely had an exceptionally large influence over readers in various parts of the country. The inextricable link between deism and Republicanism that Coleman highlighted offered a partisan framework that could be applied to almost any local political context far removed from the circumstances in New York that split the Burrites and Clintonians. This was especially true for editors who recognized that publishing partisan religious controversy had greater potential value than lengthy and learned expositions of theology.42 The Columbian Illuminati controversy was the closest Federalist editors came to actually achieving an opposition campaign with national reach. Still, this was not enough to forestall the Republicans’ continued political ascendancy. Within a decade, Federalist opposition to the War of 1812 further doomed the party as a national political force. Although political fortune was not on the Federalists’ side, the form of partisan religious controversy they developed drew commentary from political observers throughout the early 1800s. Some observers entirely dismissed the opposition strategy of Federalist editors because it did nothing to win elections. Despite their apparent inability to change electoral outcomes, other writers believed that Federalist opposition strategies should not be discounted. Those who took partisan religious controversy seriously all agreed that it affected larger

Partisan Religious Truths

137

understandings about religion’s place in public life. Differences arose over how to interpret these changes. Optimistic writers argued that developments within the country’s recent political history advanced more expansive notions of freedom of conscience and religious liberty. This view acknowledged that partisan religious controversy, despite the rancor it engendered in other realms, on balance benefited the faithful. Pessimistic observers charged that partisanship in general weakened the authority of Christian teachings in American life. They blamed the tactics of Federalist editors for increasing rather than diminishing religious uncertainty. With electoral victories mounting for their party, Republican stalwarts were most likely to dismiss Federalist opposition efforts out of hand. Denis Driscol viewed Federalist efforts with bemusement. It was “unaccountable” to him “why the Doctors of the church have allowed the defence of Christianity to devolve totally on the Editors of American newspapers!” Benjamin Hobart of Abington, Massachusetts, and John B. Colvin of the Democratic Republican, or, Anti-Aristocrat in Baltimore, Maryland, viewed Federalist religious politics as frivolous and largely ineffectual. Hobart noted in an 1805 July Fourth address that electoral victories for Jefferson and other Republicans proved that the Federalists’ best efforts to label their opponents “enemies to God and Man” had failed. Moreover, Federalist predictions that the United States would descend into ruin and irreligion following Jefferson’s election were proven patently false in hindsight. Writing at the height of the controversy regarding the Columbian Illuminati, Colvin focused attention on the actions of “tory editors, beginning with Coleman of NewYork, and coming regularly down to the wizards of the Federal Gazette,” the latter being John Hewes’s anti-Republican Baltimore newspaper. According to Colvin, “[W]hilst, pell-mell, Jefferson, and Paine, and deism, and infidelity, are jumbled together without order or mercy, we can see in such noisy nonsense nothing but the yelpings of a set of bloodhounds.”43 Not all Republicans were so quick to denigrate Federalist opposition tactics just because they were politically ineffective. The “pell-mell” associations of names and epithets dismissed by Colvin seemed consequential to other observers. In 1808, a Simon Snyder supporter cautioned the voters of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, against the workings of “federal christianity on electioneering occasions.” Federalists, this writer argued, understood religion as Proteus-like in its ability to take “any shape as need required.” In elections from 1800 onward, the Federalists, “by their consecrated juggle” and their “consecrated power of transformation,” cast Jefferson as a deist

138

Chapter 4

and Pennsylvania Federalist James Ross as a pious Christian, despite contrary evidence surrounding both men’s religious opinions. These acts of “federalist enchantment” were not sincere attempts to assess a candidate’s faith or piety, but instead efforts to achieve political gain. Federalists thus cynically used religious language for partisan ends. This pamphleteer warned that Federalist campaign tactics ultimately stripped religious language of its utility in making moral judgments about candidates. As a result of their opposition, Federalist partisans actually increased deism’s appeal, or so concluded Solomon Aiken, minister at the First Church in Dracut, Massachusetts. Aiken was a Congregationalist Republican, part of a small group of New England clergyman who charged that the partisanship of their Federalist colleagues undermined the ministry and betrayed God’s word. Once religion became too entangled in the world, people had more reason to doubt its authority. In an 1811 fast-day sermon, Aiken thus warned that “the great increase in infidelity” was an “evil effect of federalism.” Federalist editors deserved equal blame for this, for they inadvertently gave reasons for people to become infidels. The “federal papers” were filled with details about infidels and their political designs that Federalist editors published “with great zeal.” By labeling infidels those people “who stand the highest for reputation, and have acquired, and possess the greatest confidence, of any in the Nation,” the Federalist opposition risked elevating infidelity’s appeal. Federalist editors forgot the lessons learned in debates over The Age of Reason that patriotic emulation could generate piety but also irreligion.44 Some observers, however, identified clear political and religious benefits should the nation’s partisan conflicts spread deistic opinions. “True Baptist” was a pseudonymous writer who challenged the Federalist religious establishment in New England. This author proposed that the United States might be better off if Jefferson, indeed if all civil authorities were not Christians. He queried, “Which would be most conducive to the general good, to have an infidel” or “an old bigoted professor of Christianity” at “the head of public affairs?” The answer was clear. The infidel cared “so little about religion, that he would not disturb it, if he did it no good, but would leave every man to enjoy his own opinion.” The “Christian,” however, “would be continually interfering with men’s opinions, and disturbing public peace by instigating and sanctioning laws to establish religion.” Boston lawyer William Charles White believed that the country’s recent partisan conflicts taught an important lesson about how Americans might avoid similar strife in the future. In 1809, White delivered a July Fourth oration before the Bunker Hill

Partisan Religious Truths

139

Association in which he reminded his audience to remain prideful of their civil and religious freedoms. “The sanctuary of conscience is unprofaned” in America, White boasted. White’s notion of conscience included anyone who believed in God and a future state, arguing that “every citizen, who has this foundation, may erect upon it what superstructure he pleases.” Religious liberty bestowed equal legitimacy to distinct and often mutually exclusive belief systems. Citizenship was not linked to a specific religious confession in White’s framework, and he explicitly included Jews, Quakers, Catholics, as well as deists. Whether citizens joined with the “Hebrew” and anticipated “in fond imagination the coming of his long looked for Messiah; or, with the deist,” to “explore the immense volume of creation, and ‘look through nature up to nature’s God,’ ” a broad spectrum of belief was protected within the liberty of conscience. If Americans could tolerate expressions of vastly different religious opinions by focusing their attention on points of agreement, they could certainly do the same with political differences. After all, the ways of dealing with sect and party were identical. As White concluded, the “rage of party” posed the greatest threat to civil and religious liberty because “party is scarcely any thing but an ignorant, illiberal, and furious zeal about trifles.”45 If tolerance for deists was the cost of ending political strife in the United States, some Americans were unwilling to see partisanship abate. This put Federalists of more conservative views in a complicated position. Americans, they argued, still needed to oppose infidelity, but Federalist challenges to irreligion actually undermined the Christian principles that they were supposed to uphold. Federalist politician David Daggett and Federalist minister Samuel Leonard separately concluded that Federalist polemics actually advanced contingent notions of religious truth. In Daggett’s 1805 July Fourth oration in Greenfield, Connecticut, he reminded his audience that Federalists from the late 1790s onward had drummed a constant chorus that Republican political ascendancy would certainly destroy religion, marriage, and government. This message was also “echoed, and reechoed from every federal paper on the continent,” thus illuminating “the inconsistency of federal principles with their conduct.” Federalist appeals to social order and moral governance relied on the Bible’s unchanging, divinely revealed truths that had withstood the tests of time. However, Daggett argued, Federalists behaved politically as though the Republicans, the governing party of a developing republic, actually posed an existential threat to Christianity like none other in the religion’s eighteen-hundred-year history. Daggett’s oration

140

Chapter 4

thus highlighted the epistemological consequences of partisanship. Daggett suggested that Federalist partisans either harbored their own doubts about Christianity or sought political gain by fashioning an opposition strategy that incorporated a concept of religion not unlike that held by the deists they lambasted. If Federalists doubted Christianity, or if their efforts at political gain introduced doubts about Christianity, then the Federalist opposition invited more than political defeat, they invited divine retribution. Samuel Leonard warned as much in his 1804 July Fourth oration in Poultney, Vermont. Leonard lamented that “religion is no longer considered desirable in those who fill the chair of state” because Americans believed that it confined “genius” and also bound them to “ancient customs deemed . . . oppressive and foolish.” Infidel Republicans would have readily concurred, but Federalist partisans confirmed as much by conceding defense of their faith to editors and operatives. Leonard thus asked forebodingly, “Since the same God governs who has always governed, have we not just occasion for alarm?” Efforts to answer such questions expanded religious controversies into entirely new realms of American public life in the years to come.46 Partisan religious controversy in the early 1800s advanced the notion that religious truth consisted of opinions that were open to rational inquiry and public debate. These controversies also forced further recognition, if not acceptance, that American society had critics of Christianity. Private beliefs could not be changed by force or law, but only by persuasion. Indeed for those Americans eager to contest spiritual matters in public, persuasion seemed the most efficacious and least threatening means of religious dispute for people of vastly differing beliefs. Larger changes in American society reinforced this view. As the nineteenth century progressed, civil society— the arena of persuasion—expanded dramatically with new opportunities for Americans to associate, print, and read. In addition, the partisan alignments of the late 1790s and early 1800s eventually dissolved thus creating new avenues for Americans to cooperate on shared religious issues outside the realm of formal politics. Lyman Beecher described a variation of this process in Connecticut following disestablishment in 1818. Once a chief religious pillar of Connecticut’s Federalist political order was dismantled, “the occasion of animosity between us and the minor sects was removed, and infidels could no more make capital with them against us.” All true Protestants began “to feel the dangers of infidelity,” which “laid the basis for co-operation and union of spirit.”47

Partisan Religious Truths

141

The partisan editors of 1800 were on the vanguard of changes to come in how Americans waged public religious conflicts. Driscol sought to advance an unpopular religious view by justifying its political legitimacy according to abstract natural rights and religious freedoms. Although this approach was suitable to theoretical or legal discussions, alone it was no match against opponents who defended their faith in the visceral and sentimental terms of family, tradition, or community. As deists pursued new anti-Christian offensives in subsequent decades, they learned from the limitations of Driscol’s approach. Federalism ended as a force in national electoral politics by the early 1800s, but former Federalists, both men and women, became formidable in their ability to influence the national culture by harnessing the institutions of civil society in service of their moral and religious aims. The rise of ecumenical, broadly Protestant national reform movements in the nineteenth century partly resulted from the public efforts of these former Federalists. Editors such as Coleman and Croswell pioneered ways to publicly defend specific religious opinions or ideas of social order in a culture where broad agreement on these issues could not be expected, through either tradition or deference. Those who joined the era’s many Protestant reform movements pursued this strategy even more aggressively in their efforts to limit the public influence of religious opinions or moral behavior they deemed intolerable.

Chapter 5

America’s Deist Past

In 1860 George Peck, a Methodist minister in Scranton, Pennsylvania, recounted his denomination’s growth in the Genesee Conference, which encompassed northern Pennsylvania, central and western New York, and neighboring areas of Canada. Peck committed several pages of his confidently titled chapter, “Progress of the Work,” to “infidelity” in Wilkes-Barre during the late 1790s. It was here, in this future coal town on the banks of the Susquehanna River, that Methodist itinerant William Colbert concluded his April 1797 sermon at the courthouse with “a word of caution to the deists” in attendance. Peck contextualized Colbert’s diary entry, noting that several of the town’s finer citizens were disciples of the era’s most infamous deist, “Blind Palmer,” including Elihu’s brother, a prominent lawyer in the community. Wilkes-Barre’s deists supposedly read and discussed The Age of Reason as well as Palmer’s writings. True to his itinerant mission, Colbert had hurried away to his next destination without comment on whether Wilkes-Barre’s infidels took his warning to heart. Peck, however, reassured his readers that “the old leaven of infidelity, we fear, has never been wholly exterminated from the old town, although it has ceased to exercise much public influence.”1 It seems peculiar that a man of faith would celebrate an ostensibly pyrrhic victory. The gospel had failed to change hearts and minds; deists in Wilkes-Barre presumably remained steadfast in their beliefs. Yet this was still a victory for God, Peck maintained, because Colbert had effectively curtailed public criticisms of Christianity. By the time Peck wrote, Elihu Palmer, Denis Driscol, and Thomas Paine had long lived only in their writings. The 1790s— with their irreligion, the French Revolution, and The Age of Reason—had receded further into history only, so it seemed, to be buried deeper by the rising appeal of evangelical Protestantism. However, as the writings of Peck suggest,

Deist Past

143

religious controversies of the 1790s occupied a place in the larger culture well into the nineteenth century. This was especially true for Protestant writers with evangelical commitments who began referencing America’s deist past much earlier in the 1800s. Depicting the 1790s as a time when American culture was imbued with disbelief in Christianity served such writers in important ways. It helped give meaning and purpose to their ongoing evangelical efforts while eliding controversial aspects of their own early history. Several popular evangelical movements advanced politically and socially during the 1770s and 1780s. These gains accelerated during the partisan conflicts of the early 1800s. Republican electoral success brought new public legitimacy to ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. Consequently, previously marginalized churches and denominations benefited immensely. Methodists, Baptists, and other denominations grew rapidly to form a popular religious culture in which ordinary men and women defined spiritual life according to their own terms. However, ideas that contributed to evangelical success were also complicit in political and intellectual changes that further rendered religious belief, or disbelief, a matter of personal opinion open to debate in the public sphere. Evangelical denominations that entered the religious mainstream during the nineteenth century had leaders who strove to secure the sources of their growth but in ways that did not diminish evidence of a Christian God’s authority in the world. Harvesting souls for Christ was a sure indication of God’s presence. But in a culture where public opinion and persuasion were arbiters of political and religious truths, evangelists might always confront stalwart unbelievers like those in Wilkes-Barre. If private beliefs were less amendable to evangelical ambitions, at least evangelicals might be capable of shaping the larger society to prevent undesirable religious opinions from gaining public influence. Organized evangelical reform in the early republic focused heavily on this goal. The publishers of religious tracts and newspapers that flooded American culture were indispensible in this regard. Peck thus measured evangelical success by a standard new to the nineteenth century. It was a standard largely defined by the effectiveness of evangelical institutions, including organized itinerancy and the press, to control the worldly effects of private belief. This message was conveyed in the nation’s evangelical press, especially when editors and publishers invoked America’s deist past in an effort to mobilize their ranks to engage public life.2 Nathan Bangs was American Methodism’s first prominent chronicler. Writing in 1845, fifteen years before Peck, Bangs devoted several pages of his

144

Chapter 5

multivolume history of Methodism to American irreligion in the 1790s. He described a people “corrupted by the deistical writings of Thomas Paine” along with other books “of a kindred character” that circulated widely and exerted “a most deleterious influence upon the minds of many of our citizens.” As historians, Bangs and Peck thus reached very similar conclusions, but as clergy they held divergent views about Methodism. Bangs worked tirelessly to make Methodism a respectable faith for the republic’s urban middle class. From his position in New York, he organized and oversaw Methodist missionary, educational, and publication efforts. Peck, on the other hand, reacted against the form of Methodism championed by Bangs. He admired “primitive Methodism . . . especially as it existed in the interior, in the backwoods among the pioneers of the country, and as maintained by the old pioneer preachers.” Peck’s effort to remind his Methodist readers about the virtues of their early history thus stood in sharp contrast to Bangs’s Whiggish history of Methodism’s growth into a modern denomination. Nonetheless, both concluded that the success of their denomination to grow and spread God’s word in light of obstacles, including widespread infidelity during the 1790s, affirmed the power of the Methodists’ message and their ways. Methodism, its historians believed, began its popular ascent at a historical moment endowed with divine significance. God’s providence, not coincidence, inspired their spiritual forebears when their work was most needed in the United States. Bangs, and later Peck, concluded that itinerant ministers worked most successfully to disabuse Americans of their disbelief in Christian teachings.3 As former itinerant preachers, Bangs and Peck fashioned their religious identities, their vocations, and their understandings of the broader Methodist enterprise in reference to the historical memory of a supposedly irreligious decade—the infidel 1790s. Bangs and Peck had good reason to write histories about Methodism’s exponential growth. With fewer than 1,000 members in 1770, the denomination had 250,000 by 1820 and more than one million by 1850. In New York, where Bangs and Peck both toiled in the missionary field, Methodist membership during the infidel 1790s stood at 3,400 but rose to 20,000 by 1810. Bangs and Peck thus wrote the history of a remarkably successful denomination, yet they were also beneficiaries of a larger evangelical movement that Methodists did not build alone.4 Comforts of hindsight and historical perspective bolstered the confidence expressed by Bangs and Peck. They were not gripped by the uncertainty prevalent early in the century regarding Christianity’s, let alone

Deist Past

145

Methodism’s, future prospects in the United States. Yet in ways perhaps unrealized by Bangs and Peck, these earlier fears of an unchristian future had shaped fundamental aspects of the evangelical ambitions they both shared. Out of these earlier concerns, religious writers had further refined one of evangelicalism’s central aims: to prepare believers for their own missionary work. This stemmed from the proselytizing emphasis first displayed by Jesus and central to Christianity thereafter. However, such training was uniquely necessary for a wide array of Protestants who lived in a society without state churches, in an intellectual climate where religious knowledge was uncertain, and in a culture saturated with new forms of print. The Methodist histories by Bangs and Peck thus culminated a generation’s worth of evangelical self-understanding and historical memory that established the religious controversies of the 1790s as fundamental to American, and indeed world, Christianity. Accounts about the success of their specific denomination elided broadly shared evangelical approaches to religious controversy that minimized theological difference in order to prevent infidelity’s triumph in the United States. Indeed, those writers and reformers most opposed to infidelity were quite often Protestant ecumenicists. This position allowed them to challenge disbelievers in their faith by deploying the full organizational power of nineteenth-century evangelicalism. Observers less removed in time from the events of the 1790s cited that decade’s irreligion when developing powerful arguments for evangelical mobilization. This was certainly the view that Reverend John Smith of Salem, New Hampshire, expressed in an 1813 Thanksgiving Day discourse titled The Triumph of Religion over Infidelity. Smith reflected on the introduction of European “illuminism” to the United States over twenty years earlier, and how “with immense turpitude, infidels attacked our morals, our social order, our holy ordinances.” Imported infidelity bore American fruit in the 1790s, and American “minds” were unwittingly and “gradually moulded into a kind of deistical cast.” He identified a range of social sites where Americans during the 1790s, especially talented youngsters, acquired the ideas and the language of French philosophes. Brief attendance at one of the republic’s newly formed academies was enough for students to learn “that the Bible was a farce, that religion was superstition, and that to scoff at it was noble.” College life, he argued, was equally detrimental to piety as were careers in medicine and law; pursuers of professional success declared themselves freethinkers, deemed religion vulgar, and elevated nature above divine agency. And if a young republican lacked access to formal education,

146

Chapter 5

infidel opinions were still within reach, for “he could become a philosopher behind the counter, in the mechanick’s shop, or in following the plough, and talk wonderfully wise about priestcraft, religious oppression” and a brighter future without Christianity. Prominent Connecticut divine Lyman Beecher shared Smith’s general sentiments. Infidelity’s presence in American life had long vexed Beecher. For him, immorality and social ills stemmed from infidel opinions, the mother of all vices. Infidelity was a form of “political atheism,” Beecher warned, and its proponents endeavored “to turn the world up side down, and empty it of every institution, thought, feeling, and action which has emanated from Christianity.”5 Despite their bleak assessments of the nation’s recent past, in their own ways both Smith and Beecher believed that predictions issued in the 1790s about America’s infidel future were overwrought. Smith argued that the sedulous efforts of Christians against the “designs of infidels” halted America’s descent at the turn of the nineteenth century. Moreover, this was a global trend. Christians in the United States, England, Scandinavia, Continental Europe, and South Asia refused to remain idle, Smith boasted. They formed an array of Bible, missionary, and moral societies to gain converts and to dispute skeptics. From unlikely circumstances, Beecher eventually reached a similar conclusion. This was the result of his personal odyssey from a defender of Connecticut’s Standing Order to a proponent of religious disestablishment. When Connecticut disestablished the Congregational Church in 1818, Beecher lost state power to challenge the moral ills around him that he had previously wielded from his Litchfield pulpit. The end of state support forced Beecher to reconsider religion’s political authority. Beecher eventually concluded that Protestantism could preserve and likely enhance its power by establishing voluntary associations. Beecher argued that God provided “providential substitutes for those legal provisions of our Fathers” by pouring “out his Spirit upon the churches; and voluntary associations of christians were raised up to apply and extend that influence, which the law could no longer apply.” Beecher believed Christian influence exercised in civil society was potentially quite great, indeed “voluntary efforts, societies, missions, and revivals” gave ministers, and by extension their followers, unprecedented political power. Still public opinion, “however corrupt that may be,” was sacrosanct in a democracy for it determined the legitimacy of civil law. Beecher argued that Protestantism’s political power stemmed from believers organized in civil society who exerted their moral influence “into

Deist Past

147

systems of legislation,” thereby shaping religious opinions by “extending their all pervading efficacy through every relation of social life.”6 Both New England clergymen concluded that infidelity was most vulnerable if its opponents viewed it primarily as a social problem with political remedies. Throughout the early nineteenth century, other evangelical minded Protestants reached the same conclusion. They increasingly emphasized changing the social world that created deists rather than producing systematic disputations of deism. Beecher’s ideal of an active Protestant presence in civil society motivated action of this sort. In a democracy, as Beecher recognized, public immorality in all forms, including irreligion, could not be defeated by the force of law alone. Voluntary measures by committed Protestants exercised an influence over public opinion “distinct from that of government, independent of popular suffrage” and “superior in potency to individual efforts.” Indeed Beecher viewed members of Protestant voluntary associations as “a sort of disciplined moral militia” dedicated to “suppressing vice and guarding the public morals.” Moral militias carried out much of their work in the evangelical press. Smith credited the publishers of tracts and newspapers for their work to limit the public consequences of private disbelief. Indeed, evangelical publishers generally found that tracts and newspapers were the most effective print media for attacking the social sources of infidelity. To reach this conclusion, religious publishers of tracts and newspapers borrowed assumptions about how best to challenge infidelity from a host of other sources.7 Evangelical writers in the early 1800s championed methods for critiquing deism that had undergone significant changes. This is apparent when antideist writings published in the early republic are compared with those issued earlier. Charles Leslie’s A Short and Easy Method with the Deists, published in 1679, challenged deism by drawing almost entirely on comparative biblical criticism and rationalist epistemology. To Leslie, philosophical procedures were available to justify faith and prove deism false. Leslie’s book remained the standard critique of deism well after its publication. Copies of Leslie’s book appeared in many early national libraries. English dissenting minister Phillip Doddridge’s The Family Expositor: or, A Paraphrase and Version of the New Testament, which was published in six volumes between 1739 and 1756, also became a Protestant standard. Doddridge characterized his work as offering the “easiest and plainest principles” that provide “rational satisfaction to the minds of common Christians, who have not

148

Chapter 5

leisure, nor perhaps ability, to enter into all the niceties of theological and scholastical controversy.” As a testament to the influence of both books, several English and eventually American editions were published well into the nineteenth century.8 Although Leslie’s text remained a readily available weapon in the antideists’ arsenal, challenges to deism published from the late eighteenth century onward increasingly exhibited the polemic methodology outlined by Doddridge. This approach sought ways to make the methods of religious controversy accessible on a much broader scale. Boston Unitarian William Ellery Channing’s Two Sermons on Infidelity, published in 1813, emphasized his belief that critical examinations of Christianity were the sources of its greatest strength. Channing recommended books by prominent English theologians including Leslie’s Short and Easy Method and Doddridge’s Family Expositor for his readers “who want time for elaborate works.” Channing had fairly ambitious expectations for the kind of religious writings that his audience of busy readers had the time or the capacity to read.9 More common were the religious writers and publishers who wanted to reach an audience without the education or interest to read theologically informed and philosophically organized works such as Leslie’s. From the 1790s onward, a steady stream of books and pamphlets was published in the United States intended to reduce the costs in time and intellectual capacity necessary for gaining knowledge to oppose deism. Congregational minister and poet Joseph Vaill, of Hadlyme, Connecticut, penned a verse in 1796 titled An Address to a Deist: A Poem. “The design . . . in publishing this short poem,” Vaill stated in its preface, “is to benefit those persons in particular, who have not leisure, or inclination, to peruse laboured and prolix productions, against Deistical Writers.” In 1808 Henry S. Keatinge of Baltimore published a “method” for challenging “modern unbelievers.” In a single volume, “within the compass of every person’s study and purchase,” he compiled, edited, and provided commentary on the writings of theologians, historians, and other biblical commentaries in order “to shorten the labor and expense of more severe researches, and to give a competent knowledge of these matters to those who have not the leisure or abilities for more voluminous and learned enquires.” In 1810, Trenton printer James L. Wilson published A Brief Defence of Christianity, Against Deism and Infidelity, by “A Friend to True Religion,” which the author described as “chiefly a summary of facts . . . compiled for the use of those who have not leisure, or inclination, to peruse more voluminous works.” Alden Bradford described his 1813

Deist Past

149

book Evangelical History, or, A Narrative of the Life, Doctrines and Miracles of Jesus Christ as a work “chiefly for those who have not leisure to peruse the larger works of voluminous Commentators.” Ultimately, “The great proportion of mankind,” as Jonathan Ward reminded the members of the Maine Missionary Society, “have not leisure and ability for deep investigation.” Ward delivered his sermon at the annual meeting of the Maine Missionary Society in 1811, where its members announced their continued efforts to withstand “the progress of infidelity.” Ward’s sermon, and especially its occasion, exemplifies the relationship between organized evangelicalism and forms of religious controversy in which spiritual positions were packaged and conveyed in terms designed for all Christians to understand and use. These disparate writers, in different regions and from diverse denominational backgrounds, all agreed that acquiring intellectual tools to challenge deism should not be burdensome.10 Less evidently religious writings published in the early 1800s also conveyed the dangers of infidelity without relying on sustained theological explanation. This approach had, of course, appeared in infidel controversies from the 1770s onward, so it was a continuation of earlier developments. Several almanacs addressed deism in this way. The Washington Citizen and Farmer’s Almanac of 1808 carried a short piece titled “The Deist Confounded” in which a commonsense farmer proves to his deist cousin that reason without divine revelation cannot bring happiness. The New Jersey and Pennsylvania Almanac for 1817 briefly reminded its readers that deism and debauchery were one and the same. And the New England Almanac for 1818 included a pithy warning against the elevation of principle over experience: “Precepts many, Examples few, Make wicked men and Deists too.” The almanac entries demonstrate a popular familiarity with various forms of infidelity. A similar theme appeared in the early republic’s most widely used grammar, Murray’s English Grammar. A lesson on syntax included the sentence “[n]ot one in fifty who call themselves deists, understand the nature of the religion they reject.” The Understanding Reader: or, Knowledge Before Oratory included a poem titled “The Bible” as part of a vocabulary lesson that included the stanza: “Despis’d, neglected, though thou art / Where vice usurps the poison’d heart / Though Deists dazzled with the ray / Of reason’s glimmering twilight day / Wilder’d in a speculative maze.” The young reader of this volume learned a valuable lesson about unaided reason. To affirm this didactic point, “usurps,” “deists,” and “dazzled” were the words designated necessary for memorization. To varying degrees, the authors of these texts

150

Chapter 5

conceded that their audiences were already familiar with the meaning and dangers of deism. Additional esoteric knowledge of theology and philosophy were superfluous for understanding moral lessons conveyed in the relatively brief references to deism in almanacs and grammars.11 Publishers of evangelical tracts and newspapers also incorporated techniques that reflected the increasingly public nature of knowledge claims in the early republic. By the early 1800s, forums existed to debate and address religious uncertainty, especially uncertainties about free will and its implications. Public religious debates were incredibly popular in the early nineteenth century, especially after 1820, on occasion attracting substantial audiences. These were well-organized events, which were often advertised in the local press far in advance. In ways remarkably similar to duels, participants agreed to rules set before the debate regarding theological definitions, appropriate texts, and acceptable subject matter. Alexander Campbell, a leader of the “Disciples of Christ” restorationist movement, debated Robert Owen, a deistic utopian socialist, for eight days in Cincinnati in 1829. Each day’s exchange occurred before an estimated audience of 1,200 people. Newspapers throughout the Ohio River Valley and farther east reported on this event. A paper sympathetic to Campbell declared him the winner, exclaiming that “the Goliath of infidelity has fallen.”12 Debate audiences would tolerate lengthy arguments about abstract theological points so long as participants conveyed their message in dramatic and persuasive rhetorical styles. Participants rarely believed their debates would definitively resolve questions about religious truth, but instead they would affirm a given interpretation of the Bible as understood by distinct religious groups. This was another example of how religious controversy in the early nineteenth century served larger evangelical ends by subjecting faith claims to the standards of public opinion. These debates thus highlight the degree to which judgments about ultimate religious truth slipped in importance to a modest but more politically effective goal of establishing the public legitimacy of a religious interpretation.13 When evangelical tract and newspaper publishers challenged deism, they did so on well-tread intellectual ground shaped in myriad ways by larger efforts to challenge infidelity without relying on sustained theological explanation. Evangelical tracts and newspapers in circulation throughout the United States offered lessons that minimized the intellectual burdens of challenging infidelity while encouraging the pious to do so according to the persuasive conventions of early national public life. Both genres were

Deist Past

151

thus designed, in part, to integrate religious controversy into the routines of ordinary existence. As the influence of religious publishing increased in the United States throughout the early nineteenth century, so too did the potential influence of these methods for challenging infidelity. The importance of newspapers and tracts to the evangelical enterprise is apparent, first and foremost, in volume. According to available sources, nearly half of the periodicals in existence between 1820 and 1850 focused on religious themes, and a growing number had explicit denominational affiliations. By one estimate, religious periodicals in 1830 had around 400,000 subscribers. Religious tracts appeared in even greater numbers. Between 1812 and 1816 local tract societies were established in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Hartford, as well as in smaller cities and towns. Together, the New York and Philadelphia societies published more than two million tracts before 1824. The New England Tract Society, formed in 1814, was the most successful local society regarding production and geographic reach. Within three years it administered over thirty regional depositories in New England and beyond. It eventually published 4.2 million tracts and supplied over 500 local tract societies. National religious publishers also formed between 1815 and 1825, including the American Bible Society in 1816, the American Sunday School Union in 1824, and the American Tract Society in 1825. These organizations adopted technological advancements in mechanized printing and papermaking in order to increase product volume and quality. By the early 1830s the American Bible Society, for example, distributed over one million Bibles throughout the United States. The American Tract Society regularly distributed tracts and books, sometimes free of charge, to between two and three million people, and it published approximately five million pages annually. Infidelity was not the only subject broached by tract authors. But through distribution capability alone, religious publishers ensured that their readers had a steady flow of information about the perils of deistic challenges to Christianity.14 Evangelical print also served crucial instrumental and didactic purposes. Indeed, the denominational growth, sectarian divisions, theological changes, new forms of religious experience, and organizational innovations that constituted the Second Great Awakening relied on print in important ways. The advent of denominational newspapers and periodicals heralded central theological and sectarian distinctions that increasingly shaped religion in the early republic. Such papers and journals expressed and also promoted the era’s diversity of religious institutions and the wide array of

152

Chapter 5

personal religious experience. Denominational periodicals provided an institutional print voice for a new array of better organized religious movements. For individual believers and readers, denominational periodicals provided a framework to understand the broader religious implications of their piety. Evangelical tracts, however, contained uplifting narratives about the promise of Christian salvation or, occasionally, cautionary tales about faith lost.15 Those who formed America’s tract societies and published religious newspapers often agreed upon a version of Protestantism with the doctrines of free will and postmillennialism at its core. Free will held that individuals chose to accept or ignore God’s grace; in other words, they could decide whether or not to receive Christian salvation. Postmillennialism referred to the moment of Jesus Christ’s return as prophesied in the Bible. According to this doctrine, believers claimed that one thousand years of peace would precede the Second Coming. This was an optimistic interpretation of the millennium in which human agency on behalf of personal self-improvement, moral reform, and social change could advance Christian prophecy. Of course, such theological positions did not encompass the entirety of Christian belief and experience in the early republic. Yet for denominations they did influence—primarily Methodists, Presbyterians, and some Baptists and Congregationalists—they proved a powerful source of ecumenical cooperation as sectarian differences diminished in importance. Moreover, this theology was spiritually motivating as those who embraced it were actively involved in forming the print networks, voluntary associations, and eventually the political coalitions that defined Protestant reform in the early republic. However, freedom of conscience, the intellectual consent at the foundation of free will, legitimized personal belief and disbelief alike. One of evangelical Protestantism’s principal doctrines therefore did little to prevent, but possibly promoted, infidelity. The deistic implications of free will informed evangelical fears about infidelity as the willful choice of personal disbelief and moral depravity that stalled Jesus Christ’s return and the fulfillment of Christian prophecy. If the evangelical enterprise rested on free will and postmillennialism, then deism was an especially subversive set of ideas. Evangelical tracts and newspapers were especially suited for alerting readers of infidelity’s dangers. Tract authors and newspaper editors incorporated evangelical theology into their writings and editorial decisions. When challenging infidelity, American religious publishers were, in general, willing to elide points of Protestant doctrine in order to avoid excessive

Deist Past

153

sectarianism and to increase, rather than limit, access to God’s word. Along with serving an evangelical purpose, the emphasis on theological consensus in American religious publishing constructed a bulwark of Protestant unity against irreligion, doubt, and infidelity. Occasionally evangelical writers divided the world into Protestant and infidel camps in highly provocative and unwavering ways, without any attention to theology but to actions. In such instances, evangelical polemicists even labeled fellow believers infidels simply for disagreeing with their methods. The author of an 1822 article in the Ballston Spa Gazette attacked denominations that objected to missionary efforts on theological grounds, declaring that any member of such group should “have the honesty and truth first to avow himself an infidel” for knowingly preventing others from experiencing Christ’s “blessings.” Protestant unity thus stemmed from intellectual developments internal to respective nineteenth-century denominations, but its power to shape evangelical priorities in the world was strongly evident in challenges to infidelity. Indeed, moments of Protestant unity allowed for a division of labor within evangelical publishing. Whereas Bible societies, for example, disbursed scripture in order to curtail personal disbelief and bolster wayward piety, tract societies and newspapers were devoted more heavily to challenging the social and cultural sources of personal disbelief.16 Readers of tracts and evangelical newspapers thus gained insight into infidelity’s dangers through examples of its public manifestations. Religious publishers, printers, and writers provided such examples in pursuit of two primary objectives. The first was to give infidelity a social life; to explain, map, and categorize the gender, status, reading habits, morality, and intellectual development that characterized the typical infidel. The second objective was to provide ordinary readers with the intellectual tools to become everyday religious polemicists. Religious publishers encouraged and instructed their readers to challenge infidelity when it appeared in their communities, on their streets, in their taverns and social clubs, or even within their families. Both objectives were evident in evangelical tracts and newspapers, but to different degrees.17 Religious tracts often provided the most detailed social portraits of infidelity. By conveying the life stories of skeptics, tract authors utilized the biographical genre to warn against the perils of disbelief. Biographies of both the mighty and, more important, the meek were freighted with moral value in the early republic. Secular and religious writers in the early nineteenth century all believed that biographies provided accounts of representative

154

Chapter 5

lives, for good and for ill, which instructed readers in morality, piety, and general good behavior. Tract authors deployed the cultural power of biography when crafting their accounts of personal infidelity, thus linking their social profiles of disbelief to an explicitly didactic framework suitable for the purposes of an evangelical text.18 Religious newspapers, on the other hand, carried articles to educate and train ordinary religious polemicists. By the 1830s, editors of evangelical newspapers prioritized introducing readers to the arts and tactics of religious controversy. Despite a tendency within evangelical newspapers to draw sharp denominational or doctrinal divisions between fellow Protestants, this was only one facet of evangelical journalism. The evangelical propensity for religious controversy also allowed editors to use newspapers as vehicles of “Christian” cohesion in ways that diminished sectarian differences. Editors of religious newspapers forged ecumenical cooperation against the anvil deism. Moreover, religious newspapers shaped the experience of American Protestants beyond giving them a sense of membership in a transcendent fellowship of believers. Religious newspapers provided reasons for the faithful to join Lyman Beecher’s moral militias. By educating everyday religious polemicists, evangelical newspapers thus had a decidedly worldly mission. These newspapers gave readers reason for acting in the world as Christians, in a broadly ecumenical sense of the term, against disbelief. In creating everyday polemicists, newspapers, when read in conjunction with tract narratives, served the decidedly nontranscendent purpose of dealing with immediate, local disbelief.19 All religious publishers, including those of tracts and newspapers, believed that a text’s veracity and its evangelical potential were inextricably linked. Religious publications had to recount true events in order to convince readers of God’s power in the world. Infidels who populated the pages of religious tracts and periodicals were not generic figures, but often real people documented in other sources. Deism became associated with specific gender, class, and intellectual characteristics that it lacked in earlier discourses surrounding infidelity. To further establish the authenticity of their tracts, religious writers, editors, and publishers borrowed from an eclectic array of sources. As a result, religious tracts and newspapers that were neatly produced and systematically distributed often originated in nonreligious writings. This reflects the highly porous boundary between “religious” and “secular” print culture in the early republic. Rather than print voices of an evangelical subculture, religious tracts and newspapers served as printed

Deist Past

155

clearinghouses in which disparate polemic writings and isolated incidents of religious controversy were collected and republished to meet evangelical ends. Ultimately, the emphasis on veracity in religious publishing dovetailed with efforts to identify infidelity’s social profile and train everyday religious polemicists.20 Tracts were written according to a specific set of assumptions about the role of reading and the sort of message most likely to gain converts. First and foremost, tracts had to contain compelling narratives that would entertain and engage readers while delivering Christian teachings. Tract authors purposely used sentiment and emotional appeals common in popular literature in order to promote their religious messages. Tracts about infidelity often shared a cast of typical infidels, narrative structures, normative lessons, and details. Tract writers were particularly concerned about the origins of personal infidel opinions and whether or not such views were ever renounced. Of equal interest was the behavior of unrepentant infidels when faced with imminent death or at moments of immense personal need without the solace of Christianity. In this way, tract narratives often echoed lessons from other evangelical writings. An 1811 devotional reader designed to guide children’s morning religious studies defined deism as overconfidence in one’s reason and a source of false succor that became apparent only in moments of duress.21 By recounting the life cycles and biographies of individual infidels, tract writers demonstrated the power of Christian conversion or, equally important, the consequences of rejecting Christianity. The infidel often first doubted Christianity within a social context removed from family and community religious ties. When religious conversion did take place, it often followed moments when infidels witnessed examples of Christian piety expressed by individuals considered socially or racially inferior, be it a child, wife, laborer, or slave. Status and education were thus tenuous attainments in the typical tract, for they provided only temporary worldly benefits. They also distracted one from the true importance of life: ensuring eternal salvation. Infidel conversions to Christianity were often portrayed as instant developments. The time between an infidel’s initial self-doubt and the moment of spiritual awakening was compressed to such a degree that it reaffirmed broader Christian notions that God’s work in the world was immediate, powerful, and easily apparent. Unrepentant infidels nearly always arrived at agonizing ends, either from sickness or by accident. This belonged to a long tradition within anti-infidel polemics. Before their bodies had cooled,

156

Chapter 5

reports circulated that Voltaire and Paine suffered excruciating deaths. These reports were reprinted in America’s evangelical and secular press alike. More recent stories about the sudden death of C. C. C. Cohen, a New York chemist and atheist, in an 1834 lab explosion served similar instructive ends. Finally, in their last moments, tract infidels often accepted, all too late, that ignoring the Christian God brought eternal damnation, and that deism failed to comfort them in times of need.22 Religious tracts also provided a specific understanding of infidelity’s social life. According to these tracts, deistic socialization occurred in three interrelated ways: through reading habits, family life, and moral choices. The success of evangelical tracts ironically depended upon a print culture that religious publishers distrusted because of its sensational fiction about topics such as crime, romance, or irreligion. Religious writers and publishers worried that reading brought people to the heights of salvation but also the lows of infidelity. Deism’s ubiquity in the texts that streamed from America’s religious press reiterated assessments of what devout writers and publishers feared Americans were already reading in the early nineteenth century. Responses to such fears varied. Kentucky Presbyterian John P. Campbell believed that infidelity’s broad social dispersal jeopardized the moral state of the nation. Campbell’s analysis was part of an 1812 discourse, A Portrait of the Times; or, The Churches Duty, that outlined the proliferation and popularity of religious skepticism. Campbell provided his audience with a veritable bibliography of infidel writers whose books supposedly inundated American print culture. He cited Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Godwin, Erasmus Darwin, Wollstonecraft, Volney, Paine, and Palmer, among others. Campbell’s list is telling because it included many of the authors who gained popular name recognition, if not necessarily a readership, in debates from previous decades about generational religious change and partisan religious controversies. More dramatically, directors of a library in New London, Pennsylvania, took no chances when in 1832 they “solemnly tried, condemned, and executed, (by committing to the flames) that valuable work, Volney’s Ruins!” Perhaps New London’s librarians were extra vigilant about infidel writings in their midst as the book burning occurred just when people in the town’s vicinity purchased five hundred copies of The Age of Reason through subscription. Although the actual destruction of irreligious books was far from common, the conflagration in New London highlights a local reaction to the circulation of infidel writings. Works by Volney, Palmer, and Paine thus composed a persistent reserve of literary references that first circulated in

Deist Past

157

American religious controversies during the 1790s. Moreover they sustained a place in American cultural memory that far outlasted their authors’ literary careers.23 Careful reading of the wrong books typified infidel biographies. Indeed the names of certain authors appeared repeatedly in evangelical publications. The Methodist Connection reprinted The Confessions of J. Lackington, late bookseller, at the Temple of the Muses, in a Series of Letters to a Friend, in which Lackington attributed his deism to the works of Voltaire, Hume, and early English deists. The same authors similarly affected David Baldwin of Flatbush, New York, who was the subject of a narrative published by the American Tract Society. Baldwin was described as an affable but adept debater on behalf of infidel opinions. He was well versed in books that cast doubt upon revealed religion. Writings by Voltaire, Paine, Volney, Gibbon, and Hume “each in their turn, were carefully read; and I am sorry to add, his mind became tainted with their sentiments.” Baldwin’s reading convinced him that the Bible was false and that Jesus Christ was an impostor. Hume’s writings carried special dangers. They were responsible for Lackington’s deism. The author of Baldwin’s biography emphasized that “Hume’s argument, alleging that miracles were not susceptible to proof, he seemed to regard as his strong hold.” An 1832 tract published by the American Tract Society titled I am an Infidel! recounted the story of Henry, an ambitious young man who turned against Christianity after reading Hume. The lives of Lackington, Baldwin, and Henry demonstrate that infidelity resulted from discernible reading habits and preferences.24 Tract authors also mapped the social sites where people gained access to infidel writings. Deists purchased and discussed infidel works in Lackington’s bookstore. Influenced by his reading, Baldwin instigated frequent religious disputes in his neighborhood over the merits and truth of Christianity. In each instance, personal disbelief gained through private acts of reading garnered attention in public places. Through these examples, readers of tract narratives learned that infidelity was a source of sociability made possible by access to deistic books and the circulation of deistic ideas. The books infidels read not only influenced their religious opinions, but also provided a network of associates that further removed them from the influence of pious families and communities. Yet in each narrative the hold of infidel sociability ultimately broke. The influence of skeptical writers was incidental to a broader message about the inadequacy of deism and religious doubt at moments of personal duress. Lackington returned to the Methodist fold,

158

Chapter 5

Baldwin converted to Christianity on his deathbed in 1833, and Henry’s devout landlady introduced him to Christian revivals. Tract authors often exalted pious family life as the best protection against infidelity, but families were not certain incubators of Christian faith. Tract narratives recounted the lives of infidel patriarchs whose influence made religious family life particularly tenuous. Tract infidels were not always men, but narratives were predominantly about males. Lackington’s male patrons and Baldwin’s male acquaintances brought their deism home, a reality that preoccupied some tract authors. The Infidel Reclaimed; or, The Useful Tracts centered on the Nelson family, which included an infidel father, his pious wife, and an impressionable young daughter. Nelson’s infidelity seemed unwavering, and his daughter approved of her father when he ridiculed Christianity. However, it was Mrs. Nelson’s religious influence, sustained with tracts supplied by a blind peddler, that restored her family’s piety. Tracts sparked a religious awakening within the Nelson family. Although the work of evangelicals could ignite conversions within families, the presence of patriarchal infidels could also counteract evangelical efforts and undermine family piety. An article in Christian Watchman, an evangelical newspaper, reported on the successes and hardships of a Moravian mission to the Cherokees. Betsey Leslie was Cherokee leader Major Ridge’s sister-in-law, thus a fairly prominent Cherokee woman. Although Leslie was a devout Christian, her husband, an Anglo-American, was “a most profane infidel” who did all he could “to weary her out of her folly” even while she prayed for his soul. In both instances, evangelical efforts eventually bolstered family piety against the influence of religious doubts that fathers and husbands introduced to their homes.25 Religious publishers not only worried about the influence of parental disbelief on children within the home, but also emphasized the fragility of a child’s faith once he or she left home. In 1817 the Religious Tract Society of Philadelphia issued Conversion of a Deist, containing an unusual narrative because it focused on the life of a female deist, Isabella Brander. Brander was a young woman from rural England who arrived in London in 1798 to work as servant. This narrative reiterated a litany of common moral dangers that accompanied metropolitan life in an increasingly mobile society: distance from the piety of family and community and the dangers of learned society. Brander arrived in London at the height of conservative reactions to the French Revolution, still she “imbibed deistical sentiments, by residing in an academy . . . where she heard as the common topic, the Bible

Deist Past

159

ridiculed.” Brander’s immersion in this intellectual environment prompted her declaration, “I believe in no hell; and as for the Bible, it is a parcel of lies.” As common in tract narratives, Brander suffered a sudden illness that forced her to return to her community in the hinterlands. Once home, she regained her faith in time to expire peacefully. As an exemplar of tract infidelity, Brander’s experiences offered American readers clear lessons about the importance of pious family and community life in a society where young girls left their rural homes to seek employment in growing cities.26 Urban families with the means to hire servants, perhaps much like the family that hired Brander, were under special obligations to remain pious. At least this was the lesson contained in A Warning to Gamblers and Swearers, a New York Religious Tract Society publication of 1825. This narrative emphasized that morality was fragile once religious belief became only a species of personal judgment and if conscience worked unaided by divine revelation. This tract recounted an event within the household of William and Lucy Mallet, prominent figures in London’s theater scene during the 1750s. The Mallets discussed doubts about Christianity so frequently and “with so much earnestness, that the inferior domestics became soon as able disputants as the heads of the family.” William and Lucy’s open avowals of deism at the dinner table had immediate consequences. The Mallets’ servant imbibed “irreligious and blasphemous” ideas while waiting on their table. Under this influence, the Mallets’ servant pilfered their silver. When asked to explain his action, the servant replied, “Sir, I have heard you so often talk of the impossibility of a future state, and that after death there was no reward for virtue, nor punishment for vice, that I was tempted to commit the robbery.”27 Isabella Brander and Lucy Mallet offered examples of infidelity that complicated easy conclusions about the femininity of evangelical piety or the masculinity of disbelief. Furthermore, these narratives provided two of the clearest lessons about the domestic conduits of religious belief, for good and for ill. However, these narratives also highlight an additional context that tract writers used to frame the dangers of personal infidelity, its connection to other social problems. Infidelity was not a lone moral failing, but rather one point within a constellation of moral deficiencies. In the case of Mallets’ servant, infidelity produced criminality. Heavy drink was especially associated with infidelity. Comparing infidelity to alcoholism indicated how religious doubt led to individual, family, and social decay. The American Tract Society published

160

Chapter 5

Convictions Stifled: A Narrative of Facts about a pious young Pennsylvania man. His male infidel compatriots plied him with alcohol, and when he suffered pangs of guilt for getting drunk, friends ridiculed him for “turning christian.” Under the sway of drink, and in association with other infidels, the male protagonist became unmoored from the piety of family and community, after which he never attended church again. According to the tract narrative, he was widely “known to be a bold blasphemer. He spoke publicly and with much apparent enmity against ministers of the Gospel and professors of religion.” This anonymous infidel suffered a sudden, unexpected death, again a death without the benefits of Christian salvation.28 This tract depicted the fate of a single infidel whose experience illustrated a common moral lesson. Heavy drink and disbelief were just two of the dangers that befell individuals living beyond the influence of religious families and Christian community. An article in Religious Intelligencer described an 1820 awakening in Bristol, Rhode Island, that purportedly swept the entire town including “profane swearers, drunkards, scoffers at religion, gamblers and infidels; many of whom may be said to have been lost to themselves, to their families, and to society.” The author described “almost a complete moral revolution” in Bristol. Whereas the young Pennsylvanian died an unredeemed infidel, events in Bristol showed that even the basest infidels could still gain salvation with the guidance of dedicated evangelicals.29 No tract published in the early republic better captured the central themes of tract infidelity than Conversion of an Aged Deist: A Narrative of Facts by Nathan Hoyt. Hoyt was a Presbyterian minister from New Hampshire who in 1830 assumed a pulpit at First Presbyterian Church in Athens, Georgia. In 1831 a religious revival swept Athens and brought local planter Noah Price along with it. Price was “one of the most confirmed, undoubting deists to be found in the world.” According to Hoyt’s narrative, Price adopted deism around 1801, at midlife, even though “pious parents raised him.” At this time Price became “a settled deist” after surrounding himself with “intelligent infidels” and reading “a popular infidel work.” For the following thirty years he discounted the Bible as fiction and rejected the possibility of eternal life, although he kept these opinions from his devout family. During the Athens revival of 1831, Price overheard one of his slaves praying in the woods. Under the influence of a “pious old negro” the deist patriarch doubted his infidelity for the first time in thirty years. Moreover, Price experienced stirrings of Christian salvation at the same time that one of his devout daughters acquired a copy of Watson’s Answer to Paine during

Deist Past

161

a sojourn to the local bookstore. Price’s daughter shared her opinion of Watson’s work with her circle of young, equally pious, female friends, concluding that this was a “treatise against infidelity, for which they had no special use in their family.” Price’s daughter cast the book aside. There her father discovered the book and read it at a most propitious moment just as his “castle of infidelity, which had been trembling for some weeks under the gentle breezes of divine Spirit, was so utterly demolished that not one stone was left upon another—all was in ruins.” Price then experienced a sudden, permanent conversion. In key ways, Price’s life fit the social profile of infidelity and its possible demise as described in the pages of America’s religious tracts.30 Tract societies took pride in all evidence that their productions assisted God’s work. At the third annual meeting of the Newark Tract Society in 1820, its managers celebrated the good work of the first tract they published, The Praying Negro. This narrative recounted the experiences of an enslaved woman who responded to a savage beating from her master with forgiveness and prayer. The enslaved woman’s expression of Christian faith and charity so moved a New England doctor of infidel principles who read this tract that, according to several witnesses, he “collected his deistical books at home, and those he had lent to his neighbors, and committed them to the flames.” The Newark Tract Society highlighted a narrative containing details consistent with other tract stories about deism in order to bolster its evangelical mission. An educated male infidel learned about the piety of a social inferior by reading a tract. The doctor experienced an instant conversion after years of staunch deism and proceeded to destroy the conduits of irreligion that so troubled many observers—books.31 In at least one instance, themes from tract narratives migrated into the autobiographical writings of the Christian faithful. In 1834, Grant Thorburn, a prominent New York seed dealer, published an account of his experiences in the United States since emigrating from Scotland forty years earlier. Thorburn remembered his early life among New York’s mechanics, and he explained why his life diverged from the lives of others who arrived around the same time. Upon disembarking in the United States, Thorburn immediately sought a church, he worked diligently at his trade, and he eventually secured a competency, all of which were anchored by a pious life. Thorburn’s fellow émigrés chose rum over redemption and spent their Sundays drinking. They also squandered their earnings on fashions and other unnecessary goods; some met early deaths as a result of their misspent youths. Thorburn singled out William Carver to “comment on the effects of infidel principles.”

162

Chapter 5

Thorburn described Carver as “a warm politician—a democrat as red hot as the iron he hammered,” who soon found the company of “the radicals of that day.” In particular, Thorburn noted that Carver frequently attended Elihu Palmer’s deistic lectures at the Assembly Room in New York. Under Palmer’s influence, Carver became a “flaming deist” who would rather haunt taverns and deist associations where he could discuss The Age of Reason than attend church with his family. Carver’s children suffered moral ruin because of their father’s deism, Thorburn claimed. Carver’s unabashed deism also incensed his customers, who took their business elsewhere. By the 1820s, Carver was destitute and without any of the social or familial networks crucial to surviving old age in the early republic. “Now, Mr. Deist and Mrs. Deist, you who purpose to reform the world by destroying the Bible and abolishing the Sabbath, I would ask you who lived the most comfortable life, they or I?” In a society where freedom was tenuous and economic security a necessary raft for moral and social standing, Thorburn answered that deism and Christianity produced starkly different personal trajectories. In the life stories of his fellow émigrés, Thorburn thus found moral lessons for the Christians and deists of his own time.32 Thorburn’s portrait of deism was challenged by another form of biography: the obituary. Beginning in the 1830s, deistic newspapers regularly published obituaries for deceased deists that were authored and submitted by readers from across the country. Those who wrote and published these notices did so with clear polemic motivations, specifically to deny evangelical claims that infidels spent their final moments of life in agony. According to their respective obituaries, William C. Hawley of Carthage, Illinois, “died a materialist, expressing the same firm and unshaken opinions, that had characterized him through life,” and Joseph Yeo of Brighton, New York, “had always been an open and avowed Infidel, and died firmly in the belief that death is an eternal sleep.” Hawley was also lauded for his morality and dedication to his family. The 1835 obituary for Christina Gardner of Cambridge, Massachusetts, described her as a loving mother, a devoted wife, a person of good character, as well as a regular attendee at lectures held by Boston’s First Society of Free Enquirers. Moreover, Gardner “was a firm believer in Nature, and in nothing beyond, and was firm in her opinions to the last.” These obituaries were thus also intended to challenge evangelical claims that disbelief in Christianity engendered immorality and family dissolution. Despite their polemic intent and the potential license available to

Deist Past

163

obituary authors, deist death notices were capsule biographies that fit the cultural conventions of that genre.33 Authors of obituaries and authors of tracts both relied on detailed, historically accurate portrayals in order to give their respective writings meaning and credibility. As such, the relationship between infidel obituaries and evangelical tracts is quite similar to that which exists between a place and its map. A map describes a place in ways that readers find usable even though distortions of the actual location are unavoidable and in some instances necessary. Nevertheless, few doubt that a map refers to a real place, or doubted that an evangelical tract described an actual feature of social life. Ultimately, then, infidel obituaries marked the terrain of lived deism that evangelical tracts described for didactic ends. Even if tract authors never encountered actual infidels, their existence, as evidenced in their obituaries, provided tracts an additional layer of meaning and resonance. Evangelical tracts contained useful lessons because they referred to real instances of anti-Christian thought and action in American life. Infidel obituaries often confirmed salient points in dominant evangelical understandings of their own history. The eighteenth century’s irreligious culture nurtured infidelity in Romanus Emerson of Boston, who rejected Christianity early in his life; in Revolutionary War veteran Asa Selden of Ashfield, Massachusetts, who became an infidel after reading the Bible; and in Jonathan Wilson, a self-proclaimed Jeffersonian from Haverhill, New Hampshire. Emerson and Wilson were teenagers in the 1790s, thus they exemplified the perils to childhood piety in the decade of Paine, Palmer, Jefferson, and Jacobinism. Selden, aged thirty-seven in 1794 when The Age of Reason was first published in the United States, was an infidel patriarch of the Revolutionary generation that anti-infidel writers in the 1790s warned young men such as Emerson and Wilson not to emulate. These life stories reaffirmed evangelical interpretations of their own past and the important but challenging work they accomplished in the late eighteenth century.34 These obituaries also confirmed components of infidelity’s social profile as described by tract authors. In particular, they reflected evangelical concerns that family connections transmitted and cultivated infidelity in the absence of Christian teachings in the home and Christian values in a community. Gardner and Hawley, after all, opposed Christianity but were devoted parents and spouses. By attending meetings of Boston’s First Society of Free Enquirers, Gardner had access to the sites of deist sociability identified

164

Chapter 5

by tract authors, thereby making her opposition to Christianity a strand that united her family obligations as a mother and her social life. They also verified concerns that holding infidel opinions did nothing to tarnish social standing in contemporary American life. Other obituaries describe the lives of men such Reuben Pew of Battle Creek, Michigan, and Samuel Ogden Briggs of Esperance, New York. Pew, an “unbeliever” for most of his adult life, managed the Battle Creek House, a hotel, and founded, along with six of his fellow citizens, the Temple Building Company of Battle Creek. Pew was later memorialized as a “leading man” in Battle Creek’s early development. Briggs petitioned the New York State legislature “against the use of religious books and ceremonies in common schools and academies, against Sunday laws, the prohibition of the passage of laws founded on the dogmas of the bible, &c.” Briggs also served as a lieutenant in the New York militia during the War of 1812, as an assistant judge in 1816, and as a delegate to New York’s 1821 constitutional convention. Briggs exalted nature and dismissed the “dogmas of the bible” without losing the trust of his neighbors. These obituaries offered a portrait of infidelity in the early republic that originated in the 1790s, that exercised deep influence in families, and that was tolerated by communities in disparate parts of the country.35 Religious periodicals provided readers intellectual tools necessary to challenge infidels such as Christina Gardner or Reuben Pew that they may encounter in their daily lives. Religious newspapers often reprinted articles regarding contests between deists and their opponents in a variety of situations. This led to the eclectic nature of stories in religious newspapers. When taken as a whole, however, these accounts contributed to a single narrative about Christianity’s steady advance despite infidelity’s persistence in American culture. Religious newspapers thus complemented the evangelical mission of religious tracts, providing the means for believers to contest personal infidelity and the social conditions that allowed it. An 1834 broadside published to rally subscribers for the Christian Watchman carried the observation that “[t]he American people have become, eminently, a newspaper-reading community, and newspapers will be read, infidel newspapers and political newspapers, many of which we are sorry to say, are every day teeming with the grossest infidelity—they will be read by children and youth.” The Christian Watchman thus offered a timely, appropriate antidote to infidelity.36 Although evangelical newspapers offered guidance to laypeople in the skills of religious controversy, this was not entirely at the expense of

Deist Past

165

ministerial training. A religious newspaper in 1820 printed an anecdote about a deist who attempted to disprove Christianity by critiquing a passage from Matthew in which, according to an English translation of the Bible, “Christ says that old bottles are not so strong as new.” This, the anonymous deist argued, was contrary to common sense and reason because age does not affect the strength of glass. A minister responded to this critique by showing that in the Bible’s original Greek, and according to historical examples, the “old bottle” in question was made of animal hide not glass. With this reply, the crowd completely dismissed the infidel and ridiculed him with laughter. The author of this account concluded with an endorsement of ministerial erudition: “We may here learn that the knowledge of the original languages in which the Scriptures are written is of no small utility to a Christian Minister.” The influence of an educated clergy had its limits, however. Ordinary people thus had to combat infidelity on their own. By training their readers to effectively challenge infidelity, evangelical newspaper editors made novel contributions to the practices of religious controversy in the early 1800s.37 Religious Messenger, a short-lived periodical published in Norwich, Connecticut, demonstrates the role played by religious journalism. This paper provided ready access to and quick summaries of the tools of religious controversy while popularizing and circulating details about religious debates. The editor included succinct evidential statements of the Bible’s veracity, its compatibility with reason and the natural world, and the fulfillment of prophecy. More important than the message, however, was its method of delivery. Short, direct factual statements were ideally suited to fulfill the editor’s stated intention to provide young Christians from all denominations easily memorized reasons for believing that the Bible was the word of God, “with the view to fortify their minds against the objections of infidels.” This strategy was displayed in another issue in which isolated passages from the writings of “popular infidels” were compiled in a list that highlighted the contradictions and disagreements within a viewpoint supposedly informed by reason’s unwavering guidance. When placed underneath an evangelical editorial lens, human reason proved remarkably limited and infidel opinions were open to easy ridicule. Religious newspapers encouraged its ideal audience of potential polemicists to actively challenge infidels by providing a summary of intellectual points, religious truths, and textual examples to successfully refute any infidel arguments.38 At the broadest level, those who opposed infidelity in their daily lives participated in a cosmopolitan evangelical sphere with international import.

166

Chapter 5

The Christian spirit moved inhabitants in distant corners of the globe according to writings collected and copied by evangelical editors. Samuel Marsden, an English missionary based in New Zealand in the early nineteenth century, visited Tahiti and reported that the “Otaheitans, King and people, have forsaken their gods, and cast them into the fire, because they were no gods.” Conversion narratives from the Indian subcontinent depicted individual families and entire villages abandoning Hinduism after English missionaries introduced them to Protestantism. For the devout who would never pursue their faith across the world’s oceans, such accounts could at least inspire them to challenge unchristian opinions in their own neighborhoods. Whether or not “heathens” were better off without Christianity and if they even wanted Christianity when missionaries offered it were sources of religious dispute between Christians and their opponents in places such as England and the United States. Accounts of religious conversion in the South Pacific or the Indian subcontinent thus bolstered the arguments of Euro-American Christians at home. Editors of Religious Messenger prefaced their reprint of the Indian conversion narrative to speak directly to domestic concerns. “Infidels often extol the virtues of the heathen, and pretend that christianity, were they to receive it, would be of little use to them. But what say the heathen themselves, when brought to feel the power of the gospel?”39 Accounts of distant conversions provided evidence for the spiritual workings of a Christian God, yet editors of Religious Messenger were also attuned to intellectual developments that weakened arguments against Christianity. Readers learned about London debates between ministers and infidels, before crowded audiences of Christians and deists alike, in which simple biblical truths were enough to overturn complicated arguments against Christianity. Scientific developments removed from the context of specific theological debates also provided useful resources for America’s everyday Christian polemicists. The announcement by French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion that he discovered the hieroglyphic code necessary to decipher a sculptured zodiac in the Egyptian temple of Denderah first captured the attention of editors at the Vermont Chronicle and eventually at Religious Messenger. Scientists who accompanied Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt studied the temple and its zodiac concluding that both were constructed “some 15,000 years ago . . . far beyond the time of creation.” French scholars removed the zodiac from the temple and brought it to France in 1821, inspiring “the infidels of Paris” to pronounce that this antiquity “has destroyed the authority of the bible.” Champollion disagreed. His discovery led him to conclude that

Deist Past

167

the zodiac was merely an astrological device, not an accurate chronology of Egyptian history. More important, it proved that the Temple of Denderah, which housed the sculpture, was constructed during the Roman Empire. With Champollion’s discovery, the editor declared, “thus fell with a shock, the baseless fabric which infidelity had raised against the bible.” Developments within the world of Parisian Near Eastern scholarship gained the accolades of a Vermont editor, who then recruited Champollion to battle infidelity in the Green Mountains.40 Although religious newspapers delivered readers a broad-ranging curriculum to inform their polemics, successful opposition to infidelity required the faithful to adopt the cause. Recruitment was not easy or certain, however. The lives of Emily Chubbuck Judson and Samuel Whitcomb were dramatically different in important and obvious ways, but they shared personal encounters with deists. Both were self-professed Christians of Protestant backgrounds, but they ultimately held very different judgments about the dangers that infidelity posed to American society and the positions they should take in early national religious controversies. If Christianity’s vitality in the United States and the world depended partly on the individual efforts of everyday religious polemicists, then Judson’s and Whitcomb’s lives exhibit early national evangelicalism’s potential and its weaknesses alike. In Hamilton, New York, in 1830 and 1831, a thirteen-year-old Chubbuck explained her reasons for joining the battle against infidelity in the pages of her diary. Chubbuck received a partial education while working in local woolen mills. Along with lessons in rhetoric and natural philosophy, she learned English composition from a teacher recorded as “C. F.” Although Chubbuck adored her teacher, she also recognized that she was very “dangerous.” C. F. avidly read novels and had also “imbibed infidel sentiments from a young man of better mind than morals, with whom she was too well pleased.” C. F. also read and admired books by Gibbon, Hume, and Paine, but she especially liked Voltaire and Rousseau. She eagerly introduced these writers to Chubbuck, who stopped short of adopting their ideas for her own, but nevertheless, she confessed, “I felt my confidence in the Bible weakened, and lost, to a great extent, my religious impressions.” Chubbuck’s piety was challenged by all the sources that tract narratives warned about: improper reading and the influence of morally lax social institutions such as academies. Chubbuck’s diary even had an insinuating male infidel who corrupted his female acquaintance.41 For Chubbuck, however, this experience only reaffirmed her Christianity

168

Chapter 5

and sparked her desire to become a missionary. She eventually did so with great zeal after marrying Adnoriam Judson, a Baptist minister, and accompanying him to Burma, where she worked as a missionary from 1846 to 1850. The source of her later evangelical commitments was apparent very early in her life. An entry in her diary from 1831, while working for a thread maker, recounted her reflections on the books C. F. had taught her to read. Even at her young age, Chubbuck felt obligated to learn “how to refute all those infidel arguments.” She nagged the adults in her family with questions about unorthodox subjects. Much to her father’s concern, she avidly studied The Age of Reason, the first book she ever borrowed from the town library. Yet as an adult, Emily Chubbuck Judson’s early engagement with infidel writings steeled her faith in order to become a missionary, an everyday polemicist.42 Samuel Whitcomb, from Hanover, Massachusetts, chose not to become a polemicist even though he observed popular infidelity on a bookselling trip through the Midwest and the South in 1818. In his travels, Whitcomb dined and lodged with a Presbyterian, attended and criticized a Methodist meeting, and conversed with a Shaker, who announced with great alacrity his disbelief in Jesus’ resurrection, adding, “[W]e don’t care any thing about that.” On a different night he stayed with a family that, as Whitcomb described it, could have provided ideal fodder for an evangelical tract. This family included two pious women and a man who believed that Jesus was neither divine nor sin-free. The infidel patriarch of this family announced to Whitcomb that “Christ did nothing for us but set an example” and that “Tom Payn had more just notions of God than the great mass of Christians have.” Finally, Whitcomb recorded claims in Tennessee that a silver “Roman coin” was lately unearthed, fueling speculations by a local judge that this artifact traveled from India to Tennessee by way of South America. This find, according to Whitcomb, inspired the judge to embark on a study of “religion, prophesy, American antiquities and the origin of nations.” This was a remarkable choice since he had only “become attentive to religion within 2 years,” having never before read the Bible.43 Whitcomb’s diary offers a firsthand account of American society populated by competing Protestant sects and punctuated by revivals, but also a culture in which religious knowledge was the source of skepticism and inquiry for ordinary farmers and judges alike. Whitcomb’s own faith and his professed interest in religious speculation made him extra attuned to the surrounding religious debates. Whitcomb’s beliefs and disposition, along

Deist Past

169

with his experiences as a traveling bookseller, could have primed him to oppose infidelity in accordance with the hopes of evangelical tract authors and editors. However, Whitcomb was uninspired by stories about religious conversion. He was more disturbed by the Methodists he encountered than the Shaker or the “Payn” devotee who denied Christianity’s foundational teachings. On two separate occasions Whitcomb attended Methodist meetings. After the first he lamented “O how is the religion of Christ perverted!” and, after the second, that “Religion and Literature are at low ebb.”44 Whitcomb was certainly not the only Christian who opposed evangelicalism, but his reasons for doing so express discontent with the intellectual compromises crucial to religious dispute in the early republic. Although writing after his bookselling trip and in reference to his native Massachusetts, Whitcomb succinctly expressed what most likely troubled him in 1818: that “a spirit of investigation of theological subjects” had declined and was “not now perceptible.” And Whitcomb continued, “For more than thirty years I have noticed the waning of this religious inquisitiveness.” Religious inquiry for the sake of developing intellectual arguments in Christianity’s defense was replaced, Whitcomb stated bitterly, by a need to merely “[s]atisfy some self-constituted ‘Evangelical Church’ that you have been converted— Subscribe to its Creed, unquestioningly—approve all its usages and dogmas no matter for theological information.” Where Whitcomb perceived evidence of decline, evangelicals viewed the sources of their success. Only through such evangelical commitments could believers mobilize to shape society and culture in the image of their own faith. Those recruited as everyday polemicists accepted these new evangelical conceptions of Christianity, thus Whitcomb would not join their ranks. From Whitcomb’s perspective, he disdained such superficial measures of evangelical success that seemed most concerned with public religious expressions rather than personal beliefs. Instead, he embraced “freedom of enquiry” to defend Christianity, not evangelical missionary work. With this position, however, Whitcomb expressed an idea that other Americans were already using by the late 1820s to criticize Christianity rather than defend it.45 Religious newspapers, much like religious tracts, highlight the degree to which American religious publishing actively linked evangelicalism with religious controversy. Whether by delineating and describing the social worlds of infidelity or by teaching Christians the intellectual tools necessary to combat deists and providing justifications for doing so, infidelity

170

Chapter 5

remained central to the ways that American evangelicals defined themselves and their mission well into the nineteenth century. With the passing of deist polemicists from an earlier era, writings by self-avowed deists appeared less frequently between 1810 and 1825. However, the evangelical press kept deists and deistic ideas prominent in American culture as evangelicals grappled with the legacy of the religious debates from the 1790s. For some of America’s evangelical publishers and writers, it mattered little that deists were not publishing weekly journals, delivering frequent lectures against the divinity of Jesus Christ, or denouncing the Bible. Instead, the elevation of freedom of conscience to a political ideal and a partisan principle, encouraged by many evangelical Protestants and deists alike, further weakened public influence over religious belief. It became a political good for individuals to make personal decisions about what to believe, or even whether to believe. As evangelicals developed new understandings of Protestantism’s emphasis on an individual’s private relationship to God, they widened the gap between public culture and the private spheres of religious belief or disbelief. The evangelical press that flourished during the early 1820s was intended to address this gap. At the same time, however, deism began gaining a new generation of adherents who defined themselves as “free enquirers” and “moral philanthropists,” a development that increased evangelical concerns about personal infidelity. Ezra Stiles Ely, a Presbyterian minister and one of the era’s most avid religious controversialists, warned of this development in 1831. Despite the success of evangelical newspapers, “they are opposed by infidel, universalist, and antitrinitarian newspapers, which are coming up like the frogs of Egypt, to cover the whole face of the country.”46

Chapter 6

Free Enquiry

In 1830, a tract titled Prossimo’s Experience appeared in New York City. Similar to countless tracts that circulated in the early republic, Prossimo’s Experience was a small, twelve-page, patently ephemeral pamphlet intended for cheap distribution. Although it looked like a product of America’s evangelical publishers, it contained a very different message. Prossimo’s Experience was a conversion narrative that instructed readers to find self-improvement by abandoning Christianity. The author of this narrative confidently declared, “I am now a sceptic. I live for this world, because I know nothing of any other. I doubt all revelations from heaven, because they appear to me improbable and inconsistent.” So concluded Prossimo’s full “conversion to infidelity.”1 Although Prossimo’s narrative was the subject of the early republic’s only actual tract that encouraged its readers to reject Christianity, he was not the only person with such a conversion experience to share. Beginning in the late 1820s Americans for the first time penned “infidel conversion narratives,” narratives of their conversions out of Christianity. These infidel conversion narratives typically appeared in deistic newspapers. Those who relayed their experiences frequently described themselves as “free enquirers” after their conversions. These narratives offer detailed intellectual autobiographies of why people became free enquirers, the process of infidel conversion, and the significance that observers attached to individual exits from Christianity. Infidel conversion narratives contained several salient themes, all of which explain free enquiry’s appeal in the 1820s and 1830s. Infidel converts expressed deep aversion to aspects of Protestant theology and self-understanding that made the pursuit of salvation emotionally and psychologically burdensome, especially for skeptics. Free enquirers converted

172

Chapter 6

out of Christianity primarily because they found evangelical Protestantism stultifying rather than empowering. Moreover, infidel conversions prepared free enquirers to challenge evangelical Protestantism’s publishing and reform institutions. The ideal of open-ended investigation made the concept of free enquiry quite agile and capacious. Free enquiry allowed its adherents to incorporate deistic principles into larger social, political, and economic arguments against Christianity. In addition, free enquirers increasingly focused their criticisms on Christianity’s social implications rather than the personal beliefs of individual Christians. Thus ultimately, the free enquirer’s entrance into the American cultural landscape marked the accommodation of deistic critiques of Christianity to the persuasive imperatives of early national religious controversies. Free enquirers mobilized their doubts about Christianity in order to challenge evangelicals in realms of everyday religious polemics. Free enquiry was not a novel concept in the early 1800s. For over a century writers throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world had used it to address a range of pressing religious problems. Prominent English chemist and natural philosopher Robert Boyle used his scientific work to explore God’s power and presence in the world. His 1686 critique of Aristotelian theories of divinely animated nature and Hobbesian materialist formulations of nature was titled A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. Anglican clergyman Conyers Middleton published a treatise in 1749, titled Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are Supposed to have Subsisted in the Christian Church, that denied Christian miracles, and thus biblical inerrancy, by promising an “honest and disinterested view, to free the minds of men from an inveterate imposture, which, through a long succession of ages, has disgraced the religion of the Gospel, and tyrannized over the reason and senses of the Christian world.” Freedom was also Connecticut Congregational minister Elisha Williams’s chief concern when he defended liberty of conscience in a 1745 pamphlet titled The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants. Civil peace could not be ensured through state endorsement of a given sect, Williams argued. Instead, civil peace arose when believers reached general agreement on basic Christian principles and practices, which were ultimately knowable through “the Exercise of private Reason, and free Enquiry in a strict and constant Adherence to the sacred Scriptures as the only Rule of Faith and Practice.”2 Writing in the new United States, Philadelphia minister Robert Annan

Free Enquiry

173

and Thomas Jefferson published their views on free enquiry in 1787. Annan valued critical investigations into religious beliefs, but he distinguished between free enquiry and outright skepticism. Annan, much like Williams, argued that the former was a sure guide for establishing religious truths when pursued within the bounds of Protestant faith. Thomas Jefferson deployed a rather more capacious understanding of free enquiry in Notes on the State of Virginia. “Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error,” Jefferson argued. “True” religion could withstand critical scrutiny, but those beliefs that could not deserved rejection. Christianity emerged in antiquity because of free enquiry, and free enquiry purged Christianity of papist influence during the Reformation, Jefferson argued. Reflecting on his own times, Jefferson believed free enquiry must remain vibrant or else “the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged.” For Annan, free enquiry yielded Christianity’s timeless truths so that the pious could preserve them in a constantly changing world. For Jefferson, free enquiry was an agent that corroded the power of tradition. By stripping the façade of permanence from all but the truest religious opinions, free enquiry ensured that people could have the religion they wanted.3 In its various guises, free enquiry exemplified how people could enact the enlightenment’s ideals. Free enquiry, its adherents believed, was a way of becoming and being enlightened. Civility, reason, and disinterestedness were bundled values present in nearly all concepts of free enquiry. This combination worked in eighteenth-century religious controversies because it had to; the seventeenth century’s bloody sectarian conflicts seemed to be the only alternative. Free enquiry thus provided methods as well as cultural conventions for debating religious knowledge that were politically safe, in no small measure because free enquiry seemed ideally suited to religious disputes penned by gentlemen theologians or learned denizens of the republic of letters. The early national United States, especially by the nineteenth century, seemed safe from religious controversies waged with fire and flint. However, it was also a society in which free enquiry gained acceptance in realms far beyond the relatively narrow confines of philosophical circles or esoteric theological treatises. Free enquiry changed from a tool of learned discourse to a more encompassing intellectual position because it shared imperatives with disparate intellectual, cultural, and religious developments in the United States. American politics relied upon notions of commonsense moral philosophy that shared with free enquiry an emphasis on reason. The strain of rational individualism presumed by free enquiry complemented

174

Chapter 6

notions of the intuitive, moral self that were apparent in Transcendentalism, reform movements, and emerging ideas about the market. And, finally, evangelical Protestantism’s disregard for inherited authority merged with free enquiry’s emphasis on the need to constantly judge intellectual and social conventions according to experience. By the early 1800s, free enquiry thus became unmoored from those contexts that seemingly tempered its most radical implications.4 Free enquiry was deeply embedded in American thought during the early republic, thus it was a ready resource for individual appropriation and use. Free enquiry provided a plausible and resonant intellectual framework to justify personal disbelief. American and English émigré writers reformulated free enquiry from a critical perspective latent in Anglo-American culture into a more coherent intellectual position. Free enquiry incorporated and expanded upon deistic ideas regarding the incompatibility of reason and faith and the impossibility of biblical revelation. Some free enquirers still identified themselves as deists, others as skeptics, “moral philanthropists,” materialists, or even infidels, depending on their certainty about the existence of a God or their relish for controversy. Free enquiry in the 1820s and 1830s was an intellectual and religious movement that relied upon, often intentionally, an Atlantic history of deism in the late eighteenth century. Free enquirers updated older deistic ideas to address those forms of evangelical Protestantism present in the world around them. They actively contributed to American print culture and fashioned evangelical techniques especially suited to reaching the republic’s growing northern cities. Free enquiry was disbelief as it emerged and operated in the world. Free enquiry during the 1820s and the 1830s was a twofold term, epistemological and ontological. First, it described a set of intellectual procedures to develop sentiments, theories, and opinions verifiable by reason and nature alone. Free enquiry constituted an individual’s epistemic position. Second, free enquiry assumed the existence of specific social and political conditions necessary for carrying out these intellectual procedures. The two facets of free enquiry were mutually reinforcing. Free enquirers argued that as more people jettisoned belief in Christianity, the social and political benefits of disbelief would accrue and new social space would develop for people to become disbelievers. Advocates of free enquiry believed that it resulted in mental emancipation, an experience described in vivid terms by N. C. Rhodes of Providence, Rhode Island. Upon reading The Age of Reason,

Free Enquiry

175

Rhodes exclaimed, “[T]he superstitious curtain drops at once, and the mind, freed from the power of Demons, emerges into the open air of liberty and happiness.” Combined, the epistemic and ontological aspects of free enquiry removed moral barriers to disbelief, which in turn expanded disbelief’s influence in the world. Free enquiry thus proved remarkably meaningful and motivational for infidel converts.5 The personal experiences of infidel converts were published in several of the nation’s free enquiry periodicals. Editors of the Correspondent and the Free Enquirer—both New York journals—and the Western Examiner in St. Louis encouraged readers to submit their experiences. The Correspondent and the Free Enquirer were two of the most important papers dedicated to free enquiry during the late 1820s and early 1830s. George Houston, a Scottish émigré previously active in London’s radical political circles, established the Correspondent in January 1827. The Correspondent set out to “fearlessly advocate the paramount importance of the laws of Nature, and the dignity of Reason,” thereby diffusing “correct principles, which alone form the basis of morals and of happiness.” From the paper’s outset until it ceased publication in July 1829, Houston defended deism by introducing his readers to writings and opinions that questioned the veracity of Christian scriptures. The Free Enquirer, published from 1828 to 1835, was far more influential than the Correspondent. The Free Enquirer was originally published as the New Harmony Gazette, the print voice of New Harmony, Indiana’s, utopian community. Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright were the first editors of the Free Enquirer. Beginning in 1831, Amos Gilbert, a Hicksite Quaker, edited the paper, followed by Henry D. Robinson, its fourth and final editor. Owen and Wright established the Free Enquirer to investigate “[r]eligion, morality, and human economy, those master principles which determine the color of our lives.” The paper’s editors were particularly interested in offering a venue to analyze the social consequences of religious beliefs. According to the paper’s prospectus, if religion rested on duplicity and false premises, “it is not useless only  .  .  .  it is mischievous by its hypocrisy; by its fanaticism; by its dogmatism,” and most important “by its waste of public time and public money.”6 Editors publicized the accounts of Christians who abandoned their beliefs to advance the agendas of their respective papers. But these same accounts also offered something for readers who were already free enquirers, or who were on their way to becoming so. By reading these papers, or even

176

Chapter 6

Prossimo’s Experience, Americans doubtful about aspects of Christianity learned that other people shared their sentiments, and they gained a sense that infidel conversion experiences led to a variety of positive outcomes. Embracing free enquiry did not necessarily entail rejection of Christianity, however. According to a member of a heterodox faction of Quakers in Wilmington, Delaware, “We all believe in a ‘saving faith,’ faith in the spirit of—free enquiry.” Wilmington’s Quakers imbued free enquiry with supernatural force, for they went “to orthodox meeting, quaker meeting, or heretic meeting, as the spirit moves us.” Skepticism carried out in “free discussion,” an idea that no religious tenet was too sacred to be above dispute, provided the foundation for all their religious beliefs. According to this correspondent, “[K]nowledge is the saviour of man.” Wilmington’s Quakers believed that Christian salvation was wholly attainable through critical investigations of religious teachings.7 As Wilmington’s Quakers used free enquiry to bolster their faith, others credited free enquiry for allowing them to abandon their Christian beliefs altogether. Unlike conversions that culminated with repentant sinners embracing Christianity, free enquiry provided the basis of an equally powerful conversion experience in which individuals rejected Christianity. Such conversions shaped the religious lives of individuals outside the context of evangelical Protestantism. Nevertheless, infidel conversions unfolded according to the cultural conventions and even the language of Christian conversions. Infidel converts published their conversion narratives as acts of religious introspection that might also encourage those readers on the precipice of abandoning Christianity. Moreover, they described their embrace of free enquiry by quoting the Bible and using evangelical vocabulary. The cultural authority of evangelical conversion provided a ready repository for individuals to understand, explain, and justify their denials of Christianity and their exits from Christian community. The experience of Christian conversion in the early republic, as well as its theological explanations, involved a personal connection with God made possible by declaring faith in Jesus Christ as the only source of salvation. Protestantism’s cultural dominance in the United States during the 1820s and 1830s meant that religious conversion largely occurred within a Protestant theological and, to some extent, institutional context. Conversion experiences and public declarations of faith underwrote membership in the many Protestant churches and evangelical denominations that grew rapidly in the decades following the Revolution. As evidenced by the era’s rising

Free Enquiry

177

membership in Methodist and Baptist churches, or its new evangelical print and organizational institutions, conversions to Christianity were real social phenomena with deep cultural resonance. By comparison, the handful of narratives describing individuals who shed Christian belief and exited Christian community were ostensibly curious voices in a culture already characterized by religious curiosity. Notwithstanding, these narratives explained in remarkable detail how and why people eventually disbelieved in Christianity. Americans who converted to free enquiry ultimately affirmed American preoccupations with personal infidelity first expressed in debates over generational deism in the 1790s, and reiterated in efforts by tract authors in the 1820s and 1830s to map infidelity’s social profile. Narratives that relayed conversions to free enquiry shared similarities with the depictions of infidelity found in evangelical tracts. Converts to free enquiry emphasized the piety of their families, especially their mothers. Eventual free enquirers had early lives that typically centered on weekly and daily routines of church attendance, Bible reading, and prayer. Skeptical fathers often undermined the faith of future free enquirers by introducing doubt into their families. Absent an infidel father, books by the usual authors such as Thomas Paine or David Hume ushered these converts into disbelief. Prossimo’s conversion narrative exemplified the influence of infidel patriarchs. Despite the efforts of a deeply religious mother and the impressions set by frequent church attendance, Prossimo’s father made him a disbeliever. His father discounted the special providence of Christianity by comparing it to Islam, noting that both had sacred texts, both claimed to convey God’s revealed word, and both had large numbers of devout followers. After this venture into comparative religion, Prossimo’s father asked, “How do you know which God sent upon earth, Jesus Christ or Mahomet?” Prossimo lacked an adequate answer, and even more important for his future religious opinions, he wondered how this “little simple question . . . should have ultimately shaken the faith which my mother had been years in planting.” The details of Prossimo’s narrative were nearly interchangeable with evangelical tract narratives that warned against infidelity, yet Prossimo became an unabashed “sceptic” rather than a certain Christian.8 Understanding why the author behind Prossimo arrived at this conclusion requires a more direct comparison between infidel and Christian conversion narratives. Authors who recorded their conversions from Christianity to free enquiry described an experience that had remarkable commonalities with conversion experiences described by Christians. Prossimo’s

178

Chapter 6

Experience and evangelical tracts contained similar descriptions of personal religious change, indicating the cultural dominance of the conversion genre. Equally telling was the emotional, almost visceral, nature of the moments preceding conversion that Christians and free enquirers experienced alike. In 1830, a free enquirer who adopted the pen name “Truth” wrote a conversion narrative that Owen published in Free Enquirer. Although his moniker evinced certainty, it was confidence gained after an emotionally wrought process. Before his conversion to religious disbelief, Truth read The Age of Reason and felt “as if hell was yawning to devour me.” Despite this dreadful experience, Truth finished Paine’s book, and he remained a faithful Christian, but only temporarily. The prospect of damnation and the literalness of hell impressed Truth as powerfully as it did many Christian converts. Indeed, the author behind Truth described a condition remarkably similar to Christian accounts of the moment in which a person is confronted with innate depravity and total damnation. In the end, however, Truth concluded “that religion was a fabric without a foundation.” Under similar psychological and spiritual duress, some people gained conviction in Jesus Christ, while others, including Truth, became confident disbelievers.9 Infidel converts recorded their experiences to explain how the crucible of spiritual confusion led to disbelief. Those awakened to free enquiry purposely described their transformation in language familiar to Christians. Prossimo felt compelled to share “a concise history of ‘my experience,’ as some religionists express it; I mean a history of my conversion to infidelity, and the changes that preceded and produced it.” Prossimo easily deployed a key trope from evangelical discourse, and he was motivated by the moral inspiration and pedagogical value of his narrative, thus making his account doubly reflective of the Christian conversion experience. Prossimo’s narrative was instructive because it purported to be a factual account of religious and intellectual transformation. Evangelical conversion narratives were authoritative because of their historical veracity; they provided social, personal, and intellectual details to document and explain religious change. The importance of historically verifiable conversion narratives also served people who exited Christianity. “History of a Young Convert,” the headline of Truth’s narrative as published in Free Enquirer, echoed the descriptive simplicity of evangelical tract titles. It also captured an understanding of disbelief as a process of documented religious change; truth value carried equal weight in Christian and infidel conversion narratives. The Bible also played a role in infidel conversions by providing converts language to

Free Enquiry

179

explain the significance of their conversions. “Philos Kosmos” cited his own version of a passage from the book of Isaiah to describe his renunciation of Christianity as a liberating and prophetic transformation. Philos Kosmos thus declared, “I now feel it my duty to ‘Arise and shine for the light is come, and the glory of truth has arisen upon me.’ ” This writer substituted a purely moral and rational notion of “truth” for “the Lord” in his interpretation of a biblical book that Christians typically cited to justify the power and eventual triumph of their religion. For Philos Kosmos, the optimism of the Christian millennium was channeled into the progress of religious disbelief. All three infidel converts were adamant about their denials of Christianity and unregretful about their exits from Christian community. At the same time, the language of evangelical Protestantism and biblical references provided crucial explanatory and rhetorical power at key points in their conversion narratives.10 Christianity’s prominent place in the infidel conversion experience shows a unique intellectual engagement between these converts and revealed religion. Infidel converts in the 1820s critiqued and ridiculed Christianity no less harshly than the polemicists in the 1790s and early 1800s such as Thomas Paine, Elihu Palmer, and Denis Driscol. Yet the narrative form emphasized the personal intellectual changes that culminated in the religious disbelief necessary to deride Christianity. Becoming a free enquirer required a serious and sustained grappling with Christian faith, a struggle recounted in every infidel conversion narrative. Infidel converts ultimately argued that efforts to redouble their Christian faith led them to disbelief. The more they explored Christianity, the more worthy it seemed of rejection, but also ridicule. Infidel converts often exited Christianity after initial efforts to affirm their piety. Revolutionary War veteran Asa Selden read the Bible only to become one of Ashfield, Massachusetts’s, resident doubters. Truth, the young infidel convert in New York, confidently denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Bible’s divine inspiration, and even the certainty of God’s existence. Yet his assuredness developed after his initial shock at hearing similar opinions expressed by a friend. In his attempt to persuade his friend to become a Christian, Truth studied the Bible more intently, which raised troubling questions in his own mind. Doubts about Christianity soon tempered Truth’s desire to convert his friend. To address his doubts, Truth described how he became “more studious, I read both religious and infidel works,” borrowed copies of Free Enquirer, and conversed “with persons of more

180

Chapter 6

experience.” Truth’s conviction about the falsehood of Christianity followed a determined and focused intellectual investigation. The same was true for Samuel Ogden Briggs, whose religious skepticism increased as he “grew in knowledge.” Briggs’s education came not from sacred books or infidel prints alone but also from nature, which “spread out before him her magnificent volume of hieroglyphics, and his discriminating mind perceived the true relation of thing to thing.”11 Robert Dale Owen’s conversion to infidelity also followed a sustained intellectual ordeal, but his was emotionally wrought in a way that Truth’s and Samuel Briggs’s were not. The young Owen was far more faithful than the anonymous contributor to his paper. In an 1830 column, Owen described his early commitment to Presbyterianism, his firm belief that the Bible was God’s word, and his opinion of “Calvin as the greatest and best of men.” Far from being spiritually lazy, Owen emphasized his religious zeal. Yet he was also committed to free enquiry. When Owen learned that other people disbelieved his religious tenets, his “extreme desire to be confirmed in the truth of my already received opinions” prompted him to investigate the foundations of his religious belief. Owen embarked upon a distressing course. He experienced “painful anticipation” that his inquiries would force him to abandon his Christian faith and that “such a change would be the loss of my soul.” Despite his Presbyterian upbringing, his early pious devotion, and his real fears of damnation, Owen felt compelled by reason to renounce his faith. As Owen confessed, “Through fears, prejudices, antipathies and early feelings conviction forced her unaided way—and I became a skeptic.”12 Not all converts to free enquiry viewed their conversion as the abandonment of Christianity. For “Anna,” Christianity changed around her. Anna’s conversion narrative appeared in an April 1829 issue of Free Enquirer. She addressed it specifically to Frances Wright, the most famous female free enquirer in the Anglo-Atlantic world and, at the time, a coeditor of the newspaper. Anna’s account was the only published infidel conversion narrative written by a woman, or at least from a woman’s perspective. Anna recounted her earlier conversion to Christianity under the guidance of ministers and fellow believers who were honest and diligent in their faith. For Anna, Christians achieved salvation by focusing energy on their souls and their churches, not on the world. Anna thus believed that her Christian community strayed from their principles by supporting missionary, Bible, and tract societies only to, in her opinion, earn money. Her disenchantment with

Free Enquiry

181

institutional evangelicalism coincided with her move toward a “disposition of religious enquiry.” By openly avowing her doubts, Anna soon became unwelcome within her religious community, upon which she recognized “that, to prosecute that spirit of enquiry dictated by reason and common sense, I must separate myself from my religious associates.” She promptly did. Anna specifically described her experience as an ordeal, but she also emphasized the benefits of converting to free enquiry. It provided her a sense of freedom, both freedom to use her “reasoning faculties” and freedom from concerns about the afterlife. Anna redefined her understanding of self-improvement. Instead of focusing on a future state, she looked to the world around her; in her words, she was “anxious only to improve and enjoy the present.”13 Like Anna, Samuel Underhill abandoned Christianity in a fairly measured way. He explained that his faith disappeared as his understanding of “religious emotions” deepened. Underhill defined religious emotions in an 1829 lecture delivered in Bethlehem, Ohio, as “a disturbance or agitation of the mind, and is here used to signify such agitations as are denominated religious.” Prayer generated religious emotions, as did merely thinking about religious ideas in less devotional settings. The pangs of a guilty conscience were also expressions of religious emotion inflamed when committing acts of “doubtful propriety.” Religion produced powerful emotional and psychological effects. Underhill knew this from experience. At one point in his life, Underhill’s faith ran deep, “a more firm believer in divine revelation did not exist.” Underhill attributed the emotional excitement that accompanied his faith to “divine visitations” and “supernatural power.” Eventually the excitement always waned, Underhill noted, and when it did “I had doubts, which I called temptations or poverty of spirit.”14 Underhill’s study of anatomy and physiology changed his view about the sources of emotion and the nature of doubt. Underhill argued that emotions, religious or otherwise, were imaginary in purely cognitive and biological terms. Human senses gathered information from the world that imagination transformed into emotions. From emotions came opinions. From Underhill’s perspective, humans were left with a terribly unreliable as well as disconcerting source for forming their opinions; the imagination was easily impressed, and it produced psychologically gripping emotions. This was especially true for religious opinions. Underhill argued that Christian teachings conditioned the human imagination to assume that religious emotions actually indicated the supernatural workings of God on the soul. Underhill addressed this problem in his own life by paying greater attention

182

Chapter 6

to what influenced his imagination. “When we understand all our impressions, we cease to hear the whisperings of the Spirit,” Underhill declared. Moreover, Underhill extended his warning to Muslims, Zoroastrians, and even deists to emphasize that the unchecked imagination might influence religious opinions of all kinds. Underhill endorsed free enquiry in order to control imagination, explain religious emotions, and form correct opinions. Doubt, or what Underhill labeled “a spirit of enquiry,” was thus not sinful, as religious instruction during his childhood taught him, but instead an instrumental source of knowledge and ultimately a virtue. Free enquiry, Underhill concluded, brought happiness in a way that belief in “supernatural emotions” never did.15 Free enquirers thus emphasized that they did not abandon Christianity quickly, easily, or thoughtlessly. First and foremost, by defining infidel conversion as a tribulation, they satisfied the immediate didactic purposes of infidel conversion stories. Experiencing personal religious doubt was inevitably taxing. Infidel converts inhabited societies imbued with Christianity and still shadowed by the historical memory of the French Revolution in which religious disbelief and political chaos were inextricably linked. Christian readers of infidel conversion narratives were encouraged to follow doubt and conscience by renouncing faith; infidel conversion narratives provided examples of previously faithful Christians who embraced their doubt. Prossimo believed his experience would “not be without interest, nor without utility to many; especially to those who still stand on the bank of the Rubicon.” Apart from bolstering current and potential disbelievers, infidel converts countered evangelical criticisms by testifying to the difficulty of shedding Christian faith. Pious observers viewed avowals of deism, or denials of Christianity in any way, as a personal failing indicative of hubris, vanity, and a range of other negative qualities that allowed humans to ignore God. Indeed a central part of the evangelical enterprise involved helping people recognize the necessity of choosing salvation over disbelief. Conversions to infidelity were thus rank acts against God, and clear threats to the authority of evangelical Protestantism. By emphasizing the arduousness of infidel conversion, these narratives highlighted the sincerity of disbelief in order to absolve themselves of Christian moral approbation.16 A St. Louis infidel expressed this view in a letter that Elijah P. Lovejoy published in his evangelical abolitionist newspaper St. Louis Observer in 1834, three years before a proslavery mob murdered him in Alton, Illinois. Lovejoy engaged in religious controversies over disbelief along with his

Free Enquiry

183

antislavery activities. “S. M.” asked Lovejoy to provide assurances about Christian truths that readers like himself no longer believed. S. M. prefaced his queries to Lovejoy with a defense of free enquiry. “Sceptics have frequently been charged with ‘shunning the light of the Gospel,’—‘rejecting the professed interposition of the agents of the Lord,’ ” according to S. M. Rather than ignoring grace, S. M.’s skepticism resulted from his desire for truth that forced him to investigate all subjects that were important to him, including religion. His inquiries into Christianity did not convince him of its truth, thus he asked Lovejoy to allay his doubts. Whether S. M. was baiting Lovejoy into religious disputes or sincerely seeking his opinion, S. M. argued that the “candor” of his skepticism was evidence that he did not carelessly ignore God. For both of St. Louis’s infidels—S. M. and Philos Kosmos—free enquiry affected their consciences in ways that made it almost impossible for them to maintain their faith. Once doubts about Christianity sparked introspection, infidel converts described free enquiry’s ineluctable force.17 Robert Dale Owen described his inability to resist disbelief in several issues of Free Enquirer. In the summer of 1829 Owen received a letter from a concerned Christian that included a copy of Quench not the Spirit, an American Tract Society publication. This tract conveyed the central evangelical warning not to ignore the “strivings of the Spirit,” the evidence of God’s grace that many Protestants believed weighed heavily on the consciences of all people before they accepted salvation. Owen published the letter and the tract in Free Enquirer to explain that he had already heeded the tract’s warning. When Owen first experienced religious doubt in his youth, he “did ‘strive to quench the spirit,’—not of piety but of enquiry.” His conscience demanded that he investigate the veracity of Christianity. Free enquiry operated on his mind with all the force of the Holy Spirit. For Owen a “spirit” of free enquiry was as powerful as the spirit of God that called humans to salvation. Owen followed his “conscientious impression” as devoutly as any pious Christian would, but he arrived in a very different place. The more he searched the Bible for truth to meet the demands of free enquiry, “the less evidence I found, and the more I doubted both the truth and the utility of what is called Revealed Religion.”18 The infidel conversion experiences described by Owen and others suggest that they rejected the desired trajectory of free will as commonly understood by the era’s dominant Protestant denominations. Owen recounted that “the evidence against religion struck on my mind with overwhelming

184

Chapter 6

force,” and eventually “I surrendered my religion to the irresistible force of conviction.” Whether intentional or not, Owen’s claim that his disbelief resulted from an irresistible conviction practically endowed free enquiry with the same power as the Calvinist doctrine of “irresistible grace.” According to this doctrine, it was impossible for the elect to reject salvation and God’s calling. Owen’s Presbyterian upbringing in Scotland certainly familiarized him with this doctrine, yet he rejected Christianity from a position of moral certainty characteristic of Calvinist election. Similarly, William Carver defended his religious opinions before a “Calvinist Christian” by claiming that deism appealed so strongly to his reason that he was absolutely unable to believe otherwise. With deep concern, Mehitable Hunt and Elisha Cranson, siblings in Massachusetts, believed that their seventy-year-old sister was gripped by a similar view. When pressed about her beliefs, she replied, “[W] hat can I do I cannot change my heart.” Thus she approached the end of her life “with out hope of god in the world,” Hunt lamented. Owen, Carver, and the other converts to free enquiry were determined to prove that disbelief resulted in the substitution of one sincerely held moral framework for another instead of an exit from morality altogether. Converts to free enquiry labored to demonstrate that they were moral people.19 Christian apologists reached a different conclusion. Ezra Stiles Ely, a prominent Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia and an adept polemicist against infidelity, railed against the metaphysics of “modern infidelity” used by disbelievers to absolve themselves of moral agency and adherence to Christian teachings. According to Ely, infidels claimed “that belief is not voluntary, and consequently there is no merit in entertaining any one opinion more than another.” The infidel perspective held that reasoned assessment of evidence convinces the mind of a proposition’s truth or its falsity, and an individual must either believe or disbelieve accordingly. Ely challenged this claim by distinguishing between “voluntary” and “involuntary” judgments. Individuals made a range of voluntary judgments, including decisions to renounce Christianity, shaped by “will and moral habits,” Ely concluded, which implied that moral deficiency caused disbelief. To critics such as Ely, infidel converts could have acted otherwise.20 Evangelicals, more broadly, found early national free enquirers troublesome for several reasons. Protestant emphases on sola scriptura, meaningful religious conversions, private conviction, individual conscience, and Protestant understandings of their heroic stands to defend their faith against state power all incorporated principles of free enquiry. Moreover, despite its many

Free Enquiry

185

differences, popular Protestantism in the early republic held special disdain for the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. In its place, several of the denominations that vied for converts in nineteenth-century America subscribed to some version of free will. Accordingly, God created humans with the moral and intellectual ability to accept or reject saving grace. Charles Grandison Finney, for one, believed that the will was free in the sense that humans had a “natural ability” to perceive God’s grace, in part through reason, and then to act by accepting this grace and their salvation. Methodists and other Arminian denominations in the early nineteenth century understood free will through the concept of “prevenient grace.” According to this doctrine, God offered grace to all humans prior to and independent of any decision they might make; individuals were thus free, despite their sinful nature, to choose or reject salvation. Both understandings of free will justified Christians in expecting and encouraging everyone to seek repentance, while at the same time they allowed them to hold the unrepentant morally accountable for their decisions. The willful rejection of God’s grace was not only sinful, but also an indication of moral depravity. Thus for Finney, and those revivalists who adopted his “New Measures,” or for rapidly growing evangelical denominations such as the Methodists, free will was a theological concept that sparked great optimism but also provoked deep anxiety. Humanity’s free will suggested that the world could be Christianized despite its fallen state. There was no guarantee, however, that sinful humans would always choose salvation, at least not immediately.21 Modern free enquirers, it seemed, had turned the sources of Protestantism’s greatest strengths into its most dire existential threats. The republic’s infidels offered glaring examples of free will’s dangerous implications made manifest. Free enquirers shared with their Christian opponents a basic understanding that humans could and should use their rational faculties in search of answers to religious questions. Indeed rational introspection was essential to notions of free will held by infidel converts and their Protestant opponents alike. They differed, however, on what they expected free will to achieve. The pious typically valued free will only as it led individuals to Christ. Other outcomes resulted from immoral motives or deficient intellect overriding God’s grace. Free enquirers dismissed this as hypocritical. The will was not free when its sphere of legitimate action and outcome seemed closely circumscribed by dogma, doctrine, or confession. For early national infidels, true free will required enquiry alone. Free enquiry proved so subversive to Christianity because its adherents secularized free will in order

186

Chapter 6

to reverse the trajectory of religious seeking toward a position of critical disbelief. Modern free enquiry also seemed like a set of ideas with potentially large appeal, its opponents worried. One did not have to become a full-blown infidel; indeed one could remain a nominal Christian, while still challenging basic Christian teachings on the grounds of free enquiry. Thus to pious observers, free enquirers looked remarkably like the infidels who appeared in the tracts and newspapers that flowed from evangelical presses, and for good reason. Like Christian conversions in this period, conversions to free enquiry were individual acts that sparked community awakenings of free enquiry. In the spring of 1828 the Correspondent published two separate reports about towns where Christianity’s fortunes declined in the wake of rising free enquiry. A subscriber in Laurenceburg, Indiana, declared, “It is a day of reasoning in our land.” Many of the town’s pious residents, including a local Methodist minister, read the Correspondent approvingly. Until then, many people in Laurenceburg had not been interested in thinking about religious subjects, be it due to apathy or contentment with current beliefs. Suddenly, according to this correspondent, townspeople were “breaking through the fog of superstition, and throwing off the shackles of Christianity.” This perspective from Laurenceburg echoed in a description of religious changes taking place in Germantown, Pennsylvania. “G. H.,” a correspondent from Germantown, announced that “liberal principles” were spreading throughout his community. As evidence he cited the local popularity of deistic writings such as Paine’s Age of Reason, Volney’s Ruins, Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature, and even Ecce Homo and Christianity Unveiled, atheistic writings by the eighteenth-century French philosophe d’Holbach. G. H. described a town in which neighbors eagerly lent each other and discussed books that contained strident arguments against Christianity.22 In ways that paralleled warnings about infidelity in evangelical tracts, Germantown’s infidel awakening was the direct result of reading. G. H. credited himself with initiating the town’s awakening. “Ten years ago,” he recalled, “I was the only person in the place who dared openly to deny a future state of rewards and punishments.” At the time, his opinions cost him the respect of his neighbors, who labeled him an infidel and a danger to the community. The town’s clergy and laymen all believed he was a threat. Nevertheless, Volney’s Ruins ignited in him “a thirst after truth and knowledge.” This desire inspired a proselytizing impulse to propagate the books that had advanced his own infidel opinions. Beginning in 1825 he

Figure 6. Eight Illustrations for the World of Wonders (1838), by David Claypoole Johnston. Etching (detail). This image is a satirical depiction of a gathering of free enquirers. The phrase on the wall draws attention to the pernicious implications of the free enquirer’s confidence in reason alone. The speaker removing his mask suggests that free enquiry was duplicitous in nature. This image captures the reality of free enquirer gatherings in one important way, however. They were typically attended by men, women, and some children. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.)

188

Chapter 6

introduced a few of his neighbors to Volney, to Paine, and, eventually, to the remaining books that influenced reading habits and opinion in Germantown. As a result, the hitherto pious townspeople began “to think for themselves, instead of paying the clergy to think for them.” Hannah Syng Bunting, a Methodist Sunday school teacher from Philadelphia, received a different impression when she visited Germantown. She described it in her diary as a place “where infidelity stalks at noon day.” G. H.’s actual responsibility for the advance of religious skepticism in Germantown is uncertain, perhaps he boasted. But the town’s impiety that Bunting noted suggests the collective influence of personal conversions to infidelity by people such as G. H.23 Mapping the contours of religious belief in specific places provided free enquiring and evangelical commentators the opportunity to reaffirm their own religious opinions. Bunting’s visit to Germantown and its neighboring communities shocked her Methodist convictions in such a way that she culled the area for any available circuit preacher who could instruct the wayward residents. Bunting remarked hopefully, “May the Lord take his own cause in hand in this part of the country.” As editor of the Correspondent, George Houston’s response to events in Germantown was equally predictable. The popularity of Paine and d’Holbach exemplified the “progress of liberal opinions,” and individuals who read their works were “co-operators, in other parts of the Union” who zealously endeavored “to break down the strong hold of superstition.” Bunting and Houston used incidents of infidel conversions to justify their own desired courses of religious change.24 The possibility that conversions to free enquiry would bring about broader social improvement was a central theme in the writings of free enquirers. Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen assured their readers in 1829 that a majority “of the American people are now awake to enquiry and are ripe for reform,” thus the “work of free enquiry has only commenced.” The inaugural issue of St. Louis’s Western Examiner announced without reservation that “it must be obvious to every unbiased observer, that at no very distant period, Christianity must fall.” Free enquiry ushered in its own millennium. Proponents of free enquiry believed they were substituting a corrupt moral framework with a better one. This ideal was emphasized in the Western Examiner article: “[I]f Christianity must fall we say, a correct system of morals must be inculcated in its stead.” The editors of such newspapers had personal interests in optimistic assessments of free enquiry’s fortunes, just as converts to free enquiry could further justify disbelief if it seemed to

Free Enquiry

189

encourage social and moral improvement. Visions of an infidel millennium were, however, informed by the early republic’s increasing religiosity. Free enquiry gained an intellectual foothold in a culture that also produced reinvigorated Protestant publishing enterprises, new missionary ventures in the United States and abroad, an array of new evangelical denominations, and even claims of a new revelation from God to Joseph Smith. Amid antebellum America’s vibrant religiosity, Protestant and otherwise, free enquirers still believed that their ideas were prevailing despite the cultural influence of Christianity in its varied forms. Most encouraging for free enquirers was their belief that amid flourishing religious conviction, free enquiry taught people greater tolerance. Lessons from the Protestant Reformation still held weight in the early nineteenth century, causing Americans of many religious persuasions to associate religious difference with religious violence. From the vantage of free enquiry periodicals, another novel development of the era was the believers’ willingness to temper their religious principles for the sake of social good. Robert Dale Owen announced “that the times are becoming daily more liberal.” Yet Owen specified what he believed were the religious implications of liberality. “When I speak of the times being more liberal, I do not mean that men differ less in opinion, but that they are learning how to differ.” “Amanda,” a correspondent to Owen’s paper, proved his point. She defended the Presbyterians in a letter to Owen. Although she was not a church member, she did attend Presbyterian services and teach in a Sunday school. She professed her faith and her disapproval of free enquiry, but she qualified, “I am not bigoted, I am not intolerant, and willing you should believe as you please; and am conscious it can do me no harm.” Christianity’s moral framework still bound its adherents, but Christians such as Amanda did not assume that her religious beliefs should also bind others. It was the job of papers such as his own, Owen argued, to encourage Amanda and others like her. Prossimo, for example, emphasized that even his pious mother did not renounce him once he became a free enquirer. She respected his opinions because he arrived at them after sincere introspection, and because he remained a moral person despite his disbelief. Ultimately, advocates of free enquiry believed that it taught people with opposing religious beliefs to ignore religious difference and to respect religious opinions that were not their own, including disbelief.25 As a self-affirming view, free enquirers were inspired by stories about people who learned new ways to be religious, and especially if these

190

Chapter 6

individual experiences influenced similar developments within entire communities. A correspondent to the Free Enquirer identified as “A Voice from the Far West” affirmed evangelical concerns that infidelity was on the rise in the Mississippi valley. “If free inquiry be infidelity,” then evangelicals were justifiably concerned, according to this writer. Not only did westerners doubt the Bible and read Paine, Volney, and Hume, but their books were readily available in local libraries, “notwithstanding those missiles so plentifully showered upon us by” the American Tract Society. This writer attributed positive social changes to free enquiry’s broad acceptance in the West. “Religious opinions, very justly, are allowed to have little or no influence in the actions of one man towards another.” According to the western correspondent, people’s economic livelihood, social status, and personal liberty were not jeopardized for believing or disbelieving in Christianity, contrary to the lack of tolerance in the East. Infidel mechanics found employment and infidel physicians attracted patients. This writer’s assessment was overly sanguine, as evidence of sharp religious disagreements filled the pages of St. Louis’s religious newspapers. Nevertheless, the assessment both exacerbated evangelical concerns about the advance of personal infidelity and provided a sympathetic example of the perceived benefits that accompanied individual conversions to free enquiry.26 Free enquirers and evangelicals actively engaged each other in the pages of their respective newspapers and tracts in order to debate the meaning of personal disbelief. Taken together, the writings of evangelicals and free enquirers constitute competing efforts to recruit ordinary people for religious controversies. These sources have value beyond the insight they provide into the vocabulary and practices of religious dispute, however. Infidel conversion narratives and accounts of community awakenings to free enquiry elucidate the experience of unbelief that was remarkably similar to the social portrait of infidelity portrayed in the evangelical press. This similarity resulted from the commitment, shared by free enquirers and evangelicals alike, that anecdotes used in their polemics must be true. A consistent portrait of infidelity’s social profile and its practices thus underlay the polemic façade of publications by free enquirers and evangelicals. Writers from all religious perspectives were ultimately concerned with the lives of infidels; the details of infidel biographies bolstered the agendas of Protestant evangelists and free enquirers. The advent of Thomas Paine birthday commemorations added new details about the lives of ordinary infidels. These events became part of the

Free Enquiry

191

early republic’s yearly cycle of popular celebration in the late 1820s. On these occasions, the practices of lived deism gained a public profile that they previously lacked, and not one constructed solely in the pages of anti-infidel polemics. The influence of infidel writings, the social networks that encouraged and sustained disbelief, the gendered dimensions of disbelief—topics of interest in the free enquiry and evangelical press—were all displayed in accounts of these celebrations. Reports about Paine birthday commemorations offer direct entry into the lives and ideas of their free enquiring participants: both men and women, primarily of middling or mechanic status, and almost certainly white. When celebrants were identified by gender, it was clear that men and women had different reasons for celebrating Paine. Though many participants remain unknown beyond their names and their toasts, these accounts are enough to demonstrate their place in an organized campaign to engage contentious debates over the religious and moral underpinnings of antebellum American life. Paine birthday celebrations consisted of orations and dinners, followed by a series of planned toasts, then volunteer toasts. Both types of toasts convey the tenor and meaning of the celebrations. Distinguishing between formal toasts and volunteer toasts is important, however. Volunteer toasts in particular offer a glimpse, if only brief, into the intellectual world of ordinary Americans at a period when the traces of a popular intellectual history are often elusive. Paine celebrations were opportunities for infidel conversions to gain social and public importance as free enquirers exited a Christian community and entered a community of Christianity’s critics. Paine’s birthday was not commemorated in the United States until 1825, but the first organized celebration occurred in London in 1818. Much had changed since the initial American celebrations, according to Benjamin Offen, an English émigré who spoke at an 1828 celebration in New York. Offen reminded his audience that just three years before only one location had a proprietor willing to host an event honoring Paine, whereas in 1828 celebrants “have their choice of situations; and the day will be celebrated in different parts of the city, both in public and private.” The advance of “liberal opinions” was even greater in Britain, Offen declared. Celebrations in 1828 were held throughout Scotland and England, including a very public gathering in City of London Tavern, “the first tavern of the metropolis,” far overshadowing the private commemoration shared by a few individuals in 1818. Offen thus opened his 1828 address by boasting, “This day, which has been considered by fanatics the birthday of a monster rather than a man, is now

192

Chapter 6

remembered and observed by thousands both in England and America.” Offen’s optimism proved merited. Celebrations of Paine’s birthday became increasingly public and somewhat less controversial on both sides of the Atlantic over the coming years. New York’s Tammany Hall provided the venue for an 1832 Paine birthday oration and social ball reportedly attended by almost four hundred men and women. The crowd was so large that organizers moved the celebration to Tammany Hall’s “big room,” which forced a smaller political meeting to convene elsewhere.27 Paine commemorations were organized in a distinct social and geographic context. It was an urban, primarily northern development. Politically, Paine celebrations promoted causes that overlapped with interests of the Workingmen’s labor movement, land reform, and the more radical wing of the Democratic Party. They had strong support from mechanics—such as Amory Amsden, a machinist in Rochester, New York, who celebrated Thomas Paine in 1835—as well as from individuals who concerned themselves with the fortunes of urban workers such as Frances Wright. Wright hailed from Scotland and was perhaps best known in the United States for her controversial lectures on free thought, labor issues, and gender equality. But Paine celebrations also attracted eclectic social reformers such as Abner Kneeland in Boston and émigrés such as Scottish radical Robert L. Jennings.28 An 1835 celebration in New York City’s Debtors’ Prison further suggests the material circumstances of antebellum free enquiry. Paine’s memory was very much alive for those whose economic woes landed them in municipal custody, and inmates celebrated with dinner, wine, and a series of regular and voluntary toasts. New York’s Society of Moral Philanthropists, organizers of that city’s annual Paine birthday celebration, purchased food and wine for the debtors with surplus revenue raised from ticket sales for their event’s ball. During the same year, the society also disbursed $43 from its surplus for six people “in need of assistance.” Of the regular toasts, the first was a straightforward nod to the memory of Thomas Paine. Toasts that followed included one to the memory of Thomas Jefferson: “He was for a Union, but not of Church and State.” “Civil and Religious Liberty— Unshackled in either mind or body by designing Priests or heartless Creditors,” another inmate cheered. The debtors of New York City concluded their celebration with a volunteer toast asserting that incarceration for debt would cease only after the “Age of Reason” arrived and the “Rights of Man” are respected.29 Shared experiences with the people and institutions of evangelical reform

Free Enquiry

193

Figure 7. Thomas Paine (n.d.), artist unknown. Etching. This image was likely created in the 1830s or 1840s. It captures Paine’s resurrection as a celebratory figure in American life after 1820. The woman on the left, with a flame on her head, symbolizes reason (she is possibly unveiling herself for Paine), while the monk (on the right), a symbol of superstition or fanaticism, flinches at Paine’s image. “The world is my country & to do good my religion,” a version of a passage from Paine’s Rights of Man, appears engraved on the stone between the two figures. (Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

united the free enquirers who celebrated Paine. Paine was celebrated in eleven cities between 1825 and 1835, and four were locations directly influenced by the people, prints, and power of evangelical Protestantism. New York City and Philadelphia were both centers of missionary financing and publishing. Other sites included Rochester and New Hartford, New York, both visited by Charles Grandison Finney, the famed lawyer turned itinerant revivalist. An 1829 celebration in New Hartford included the toast “New Hartford—bullet proof against the late Finney excitement.” Commemorations in Boston and Providence began in the wake of local controversies surrounding religion and municipal governance. Boston’s first celebration occurred in 1834, only

194

Chapter 6

months after the Commonwealth of Massachusetts charged Abner Kneeland with blasphemy for sentiments he published in the Boston Investigator. In Providence, John Dispeau used his toast at the city’s first celebration in 1833 to protest attempts by Providence authorities to “Veto Free Enquiry, by refusing a public building on the grounds of sectarianism,” suggesting some in Providence opposed public commemorations of Paine.30 Local religious controversies over free enquiry informed the content of Paine celebrations, but organizers and participants believed these events upheld a grander cause: the legacy of the American Revolution. By the late 1820s more and more Americans claimed the Revolution as justification for contemporary causes. Free enquirers remembered the Revolution as an event that marked the initial decline of religious revelation, the authority of churches, and belief in the supernatural. They made this point by claiming the Revolution’s leaders as early free enquirers who served a republican cause. Frances Wright articulated this position in an 1830 oration in which she argued that the American clergy grossly dissembled when they characterized America’s Revolutionary leadership as “orthodox believers in a superstition they disclaimed, and obedient sons of a church they suspected.” Wright warned her audience not to accept “the trash of the tract house and the libels of the pulpit.” Instead, Wright urged her audience to believe only what the founding generation wrote about their religious views and how contemporaries viewed their leadership during the Revolution. This effort to reconstruct a lost history of the American Revolution as a political event imbued with deistic free enquiry, Wright argued, belied claims that the Revolution’s ideals justified Christian moral reform. After all, Wright concluded, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, Ethan Allen, Horatio Gates, “all the nobler host of worthies, who secured this country’s independence,” were accepted and open “infidels—that is, all disbelieved the compound Jewish and Christian system, and looked upon its mysteries and its miracles as upon nursery tales.”31 In the course of honoring Paine, free enquirers also lobbied for his place in the pantheon of America’s founders. This effort to rehabilitate Paine’s role in the Revolution defied decades of hostility toward him and his ideas. Even before Paine’s death in 1809, his descent into derision was well under way throughout the Anglo-American world, and opinion of him continued to decline through the 1810s. Paine lost popular admiration after publication of The Age of Reason, which was widely denounced in England and the United States as a blasphemous threat to established political and social order.

Free Enquiry

195

However, Paine’s admirers viewed The Age of Reason as a fitting extension of his ideas in Common Sense and Rights of Man. The reading habits that sustained personal disbelief were thus worthy of acclaim. J. Wells, a celebrant at an 1832 event in New York, offered a voluntary toast to The Age of Reason, exhorting, “Christians read it; it will convince you of the impositions of priestcraft.” During an 1834 Boston celebration, the evening’s speaker Abner Kneeland, in the midst of his blasphemy prosecution, extolled Paine for doing more “to break the yoke of both Political and Religious intolerance, than any other heroes of the American revolution.” Later in the event Kneeland challenged alternative historical interpretations with a volunteer toast in honor of Benjamin Franklin, Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. Though all three had similar religious views when alive, Kneeland argued, “Christians are trying to claim the first and the last [Franklin and Jefferson], when dead.” Equally telling are the members of the Revolutionary generation who were “forgotten” in the course of Paine commemorations, including Samuel Adams and Benjamin Rush who both combined their Christian faith and Revolutionary commitments in ways difficult to elide. Nevertheless, if Paine deserved a place among the worthies of the Revolution, then his writings, including The Age of Reason, should rest on the bookshelf of any patriotic American, his admirers concluded.32 It was a small interpretive step from understanding Paine as a central figure of the republic’s early history to viewing the Revolution as an event that established Paine’s ideas as the foundation of the nation’s new political order. Paine’s admirers believed that the American Revolution was an event in favor of free enquiry. Orations and toasts honoring Paine conflated the contentious religious and cultural history of the early republic’s first decades into a progressive narrative of declining superstition in the wake of advancing free enquiry. This was a politically potent remembrance of the American Revolution. The few hundred participants at an 1833 Providence, Rhode Island, celebration remembered the Revolution in such a way. The city’s Society of Moral Philanthropists organized the celebration, inaugurated with cannon fire from atop the hills surrounding Providence, and reprinted the proceedings for distribution. Samuel E. Brown’s voluntary toast nodded to Paine as “the great apostle of religious and republican liberty in every hemisphere.” One Mr. Peck toasted “[t]he worthies of the revolution by whose indefatigable exertions, Church and State were separated; the reunion of which may we nor our sons never live to see.” An anonymous “Lady” offered cheers to free enquiry, “may

196

Chapter 6

it flourish in this land of Liberty, until bigotry and priestcraft are buried in oblivion.” Paine’s admirers in Rochester, New York, reaffirmed this historical interpretation in an 1835 celebration. That year, 110 of Rochester’s “Free Inquirers” met in the City Hotel to honor Paine’s birthday. They commemorated Paine, “who devoted a long and laborious life to the emancipation of man from political and spiritual tyrants.” In an event complemented with music and attended by both men and women, celebrants toasted “[t]he sages and heroes of our glorious revolution—Almost to a man untrammeled by the dogmas of the church,” and to the downfall of “Temporal and Spiritual Tyrants—We have free’d ourselves as a nation from one, and will ere long from the other.” The free enquirers who feted Paine did so to support their view of the American Revolution as an event decidedly opposed to Christianity.33 Along with highlighting sites where free enquirers used their ideas to define a social space with its own customs, events, and order, Paine celebrations offer additional insights into the personal benefits of free enquiry and disbelief. It seems fairly certain that free enquiry, with its presumption of mental emancipation, offered men who celebrated Paine a way to link suspicion of evangelical Christianity to a political identity and a broader historical narrative: republican citizens upholding the principles of 1776. Free enquirers developed a historical interpretation to deny pejorative accounts of the infidel 1790s that were central to the historical memory evident in evangelical print culture. Paine’s admirers, primarily male urban mechanics, thus turned to free enquiry as an alternative to the emerging cultural dominance of evangelical Protestant reform in America’s northern towns and cities.34 Women, however, also appeared in the celebration accounts, both in the gendered language of their male counterparts and as active participants. Male celebrants occasionally promoted an ideal of the free enquiring woman, usually in reference to women who publicly criticized Christianity as writers and lecturers. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the controversial A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, was frequently toasted, for example. Salutations were also made of a more general tenor directed at diminishing the authority of the clergy. Negative gendered assumptions about female susceptibility to sly clerics often colored these remarks in order to demonstrate that the nation’s religious authorities were losing their foothold even among those perceived most vulnerable to the clergy’s teachings. Rochester celebrants toasted “The American Fair” in 1835. Though long “pray to

Free Enquiry

197

a designing priesthood,” may they soon “spurn with contempt the infamous designs of a hireling clergy to enslave their minds.”35 A gendered discourse concerning female capacity for free enquiry and mental emancipation versus their tendencies toward mental acquiescence appeared during several celebrations. Russel Canfield developed this theme in order to critique what he believed was the inherent, unjust nature of Bible teachings. By extension, he challenged claims to the Bible’s divine authorship and the general utility of religion. Canfield expressed this view during an 1835 oration in Philadelphia, and it anticipated his later writings on the physiology and sociology of sexuality. Canfield addressed a large portion of his oration to the women in the audience and declared that, historically, biblical justifications of social relations and conceptions of gender had done nothing but render women “slaves, liable to be sold to the first purchaser, either as wives or prostitutes.” Only the progress of free enquiry and mental emancipation could dismantle the social and political restraints imposed upon women, Canfield argued. Such restraints were often authorized by religious principles that prevented women from achieving their full value and dignity. Ultimately, Canfield’s biblical critique centered on his declaration to the women in his audience that “[e]very where, and at all times, has religion been adverse to your rights, your reputation, your enjoyments.” Canfield was optimistic about not only women’s potential for free enquiry, but also its appeal to women once they were awakened to Christianity’s negative influence on their lives.36 Opponents of Paine commemorations shared the gendered assumptions of Paine’s male admirers, but they used them to highlight the pernicious implications of female participation. Women who admired Paine and The Age of Reason acted contrary to their interests, according to critical observers, even if their collective admiration was cloaked in behaviors and ideas thought becoming of an early nineteenth-century lady. In March 1837 an Amherst, New Hampshire, paper, the Farmer’s Cabinet, described a recent Paine birthday celebration in New York City. The author of this piece could not understand why women attended the event. First and foremost, “[t]he purity imputed to the female mind is so entire, that a single stain mars the whole.” Celebrating a writer who taught the world to doubt revealed religious truths was certain to irreparably damage the female mind, or so this writer believed. Mental damage aside, this writer also argued that women had ideals of human equality, which rested on Christian moral precepts, to credit for their recent elevation

198

Chapter 6

from material and mental drudgery to the role of man’s “companion, friend, and almost superior.” For the author writing in the Farmer’s Cabinet, the road to antebellum ideals of middle-class womanhood was apparently paved with good religion, not the infidelity of Thomas Paine.37 For all the writings about whether women should celebrate Paine, the arguments men developed about female participation suggest a fairly seamless extension of how they understood the role of women in religious life. Male evangelicals knew that women were crucial to spreading the gospel in their homes and communities. Every woman who became a free enquirer was at least one less soul devoted to Christianity. As tract authors also emphasized, female piety was the best antidote to male infidelity. For free enquiring men, the existence of disbelieving women provided a useful bludgeon against the authority of evangelicals. Despite their rhetorical support for Wollstonecraft’s and Wright’s contributions to women’s rights, having free enquiring wives and daughters may have also served the domestic interests of free enquiring men. Female participation in the evangelical movement proved highly disruptive in many early national households. Men throughout the United States often disdained evangelical ministers and the effects they had on patriarchal authority. Some men believed that their wives’ and daughters’ commitment to evangelical causes superseded their dedication to home, and they suspected that evangelical Christian ministers encouraged this attitude. If wives, daughters, and sisters rejected Christianity outright, then the evangelical threat to harmonious home life would disappear. This was of course an unimaginable trade-off for fathers and husbands who remained faithful; however, the benefits for free enquiring men seem obvious. The embrace of free enquiry could thus in some instances have fairly conservative implications considering the stance of free enquirers toward churches, benevolent societies, and missionary organizations, all of which were some of the early republic’s most important sites of female moral authority within civic life.38 Despite what opponents of free enquiry believed were its denigrating effects on women’s lives, some women were in fact sincere free enquirers. Christina Gardner of Cambridge, Massachusetts, an early member of Boston’s First Society of Free Enquirers, was one. Gardner as well as Anna, the author of the single infidel conversion narrative penned by a woman, were joined by numerous women who shared their opinions. Such women frequently attended Paine commemorations, listened to the orations, and even offered toasts that were then printed for popular consumption. These

Free Enquiry

199

festivities also offered female celebrants a role in civil society and a voice, albeit limited, in public discourse. These moments of female political participation were ultimately a response to evangelical religion, an ostensibly curious target of female opposition. Of all the opportunities for women to enter the antebellum public sphere, it was in evangelical reform movements that women had the greatest influence, in the greatest numbers. The motivations of anonymous female Paine celebrants referenced in newspaper reports and published toasts must, therefore, be inferred by comparing the few remarks of named women that appeared in print with Anna’s conversion narrative. Female free enquirers shared the same conservative assumptions as their male counterparts. In other words, female celebrants viewed free enquiry and critiques of revealed religion as the source of an alternative understanding of female authority and femininity lodged primarily in the home but not premised on evangelicalism. Anna, for example, encouraged Frances Wright’s “good work of vindicating the rights of man— and, yet more, of womankind” while at the same time admitting that although she was “incompetent to assist you in public, in private my heart and my exertions shall be with you.” Without any contradiction, Anna lauded Wright and paraphrased Mary Wollstonecraft, and yet limited her realm of influence as a free enquirer to her home. Celebrating Paine was a way for women, especially those in the North, to define themselves against emerging ideals of nineteenth-century femininity that emphasized extensive pursuits of benevolent causes. Assuming the women who celebrated Paine shared the status of their male counterparts, they probably lacked the social resources and were perhaps uninterested in joining the evangelical movements that typified northern religious culture.39 Between the few women exceptional for their public diatribes against revealed religion and lofty toasts to the “American Fair” were those women who actually helped organize the celebrations and those who attended and expressed their views. A Mrs. Matthies, for one, hosted the dinner provided for Rochester’s celebrants at the City Hotel, which her husband operated. Women participated at a celebration in Salubria, Iowa. “The daughters of Iowa—may they learn less of priestcraft, and lay aside their Bibles for the distaff and loom,” toasted one Mrs. Adams. Miss D. J. Rice also toasted Iowa’s young women in the hope that “their buoyant minds and guileless hearts never be ensnared by the artifices of the priest.” Ultimately, then, the women who celebrated Paine adhered to a conception of mental emancipation and free enquiry that reinforced dominant cultural constructions of gender

200

Chapter 6

appropriate labor and female psychology. This concept of mental emancipation allowed female celebrants to critique the high demands of evangelical femininity. In at least one instance, however, free enquiry opened economic opportunities to women. If a skilled vest or pantaloon maker attended the 1833 New York celebration, New York clothing manufacturer Henry M. Lion may have hired her that summer. He needed fifty employees and “none need apply that are not liberals and first rate tailoresses.” This was employment that brought immediate gains that laboring for God could never guarantee. As a volunteer toast at the same 1833 celebration mockingly described the American Tract Society, “Large manufacturer of fables and folly. Ten thousand simple females are now wanted to distribute tracts, to whom good wages will be given, in promissory notes, without date, payable at the Bank of Heaven.” Evangelicalism called for material commitments from the pious that were impractical to many women. Thus free enquiry provided the means to maintain personal dignity by ensuring women that the pangs of grace were priestly nonsense.40 Examining the motivations of the men and women who honored Paine reveals much about American religion during the 1820s and 1830s. Judging by the growing eagerness of people to celebrate Paine for the sake of free enquiry, there were Americans who not only disbelieved aspects of Christian theology but also wanted to abandon Christianity altogether. They expressed deep disconcert with prevailing Protestant understandings of free will. Spiritual liberation and promises of Christian salvation offered little consolation against the apprehension of encountering God’s grace. Free enquiry was an ideal substitute. Conversions to free enquiry were arduous, but the outcome offered new free enquirers moral certainty that they could not find in Christianity. As such, the free enquirer appeared in the early republic’s cultural landscape in direct response to the growing influence of evangelical Protestantism. Free enquirers occasionally identified as deists or infidels; evangelicals did not equivocate, free enquirers were always infidels. Dramatic evangelical tract narratives told the lives of infidels, and fears about infidelity haunted the evangelical imagination while bolstering the evangelists’ spirituality and their sense of Protestant identity. Connections between free enquiry and evangelicalism strengthened during the 1830s. Free enquiry became the basis of greater social organization. Paine birthday celebrations were but yearly examples of monthly and weekly meetings held by free enquirers across the country. From the

Free Enquiry

201

evangelical perspective, disbelief reached deeper into American society as the 1830s progressed. Evangelicals responded by increasing their efforts. Print polemics central to religious controversies between free enquirers and evangelists became part of an altogether broader field of religious debate after 1830: the political development of civil society. A reinvigorated politics of religious controversy that centered on the perceived organizational power of evangelical polemicists and infidel converts alike thus erupted in the United States.

Chapter 7

Political Religion, Political Irreligion

Of the many July Fourth orations delivered in the summer of 1827, two expressed in clear detail how free enquirers and evangelical polemicists understood their civic duties and their political challenges. Robert L. Jennings delivered an oration before an audience of roughly sixty selfproclaimed deists and free enquirers assembled by the Free Press Association, an organization established in New York City to sponsor and promote critical discussions of Christianity. Although a Scottish émigré, Jennings readily invoked the memory of the American Revolution when he declared that recent efforts at evangelical organization were dangerous deviations from the principles of 1776. Jennings warned his audience that the Revolution would prove for naught unless Americans resisted the distribution of Bibles, religious tracts, and legislative enforcements of the Sabbath. Presbyterian minister Ezra Stiles Ely also invoked the Revolution’s legacy in an oration delivered from his Philadelphia pulpit. Only an organized Christian polity could fulfill the Revolution’s promise, Ely announced.1 Jennings concluded by denouncing the circulation of “vile pernicious tracts, which are calculated to prepare the minds of our now politically free citizens, for that passive submission to the expounders of holy oracles.” On the other hand, Ely concluded his remarks by calling for a “Christian party in politics.” This party would not gain its strength from national and local institutions or organizing documents. Instead its power would derive from the shared and voluntary efforts of Christians committed “to act upon, truly religious principles in all civil matters.” Ely was convinced that by sheer numbers the nation’s Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists could act in concert at election time to ensure that the United States “would never be dishonoured with an avowed infidel in her national

Political Religion

203

cabinet or capitol.” In fact, Ely claimed that Presbyterians “alone could bring half a million of electors into the field, in opposition to any known advocate of Deism, Socinianism, or any species of avowed hostility to the truth of Christianity.”2 Jennings and Ely, respectively, voiced political positions inherent in infidel conversions and the religious concerns addressed in tract literature. Conversions to infidelity and evangelical concerns about personal disbelief provided the foundation for organized free enquiry and institutionalized Christian moral reform, which emerged simultaneously as advocates of each justified their position through opposition to the other. Both 1827 orations contained salient themes that appeared consistently in conflicts between free enquiry and evangelical reform throughout the 1830s. Jennings’s audience consisted of self-avowed free enquirers and deists, a point of only passing importance for Jennings in light of his immediate concern to limit the political reach of evangelical reform. For Ely, however, organized free enquiry constituted a coherent political interest within an “infidel” bloc, in essence a party that could mobilize constituencies and elect candidates to national political office. Thus Ely countered by advocating the formation of a Christian party in politics. In terms current to the 1820s and 1830s, Jennings opposed “fits of political religion,” or the pursuit of sectarian ends through political means. Ely, for his part, sought to curb what another observer described as “political irreligion,” or “carrying on the business of the commonwealth professedly as ‘without God in the world.’ ”3 Political religion and political irreligion referred to, first and foremost, the social consequences rather than the intellectual merits of personal religious opinions. Conflicts between Protestant reformers and free enquirers thus increasingly turned on questions of political power. With other Americans during the 1830s, Protestant moral reformers and free enquirers expand their public presence by forming new voluntary associations and denser print networks. Growth in American civil society amplified the influence of political religion and political irreligion. In addition, the legal and cultural underpinnings of civil society proved more effective at bolstering competing notions of religious truth than either theological claims alone or developments within religious movements. As a result, however, it seemed to free enquirers and Christian moral reformers that religious opinions were wedded more closely to the coercive and intolerant exercise of state power than at any time in American history. This fear eventually gained wide partisan currency. When the Democrats and Whigs finally coalesced

204

Chapter 7

as political parties in the 1830s, they were identified in contemporary partisan discourse as, respectively, the party of infidelity and opposition to Protestant reform and the party of orthodoxy and support for Protestant reform. Without question, the Protestant moral reformers who busied themselves throughout the 1820s and 1830s were more numerous and more effective organizers than free enquirers. Nevertheless, both sides were apt to overlook their opponents’ actual influence. Evidence of even one deistic society such as the Free Press Association was enough to further stoke the evangelical imagination with concerns that American culture was imbued with private infidelity. Conversely, a provocative statement such as Ely’s call for a Christian party in politics, even when it did not materialize, was enough to rouse free enquirers such as Jennings to the conclusion that any form of organized Christian moral reform had dangerous political implications. A bundle of assumptions, misapprehensions, and fears thus shaped the intersecting ideas and motivated the political actions of both Christian moral reformers and self-avowed free enquirers. These misperceptions and exaggerations do, however, contextualize actual changes taking place in antebellum American religion. By the 1830s levels of church adherence had increased from those of the late eighteenth century to include approximately one-third of the population. Higher rates of adherence were accompanied by new political demands to maintain Christian piety and the formation of new institutions in civil society to assert these demands. In other words, political religion, in some forms, was on the rise. Conversely, social mobility and attending changes in demographics, especially in the country’s fastest growing cities, contributed to lower rates of total and apparent church attendance. Moreover, alignments between free thought and the Democratic Party were becoming more evident, thus raising the specter of political irreligion.4 Jennings and Ely delivered their orations just before American Protestants launched new evangelical initiatives. Beginning in 1829, each of the country’s three major evangelical organizations—the American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, and the American Tract Society—devised ambitious plans to disperse God’s word throughout the United States. At a national meeting of evangelical organizations in New York City in 1829, members of the American Bible Society were confident enough in their missionary and organizational capacities to publicly announce that by 1831 every American home would own a Bible courtesy of the American

Political Religion

205

Bible Society. By 1830 the society disbursed over one million Bibles into a nation of almost thirteen million people. Although clearly the society did not distribute a Bible to every American household, it certainly made broad steps toward its goal. In 1830 the American Sunday School Union commenced the Mississippi Valley Project, designed to establish Christian institutions including schools and libraries stocked with morally appropriate reading. The project reflected prevailing evangelical concerns that the West was largely populated by irreligious if not atheistic inhabitants. By 1833, the Mississippi Valley Project resulted in the establishment or improvement of 5,000 schools that the Union outfitted with 500,000 books. In both instances, evangelical societies stamped their hopes for a pious order on the complex world around them, yet neither did so as ambitiously as the American Tract Society.5 Founded in 1825 by an interdenominational coalition of Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Dutch Reformed churches, the American Tract Society launched its Systematic Monthly Distribution plan in 1829. Under this plan every resident in New York City would receive at least one tract per month, selected by the society’s board of directors. The society divided the city’s fourteen wards into five hundred districts, each containing roughly sixty families, to help ensure that all New Yorkers received each month’s selections. The society appointed a committee for every ward in the city. Committee chairpersons oversaw general operations in each ward and assigned agents who canvassed New York City’s streets distributing tracts to individual households. Merchant-evangelist financiers Arthur and Lewis Tappan were among the most prominent ward administrators. New York City was eventually deluged with five million tract pages delivered to the city’s thirty-six thousand families, courtesy of the Systematic Monthly Distribution plan. According to American Tract Society reports, most New Yorkers gladly accepted the tracts. Society agents also canvassed the city’s public and semipublic spaces, offering tracts to city visitors from the rural hinterlands and the world’s ports. With encouragement from the society’s leadership in New York, evangelicals in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and towns throughout New England, as well as more remote areas farther west, eventually implemented similar distribution plans. In each location, the American Tract Society’s efforts bore the organizational hallmarks of antebellum moral reform, conceived and managed, as they were, like the era’s leading mercantile firms.6 The plans also reflected bold evangelical imaginings of pious urban

206

Chapter 7

space. Evangelicals viewed the success of their distribution plans as a measure of Christianity’s steady advance literally through the streets of early national cities. The din of cart and foot traffic, the odors of livestock and garbage, the proliferation of print and commerce, indeed the very substance of antebellum city living were subsumed within the transcendent drama of Christian conversion. Urban life unfolded in ways familiar to any reader of an evangelical tract, thus heightening reformers’ concerns about the moral health of the republic’s cities. An 1831 report by Thomas G. Allen of the Philadelphia Mission described his city as a “destitute and important field” inhabited by irreligious masses. While distributing tracts and Bibles over the course of several months, agents testified to alcoholics instantly becoming abstinent, hardscrabble women gladly accepting invitations to pray, and an “avowed infidel” who took a tract and pleaded for the agent’s quick return. According to Allen, this was evidence proving that God’s power worked immediately; urban life imitated the evangelical tract.7 Despite the apparent success of these initiatives, members of all three societies believed their efforts were insufficient. The universal distribution of tracts and Bibles and the long-term viability of Sunday schools seemed logistically impossible because of negligent, disorganized, and debt-ridden local auxiliaries. Moreover, evidence of organized religious doubt in the very cities where evangelical societies exerted their greatest energy challenged pious descriptions of God’s power in the world. Times seemed bad for the country’s evangelical reformers. At the very height of renewed evangelical efforts in 1830, a writer in the Boston Evening Gazette warned that “half a dozen periodicals in this country are decidedly hostile to religion; tracts of the same character are printed for a mill a page, and widely circulated; societies of free thinkers are organized in considerable number, and embrace not a few substantial and respectable citizens.” In all the major eastern cities, infidel “organization was open and as well known as that of Christian churches,” Lyman Beecher warned, and “their plans were avowed in their books, and tracts, and newspapers, and inculcated in their temples of reason, discussed in their weekly meetings.” Both writers accurately reported the efforts of free enquirers, but they did not address their grievances in any detail.8 In periodicals, tracts, and societies, free enquirers issued a unified alarm against evangelical Protestantism as an expression of “political religion” whose practitioners engaged in “priestcraft.” Charges of priestcraft had been staples of Anglo-American political and intellectual discourse since the early

Political Religion

207

eighteenth century, but they gained new resonance in the United States during the 1820s and 1830s. The term “priestcraft” referred to a broader sense that religious ideas were consistently corrupted and manipulated by clerical institutions throughout history and across religious traditions. From this perspective, most religious systems were not divinely authored but social products with questionable origins. A writer in the Correspondent offered the sweeping conclusion that after much investigation, “the Christian religion, as well as all other religions now professed, except the religion of Nature, have originated in craft, and are supported by fraud.”9 The term “political religion” incorporated assumptions inherent in the term “priestcraft” while focusing them in ways that made them relevant to religious controversies in the late 1820s. Free enquirers described the United States as a nation plagued by “fits of political religion.” In 1827 a writer under the name “Republican” argued that state-sponsored fast days resulted “when our rulers wish to court the clergy” and, more important, “when the clergy wish to intermingle in state concerns.” Republican viewed fast days as no more than efforts by “clerical politicians” to insist “that I shall have a fit of political religion” on a day of their choosing. In the end, bending political rights to the arbitrary whims of clerical politicians was certainly the “road to an alliance between church and state—the establishment of a clerical order independent of the people.” When Dutch Presbyterian Thomas DeWitt extolled the potential benefits of a church and state union during an 1830 sermon, an anonymous correspondent to the Free Enquirer responded by identifying the mechanics of political religion, asking, “To what system of clerical dictation are we arriving, when men thus use the pulpit for political purposes?” In 1834 the Free Enquirer identified prominent members of political religion’s “priesthood,” including Ely and a Reverend Barton, who predicted that “when all our Presbyterian Colleges are under our controul, it will establish our sentiments and influence, so that we can manage the civil government as we please!”10 Sharing space in New York’s streets guaranteed a mutual awareness between free enquirers and evangelical Protestants, especially those most closely associated with revivalist Charles Grandison Finney. Finney’s form of evangelicalism was designed to awaken an urban populace with indoor meetings and a theology suitable to an aspiring middle class. The opposition of urban free enquirers to organized evangelicalism stemmed from countless distinct encounters between agents of institutions such as the American

208

Chapter 7

Tract Society and individuals who found their mission troublesome. Both sides ultimately advanced their positions using a burgeoning press and a network of voluntary associations, the sinews of civic culture in America’s early nineteenth-century towns and cities.11 Conflicts between free enquiry and evangelical Protestantism engendered by the peculiarities of urban life were especially conspicuous in New York City, the intellectual and institutional center of antebellum free enquiry. It was also home to important Bible, tract, and missionary societies, and to prominent figures such as the Tappan brothers and Charles Finney. To some extent the entire country eventually fell within the orbit of moral reform during the 1820s and 1830s, but New York remained its gravitational center. For those concerned with matters of religion and civic life, the city was a bellwether to gauge America’s future. Frances Wright described New York in 1830 as “[t]he chosen throne of church power and church influence,” the city that “flooded the whole country with superstition and drew into the coffers of her Bible and Tract House” the earnings of America’s farmers, laborers, and widows. A Massachusetts writer in the Northampton Courier also focused attention on New York City, but he arrived at a very different conclusion. “The progress of infidelity in the great commercial emporium of the United States” indicated the “alarming state of society, where infidelity openly stalks abroad.” Both writers agreed, however, that as went New York, so would go the United States. These charged comments about New York City portray it as a symbol of both the prospects and the peril of infidelity at a moment in American society undergoing urban growth and the ready circulation of information and people.12 Such a reputation was partly deserved as New York City was home to the Correspondent and the Free Enquirer, the two most important deistic weeklies published between 1827 and 1835. New York also had the Hall of Science, a prominent two-story building with Greek columns on Broome Street that formerly housed a church. Owen and Wright helped establish the hall in June 1829 as a venue for weekly Sunday gatherings that served as alternatives to church services. The Hall of Science brought evangelicalism and organized free enquiry literally face to face: it was located directly across the street from a Bible repository. Wright and Owen supposedly taunted visitors to the repository by hanging pictures of Paine and Godwin in the hall’s windows. Free enquirers used the hall for Sunday night lectures and debates on moral, religious, and scientific topics, and it also served as the Free Enquirer’s office. The Hall of Science hosted weekly debates until November

Figure 8. Hall of Science, from an illustrated title page of the Free Enquirer, October 31, 1829. This image seems intended to convey free enquiry’s orderly public presence in New York City. A polite encounter between a man and woman in the Hall’s front door reiterates free enquiry’s supposed respectability. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.)

210

Chapter 7

1831, when Owen and Wright realized that the hall’s maintenance expenses exceeded the costs of renting a meeting room in a better location in the city. Owen and Wright sold the building to a Methodist congregation.13 In addition to the Hall of Science, free enquirers in the late 1820s launched new organizations in New York. The Free Press Association, Jennings’s venue in 1827, provides a case in point. It was the first society dedicated to free enquiry in New York. According to one account, large crowds gathered before the association’s meetings, “and it is with difficulty that even the ladies can obtain a seat.” Estimates claimed that two to three hundred people attended Sunday lectures, including men of all ages and women, who, according to one critic, had “sufficiently divested themselves of the fear of God to join such a circle.” Rising attendance forced the association to change locations three times in the first eight months of its existence. Soon after the Free Press Association formed in 1827, New York also became home to the Society of Free Enquirers, the Society of Moral Philanthropists, and the Philosophical Library Association. The Society of Free Enquirers and the Society of Moral Philanthropists were primarily debating institutions, intended to encourage and promote criticism of political religion by giving free enquiry an associational presence in the public sphere. The Free Press Association and the Philosophical Library Association were formed primarily to counter Bible and tract societies by developing a print culture centered on free enquiry. These institutions illuminate the various ways in which free enquirers pursued an organizational structure that paralleled the forms of political religion they opposed while fueling perceptions that infidelity was gaining a public foothold in the nation.14 The Free Press Association organized regular lectures to complement its printing activities. The association’s lecturers often focused their remarks on revealed religion’s deleterious social effects. For example, George Houston lectured “on the pernicious tendency of what is called revealed religion.” After identifying inconsistencies in the Bible, and in Christian definitions of God, Houston concluded that revelation was not a reliable source of religious truth or moral principles. As proof for this conclusion, Houston cited a historical record of “persecutions, bloody wars, and massacres on account of religion,” actions supported and perpetrated by believers. Houston attributed Christianity’s history of violence to its zealous adherents, a demonstration “of the superiority of that religion alone worthy the consideration of rational beings—the Religion of Nature.” He reiterated this theme in a lecture “[o]n the influence of the invisible world over the visible,” as did the

Political Religion

211

attorney Henry A. Fay, who challenged the assertion that “religion is the bond of society.” Fay argued that religion did not create a beneficial social bond in any moral sense of the term. Religion created factions instead. It “disunites, divides our citizens into sects, whose hearts nourish toward each other rancor, hate, jealousy, and numerous ugly passions.” The lectures at the Free Press Association illustrate a history and sociology of religion that was typical of free enquiry, a view that free enquirers used to justify the importance of their efforts to limit the power of Protestant reform.15 The 1828 establishment of the New York Society of Free Enquirers, soon after the formation of the Free Press Association, prompted George Houston to conclude that “the prevailing disposition to investigate religious dogmas, and to get rid of priestly domination” was taking hold in New York. The society held its first meeting at Military Hall, and Henry Fay, a Free Press Association member, delivered the opening address. Fay extolled the virtues of free enquiry and the adequacy of reason unaided by revelation in determining moral truths. He concluded by reminding his audience of free enquirers that they themselves were part of a long tradition. “In every age, in every country, the obstacles in ambition’s frenzied career; the terror of aspiring demagogues, and the revolutionizers of empire, have been free enquirers. It seems as if, in the sicklied frame of corrupted society, there always lurks that latent constitutional vigor—free enquiry.”16 Fay’s address set rather lofty goals for the Society of Free Enquirers, but in reality it mostly hosted lectures investigating the philosophical and social implications of religious belief. At the March 8, 1829, meeting, for example, a lecture was scheduled on the “evidences of Christianity,” and debate that evening was reserved for the question, “Are the essential principles of morality founded on the nature of man, or are they derived from the Christian system of religion?” Later in 1829, the Society of Free Enquirers debated the question, “Is the sum of human happiness augmented or diminished by the belief of a revealed religion?” Apart from Fay’s address and the advertisements of debates, there is a dearth of information about who and how many people attended meetings of the Society of Free Enquirers. By 1831, however, the society was superseded by the Society of Moral Philanthropists, which became a much more prominent and controversial organization.17 Free enquirers launched new press initiatives in order to promote and extend the influence of their societies. During the summer of 1828, the Free Press Association established a Free Press Tract Fund to subsidize a print offensive against Bible, missionary, and tract societies. The fund’s organizers

212

Chapter 7

were inspired by free enquirers in Europe who pioneered the distribution of cheap prints to educate and enlighten the public. Christians in the United States were relative newcomers, Houston argued, having recently adopted this strategy in the hope of extending “the empire of superstition, and the influence of the priesthood.” Reports from the colporteurs who distributed evangelical tracts across the country vindicated Houston’s assessment. They described readers who invested the printed page with supernatural authority and agency. Houston and other free enquirers wanted to reassert the popular press as a vehicle for reason, free enquiry, and science. The fund subsidized the publication, sale, and distribution of cheap prints, in bulk, “to counteract the demoralizing effect which the circulation of religious tracts must have on the community.” By 1829 the fund had issued eight “liberal” tracts including Progress of Christianity, a chronicle of Christianity’s development emphasizing violence and political intrigue, a position wholly in line with deistic interpretations of Christian history.18 The Free Press Association disbanded following the demise of the Correspondent, but within a few years similar organizations filled the void. In 1832, the Philosophical Library Association was formed to publish older works and works with previously limited circulation that criticized revealed religion or exposed Christianity’s social and political history in negative terms. In 1833, the Philosophical Circulating Library and Reading Room offered its patrons access, for a fee, to American and European periodicals and journals that complemented the Philosophical Library Association. The circulating library proved to be fleeting, and the goals of the Philosophical Library Association were instead carried out in the New York Philosophical Library. Unlike the Philosophical Circulating Library and Reading Room, the new Philosophical Library did not occupy a physical space within New York City. Instead, it was a compilation of contemporary and historical writings on a range of religious and ethical topics available by subscription. Henry D. Robinson edited the Philosophical Library while also editing the Free Enquirer in the mid-1830s. Available writings included works by eighteenth-century Europeans such as English translations of French philosopher d’Holbach’s atheistic work The System of Nature and the philosophical writings of Thomas Cooper, the controversial president of South Carolina College. D’Holbach’s work also comprised the first installment in a proposed Free Enquirers’ Family Library, another of Robinson’s attempts to introduce a broad readership to cheap, attractive editions of works that strike “at the root of all the errors and evil consequences of religious superstition and intolerance.” By

Political Religion

213

1836, fifty titles were available through the Free Enquirers Family Library at twelve and a half cents per item. Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen contributed to New York’s fledgling deistic print culture in 1831 by publishing for purchase thirty-five works by American and European authors and importing fifteen works from London printers. Efforts to create and promote a print culture thus resulted in a fairly coherent curriculum of texts, both classic and contemporary, that provided opponents of political religion a history and an intellectual tradition to bolster their efforts.19 A free enquiring public, critical of Christian reform and its corollary political religion, developed in places far removed from New York. Indeed, the city’s free enquiry newspapers did not champion merely local attacks on Christianity but also provided the crucial link between the spread of free enquiry and the advent of organized opposition to political religion elsewhere. By the mid-1830s societies and publications dedicated to free enquiry were established in New England, Philadelphia, Delaware, and St. Louis. These associations were all concerned directly with the problem of political religion, and they typically formed after the Correspondent or the Free Enquirer began circulating in a particular city or region. These papers had a broad geographic reach, as evidenced in the list of agents, or local representatives for each periodical. When the Correspondent ceased publication in 1829, it had agents in ten of twenty-four states and was published simultaneously in New York and Philadelphia. At the height of the Free Enquirer’s circulation in 1831, it had agents in eighteen of twenty-four states, along with east Florida and Lower Canada, and it printed one thousand issues per week.20 As these papers circulated more widely, so did opposition to political religion. The residents of Paterson, New Jersey, received a steady flow of information about free enquiry courtesy of Robert Chiswell, the local agent for both papers. Unsurprisingly, some of the townspeople established the Paterson Free Reading Society in the autumn of 1827. Paterson’s free enquirers organized themselves in opposition to political religion’s influence in the United States, from their belief “that superstition has erected an empire here more extended and fatal than in those countries where religion is established, and protected by civil power.” They argued that this empire maintained itself by inundating American culture “with tracts, and other devotional productions, calculated to mystify and debase the mind” and by propagating “the errors of theology, that source of all the misery with which humanity is afflicted.”21 A similar pattern appeared in such disparate places as St. Louis;

214

Chapter 7

Woodstock, Vermont; and Wilmington, Delaware. Agents for both the Correspondent and the Free Enquirer resided in St. Louis in the 1820s, and in 1829 residents formed a Society of Free Enquirers “in opposition to bigotry and superstition.” Nahum Haskell acted as the Woodstock agent for the Correspondent and the Free Enquirer in order to meet the demand for “liberal publications” in rural Vermont. Haskell edited a short-lived monthly, Liberal Extracts, and he was a member of the Woodstock Free Reading Society. He also exposed local efforts to suspend Sunday mail delivery, and he warned his community that “the orthodox clergy are trying to exercise an undue influence over our national and state assemblies,” a “fact too well authenticated to need any further proof.” According to a local reader in Wilmington in 1828, twelve to fourteen professed deists were inspired by the Correspondent to propose regular meetings for the critical investigation of the Bible.22 Evangelicals attributed great influence to the printed word, so it is unsurprising that pious observers found the publication efforts of free enquirers more worrisome than their efforts to host regular discussions. Conclaves of debating infidels in Woodstock and Wilmington posed a limited threat in comparison to the tracts and newspapers put into circulation by Frances Wright and Henry Robinson. In 1834 Samuel Gridley Howe, an early advocate for educating the blind, described free enquiry’s insinuation into American culture through “the dissemination of infidel tracts and books.” The dispersal of free enquiry deep into American life was precisely what commentators such as Howe feared most about the push by free enquirers to establish a print culture to challenge evangelical Bible and tract societies. Howe’s concerns were concretely manifested in books such as a pocket edition of Elihu Palmer’s 1801 treatise on deism, Principles of Nature, available for purchase at the Free Enquirer’s office in 1831.23 The advent of pocket-size editions is highly indicative of the ways free enquirers applied developments in print technology to contest political religion and the evangelical print culture associated with it. In addition to pocket editions of Principles of Nature, George Henry Evans published a pocket-size volume titled The Manifest of Reason in New York in 1828. This volume consisted of one hundred “axioms” covering a range of precepts including denials of an afterlife and the divine origins of the universe. It also iterated a critique of political religion centered on the principle that the “proper state of a nation is when its constitution secures the liberties of individuals, and order in the community; and when no organized bodies and particular sects, adhering to fixed dogmas and formalities, are allowed

Political Religion

215

to possess such privileges and distinctions, and exercise such influence, as to prevent the expression of sentiments opposed to their own creeds, and thus arrest the progress of truth and science.” Pocket-size volumes potentially introduced critiques of religious revelation and political religion into a broader range of social contexts and daily interactions because they were easily portable and inexpensive.24 Free enquirers named their societies to reflect their critique of American print culture. Naming an association “Free Press,” or “Free Reading” as the Paterson and Woodstock associations were called, reinforced the view that Bible societies, Sunday schools, and evangelical periodicals were sectarian efforts to limit and control access to information. According to the Free Press Association’s constitution, it was formed to introduce “true philosophy” into a voluminous yet politically restrained print culture. Although the existing American press purported to uphold the ideal of intellectual improvement, the association observed, in reality it contributed little to the broad sweep of human knowledge and often failed even “to penetrate the veil of error and superstition” that shrouded American society. This was an indictment of the American press as burgeoning, yet institutionally derelict in its political and educational duties. Its supporters believed that the association pursued morally benevolent, philanthropic ends wholly congruent with the normative assumptions of voluntary society in the late 1820s. Article 2 of the association’s constitution stipulated that funds derived from monthly membership dues would be used to purchase books for a library “calculated to enlarge the mind, improve the morals, and promote the happiness of society.” Along with plans to create a library, the Free Press Association hoped to serve the public good by hosting frequent lectures designed to introduce audiences to critiques of revealed religion. The Free Press Association’s antidote to political religion was not lost on its supporters. A writer using the pseudonym “A Deist” celebrated the formation of the Free Press Association, for it would lift “the yoke of religious despots” by promoting deism instead of revealed religion.25 Although the American press became less centered on religious subjects after the Revolution, the 1820s and 1830s marked an upsurge in the forms and types of religious publications circulating throughout the country. In this context, free enquirers challenged political religion by engaging in their own efforts to print, proselytize, and ultimately create a public sympathetic to deistic critiques of Christianity. In order to challenge political religion on its own terms, purveyors of deistic print introduced works that offered

216

Chapter 7

competing conceptions of morality, theology, and religious truth to their readers. Ultimately the print output of free enquirers paled in comparison to the volume of literature distributed by evangelical publishing enterprises. Between 1825 and 1850 the American Tract Society issued 529 titles, and by 1835 it had printed over thirty-two million tracts. The distribution capability of the American Bible Society was equally vast. The efforts of tract and Bible societies suggested to free enquirers that the nation’s most institutionally and financially endowed Protestant churches had embarked upon an effort to shape public life through a reinvigorated Christian cultural campaign; free enquirers needed not to question whether readers of tracts and Bibles actually took away the messages intended for them. Conversely, the publication of only a handful of “liberal tracts” was enough to place the specter of infidelity at the forefront of the evangelical assessment of America’s religious and social climate; evangelicals needed not to question whether the few published infidel tracts actually reached an audience.26 Concerns about the mere existence of an infidel print culture rather than the reception of infidel ideas shaped the actions of free enquiry’s opponents. In April 1830, George Houston, Daniel Constable, and Edward Thompson— three of New York’s most active free enquirers—traveled up the Hudson River on a “missionary tour” of the valley’s bustling towns. At each stop these itinerant infidels planned to lecture and sell books. Titles for purchase included nearly every work, both old and new, necessary for a proper free enquirer’s library such as works by d’Holbach and Voltaire, Paine’s theological writings, Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature, and an expose of the Bible Society. Lecture topics included the benefits of free enquiry, critical assessments of the Mosaic account of creation, and the dangers posed by unions of church and state. Houston and his companions began their tour in Newburgh, whose inhabitants in 1830 were far more accommodating of Christianity’s opponents than they had been when Palmer visited them in 1797. Local supporters posted announcements and secured a prominent venue for their lectures in advance of the trio’s arrival. Local notables attended their lecture and implored them to stay in Newburgh an additional day so that Houston and Thompson could deliver a second set of lectures and sell more of their books. In all, Newburgh proved a ripe missionary field for the visiting free enquirers. Hopes were high for a similar reception at Hudson, their next destination farther north.27 As in Newburgh, supporters in Hudson arranged lecture space and placed announcements throughout the city advertising Houston’s lecture

Political Religion

217

on “The existence and Immortality of the Soul.” Unlike in Newburgh, the arrival of infidel missionaries divided the people of Hudson. Houston delivered his lecture as planned, and he, along with his fellow free enquirers, eventually left Hudson unscathed but notwithstanding efforts by their opponents to punish them. Those opposed to Houston and his companions attempted to silence them in two very different ways: by force and by law. In both instances opposition focused on the circumstances surrounding Houston’s lecture rather its content. Moses Derby, a burly Methodist tinker, forcefully blocked Houston from entering the school reserved for his lecture. Meanwhile, the town’s other Methodists debated entering the school en masse to forcibly occupy the building in order to prevent Houston from speaking. Derby’s fellow Methodists voted against storming the school. According to a pamphleteer in Hudson, “The days have long since passed away, when the fires of Smithfield scorched its agonizing victims,—and when our pilgrim fathers burnt quakers and old women.” Nevertheless, “while a vestige of Religion exists,” the “principle of persecution” remained. In Hudson, this principle took the form of “legal intolerance,” or actions by the townspeople to find acceptable ways of denying the visiting free enquirers their rights to speak and assemble. Although this writer clearly sympathized with Houston’s aims, he offered a telling assessment of the religious controversy in Hudson.28 It so happened that the free enquirers arrived in Hudson when a grand jury was convened in the town. Local worthies General Van Rensselaer and Elisha Williams, both attorneys, used this opportunity to convince presiding judge Aaron Vanderpoel that Houston, Thompson, and Constable were in contempt of court if they proceeded to lecture and sell books. Van Rensselaer and Williams argued that Houston and his companions violated public morals, profaned Christianity, and caricatured God by selling an apparently unflattering portrait of Jesus drawn from scriptural sources. These charges certainly expressed the accusers’ fears that their own religious beliefs were under attack, but challenges to free enquiry on theological or scriptural grounds alone seemed insufficient. So, Van Rensselaer and Williams took the occasion of a sitting grand jury to find legal cause that might give their religious opinions coercive force within their community. This tactic would have been impossible had Houston and his companions visited Hudson when the grand jury was absent. Still others in Hudson challenged the visiting free enquirers in equally telling ways. At the controversy’s height, two handbills circulated in Hudson’s streets: one announced an additional

218

Chapter 7

lecture by Thompson and another defended the visiting free enquirers on the grounds of constitutional religious freedoms. Outraged citizens tore down the handbills appealing to rights of conscience but left posted the announcements for Thompson’s lecture. According to one observer, this proved that a “renewed assertion of civil and religious rights, was more galling to a proud and priest-ridden aristocracy, than the mere mooting of the theological question, whether a human body can, or will be resuscitated after life.” Whereas Van Rensselaer and Williams at least attempted to uphold a theological position, Hudson’s other protesters did not bother. Instead, they recognized that the rules of religious controversy in antebellum America required efforts to control the context in which ideas were expressed, or in this case deny legal protections for disbelief, rather than dispute the content of these expressions.29 The arrival of infidel missionaries in Hudson, but also efforts such as Haskell’s in Vermont and those of St. Louis’s Free Enquirers, added further credibility to reports that organized free enquiry had growing popular appeal. An 1834 article in the Christian Watchman, an evangelical periodical published in Boston, reported, “The number of those in our country who deny the divine authority of Christianity, is supposed to be the majority of our male adults.” Proof for this assessment was evident in a variety of ways including the publication of infidel prints and papers and the establishment of infidel societies in cities and towns from New England to the Midwest. According to this 1834 article, New York City alone had three separate infidel societies with an estimated twenty thousand members and attendees. This estimation probably exaggerated the numbers who joined these societies and attended their events. Ultimately, however, the size of the audience was less significant than an infidel society’s potential influence. Not only were the Christian Watchman’s editors troubled by the formation of these societies, but the low cost of attending society lectures and their openness to women and children expanded the potential reach of infidelity beyond those men in the republic already influenced by doubts about Christianity. Editors of a journal such as the Christian Watchman had cause for identifying a larger infidel presence than actually existed in the United States because doing so justified its evangelical mission. However, the existence of organized free enquiry also exacerbated a deepening fracture in early national Protestantism.30 Organized free enquiry troubled evangelical organizers and editors because it emerged during a reaction against revivalism that swept American

Political Religion

219

Protestantism beginning in the late 1820s. This reaction originated with believers of various religious backgrounds who were concerned that the theological and organizational underpinnings of revivalism harmed individual spirituality. Revivalism’s Christian critics feared that its emphasis on emotional confirmations of salvation within a religious culture characterized by sectarianism and competition generated religious apathy and outright skepticism instead of converts. This, of course, was the perspective of individuals primarily concerned with ensuring the vitality of their faith, so they may have had reason to drum the dangers of religious skepticism. However, the increased formation of small societies scattered throughout the United States whose members publicly announced their commitments to deism and free enquiry certainly added weight to the claims of revivalism’s critics. Although free enquirers dismissed Christianity’s central tenets, their critiques of political religion announced themes similar to arguments of the pious who were dissatisfied with organized revivalism. Primitive Baptists, labeled “hard shell” Baptists by their opponents because of their continued adherence to Calvinism, opposed all forms of organized reform as the dangerous intermingling of church and state. These Baptists ultimately feared that organized Christian reform removed matters of religious life from the control of local churches and ordinary believers into the hands of distant, economically powerful institutions.31 Moreover, for Primitive Baptists and other like-minded Protestants, tract, Bible, and especially missionary societies smacked of the dangerous overextension of evangelical power. In opposing evangelical mission societies, Calvinist “hard shells” joined free enquirers in support of Theophilus Gates, who preached an anticlerical message that cast all church institutions as equally apostate. Theological training, creeds, and an organized clergy all distorted Christianity’s true essence: the movement of God’s spirit through individuals. By Gates’s estimation, evangelical mission efforts exemplified Christian teachings at their most corrupt because they presumed divine power for man-made institutions. Gates monitored and lambasted organized missions in his monthly journal, the Reformer, which reprinted antimission arguments from Methodists, Quakers, and Baptists as well as Universalists and free enquirers. Quaker merchant Lyman Spalding also attacked Christian missions in his paper Plain Truth, which he edited in Canandaigua, New York, in the early 1820s. Publishing on behalf of all “liberal minded Christians” regardless of denominational preferences, Spalding challenged evangelical missionaries for “rearing up and educating swarms

220

Chapter 7

of idle young men, who have an interest distinct from the great body of the people.” Rather than a cadre of ordinary polemicists trained and mobilized to defeat infidelity, as missionary organizers touted, Spalding sensed the workings of “a fanatical, intolerant spirit, equally at war with the christian religion and civil liberty” that enabled “artful, ambitious men, to acquire vast sums of money, together with a moral force unknown to our constitution.” In all, missionaries threatened American liberty. Nevertheless, public opinion favored his position, Spalding announced. He maintained that most Americans opposed Christian missionaries and were no longer persuaded by evangelical attempts “to prejudice public opinion” by branding their critics “with the name of Atheist, Deist, Arian, Socinian, &c. &c.”32 Their shared opposition to priestcraft provided an overlapping issue for free enquirers and antievangelical Protestants. Charges of priestcraft gained greatest currency during the Sabbatarian controversy, and not only among free enquirers. The term spilled from the sermons of popular religious leaders such as Lorenzo Dow, Barton Stone, and Joseph Smith. It literally defined the publishing efforts of Spalding and Universalist minister Theophilus Fisk. Spalding edited Priestcraft Exposed and Primitive Christianity Defended in 1828, and in 1830 Fisk established a short-lived weekly titled Priestcraft Unmasked, published in New York City. In a letter to physician-ethnologist James Lakey in 1828, Spalding explained why he started his new paper: “We are in the midst of a most tremendous revival—priestcraft flourishing— some ‘charitable’ societies are organizing, as a matter of cause and they talk their own line, without being exposed.” Fisk started his paper to challenge all forms of political religion. This position won 1,400 subscribers during the year that Priestcraft Unmasked circulated. As suggested by its title, Fisk’s paper apprised readers of priestcraft’s machinations, or “religious management to exercise, usurp, or gain power.”33 Thus by the 1830s developments within American Christianity created disaffected believers who might align themselves with free enquirers. The opponents of organized Christian reform, much like its proponents, could potentially overlook deep differences of opinion for the sake of larger shared interests. Such cooperation of course had its limits. Lorenzo Dow commented on the relationship between predestination and deism, concluding “one to be the foundation of the other,” thus condemning Primitive Baptists and free enquirers together. Nevertheless, opposition between deistic free enquiry and evangelical Protestantism was not automatic. Free enquiry was one among many vehicles to oppose specific styles of evangelicalism that

Political Religion

221

seemed to be gaining power by the late 1820s. Moreover, conflicts between free enquiry and organized evangelicalism adhered to the larger political imperative that shaped antebellum religious controversies. Rather than mounting challenges to privately held beliefs, protagonists shifted their attention to the means by which these beliefs were translated into public actions with political power.34 Free enquirers targeted ecumenical cooperation among Protestant reformers. Revivalists and tract authors emphasized ecumenical cooperation as a testament to the power of the gospel because it allowed believers to channel minor theological and ecclesiastical differences toward the larger of goal of Christianizing America. Robert L. Jennings offered an altogether different interpretation of ecumenical unity in an 1830 lecture before Boston’s First Society of Free Enquirers. Christian reformers were forced to regroup along ecumenical lines, Jennings argued, only because denominationally based groups had failed to gain legislative support for ending Sunday business. Jennings warned that political defeat taught Christians an important lesson about the efficacy of bolstering their power in the public sphere by diminishing theological differences. For Frances Wright, evangelical reformers may have gained political traction through ecumenical endeavors, but Christianity remained a deeply deficient source of true social change. She developed an alternative conception of reform premised on limiting Christianity’s social reach in a series of public lectures during the late 1820s and early 1830s. Her definition of reform critiqued religion’s social consequences rather than its theological merits. She encouraged “the public to examine, whether its utility was equal to cost; whether its quarrels added to the comfort of society.” Wright concluded that effective reform entailed the recognition “that theology was very expensive, its disputes very injurious, and its teachers very intermeddling.” In challenging political religion, free enquirers attacked organized evangelicalism’s key sources of strength by offering alternative understandings of moral reform.35 Robert Dale Owen laid bare the political implications of Protestant reform from the free enquirer’s perspective. In the summer of 1831 Owen acquired the “Annual Report of the New York Magdalene Society” and found proof in its pages that evangelical reform did not improve the spiritual and material conditions of ordinary people as its boosters claimed. The New York Magdalene Society was formed to curtail and eventually end prostitution in New York City. Arthur Tappan, the New York merchant who funded many of the city’s evangelical organizations, presided over the society while

222

Chapter 7

a group of active evangelical women carried out its daily operations. The annual report documented and quantified prostitution’s prevalence in the city. The Magdalene Society’s own estimates proved that prostitution thrived in New York, Owen argued, concluding, “It resounds, surely, neither to the credit of New York, nor of the Christian Religion, that such a mass of vice and misery should be found within the walls of the American metropolis.” Owen acknowledged that the moral shortcomings of New York’s inhabitants were partly responsible, but he leveled his strongest charges against the financially equipped and institutionally capable agents of evangelical reform. “What a satire on modern Christianity does it contain,” exclaimed Owen. That prostitution flourished in a city dominated by Christian institutions was proof of Christianity’s “inefficiency” as either a moral system or the basis for social reform and philanthropy. For Owen, this deficiency raised fundamental questions about the ability of religious organizations to promote ends beneficial to society, ends far beyond controlling social problems such as prostitution. Could religious organizations fulfill a range of social needs not met by municipal authorities? Even broader, could categories of citizenship and political organization premised on Christianity support a republican political order or inform participation in electoral politics?36 By asking these questions, Owen contributed to a central religious division in American life during the 1830s. This divide was not internal to Protestantism, whether conflicts of reason versus revelation or popular versus elite authority. Instead, believers and nonbelievers fractured in some instances but found common cause in others over differing views about the political power that religion, defined quite broadly, did and should have through its connection to the institutions of antebellum civil society. Controversies over political irreligion and political religion reflected opposing sides of this division within early national culture. When viewed as part of this larger divide, free enquirers’ critiques of Christian reform gain an altogether new political valence. Free enquirers opposed moral reform because it was organized and promoted in ways that linked Christian faith to the political resources of citizenship. In turn, free enquirers responded by deploying the very same political tools in pursuit of their own conceptions of morality and religious truth. Free enquirers ultimately pursued measures that they themselves had denigrated as “political religion” when carried out by their opponents. The public actions of organized free enquirers exemplified “political irreligion” as contemporaries understood the term. Organized free enquiry consisted of public critiques of Christianity that reflected a broader

Political Religion

223

political and social mobilization of private disbelief. Political irreligion of this nature was of fairly recent origins, its critics believed. It began with Thomas Jefferson’s refusal to participate in a national day of thanksgiving, and it extended through similar actions by Andrew Jackson as well as Senator Richard M. Johnson’s report defending Sunday postal service. Organized free enquiry was thus political irreligion’s dangerous extreme, but also its logical conclusion.37 Solomon Southwick was a fixture of New York State politics in the early nineteenth century, first in support of Thomas Jefferson and later as part of New York’s Anti-Masonic Party. His familiarity with politics informed his gloomy prediction in 1834 “that the battle between Christianity and Infidelity would have to be fought entirely over again.” Writing as “Sherlock,” Southwick declared that “there has been for some time past an organized party of Infidels in this state, if not throughout the Union,” a direct reference to the Correspondent and the Free Enquirer. Southwick’s prediction contained a nod to the past, and in particular to the religious and political discord that convulsed the United States during the 1790s. He believed, however, that America’s old demons were wrapped in the new garb of party. Southwick charged that infidelity in the 1830s was not a musty remnant from the eighteenth century but rather a force aligned with the forms of political association that increasingly ordered American public life.38 Although free enquirers did not form a party in any way familiar to nineteenth-century politics, Southwick’s essay was a response to the likes of Houston, Owen, and Wright, who cultivated a public for free enquiry through institutions in civil society. Supporters of organized Christian reform shared with advocates of free enquiry an understanding that religious opinions gained political power through the press, voluntary associations, and the mobilization of constituencies. As such, contemporaries understood political religion and political irreligion as inseparable from their understanding of the relationship among citizenship, civil society, and the state. Citizenship in the early nineteenth century as a formal, constitutional category linking individuals to the federal state was not the only or even the most important source of inclusion in public life. Indeed citizenship reached beyond iterated rights and obligations formalized in a written constitution, be it state or federal. Instead, the forms of citizenship that mattered most in people’s lives were “nonconstitutional.” Nonconstitutional citizenship describes how political power, status, and protection of the law were

224

Chapter 7

either granted or denied through one’s level of participation in, and access to, a range of social relations—often local, usually public and voluntary, but rarely in any modern sense constitutional. Equally important, but less often noted, is that the sources of nonconstitutional citizenship—particularly associations—were often formed out of normative commitments. Such commitments upheld a religious belief or philanthropic cause that identified the privileges of citizenship gained through membership in that particular association with a set of moral and theological principles. Understandings of citizenship in the antebellum United States adapted old concerns about the necessity of a moral republican citizenry to a new political context of civil society largely shaped by voluntary associations.39 Voluntary associations in the early republic had the authority and legal backing of state and local governments. Economic, political, benevolent, literary, and arts societies of all sorts were created according to legislation and protected by laws of association. Judges, politicians, and legal theorists viewed such associations as part of, and in the service of, the state. According to theories of self-government in the early republic, voluntary associations served a public function by assisting the state in promoting the common good. As such, some states granted associations the power to draft constitutions and create governing structures. Even unincorporated associations served the same role in self-government and were granted the same self-regulatory powers under common law.40 The important public role of early national voluntary societies and the legal power associations had over their members highlight the politico-legal implications of organized free enquiry and institutional evangelical reform. The American Tract Society and the American Sunday School Union, for example, were state-chartered national associations. Free enquirers also sought state recognition. In 1832 Thomas J. Vinten, on behalf of his fellow free enquirers in Boston, petitioned the Massachusetts House of Representatives for an act of incorporation for the city’s First Society of Free Enquirers. Although the house committee on petitions saw no reason to vote on this request, common law rules bestowed indirect state sanction on Societies of Free Enquirers in Boston and elsewhere. In all cases, evangelists and free enquirers in the 1830s used the state to engage in religious controversy, which raised concerns that dangerous religious opinions might influence governance and benefit from state power. The alarm caused by political religion and political irreligion is fully understandable only by recognizing the

Political Religion

225

extent to which early national Americans understood the close political and legal connections between voluntary associations and the state.41 As legal creations, voluntary associations were also expressions of state power. Indeed they were the most common, tangible manifestations of the state that Americans encountered in their daily lives. When put within the context of antebellum understandings of citizenship, civil society, and the state, the political implications of priestcraft and organized infidelity become markedly evident. Political religion and political irreligion were viewed as efforts to endow competing religious opinions with state power according to the principles of a democratic public sphere. From this perspective, fears that evangelical reform would result in connections between church and state were literal. Conversely, opponents of organized free enquiry saw in it new potential for state-established disbelief, a union of infidelity and state. Abstract concerns that the laws of civil society essentially created a state establishment of belief became concrete in the constitutions drafted by evangelical and free enquiry associations. In important ways, free enquiry associations were organized according to constitutions very similar to those of the era’s largest evangelical institutions. Constitutions of the American Tract Society, the American Bible Society, and the American Sunday School Union, along with local auxiliaries, included governing structures that elaborately regulated boards of trustees, dues collection, financial administration, membership, and the organization’s mission. The same was true for associations dedicated to free enquiry. For example, Boston’s First Society of Free Enquirers, formed in 1830, governed itself according to a constitution that regulated the election of officers, meeting locations, the discipline of wayward members, and society plans for investing and donating revenue from initiation fees, quarterly dues, and “Sunday collections.” The society was created, according to its constitution’s preamble, from the belief “that the long established custom of teaching creeds, miracles and religious doctrines to children, is an erroneous mode of education, and unfriendly to the progress of Free Enquiry; and being of opinion, that this custom would be less revered, and finally abolished, education benefited, and our civil and religious rights preserved by the formation of a Society for the promotion of Free Enquiry.” Boston’s free enquirers believed that critical investigations of religious truth provided the basis of effective citizenship, and it was the role of associations such as their own to create free enquiring citizens, beginning with children. The constitution that governed Boston’s First Society of

226

Chapter 7

Free Enquirers contained unequivocal statements about the nature of religious knowledge, but importantly this constitution established a framework that determined how and where its members could express their critique of Christianity. The society exemplified the coercive power over individuals available to associations within civil society, but also the public power such associations had to influence the larger culture. Society members would have found this combination uncontroversial. For the pious, it likely seemed that laws of association suddenly protected and even encouraged the spread of infidelity across generations, adding new dimensions to a long-standing concern. Theologically neutral laws of civil society thus provided increased public authority to religious and irreligious ideas alike. Under certain circumstances, this gave protagonists the opportunity to challenge their religious opponents without debating theological specifics.42 Free enquirers and evangelical reformers thus readily embraced institutional aspects of citizenship, but they sharply disagreed about what constituted citizenship’s moral and religious texture. In other words, they held different beliefs about who was a moral, religious citizen. Free enquirers believed that full citizenship required what they variously termed “mental freedom,” “mental liberty,” or “mental emancipation.” Free enquirers argued that one could possess the full rights and meet the full obligations of citizenship only if one was mentally emancipated, which resulted solely through free enquiry. This connection between free enquiry and effective citizenship prompted Rochester mechanic Amory Amsden to toast “Free Inquiry—The chief cornerstone of republicanism” at an 1835 Thomas Paine Birthday celebration. Conceptions of Christian citizenship articulated by evangelical reformers, on the other hand, emphasized political participation informed by Christian principles and involvement in benevolent societies and voluntary associations. Versions of Christian citizenship were evident in Ely’s 1827 July Fourth oration and in the sermons of Lyman Beecher, who during the 1820s argued that Christian citizenship allowed the faithful to “exercise their own civil rights, under the guidance of their own consciences, enlightened by the word of God.” According to both conceptions of citizenship, citizens actually exercised their power in ways that were particularly suited to the urban populations in nearest proximity to organized free enquiry and institutional Protestant moral reform. Amory Amsden could celebrate Paine and free enquiry as a fulfillment of citizenship through critiques of Christianity just as moral reform societies offered citizenship by way of participation in any number of evangelical organizations. That the political power of citizenship

Political Religion

227

was so easily linked to religious and moral opinions thus focused the contest between political religion and political irreligion squarely on matters of citizenship and civil society during the early 1830s.43 In 1833 inhabitants of Pleasant Valley, New York, held a public meeting to condemn the encroachments of Christian citizenship. The formation of temperance societies prompted the meeting, but participants soon turned to the political implications of Christian moral reform. They believed temperance societies were formed primarily “to establish chains of communication from one to another and ramifications, concentrations, auxiliaries and focuses of power, in the self same manner that the bible, tract, and missionary societies obtain an influence of dangerous tendency,” a “lust of power which has ever characterized sectarianism.” Curbing alcohol consumption was merely pretense for maintaining the public authority of those denominations most involved with reform activities. The inhabitants of Pleasant Valley declared that even if intemperance was abolished, such societies would persist “for the purpose of controuling opinion, influencing the public mind, and exercising the power which an organized system secures, to destroy the honest free thinker, the liberal” who do not subscribe to “impossible dogmas.” The formation of temperance societies was therefore rife with political consequences. When “religious sects” sought to maintain their social influence, they acted not within “Christian party politics” but with “a new and insidious weapon,” the temperance society. The town of Pleasant Valley resolved that temperance societies were tools of sectarian oppression and that it was “incumbent upon every man who values civil and religious liberty to oppose them.”44 Free enquirers issued more general warnings against efforts by religious organizations to deploy institutional sources of citizenship. The orator at an 1830 celebration of Thomas Paine’s birthday in New Hartford, New York, extolled Paine for championing “mental liberty” against “that master-tyrant of the human mind, revealed religion.” Nevertheless, even in the United States, according to the anonymous orator, efforts were afoot to depart from the nation’s foundation in a revolution imbued with Paine’s ideas that religion should be circumscribed within the public sphere. There was an “immense number of associations under the denomination of societies, with which this country is literally deluged—formed for the purpose of supporting revealed religion.” Directly opposing the institutional sources of Christian reform, from Sunday schools to missionary and tract societies, New Hartford’s orator warned that the nation’s clergy could manipulate voluntary networks of citizenship and indirect political power to “control the government of our

228

Chapter 7

country as they please” in the very near future. This development would ultimately prove false America’s distinction as a nation defined by “civil and political freedom.” An article in the Rhode Island Republican, a Newport paper sympathetic to free enquiry, carried a warning in 1834 that “the Presbyterian ‘Christian Party in Politics’ ” planed to influence voters in the state by deploying three hundred political agents “disguised in the character of Temperance agents, Tract peddlers &c. &c.” “Freemen Beware,” this article warned.45 Concerns over the deleterious effects of politically empowered Protestantism were premised on the belief that religious revelation and republican politics were incompatible. A self-proclaimed Deist wrote an article titled “Religion Subversive of Virtue” for the Free Enquirer. “The greatest crimes in every age of the world . . . have been produced by the system of superstition, called Religion,” the author argued. “No Bigot,” the pseudonym for an author of a brief report titled “Progress of Fanaticism,” elaborated on this sentiment in 1829. This article’s central theme was the fairly standard assertion that American “political institutions are founded upon reason.” Determinations of good governance, morality, and political rights were based on observation and experience. Otherwise, political participation would result in bad governance, immorality, and enervated rights. No Bigot warned that organized moral reform threatened to invert accepted political theory concerning reason’s efficacy. He concluded that the progress of “fanaticism” in the form of Christian moral reform would replace reason with superstition as the mainspring of American politics. No Bigot thus warned, “The various missionary and all other societies, throughout all their ramifications, have a direct and vile tendency to excite the superstition of the people. Whoever read history, will find the virtue of the people diminishes in proportion as the superstition increases; consequently, every man who attempts to promote it, is the practical enemy of our republican institutions.”46 Similar fears that evangelical institutions threatened American civic life persisted throughout the 1830s. A writer with the appropriate pen name “Tocsin” warned in the pages of the Free Enquirer that “those great monied institutions of the Atlantic cities, the Bible Society, Tract Society, &c. &c.” were intended for no “other purpose than to aid in the great work of establishing an hiearchy on the ruins of our present government!” Tocsin depicted a future in which religious organizations appropriated sources of political power and citizenship to strengthen their authority in civil society under the pretense of social benevolence. Poughkeepsie editor Jesse Torrey’s Herald of Reason and Common Sense, a paper dedicated to abolishing

Political Religion

229

“mental slavery” and the “unconstitutional union of church and state,” published a memorial that confirmed Tocsin’s fears. At issue was a revised New York statute that further exempted clerical property as well as religious societies, companies, and corporations from partial or full taxation. The memorialists deemed this a government act that enhanced the already growing power of organized evangelicalism. Between 1819 and 1832, the memorialists claimed, the number of clergy had steadily increased, thus enlarging the number of citizens who benefited from tax exemptions. Moreover, the memorialists estimated that clergy in New York state owned property worth over $25 million, which the government could not tax. By diminishing the tax burden, the government thus subsidized “the most powerful and numerous sects,” which were “steadily aiming to make and direct public opinion— to gain political power—to infuse into our political institutions the spirit of proselytism.” Although the memorialists expressed real concerns about Christianity’s political power in New York, they challenged it without contesting theological points or notions of religious truth. Although belief was not debatable on political grounds, the results of belief were. Torrey and the memorialists thus channeled opposition to Christianity into political debates over a patently secular and banal issue: government fiscal policy. This approach made controversies over religious knowledge tangible and usable in a political culture dominated by concerns over monopolies and unfair government privilege.47 For opponents of political irreligion, developments in the early 1830s raised altogether new concerns about the dangers to civil society posed by organized free enquiry. In 1831 the members of the Society of Free Enquirers adopted the name Moral Philanthropists and began holding debates and lectures at Tammany Hall. They certainly increased the profile of their organization by assembling at a prominent civic place in New York, but the views of the society’s president, Benjamin Offen, and the topics of their “monthly revivals” contributed to this as well. Offen was an English shoemaker who immigrated to the United States in the 1820s and brought along his radical political and religious leanings. According to his reputation, Offen possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of Christian scripture that he used to criticize biblical truths. The appropriation of the word “revival” to describe their monthly meetings was clearly an attempt by the Moral Philanthropists to gain new adherents and reinvigorate current members. Free enquirers purposely used the term “revival” “in imitation of revivals of religion, but contradistinguished from them in being revivals of common sense and

Figure 9. Benjamin Offen, Lecturer of the Society of Moral Philanthropists (1836), by Henry R. Robinson. Lithograph. Robinson depicted Offen holding a fictitious book titled Free Discussion Will Renovate The World next to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The Holy Bible lay upon the table. Robinson arranged the books in a way that appealed to the Moral Philanthropists’ understanding of themselves as committed to free enquiry above all else. This arrangement also reflected Offen’s reputation as an orator whose own commitment to free enquiry resulted from a deep knowledge of Christian scriptures. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.)

Political Religion

231

rational enjoyment,” not indications of God’s power in the world. According to reported estimates, two thousand people usually attended the revivals in order to discuss and debate the existence of God, the veracity of the Bible, and Christianity’s influence on society. Both free enquirers and free enquiry’s opponents attended these revivals. Origen Bacheler, an evangelical who plied his missionary efforts among New York’s infidels, frequently participated in Tammany Hall “revivals,” always on the side of Christianity.48 The Moral Philanthropists’ monthly “revivals” raised vexing questions about the moral underpinnings of civil society and participants developed their own methods for answering them. They would ascertain what constitutes religious truth, using free enquiry, and then ensure that false religious ideas were separated from the sources of political power and civil authority. For the Moral Philanthropists and their supporters, the society was clearly formed to challenge political religion. Christianity, broadly defined, was considered a subject of “vital importance to the human race—if true, they wish to believe in the Bible—if false, as they most steadfastly believe, they do not wish to use moderation.” To this end, George Houston argued in an 1833 address titled “The Pernicious Influence of Christianity” that “all the improvements in arts, sciences, and the condition of the people professing Christianity within the last four centuries, have advanced in a ratio with the diminution of the influence of that religion and of Priestcraft.” Houston’s address reaffirmed the society’s stated goal to help the “priest-ridden” people of America recognize that evangelical religion was a source of “clerical domination,” not spiritual or personal freedom, and that Christian leaders had “figured on the tapis of political preferment” for too long. Such critiques of political religion were popular judging by the fact that the society paid its $500 yearly rent to Tammany Hall along with incidental expenses from revenue raised by admittance fees alone.49 To some observers, societies such as the Moral Philanthropists were a problematic presence in public life, not the solution to its ills. Baltimore lawyer Ebenezer L. Finley expressed this perspective after attending one of the Moral Philanthropists’ monthly meetings in 1835. While in the audience, Finley became deeply concerned by the night’s events, and he was dismayed that Tammany Hall, the “great arena of public discussion,” the name of which was “associated with Democracy, and with liberty and freedom of speech,” provided the venue for public, organized critiques of Christianity. Nothing was more “subversive of the free institutions under which we live.” More troubling, the Moral Philanthropists denied Christianity before an

232

Chapter 7

Figure 10. Tammany Hall, 1830 (1830), artist unknown. Black and white print. This image captures Tammany Hall’s physical prominence in New York City during the 1830s. This was the venue for monthly lectures and debates sponsored by New York’s Society of Moral Philanthropists as well as yearly Thomas Paine birthday commemorations. New York’s deists gained a significant public profile by congregating in such a building while their ability to fill the space struck some observers as one more indication of infidelity’s advance in American society. (Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

audience consisting of many women and children, whom Finley believed were particularly susceptible to “designing men.” Finley sought permission from the society to offer a rebuttal, but the organization’s trustees refused, and a member of the audience forcefully attempted to remove him during an ensuing melee.50 Finley returned to Baltimore, but the concerns sparked by his visit to Tammany Hall simmered inside him. He eventually drafted an appeal titled “To the Corporate Authorities and the Citizens of New-York,” which

Political Religion

233

appeared first in the Baltimore Patriot and then in New York newspapers. Finley’s appeal was an effort to persuade the city’s officials to use legal authority as “the constituted guardians of the people’s morals—the watchmen over their civil and political liberties” to prevent the Moral Philanthropists from holding public meetings. Finley’s appeal drew on a well-established understanding of local governance in the early nineteenth century, one that gave municipal authorities the right and the obligation to ensure the “people’s welfare” by policing morality. For Finley, the Moral Philanthropists’ meetings were ultimately treasonous because critiques of Christianity, especially Christian understandings of God, undermined community welfare. After all, Finley argued, the idea of God’s existence “is incorporated with all our institutions, whether religious, political, or social. It is the substratum upon which the constitution of our free Government rests. The responsibilities which it imposes, and the duties it inculcates, in all the relations of life, are the grand cement which keeps society together.” Finley opposed the Moral Philanthropists on theological grounds, but he relied on laws of local governance to give his religious beliefs political traction. Equally important, these laws were effective not because they affirmed absolute conceptions of religious truth or a sectarian position but because they addressed the social implications of religious opinions expressed at sites within civil society. Finley thus defended his personal religious beliefs and his expectations about the role of religion in public life through legal mechanisms invested with coercive power rather than theological authority.51 Appeals to public morality and the common good, along with reliance on the state to enforce religious opinions, were positions equally amendable to the interests of New York’s Moral Philanthropists. President Offen led the society’s trustees to issue their own account of Finley’s visit. They justified preventing Finley’s address to the society because allowing it would have violated the rules regarding debate outlined in their constitution. Sunday afternoons were allocated for open discussion on theological matters, but Sunday evenings were reserved for a single lecture delivered by an orator preapproved by the trustees, a responsibility that members elected them to carry out on behalf of the society. New York’s Moral Philanthropists were committed to free discussion but Finley’s “lawless and violent” attempt to address the society contrary to its regulations disregarded the order of the meeting. In line with theories about the role of associations in civil society, Finley, from Offen’s perspective, broke the law. As such, the society’s officers actually attempted to have Finley and his companion detained by city

234

Chapter 7

authorities for violating state laws regarding the right of assembly. This attempt failed because a police official questioned the legality of the society’s actions, but Offen’s response and that of his fellow trustees demonstrates the free enquirers’ equal willingness to use available powers legally granted to associations in an effort to enforce their understanding of the common good. Whereas Finley argued for the need to regulate the contexts in which controversial religious opinions were discussed and circulated, Offen and the trustees fastidiously adhered to constitutional rules in order to prevent a dissenting voice from being heard. Both sides, however, translated and pursued competing theological understandings by resorting to the laws and cultural assumptions that governed antebellum civic life.52 The actions and arguments of both sides in the controversy suggest their agreement that voluntary societies served important roles in the early republic and their recognition that associations exercised real legal power over their members. These larger conditions allowed the Moral Philanthropists and Finley to justify actions that were intolerant of differing religious opinions without violating norms of religious liberty. Common law rules bestowed indirect and tacit state sanction on Free Reading, Free Enquiry, and Moral Philanthropist societies, which raised concerns for observers such as Finley that dangerous religious beliefs were authorized by the state and empowered by instruments of self-governance to influence public opinion. Finley thus encouraged authorities in New York to deploy state power, also for the sake of the common good, in order to prevent the Moral Philanthropists from convening. On the other hand, the Moral Philanthropists’ trustees also relied heavily on the protections granted by civil and common law statutes regarding voluntary associations, especially the authority of society constitutions. Even though the society’s members premised their meetings on open, critical debates of all religious topics they prevented Finley’s participation through recourse to the society’s by-laws regarding discussion. The history of early national blasphemy prosecutions further illuminates civil society’s constitutive role in shaping early national practices of religious tolerance. There were only two significant blasphemy prosecutions between 1800 and 1830: an 1811 New York case, People v. Ruggles, and an 1824 Pennsylvania case, Updegraph v. Commonwealth. Although a lawyer, Finley cited neither in his opposition to New York’s Moral Philanthropists, even though the cases were well known at the time. The Pennsylvania case stemmed from comments spoken during a debate society meeting, thus it was especially relevant to Finley’s argument. Judges in Updegraph v. Commonwealth

Political Religion

235

concluded that language was blasphemous only when deemed licentious, that is, disturbing to the “peace and safety of this state.” Ultimately, then, blasphemy was harmful for its political and social implications, not as an affront to God. It was an issue that dealt with questions about where and how people disbelieved rather than the nature of disbelief itself. Contrary to the view that early national Americans simply did not care about blasphemy, as indicated by the relatively few prosecutions, the fact that Finley ignored the existing legal precedents regarding blasphemy suggests otherwise. Americans in the 1830s cared deeply about the cultural presence of disbelief, but they recognized that it was best challenged by relying on the coercive potential inherent in the laws and assumptions of civil society, thus through largely informal political means, instead of blasphemy prosecutions that were most effective when backed by state churches.53 Observers of the print exchange between Finley and the Moral Philanthropists reiterated this preference for the informal coercive power available within civil society instead of the courtroom. The Journal of Commerce, a New York paper financed by prominent evangelical merchant Arthur Tappan, announced its disdain for the opinions expressed by the Moral Philanthropists. The same article, however, also criticized Finley’s excess in arguing that direct police action should be used to prevent the society from meeting. It was a widely recognized political right of all Americans to freely assemble and openly discuss all opinions, the editor argued. “Infidels therefore have the same civil right to assemble and call the Bible humbug, as others have to proclaim” its truth. Indeed, the power of societies to choose officers to enforce their own rules was a prerogative granted to associations that Christians should be especially committed to protecting. Without it, the editor argued, there would be no recourse if infidels intruded upon a Presbyterian or any other Christian assembly. In an especially telling comment about the actual sources of religious power in the 1830s, he argued that voluntary associations not civil authorities best defended Christianity. The good morals of New York would be ensured through “day schools and Sunday schools, and Bibles and tracts, and instruction of all kind.” As an ideal expressed in relationship to antebellum civil society, appeals to freedom of opinion thus also underwrote highly effective forms of religious coercion and intolerance in a society that celebrated religious liberty.54 The Finley incident stemmed from basic issues that drove the advent of organized free enquiry and, in response, institutional evangelical reform,

236

Chapter 7

especially in America’s cities. Antebellum urban spaces were particularly conducive for efforts by infidels and partisans of political religion to print, organize, and ultimately mobilize constituencies that would translate their ideas and beliefs into public action. Evangelical reformers surpassed free enquirers on all of these fronts, but such success did little to alter an asymmetry of perception that endowed political religion and political irreligion with nearly limitless reach in the imagination of their opponents. Ultimately, these misperceptions influenced more than the interrelated history of free enquiry and evangelical reform to inform central themes of American political culture from the 1830s onward. The partisans of 1800 who redefined religion as a concept to serve political ends devised an approach to religious controversy that partisans in the 1830s eventually incorporated into their political organizations. As a result, American believers of various opinions completed the transfer of significant religious authority to the public sphere in order to ensure that their religious claims remained persuasive in a constantly changing political culture. Controversies between free enquirers and their evangelical opponents over questions about citizenship, civil society, and the limits of public religious expression provided a bridge between these two periods of partisan religious conflict. Indeed, fears about organized infidelity and priestcraft had currency in American culture before becoming integrated into formal partisan alignments. The opposition between free enquiry and evangelical reform, in part, provided the foundation for a partisan discourse that cast Democrats as the stalking horse of infidelity and put the Whigs at the vanguard of efforts to rehabilitate state religion. At a broader level, conflicts between free enquiry and moral reform highlight how new forms of religiosity shaping American culture during the 1820s and 1830s demanded further efforts to reconcile the vexing relationship between personal beliefs and political obligations.

Epilogue

The Origins of American Cultural Politics

Hubbard Winslow was pastor at Boston’s Bowdoin Street Church and a committed Whig in politics. Massachusetts ended its state religious establishment in 1833. Judging by Winslow’s 1835 treatise, Christianity Applied to our Civil and Social Relations, disestablishment was entirely for the better. Winslow had clearly absorbed the lessons of the religious controversies over infidelity of the previous decades. He ranked infidelity first when listing the “forms of our national disease.” “Let infidel principles gain the ascendant and atheism stalk at large over the land,” Winslow warned, “and all of our free institutions, now in the bloom and freshness of youth, would soon wither and expire.” He had no reason to believe that infidelity would not prevail. In religious matters, Winslow championed voluntary action in civil society rather than coercive enforcement through the state. Winslow embraced critical inquiry as completely as any celebrant of Thomas Paine’s birthday, and he revered popular opinion as the ultimate arbiter in public life. From Winslow’s perspective, Americans might choose infidelity over Christianity and then act on their decision politically. Winslow declared rhetorically, “Let public opinion advance in degeneracy, till it shall decree into its public enactments the maxims of infidelity and atheism . . . and what would be your legislators, your judges, your witnesses, your executive officers? The mere panders and patrons of crime. What would be your subjects? The mere perpetrators of crime.” Conversely, Christians could use the sources of infidelity’s possible advance to launch a counteroffensive. Thus Winslow called for a “union of Church and State which is produced by renewing the minds of men, and sending thence up a moral influence through our civil and political institutions, uniting them all to Christ, and rendering all men affectionately allegiant to Him, as king supreme.”1

238

Epilogue

Winslow was one more nineteenth-century prophet of infidelity’s imminent arrival, yet he foretold a future that never materialized in quite the dramatic fashion that he and others like him envisioned. Still, being wrong about such matters was always politically powerful. The prevalence of actual infidels shifted the center of acceptable belief between the 1770s and the 1830s by creating more room for open religious doubt. In response, pious observers maintained Christianity’s cultural purchase by accommodating religious knowledge to changing standards of political authority, especially popular opinion and persuasion within civil society. Seemingly pedestrian improvements in print technology, reduced transportation costs for printed materials, and increased social opportunities to associate all rendered changes in religious knowledge possible. In debates over infidelity, Americans thus pursued competing religious beliefs in the public sphere by wedding religious opinion to political power in altogether new ways. As a result, by the 1830s Americans had thoroughly constructed American civil society and politics on religious terms. These developments served infidels as well as their opponents. Winslow called for a new union of church and state, however several new unions between religious opinion and the state formed in the United States from the 1830s onward. Consider Tobias Hogeboom of upstate New York, who cared for corn more than Christ. In addition to his lifelong participation in agricultural societies—the Columbia County Agricultural Society bestowed an award on his corn in 1848—he was also a committed supporter of Thomas Jefferson and later Andrew Jackson. In 1844 he was a presidential elector. Hogeboom was also one of the Boston Investigator’s earliest subscribers. When he died in 1849, an obituary described him as someone who viewed his critique of Christianity and his political commitments as one and the same: “The cause of Liberal principles, in Religion as well as in Politics loses in his death one of its most faithful and persevering champions.” Through the lives of Winslow and Hogeboom, it becomes clear how religious controversies over infidelity shaped the development and tenor of the Second Party System.2 Christians who subscribed to postmillennialism and ecumenical evangelical cooperation found an ideal vehicle for their reform efforts in the Whig Party, which adhered to an understanding of governance in which politics were used to regulate behavior and promote morality. Confidence in the abilities of everyday religious polemicists to bring about moral change in society and politics partly shaped the Whig Party’s vision for itself in American life. Institutions in civil society proved especially amendable to

Epilogue

239

evangelical and Whig ends. In key ways, the Whigs became the party most concerned with regulating the context and consequences of religious opinions. They incorporated assumptions about context into their political and cultural worldview through their emphasis on missionary activities and institution building, which were designed to create conditions in the family and the community to form moral individuals. Context was necessary in shaping and controlling moral behavior, from the Whig perspective; beliefs could not be changed by intellectual engagement alone. Moreover, the Whig Party marked the culmination of Christian citizenship in which evangelical laymen combined religious commitments with associational life, reform initiatives, and elected office. Prominent Whig politicians in the 1840s also blended evangelical commitments and partisanship. Theodore Frelinghuysen was a U.S. senator and vice presidential candidate who joined several evangelical causes and served in numerous reform societies. Known as the “Christian Statesman,” Frelinghuysen lived the ideal Christian life as depicted in evangelical tracts and newspapers. Christians should mobilize themselves against infidelity and its social sources, this literature instructed, and Frelinghuysen chose electoral politics as his venue. The same held true for George N. Briggs, a congressman from Massachusetts who actively promoted overseas evangelical missions. These were the very organizations that supplied information about Christian conversions among Tahitians and Hindus in India. Reformers in the United States used these details to envision God’s work on a global scale and in debates with infidels over religious knowledge.3 Free enquiry was an intellectual cornerstone of the Democratic Party’s social and political philosophy. The Democrats’ emphasis on egalitarianism and their suspicion of monopolies and overextended government authority corresponded to their deep fears that state and church authority could be reunited in the United States. The party attracted people—Christians and non-Christians alike—who for reasons of belief and experience shared these fears. Kentucky Democrat Richard M. Johnson’s 1829 Senate report rejecting the legality of Sabbatarian calls to end Sunday mail delivery expressed widely shared views about religion and public life within Democratic ranks. Government power could not define divine law, according to the report: “It is a right reserved to each citizen” that “cannot be held amendable to any human tribunal for his conclusions.” Johnson was a Baptist, and his report was popular with religious groups that typically supported the Democratic Party. Although their Whig opponents occasionally cast the Democrats as

240

Epilogue

the party of infidelity, free enquiry was thus a position regarding religious knowledge shared by various Christians and infidels alike.4 Controversies between infidels and their opponents ultimately had political implications for a broad spectrum of believers. Americans embraced the politics of religious controversy in order to grapple with the era’s central religious divide: the relationship between belief and state power. Partisan conflicts during the early 1800s demonstrated that Americans could safely engage in religious controversy without inciting religious violence. As a result, however, religious beliefs maintained political power only as competing opinions, open to debate in the public sphere. Theology no longer provided political traction. The Whigs and Democrats thus brought changed notions of religious knowledge into the mainstream of American politics. In the decades preceding the Civil War, Americans often referenced infidelity when debating the country’s other social ills. Even if participants were unaware of the history of religious controversies surrounding infidelity, the fact that infidels maintained their place in antebellum political discourse demonstrates that Americans absorbed this history. From monumental issues such as slavery and women’s rights to seemingly less urgent matters such as temperance, Americans concerned about these issues were forced to pursue absolute moral claims in a political culture that valued persuasion and public opinion. As religious knowledge became a political commodity in controversies over infidelity, Americans developed strategies for giving political traction to moral concerns of all sorts. In nearly all instances Americans kept competing moral claims relevant and resonant by focusing their energy on shaping the context in which beliefs circulated. Changes to private belief were desirable but assumed to be possible only after changing the social conditions that supported a given belief. Violence resulted when this broader politics of moral controversy failed, that is, when competing moral claims seemed unaccountable to opinion and persuasion. The 1839 murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia in 1844, and John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry can all be viewed as moments when moral claims trumped the political culture’s ability to diffuse competing beliefs. In addition, the politics of religious controversy informed how American Protestants dealt with Roman Catholicism. Anti-Catholicism ran deep in Anglo-American culture. Beginning in the 1830s, immigrants from Ireland and Germany increased the Catholic population in the United States. Catholic immigration stoked political concerns for many native-born

Epilogue

241

Protestants. Lyman Beecher, an adept practitioner of religious controversy in the early republic, labeled Catholicism “a religion which never prospered but in alliance with despotic governments, has always been and still is the inflexible enemy of Liberty of conscience and free inquiry, and at this moment is the main stay of the battle against republican institutions.” Such political sentiments sparked the Nativist movement and eventually the Know Nothing Party, which at its most powerful in 1854 mobilized approximately 1.5 million voters, especially in its New England stronghold. Evangelical polemicists responded to the Catholic influx by further eliding theological differences between fellow Protestants. George Peck, the future historian of Methodism who focused on his denomination’s earlier triumphs over infidelity, mobilized Protestants against Catholicism in 1846 with an ecumenical call to “Perish the Calvinistic and Arminian controversy.” At the same time, Protestants in the United States organized themselves into the American Protestant Union to further challenge popery. Thus earlier controversies over infidelity provided pious Americans with lessons, practice, and methods for challenging Catholicism. In battles against infidelity, the faithful honed their skills in nontheological religious controversy by elevating issues of context and turning to civil society as their field of action.5 The politics of religious controversy in the decades following the Revolution had deep implications for American society. In their efforts to transform politics into the means for addressing private disbelief, believers in the early republic mobilized politically by combing sharply divergent sectarian convictions into the category of Protestantism, and eventually into “religion” or “Christianity.” Modern alignments between Protestants and Catholics, for example, and modern appeals to a “Judeo-Christian tradition” would have been unfathomable, indeed undesirable, in much of the early modern Anglo-Protestant world. The ability of Americans to combine different beliefs, even entirely different religious systems, for political ends speaks to the constitutive power of religious uncertainty. Cultural politics in the United States are contentious, but also highly effective, in part because they rely on appeals to supposedly timeless, absolute religious truths. Deeply held religious beliefs are nonetheless modified by the political practices necessary to ensure religion’s continued purchase in public life. The political and cultural history of infidelity demonstrates how “religious truths” were invented and redefined through religious controversies in the public sphere. The story of religious controversy in the early republic thus describes the origins of cultural politics in the United States.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction 1. “To the Citizens of Pennsylvania” (Pittsburgh, 1808), 3. 2. My definition of religious knowledge is informed by scholarship on popular religion in North America that deploys a capacious definition of religious experience, as well as recent research on religion in the European Enlightenment. Historians have increasingly defined the Enlightenment as not merely a set of philosophical or religious precepts, but also new alignments of institutions, spaces, and communication networks that shaped intellectual life during the Enlightenment. See Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1061–80. Below I discuss scholarship on popular religion in early America. 3. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 285; and New Hampshire Gazette, December 16, 1834. 4. Ithaca (NY) Journal and General Advertiser, February 10, 1830. 5. On the distinction between infidelity and heresy in early modern Europe generally, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2–3 and 294–330; and in the Iberio-Atlantic world, see Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 18. On laws against heresy and their enforcement in colonial British North America, see Susan Juster, “Heretics, Blasphemers, and Sabbath Breakers: The Prosecution of Religious Crime in Early America,” in Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, eds., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 123–42. For a brief but useful introduction to deist theology in England, and deism’s opponents in England and British North America, see E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 160–61 and 166–68. 6. On the fusion of infidelity and heresy in England, see Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), esp. 26 and 320.

244

Notes to Pages 5–9

7. Even adherents of Christian positions such as Unitarianism and Universalism could face charges of infidelity from proponents of more traditional doctrines. For controversies surrounding Unitarianism and Universalism in the early republic, see, respectively, J. D. Bowers, Joseph Priestly and English Unitarianism in America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007) and Colin Wells, The Devil and Doctor Dwight: Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 8. Temple of Reason, January 31, 1801. 9. John Foster, Infidelity Exposed, and Christianity Recommended (Cambridge, MA, 1802), 12. On English deist controversies, see Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); on Pope’s Day and anti-Catholicism as a feature of culture and politics in British North America, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 56–63 and 112–19; and on conversos in the Iberio-Atlantic world, see Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, 43–69. 10. Although many of the people who appear in this book used the terms “infidel” and “infidelity,” when I use them as the author I generally do so to capture or explain the antideist viewpoint of an individual writer or a larger group. 11. Boston Investigator, December 29, 1852. On the appearance of the Hall of Science, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 511. 12. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 101–2. 13. My formulation of “lived deism” is informed by expansive theoretical and empirical approaches to early modern religious practice and belief, in particular the methodological overview and studies in David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Christopher Grasso first suggested the possibilities for exploring the history of a broadly considered “lived irreligion” in the early republic in “Skepticism and American Faith: Infidels, Converts, and Religious Doubt in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 3 (2002): 495n46. My emphasis on lived deism counters arguments for deism’s precipitous decline after about 1800. This interpretation appeared in the early twentieth century—in G. Adolf Koch, Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (New York: Henry Holt, 1933) and Herbert M. Morais, Deism in Eighteenth Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934)—and persists in more recent influential intellectual histories such as Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 326– 27; and Turner, Without God, Without Creed, 101–2. An important recent exception is Holifield, Theology in America. 14. My description of the relationship between “ambient infidelity” and “lived deism” as they operated in a political and cultural context reflects the workings of England’s state policy toward heretics as described by Alexandra Walsham. According

Notes to Pages 10–12

245

to her, “The making of a ‘heretic’ or ‘heretical’ community is thus a twin-stranded process: it requires individuals or groups who criticise or oppose the status quo and officials willing and able to take active steps to isolate, restrain, repress and punish them.” Charitable Hatred, 26. 15. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). For a concise summary of important interpretive changes in the historiography on American religion, see Charles L. Cohen, “The Post-Puritan Paradigm of Early American Religious History,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 4 (1997): 695–722. For a book representative of Cohen’s post-Puritan paradigm, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Evangelical Protestantism also figures prominently in major synthetic studies of the early republic, specifically Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005); and Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Interpretations of evangelical Protestantism often center on the importance of commonsense moral rationalism, declining social deference, and antiauthoritarianism in American religious life following the Revolution. Focusing on evangelical Protestantism broadly, or any single denomination, reveals much about the religious experience of individual believers or groups. Historians have uncovered the religious lives of women, free and enslaved African Americans, Native Americans, urban mechanics, and hardscrabble farmers. Even more, scholars have demonstrated that evangelical Protestantism contributed in part to the democratization of American society, and that it was democratized itself as evangelical movements empowered ordinary believers to define their own religious experiences. The “democratization” of American Christianity, as Nathan Hatch defines this process, contributed to the early republic’s astounding denominational and sectarian diversity within an evangelical religious culture that developed in the United States. 16. My definition of “tolerance” as behavior comes from Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 8, and as a cultural sentiment from Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, 6. See also Walsham, Charitable Hatred. On “tolerance” and “toleration” in the American context, see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and the essays in Beneke and Grenda, First Prejudice. On this topic and the law, see Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Steven K. Green, The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 17. On the “moral establishment,” see Sehat, Myth of American Religious Freedom, 5 and 36. On the “informal establishment,” see Green, Second Disestablishment, 84. 18. Kline’s Carlisle Weekly Gazette, September 30, 1808.

246

Notes to Pages 13–15

19. Holifield, Theology in America, 159–72; Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 31–33; and Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Arminianism, Harrison notes, “unwittingly transformed the divinely imparted saving knowledge into just another species of information”; 23–26. On competing conceptions of the term “religion” during Virginia’s disestablishment debates in the 1780s, see Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 262–66. 20. On Kinnersely and the culture of electric experimentation and demonstration, see James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), esp. chap. 3. On Rannie and the religious questions raised by ventriloquism, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 4. 21. Gordon Wood argues that this “democratization of truth” in the early national United States sparked “an epistemological crisis as severe as any in its history”; see The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 361–63. The crisis Wood describes vexed religious thinkers in the early republic. According to Robert H. Abzug, disestablishment created a culture with competing religious truths, which reformers grappled with through efforts to construct new sacred connections in the world. See Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). This crisis also unsettled colonial advances in religious freedom. During the eighteenth century American Christians increasingly emphasized what Chris Beneke labels Protestant “fundamentals above particulars” as they learned to accept religious difference and a level of religious uncertainty. Disestablishment thus jeopardized ideals of religious freedom that assumed an underlying Protestantism as the only form of legitimate religious belief. See Beneke, Beyond Toleration, 225. 22. Free Enquirer, August 5, 1829, emphasis original; and Western Examiner, January 1, 1834. 23. Hubbard Winslow, Christianity Applied to Our Civil and Social Relations (Boston, 1835), 130. Expanding Jürgen Habermas’s theoretical formulation of the rise of the public sphere, John Brooke links persuasion in civil society as a mode of politics in the early republic with the separation of metaphysical authority from the state. See John L. Brooke, “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 207–50. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, explores the role of opinion and persuasion in the development of popular evangelical movements. 24. David Zaret, “Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 221; and, more broadly, Zaret, Origins of

Notes to Pages 16–19

247

Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). James Van Horn Melton, “Pietism, Politics, and the Public Sphere in Germany,” in James E. Bradley and Dale K. Van Kley, eds., Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 326. 25. Holifield, Theology in America, 5 and 159–72. John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 6. On civil society as a state creation, see William J. Novak, “The American Law of Association: The Legal-Political Construction of Civil Society,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (2001): 163–88. 26. Select works on anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism: Daniel A. Cohen, “Passing the Torch: Boston Firemen, ‘Tea Party’ Patriots, and the Burning of the Charlestown Convent,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (2004): 527–86; on the larger political history of Nativism: Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); on Smith’s murder: Richard Lyman Smith, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 546–53; and on larger Mormon controversies: Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Chapter 1 1. John Swanwick, Considerations on the Act of the Legislature of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1786), iii; and see also Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 168; “Debates in the Convention of the State of North Carolina, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,” in Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1836–59), 192; and Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Honor and Glory (New Haven, 1783), 70. Stephen Botein provides a succinct overview of the central religious themes common in various state constitutions. See “Religious Dimensions of the Early American State,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 318–19. 2. On eighteenth-century efforts to balance religion and the common good in the Anglo-American context, see Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On the persistence of ideas about the common or public good in the early republic, see William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). For two accounts of the legal and religious history of ideas about freedom of opinion, see Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Vintage, 1997), 310–12; and Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the

248

Notes to Pages 19–26

American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 263–68. On the intellectual and historical significance of understanding religion as a matter of opinion rather than faith, see Roger D. Lund, ed., The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. J. G. A. Pocock, “Within the Margins: The Definition of Orthodoxy,” 33–53. 3. On the shift from religious toleration to religious liberty in eighteenth-century America, see Beneke, Beyond Toleration, esp. chaps. 4 and 5. 4. On the Revolution as a turning point toward greater religious liberty, especially regarding state and national constitutions, see Chris Beneke, “The ‘Catholic Spirit Prevailing in Our Country’: America’s Moderate Religious Revolution,” in Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, eds., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 268–72; and John K. Wilson, “Religion under the State Constitutions, 1776–1800,” Journal of Church and State 32 (1990): 753–73. On Virginia disestablishment, see Thomas J. Buckley, S.J., Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1786–1787 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977). On the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, see Akil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 32–45. 5. My definition of “tolerance” comes from Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 8; and Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 6. 6. Constitution of Pennsylvania (1776), sec. 10. 7. On Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution, see Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005), 22–25. 8. For an account of the public meeting, see Pennsylvania Packet, October 22, 1776, and Pennsylvania Gazette, November 13, 1776. 9. “A Real Friend of the Christian Religion,” Pennsylvania Packet, October 22, 1776. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. “Christophilus Scotus,” Pennsylvania Packet, October 29, 1776, and “A Friend of Christ,” Evening Post, September 26, 1776. Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774. 13. “Christophilus Scotus,” Pennsylvania Packet, October 29, 1776; “A Friend of Christ,” Evening Post, September 26, 1776; and Pennsylvania Packet, October 29, 1776. 14. On debates over article VI, sec. 3 during the Constitutional Convention, and the article’s broad tolerance when compared to contemporary provisions, see Morton Borden, “Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and Religious Freedom,” Journal of Church and State 21 (1979): 471–73. “Luther Martin’s Letter on the Federal Convention of 1787,” in Elliot, Debates, 1:385–86. 15. Elliot, Debates, 5:192 and 196–98. Abbot, Iredell, and Johnston all eventually

Notes to Pages 26–31

249

voted for the Constitution, even though North Carolina required a second ratifying convention to offer approval in 1789. 16. Elliot, Debates, 2:119 and 90. 17. Ibid., 118–19. 18. On the distinction between “fundamentals” and “circumstantials” in American religious thought, see Beneke, Beyond Toleration, 80–81. On a similar distinction maintained by European theologians between “fundamenta” and “adiaphora,” see Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 132–33. 19. Benjamin Rush quoted in Borden, “Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and Religious Freedom,” 471. 20. I borrow the term “menagerie” from Don Herzog, who uses it to describe racial, gender, and class categories in late eighteenth-century British political discourse that informed debates over social hierarchy and cultural mores. See Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 244–323. A similar combination of categorization, polemic, and political debate defined questions about the religious implications of American government during the 1790s. 21. “Aristocrotis” [William Petrikin], The Government of Nature Delineated or An Exact Picture of the New Federal Constitution (1788), in Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 7:207. On Petrikin, see Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 107–9. “Federal Farmer,” quoted in and identified by Cornell, Other Founders, 94. 22. On the “Jew Bill” and its implications for English debates about the limits of toleration, debates that relied on polemic strategies that anticipated debates in Pennsylvania in 1776, see Justin Champion, “Toleration and Citizenship in Enlightenment England: John Toland and the Naturalization of the Jews, 1714–1753,” in Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter, eds., Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133–52; “Prohibited sects,” quoted in ibid., 136; Pennsylvania Evening Post, October 10, 1776. 23. On expanding religious liberties and growing tolerance for Jews and Catholics in the early national United States, see Beneke, Beyond Toleration, 180–91. 24. Article IX, sec. 4 of the 1790 constitution stipulated that “no person, who acknowledges the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments, shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust or profit under this commonwealth.” Gone was any reference to scripture, inspired or otherwise. 25. On popular “constitutionalism” in the early republic, see Saul Cornell, “Beyond the Myth of Consensus: The Struggle to Define the Right to Bear Arms in the Early Republic,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 251–73. On the

250

Notes to Pages 31–33

law’s place and its continuous reinterpretation in popular discourse and culture in the early republic, see Steven Wilf, Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 26. National Gazette, March 15, 1792; and John Fitch, The Autobiography of John Fitch, ed. Frank D. Prager (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976), 139. Although studies of Palmer are few, see Kerry S. Walters, The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 240–44; Nathalie Caron, “Introduction to the Life and Work of a Militant American Deist: Elihu Palmer (1764–1806),” Annales du Monde Anglophone 1 (1999): 35–45. Secondary works on Fitch include Richard Deluca, “Against the Tide: The Unfortunate Life of Steamboat Inventor John Fitch,” Connecticut History 44 (2005): 1–31; and Ric N. Caric, “To the Convivial Grave and Back: John Fitch as a Case Study in Cultural Failure, 1785–1792,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 126 (2002): 537–89. 27. My understanding of how and where deism was expressed in intellectual and spatial terms draws upon scholarship on the practices of religious toleration in early modern Europe, especially Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 1031–64. Although Kaplan’s study focuses on European states with legal religious establishments, methods that early modern Europeans developed for addressing religious difference anticipated American approaches during the 1790s, only the focus was on categories of opinion rather than dissenting religious beliefs. 28. On Philadelphia and the “Revolutionary Enlightenment,” see Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 202–24. Some more recent studies that outline intellectual and cultural life in Philadelphia during the 1790s are Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and Nina Reid-Maroney, Philadelphia’s Enlightenment, 1740–1800: Kingdom of Christ, Empire of Reason (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001). The works by May and Reid-Maroney engage the broader meaning of the Enlightenment as a historical moment in America by focusing heavily on its religious implications. Scholars of the European Enlightenment have recently returned to its religious manifestations, a shift in focus that has resulted in definitions of the Enlightenment that include philosophical or religious precepts, but also new alignments of institutions, spaces, and communication networks in which its intellectual history unfolded. See Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1061–80. My attempt to embed the Universal Society and the Palmer controversy in the society and politics of Philadelphia is informed by Sheehan’s insights and those of May and Reid-Maroney. John Fellows, Posthumous Pieces by Elihu Palmer (London, 1824), 5–6. 29. Palmer and Fitch updated concepts of religious tolerance developed by an

Notes to Pages 33–37

251

earlier generation of English deists, in particular John Toland. On such deistic notions, see Champion, “Toleration and Citizenship in Enlightenment England,” 151. 30. Deluca, “Against the Tide,” 1–31; and Fitch, Autobiography, 120–21. David S. Shields has outlined the workings of literary debate clubs in the early republic as places formed for nonadversarial conversation. Although Shields is primarily interested in clubs formed by writers and readers, the priority these clubs placed upon comity and the avoidance of political problems were reflected in Fitch’s understanding of the Universal Society. See Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 321–22. 31. Fitch, Autobiography, 121–22. 32. Ibid., 121–22. On the occupations of the first members, see James Hardie, Philadelphia Directory and Register (Philadelphia, 1793); Ronald Schultz, “God and Workingmen: Popular Religion and the Formation of Philadelphia’s Working Class, 1790–1830,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Religion in a Revolutionary Age (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 137 and 148–55. 33. Fitch, Autobiography, 121–22. Fitch offered a second, less lofty, reason for proposing the society: “Pride” and his determination “to let the world know as contemptable as I was and despised by all ranks of People from the first Officers of Government down to the Blacburry garls” that he could still change the world. 34. On Masonic lodges as crucial institutions for instilling values of religious tolerance in certain segments of colonial American culture, see Beneke, Beyond Toleration, 87–90; Fitch, Autobiography, 123 and 130–32. 35. This paragraph is informed by Kaplan, “Fictions of Privacy,” 1036. 36. Much of what is known about Palmer’s life during the 1790s comes from John Fellows, Posthumous Pieces. For the “Adam and his wife” quote, see ibid., 4–5. It is often difficult to parse Palmer’s actual beliefs in the 1790s from Fellows’s interpretation and narrative, which may well have been a vehicle for Fellows to pronounce his own disdain for revealed religion and suspicion of Christian institutions. Moreover, Fellows’s account often reads as an apostolic testimony intended to evoke sympathy and reverence for an almost martyred prophet. No doubt this was Fellows’s impression of Palmer and why radical London bookseller Richard Carlile requested from Fellows information about Palmer’s life, for in 1824 Carlile was battling British authorities over his publication of deistic and free thought writings; see Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 70–72. These caveats aside, Fellows’s narrative is still the most comprehensive source for information about Palmer’s life. 37. On Palmer’s academy work, see a letter from Isaac Briggs to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society written on Palmer’s behalf on September 10, 1790, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Charles C. Jones Jr., Memorial History of Augusta, Georgia (Syracuse, NY, 1890), 320; and Fellows, Posthumous Pieces, 7. 38. Elihu Palmer to Jedidiah Morse, September 25, 1791, Gratz Manuscripts,

252

Notes to Pages 37–41

Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Socinianism differs from deism. Both denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, but Socinians considered themselves Christians and still accepted a range of Christian doctrines that deists denied. Although Palmer described himself as a Socinian to Morse, his views at the time were much closer to deism. 39. Elihu Palmer to Jedidiah Morse, September 25, 1791; and Fellows, Posthumous Pieces, 5–6. On early Universalists in Philadelphia, including information about class dimensions and theology, see Ann Lee Bressler, The Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22–23 and 33; and Schultz, “God and Workingmen,” 137 and 148–55. 40. American Daily Advertiser, March 3, 1792; and Fitch, Autobiography, 138–39. 41. Fellows, Posthumous Pieces, 6. 42. Fitch, Autobiography, 139; and Fellows, Posthumous Pieces, 5. 43. Gazette of the United States, March 14, 1792. On Fenno, Freneau, and the political implications of their newspapers, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 51–56 and 66–73. 44. On Petrikin and his role as the voice for the state’s “plebian Anti-Federalists,” see Cornell, Other Founders, 107–9. 45. Fellows, Posthumous Pieces, 6. Fellows mistakenly listed the Aurora as the paper where Palmer advertised his lecture. Despite the anonymity of the mob, the 1792 controversy illustrates how ideas were transmitted and received outside formal circles of intellectual elites and how this process drew upon broader political philosophies first articulated in debates over religious tests. 46. Paul Gilje identified riots of “communal regulation” and those to police religious belief in The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 85 and 207. 47. Fitch, Autobiography, 139. The Long Room in question may have been part of the Bunch of Grapes Tavern, located at Third Street between Market and Arch Streets. Church Alley ran east to west from Second to Third, between Market and Arch Streets. For a reference to the tavern, see Federal Gazette, October 6, 1790. On Church Alley, see Robert I. Alotta, Street Names of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1975), 41–41; and on Church Alley’s location, see Edmund Hogan, The Prospect of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1796), 62. For a description of Christ Church in 1792 and White’s theology, see Deborah Mathias Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia: The Nation’s Church in a Changing City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 49–51 and 173–74. 48. On the development of political alignments in the early 1790s among Philadelphia’s artisans in reaction to Federalist economic policies, see Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 42–46. On the intersections between artisan culture and Universalism in Philadelphia circa 1792,

Notes to Pages 41–47

253

see Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 130–33. 49. Robert Annan, Brief Animadversions on the Doctrine of Universal Salvation (Philadelphia, 1787), 38 and 36. 50. Ibid., 30 and 48. 51. General Advertiser, March 17, 1792; Federal Gazette, March 22, 1792. 52. State Gazette of South-Carolina, May 3, 1792. Chapter 2 1. On prophecy and millennialism in England and the United States, see Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), and on the varieties of millennial thinking, especially in the United States during the 1790s, see Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 2. Abigail Adams to Abigail Adams Smith, March 10, 1794, in Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, 3rd ed., vol. 2, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1841), 282. 3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, vol. 2 of Select Works of Edmund Burke (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 115; Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, “Plan for a Declaration of the Natural, Civil and Political Rights of Man” (1792), in Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory, ed. and trans. Iain McLean and Fiona Hewitt (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1994), 283; Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791), in Paine: Collected Writings, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 439; on Jefferson, see Hebert Sloan, “The Earth Belongs in Usufruct to the Living,” in Peter Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 281–315, and Daniel Scott Smith, “Population and Political Ethics: Thomas Jefferson’s Demography of Generations,” William and Mary Quarterly, 56, no. 3 (1999): 591–612. On larger generational discourses, especially in North America, see Glenn Wallach, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 7. Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) emphasizes the importance of ideas about generational change in the early national United States, esp. 1–55. 4. There is a voluminous literature by political scientists, political philosophers, and historians on the subject of consent. On the relationship between Locke’s writings about informed consent and his writings about epistemology and pedagogy, and how the two influenced Anglo-America law and politics in the Revolutionary era, see Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 91–97 and 111.

254

Notes to Pages 48–53

5. Ibid., 96–97; Locke quoted in ibid., 91. 6. Jeremy Belknap, Dissertations on the Character, Death & Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the Evidence of his Gospel; with Remarks on Some Sentiments Advanced in a Book intitled “The Age of Reason” (Boston, 1795), 8. On other aspects of the cultural and intellectual responses to deism in the 1780s and 1790s, see Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 348–63; Grasso, “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 95 (2008): 43–68; E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 162–70; and Colin Wells, The Devil and Doctor Dwight: Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 184, dates American preoccupation with infidelity to the publication of The Age of Reason, which overlooks debates about infidelity that predated Paine’s work. 7. May, Enlightenment in America, 226; and Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005), 80–85. On The Age of Reason’s availability in American libraries during the 1790s and on its likely readership, see David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1976): 270 and 287. In a sample of holdings from 119 libraries during the 1790s, The Age of Reason was available in 13, or just over 10 percent. For works that emphasize Paine’s democratic prose as the chief source of opposition to The Age of Reason, see Kaye, Thomas Paine, 84 and Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York: Penguin, 2006), 266. 8. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (New York, 1794), preface. This is the John Fellows edition. Paine dedicated the second part of The Age of Reason to Lafayette, “to which nobody had any kind of objection,” according to Paine’s nemesis William Cobbett, Gazette of the United States, June 7, 1796. On book dedications in early modern Europe, see Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13–44. For a theoretical treatment of dedications as “paratexts,” or literary conventions that mediate between authors and readers, see Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 118–36. On Locke, see David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two Treatises of Government,’ ” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–27; and on Rousseau, see Helena Rosenblatt, “Rousseau’s Gift to Geneva,” Modern Intellectual History 3, no. 1 (2006): 65–73. 9. Observations on 1st. The chronology of Scripture. 2d. Strictures on The age of reason. 3d. The evidence which reason, unassisted by revelation, affords us with respect to the nature and properties of the soul of man. 4th. Arguments in support of the opinion, that the soul is inactive and unconscious from death to the resurrection, derived from

Notes to Pages 53–59

255

Scripture (New York, 1795), 47 and Andrew Broaddus, The Age of Reason & Revelation (Richmond, 1795), 6–8. On Broaddus, see James H. Smylie, “Clerical Perspectives on Deism: Paine’s The Age of Reason in Virginia,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 6, no. 2 (1972): 204–205. Other American responses to The Age of Reason that focused special attention on Paine’s dedication: The Folly of Reason (New York, 1794); William Patten, Christianity the True Theology (Warren, RI, 1795); Miers Fisher, A Reply to the False Reasoning in the “Age of Reason” (Philadelphia, 1796); and Divine Oracles the True Antidote Against Deism, and False Christianity (Providence, 1797). 10. Ebenezer Bradford, Mr. Thomas Paine’s Trial; Being an Examination of His Age of Reason (Boston, 1795), 62 and 68; John Foster, Infidelity Exposed, and Christianity Recommended (Cambridge, MA, 1802), 12; and Elias Boudinot, The Age of Revelation, or, The Age of Reason Shewn to be an Age of Infidelity (Philadelphia, 1801), xii. 11. Bradford, Mr. Thomas Paine’s Trial, 62 and 68 and Boudinot, Age of Revelation, xii and xxii. 12. Boudinot, Age of Revelation, xx. 13. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 10; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Roger Woolhouse (New York: Penguin, 1997), 357; and Simeon Doggett, A Discourse on Education, Delivered at the Dedication and Opening of Bristol Academy, the 18th Day of July, a.d. 1796, quoted in Brewer, By Birth, 126. 14. Rodney Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 3–7 and 19; Jacqueline S. Reinier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775–1850 (New York: Twayne, 1996), x and 2; and Boudinot, Age of Revelation, xiii. 15. For overviews of education’s role in the early United States, see Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper & Row, 1980) and Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983). Foster, Infidelity Exposed, 21. 16. Jedidiah Morse, Elements of Geography (Boston, 1795), 63 and Erastus Root, An Introduction to Arithmetic for the Use of Common Schools (Norwich, CT, 1796), vi. On the curriculum at early national primary schools, see Cremin, American Education, 393. 17. Donald Fraser, The Mental Flower-Garden, or Instructive and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (Danbury, CT, 1800), 47. 18. On infidelity’s perceived influence on early national college campuses including the quote about the College of New Jersey, see Kaye, Thomas Paine, 110, and on Ezra Stiles, see Grasso, Speaking Aristocracy, 274. 19. Broaddus, Age of Reason, 8 and Bradford, Mr. Thomas Paine’s Trial, iii. 20. Bradford, Mr. Thomas Paine’s Trial, 66 and 69 and Benjamin Rush, Sixteen Introductory Lectures to Courses of Lectures Upon the Institutes and Practice of Medicine (Philadelphia, 1811), 121. For other examples of Washington as worthy of emulation

256

Notes to Pages 60–65

in the early republic, and on the broader cultural ideas of emulation and ambition, see J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. 111–12. 21. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (London, 1757); Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776–88); Henry Home, Lord Kames, Six Sketches of the History of Man (Philadelphia: R. Bell & R. Aitken, 1776). On all of these figures as well as Adam Smith and John Millar as authors of “conjectural history,” see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 310–11, 312–14, and 355. Rosemarie Zagarri argues that these conjectural histories gave examples of women contributing to society, thus they provided crucial intellectual support to late colonial arguments that women might be able to contribute to politics as well. See Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 17–18. The discourse surrounding female political participation in the early republic, with its combinations of hopes and fears, highlights how concepts of gender and irreligion operated in a similar fashion by writers seeking to expand or limit political power. 22. Belknap, quoted in Arthur H. Shaffer, The Politics of History: Writing the History of the American Revolution, 1783–1815 (Chicago: Precedent, 1975), 74. On cyclical concepts of history, see ibid., 59–61 and 74; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 91–92 and 123; and Peter Charles Hoffer, Revolution and Regeneration: Life Cycle and the Historical Vision of the Generation of 1776 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 40–69. 23. Shaffer, Politics of History, 28 and 32–33. 24. Belknap, Dissertations on the Character, Death & Resurrection, 107–10 and Samuel Stilwell, A Guide to Reason or an Examination of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (New York, 1794), 14–15. 25. Stilwell, Guide to Reason, 14–15; Elhanan Winchester, Ten Letters Addressed to Mr. Paine, in Answer to his Pamphlet, entitled The Age of Reason (Boston, 1794), 59; and Belknap, Dissertations on the Character, Death & Resurrection, 107–10. 26. Winchester, Ten Letters, 59. 27. Boudinot, Age of Revelation, xx. On the cultural role of honor in early national politics, especially among America’s national political elite, see Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 28. James Wallis, The Bible Defended; being an investigation of the misrepresentations and falsehoods of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, part the second (Halifax, N.C., 1797), vii and 10. On Mecklenburg County, see John Brevard Alexander, The History of Mecklenburg County: From 1740–1900 (Charlotte, 1902), 78 and 281–82 and Harriet M. Irwin, History of Charlotte, N.C. (1882), 29–30. 29. Uzal Ogden, Antidote to Deism: The Deist Unmasked (Newark, 1795), vi and

Notes to Pages 65–71

257

xiv. Ogden’s comparison of Paine and d’Holbach would have incensed Paine. Paine wrote The Age of Reason in response to the sort of atheistic arguments advanced by d’Holbach. 30. On American responses to the Directory, see May, Enlightenment in America, 224–26. For a general history of the Directory, see Jeremy D. Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), 94–108. 31. Volney’s interest in rational, systematic inquiry into religious belief, and into the development of ideas in general, grew from his association with the ideologue movement in Revolutionary France. On the ideologues, see Cheryl B. Welch, Liberty and Utility: The French Ideologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Ideas about comparative religious inquiry and notions of religion as a topic of study rather than merely belief in early modern England are covered in Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 32. Constantin François Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, Volney’s Answer to Doctor Priestly (Philadelphia, 1797), 4, 7–8, 11. On Volney, see Kerry S. Walters’s brief biographical sketch in The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 182–83. On Priestly’s intellectual life in Philadelphia, see May, Enlightenment in America, 219–22 and J. D. Bowers, Joseph Priestly and English Unitarianism in America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 77–116. On Priestly as a Rational Dissenter and his connection to opposition politics in England before 1790, see John Seed, “ ‘A set of men powerful enough in many things’: Rational Dissent and Political Opposition in England, 1770–1790,” in Knud Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 140–68. 33. James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 206–8. 34. Manual of the Theophilanthropes (Philadelphia, 1800), v–vii. 35. Ibid., 47 and 44–45. 36. Nathaniel Dwight, A Short but Comprehensive System of the Geography of the World: by way of Question and Answer (Hartford, 1795), 44–45; Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), August 15, 1797; Albany Chronicle, August 21, 1797; Oriental Trumpet (Portland, ME), October 3, 1798; and “Layman,” Theophilanthropy: or, The Spirit of Genuine Religion, Displayed in Thirty-Nine Articles, and Published for the Consideration of all Rational and Liberal Minds, and for Promoting Universal Benevolence (Lancaster, PA: Wm. Hamilton, 1799). 37. Temple of Reason, December 13, 1800. 38. Temple of Reason, November 25, 1801 and December 13, 1800. There is no evidence that the temple was actually constructed. 39. On Driscol’s discourse before the society, see Temple of Reason, May 27 and June 3, 1801. On Driscol’s optimism about the possibility of associations being formed in other parts of the country, see Temple of Reason, December 27, 1800.

258

Notes to Pages 72–80

40. On the societies in Baltimore and New York, see Temple of Reason, October 2, 1802. See also “Principles of the Deistical Society of the State of New York,” in Elihu Palmer, Posthumous Pieces (London: R. Carlile, 1824), 11–12; and Prospect; or, View of the Moral World, August 18, 1804, and August 25, 1804. Still one of the best studies of voluntary associations in the early republic is John L. Brooke, “Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Launching the “Extended Republic”: The Federalist Era (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 273–377. 41. On the “age of reason” as concept in Anglo-American politics and law, see Brewer, By Birth, 8; Prospect; or, View of the Moral World, September 15, 1804; and Volney, Volney’s Answer to Doctor Priestly, 13. 42. Temple of Reason, June 3, 1801. 43. Alexander Addison, Liberty of Speech and of the Press (1797), 12–14 and Temple of Reason, July 10, 1802. 44. Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker diary entry for December 1, 1802, in The Diary of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker, vol. 2., ed. Elaine Foreman Crane (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 845. On Drinker’s place among elite, educated women in early national Philadelphia, see Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 38. Chapter 3 1. Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 1st sess., 350 and Albany Centinel, July 21, 1797. 2. On citizenship and patriotism in the revolutionary Atlantic world, see, among others, David A. Bell, The Cult of Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). 3. On the role of Protestantism and imperial patriotism in British North America, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 112–19. 4. Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century renewed arguments about the incompatibility of republican citizenship and Catholic faith. 5. Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 235–46. 6. Expatriation was one of the most contentious legal questions regarding political allegiance addressed by Americans in the 1790s. Expatriation debates thus provide a clear window into contemporary understandings of citizenship and patriotism, especially when judged by the frequency with which the expatriation issued appeared in congressional debates and the press, but also by high-profile court cases regarding

Notes to Pages 80–84

259

the legality of expatriation. See, for example, the political controversies surrounding Edmond-Charles Genêt’s efforts in 1792 to recruit American citizens to the French Revolutionary cause and the 1799 Circuit Court case United States v. Williams. For secondary works on the importance of expatriation to American law and politics in this period, see Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 268 and 271–73 and Kunal M. Parker, “Citizenship and Immigration Law, 1800–1924: Resolutions of Membership and Territory,” in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins, eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America: The Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 171. 7. Louis-Charles Fougeret de Montbron, Le Cosmopolite ou le Citoyen du Monde (London, 1750; repr., Paris: Ducros, 1970), 130 and Time Piece, January 24, 1798. 8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 158 and Talbot v. Janson, 3 U.S. 133 (1795). For a history of cosmopolitanism as a philosophical concept, and Montbron and Rousseau’s critiques, see Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown, “Cosmopolitanism,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/ cosmopolitanism/. 9. Alexandria Times, October 29, 1799; Public Advertiser, September 17, 1807; [Charles Pinckney], “A South Carolina Planter,” City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, November 25, 1799; Uriah Tracy, quoted in American Minerva, December 26, 1794; and Albany Centinel, July 21, 1797. 10. Political Observatory, May 30, 1806; Newburyport Herald, March 3, 1807; Connecticut Gazette, October 2, 1799; and Gazette of the United States, December 20, 1799. 11. Time Piece, January 24, 1798; Weekly Wanderer, April 4, 1808; Aurora General Advertiser, March 8, 1796; and Alexandria Times, October 29, 1799. 12. The Address of the Grand Jury (Baltimore, 1813), 18–19; Baltimore Daily Intelligencer, August 11, 1794; and Kline’s Carlisle Weekly Gazette, July 14, 1809. The relationship between religion, allegiance, and patriotism ran deep in Anglo-American political theory and the law, see J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 47–59. 13. Elias Smith, quoted in Jonathan D. Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 87. 14. On Baptist ecclesiology, see E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 276–77. Freewill Baptist verse quoted in Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 43. 15. On Francis Asbury and the Methodist emphasis on itinerancy, see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 83–89; on Methodism as an international movement, see David N. Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven: Yale

260

Notes to Pages 85–91

University Press, 2005); Lorenzo Dow, History of a Cosmopolite: or, the Four Volumes of Lorenzo’s Journal (New York, 1814), iv; and George Roberts, Strictures on a sermon delivered by Mr. Nathan Williams, A.M. in Tolland, on the public fast, April, 17, 1793 (Philadelphia, 1794), 11. 16. On evangelical threats to southern concepts of masculinity, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 130–35; Eric Baldwin, “ ‘The Devil Begins to Roar’: Opposition to Early Methodists in New England,” Church History 75 (2006): 94–119. Williams quoted in Baldwin, “ ‘Devil Begins to Roar,’ ” 101; and John Foster, Infidelity Exposed, and Christianity Recommended (Cambridge, MA, 1802), 7 and 15. 17. Joseph Eckley, A Discourse, delivered on the Public Thanksgiving Day, November 29, 1798 (Boston, 1798), 21, 17–18, and 22–23 18. Foster, Infidelity Exposed, 9; Eckley, Discourse, 17–18; and John Lathrop, Patriotism and Religion (Boston, 1799), 11–12. 19. Foster, Infidelity Exposed, 15; Eckley, Discourse, 21; and Lathrop, Patriotism and Religion, 13. For a detailed study of the relationship between Congregationalism and politics in post-Revolutionary New England, see Sassi, Republic of Righteousness. 20. Henri François Godineau, Oration Upon Religious Worship (Philadelphia, 1793), 1, 2, and 4 and Robert Coram, Political Inquiries (Wilmington, DE, 1791), 101–2. 21. Temple of Reason, June 3, 1801. 22. William Currie, A Description of the Malignant, Infectious Fever Prevailing at Present in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1794), 5; Samuel Hogdon to Isaac Craig, September 21, 1783, in “Notes and Queries,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 14 (1890): 329; and Mark A. Smith, “Andrew Brown’s ‘Earnest Endeavor’: The ‘Federal Gazette’s’ Role in Philadelphia’s Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 120, no. 4 (1996): 321–42. On Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever outbreak more generally, see J. Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith, eds., A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1997). On Palmer’s treatment by Rush, see John Fellows, Posthumous Pieces by Elihu Palmer (London, 1824), 7. 23. On the links among vision, epistemology, and superstition in early America, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 16–18; Elihu Palmer, An Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement of the Human Species (New York, 1797), 3; Fellows, Posthumous Pieces, 7; and “Portrait, Elihu Palmer, copied from the best Likeness that appeared in America,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), Simon Gratz autograph collection. 24. Gilbert Tennent, The Examiner, Examined, or Gilbert Tennent, Harmonious (Philadelphia, 1743) and Joseph Fish, The Examiner Examined: Remarks on a piece wrote by Mr. Isaac Backus (New London, CT, 1771). 25. On the paper’s agents, Prospect; or, View of the Moral World, December 10, 1803; on lecture topics, Time Piece, September 14, 1797; September 18, 1797; September

Notes to Pages 91–94

261

29, 1797; and May 4, 1798; and Palmer, Original Sin, Atonement, Faith, &c. A Christmas Discourse Delivered in New-York, December 1798 (New York, 1806), 10 and 6. For a study of the writing communities and modes of print exchange and publication of a much earlier deist and polemicist, see Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 26. Republican; or, Anti-Democrat, November 2, 1803, announced the recent marriage of Palmer and Mary Powell. It is unclear who “wrote” for Palmer before Mary. Perhaps his first wife fulfilled this task. On Palmer’s residence at Powell’s boardinghouse from 1798 through the early 1800s, see John Fellows to Horatio Gates, July 11, 1798, Horatio Gates Papers, MS 240, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society, and announcements for Palmer’s Principles of Nature in editions of Temple of Reason in 1800 and 1801. Mary Palmer to Robert Hunter, September 3, 1806, in the Robert Hunter Correspondence, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Thomas Paine included Mary Palmer in his will, leaving $100 “to Mrs. Palmer, widow of Elihu Palmer, late of New York.” See Paine’s will in W. T. Sherwin, Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine (London, 1819). 27. Palmer, Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement, 34. On the books available at Fellows’s bookstore in 1797, see Fellows’s advertisement in the Diary; or, Loudon’s Register, November 8, 1797. Fellows advertised in multiple New York journals. Of the more radical works sold by Fellows was Boulanger (d’Holbach), Christianity Unveiled. John W. Francis, Old New York; or, Reminiscences of the Past Sixty Years (1858), 134–35. On John Foster, see Abel C. Thomas, A Century of Universalism in Philadelphia and New York (Philadelphia, 1872), 268. Elihu Palmer to Robert Hunter, September 6, 1805, in the Robert Hunter Correspondence, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 28. Diary; or, Loudon’s Register, July 7, 1797. For an indication that Palmer was familiar to New York’s deists, see advertisements for this “moral discourse” carried in the October 1, 1796, issues of the Argus, The Minerva, & Mercantile Evening Advertiser, and the Weekly Museum. Freneau reprinted Palmer’s oration in the July 26, 1797, issue of the Time Piece, and Fellows placed an announcement for his edition in the Diary; or, Loudon’s Register throughout the fall of 1797; see October 7, 1797, for example. 29. John Fellows to Horatio Gates, July 11, 1798, Horatio Gates Papers, MS 240, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society, and Elihu Palmer to Thomas Jefferson, September 1, 1802, Thomas Jefferson Papers, series 1, General Correspondence, 1651– 1827, Library of Congress. Jefferson’s copy of Principles of Nature is still housed in the Library of Congress; see E. Millicent Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2, Philosophy (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1952–59), 24–25. 30. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), esp. 27–92 and 241–58. Alexander Geddes, quoted in ibid., 244. 31. Robert Ross, The American Grammar: or, A Complete Introduction to the

262

Notes to Pages 94–99

English and Latin Languages (Hartford, 1782), vii, originally published in 1742 as A Complete Introduction to the Latin Tongue. Geddes’s opponents, quoted in Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, 245. 32. Prospect; or, View of the Moral World, June 16, 1804, and January 12, 1805. 33. Elihu Palmer, The Examiners Examined: being a Defence of the Age of Reason (New York, 1798), 8 and William Wyche, An Examination of The Examiners Examined, being a Defence of Christianity: Opposed to the Age of Reason (New York, 1795), 13–14. The 30,000 different readings of the New Testament cited by Wyche was a count generated in early eighteenth-century English religious controversies involving prominent Oxford scholar John Mill. On the calculation of the 30,000 figure and the consequent controversies, see Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, 44–46. Two writers responded to Examiners Examined as part of broader critiques of Age of Reason. See William Patten, Christianity the True Theology and Only Perfect Moral System; in An Answer to the Age of Reason (Warren, RI, 1795) and James Wallis, The Bible Defended; being an investigation of the misrepresentations and falsehoods of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, part the second (Halifax, NC, 1797). 34. Prospect; or, View of the Moral World, February 9, 1805, and December 10, 1803. 35. Prospect; or, View of the Moral World, February 9, 1805; Palmer, Examiners Examined, 61–62; Palmer, A Christmas Discourse, 10; and Palmer, Examiners Examined, 60–61. 36. Palmer, Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement, 28–30 and Palmer, Political Happiness of Nations (New York, 1800), 20–21 and 22–23. 37. Palmer, Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement, 30; William Dunlap on Palmer, August 2, 1797, in Diary of William Dunlap (1766–1839): The Memoirs of a Dramatist, Theatrical Manager, Painter, Critic, Novelist, and Historian, 3 vols., ed. Dorothy C. Brack (New York, 1930), 1:126; and Dunlap on patriotism, quoted in Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 49. On the Friendly Club, see also Kaplan, Men of Letters, esp. 42–49. 38. Kaplan, Men of Letters, 109–12. 39. John Fellows to Horatio Gates, July 11, 1798, Horatio Gates Papers, MS 240, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society. 40. E. M. Ruttenber, History of the Town of Newburgh (Newburgh, NY, 1859), 86–88. 41. Phineas Hedges, An Oration, Delivered before the Republican Society (Goshen, NY, 1795); Strictures on the Elementa Medicinae (Goshen, NY, 1795); and “Case of an Extraordinary Disease, in a Child, apparently Scrophulous,” Medical Repository 1 (1797): 172–79. On Phineas Hedges’s involvement with Newburgh deists, see Ruttenber, History of the Town of Newburgh, 89. On the Medical Repository, see Kaplan, Men of Letters, esp. 87–96. On Jonathan Hedges as an agent for Palmer’s paper, see Prospect; or, View of the Moral World, December 10, 1803. On Jonathan Hedges and the Bank of Newburgh, see Ruttenber, History of the Town of Newburgh, 149. 42. Ruttenber, History of the Town of Newburgh, 86–88.

Notes to Pages 100–106

263

43. Goshen Repository, October 10, 1797. On Hurtin, see Jeffery L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 166–67. 44. Goshen Repository, December 12, 1797. 45. Goshen Repository, October 10, 1797. 46. General Remarks, on the Proceedings Lately Had in the Adjacent Country, Relative to Infidelity (Newburgh, 1798), 10–11 and 7. 47. Goshen Repository, October 10, 1797. 48. On Federalist versus Republican conceptions of citizenship, especially as related to expatriation, see Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 121–22. On political conceptions of regional identity in the years after 1800, including in New England, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 251–62. 49. The close relationship between religious belief and partisan alignment in New England is well documented by historians. On Massachusetts, see Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 154–55. For an expansion of this theme, see Sassi, Republic of Righteousness. For an excellent study of Abraham Bishop and his partisan use of anticlericalism, see David Waldstreicher and Stephen R. Grossbart, “Abraham Bishop’s Vocation; Or, the Mediation of Jeffersonian Politics,” Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 4 (1998): 645–47. 50. Abraham Bishop, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against Christianity and the Government of the United States (Hartford, 1802), 82, 81, 6, 84, and 39. 51. Ibid., 39 and 83 and John C. Ogden, A Sermon on Peace, Charity, and Toleration (Philadelphia, 1800), 16. 52. Bishop, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 134 and John C. Ogden, A Short History of the Ecclesiastical Oppressions in New-England and Vermont (Richmond, VA, 1799), 19. 53. The toast made in New Jersey was cited in Alan V. Briceland, “The Philadelphia Aurora, the New England Illuminati, and the Election of 1800,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 100, no. 1 (1976): 35. Briceland’s article is the best treatment on the New England Illuminati in American politics during the early nineteenth century. 54. James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” in William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962–77), 8:298–304, emphasis added. On the role of contractual ideas among Virginia Baptists, see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 291–93. Jonathan Sassi has noted the tenuous place of arguments such as Bishop’s that combined anticlericalism within a political culture of pious voters, but also the capacity for Republicans in New England to accommodate a degree of disbelief; see Sassi, Republic of

264

Notes to Pages 106–113

Righteousness, 111–15. Of course not all Republicans were eager to accept the charges of infidelity against Jefferson that support from the likes of Bishop, Duane, and Ogden engendered. See, for example, “Timoleon” (Tunis Wortman), A Solemn Address, to Christians and Patriots Upon the Approaching Election of a President of the United States (New York: David Denniston, 1800) and “Grotius” (DeWitt Clinton), A Vindication of Thomas Jefferson; Against the Charges Contained in a Pamphlet Entitled, “Serious Considerations” (New York: David Denniston, 1800). Both were defenses of Jefferson against charges of infidelity. Denniston printed both pamphlets, which suggests that his partisanship trumped any sympathy he had for deistic principles. 55. George I. Eacker, An Oration Delivered at the Request of the Officers of the Brigade (New York, 1801), 15. 56. Palmer, “Extract form an Oration, Delivered at Federal Point, near Philadelphia, on the Fourth of July,” in Political Miscellany (New York, 1793); Palmer, Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement, 27–29; Palmer, Political Happiness of Nations, 6–9; and Temple of Reason, April 22, 1801. 57. Mercury and New England Palladium, November 19, 1802; [Luther Martin], The Charge Delivered to the Grand Jury, 10–11; and Albany Centinel, October 7, 1803. Chapter 4 1. On the historical and theoretical implications of persuasion, see John L. Brooke, “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 207–50. Recent scholarship on the politics of 1800 focusing on religion fails to address the full import of deistic doubt to the political changes that occurred after 1800. See, for example, Frank Lambert, “ ‘God—and a Religious President . . . [or] Jefferson and No God’: Campaigning for a Voter-Imposed Religious Test in 1800,” Journal of Church and State 39, no. 4 (1997): 769–89 or Robert M. S. McDonald, “Was There a Religious Revolution of 1800?,” in James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 173–98, which addresses the religious and cultural debates that drove partisan politics but generally ignores deism except in relationship to Jefferson’s beliefs. 2. Jefferson quoted in Johann N. Neem, “Beyond the Wall: Reinterpreting Jefferson’s Danbury Address,” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (2007): 146 and 149. In this article, Neem develops a compelling argument for interpreting Jefferson’s “wall of separation” metaphor as one that betrayed Jefferson’s hope that free inquiry would challenge Christianity; see 141–54, but esp. 142–49. Temple of Reason, November 13, 1802. 3. Temple of Reason, November 13, 1802, and January 3, 1801. 4. On revolutionary émigrés and exiles, see Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); Ashli

Notes to Pages 113–116

265

White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); and Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011). On Driscol’s life, see Kerby A. Miller et al., Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 586. 5. On Cheetham and Denniston’s editorship of the American Citizen, see Durey, Transatlantic Radicals, 270–73; on Cheetham’s life in England, see ibid., 32–33; on Clinton, see Evan Cornog, The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769–1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and on Denniston’s earlier association with Palmer and Newburgh’s deists, see Goshen Repository, September 26, 1797, October 10, 1797, and December 12, 1797. For fairly solid evidence that Denniston and Cheetham assisted Driscol in establishing Temple of Reason, see a sworn testimony by George Baron, a mathematics instructor in New York City, printed in the New York Evening Post, September 21, 1802. 6. New York Gazette, March 11, 1801, and Temple of Reason, July 10, 1802. Driscol never mentioned Lithgow, but for a convincing argument that Lithgow did assume the editorship of Temple of Reason, see Durey, “John Lithgow’s Lithconia: The Making and Meaning of America’s First ‘Utopian Socialist’ Tract,” William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1992): 675–94. 7. Temple of Reason, November 27, 1802. In 1800, there were 234 newspapers published in the United States, and most, like Temple of Reason, were weeklies. See Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party Operations, 1801–1809 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 236. On typical newspaper circulation and duration, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 7, 8, 48, 49, and 52. 8. Temple of Reason, January 3, 1801. 9. For evidence that Cheetham was the only editor in New York who advertised Driscol’s paper, see Temple of Reason, March 13, 1802. When editors agreed to print advertisements, they did so to earn revenue for their own papers. Driscol thus had a financial relationship with Cheetham and Denniston. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Cheetham and Denniston would open their paper to certain criticism for promoting deism only for the relatively meager advertisement revenue if they did not also support Driscol’s cause. On Driscol’s arrangement with Duane, see Temple of Reason, February 7, 1801. On announcements by Philadelphia deists to establish a meeting place, see, for example, Temple of Reason, December 9, 1801, and Aurora, December 29, 1801. 10. For a study that elucidates Pennsylvania’s tangled politics in the early republic, see Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), esp. chaps. 2 and 3. For Driscol’s policy positions, see, for example, Temple of Reason, May 6, 1801. On Lithgow’s economic views, see Durey,

266

Notes to Pages 116–123

“John Lithgow’s Lithconia” and Durey, “Thomas Paine’s Apostles: Radical Emigres and the Triumph of Jeffersonian Republicanism,” William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1987): 661–88, which addresses the role of radical émigrés in the development of Jeffersonian political economy in the 1790s. 11. On Driscol’s move to Georgia, see Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans, 240. 12. Temple of Reason, November 8, 1800. For a continuation of this theme in Temple of Reason, see the June 24, 1801, edition in which a section titled “Christian Persecution” includes a similar argument about the Pennsylvania Constitution. 13. Temple of Reason, November 8, 1800. 14. John Adams to Mercy Warren, August 8, 1807, Correspondence between John Adams and Mercy Warren, ed. Charles Francis Adams (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 429. 15. Providence Gazette, September 27, 1800, and October 11, 1800. The Burleigh essays were originally published in the Connecticut Courant. 16. Josiah Quincy quoted in Steven Watts, “Ministers, Misanthropes, and Mandarins: The Federalists and the Culture of Capitalism, 1790–1820,” in Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg, eds., Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 172. Watts argues that Quincy exemplified the new generation of Federalist politicians who worked to make their party more competitive in a democratizing political culture despite their reservations about the capacities of ordinary people; ibid., 171–74. 17. On the Federalist partisan press after 1800, see Pasley, Tyranny of Printers, 230–31, 233–34, 238, and 254–55. 18. Republican; or, Anti-Democrat, September 10, 1802. 19. The degree to which Federalist editors embraced democratic assumptions and electoral politics after 1800 is a matter of historiographic dispute; see, for example, David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 129–49 and Pasley, Tyranny of Printers, 229–57. 20. On Coleman’s interest in promoting morals in politics and religion, see James Grant Wilson, The Memorial History of the City of New-York: From Its First Settlement to the Year 1892, vol. 5 (1892), 146. 21. On Prentiss, see Pasley, Tyranny of Printers, 241; and Allan B. Slauson, “Curious Customs of the Past as Gleaned from the Newspapers in the District of Columbia,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 9 (1906): 97–98. On Dennie, see Pasley, Tyranny of Printers, 248; and on the Port Folio, see William C. Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801–1812 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). On Coleman, see Pasley, Tyranny of Printers, 240–41; on Coleman’s duel, see Fischer, Revolution of American Conservatism, 186; and on Coleman’s caning, see Joanne Freemen, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 172. On Croswell, see Pasley, Tyranny of Printers, 234. Nearly all the Federalist editors who paid attention to Driscol were “Young Federalists” or “Transitional Figures” according to Fischer’s

Notes to Pages 123–132

267

categories. For the distinction within Federalism between the Old School and Young Federalists, see Fischer, Revolution of American Conservatism, 1–49. 22. On the attempt to advertise Temple of Reason in Coleman’s paper, see Evening Post, February 3, 1802. On Croswell’s connections to the Connecticut Courant, see John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 77–78 and 484. 23. Philadelphia Gazette, November 17, 1800, and Columbian Centinel, November, 29, 1800. For the partisan affiliation of these papers, see Fischer, Revolution of American Conservatism, 414 and 419. This notice also appeared in the Boston Gazette, November 27, 1800, a nonpartisan newspaper. 24. Port Folio, cited in Temple of Reason, May 13, 1801; Newburyport Herald, June 25, 1802; Republican; or, Anti-Democrat, September 29, 1802, reprinted by John and Bennett Wheeler of Providence, Rhode Island, in their paper, United States Chronicle, October 14, 1802; and Federal Gazette, and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, reprinted in Evening Post, August 21, 1802. 25. Republican; or, Anti-Democrat, September 29, 1802. 26. Boston Gazette, June 28, 1802 and Trenton Federalist, excerpted in Temple of Reason, October 23, 1802. 27. Newburyport Herald, February 10, 1801, and Republican; or, Anti-Democrat, September 10, 1802. The latter was reprinted in the Federalist New York Gazette, September 14, 1802. 28. Republican; or, Anti-Democrat, September 29, 1802, and Repertory, May 31, 1805. 29. Washington Federalist, reprinted in the New England Palladium, July 22, 1803. 30. Repertory, May 28, 1805 31. On the 1808 election, see Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy, 185; Tickler, May 24, 1809, reprinted in Pennsylvania Herald (Easton, PA), June 14, 1809; on Helmbold, see David E. E. Sloane, “The Comic Writers of Philadelphia: George Helmbold’s The Tickler, Joseph C. Neal’s ‘City Worthies,’ and the Beginnings of Modern Periodical Humor in America,” Victorian Periodicals Review 28, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 186–98; and American Citizen, October 10, 1809. 32. New York Gazette, August 24, 1802, and reprinted in the Evening Post, August 24, 1802; Balance, and Columbian Repository, November 26, 1805; Olio, September 17, 1802; and the Massachusetts Spy, January 22, 1806. 33. Balance, and Columbian Repository, November 26, 1805 34. On Wood’s life in Scotland, see Durey, Transatlantic Radicals, 160–63. On Wood’s political career in support of Aaron Burr, see Cornog, Birth of Empire, 41–42. John Wood, A Full Exposition of the Clintonian Faction, and the Society of the Columbian Illuminati (Newark, NJ, 1802), 48. 35. Wood, Full Exposition, 28, 33, 39–40, and 41–43. 36. Ibid., 27. Wood’s pamphlet is virtually absent from the standard political and religious histories of the period. This absence can perhaps be attributed to the fact

268

Notes to Pages 132–139

that studies of partisan conflict after 1800 often do not ask questions about religious rhetoric and its implications to the same extent as scholarship focused on the period before 1800. New York deists, inspired by French Theophilanthropy, formed the Theistical Society. On the European Illuminati, see Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York, 1918). 37. Evening Post, September 11, 1802. 38. Evening Post, October 5, 1802, and October 7, 1802. 39. Evening Post, September 8, 1802. On divisions among New York Republicans in 1802, see Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans, 205–6. 40. On the Federalist opposition strategy and Gallatin’s assessment, see Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans, 212–13 and 207. National Aegis, September 29, 1802. This piece also appeared in Newark, New Jersey’s Centinel of Freedom, October 12, 1802, an indication that Republicans used their own press networks to promote, interpret, and engage in editorial polemics. 41. Spectator, September 15, 1802 and Evening Post, September 14, 1802, and September 20, 1802. 42. Balance, and Columbian Repository, September 21, 1802, and Trenton Federalist, November 11, 1802. By way of comparison, Temple of Reason was the only Republican paper that addressed Wood’s pamphlet. See the September 25 and October 2, 1802, issues. By this time, John Lithgow had replaced Driscol as the paper’s editor. Since Temple of Reason was closely affiliated with members of the Theistical Society and a frequent target of Federalist newspaper polemics, Lithgow addressed Wood’s pamphlet in order to defend his paper, if nothing else. Other Republican editors likely ignored Wood’s pamphlet to keep from further exposing a potential fracture in their political coalition. The absence of references to Wood’s Full Exposition or Coleman’s review in Rhode Island, Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Northwest Territories corresponds to a weak Federalist press in each of these states. None of these states except Delaware had “decidedly” Federalist papers, according to Fischer’s categories, whereas all the papers that reprinted excerpts from the Columbian Illuminati controversy were, when can be determined, “decidedly” Federalist. See Fischer, Revolution of American Conservatism, 413–23 for partisan affiliation of newspapers circa 1800. 43. Temple of Reason, January 17, 1801, emphasis original; Benjamin Hobart, An Oration, Pronounced July 4, 1805, at Abington, on the Anniversary of American Independence (Boston, 1805), 12–13; and Democratic Republican, or, Anti-Aristocrat, August 13, 1802. 44. Kline’s Carlisle Weekly Gazette, September 30, 1808, and Solomon Aiken, The Rise and Progress of the Political Dissension in the United States (Haverhill, 1811), 14. On Congregationalist Republicans, see Jonathan D. Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 109–10. 45. “True Baptist,” The Age of Inquiry; or, Reason and Revelation in Harmony with

Notes to Pages 140–147

269

Each Other (Hartford, 1804), 76 and William Charles White, An oration in commemoration of the anniversary of American independence delivered in Boston, July 4th, 1809, at the request of the Bunker-Hill Association (Boston, 1809), 8–9. White quoted The Age of Reason in his reference to nature’s God. 46. David Daggett, An Oration Delivered at Greenfield, on the Fourth of July, a.d. 1805 (New Haven, 1812), 13 and Samuel Leonard, The Substance of a Discourse, Delivered at Poultney, Vermont (Salem, MA, 1804), 28–29. 47. Lyman Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc., vol. 1, ed. Charles Beecher (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1864), 453. The connections between partisan religious controversies and larger developments in American life during the nineteenth century in this paragraph and those below are drawn from the work of two scholars, Daniel Walker Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North during the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 77 (1991): esp. 1224, 1228–29, and 1235; and John L. Brooke, “Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the Composite-Federal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (2009): esp. 10–16; and Brooke, “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere,” 237, in which he notes “that Federalists, and later Whigs, were far more adept than their opponents in mobilizing the resources to pursue a cultural, persuasive strategy, a strategy that would come to include virtually the entire institutional and publication armature of the evangelical empire.” Chapter 5 1. George Peck, Early Methodism Within the Bounds of the Old Genesee Conference from 1788 to 1828 (New York, 1860), 123. 2. On the expansion of popular religion and its connections to Republican political thought, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 3. Nathan Bangs, A History of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York, 1845), 2:21 and 146; on Bangs’s work to make Methodism respectable, see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 201–4; and Peck, Early Methodism, 4. 4. John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–6. 5. John Smith, The Triumph of Religion over Infidelity (Haverhill, MA, 1814), 21–22 and Lyman Beecher, Lectures on Scepticism (Cincinnati, 1835), 58–59. 6. Smith, Triumph of Religion, 25–26; Lyman Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc., vol. 1, ed. Charles Beecher (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1864), 344; and Lyman Beecher, The Design, Rights, and Duties of Local Churches (Andover, 1819), 18. See Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 30–56, for an astute analysis of Beecher’s changing views toward reform. For other New England Federalist ministers who turned to moral reform efforts after 1810, see Jonathan D. Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy

270

Notes to Pages 147–151

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). On the Federalist clergy’s disillusionment with partisan politics and their turn to civil society, see Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 16. On lay Federalists in Philadelphia who abandoned electoral politics for civil society after 1800, see Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). 7. Beecher, “A Reformation of Morals Practicable and Indispensible,” in Sermons Delivered on Various Occasions (Boston, 1828), 87. 8. Charles Leslie, A Short and Easy Method with the Deists (1679). The first colonial edition was published in Boston in 1719. Between 1719 and 1820 American publishers issued twelve more editions. Philip Doddridge, The Family Expositor: or, A Paraphrase and Version of the New Testament (Charleston, SC, 1773), 417, is a copy of the sixth Edinburgh edition of 1772. For early national libraries that held copies of A Short and Easy Method with the Deists, see catalogues for Library Company of Philadelphia (1807), Library Company of Baltimore (1809), Charleston Library Society (1811), Social Library Company (New Haven, 1812), Library of the Three Monthly Meetings of Friends of Philadelphia (1813), New York Library Society (1813), and New Haven Library Company (1815). 9. William Ellery Channing, Two Sermons on Infidelity delivered October 24, 1813 (Cambridge, MA, 1813), 1. 10. Joseph Vaill, An Address to a Deist: A Poem (New Haven, 1796), Preface; The Holy Bible Explained, or, The Old and New Testament Digested and Illustrated (Baltimore, 1808), Preface; “A Friend to True Religion,” A Brief Defence of Christianity, Against Deism and Infidelity (Trenton, 1810), Preface; Alden Bradford, Evangelical History, or, A Narrative of the Life, Doctrines and Miracles of Jesus Christ (Boston, 1813), title page; and Jonathan Ward, A Sermon Delivered Before the Maine Missionary Society (Hallowell, ME, 1811), 9 and 26. 11. Washington Citizen and Farmer’s Almanac for the Year 1808 (Philadelphia, 1807), n.p.; The New Jersey and Pennsylvania Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1817 (Trenton, 1816), n.p.; Allen’s New England Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1818 (Hartford, 1817), n.p.; Key to the Exercises Adapted to Murray’s English Grammar (Philadelphia, 1810), 65; and Daniel Adams, The Understanding Reader: or, Knowledge Before Oratory (Boston, 1816), 131. 12. E. Brooks Holifield, “Theology as Entertainment: Oral Debate in American Religion,” Church History 67, no. 3 (1998): 505 and 511–12. Campbell’s supposed victory as reported by the press is quoted in ibid., 513. 13. Ibid., 500 and 515–16. 14. Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 154 and David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the

Notes to Pages 152–158

271

Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5, 7, 25, 53, 55–56, 77–78, 80, and 86. 15. For the importance of religious newspapers in the development of American Protestantism in the early republic, see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 126. 16. On the relationship between evangelical theology and publishing, see Nord, Faith in Reading, 43 and 127–28. Ballston Spa Gazette, and Saratoga Farmer, May 1, 1822. 17. For an evangelical writing that addressed profiles of infidelity and the training of everyday polemicists together, unlike typical tracts and newspapers, see John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady on a Variety of Useful and Interesting Subject (Philadelphia, 1809), 90–92. 18. On the cultural meaning of biography in the early republic, see Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), esp. 114–18. 19. Brown, Word in the World, 142, 149, 169–70, and 177. Brown persuasively argues that religious periodicals created a sense of shared religious experience that transcended locality. 20. Brown highlights the blurring of secular and religious prints in the early republic. See ibid., 154. 21. Nord, Faith in Reading, 52–53 and 120–22 and William Mason, A Spiritual Treasury for the Children of God (New Brunswick, NJ, 1811), 362. 22. On the supposed pious influence of social inferiors, see, for example, Cesar Malan, The Infidel Convinced by a Child (Philadelphia: Baptist General Tract Society, 1827–29). For a variety of stories about the agonizing deaths of infidels, see Nantucket Gazette, October 12, 1816, which described Voltaire’s unpleasant state at the time of his death; Christian Watchman, May 20, 1820, which recounted the last moments of an infidel whose greatest tumult arose from the hardship his infidelity caused for his family and friends; Religious Messenger, February 25, 1832, which carried one of the ubiquitous accounts of Thomas Paine’s uncomfortable death as a result of his deism; George Horne, Account of the Death of an Infidel (Philadelphia: Baptist General Tract Society, 1829); and Baltimore Patriot, May 5, 1834, which reported on the sudden death of C. C. C. Cohen. 23. John P. Campbell, A Portrait of the Times, or, The Church’s Duty (Lexington, KY, 1812), 16–17 and Delaware Free Press, April 28, 1832. 24. James Lackington, The Confessions of J. Lackington, late bookseller, at the Temple of the Muses, in a Series of Letters to a Friend (New York: Methodist Connection of the United States, 1806); William Crookshank, David Baldwin, or, The Miller’s Son: An Authentic Narrative (New York: American Tract Society,1833), 5, 9, 22–23; and William Wisner, I am an Infidel! (American Tract Society, 1832). For other tract narratives that warned about the influence of infidel writings, see Horne, Account of the Death, 5. 25. The Infidel Reclaimed; or, The Useful Tracts in, The Clergyman’s Orphan; or, The

272

Notes to Pages 159–165

Child of Providence: A Tale Founded Upon Facts (New York, 1833), 139 and 148–49 and Christian Watchman, July 22, 1820. 26. Conversion of a Deist: Happy Death of a Youth (Religious Tract Society of Philadelphia, 1817), 1 and 9–10. 27. A Warning to Gamblers and Swearers (New York Religious Tract Society, 1825), 6. 28. Convictions Stifled: A Narrative of Facts (American Tract Society, date unknown), n.p. For another example in which infidelity and alcohol consumption were equated, see Religious Messenger, June 11, 1831. 29. Religious Intelligencer, May 27, 1820. 30. Nathan Hoyt, Conversion of an Aged Deist: A Narrative of Facts (New York: American Tract Society, 1838), 1, 3, and 6. On Hoyt’s background and his position as minister at the First Presbyterian Church of Athens, see Ernest C. Hynds, Antebellum Athens and Clarke County Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974), 112. Hynds verifies the 1831 Athens revival. 31. The report of the Newark Tract Society was reprinted in Christian Watchman, August 26, 1820. For another reference to The Praying Negro, see The Infidel Preacher (Philadelphia: Sunday and Adult School Union, 1821 or 1822), 13. 32. Grant Thorburn, Forty Years’ Residence in America (Boston, 1834), 192–94. On the idea of a competency, see Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1990): 3–29. “Death and Confessions of a Veteran Infidel,” in The Farmer’s Cabinet, August 27, 1831, also traced a person’s infidelity in the 1830s back to Elihu Palmer’s influence. 33. William C. Hawley, Western Examiner, April 9, 1835; Joseph Yeo, Boston Investigator, November 12, 1851; and Christina Gardner, Free Enquirer, March 29, 1835. 34. Romanus Emerson, Boston Investigator, October 13, 1852; Asa Selden, Boston Investigator, January 6, 1841, and for a record of Selden’s military service, A Census of Pensioners for Revolutionary or Military Services; with their Names, Ages, and Places of Residence (Washington, 1841), 34; and Jonathan Wilson, Boston Investigator, December 4, 1850. 35. Western Examiner, April 9, 1835, and Free Enquirer, March 29, 1835. On Reuben Pew, see Boston Investigator, February 13, 1850; Acts of the Legislature of the State of Michigan, Passed at the Annual Session of 1849 (Lansing, 1849), 111; Report of the Pioneer Society of the State Michigan, vol. 7 (Lansing, 1886), 367–68; and Biographical Review of Calhoun County, Michigan (1904), 132. On Samuel Ogden Briggs, see Boston Investigator, September 10, 1845; Public Papers of Daniel D. Tompkins, Governor of New York, 1807–1817, Military, vol. 1 (Albany, 1898), 395; Alden Chester et al., Legal and Judicial History of New York (1911), 192; Chester et al., Courts and Lawyers of New York: A History, 1609–1925 (1925), 660; and Debates and Proceedings in the New-York State Convention: For the Revision of the Constitution (Albany, 1846), 557. 36. Christian Watchman (Boston, 1834). 37. Religious Intelligencer, May 27, 1820. 38. Religious Messenger, September 10, 1831, and September 1, 1832.

Notes to Pages 166–175

273

39. Religious Intelligencer, July 1, 1820, and Religious Messenger, July 16, 1831 and August 13, 1831. 40. Religious Messenger, March 17, 1832. 41. Emily Chubbuck Judson, The Life and Letters of Mrs. Emily C. Judson (New York, 1860), 22–24. 42. Ibid., 22–24. Judson’s adult life was included in a three-part biography of evangelical women that achieved great popular success in the antebellum United States; see Casper, Constructing American Lives, 112–13. 43. Samuel Whitcomb Papers, 1818–79, Massachusetts Historical Society, Diaries, 1818–45: box 7, folder 1: July 15, 1818; July 13, 1818; August 14, 1818; August 13, 1818; and September 11, 1818. 44. Ibid., July 13, 1818 and August 2, 1818. 45. Whitcomb Papers, box 5, folder 3, Research and Personal Notes, 1820–60 and box 4, folder 25, Speeches, n.d. 46. Religious Messenger, July 16, 1831. Chapter 6 1. Prossimo’s Experience (New York, 1830), 11–12. “Prossimo” originally recounted his conversion to religious disbelief in a series of letters to the Free Enquirer submitted and published in 1828. 2. Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (London, 1686); Conyers Middleton, Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are Supposed to have Subsisted in the Christian Church (London, 1749); and Elisha Williams, The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants (Boston, 1744), 42 3. Robert Annan, Brief Animadversions on the Doctrine of Universal Salvation (Philadelphia, 1787), 33 and Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), 285. 4. For its adherents, free enquiry allowed necessary intellectual liberty for meaningful and effective maturity, to paraphrase Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784). According to Kant, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Maturity is an especially apt description of the change described by infidel converts from uncertain young Christians to confident adult disbelievers. The metaphor also captures concerns about generational religious change common in the early republic. 5. For a contemporary definition of free enquiry, see the Correspondent, January 31, 1829. N. C. Rhodes, An Oration, Delivered Before The Society Of Moral Philanthropists, At The Celebration Of The Ninety-Sixth Anniversary Of The Birth Day Of The Hon. Thomas Paine (Providence, 1833), 9. Rhodes was the designated orator at an 1833 Paine birthday celebration in Providence organized by the city’s Society of Moral Philanthropists. 6. See the “Prospectus” for the Correspondent, January 20, 1827; “Deism Defended,” January 27, 1827; and “Authenticity of the Scriptures,” January 20, 1827; on Houston’s activities in New York, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City

274

Notes to Pages 176–185

and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 153; on Houston’s previous life in England, see Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 84–85, 184. On Wright, see Celia Morris Eckhardt, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); on Owen, see Richard William Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: A Biography (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), 65–84; on the Free Enquirer’s various editors, see Leopold, Robert Dale Owen, 66–67. Owen’s father, Scottish industrialist Robert Owen, established New Harmony, Indiana. On Owen and Wright’s ambitions, see Free Enquirer, October 29, 1828. 7. Free Enquirer, December 24, 1828. 8. Prossimo’s Experience, 6–7. 9. Internal evidence within the narrative, such as an early interest in a career in the ministry and a reminiscence that Truth joined a group of “lads” who attended to church with the sole “intention of seeing the girls,” indicates that Truth was male. Free Enquirer, May 15, 1830. 10. “Prossimo,” Free Enquirer, November 19, 1828; “Truth,” Free Enquirer, May 15, 1830; and “Philo Kosmos,” Western Examiner, October 29, 1835. 11. Boston Investigator, January 6, 1841; Free Enquirer, March 15, 1830; and Boston Investigator, September 10, 1845. 12. Free Enquirer, August 28, 1830. 13. Free Enquirer, April 1, 1829. Anna’s description of her conversion from Christianity as a liberating separation from an existing religious community coincides with Susan Juster’s analysis of female conversion experiences in early nineteenth-century New England. See Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 197–202. 14. Samuel Underhill, A Lecture on Mysterious Religious Emotions (Steubenville, OH, 1829), 4–5 and 7. 15. Ibid., 5 and 22. 16. Prossimo’s Experience, 12. 17. Western Examiner, January 15, 1834. 18. Free Enquirer, August 5, 1829. 19. Free Enquirer, August 28, 1830; William Carver, Select Pieces in Prose and Verse on Various Subjects (New York, 1834), 14–15; and Mehitable Hunt to Elisha Cranson, December 15, 1842, Cranson Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 20. Free Enquirer, August 28, 1830. 21. On evangelical rejections of predestination, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 170–89; for Finney’s emphasis on “natural ability,” see Allen C. Guelzo, “Oberlin Perfectionism and Its Edwardsian Origins, 1835–1870,” in Stephen J. Stein, ed., Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 163–67; and on the Arminian doctrine of “prevenient grace,” see E. Brooks Holifield,

Notes to Pages 186–194

275

Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 264 and Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 335. 22. Correspondent, April 5, 1828, and April 26, 1828. 23. Correspondent, April 26, 1828, and Hannah Syng Bunting to Mary Ann Walker, October 17, 1830 in Memoir, Diary, and Letters of Miss. Hannah Syng Bunting, of Philadelphia, ed. T. Merritt (New York, 1837), 144. 24. Correspondent, April 26, 1828, and Bunting to Walker, October 17, 1830, 144. 25. Free Enquirer, August 5, 1829, emphasis original, and Prossimo’s Experience, 11. 26. Free Enquirer, February 2, 1833. 27. On the 1828 New York celebration, see the Correspondent, February 2, 1828. On the 1832 New York celebration, see New Hampshire Sentinel, February 10, 1832. 28. On Amsden, see Charter and Directory of the City of Rochester (Rochester, 1834), n.p. The urban, mechanic-centered, northern, and Democratic-leaning nature of American free enquiry during the 1830s, at least as it existed only in New York City and was led by Owen and Wright, is documented in Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 153–57. For the religious culture of urban artisans in the decades before 1830, see Ronald Schultz, “God and Workingmen: Popular Religion and the Formation of Philadelphia’s Working Class, 1790–1830,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Religion in a Revolutionary Age (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 125–55; on Democratic land reform and the free enquirer George Henry Evans, see Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824– 1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 58–62. 29. Free Enquirer, February 8, 1835, and March 8, 1835. See Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1–2, for a description of other festivities at a New York debtors’ prison in 1800. 30. Correspondent, February 21, 1829. On Rochester, Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 95–115; on Oneida County, Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 92–96; on Finney, see Keith Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney, 1792–1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987) and Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996); and on the connection between Finney and urban revivalism, see James D. Bratt, “Religious Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 1 (2004): 69–70. Rhodes, Oration, 13. 31. Free enquirers were clearly engaged in the construction of what Michael Kammen refers to as “alternative memories” that depicted an aspect of the past in ways that justified contemporary political or cultural concerns. See Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York:

276

Notes to Pages 195–198

Knopf, 1991), 9–10. The political and cultural implications of remembering the Revolution during the 1830s are discussed in Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 143–54. Frances Wright, Address, Containing A Review of the Times, As First Delivered In The Hall of Science, New-York On Sunday, May 9, 1830 (New York, 1830), 12–13. 32. New York celebration: An Oration Delivered In Tammany Hall, In Commemoration Of The Birthday Of Thomas Paine (New York, 1832), 24 and 29. The events of the celebration were printed for distribution at the request of the society’s Committee of Arrangements. This celebration’s vice president was the ubiquitous Benjamin Offen. The account of the celebration was also carried in the New York Daily Sentinel, February 2, 1832. Boston celebration: Boston Investigator, February 7 and 14, 1834. On Kneeland, see Roderick S. French, “Liberation From Man and God in Boston: Abner Kneeland’s Free-Thought Campaign, 1830–1839,” American Quarterly 32, no. 2 (1980): 209–25. For other celebrations where Paine’s status as a founder was declared and the American Revolution claimed as an event in the struggle to separate religion from politics, see the Correspondent, February 2, 1828, for a New York City celebration and the Free Enquirer, February 22, 1835, for a Buffalo, New York, celebration. 33. An Oration, Delivered Before The Society Of Moral Philanthropists, At The Celebration Of The Ninety-Sixth Anniversary Of The Birth Day Of The Hon. Thomas Paine, 12–13; Boston Investigator, February 8, 1833; and Free Enquirer, March 8, 1835. 34. The relationship between early national laborers and evangelicalism is a historiographically fraught subject. For two alternative views, see Johnson, Shopkeeper’s Millennium, who developed a “social control” argument, and William R. Sutton, Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), who argues for evangelicalism’s appeal among antebellum artisans. 35. Free Enquirer, March 8, 1835. On women’s access to public life in the early United States despite prohibitions on their participation in formal, electoral politics, see, among others, Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 36. Free Enquirer, March 1–15, 1835. Russel Canfield, The Besom of Truth; or A brief reply to the question “Is the resurrection of Christ from the dead so taught in the Bible as to be a subject of rational belief?” (Boston, 1837) and Practical Physiology: being a synopsis of lectures on sexual physiology, including intermarriage, organization, intercourse, and their general and particular phenomena (Philadelphia, 1850). 37. Farmer’s Cabinet, March 3, 1837. 38. For accounts of the family disruptions caused by evangelicalism in very different regions, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), esp. 117–61, and

Notes to Pages 199–205

277

Eric Baldwin, “ ‘The Devil Begins to Roar’: Opposition to Early Methodists in New England,” Church History 75 (2006): 119. 39. Free Enquirer, April 1, 1829. 40. Free Enquirer, March 8, 1835. On the Salubria celebration, see Berkshire County Whig, April 14, 1842. The author of the piece on Salubria mistakenly located it in Wisconsin. Abner Kneeland formed Salubria as a communal venture in 1839. On Salubria, see Margaret Atherton Bonney, “The Salubria Story,” Palimpsest 56, no. 2 (1975): 34–45. Henry M. Lion’s advertisement, see Comet, July 21, 1833. Free Enquirer, February 9, 1833. For a study of how women in the early republic pursued political power through rather than against dominant gender constructions, see Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). Chapter 7 1. Robert L. Jennings’s July Fourth oration appeared in the Correspondent, July 7, 1827. On Jennings’s Scottish origins and his connection to New York free thinkers, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 153. Ezra Stiles Ely, “The Duty of Christian Freemen to Elect Christian Rulers,” in Joseph L. Blau, ed., American Philosophic Addresses, 1700–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 558–59. 2. Correspondent, July 7, 1827; Ely, “Duty of Christian Freemen,” 558–59. On the theological underpinnings of Ely’s political views, see Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 123–24. 3. H. W. Warner, An Inquiry Into the Moral and Religious Character of the American Government (New York, 1838), 10–12, emphasis original. 4. Changing levels of church adherence and its implications are summarized in Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the America People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 282–88. For a succinct statement regarding free thought and partisan alignment, see Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 192–97. 5. On the American Bible Society and the 1829 pronouncement, see Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 118–20. On the volume of Bibles distributed by the American Bible Society in 1829–30, see Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 51. On the Mississippi Valley Plan, see David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 85–86. 6. This description comes from Nord, Faith in Reading, 85.

278

Notes to Pages 206–213

7. Religious Messenger, August 6, 1831. 8. Boston Evening Gazette, reprinted in Liberal Extracts, February 1830 and Lyman Beecher, Lectures on Scepticism (Cincinnati, 1835), 74–75. 9. For an intellectual history of “priestcraft,” see Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 77–84. Correspondent, July 28, 1827. 10. Correspondent, June 16, 1827; Free Enquirer, September 4, 1830; and Free Enquirer, January 19, 1834. 11. On Finney, see Keith Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney, 1792–1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987) and Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996). On Finney and urban revivalism, see James D. Bratt, “Religious Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 1 (2004): 69–70. 12. Wright’s article appeared in the Free Enquirer, May 22, 1830. The assessment from the Northampton Courier was reprinted in the Free Enquirer, December 3, 1831. 13. On the Hall of Science, see Free Enquirer, November 12, 1828, June 24, 1829, and November 5, 1831; Frances Wright, Introductory Address, Delivered by Frances Wright, at the Opening of the Hall of Science, New York, on Sunday, April 26, 1829 (New York, 1829); and Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 511. 14. For an account of the Free Press Association’s growing popularity, see the Correspondent, October 20, 1827. The New York Observer published the critical description of Association meetings, reprinted in the Salem Gazette, October 12, 1827. Several New England newspapers reprinted the Observer article in October 1827. 15. Houston’s lecture appeared in the Correspondent, March 10–24, 1827; “On the influence of the invisible world over the visible,” Correspondent, April 14–21, 1827; and Fay’s lecture in the Correspondent, January 26, 1828. 16. Correspondent, February 29, 1828; and Fay’s address was reprinted in the Correspondent, April 5 and April 12, 1828. 17. Debates at the Society of Free Enquirers were announced in Free Enquirer; see January 7 and May 6, 1829. 18. Correspondent, June 21, 1828, and June 6, 1829. For colporteur reports, see Mark S. Schantz, “Religious Tracts, Evangelical Reform, and the Market Revolution in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 17, no. 3 (1997): 429. 19. On The Philosophical Library Association, see Free Enquirer, December 22, 1832; on the Philosophical Circulating Library and Reading Room, see Free Enquirer, July 29, 1833; and on the New York Philosophical Library, see Free Enquirer, April 5, 1835. Information on the Free Enquirers’ Family Library comes from its Prospectus, included in an edition of Thomas Herttell, Rights of Conscience Defended, In a Speech of Thomas Herttell, Esq. (New York: G. W. and A. J. Matsell, 1835) and the Rhode Island Republican, October 14, 1835. The paper’s editor, Charles B. Peckham, sold

Notes to Pages 213–220

279

installments from the library at his office in Newport. In the 1840s George Matsell turned his attention from peddling works on free enquiry to law enforcement by leading efforts to modernize New York’s police. On Wright and Owen’s efforts, see Free Enquirer, April 4, 1831. 20. Lists of agents for each paper appear in the Correspondent, July 18, 1829, and the Free Enquirer, September 17, 1831. Houston arranged to have his paper published in Philadelphia; see Correspondent, December 20, 1828. 21. On the Paterson Free Reading Society, see Correspondent, October 20, 1827. 22. On St. Louis’s Society of Free Enquirers, see Free Enquirer, January 9, 1830; on Woodstock, Vermont, see Liberal Extracts, March 1829 and February 1830; and Correspondent, April 5, 1828, and February 28, 1829. 23. Howe’s warning appeared in the New Bedford Mercury, December 19, 1834. For a list of available prints, see Free Enquirer, April 4, 1831. 24. The Manifest of Reason (New York, 1828), 95. The pocket edition of Palmer’s Principle of Nature sold for 62 cents, 13 cents less than the full-size edition, and Manifest of Reason cost only 6 cents. See Free Enquirer, April 2, 1831, and January 16, 1830. 25. “Constitution of the Free Press Association,” reprinted in the Correspondent, February 17, 1827. “A Deist,” Correspondent, March 3, 1827. 26. Brown, Word in the World, discusses the expansion of nonreligious prints after the Revolution and the renewed focus on religious printing beginning in the 1820s. On the American Tract Society, Schantz, “Religious Tracts, Evangelical Reform,” 426. 27. “A Citizen,” The Triumph of Liberal Principles, Over Legal Intolerance, As Evinced in Hudson City by the Judicial Authorities of Columbia County, NY on the 15th Day of April, 1830 (Hudson: H. Wilbur, 1830), 2–5. 28. Ibid., 6 and 13. 29. Ibid., 7–10. 30. Christian Watchman, reprinted in the Free Enquirer, February 2, 1834. 31. For concerns that revivalism was actually detrimental to religious piety, see Bratt, “Religious Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America,” and for the contribution of this theme to broader changes in American religion that were just beginning in the 1830s, see Bratt’s earlier essay, “The Reorientation of American Protestantism, 1835– 1845,” Church History 67, no. 1 (1998): 52–82. 32. On Theophilus Gates, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 176–79. Plain Truth, June 28, 1822; June 21, 1823; and March 8, 1822. 33. Lyman A. Spalding to Dr. James Lakey, March 2, 1828, folder 15, Lyman A. Spalding Papers, #522, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. On subscription numbers, see Priestcraft Unmasked (New York, NY), February 1, 1830; on the definition of priestcraft, see May 1, 1830. In this context priestcraft referred to any member of the clergy engaged in political religion, not priests of the Catholic Church. It is important to note that Universalism was distinct from free enquiry in its willingness to engage and accept aspects of Christian theology, but the

280

Notes to Pages 221–224

Universalist conception of priestcraft was wholly in line with the free enquirer’s use of the term. On Universalist theology, see E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 218–33. 34. Lorenzo Dow, History of Cosmopolite; or the Four Volumes of Lorenzo Dow’s Journals Concentrated in One (Wheeling, VA, 1849), 207. On Baptist opposition, see Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 126–27 and Wosh, Spreading the Word, 134–36. For a broader study of evangelical Christian apprehension at the blurring of religious belief with secular ideas and institutions after 1830, see Mark Y. Hanley, Beyond a Christian Commonwealth: The Protestant Quarrel with the American Republic, 1830– 1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 35. R. L. Jennings, An Address Delivered Before the First Society of Free Enquirers, in Boston, on Sunday, July 4, 1830 (Boston, 1830), 15 and Frances Wright, Address, Containing A Review of the Times, As First Delivered In The Hall of Science, New-York On Sunday, May 9, 1830 (New York, 1830), 16–17. Other works on moral reform that suggest the relationship between reform and free thought include Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978) and Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 36. Free Enquirer, July 23, 1831. On prostitution in New York City and the role of the Magdalene Society during the 1830s, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987), chap. 9, especially 172–73. 37. Warner, An Inquiry, 10–12. 38. “Sherlock” [Solomon Southwick], A Layman’s Apology, for the Appointment of Clerical Chaplains by the Legislature of the State of New-York (Albany: Hoffman and White, 1834), xxvii. On Southwick’s political career, see Jabez D. Hammond, The History of Political Parties in the State of New York, vol. 1, 4th ed. (Buffalo, 1850). 39. On “non-constitutional” citizenship in the nineteenth century, see William J. Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Meg Jacobs et al., eds., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 85–119. Novak, 94, argues that the relationship between the individual and the federal state in nineteenthcentury America was “but the last form of membership in a continuum of public functions and civil associations.” 40. William Novak has done significant work to clarify the relationship between civil society and the state in the United States. According to Novak, laws in the early republic gave voluntary associations “the ability to enact rules and regulations binding individual members of the association for the good of the whole.” See “The American Law of Association: The Legal-Political Construction of Civil Society,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (2001): 172–74, and 180. For Novak’s exploration of American state power as “infrastructural,” as operating through incorporation and

Notes to Pages 225–231

281

local self-government, among other ways, see Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): esp. 767. This work informs my discussion in this and the following paragraphs. 41. Salem Gazette, March 16, 1832. 42. The Constitution of the First Society of Free Enquirers, in the City of Boston (1830), n.p. 43. Free Enquirer, March 8, 1835. On Amsden, see Charter and Directory of the City of Rochester (Rochester, 1834). Lyman Beecher, The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints. A Sermon delivered at Worcester, Mass. Oct. 15, 1823 (Boston, 1823), 33. The advent of Christian citizenship reached across denominational lines in the 1820s and 1830s. See Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 22–30 and Jonathan D. Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 168–84. 44. Free Enquirer, April 13, 1833. 45. Free Enquirer, February 20, 1830. Rhode Island Republican, reprinted in the Western Examiner, May 15, 1834. 46. Free Enquirer, July 20, 1833, and January 28, 1829. The “Progress of Fanaticism” was originally published in the Pennsylvania newspaper Berks and Schuylkill Journal. 47. Free Enquirer, September 14, 1833, and Herald of Reason and Common Sense, January 3, 1835. 48. This description of the Society of Moral Philanthropists comes from a history of the Society published in Free Enquirer, April 13, 1833. The Tammany Society controlled access to space in Tammany Hall. This society had strong connections to the Democratic party from the 1830s onward, but until the 1850s membership in the society included Whigs, Know-Nothings, and eventually Republicans. See Jerome Mushkat, Tammany: The Evolution of a Political Machine, 1789–1865 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971), 1–2. Although the Tammany Society granted the Moral Philanthropists permission to use the hall, this privilege may not have resulted directly from partisan support for the Moral Philanthropists or infidelity in general. On Offen, see Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 214 and Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 154–56. 49. Free Enquirer, February 16, 1833 and April 13, 1833. If this glimpse into the society’s financial status is correct, then an estimate of 2,000 attendees per “revival” may be fairly accurate. According to the March 24, 1835, issue of Free Enquirer, it cost sixpence to attend society meetings. Since sixpence was worth one-sixteenth of a dollar during this period, at least 8,000 attendees, many of whom may have been repeat visitors, would have to attend annually to cover the hall’s $500 rental fees. On the value of a New York sixpence in the 1830s, see John J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Commodity Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 2001), 87n28.

282

Notes to Pages 232–241

50. Connecticut Courant, June 15, 1835. 51. Ibid. On the concept of “the people’s welfare” and its relation to public morality, see William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 149–89. 52. New York Transcript, reprinted in Western Examiner, July 30, 1835. 53. Sarah Barringer Gordon, “Blasphemy and the Law of Religious Liberty in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 52 (2000): 693–94. Judges quoted in ibid., 685. Leonard W. Levy argues for American’s lack of interest in blasphemy following the Revolution in Blasphemy: Verbal Offenses against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 404–5, 413. 54. Journal of Commerce, reprinted in Free Enquirer, May 24, 1835. Epilogue 1. Hubbard Winslow, Christianity Applied to our Civil and Social Relations (Boston, 1835), 136, 132, and 123. 2. On Hogeboom, Boston Investigator, June 27, 1849, and Transactions of the NewYork State Agricultural Society (1849): 452–53. Daniel Walker Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North during the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 77 (1991): 1234, argues for the working of “a functional establishment of religion” under the Second Party System. 3. Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 40, 65–66, and 123–24; Howe, “Evangelical Movement,” 1233. John L. Brooke argues that Federalists and Whigs “were far more adept than their opponents in mobilizing resources to pursue a cultural, persuasive strategy, a strategy that would come to include virtually the entire institutional and publication armature of the evangelical empire”; see Brooke, “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds. Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 237. 4. American State Papers: Post Office Department, 1:211; Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 35, 100, 111–12, and 125–27; and Howe, “Evangelical Movement,” 1226–29. 5. Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835), 82; on the American Protestant League and Peck’s quote, Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 129–30; and on Nativism, Tyler G. Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oaxford University Press, 1992).

Index

Abbot, Henry, 18, 25 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, Virginia, 18, 20 Adams, Abigail, 45 Adams, John, 118, 194 Adams, Samuel, 195 Addison, Alexander, 73–74 Age of Reason, The (Paine), 129, 142, 156; circulation in the United States, 49; influence on educated men, 58; opposition to, 60–63; reaction to Paine’s book dedication, 51–52; source of religious doubt, 162, 168, 174–75, 178, 186 Age of Reason & Revelation, The (Broaddus), 58 Aiken, Solomon, 138 Albany Cenitnel (N.Y.), 76, 107–8 Alien and Sedition Acts, 79 Allen, Ethan, 194 Almanacs: and anti-deist messages, 149 ambient infidelity, 6–7 American Bible Society, 151, 204, 216; constitution of, 225 American Citizen (N.Y.), 113, 115, 134 American Protestant Union, 241 American Sunday School Union, 151, 204, 224; constitution of, 225; and Mississippi Valley Project, 205 American Tract Society, 151, 157, 159, 190, 200, 204, 216, 224; constitution of, 225; and Systematic Monthly Distribution Plan, 205 Annan, Robert, 41–42, 172–73

Anti-Catholicism, 16, 240–41; and patriotism in British Empire, 79. See also ambient infidelity Anti-Masonic Party, 223 antimissionaries: Christian, 219; and Christian-free enquirer alliances, 219 Anti-Mormonism, 16–17 antirevivalism: as source of Christian-free enquirer alliances, 220–21 Arminianism, 13 Article VI (U.S. Constitution), 18, 20; Massachusetts ratification debates, 26; North Carolina ratification debates, 25–26; state ratification debates, 24–25. See also religious tests Asbury, Francis, 84 Augusta (Ga.): tolerance for deism in, 36–37. See also Richmond Academy Aurora (Philadelphia), 105, 115 Bache, Benjamin Franklin, 42, 87 Bachler, Origen, 231 Balance, and Columbian Repository (Hudson, N.Y.), 123, 128, 136 Ballston Spa Gazette (N.Y.), 153 Baltimore Patriot, 233 Bangs, Nathan, 143–45 Baptists, 106, 152, 202, 219; Danbury, CT, 111–12; ecclesiology, 84; Freewill, 84; Primitive, 219 Barlow, Joel, 66, 91 Bayard, John, 22 Beecher, Lyman, 140, 146–47, 206, 226, 241 Belknap, Jeremy, 49, 60–63

284

Index

Bible, 4–5; and infidel conversion, 179. See also biblical criticism; Palmer, Elihu biblical criticism, 93–94 Bishop, Abraham, 103–5, 125 Blake, Francis, 135 blasphemy, 234–35 Boston Gazette, 125 Boston Investigator, 238 Boudinot, Elias, 53, 55–56 Boyle, Robert, 172 Bradford, Alden, 148–49 Bradford, Ebenezer, 53–54, 58 Bradford, Susan, 56 Briggs, George N., 239 Briggs, Samuel Ogden, 164, 180 Broaddus, Andrew, 53–54, 58 Brown, John, 240 Bunting, Hannah Syng, 188 Burke, Edmund, 46 Burr, Aaron, 130 Campbell, Alexander, 150 Canfield, Russel, 197 Cannon, James, 21 Carlile, Richard, 90 Carver, William, 72, 161–62, 184 Catholicism, 20, 22, 29, 44, 79 Champollion, Jean- François, 166–67 Channing, William Ellery, 148 Cheetham, James, 113, 115, 134, 135 Chemin-Depontés, J. B., 67 Chiswell, Robert, 213 Christian Watchman (Boston), 158, 164, 218 church adherence, 204 church and state, separation of, 111 citizenship, 78, 223–24; Congregationalist concepts of, 85–87; and deistic free enquiry, 226; and evangelical reform, 226; expatriation and naturalization, 79– 80; nature of allegiance, 80; and religion, 77–78; and religious choice, 83–84; and religious obligation, 83; as source of deist-evangelical alliance, 105–7. See also expatriation citizenship, Christian, 239 citizenship, deist, 78, 87, 97–98; and Republicans, 107, 116–17. See also Driscol, Denis; Dunlap, William; Palmer, Elihu; Smith, Elihu Hubbard civil society: and conflicts between free

enquirers and evangelical reformers, 208; in the early United States, 15–16; and established religious opinions, 225; and evangelicalism, 146–47; evangelical reformers in, 203, 224; free enquirers in, 203; infidel controversies in, 15–16; and organized free enquiry, 224; political power of religious opinions in, 222; and religious intolerance, 234; and religious knowledge, 238; and the state, 225; voluntary associations in, 224 Claiborne, William, 76 Clinton, DeWitt, 113, 129, 130 Clinton, George, 116, 130 Cobbett, William, 114 Cole, John, 121, 124, 126 Coleman, William: background, 123; publicizes information about the Columbian Illuminati, 132–35 colleges, efforts to limit deism’s influence at, 57–58 Colvin, John B., 137 Common Sense (Paine), 52 Condorcet, Marquis de, 46, 66, 91, 97 Congregationalists, 83, 104, 152, 202, 205; covenant theology, 85; opposition to itinerants, 85 Connecticut Courant, 123 conscience, freedom of, 83; as source of disbelief, 152 consent, political: deist understandings of, 72–73; and political legitimacy, 47–49; as source of political legitimacy and religious truth, 62. See also generation; Locke, John Constable, Daniel, 216 Constitution (U.S.), 111–12 conversion, Christian, 176–177 conversion, infidel: arduousness of, 182; and Bible reading, 179; and commonalities with Christian conversion, 176–79; criticisms of, 184–86; and free will, 183–84; political implications of, 203; Prossimo’s Experience, 171; recorded in newspapers, 175–76; sincerity of, 182–84; and social improvement, 188; and source of conflict between free enquirers and evangelicals, 190; sources of, 177; in whole communities, 186–88; and women, 180–81

Index Conversion of a Deist (tract), 158 Conversion of an Aged Deist: A Narrative of Facts (tract), 160–61 converts, infidel, 7–8, 36–37, 162–64, 179–84, 198–99, 238 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 51 Cooper, Thomas, 212 Coram, Robert, 87 Correspondent (N.Y.), 186, 188, 207, 208, 212, 223; circulation, 213–14; purpose and origin, 175 cosmopolitanism, 101; Christian, 104–5; defined, 80; and evangelical newspapers, 165–66; and expatriation, 81; opponents of, 80–81, 85; proponents of, 80. See also Dunlap, William; Palmer, Elihu; Smith, Elihu Hubbard Coxe, Tench, 116 Crookes, John, 88, 92 Croswell, Harry, 123, 128, 136 Cutler, James, 125 Daggett, David, 139–40 Dallas, Alexander, 116 Darwin, Erasmus, 156 Davis, Augustine, 126, 127 dedications, book: significance of in early modern world, 51. See also The Age of Reason (Paine) deism, 4–5; and education, 56–57. See also deists deist associations: First Society of Free Enquirers (Boston), 162, 198, 221; First Society of Moral Philanthropists (Providence, R.I.), 195; Free Press Association (New York), 210–11; Philosophical Library Association (New York), 210; Society of Free Enquirers (St. Louis), 214; Society of Moral Philanthropists (New York), 192, 229–31; Universal Society (Philadelphia), 31. See also names of individual associations deistic newspapers (by place of publication): Boston, 9, 238; New York, 9, 175; Philadelphia, 9; Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 9, 228–29; St. Louis, 9, 14. See also Boston Investigator; Correspondent (N.Y.); Free Enquirer (N.Y.); Herald of Reason and Common Sense (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.);

285

Temple of Reason (N.Y./Philadelphia); Western Examiner (St. Louis) deists: beliefs, 4–5, 8; portrayed in evangelical press, 154–55 Democratic Party, 192, 236; and free enquiry, 239; and infidelity, 203–4; and religion, 239 Democratic Republican, or, Anti-Aristocrat (Baltimore), 137 Dennie, Joseph, 122–24 Denniston, David, 113, 115, 129, 134; background, 99; concept of citizenship, 101; controversial figure in Newburgh, N.Y., 99–102; deism of, 99; editor of the Mirror, 99–100; support for Elihu Plamer, 99. See also Newburgh controversy DeWitt, Thomas, 207 d’Holbach, Baron, 64 Directory, 65–66. See also French Revolution; Theophilanthropy Doddridge, Philip, 147 Doggett, Simeon, 55 Dow, Lorenzo, 84, 220 Drinker, Elizabeth Sandwith, 74 Driscol, Denis, 5–6, 73, 111–12; background, 112–13; challenges Federalist opposition strategy, 137; editorial career in the U.S., 113, 116; lecture before Society of Theophilanthropists (Philadelphia), 71; place among Philadelphia Republicans, 115–16; political alliances with nondeists, 117; as portrayed by Federalist editors, 130; as Republican editor, 115– 17; support for Republicans, 107, 112; use of partisanship to promote deism, 114–18; virtues of deist citizenship, 87–88, 117. See also Temple of Reason (N.Y./Philadelphia) Duane, William, 105, 114, 115 Dunlap, William, 98; deistic cosmopolitanism of, 97 Dutch Reformed Church, 205 Dwight, Nathaniel, 70 Dwight, Timothy, 105 Eacker, George, 106 Ecce Homo (d’Holbach), 186 Eckley, Joseph, 85–86 education, and deism, 56–57. See also colleges

286

Index

Ely, Ezra Stiles, 170, 184, 202, 226 Emerson, Romanus, 163 Episcopalians, 205 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 47 evangelicalism: in coalition with deism, 118; expanded efforts, 204–5; growth of, 143; and infidelity as a social problem, 147; and urban life, 205–6 Evans, George Henry, 214 Evening Post (N.Y.), 121. See also Coleman, William expatriation, 76, 80–83; and infidelity, 107. See also cosmopolitanism Fay, Henry A., 211 Federal Gazette, and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, 124 Federalist (Trenton), 121, 125, 136 Federalist Party, 97, 104; concept of citizenship, 103; declining power of, 136; in New York, 134; as opposition party after 1800, 119–21; opposition strategy after 1800, 127–28; opposition strategy undermined faith, 139–40 Federalist Party, editors: focus on Republican infidelity, 122–26, 128–30 Federalist Party, newspapers: focus on Republican infidelity, 121–22, 124, 130; use of as opposition party, 121 Fellows, John, 36, 88–90, 91, 97–98 Fenno, John, 38–39 Finley, Ebenezer L., 231–35 Finney, Charles Grandison, 185, 193, 207 First Amendment, 18, 20, 111 First Society of Free Enquirers (Boston), 162, 163, 198, 221, 224; constitution of, 225–26 First Society of Moral Philanthropists (Providence, R.I.), 195 Fisk, Theophilus, 220 Fitch, John, 31; background, 33; forms Universal Society, 33 Foster, John, 6–7, 53, 56, 85 Foster, John (Universalist minister), 91 Fourgeret de Montbron, Louis-Charles, 80 Franklin, Benjamin, 21, 194 Free Enquirer (N.Y.), 14, 178, 180, 190, 207, 208, 212, 223, 228; circulation, 9, 213– 14; purpose and origin of, 175

Free Enquirers Family Association, 8 Free Enquirers’ Family Library, 212–13 free enquiry, deistic: and alliances with Christians, 219, 220–21; appeal of, 171–72; and citizenship, 226; and civil society, 224; defined, 174; and Democratic Party, 239; in early modern usage, 172; and free will, 185–86; and infidel conversions, 175–76; and larger intellectual trends, 173–74; organized, 208–11, 218; and origins as a movement, 174; and Protestantism, 184; and Quakers, 176; as reaction against evangelicalism, 200; and religious tolerance, 189–90; spread of organized, 213; and women, 197–98 Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, A (Boyle), 172 Free Press Association (New York), 202, 204, 210–11; formed to challenge evangelical press, 215; and Free Press Tract Fund, 211–12 Free Reading Society (Paterson, N.J.), 213 Free Reading Society (Woodstock, Vt.), 214 free will, 83, 152, 185; deistic implications of, 152; and free enquiry, 185–86; and infidel conversion, 183–84; and public religious debates, 150 Frelinghuysen, Theodore, 239 French Revolution, 78; establishment of the Directory, 65; and spread of deism in the U.S., 64. See also Directory; Theophilanthropy; Freneau, Philip, 38, 91, 92 Friendly Club. See Dunlap, William; Smith, Elihu Hubbard Full Exposition of the Clintonian Faction, and the Society of the Columbian Illuminati, A (Wood), 130. See also Illuminati, Columbian Gales, Joseph, 114 Gallatin, Albert, 135 Gardner, Christina, 162, 163–64, 198–99 Gates, Horatio, 92, 97–98, 194 Gates, Theophilus, 219 Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia, Pa.), 38 Geddes, Alexander, 93 General Advertiser (Philadelphia, Pa.), 42

Index generation, as a political concept, 46–47 Gibbon, Edward, 59, 157, 167 Gilbert, Amos, 175 Godineau, Henri François, 87 Godwin, William, 8, 91, 97, 127, 156 Grammars/Readers: and anti-deist messages, 149–50 Granger, Gideon, 129 Hall of Science (N.Y.), 7–8, 208–10 Hamilton, Alexander, 121, 123 Haskell, Nahum, 214 Haüy, Valentin, 67 Hawley, William C., 162, 163 Hedges, Jonathan, 99 Hedges, Phineas, 99 Helmbold, George, Jr., 127–28 Hening, William Waller, 60 Herald of Reason and Common Sense (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.), 228–29 Heresy, 4–5. See also infidelity Hewes, John, 124 history: deistic interpretations of, 66; eighteenth-century concepts of, 59–60; post-Revolutionary-era historiography, 60; Thomas Paine’s understanding of, 59 Hobart, Benjamin, 137 Hogeboom, Tobias, 238 Holt, Charles, 123 Home, Henry (Lord Kames), 59 Houston, George, 210–11, 216, 231; edits Correspondent, 175 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 214 Hoyt, Nathan, 160–61 Hudson (N.Y.), infidel controversy in, 216–18 Hume, David, 59, 156–57, 167, 177 Hunter, Robert, 91–92 Hurtin, John G., 100 I am an Infidel! (tract), 157 Illuminati, Columbian: and Federalist opposition strategy after 1800, 136; and national Federalist press, 136–37; partisan conflict surrounding, 134–37; publicized by William Coleman, 132; and Republican infidelity, 131–32 Illuminati, European, 130, 131 infidel controversies, 3–4; defined, 6;

287

geographic scope, 16; intellectual sources of, 12–14; and patriotism, 108; relationship to politics, 14–16. See also civil society infidel controversies (by location and date): Hudson, N.Y. (1830), 216–18; Mecklenburg County, N.C. (1792–1797), 63–64; New York (1802–1803), 130–35; New York (1835), 231–35; Newburgh, N.Y. (1797–1798), 98–102; Pennsylvania (1809), 127–28; Philadelphia (1792), 31–33, 38–44 infidel controversies, partisan, 111, 134–37; consequences of, 140–41; in New York, 130–35; in Pennsylvania, 127–28; role of persuasion in, 140–41; source of religious tolerance, 138–39 infidelity: as distinct from heresy in early modern Europe, 4; polemic uses of the term, 5–6; as source of religious controversy, 3–4; term in antebellum cultural debates, 240; term in constitutional debates, 29–31; traditional meaning of in Christian usage, 3; understood as deism in England, 5. See also Islam; Judaism infidelity, Republican, as focus of Federalist editors, 122–24 Infidel Reclaimed; or, The Useful Tracts, 158 Iredell, James, 25–26 Islam, 4, 79 itinerants/itinerancy: critiques of, 84–85; Methodists, 84. See also Asbury, Francis Jackson, Andrew, 223, 238 Jackson, James, 116 Jarvis, Charles, 26 Jefferson, Thomas, 2, 66, 92, 106, 124, 131, 173, 194, 223, 238; on generational rights, 46–47; and letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, 111–12; religious views, 111 Jennings, Robert L., 192, 202, 221 Jew Bill (England), 28 Johnson, Richard M., 223, 239 Johnston, Charles, 25 Johnston, John, 98 Judaism, 4, 20, 29, 44, 79 Judson, Adnoriam, 168 Judson, Emily Chubbuck, 167–68

288

Index

Keatinge, Henry S., 148 Kinnersly, Ebenezer, 13 Kneeland, Abner, 192, 194, 195 Know-Nothing Party, 241 La Révellière-Lépeaux, Louis-Marie de, 67 Lakey, James, 220 Lathrop, John, 86–87 Leib, Michael, 115 Leonard, Samuel, 139 Leslie, Betsey, 158 Leslie, Charles, 147 Liberal Extracts (Woodstock, Vt.), 214 Lincoln, Levi, 124 lived deism: defined, 6, 8; relationship with ambient infidelity, 9. See also obituaries, deist Locke, John, 51, 55; theory of political consent, 47–48 Lovejoy, Elijah P., 182, 240 Madison, James, 106 Maine Missionary Society, 149 Manifest of Reason, The, 214–15 March, Angier, 124–25 Marsden, Samuel, 166 Martin, Luther, 25, 107 Massachusetts Historical Society, 60 Massachusetts Spy, 128 Matlack, Timothy, 21 McKean, Thomas, 116 Mecklenburg County (N.C), 63–64, 98 Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (Madison), 106 Methodists, 152, 202, 219; cosmopolitanism of, 84; denominational growth, 144; understandings of their own history, 144 Middleton, Conyers, 172 Millar, John, 60 Mirror (Newburgh, N.Y.). See Denniston, David missionaries. See antimissionaries Montgomery (N.Y.). See Newburgh Controversy Morse, Jedidiah, 36, 56, 105 National Aegis (Worcester, Mass.), 135 National Gazette (Philadelphia, Pa.), 38 Newark Tract Society, 161 Newburgh (N.Y.): reputation for infidelity,

99; town history, 98 Newburgh Controversy: causes and issues, 99–100; and competing views of patriotic citizenship, 100–101 New England Tract Society, 151 New Harmony Gazette (Ind.), 175 newspapers, evangelical: and cosmopolitanism, 165–66; and ecumenical cooperation, 154; portrayal of infidelity, 154; purpose of, 164–65. See also Religious Messenger (Norwich, Conn.) New York City: conflicts between free enquirers and evangelical reformers in, 208 New York Gazette, 128 New York Magdalene Society, 221–22 New York Philosophical Library, 212 New York Religious Tract Society, 159 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 2, 173 obituaries, deist, 162–64 Offen, Benjamin, 191, 229, 233 Ogden, John C., 103–5 Ogden, Uzal, 64–65 Orange County (N.Y.). See Newburgh (N.Y.) Owen, Robert, 150 Owen, Robert Dale, 14, 188, 213, 221–22; and conversion to infidelity, 180, 183; edits Free Enquirer, 175 Paine, Thomas, 21, 91, 129, 131, 156–57, 167, 177; remembered as a patriot, 194. See also Age of Reason, The; Thomas Paine Birthday Commemorations Palmer, Elihu, 31, 72, 129, 131, 142, 156–57, 162; in Augusta, Ga., 36–37; background, 36; blindness, 88–90; causes infidel controversy in Philadelphia, 38–39; concept of religious freedom, 42–43; and cosmopolitanism, 93–96; critique of Bible, 94; death, 91; defends The Age of Reason, 90; deistic cosmopolitanism, 96; early career in Philadelphia, 37; intellectual influences, 91; involvement with Philadelphia Universalists, 37–41; life after 1796, 90–98; member of Thesitical Society of New York, 72; opposition to, 39–43;

Index orations, 90–91; in Sheffield, Mass., 38; support for French Revolution, 96; support for Republicans, 107; supporters of, 91–92. Publications: An Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement of the Human Species, 92, 96, 97; The Examiners Examined: Being a Defence of the Age of Reason, 90, 94; Original Sin, Atonement, Faith, &c. A Christmas Discourse Delivered in NewYork, December 1798, 91; Principles of Nature, 90, 92, 108; Prospect; or, View of the Moral World, 90. See also individual publications Palmer, Mary (wife of Elihu Palmer), 91 Parsons, Theophilus, 26 partisanship: and religious opinions, 103 patriotism, 78; Congregationalist concepts of, 86–87; and infidel controversies, 108; and religious expression, 102; and religious toleration, 78. See also expatriation Peck, George, 142–45, 241 Pennsylvania Constitution (1776), 20–21; controversy surrounding religious oath, 21–24, 28–29 People v. Ruggles, 234 Petrikin, William, 28, 39 Pew, Reuben, 164 Philadelphia Mission, 206 Philosophical Circulating Library and Reading Room (N.Y.), 212 Philosophical Library Association (N.Y.), 210, 212 Pinckney, Charles, 81 Plain Truth (Canandaigua, N.Y.), 219–20 political irreligion: defined, 203 Political Justice (Godwin), 127 political religion: defined, 203 Polk, Ezekiel, 64 Port Folio (Philadelphia), 123 postmillennialism, 152, 238 predestination, 13 Prentiss, Charles, 121, 122, 124, 126 Presbyterian, Dutch, 207 Presbyterians, 152, 202, 205 press, Christian, critiques of deism in, 147–49 press, deistic, 211–13; compared to evangelical press, 215–16; opposition to,

289

206, 214, 216; and pocket-size editions, 214–15 press, evangelical: compared to deistic press, 215–16; and ecumenical cooperation, 152–53; emphasis on truth, 154; expansion of, 151, 204–6; and free will, 152; infidelity a subject of, 150–51; and methods for challenging deism, 147–50; political implications of, 203; portrayal of infidelity, 154–55; and postmillennialism, 152; role of, 151–52; train readers to challenge infidelity, 154. See also newspapers, evangelical; tracts, evangelical prevenient grace, 185 Price, Noah, 160–61 priestcraft, 206–7; opposition to, 220 Priestcraft Exposed and Primitive Christianity Defended (Lockport, N.Y.), 220 Priestcraft Unmasked (N.Y.), 220 Priestly, Joseph, 67 Principles of Nature (Palmer), 129, 186; pocket-size edition, 214 Prospect; or, View of the Moral World (Palmer), 99, 128; duration and circulation, 90 Protestantism: and patriotism in British Empire, 78–79 public sphere, 15 Quakers, 176, 219 Quebec Act, 24 Quincy, Josiah, 119–21 Ramsey, David, 60 Rannie, John, 13 reform, evangelical: and citizenship, 226; and civil society, 224; contrary to republican government, 228 religious controversy: implications of in U.S., 241; intellectual implications, 2–3; political implications, 2–3, 240; sources of, 2. See also civil society; public sphere religious debates, public, 150 religious disestablishment, 10, 237; in Connecticut, 140, 146; in Massachusetts, 11; in North Carolina, 11 religious intolerance, and civil society, 234 religious knowledge, defined, 2 religious liberty, defined, 19

290

Index

religious liberty, expansions of, 29; to include deism, 117; relationship to religious intolerance, 11; relationship to religious toleration, 19; state constitutions, 19–20 Religious Messenger (Norwich, Conn.), 166; and anti-deist content, 166–67; purpose of, 165 religious tests, 26–27; Anti-Federalist views, 27–28; Federalist views, 27; for federal office, 20. See also Article VI (U.S. Constitution) Religious Tolerance: and deism, 189–90; defined, 10–11; distinct from religious toleration, 10–11, 20 Religious Toleration: defined, 11, 19; distinct from religious tolerance, 10–11, 20; relationship to religious liberty, 19 Religious Tract Society of Philadelphia, 158 Republican infidelity: Denis Driscol as symbol of, 130; Temple of Reason symbol of, 124–26, 129 Republican; or, Anti-Democrat (Baltimore), 121, 122, 128 Republicans: characterized as infidel party, 124–26; concept of citizenship, 103, 117; criticisms of Federalist opposition strategy, 137–38; deist/evangelical coalition within, 118; and deist faction within, 112; and deist support for, 107; in New York, 113, 130, 134, 135; in Philadelphia, 115–16; religion and support for in New England, 103–5. See also Republican infidelity revivalism: Christian opponents of, 218–19. See also anti-revivalism Richmond Academy, 36. See also Augusta (Ga.) Ridge, Major, 158 Ritchie, Thomas, 127 Roberts, George, 84 Robinson, Henry D., 175, 212 Root, Erastus, 57 Ross, James, 1, 3, 10, 127 Ross, Robert, 93 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 51, 80, 156, 167 Ruins; or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires (Comte de Volney), 66, 186 Rush, Benjamin, 21, 27, 56, 58–59, 88, 195 Russell, John, 125

sabbatarianism, 220, 239 Schute, David, 26 Scottish Moral Sense Philosophy, 55 Selden, Asa, 163, 179 Sherman, George, 125 Short and Easy Method with the Deists, A (Leslie), 147 Smith, Adam, 60 Smith, Elias, 83 Smith, Elihu Hubbard, 98, 99; deistic cosmopolitanism, 97 Smith, Joseph, 16, 220 Smith, Melancton, 28 Snyder, Simon, 127 Society for the Propagation of the Principles of Voltaire and Rousseau (Mecklenburg County, N.C.), 64 Society of Free Enquirers (N.Y.), 210, 229; established, 211. Society of Free Enquirers (St. Louis), 214 Society of Moral Philanthropists (New York), 192, 210; attendance, 231; and civil society, 233–34; controversy surrounding, 231–35; formation of, 229; monthly revivals, 231; purpose of, 229–31. Society of Theophilanthropists (Paris), 99 Society of Theophilanthropists (Philadelphia), 70–71 sola scriptura, 184 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 47 Southwick, Solomon, 223 Spalding, Lyman, 219, 220 Stiles, Ezra, 18–19, 58 Stillwell, Samuel, 61, 63 Stone, Barton, 220 Sunday mail delivery, opposition to, 3. See also sabbatarianism Supreme Court, U.S., 80–81 Swanwick, John, 18 System of Nature, The (d’Holbach), 212 Tammany Hall, 229; venue for Thomas Paine Birthday Commemorations, 192 Tappan, Arthur, 205, 221, 235 Tappan, Lewis, 205 Temple of Reason (N.Y./Philadelphia), 9; circulation and publication, 114; established, 111, 113; as Federalist

Index symbol of Republican infidelity, 124–26; partisan position, 112, 114–15; place in the Republican press, 115–17; under the editorship of John Lithgow, 114, 116. See also Driscol, Denis Theistical Society of New York, 71–72 Theophilanthropic Society (Baltimore), 71 Theophilanthropy, 45; awareness of in the U.S., 69–70; beliefs and practices, 69; created by the Directory, 67–69; defined, 67; Manual of the Theophilanthropes, 69; opposition to in the U.S., 73–74 Theophilanthropy: or, the Spirit of Genuine Religion (pamphlet), 70 Thomas, Isaiah, 128 Thomas Paine Birthday Commemorations, 9, 190, 226; female participants, 198–200; locations, 192; male participants, 196; and memory of the American Revolution, 194–96; at New York City’s debtors’ prison, 192; origins of, 191–92; Paine remembered as a patriot, 194–95; participants in, 191; and political movements, 192; proceedings, 191; as public venue for infidel converts, 191; and references to women, 196–97; and religious controversies, 192–94 Thompson, Edward, 216 Thompson, Thomas, 7–8, 10 Thorburn, Grant, 161–62 Time Piece (N.Y.), 91–92 Tindal, Matthew, 102 Torrey, Jesse, 228 tracts, evangelical: infidelity and conversion, 155–56, 160–61; and moral sources of infidelity, 159–60; portrayal of infidelity, 153–54, 155; and social sources of infidelity, 156–61 Tracy, Uriah, 81 Transcendentalism, 174 Underhill, Samuel, 181–82 Universalists, 41–42, 219, 220 Universal Society (Philadelphia), 37; meetings, 34–35; membership, 34; purpose, 33. See also deist associations; Fitch, John Updegraph v. Commonwealth, 234–35

291

Ursuline Convent (Charlestown, Mass.), 16 Vaill, Joseph, 148 Vinten, Thomas J., 224 Virginia Gazette, 126, 127 Voight, Henry, 33 Volney, Constantin François de Chassebœuf Comte de, 66–67, 91, 97, 156–57 Voltaire, François-Marie d’Arouet, 156, 167 voluntary associations. See civil society Wallis, James, 63–64 Warren, Mercy Otis, 60 Washington, George, 194; Farewell Address, 101; as moral exemplar, 58 Watson, Richard, 58 Webster, Noah, 56 Western Examiner (St. Louis), 14, 175, 188 Whig Party, 236; and civil society, 238; and evangelical reform, 203–4; and religion, 238–39 Whitcomb, Samuel, 168–69 White, William, 40 White, William Charles, 138–39 Williams, Elisha, 172 Williams, Nathan, 85 Wilson, Jonathan, 163 Winchester, Elhanan, 61–63 Winslow, Hubbard, 14–15, 237 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 156, 196 Women: as free enquirers, 198–99; as infidel converts, 162–64, 180–81, 198–99; and Thomas Paine Birthday Commemorations, 196–200. See also education Wood, John, 130–35 Workingmen’s Movement, 192 Wright, Frances, 188, 208, 213, 221; edits Free Enquirer, 175; and Thomas Paine Birthday Commemorations, 192, 194 Wyche, William, 94 Yellow Fever, Philadelphia, 88 Yeo, Joseph, 162 Young, Thomas, 21 Youth, meaning of in the early United States, 55–56

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

Writing this book, much like its subject, has involved belief and confidence but also doubts and skepticism. I’ll take the liberty of leaving the latter two mostly unacknowledged. The idea for this book originated in conversations with Jeff Pasley and John Wigger that sparked my excitement about the possibilities of combining political and religious history. David Hackett Fischer expressed unbounded enthusiasm for my ideas over several years. He, more than anyone else, insisted that I think about this project as a book well before it seemed like one in my own mind. This, like almost all of David’s counsel, proves ever wiser as time goes on. I also owe a tremendous debt to Jane Kamensky. She generously deployed her considerable intellect and her sharp editorial eye when reading and critiquing the earliest versions of this book. This will not surprise anyone who knows her. Yet all of this pales in comparison to advice she offered one afternoon in Cambridge that forever improved how I work. For this, I am deeply grateful. Alexis Antracoli, Lindsay Silver Cohen, Denise Damico, Rob Heinrich, Jess Lepler, Gabe Loiacono, Emily Straus, and Will Walker—known collectively as the THIs—were an ideal group of critics and they remain friends, even though our scattered professional lives don’t allow us to see each other very often. I should add that Gabe provided a thorough critique of Chapter 2 at a very crucial moment, so for this he deserves extra thanks. My comrade Simon Rabinovitch was always eager to join me in Somerville for the important intellectual work that happens over burgers and beers, a collaboration I intend to continue whenever our families visit each other. Over the years, I have had the good fortune to present my work at several venues. I offer a deep collective thank-you to my fellow panelists, wellinformed audience members, and perceptive commentators who all helped me refine my arguments at various conferences. Individuals in the last

294

Acknowledgments

group include Thomas N. Baker, Seth Cotlar, David D. Hall, Monica Najar, and Leigh Eric Schmidt. I especially want to thank the eager and helpful staff at the British Museum, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Antiquarian Society in my quest for sources and images that helped shape this book in its final form. I also thank Tammy Gaskell, editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and Harry Polkinhorn, at the San Diego State University Press, for granting me permission to use earlier published work. Speaking of editors and presses, Robert Lockhart at the University of Pennsylvania Press has been absolutely stellar. He believed in this book from the outset, and he worked tirelessly to bring it into print over a lengthy process of review and revision. The anonymous readers he recruited provided reports that any author would envy. This book is decidedly better because of their suggestions and criticisms. Also, my thanks to David Waldstreicher. He expressed confidence in this book at a critical stage and gave the final manuscript his imprimatur, an endorsement I do not take lightly. Like all authors, I would be remiss not to absolve everyone who assisted with this book of any of its shortcomings. Absolution granted and, I hope, accepted. I completed most of the work for this book before arriving at the University of Texas at Dallas; still I have benefited immensely from being part of a large and growing faculty of engaged scholars that gives real meaning to the phrase “academic community.” I must, however, mention two individuals by name. Dennis Kratz, Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at UT Dallas, provided much-appreciated support during the production of this book. In addition, R. David Edmunds has been a continuous source of always useful advice—delivered with wit and directness—about all things of concern to an academic historian. An author’s family often becomes involved in the writing process whether they want to or not. The Schlereths and the Kedls have followed my progress from the very beginning, while a wedding forced the Hollanders and extended family to become engaged spectators of my work. In every instance, my entire family has supported my progress and rooted for my success with love and cheer. Ilyssa, one participant in said wedding, met me just as I started work on this book, married me well before I finished it, and even left the comfort and seasons of Boston to set up shop in Dallas.

Acknowledgments

295

This is evidence that love is indeed blind. In so many ways I owe this book and my career to her unshakable belief in me but also to her willingness to back her confidence with hard work on my behalf. She has read and edited every word I’ve written from nearly the moment we met. She is a harsh and honest critic, but often right in her judgments, which she renders with her great sense of humor. If I had known Ilyssa only through her entertaining editorial comments in track changes, she’d have had my heart. Our daughter Hazel’s impending arrival in October 2009 forced me to finish an early draft of this book, so I thank her for helping expedite my revision process. I do fear that this book might have something to do with her habit of walking by a computer or a stack of papers and saying, “I need to work and take notes.” Let’s hope that parental love, picture books, and many trips to the park can reverse the damage I’ve caused to an impressionable and hilarious toddler. Our son Ruben arrived in September 2012, just two weeks after receiving the page proofs of this book. His involvement in this project was thus shortlived but proved essential as his impressive newborn sleep schedule allowed me to review these very words from the hospital as he and Ilyssa rested. My own parents, Ray and Sue Schlereth, have done everything possible for me to succeed in a profession that at times must seem rather peculiar to them. For their boundless love and support, in my work and my life, I dedicate this book to them out of gratitude that comes deep from my heart.