Right at the end of his life, Benjamin Franklin wrote a pamphlet giving advice to Europeans planning to come to America. He said it was a good place for those who wanted to become rich. But, he said, it was above all a haven for the industrious poor, for "nowhere else are the laboring poor so well fed, well lodged, well clothed and well paid as in the United States of America." It was a country, he concluded, where "a general happy mediocrity prevails." It is important for those who wish to understand American history to remember this point about "happy mediocrity." The historian is bound to bring out the high points and crises of the national story, to record the doings of the great, the battles, elections, epic debates, and laws pa.s.sed. But the everyday lives of simple citizens must not be ignored simply because they were uneventful. This is particularly true of America, a country specifically created by and for ordinary men and women, where the system of government was deliberately designed to interfere in their lives as little as possible. The fact that, unless we investigate closely, we hear so little about the ma.s.s of the population is itself a historical point of great importance, because it testifies by its eloquent silence to the success of the republican experiment.
Early in the 19th century, America was achieving birth-rates never before equaled in history, in terms of children reaching adulthood. The 1800 census revealed a population of 5,308,843, itself a 35 percent increase over ten years. By 1810 it had leaped to 7,239,881, up another 36.4 percent. By 1820 it was 9,638,453, close to doubling in twenty years, and of this nearly 80 percent was natural increase. As one Congressman put it: "I invite you to go to the west, and visit one of our log cabins, and number its inmates. There you will find a strong, stout youth of eighteen, with his Better Half, just commencing the first struggles of independent life. Thirty years from that time, visit them again; and instead of two, you will find in that same family twenty-two. That is what I call the American Multiplication Table."
But with the end of the world war in 1815 high American birth-rates were compounded by a great flood of immigrants. It is a historical conjunction of supreme importance that the coming of the independent American republic, and the opening up of the treasure-house of land provided by the Louisiana Purchase and the destruction of Indian power by Andrew Jackson, coincided with the beginnings of the world"s demographic revolution, which hit Europe first. Between 1750 and 1900 Europe"s population rose faster than anywhere else in the world (except North America), from 150 million to over 400 million." This, in turn, produced a huge net outflow of immigration: to South America, Russia, Australasia, Canada, South Africa, and above all the United States. The rush to America began after the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 and continued right through the autumn and winter, the immigrant ships braving gales and ice. It accelerated in 1816, which in Europe was "the year without a summer," with torrential rain and even sleet and snow continuing into July and August and wrecking harvests, sending poor and even starving people to the coast to huddle in the transports. Ezekiah Niles (1777-1839), who ran Niles"s Weekly Register from 1811 onwards, in many ways America"s best journal of record at the time, calculated that 50,000 immigrants reached America in the year, though this figure was later revised downwards. His more careful calculation for 1817, based on shipping lists (the federal government, though it took censuses, did not yet publish statistics), produced a figure of 30,000 up to the end of the main season in September. Of this half went to New York and Philadelphia, though some went straight over the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley.
No authority on either side of the Atlantic was bothered with who was going where or how, though the British limited ship-carrying capacity to one pa.s.senger to every 2 tons of registry in their own ships. The sheer freedom of movement was staggering. An Englishman, without pa.s.sport, health certificate or doc.u.mentation of any kind-without luggage for that matter-could hand over 10 at a Liverpool shipping counter and go aboard. The ship provided him with water, nothing else, and of course it might go down with all hands. But if it reached New York he could go ash.o.r.e without anyone asking him his business, and then vanish into the entrails of the new society. It was not even necessary to have 10, as the British provided free travel to Canada, whence the emigrants could b.u.m rides on coastal boats to Ma.s.sachusetts or New York. There was no control and no resentment. One of them, James Flint from Scotland, recorded in 1818: "I have never heard of another feeling than good wishes to them." In the five years up to 1820, some 100,000 people arrived in America without having to show a single bit of paper.
The first check of this inflow-the end of innocence if you like-came with the catastrophic bank crash of 1819, the first financial crisis in America"s history. Such a disaster was inevitable, granted the rate at which the country was expanding. In the years 1816-21 alone, six new states were created; in size and potential power it was like adding six new European countries. The United States was already creating for itself a reputation for ma.s.sive borrowing against its limitless future. That meant a need for large numbers of banks, and they duly sprang up, good, bad, and indifferent (mostly the last two). The Jeffersonians hated banks, as we have seen, and in 1811when the First Bank of the United States" charter expired, they controlled Congress and refused to renew it. That was foolish, because the states stepped into the vacuum thus created and happily chartered banks, whose numbers thus rose from 88 in 1811 to 208 two years later. Each state bank was allowed by the state legislature to issue bills up to three times its capital. But in practice there was no check on these issues. Hence, in good times at least, to get a charter to found a state bank was literally a license to print money. As critics like Jefferson and John Taylor claimed, a new kind of money power was coming into existence in America, which ran directly counter to the Founding Fathers" concept of an idyllic rural society based on landed property. During the War of 1812 America was awash with suspect $2 and $5 bills printed by these mushroom banks. Such gold as there was flowed straight into Boston, whose state banks were the most secure. By 1813 Boston notes were at a 9-10 percent premium in Philadelphia. The New England banks refused to take paper notes from the South and West at all. In 1814, with the burning of Washington and the virtual collapse of federal government, every bank outside New England was forced to suspend payment.
The remedy of Congress proved worse than the disease. It created (April 10, 1826) the Second Bank of the United States, bought 20 percent of its stock, and stipulated that the federal government appoint five of its twenty-five directors, but made little provision for supervising its operations. Moreover, its first president, William Jones (1760-1831), a former congressman and Madison"s Navy Secretary, knew little about banking; his speciality was having dubious friends. He fitted beautifully into Taylor"s demonology. Indeed, he managed to create a fragile boom which was a miniature foretaste of the Wall Street boom of the 1920s leading to the crash of 1929. Jones" boom was in land. From 1815 the price of American cotton rose rapidly and that in turn fed the land boom. At that time public land was sold primarily to raise revenue rather than to encourage settlers, who needed no encouragement anyway. Each was charged $2 an acre in minimum blocks of 160 acres. But they only had to put 20 percent down, borrowing the rest from the banks on the security of the property. The $2 was a minimum; in the South potential cotton land was sold at $100 an acre in the boom years. The SBUS, fueling the boom by easy credit, allowed purchasers to pay even the second installment on credit, again raised on the security of the land, like a second mortgage. Jones, whose only concern seems to have been to pay high dividends, based on the total lent by his bank, ran this federal central bank like a bucket-shop. He actually allowed the SBUS to deal in "racers," short for Race Horse Bills. These were bills of exchange paid for by other bills of exchange, which thus raced around rapidly from one debtor to another, acc.u.mulating interest charges and yielding less and less of their face value. It was a typical bit of 19th-century ruin-finance, beloved of novelists like Thackeray and d.i.c.kens, who used such devices to get their gullible heroes into trouble. This kind of paper explains why needy people actually got so little of the sums they undertook to repay. But then they probably could not repay anyway, which explains why the pyramid was bound to collapse.
Jones" easy-credit policy was further undermined by the activities of the SBUS"s branch offices, some of which were run by crooks. In Baltimore the branch was run by two land speculators, James A. Buchanan and James W. McCulloch, who financed their speculations by taking out unsecured loans from their own bank ($429,049 and $244,212 respectively, with the First Teller borrowing a further $50,000). In effect, this was to put their hand in the till. Here was a typical example of the general credit expansion Jones encouraged, raising the debt on public land from $3 million in 1815 to over five times that amount ($16.8 million) three years later. Some of this went into house purchases-it was the first urban boom in US history too. As many of the Latin American goldmines had been shut by their own war of independence against Spain, which was now raging, the relation of paper to gold was astronomical. Moreover, all the other banks followed Jones" example. Sensible men warned of what would happen. John Jacob Astor, who had now used his fur empire to build up a ma.s.sive holding in Manhattan real estate, accused the SBUS of provoking runaway inflation. In a letter to Albert Gallatin (March 14, 1818) he said the SBUS had made money so cheap "that everything else has become Dear, & the result is that our Merchants, instead of shipping Produce, ship Specie, so that I tell you in confidence that it is not without difficulty that Specie payments are maintained. The different States are going on making more Banks & and I shall not be surprised if by & by there be a general Blow Up among them."
Astor was right about the state banks: Hezekiah Niles recorded that in 1815-19 all you needed to start a bank issuing paper money were plates, presses, and paper. It was enough to drive genuine counterfeiters out of business, though they still managed (according to Niles) to produce a lot of forged notes too. He said that counterfeit notes from at least 100 banks were freely circulated in 1819. Many of the new banks were in converted forges, inns, or even churches, thus adding blasphemy to gimcrack finance. By 1819 there were at least 392 chartered banks, plus many more unchartered ones, and the debt on public lands had jumped another $6 million to stand at $22 million. Suddenly, the cotton bubble burst, as Liverpool cotton importers, alarmed by the high prices, started shipping in Indian raw cotton in huge quant.i.ties. In December January 1819 the price of New Orleans cotton halved, and this in turn hit land prices, which fell from 50 to 75 percent. The banks then found themselves with collateral in land worth only a fraction of their loans, which were now irrecoverable. So the banks started to go bust. Jones compounded his earlier errors of inflation by abruptly switching to savage deflation, ordering the branches of the SBUS to accept only its own notes, to insist on immediate repayments of capital as well as interest, and by calling in loans." This immediately doubled and trebled the number of state-chartered banks going bust, and the SBUS, their main creditor, secured their a.s.sets-the land-deeds of hundreds of thousands of farmers.
Many congressmen, seeing the future of their electors thus put into the power of a wicked central bank they had never wanted anyway, turned with fury on Jones. A Congressional committee soon discovered the Baltimore business. Jones and his entire board were forced to resign and an experienced money-man, Langdon Cheves (1776-1857), took over in March 1819 to find the SBUS what he called "a ship without a rudder or sails or mast ... on a stormy sea and far from land." Cheves decided that the worst of all outcomes was for the SBUS to go bust too, so he intensified the deflationary policy and contrived, with some difficulty, to keep the SBUS"s doors open, thus earning his t.i.tle "the Hercules of the United States Bank." But everyone else had to pay for it. As one contemporary expert, William Goude, put it, "The Bank was saved but the people were ruined."
The result of the bank Blow Up was a crisis in manufacturing industry. The Philadelphia cotton mills employed 2,325 in 1816; by autumn 1819 all but 149 had been sacked. In New England the crisis was mitigated by sound banking but it was still acute and unemployment shot up. John Quincy Adams, always quick to strike a note of gloom, recorded in his diary on April 24, 1819: "In the midst of peace and partial prosperity we are approaching a crisis which will shake the Union to its center. The news of trouble reached Europe too late to affect the 1819 sailings, so tens of thousands of immigrants continued to arrive, to find no work and rising hostility. One observer, Emanuel Howitt, wrote that "the Yankees now [1819] regard the immigrant with the most sovereign contempt ... a wretch, driven out of his own wretched country, and seeking a subsistence in this glorious land. It would "never be glad confident morning again." In March 1819 Congress, in a panic attempt to stop ships arriving at New York and other ports, slapped a two-persons-for-5-tons rule on incoming ships, effective from September-the beginning of control. The State Department, in a prescript published in Niles"s Weekly Register, announced its policy-lines: "The American Republic invites n.o.body to come. We will keep out n.o.body. Arrivals will suffer no disadvantages as aliens. But they can expect no advantages either. Native-born and foreign-born face equal opportunities. What happens to them depends entirely on their individual ability and exertions, and on good for tune."
There is something magnificent about this declaration, penned by John Quincy Adams himself. It epitomizes the spirit of laissez-faire libertarianism which pervaded every aspect of American life at this time-though, as we shall see, there were state interventionists at large too. Libertarianism was, of course, based upon an underlying, total self-confidence in the future of the country. There was something magnificent too about the speed and completeness with which America recovered from this crisis, which within a year or two seemed a mere mishap, a tiny blip on a rising curve of success. Ma.s.s immigration soon resumed, thanks this time to Ireland. Hitherto, America had taken in plenty of Ulster Protestants, but few from the Catholic south. But in 1821, when the Irish potato crop failed, one in an ominous series of failures culminating in the catastrophe of the mid-1840s, the British government tried to organize a sea-lift to Canada. There was panic in Mayo, Clare, Kerry, and Cork, where rumor had it the ships would transport them to convict bondage in Australia. But, once the truth was known, the idea of going to America, at virtually no cost, caught on in the poorest parts of Ireland. When the first letters reached home in 1822, explaining how easy it was to slip from Canada into America, and how the United States, albeit Protestant, gave equal rights to Catholics, the transatlantic rush was on. In 1825 50,000 Southern Irish applied for a mere 2,000 a.s.sisted places on a government scheme. It was a foretaste of the exodus which was to transport one-third of the Irish nation to America." This, in turn, was part of the process whereby the continuing English (and Welsh and Scottish) immigation to the United States was now balanced by new arrivals from outside Britain. The number of Continental Europeans rose from 6,000 to 10,000 a year in the early 1820s to 15,000 in 1826 and 30,000 in 1828. In 1832 it pa.s.sed the 50,000-a-year mark and thereafter fell below it only twice. An Anglicized United States was gradually becoming Europeanized.,"
Why did the immigrants come? One reason was increasingly cheap seapa.s.sages. Another was food shortages, sometimes widening into famines. The bad weather of 1816, and the appalling winters of 1825-6, 1826-7, and 1829-30, the last one of the coldest ever recorded, produced real hunger. The demographic-catastrophe theories of Thomas Malthus filtered downwards to the ma.s.ses, in horrifyingly distorted form, and men wanted to get their families out of Europe before the day of wrath came. Then there was the tax burden. At the end of the Bonapartist Wars, all Europe groaned under oppressive taxation. A parliamentary revolt in 1816 abolished income tax in Britain, and in the 1820s duties were gradually reduced too. But in Europe it was the same old story of the state piling the fiscal burdens on the backs of poor peasants and tradespeople. This was compounded, on the Continent, by tens of thousands of internal customs barriers, imposing duties on virtually everything which crossed them.
By comparison, America was a paradise. Its army was one-fiftieth the size of Prussia"s. The expense of government per capita was 10 percent of that in Britain, itself a country with a small state by Continental standards. There were no t.i.thes because there was no state church. Nor were there poor rates-there were virtually no poor. An American farm with eight horses paid only $12 a year in tax. Europeans could scarcely believe their ears when told of such figures. Not only were American wage-rates high, but you kept your earnings to spend on your family. Then there were other blessings. No conscription. No political police. No censorship. No legalized cla.s.s distinctions. Most employers ate at the same table as their hands. No one (except slaves) called anyone "Master." Letters home from immigrants who had already established themselves were read aloud before entire villages and acted as recruitment-propaganda for the transatlantic ships. So, interestingly enough, did the President"s annual messages to Congress, which were reprinted in many Continental newspapers until the censors suppressed them. As the Dublin Morning Post put it: "We read this doc.u.ment as if it related purely to our concerns."
But the most powerful inducement was cheap land. Immigrants from Europe were getting cheap land from all the old hunting grounds of the world"s primitive peoples-in Australia and Argentina especially-but it was in the United States where the magic was most potent because there the government went to enormous trouble to devise a system whereby the poor could acquire it. In the entire history of the United States, the land-purchase system was the single most benevolent act of government. The basis of the system was the Act of 1796 pricing land at $2 an acre. It allowed a year"s credit for half the total paid. An Act of 1800 created federal land offices as Cincinnati, Chillicothe, Marietta, and Steubenville, Ohio, that is, right on the frontier. The minimum purchase was lowered from 640 acres, or a square mile, to 320 acres, and the buyer paid only 25 percent down, the rest over four years. So a man could get a big farm-indeed, by Continental standards, an enormous one-for only about $160 cash. Four years later, Congress halved the minimum again. This put a viable family farm well within the reach of millions of prudent, saving European peasants and skilled workmen. During the first eleven years of the 19th century, nearly 3 ,400,000 acres were sold to individual farmers in what was then the Northwest, plus another 250,000 in Ohio. These land transfers increased after 1815, with half a million acres of Illinois, for instance, pa.s.sing into the hands of small- and medium-scale farmers every year. It was the same in the South. In Alabama, government land sales rose to 600,000 acres in 1816 and to 2,280,000 in 1819. In western Georgia the state gave 200-acre plots free to lottery-ticket holders with lucky numbers. In the years after 1815, more people acquired freehold land at bargain prices in the United States than at any other time in the history of the world.
Individual success-stories abounded. Daniel Brush and a small group of Vermonters settled in Greene County, Illinois, in spring 1820. "A prairie of the richest soil," Brush wrote, "stretched out about four miles in length and one mile wide ... complete with pure springs of cold water in abundance." Once a cabin, 16 by 24 feet, had been built, they began the hard task of breaking up the prairie. This done, Brush wrote, "No weeds or gra.s.s sprung up upon such ground the first year and the corn needed no attention with plough or hoe. If got in early, good crops were yielded, of corn and fodder." He added: "Provisions in abundance was the rule ... no one needed to go supperless to bed. The Ten Brook family moved to what became Parke County, Indiana, in autumn 1822. There were twenty-seven of them altogether-three interrelated families, three single men, two teamsters, thirteen horses, twenty-one cows, two yoke-oxen, and four dogs. Their first priority was to build a strong cabin. The soil was rich but virgin. Working throughout the winter, they had cleared 15 acres by the spring and fashioned 200 fence-rails. They had l00 bushels of corn for winter-feed and spring planting. They put two more acres under potatoes and turnips. The spring brought seven calves, and that first summer they made forty 12-pound cheeses, sold at market for a dollar each. The harvest was good. They not only ground their own corn but made 350 pounds of sugar and 10 gallons of mola.s.ses from the same soil they cleared for corn. Their leader, Andrew Ten Brook, recounted: "After the first year, I never saw any scarcity of provisions. The only complaint was that there was n.o.body to whom the supplies could be sold."
The sheer fertility of the soil made all the backbreaking work of opening it up worth while. In the Lake Plains-parts of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan-a vast glacier known as the Wisconsin Drift had in prehistoric times smoothed off the rocks and laid down a deep layer of rich soil containing all the elements needed for intensive agriculture. The settlers, steeped in the Old Testament, called it Canaan, G.o.d"s Country, because it yielded a third more than the rest, known as "Egypt." Some of the settlements in the years after 1815 became celebrated for quick prosperity. One was Boon"s Lick, a belt 60 miles wide on each side of the Missouri River which became Howard County in 1816. It boasted superb land, pure water, as much timber as required, and idyllic scenery. By 1819 the local paper, the Missouri Intelligence, produced at the little town of Franklin, offered a spring toast: "Boon"s Lick-two years since, a wilderness. Now-rich in cotton and cattle!" It was widely reputed to be the best land in all the West.
Moreover, the tendency was for the land price to come down-in the 1820s it was often as low as $1.25 an acre. The modern mind is astonished that, even so, it was regarded as too high and there was a clamor for cheaper or even free land. Many settlers were termed "squatters." This simply signified they had got there first, paid over money immediately after the survey but before the land was "sectionalized" for the market. They risked their t.i.tle being challenged by non-resident purchasers-speculators. By the end of 1828 two-thirds of the population of Illinois were squatters. Their champion was Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858), Senator 1821-51. He sensibly argued against a minimum price for Western lands, proposing grading by quality, and he insisted that settlers pay compensation for improvements, pa.s.sing a law to this effect. In frontier areas, speculators were naturally hated and took a risk if they showed their faces. A Methodist preacher recorded at Elkhorn Creek, Wisconsin: "If a speculator should bid on a settler"s farm, he was knocked down and dragged out of the [land] office, and if the striker was prosecuted and fined, the settlers paid the fine by common consent among themselves. [But] no jury would find a verdict against a settler in such a case because it was considered self-defense. [So] no speculator dare bid on a settler"s land, and as no settler would bid on his neighbor, each man had his land at Congress price, $1.25 an acre."
All the same, speculation and land dealing were the foundation of many historic fortunes at this time. And powerful politicians (and their friends) benefited too. When a popular figure like General Jackson bid for a potentially valuable town lot, no one bid against him. He acquired his estate and became a reasonably wealthy man through land sales, though by the end of the war he had ceased to be interested in money. His aide, General Coffee, formed the Cypress Land Company, bought land at Muscle Shoals, and laid out the town of Florence, Alabama, where speculators and squatters bid up the government minimum to $78 an acre." Others in the Jackson camp made fortunes this way. The New York politician Martin Van Buren (1782-1862), who became Jackson"s Secretary of State, also grew rich through land deals: he got large parcels of land in Otsego County for a fraction of their true value-one 600-acre parcel he bought for $60.90-and he knocked down land cheap at Sheriff"s Auctions when settlers were sold up for non-payment of taxes." Of course some land speculation was parasitical and downright antisocial. But large-scale speculators were indispensable in many cases. They organized pressure on Congress to put through roads and they invested capital to build towns like Manchester, Portsmouth, Dayton, Columbus, and Williamsburg. A lot of speculation was on credit, and speculators went bust if they could not sell land quickly at the right price. That was how big groups like the one organized by Sir William Pulteney, the English politician, acquired huge tracts. His agent spent over $1m building infrastructures-stores, mills, taverns, even a theater. A group of bankers from Amsterdam formed the Holland Land Company, which acquired 4 million acres in northwest New York and western Pennsylvania, put in roads and other services, and eventually (1817) made a profit by selling off land in 350-acre plots at $5 an acre (on ten years" credit). But most settlers preferred cheaper land to the use of an infrastructure which they could create for themselves. Moses Cleveland, agent of the Connecticut Land Company, managed to sell good land at a dollar an acre, with five years" credit, and to found the village named after him which became in time a mighty city. It was from Cleveland that William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) played a major role in creating the new state of Ohio, then moved on to Indiana, and finally became America"s ninth President.
There is an important historical and economic point to be noted here. Men always abuse freedom, and 19th-century land speculators could be wicked and predatory. But Congress, true to its origins, was prepared to take that risk. It laid down the ground rules by statute and then, in effect, allowed an absolutely free market in land to develop. It calculated that this was the best and quickest way to get the country settled. And it was proved right-freedom worked. In South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the British authorities interfered in the land market in countless ways and from the highest of motives, and as a result these countries-some of which had even bigger natural advantages than the United States-developed far more slowly. One British expert, H. G. Ward, who had witnessed both systems, made a devastating comparison before a House of Commons committee in 1839. In Canada, the government, fearing speculators, had devised a complex system of controls which actually played straight into their hands. By contrast, the American free system attracted mult.i.tudes who quickly settled and set up local governments which soon acted as a restraining force on antisocial operators. The system worked because it was simple and corresponded to market forces. "There is one uniform price at $1.25 an acre [minimum]. No credit is given [by the federal government]. There is a perfect liberty of choice and appropriation at this price. Immense surveys are carried on, to an extent strangers have no conception of. Over 140 million acres have been mapped and planned at a cost of $2,164,000. There is a General Land Office in Washington with 40 subordinate district offices, each having a Registrar and Receiver ... Maps, plans and information of every kind are accessible to the humblest persons ... A man if he please may invest a million dollars in land. If he miscalculates it is his own fault. The public, under every circ.u.mstance, is the gainer."
He was right and the proof that the American free system worked is the historic fact-the rapid and successful settlement of the Mississippi Valley. This is one of the decisive events in history. By means of it, America became truly dynamic, emerging from the eastern seaboard bounded by the Appalachians and descending into the great network of river valleys beyond. The Mississippi occupation, involving an area of 1,250,000 square miles, the size of western Europe, marked the point at which the United States ceased to be a small, struggling ex-colony and turned itself into a major nation."
The speed with which representative governments were set up was an important part of this dynamism. In addition to Kentucky and Tennessee, the first trans-Appalachian states, Ohio became a state in 1803, Louisiana in 1812, Indiana in 1816, Mississippi in 1817, Illinois in 1818, Alabama in 1819, Missouri in 1821, Arkansas in 1836, Michigan in 1837. Insuring rapid progress from territory to state was the best way Washington could help the settlement, though under the Const.i.tution it could also build national roads. The first national road, a broad, hardened thoroughfare across the Appalachians, was open in 1818 as far as Wheeling, whence settlers could travel along the Ohio River. By the early 1830s the road had reached Columbus, Ohio. Further south, roads were built by state and federal government in collaboration or by thrusting military men like General Jackson, who in 1820, as commander of the Western Army, strung a road between Florence, Alabama, and New Orleans, the best route into the Lower Mississippi area. There were also the Great Valley Road, the Fall Line Road, and the Upper Federal Road. They were rough by the standards of the new McAdam-Telford roads in Britain but far superior to anything in Latin America, Australasia, or trans-Ural Russia, other vast territories being settled at this time. In addition there were the rivers, most of them facing in the direction of settlement. Even before the steamers came, there were hundreds, then thousands, of flatboats and keelboats to float settlers and their goods downriver. By 1830 there were already 3,000 flatboats floating down the Ohio each year. In 1825 the completion of the Erie Ca.n.a.l, which linked the Atlantic via the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, made easy access possible to the Great Plains. It also confirmed New York"s primacy as a port, especially for immigrants, as they could then proceed, via the Ca.n.a.l, straight to new towns in the Midwest. From that point on steamboats were ubiquitous in the Mississippi Valley, not only bringing settlers in but taking produce out to feed and clothe the people of America"s explosive cities-only 7 percent of the population in 1810, over a third by mid-century.
The pattern of settlement varied enormously but salient features were common. With every township, the first structure to be built was a church, to serve farming families already scattered around. Then came a newspaper, running off copies even when townsfolk were still living in tents. Then came traders, doubling up as bankers when required, then proper bankers and lawyers at about the same time. The lawyers lived by riding with the local judge on a horseback circuit, by which they became well known, and they sat in the legislature the moment it was set up-so the grip of the attorneys was firm from the start. Justice was fierce and physical, especially for thieves, above all for horse-thieves. By 1815, the pillory, ears cut off and nailed up, and branding on the cheek were becoming rare. But whippings were universal. The tone of settlers" justice was epitomized in Madison County, Tennessee in 1821 when a local thief, "Squire" Dawson, was sentenced "to be taken from this place to the common whipping-post, there to receive twenty lashes well laid on his bare back, and that he be rendered infamous, and that he then be imprisoned one hour, and that he make his peace with the state by the payment of one cent." There we have it-imprisonment was costly, fining pointless when the miscreant had no money, but there was no shortage of bare back.
A typical growth-point was Indianapolis. It was laid out in 1821. The next year it had one two-story house. By 1823 it still had only ninety families but it had already acquired a newspaper, an important engine of urban dynamics. By 1827 the population topped the 1,000 mark, and twenty-one months later a visitor wrote: "The place begins to look like a town-about 1,000 acres cut smooth, ten stores, six taverns, a court-house which cost $15,000, and many fine houses." Elijah Miles, who moved to the Sangamon River country in 1823, left a record of how he founded Springfield. It was then only a stake in the ground. He marked out an 18-foot-square site for a store, went to St Louis to buy a 25-ton stock of goods, chartered a boat, shipped his stock to the mouth of the Sangamon, and then had his boat and goods towed upriver by five men with a 3oo-foot tow-rope. Leaving his goods on the riverside-"As no one lived near, I had no fear of thieves"-he walked 50 miles to Springfield, hired waggons and teams, and so got his stuff to the new "town," where his store was the first to open. It was the only one in a district later divided into fourteen counties, so "Many had to come more than 80 miles to trade." Springfield grew up around him. They built a jail for $85.75, marked out roads and electoral districts or "precinks" as they called them, and levied a tax on "horses, neat cattle, wheeled carriages, stock in trade and distillery." By 1824 the town had its own roads, juries, an orphanage, a constable, and a clerk. The key figure in such developments was often the county clerk, who doubled as a schoolteacher, being paid half in cash, half in kind.
Although churches were the first structures to go up in most townships, religion flourished without them if necessary. The Second Great Awakening, which started in the 1790s, was essentially a frontier affair, carried out by traveling evangelists, who often held giant camp meetings. The first of these was at Cane Ridge, near Lexington, Kentucky, in 1801, which became the prototype for many more. It was organized by Barton Stone (1772-1844), a Maryland Presbyterian, who described in great detail the evangelical enthusiasm created by these open-air gatherings, where preachers whipped up the partic.i.p.ants into frenzies of worship. Stone divided their antics into what he called "exercises." Thus in the "Falling Exercise," "The Subject would generally, with a piercing scream, fall like a log on the floor, earth or mud, and appear as dead." In "The jerks," "when the head alone was affected, it would be jerked backwards and forwards, or from side to side, so quickly that the features of the face could not be distinguished. When the whole system was affected I have seen the person stand in one place, and jerk backwards and forwards in quick succession, their head nearly touching the floor behind and before." Then there was the "Barking Exercise"-"A Person affected by the jerks, especially in his head, would often make a grunt or bark, if you please, from the suddenness of the jerk." There was also the Laughing Exercise ("loud, hearty laughter ... it excited laughter in no one else"), a Running Exercise ("the subject running from fear"), a Dancing Exercise ("the smile of heaven shone on the countenance of the subject"), and the Singing Exercise, the sounds issuing not from the mouth but the body-"such music silenced every thing." These antics may make us laugh, but the fact is they have set the pattern for one form of revivalism for 200 years and are repeated almost exactly by congregations receiving the Toronto Blessing in the 1990s. And the frontier men and women of Cane Ridge and other camp gatherings had some excuse for indulging in these religious ecstasies: they had no other form of entertainment whatever. Religion not only gave meaning to their lives and was a consolation in distress, it was the only relief from the daily hardship of work.
Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), a New Haven Presbyterian who went west and became president of the Cincinnati Theological Seminary-among his other accomplishments was fathering thirteen children, one of them being Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom"s Cabin-believed that this revivalist spirit was essential to the creation of the rapidly expanding American nation. Based upon a free market in land and everything else, it was necessarily driven by a strong current of materialistic individualism, and only religious belief and practice, hot and strong, could supply the spiritual leavening and community spirit-could, in effect, civilize this thrusting people. Religion, politics, and culture all went together, he argued, "and it is plain that the religious and political destiny of the nation is to be decided in the west." Revivalism, what is now called fundamentalism, was the only way the scattered frontiersmen and women could be reached and gathered. But when the itinerant preachers pa.s.sed on, all the churches benefited. Some of the older churches, especially the Episcopalians, sniffed at camp-meetings, saying "More souls are begot than saved there," but that was because they failed to adapt their evangelism to the new trends. It was the uninhibited Methodists who profited most from revivalism, keeping up the pa.s.sionate intensity and drumming it into regular, settled congregations. By 1844 they were the biggest church in the United States. Next came the Baptists, radiating from Rhode Island and its great theological seminary, later Brown University (1764). Like most Calvinist sects, they split from time to time, generating such factions as Separatist and Hard-Sh.e.l.l Baptists, but they were enormously successful in the South and West. By 1850 they had penetrated every existing state and had a major theological college in almost all of them.
But revivalism did more than recruit for the existing churches. It created new ones. Thus one Baptist, William Miller (1782-1849), was inspired by the Second Great Awakening to conduct a personal study of the scriptures for two years, and in 1818 declared that "all the affairs of our present state" would be wound up by G.o.d in a quarter of a century, that is in 1844. He recruited many thousands of followers, who composed a hymn-book, The Millennial Harp, survived "The Great Disappointment" when nothing happened in the appointed year, and even the death of their founder. In 1855 they settled at Battle Creek, took the t.i.tle Seventh-Day Adventists six years later, and eventually, with 2 million worldwide members, became the center of a vast vegetarian breakfast-cereal empire created by John H. Kellogg (1852-1943), first president of Battle Creek College and one of the earliest modern nutritionists.
The way in which the Adventists popularized cereals throughout the world was typical of the creative (and indeed commercial) spirit of the sects which sprang out of the Second Great Awakening. This kind of intense religion seemed to give to the lives of ordinary people a focus and motivation which turned them into pioneers, entrepreneurs, and innovators on a heroic scale. Kellogg himself was the protege of Ellen G. Harmon (1827-1915), a simple teenager who conceived her vision of sanctified breakfast-food while in a religious transport. And what could be more American than cornflakes, a nutritious food with moral overtones made from the Indian crop which saved the lives of the Pilgrim Fathers? Another very ordinary young man was Joseph Smith (1805-44) born on a hard-scrabble farm in Vermont, who caught a whiff of spirituality from the Second Great Awakening in Palmyra in upstate New York, where in 1827 the Angel Moroni showed him the hiding place of a set of golden tablets. From behind a curtain and with the aid of seer-stones called Urim and Thurim he translated the mystic utterances they contained, which others transcribed to his dictation. This 500-page Book of Mormon, put on sale in 1830 (at which point Moroni removed the original plates), describes the history of America"s pre-Colombian people, who came from the Tower of Babel, crossing the Atlantic in barges, but survived only in the form of Mormon and his son Moroni, who buried the plates in AD 384. The language of the Book clearly derives from the King James Bible but the narrative, with its tribulations overcome by courage and persistence, fits into frontier life well and the movement attracted thousands.
Smith was murdered by an Illinois mob in 1844 but his successor Brigham Young (1801-77), another Vermonter and a man of immense determination (and appet.i.tes) and considerable skills of organization, led the Biblical "remnant" in a historic trek over the plains and mountains to Salt Lake City, 1846-7, where he virtually created the territory of Utah, of which Washington made him governor in 1850. When he proclaimed the doctrine of polygamy in 1852, taking himself twenty-seven wives who bore him fifty-six children, President James Buchanan removed him from office. The row over polygamy (eventually renounced in 1890) delayed Utah"s admission as a state until 1896 but it could not prevent Young and his followers from expanding their Church of Latter Day Saints into a world religious empire of over 3 million souls and making the people of Utah among the richest, best educated, and most consistently law-abiding in the United States. In no other instance are the creative nation-building possibilities of evangelical religion so well ill.u.s.trated.
Some of the by-products of the Second Great Awakening verged on the cranky. When fervent Americans were stirred up by a camp-meeting or a pa.s.sing preacher, and they found Baptism or Methodism too tame, they had a wide choice of spicier beliefs. The esoterical reinterpretation of the scriptures produced in thirty-eight huge volumes by the 18th-century philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg became an immense quarry into which American sect-founders burrowed industriously for decades. Mesmerism and homeopathy came from Europe but were eagerly adopted and adorned with rococo additions in America. Spiritualism was definitely home-grown. In 1847, John D. Fox, a Methodist farmer who had been "touched" by the Second Awakening, moved into a Charles Adams house in Hydesville, New York, and the two youngest daughters quickly established contact with a Rapper, at the command "Here, Mr Splitfoot, do as I do." Less than two centuries before, this kind of girlish joke-hysteria might have led to witchhunting as at Salem in the 1690s. In mid-I9th-century America, already keen on sensation and media-infested, it led to the two girls being signed up by the circus-impresario P. T. Barnum (1810-91) and Horace Greeley (1811-72), the great editor of the New York Tribune. So Spiritualism was born. It seems to have had a strong attraction, right from the start, for political liberals, like Robert Owen, son of the utopian community-founder. Owen read a paper about it at the White House in 1861 which led to Abraham Lincoln"s memorable observation at the end: "Well, for those who like that sort of thing, I should think it is just about the sort of thing they would like." This did not prevent Mrs Lincoln taking it up after the President"s death-with its ability to communicate with the dear departed it had a natural attraction for widows. By 1870 Spiritualism had 11 million followers, not only in America but throughout Europe, and it attracted outstanding intellects, like Victor Hugo and William James.
Many of these new sects, which sprang out of the fervor of the 1810s and 1820s, tackled not only the problem of death, like Spiritualism, but the even more everyday problem of pain. America was already developing one of its most p.r.o.nounced characteristics, the conviction that no problem is without a solution. Faith-healing flourished in the American mid-century, and Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), who suffered dreadful pain in her youth, for which the doctors could do nothing, believed she had been relieved by a Mesmerist, P. P. Quimby; and from this she created her own system of spiritual healing based upon the belief that mind is the only reality and all else an illusion. After her third marriage to Mr Eddy, a first-cla.s.s businessman, her creed began to flourish on sound commercial principles. She opened the First Church of Christ Scientist in Boston in 1879, followed by the Metaphysical College in 1881 and what became one of America"s greatest newspapers, the Christian Science Monitor. It quickly spread into 3,200 branches in forty-eight countries. Here again was overwhelming evidence of the new American phenomenon-the way in which religious belief, often of a strange and (some would say) implausible character, produced hugely creative movements with a strong cultural and educational content. Even the most bizarre of these sects founded schools, training colleges for teachers and evangelists, and even universities. Some of America"s greatest inst.i.tutions of higher education have their origins in the Second Great Awakening. It was, for instance, the leading theologian of the Awakening, Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), who created Oberlin College in Ohio. The Awakening gave an impulse to Unitarianism, which had come to America in the 1770s and opened King"s College Chapel in Boston. The American Unitarian a.s.sociation was formed in 1825 and quickly radiated all over America. With its rationalist and undogmatic approach to theology and its low-key ritual it particularly attracted intellectuals and scientists, and those of its members with a romantic and utopian disposition tended to set up rustic communities devoted to high thinking and simple living. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), who moved into the sect from Calvinism, wrote to the British sage Thomas Carlyle in 1840: "We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his pocket." Emerson had a finger in a pie of one such, Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, founded by a Boston Unitarian minister, George Ripley. It included on its agricultural committee the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64)-of whom more later-and had a printing press, a kiln for artistic pottery, and a workshop for making furniture. Needless to say it ended in bankruptcy and was cuttingly dismissed by Carlyle, who epitomized Ripley as "a Socinian minister who left the pulpit to reform the world by growing onions."
One writes "needless to say" but in fact many of the religious-utopian communities, especially the German ones, flourished mightily as commercial or farming enterprises and survive today as models of moral probity, communal tidiness, and capitalist decorum. But others commercialized themselves out of religion altogether. A group of German Pietists under George Rapp (1757-1847) settled in a community at Harmony, Pennsylvania, in 1804, right at the beginning of the Second Awakening. They practiced auricular confession, among other things, and proved highly successful farmers and traders. But as they strictly opposed marriage and procreation, they eventually ceased to exist. At the other end of the s.e.xual spectrum was Oneida Community in western New York, founded by John Humphrey Noyes (1811-86). This originally began as a socialist community, practicing free love, or what was known as "complex marriage"-procreation, as distinct from other "s.e.xual transactions," was decided communally-and the children were brought up as in a kibbutz. The community made itself rich by manufacturing steel traps but eventually lost its faith and became a prosperous corporation.
It is a curious fact that some of these religious sects had very ancient origins but it was only in the free air and vast s.p.a.ces of America that they blossomed. Thus a medieval sect which in the 14th century developed a Shaking Dance as a form of its ritual (probably derived, via the Crusades, from a Moslem revivalist group known vulgarly as the Whirling Dervishes), continued to shake as Protestant Huguenots in 16th-century France, were expelled by Louis XIV, came to England, mated with a Quaker sect, and became the Shaking Quakers, and were finally brought to America by "Mother" Anne Lee (1736-84), the visionary daughter of a Manchester blacksmith. These Shakers took advantage of the Second Awakening to develop a number of highly successful utopian communities, distinguished by separation of the s.e.xes, who lived in distinct dormitories, and amazing Spiritualist seances, leading to apparitions, levitation, and spectral voices. They had a frenzied group dance, distantly derived from the Huguenot camisard. It was characteristic of the Shakers in their American manifestation that they took the principle of minimalist government to its ultimate conclusion-their many communities, of l00 or more, lived in happiness and content without taxes, spending nothing on police, lawyers, judges, poor-houses, or prisons. They even dispensed with hospitals, believing they had "special powers" to cure sickness-that may explain, of course, why they are now extinct. (As their founder Miss Lee, known as Mother Ann, believed herself to be "The Female Principle in Christ," Jesus being "The Male Principle," and taught that the Second Coming would be marked by an a.s.sumption of power by women, the sect, whose full t.i.tle is "The United Society of Believers in Christ"s Second Coming (The Millenarian Church)," is due in a feminist age for a revival.) The existence of these angular sects, and many others, in addition to the half-dozen or so great "imperial" religions of American Protestantism, inevitably raised the question, early in the 19th century if not before, of how, granted America"s doctrine of religious toleration, all could be fitted into the new republican society. Curiously enough Benjamin Franklin, far-sighted as always, had thought about this problem as early as 1749 when he published his Proposal Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania. He thought the solution was to treat religion as one of the main subjects in the school/college curriculum and relate it to character-training. A similar view was advanced by Jonathan Edwards when president of Princeton. It was, in effect, adopted by the greatest of all American educationalists, Horace Mann (1796-1859), when he began to organize the public school system in Ma.s.sachusetts. Mann graduated from Brown, became a Unitarian, and, from 1837, was appointed the lawyer-secretary to the new Ma.s.sachusetts Board of Education. At such he opened the first "normal" school in the United States at Lexington in 1839, and thence reorganized the entire primary and secondary education system of the state, with longer terms, a more scientific and "modern" pedagogy, higher salaries and better teachers, decent, clean, and properly heated schoolhouses, and all the elements of a first-cla.s.s public school system. Ma.s.sachusetts" framework served as a model for all the other states and Mann, by propaganda and legislative changes during his period in Congress, 1848-53, led the movement which established the right of every American child to a proper education at public expense. Thus the state took over financial responsibility for the education of the new and diverse millions by absorbing most primary and secondary schools (though not tertiary colleges; in 1819 Marshall"s Supreme Court, bowing to the eloquence of Daniel Webster (1782-1852), rejected the right of the New Hampshire legislature to interfere in the running of Dartmouth College, thus establishing once and for all the freedom of all America"s privately funded universities).
That meant that the true American public school, in accordance with the Const.i.tution, was non-sectarian from the very beginning. Non-sectarian, yes: but not non-religious. Horace Mann agreed with Franklin and the other Founding Fathers that generalized religion and education were inseparable. Mann thought religious instruction in the public schools should be taken "to the extremest verge to which it can be carried without invading those rights of conscience which are established by the laws of G.o.d, and guaranteed by the const.i.tution of the state." What the schools got was not so much non-denominational religion as a kind of lowest-common-denominator Protestantism, based upon the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and such useful tracts as Bunyan"s Pilgrim"s Progress. As Mann put it, in his final report to the state of Ma.s.sachusetts, "that our public schools are not theological seminaries is admitted ... But our system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals. It founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible; it allows it to do what it is allowed to do in no other system, to speak for itself." Hence, in the American system, the school supplied Christian "character-building" and the parents, at home, topped it up with whichever sectarian tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs they thought fit (or none).
Naturally there were objections from some religious leaders. On behalf of the Episcopalians, the Rev. F. A. Newton argued that "a book upon politics, morals or religion, containing no party or sectarian views, will be apt to contain no distinctive views of any kind, and will be likely to leave the mind in a state of doubt and skepticism, much more to be deplored than any party of sectarian bias." That might apply to dogmatic theology but in terms of moral theology the Mann system worked perfectly well, so long as it was conscientiously applied. Most Episcopalians, or any other Protestants, would now happily settle for the Mann system of moral character-building if they could. So Newton"s objections, which were not widely shared, were brushed aside. A more serious question was: how were Roman Catholics, or non-Christians like the Jews, to fit in?
There had been Catholics in America since the foundation of Maryland (1632), and in 1790 Father John Carroll (1735-1815) had been consecrated Bishop of Baltimore with authority over the 40,000 Catholics then in the United States. The following year he founded Georgetown College, America"s first Catholic university. But it was only with the arrival of the southern Irish, and Continental Catholics in large numbers, that Catholicism began to const.i.tute a challenge to Protestant paramountcy. New dioceses testified to its expansion even in the South-Charleston 1820, Mobile 1829, Natchez 1837, Little Rock 1843, Galveston 1847-and in Boston and New York City Irish-dominated communities became enormous and potent. The new Catholics brought with them certain inst.i.tutions which infringed the American moral consensus in the spirit, if not exactly in the letter, almost as much as Mormon polygamy. One was the convent, which provoked a species of Protestant horror-literature infused almost with the venom of the Salem witch-trials. A journal called the Protestant Vindicator was founded in 1834 with the specific object of exposing Catholic "abuses," the convent being a particular target. The next year saw the publication in Boston of Six Months in a Convent and, in 1836, of the notorious Maria Monk"s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu in Montreal. It was written and published by a group of New York anti-Catholics who followed it up with Further Disclosures and The Escape of Sister Frances Patrick, Another nun from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal. Unlike Continental anticlerical literature about monks and nuns, a genre going back to Rabelais in the 16th century, the Maria Monk saga was not directly p.o.r.nographic but it had something of the same scurrilous appeal. Maria Monk herself was no fiction-she was arrested for picking pockets in a brothel and died in prison in 1849-but her book had sold 300,000 copies by 1860 and it is still in print today, not only in the United States but in many other countries. Nor was Protestant hostility confined to paperbacks. In 1834, even before Maria made her appearance, a convent of Ursuline nuns was burned down by a Boston mob and those responsible were acquitted-Protestant juries believed Catholic convents had subterranean dungeons for the murder and burial of illegitimate children.
There were also widespread fears of a Catholic political and military conspiracy, fears which had existed in one form or another since the 1630s, when they were a.s.sociated with the designs of Charles I, and which had been resurrected in the 1770s and foisted on George III. In the 1830s, Lyman Beecher, so sensible and rational in many ways, included in his Plea for the West details of a Catholic plot to take over the entire Mississippi Valley, the chief conspirators being the pope and the Emperor of Austria. Samuel Morse, who was not particularly proProtestant but had been outraged when, during a visit to Rome, his hat had been knocked off by a papal guard when he failed to doff it as the pope pa.s.sed, added plausibility to Beecher"s theory by a.s.serting that the reactionary kings and emperors of Europe were deliberately driving their Catholic subjects to America to promote the takeover. This, combined with labor disputes brought about the willingness of poor Catholic immigrants to accept low rates of pay, led to the founding in 1849 of a secret-oath-bound society, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which flourished in New York and other cities. It was geared to politics by opposing the willingness of the Democratic Party machine to cater for Catholic votes and when its members were questioned about its activities they were drilled to answer "I Know Nothing." The Know Nothing Party had a brief but phenomenal growth in the early 1850s, especially in 1852, when it triumphed in local and state elections from New Hampshire to Texas. In 1856 it even ran ex-President Millard Fillmore as a national candidate, but it was doomed by its proslavery Southern leadership.
The Catholics were thus put on the defensive. And some of them, in any event, had reservations about the Horace Mann approach to education. The most incisive Catholic convert of the time, Orestes Brownson (1803-76), argued that the state had no obligation to educate its citizens morally and that to do so on a lowest-common-denominator basis would promote a bland, plat.i.tudinous form of public discourse. America, he argued, needed the provocation and moral judgments which only Biblical religion could provide and the stimulation of religious controversy between competing sects. But most American Catholics, then and later, wanted badly to win the acceptance of fellow-Americans by fitting into the citizenship formula. And, less defensively and more enthusiastically, they accepted the fact that America had a free market in religion as well as everything else. From the 183os they competed eagerly to build the most churches and schools and colleges, to display the largest congregations, win the most converts, and demonstrate that Catholics were more American and better citizens than members of other sects."
The Jews did not proselytize like the Catholics but they competed in other ways and they were just as anxious to demonstrate their Americanism. In 1654 the French privateer St Catherine brought twenty-three Jewish refugees from Recife in Brazil to the Dutch colonial town of New Amsterdam. The governor, Peter Stuyvesant, protested to the Dutch West India Company against the settlement of what he called "a deceitful race" whose "abominable religion" worshiped "the feet of mammon." They were denied all rights of citizenship and forbidden to build a synagogue. But when New Amsterdam fell to the English in 1664 and became New York, the Jews benefited from a decision taken under the English Commonwealth regime, later confirmed by Charles II, to allow them to acquire all the rights of English citizenship "so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly, with due obedience to His Majesty"s laws and without scandal to his government." Some early statutes and proclamations, stressing religious liberty, included only "those who profess Christianity" in this freedom of worship. But in fact the Jews were never directly persecuted on American soil and the great governor of New York, Edmund Andros, went out of his way to include Jews when he promised equal treatment to all law-abiding persons "of what religion soever." As in England, the issue of Jewishness was not raised. Jews simply came, enjoyed equal rights, and, it seems, voted in the earliest elections; they held offices too.
Jews settled in other areas, beginning with the Delaware Valley. Some difficulties arose when the Jews wished to have their own cemetery in New York. But in 1677 one was opened in Newport, Rhode Island-later the subject of one of Longfellow"s finest poems-and New York got its own five years later. In 1730 the Shearith Israel Congregation of New York consecrated its first synagogue and a particularly handsome one was built in Newport in 1763, now a national shrine. Even in colonial times, Jews" existence in America was fundamentally unlike the life they lived in Europe. There, they had their own legal status, ran their own courts, schools, shops, paid their own special, heavier taxes, and usually lived in ghettos. In America, where there was no religiously determined law, there was no reason why Jews should operate a separate legal system, except on matters which could be seen as merely internal religious discipline. Since in America all religious groups had equal rights, there was no point in const.i.tuting itself into a separate community. All could partic.i.p.ate fully in a communal society. Hence from the start the Jews in America were organized not on communal but on congregational lines, like the other churches. In Europe, the synagogue was merely one organ of the all-embracing Jewish community. In America it was the only governing body in Jewish life. American Jews did not belong to the "Jewish community," as in Europe. They belonged to a particular synagogue. It might be Sephardi or Ashken.a.z.i and, if the latter, it might be German, English, Polish, or "Holland," all of them differing on small ritual points. Protestant groups were divided on similar lines. Hence a Jew went to "his" synagogue just as a Protestant went to "his" church. In other respects, Jews and Protestants were simply part of the general citizenry, in which they merged as secular units. Thus the Jews in America, without in any way renouncing their religion, began to experience integration for the first time. And this inevitably meant accepting the generalized morality of the consensus, in which religious education was "character-training" and part of the preparation for living an adult republican life.
But if even Roman Catholics and Jews could join in the American republican moral consensus, there was one point on which it broke down completely-slavery. One sees why St Paul was not anxious to tackle the subject directly: once slavery takes hold, religious injunctions tend to fit its needs, not vice versa. On the other hand, the general thrust of the Judeo-Christian tradition tended to be anti-slavery, and that was why it had slowly disappeared in Europe in the early Middle Ages. In America the moral and political dilemma over slavery had been there right from the start, since by a sinister coincidence 1619 marked the beginning of both slavery and representative government. But it had inevitably become more acute, since the identification of American moral Christianity, its undefined national religion, with democracy made slavery come to seem both an offense against G.o.d and an offense against the nation. Ultimately the American religious impulse and slavery were incompatible.