Chapter 10
Toward an American Culture 
Americans after 1815 experienced wave after wave of social and cultural change. Territorial expansion, the growth of the market, and the spread of plantation slavery 
uprooted Americans and broke old social patterns. Americans in these years reinvented 
family life. They created distinctively American forms of popular literature and art, and 
they found new ways of having fun. They flocked to evangelical churches that expanded 
and remade American religious life. They began, in short, to make a distinctively American 
culture. 
The emerging American culture was more or less uniformly republican, capitalist, and 
Protestant. But different kinds of Americans made different cultures out of the revolutionary 
inheritance, market expansion, and revival religion. Southern farmers and their northern 
cousins thought differently about fatherhood and the proper way to make a family. Northeastern businessmen and southern planters agreed that economic progress was indeed 
progress, but they differed radically on its moral implications. Slaveholders, factory hands, 
rich and poor farmers, and middle-class women all heard the same Bible stories and learned 
different lessons. The result, visible from the 1830s onward, was an American national culture that was (and is) less an accepted body of rules than an ongoing conversation. This 
chapter identifies the ways in which various groups of Americans thought and felt about four 
of the hot spots in that conversation: family life and personal identity, the Christian inheritance, the emerging question of race, and the nature of republican citizenship. 
The Democratization of Culture 
The weakening of traditional authority created spaces that Americans filled in their own 
ways. Important pillars of old cultures remained: the Bible and revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality were fundamental to the new cultural forms. But the transportation network that carried wheat and cotton out of rural neighborhoods brought new things in: furniture and ways of arranging it, new clothing styles, new forms of entertainment, new 
information, new aspirations. In part, Americans made new ways of thinking and living as 
consumers of these cultural goods. 
Among the items reaching Americans was information—newspapers, books, magazines, business communications, personal letters, and travelers who carried news. The 
information circulated among a public that was remarkably literate and well-informed. 

The literacy rate in the preindustrial United States was among the highest ever recorded. 
In 1790, approximately 85 percent of adult men in New England and 60 percent of those 
in Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake could read and write. The literacy rate among women 
was lower—about 45 percent in New England—but on the rise. By 1820, all but the poorest white Americans, particularly in the North, could read and write. The United States, 
more than perhaps any other country, was a nation of readers. 
A Revolution in Print 
The rise of a reading public was accompanied by a print revolution: enterprising men 
(and a few women) learned how to make their livings by providing cheap Bibles and English 
novels, almanacs, newspapers, and other printed matter to a public that not only could 
but did read. Readers were encouraged by their republican governments. The states provided common schools, and the national government helped the flow of print in ways 
that were unprecedented. The governments of Great Britain and the European powers 
tried to control the circulation of information: they established few post offices, taxed 
newspapers, monitored what was said in the newspapers and even in the mail, and prosecuted people who said the wrong things in print. 
There were attempts to do such things in America. The Stamp Tax of 1765 had 
included a tax on newspapers, which many Americans considered an attempt not only at 
direct taxation but at controlling the news. And in 1798, Federalists had jailed editors with 
whom they disagreed. Americans defeated both of these attempts. The First Amendment 
guaranteed freedom of the press, and the U.S. government (with that brief Federalist 
exception) did not interfere with newspapers. Just the opposite: newspapers enjoyed discounted postal rates and circulated far beyond their points of publication. A law of 1792 
allowed newspapers to mail copies to each other without cost, and the editors of country 
weeklies cut national and international news from the New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia 
papers, combined them with local advertising and legal notices, and provided their readers 
with cheap sources of information that were remarkably uniform throughout the North and 
West and much of the South. The rise of a democratic and national reading public, then, 
was directly and knowingly subsidized by the national government. 
Newspapers were the most widely distributed form of print in the new republic. In 
1790, 106 newspapers were being published in the United States. In 1835, 1,258 were in 
publication, 90 of which were dailies. In the latter year, the number of newspapers per 
capita in the United States was two to three times greater than in Great Britain. Still, even 
in New England, only about 1 household in 10 subscribed to a newspaper. Yet most members of the new democratic public knew what was in them, for the papers were passed 
from hand to hand, read aloud in groups, and made available at taverns and public houses. 
Timothy Dwight, Federalist president of Yale College, hated newspapers and associated 
them with gambling, tavern-haunting, drinking, and democracy. 
Improvements in distribution and printing technology encouraged other forms of popular literature as well. The emerging evangelical crusade (see later section) made full and 
innovative use of print. Sunday school tracts, temperance pamphlets, and other religious 
materials were printed in huge numbers in New York and distributed efficiently and 
cheaply through the mails—so cheaply that the American Bible Society devised a realistic 
plan to provide every household in America with a free Bible. While newspapers were 
men’s reading, the religious tracts tended to find their way into the hands of women. 
Women also were the principal readers of novels, a new form of reading matter that 
Thomas Jefferson and other authorities denounced as frivolous and aberrant. The first 
best-selling novel in the United States was The Power of Sympathy, a morally ambiguous 
tale of seduction and betrayal that exposed hypocrisy in male authorities who punished 
(generally poor and vulnerable) women for their own seductions. Such tales were seen as 
dangerous not only because they contained questionable subject matter but also because 
girls and women read them silently and in private. Printed matter provided information 
and opinion for the men who exercised power and conducted the public life of democracy, but it could also provide sustenance for the spirits and imaginations of Americans 
who were excluded from power and the public. 
The increase in literacy and in printed matter accelerated both the market and democratic 
individualism. Books and newspapers were scarce in the 18th century, and most Americans 
had experienced the written word only as it was read aloud by fathers, ministers, or teachers. 
After 1790, private, silent reading of new kinds of texts became common. No longer were 
adult male authorities the sole interpreters of the world for families and neighborhoods. 
The new print culture encouraged Americans to read, think, and interpret information for 
themselves. 
The Northern Middle Class 
Focus Question 
What were the central cultural maxims of the emerging northern middle class? 
A New Middle Class 
“The most valuable class in any community,” declared the poet-journalist Walt Whitman 
in 1858, “is the middle class.” At that time, the term middle class(and the social group that 
it described) was no more than 30 or 40 years old. The Market Revolution had created new 
towns and cities and transformed the old ones, and it had turned the rural North into a 
landscape of family-owned commercial farms. Those who claimed the title “middle class” 
were largely the new kinds of proprietors made by the market revolution—city and country merchants, master craftsmen who had turned themselves into manufacturers, and the 
mass of market-oriented farmers. They lived at the centers of the new marketing and communications networks, and they developed a self-conscious middle-class identity that was 
remarkably uniform throughout the North. 
A disproportionate number of them were New Englanders. New England was the first 
center of factory production, and southern New England farms were thoroughly commercialized by the 1830s. Yankee migrants dominated the commercial heartland of 
western New York and the northern regions of the Northwest. Even in the seaport cities 
(New York’s Pearl Street wholesale houses are a prime example), businessmen from New 
England were often at the center of economic innovation. This Yankee middle class 
invented cultural forms that became the core of an emerging business civilization. Liberty 
for them meant self-ownership and the freedom of action and ambition. Equality meant 
equality of opportunity. They upheld the autonomous and morally accountable individual against the claims of traditional neighborhoods and traditional families. They 
devised an intensely private, mother-centered domestic life. Most of all, they adhered to 
a reformed Yankee Protestantism whose moral imperatives became the foundation of 
American middle-class culture. 
The Evangelical Base 
In November 1830, the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney preached in Rochester, New 
York. Most in his audience were transplanted New Englanders, the heirs of what was left 
of Yankee Calvinism. In their ministers’ weekly sermons and in the set prayers their children memorized, they reaffirmed the old Puritan beliefs in providence and original sin. 
The earthly social order (the fixed relations of power and submission between men and women, 
rich and poor, children and parents, and so on) was necessary because humankind was 
innately sinful and prone to selfishness and disorder. Christians must obey the rules governing their station in life; attempts to rearrange the social order were both sinful and 
doomed to failure. 
Yet while they reaffirmed those conservative Puritan beliefs in church, the men and 
women in Finney’s audience routinely ignored them in their daily lives. Market expansion 
was clearly the result of human effort. Just as clearly, it added up to “improvement” and 
“progress.” And as middle-class Christians built an improved material and social world, 
the doctrines of human inability and natural depravity, along with faith in divine providence, made less sense. 
To such an audience, Charles Finney preached the organizing principle of northern 
middle-class evangelicalism: “God,” he insisted, “has made man a moral free agent.” Neither the social order, the troubles of this world, nor the spiritual state of individuals 
were divinely ordained. People would make themselves and the world better by choosing right over wrong—though they would choose right only after submitting their rebellious wills to the will of God. It was a religion that valued individual holiness over a permanent and sacred social order. It made the spiritual nature of individuals a matter of 
prayer, submission, and choice. Thus it gave Christians the means—through the spread 
of revivals—to bring on the thousand-year reign of Christianity that they believed would 
precede the Second Coming of Christ. As Charles Finney told his Rochester audience, 
 “If [Christians] were united all over the world the Millennium might be brought about 
in three months.” 
Charles Finney’s Rochester revival—a six-month marathon of preaching and praying— 
was no isolated event. Yankee evangelists had been moving toward Finney’s formulation 
since the turn of the 19th century. Like Finney, they borrowed revival techniques from the 
Methodists (weeklong meetings, meetings in which women prayed in public, an “anxious 
bench” for the most likely converts), but toned them down for their own more 
“respectable” and affluent audience. At the same time, middle-class evangelicals retained 
the Puritans’ Old Testament sense of cosmic history. They enlisted personal holiness and 
spiritual democracy in a fight to the finish between the forces of good and evil in this 
world. Building on these imperatives, the entrepreneurial families of the East and Northwest constructed an American middle-class culture after 1825. It was based, paradoxically, 
on an intensely private and emotionally loaded family life and an aggressively reformist 
stance toward the world at large. 
Domesticity 
The Yankee middle class made crucial distinctions between the home and the world— 
distinctionsthat grew from the disintegration of the old patriarchal household economy. 
Men in cities and towns now went off to work, leaving wives and children to spend the 
day at home. Even commercializing farmers made a clear distinction between (male) work 
that was oriented toward markets and (female) work that was tied to household maintenance (see chapter 8). The new middle-class evangelicalism encouraged this division of 
domestic labor. The public world of politics and economic exchange, said the preachers, 
was the proper sphere of men; women, on the other hand, were to exercise new kinds of 
moral influence within households. As one evangelical put it, “Each has a distinct sphere 
of duty—the husband to go out into the world—the wife to superintend the household. . . . 
Man profits from connection with the world, but women never; their constituents [sic] of 
mind are different. The one is raised and exalted by mingled association. The purity of the 
other is maintained in silence and seclusion.” 
The result was a feminization of domestic life. In the old yeoman-artisan republic, the 
fathers who owned property and headed households were God’s delegated authorities on 
earth, assigned the task of governing women, children, and other underlings. Middle-class 
evangelicals raised new spiritual possibilities for women and children. Mothers replaced 
fathers as the principal child-rearers, and they enlisted the doctrines of free agency and 
individual moral responsibility in that task. Middle-class mothers raised their children 
with love and reason, not fear. They sought to develop the children’s conscience and their 
capacity to love, to teach them to make good moral choices, and to prepare themselves for 
conversion and a lifetime of Christian service. 
Middle-class mothers could take up these tasks because they could concentrate their 
efforts on household duties and because they had fewer children than their mothers or 
grandmothers had had. In Utica, New York, for example, women who entered their 
childbearing years in the 1830s averaged only 3.6 births apiece; those who had started 
families only 10 years earlier averaged 5.1 births. Housewives also spaced their pregnancies differently. Unlike their forebears, who gave birth to a child about once every two 
years throughout their childbearing years, Utica’s middle-class housewives had their children at five-year intervals, which meant that they could give each child close attention. 
As a result, households were quieter and less crowded; children learned from their mothers how to govern themselves and seldom experienced the rigors of patriarchal family 
government. Thus mothers assumed responsibility for nurturing the children who would 
be carriers of the new middle-class culture, and fathers, ministers, and other authorities 
recognized the importance of that job. Edward Kirk, a minister in Albany, insisted that 
“the hopes of human society are to be found in the character, in the views, and in the 
conduct of mothers.” 
The new ethos of moral free agency was mirrored in the Sunday schools. When Sunday 
schools first appeared in the 1790s, their purpose was to teach working-class children to 
read and write by having them copy long passages from the Bible. Their most heavily publicized accomplishments were feats of memory. In 1823, Jane Wilson, a 13-year-old in 
Rochester, memorized 1,650 verses of scripture. Pawtucket, Rhode Island, claimed a mill 
girl who could recite the entire New Testament. 
After the revivals of the 1820s and 1830s, the emphasis shifted from promoting feats of 
memory to preparing children’s souls for conversion. Middle-class children were now 
included in the schools, corporal punishment was forbidden, and Sunday school teachers 
now tried to develop the moral sensibilities of their charges. They had the children read a 
few Bible verses each week and led them in a discussion of the moral lessons conveyed by 
the text. The proudest achievements of the new schools were children who made good 
moral choices. Thus Sunday schools became training grounds in free agency and moral 
accountability—a transformation that made sense only in a world where children could be 
trusted to make moral choices. 
Sentimentality 
Improvements in the printing, distribution, and marketing of books led to an outpouring 
of popular literature, much of it directed at the middle class. There were cookbooks, etiquette books, manuals on housekeeping, sermons, and sentimental novels, many of them 
written and most of them read by women. The works of popular religious writers such as 
Lydia Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, and Timothy Shay Arthur found their way into thousands of middle-class homes. Sarah Josepha Hale,whoseGodey’s Lady’s Book was the first 
mass-circulation magazine for women, acted as an arbiter of taste not only in furniture, clothing, and food but also in sentiments and ideas. Upon reviewing the sentimentalliterature read 
in middle-class homes, Nathaniel Hawthorne was not the only “serious” writer to deplore 
a literary marketplace dominated by “a damned mob of scribbling women.” 
Hawthorne certainly had economic reason for complaint. Sentimental novels written 
by women outsold by wide margins his Scarlet Letter andHouse of Seven Gables, Ralph 
Waldo Emerson’s essays, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, 
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and other works of the American Renaissance of the 
1850s. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World broke all sales records when it appeared in 
1850. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin(1852) broke the records set by 
Warner. In 1854, Maria Cummin’s The Lamplighter (the direct target of Hawthorne’s 
lament about scribbling women) took its place as the third of the monster best sellers of 
the early 1850s. 
These sentimental novels upheld the new middle-class domesticity. They sacralized 
the middle-class home and the trials and triumphs of Christian women. The action in 
each takes place indoors, usually in the kitchen or parlor, and the heroines are women 
(in Stowe’s book, docile slave Christians are included) who live under worldly patriarchy 
but who triumph through submission to God. The stories embody spiritual struggle, the 
renunciation of greed and desire, and mother love. The home is a shrine that is juxtaposed to the marketplace and the world of competition and power. Unlike the female 
characters in British and European novels of the time, the women in these American novels are intelligent, generous persons who grow in strength and independence. (The 
French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville commented that European women “almost think it 
a privilege to appear futile, weak, and timid. The women of America never lay claim to 
rights of that sort.”) 
In sentimental domestic fiction, women assume the role of evangelical ministers, 
demonstrating Christian living by precept, example, and moral persuasion. Female moral 
influence, wielded by women who had given themselves to God, is at war with the male 
world of politics and the marketplace—areas of power, greed, and moral compromise. 
Although few sentimental writers shared the views of the feminist Margaret Fuller, they 
would have agreed with her on the place of religion in women’s lives. “I wish women to 
live first for God’s sake,” she wrote. “Then she will not make an imperfect man her God, 
and thus sink to idolatry.” 
The most successful sentimental novel of the 1850s was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle 
Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s book was also the most powerful antislavery tract of these years, in 
part because it successfully dramatized the moral and political imperatives of the northern 
middle class. At its core, Uncle Tom’s Cabin indicts slavery as a system of absolute power 
at odds with domesticity and Christian love. The novel reverses the power relations of this 
world: In it, the home, and particularly the kitchen, is the ultimate locus of good, whereas 
law, politics, and the marketplace—the whole realm of men—are moved to the periphery 
and defined as unfeeling destroyers. Based solidly in revival Christianity, the novel lambastes the rational calculation, greed, and power-hunger of the “real world” that was made 
and governed by white men and upholds domestic space filled with women, slaves, and 
children who gain spiritual power through submission to Christ. The two most telling 
scenes—the deaths of the Christian slave Uncle Tom and the perfect child Eva St. Claire— 
reenact the crucifixion of Jesus. Uncle Tom prays for his tormentors as he is beaten to 
death, and little Eva extracts promises of Christian behavior from her deathbed. Both are 
powerless, submissive characters who die in order to redeem a fallen humankind. Their 
deaths are thus Christian triumphs that convert the powerful and hasten the millennial 
day when the world will be governed by a feminized Christian love and not by male 
power. 
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other popular sentimental novels were not, as Hawthorne and 
his friends believed, frivolous fairytales into which housewives retreated from the real 
world. They were subversive depictions of a higher spiritual reality that would move the 
feminine ethos of the Christian home to the center of civilization. That vision drove an 
organized public assault on irreligion, drunkenness, prostitution, slavery, and other practices and institutions that substituted passion and force for Christian love (see chapter 12), 
an assault that tried to “domesticate” the world and shape it in the image of the middleclass evangelical home. 
The Plain People of the North 
Focus Question 
Within the North, what were the alternatives to middle-class culture? 
From the 1830s onward, northern middle-class evangelicals proposed their religious 
and domestic values as a national culture for the United States. But even in their own 
region they were outnumbered by Americans who rejected their cultural leadership. 
The plain people of the North were a varied lot: settlers in the lower Northwest who 
remained culturally southern; hill-country northerners who had experienced little of 
what their middle-class cousins called “progress”; refugees from the countryside who 
had taken up urban wage labor; and increasing thousands of Irish and German immigrants. They did share a cultural conservatism—often grounded in the traditional, 
father-centered family—that rejected sentimentalism and reformist religion out of 
hand. As often as not, that conservatism was grounded in religious revivals (very different from those of the new middle class) that showered on the northern plain folk in 
the early 19th century. 
The Decline of the Established Churches 
The Founding Fathers had been largely indifferent to organized religion. A few were pious 
men, and some, like George Washington, attended church out of a sense of obligation. 
Many of the better educated, including Thomas Jefferson, subscribed to deism, the belief 
that God had created the universe but did not intervene in its affairs. Many simply did not 
bother themselves with thoughts about religion. When asked why the Constitution mentioned neither God nor religion, Alexander Hamilton is reported to have smiled and 
answered, “We forgot.” 
In state after state, post-revolutionary constitutions withdrew government support from 
religion, and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly prescribed the separation of church and the national state. Reduced to their own sources of support, the established churches—Congregationalism in New England, the Church of England 
(renamed Episcopalians) in the South and much of the mid-Atlantic) went into decline. 
The ConnecticutCongregationalist Ezra Stiles reported in 1780 that 60 parishes in Vermont 
and an equal number in New Hampshire were without a minister. In Massachusetts, 
according to Stiles’s reports, 80 parishes lacked a minister. In all, about one-third of New 
England’sCongregational pulpits were vacant in 1780, and the situation was worse to the 
north and west. In Vermont between 1763 and 1820, the founding of churches followed 
the incorporation of towns by an average of 15 years, indicating that settlement in that 
state proceeded almost entirely without the benefit of organized religion. In 1780, nearly 
all of the 750 Congregational churches in the United States were in New England. In the 
next 40 years, although the nation’s population rose from 4 to 10 million, the number of 
Congregational churches rose only to 1100. Ordinary women and men were leaving the 
churches that had dominated the religious life of colonial America, sometimes ridiculing 
the learned clergy as they departed. To Ezra Stiles and other conservatives, it seemed that 
the republic was plunging into atheism. 
The Rise of the Democratic Sects 
They were wrong. The collapse of the established churches, the social dislocations of the 
post-revolutionary years, and the increasingly antiauthoritarian, democratic sensibilities 
of ordinary northerners provided fertile ground for the growth of new democratic sects. 
These were the years of camp-meetingrevivalism, years in which Methodists and Baptists 
grew from small, half-organized sects into the great popular denominations they have 
been ever since. They were also years in which fiercely independent dropouts from older 
churches were putting together a loosely organized movement that would become the 
Disciples of Christ. At the same time, ragged, half-educated preachers were spreading 
the Universalist and Freewill Baptist messages in upcountry New England, while in 
western New York young Joseph Smithwas receiving the visions that would lead to 
Mormonism. 
The result was, first of all, a vast increase in the variety of choices on the Northern religious landscape, but within that welter of new churches there was a roughly uniform 
democratic style shared by the fastest-growing sects. First, they renounced the need for an 
educated, formally authorized clergy. Religion was now a matter of the heart and not the 
head. Crisis conversion(understood in most churches as personal transformation that 
resulted from direct experience of the Holy Spirit) was a necessary credential for preachers; a college degree was not. The new preachers substituted emotionalism and storytelling 
for Episcopal ritual and Congregational theological lectures. Stories attracted listeners, and 
they were harder for the learned clergy to refute. The new churches also held up the Bible 
as the one source of religious knowledge, thus undercutting all theological knowledge and 
placing every literate Christian on a level with the best-educated minister. These tendencies often ended in Restorationism—the belief that all theological and institutional 
changes since the end of biblical times were man-made mistakes, and that religious organizations must restore themselves to the purity and simplicity of the church of the Apostles. 
In sum, this loose democratic creed rejected learning and tradition and raised up the 
priesthood of all believers. 
Baptists and Methodists were by far the most successful at preaching to the new democratic audience. The United States had only 50 Methodist churches in 1783; by 1820 it 
had 2,700. Over those same years, the number of Baptist churches rose from 400 to 2,700. 
Together, in 1820, these two denominations outnumbered Episcopalians and Congregationalists by 3 to 1, almost a reversal of their relative standings 40 years earlier. Baptists 
based much of their appeal in localism and congregational democracy. Methodist success, 
on the other hand, entailed skillful national organization. Bishop Francis Asbury, the head 
of the church in its fastest-growing years, built an episcopal bureaucracy that seeded 
churches throughout the republic and sent circuit-riding preachersto places that had 
none. These early Methodist missions were grounded in self-sacrifice to the point of martyrdom. Asbury demanded much of his itinerant preachers, and until 1810, he strongly 
suggested that they remain celibate. “To marry,” he said, “is to locate.” Asbury also knew 
that married circuit riders would leave many widows and orphans behind, for hundreds 
of them worked themselves to death. Of the men who served as Methodist itinerants 
before 1819, at least 60 percent died before the age of 40. 
From seaport cities to frontier settlements, few Americans escaped the sound of 
Methodist preaching in the early 19th century. The Methodist preachers were common 
men who spoke plainly, listened carefully to others, and carried hymnbooks with simple 
tunes that anyone could sing. They also, particularly in the early years, shared traditional 
folk beliefs with their humble flocks. Some of the early circuit riders relied heavily on 
dreams; some could predict the future; many visited heaven and hell and returned with 
full descriptions. In the end, however, it was the hopefulness and simplicity of the 
Methodist message that attracted ordinary Americans. The Methodists rejected the old terrors of Calvinist determinism and taught that although salvation comes only through God, 
men and women can decide to open themselves to divine grace and thus play a decisive 
role in their own salvation. They also taught that a godly life is a gradual, lifetime growth 
in grace, thus allowing for repentance for minor, and sometimes even major, lapses of faith 
and behavior. By granting responsibility (one might say sovereignty) to the individual 
believer, the Methodists established their democratic credentials and drew hundreds of 
thousands of Americans into their fold. 
The Providential Worldview 
Northern plain folk favored churches as doctrinally varied as the people themselves. 
These ranged from the voluntaristic “free grace” doctrines of the Methodists to the 
iron-bound Calvinism of most Baptists, from the fine-tuned hierarchy of the Mormons 
to the near-anarchy of the Disciples of Christ. They included the most popular faiths 
(Baptists and Methodists came to contain two-thirds of America’s professing Protestants) 
as well as such smaller sects as Hicksite Quakers, Universalists, Adventists, Moravians, 
and Freewill Baptists. Yet for all their diversity, these churches had important points 
in common. Most shared an evangelical emphasis on individual experience over 
churchly authority. Most favored democratic, local control of religious life and distrusted outside organization and religious professionalism—not only the declining colonial establishments but also the emerging missionary network created by middle-class 
evangelicals. They also rejected middle-class optimism and reformism, reaffirming 
God’s providence and humankind’s duty to accept an imperfect world even while waging 
war against it. 
The most pervasive strain was a belief in providence—the conviction that human history is part of God’s vast and unknowable plan, and that all events are willed or allowed 
by God. Middle-class evangelicals spoke of providence, too, but they seemed to assume 
that God’s plan was manifest in the progress of market society and middle-class religion. 
Humbler evangelicals held to the older notion that providence is immediate, mysterious, 
and unknowable. They believed that the events of everyday life are parts of a vast blueprint that exists only in the mind of God—and not in the vain aspirations of women and 
men. When making plans, they added the caveat “the Lord willing,” and they learned to 
accept misfortune with fortitude. They responded to epidemics, bad crop years, aches 
and pains, illness, and early death by praying for the strength to endure. As a minister 
told the Scots Covenanters of Cambridge, New York, “It is through tribulation that all the 
saints enter into the kingdom of God. . . . The tempest sometimes ceases, the sky is clear, 
and the prospect is desirable, but by the by the gathering clouds threaten a new storm; 
here we must watch, and labor, and fight, expecting rest with Christ in glory, not on the 
way to it.” 
The providential worldview and the notion that God granted spiritual progress only 
through affliction came directly into play when a member of a poor Protestant family died. 
Country Baptists and working-class Methodists mourned their dead but took care not to 
“murmur” against God. In a world governed by providence, the death of a loved one was 
a test of faith. The death of children in particular called for heroic acts of submission to 
God’s will. Parents mourned the loss but stopped short of displaying grief that would suggest selfishness and lack of faith. Poor families washed and dressed the dead body themselves and buried it in a churchyard or on a hilltop plot on the family farm. Whereas the 
urban middle class preferred formal funerals and carefully tended cemeteries, humbler 
people regarded death as a lesson in the futility of pursuing worldly goals and in the need 
to submit to God’s will. 
Popular Millennialism 
Middle-class evangelicals were postmillennialists. They believed that Christ’s Second 
Coming would occur at the end of 1,000 years of social perfection brought about by the 
missionary conversion of the world. Ordinary Baptists, Methodists, and Disciples of 
Christ, however, assumed that the millennium would arrive with world-destroying violence, followed by 1,000 years of Christ’s rule on earth. Few, however, dwelled on this terrifying premillennialism, assuming that God would end the world in his own time. Now 
and then, however, the ordinary evangelicals of the North predicted the fiery end of the 
world. Prophets rose and fell, and thousands of people looked for signs of the approaching millennium in thunderstorms, shooting stars, eclipses, economic panics and depressions, and—especially—in hints that God had placed in the Bible. 
One avid student of those hints was William Miller, a Vermont Baptist who, after years of 
systematic study, concluded that God would destroy the world during the year following 
March 1843. Miller publicized his predictions throughout the 1830s, and near the end of the 
decade the Millerites (as his followers were called) accumulated thousands of believers— 
most of them conservative Baptists, Methodists, and Disciples in hill-country New England 
and in poor neighborhoods in New York, Ohio, and Michigan. As the end approached, 
the believers read the Bible, prayed, and attended meeting after meeting. A publicist 
named Henry Jones reported that a shower of meat and blood had fallen on Jersey City, 
and newspapers published stories alleging that the Millerites were insane and sexually 
licentious. Some, the press reported, were sewing “ascension robes” in which they would 
rise straight to heaven without passing through death. 
When the end of the year—March 23, 1844—came and went, most of the believers 
quietly returned to their churches. A committed remnant, however, kept the faith, and by 
the 1860s founded the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The Millerite movement was a 
reminder that hundreds of thousands of northern Protestants continued to believe that the 
God of the Old Testament governed everything from bee stings to the course of human 
history, and that one day he would destroy the world in fire and blood. 
Family and Society 
Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and the smaller popular sects evangelized primarily 
among persons who had been bypassed or hurt by the Market Revolution. Many had been 
reduced to dependent, wage-earning status. Others had become market farmers or urban 
storekeepers or master workmen; few had become rich. Their churches taught them that the 
attractions and temptations of market society were at the center of the world they must reject. 
Often their rhetoric turned to criticism of market society, its institutions, and its centers of power. The Quaker schismatic Elias Hicks, a Long Island farmer who fought the 
worldliness and pride of wealthy urban Quakers, listed the following among the mistakes 
of the early 19th century: railroads, the Erie Canal, fancy food and other luxuries, banks 
and the credit system, the city of Philadelphia, and the study of chemistry. The Baptist 
millenarian William Miller expressed his hatred of banks, insurance companies, stockjobbing, chartered monopolies, personal greed, and the city of New York. In short, what 
the evangelical middle class identified as the march of progress, poorer and more conservative evangelicals often condemned as a descent into worldliness that would almost certainly provoke God’s wrath. 
Along with doubts about economic change and the middle-class churches that embraced 
it, members of the popular sects often held to the patriarchal family form in which they had 
been raised, and with which both the Market Revolution and middle-class domesticity 
seemed at war. Hundreds of thousands of northern Protestants considered the erosion of 
domestic patriarchy a profound cultural loss and not, as it seemed to the middle class, an 
avenue to personal liberation. Their cultural conservatism was apparent in their efforts to 
sustain the father-centered family of the old rural North or to revive it in new forms. 
For some, religious conversion came at a point of crisis in the traditional family. William 
Miller, for example, had a strict Calvinist upbringing in a family in which his father, an 
uncle, and his grandfather were all Baptist ministers. As a young man he rejected his family, set about making money, and became a deist—actions that deeply wounded his parents. When his father died, Miller was stricken with guilt. He moved back to his hometown, 
took up his family duties, became a leader of the Baptist church, and (after reading a sermon entitled “Parental Duties”) began the years of Bible study that resulted in his worldending prophecies. Alexander Campbell, one of the founders of the Disciples of Christ, dramatized his filial piety when he debated the free-thinking socialist Robert Owen before a 
large audience in the Methodist meetinghouse in Cincinnati in 1828. He insisted that his 
white-haired father (a Scots Presbyterian minister) stand in the pulpit above the debaters. 
The Prophet Joseph Smith 
The weakening of patriarchal authority and attempts to shore it up were central to the life 
and work of one of the most unique and successful religious leaders of the period: the 
Mormon prophet Joseph Smith (see also chapter 13). Smith’s father was a landless Vermont 
Baptist who moved his wife and nine children to seven rented farms within 20 years. 
Around 1820, when young Joseph was approaching manhood, the family was struggling 
to make mortgage payments on a small farm outside Palmyra, New York. That farm— 
Joseph referred to it as “my father’s house”—was a desperate token of the Smith family’s 
commitment to yeoman independence and an endangered rural patriarchy. Despite the 
efforts of Joseph and his brothers, a merchant cheated the Smith family out of the farm. 
With that, both generations of the Smiths faced lifetimes as propertyless workers. To 
make matters worse, Joseph’s mother and some of his siblings began to attend an evangelical Presbyterian church in Palmyra, apparently against the father’s wishes. 
Before the loss of the farm, Joseph had received two visions warning him away from 
existing churches and telling him to await further instructions. In 1827, the Angel 
Moroni appeared to him and led him to golden plates that translated into The Book of 
Mormon. It told of a light-skinned people, descendants of the Hebrews, who had sailed 
to North America long before Columbus. They had had an epic, violent history, a 
covenanted relationship with God, and had been visited by Jesus following his crucifixion and resurrection. 
Joseph Smith later declared that his discovery ofThe Book of Mormon had “brought salvation to my father’s house” by unifying the family. It eventually unified thousands of others 
under a patriarchal faith based on restored theocratic government, male dominance, and a 
democracy among fathers. The good priests and secular leaders of The Book of Mormon are 
farmers who labor alongside their neighbors; the villains are self-seeking merchants, lawyers, 
and bad priests. The account alternates between periods when the people obey God’s laws 
and periods when they do not, each period accompanied by the blessings or punishments of 
a wrathful God. Smith carried that model of brotherly cooperation and patriarchal authority 
into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which he founded in 1830. 
The new church was ruled, not by professional clergy, but by an elaborate lay hierarchy 
of adult males. On top sat the father of Joseph Smith, rescued from destitution and shame, 
who was appointed Patriarch of the Church. Below him were Joseph Smith and his brother 
Hyrum, who were called First and Second Elders. The hierarchy descended through a succession of male authorities that finally reached the fathers of households. Smith claimed that 
this hierarchy restored the ancient priesthood that had disappeared over the 18 centuries 
of greed and error that he labeled the Great Apostasy of the Christian churches. Americans 
who knew the history of the Market Revolution and the Smith family’s travails within it, 
however, might have noted similarities between the restored ancient order and a poor man’s 
visionary retrieval of the social order of the 18th-century North. 
A New Popular Culture 
Not all of the northern plain folk spent their time in church. Particularly in cities and 
towns, they became both producers and consumers of a nonreligious (sometimes irreligious) commercial popular culture. The sports and shows attended by northern plain folk, 
like the churches they attended, were often grounded in an antisentimental view of the 
world and in traditional forms of patriarchy and masculinity. 
Blood Sports 
Urban working-class neighborhoods were particularly fertile ground for popular amusements. Young working men formed a bachelor subculture that contrasted with the piety 
and self-restraint of the middle class. They organized volunteer fire companies andmilitia 
units that spent more time drinking and fighting rival groups than 
drilling or putting out fires. Gathering at firehouses, saloons, and street 
corners, they drank, joked, boasted, 
and nurtured notions of manliness 
based on physical prowess and 
coolness underpressure. 
They also engaged in such 
“blood sports” as cock fighting, 
ratting, and dog fighting, even 
though many states had laws forbidding such activities. In 1823, 
an English tourist in New York 
City noted that “it is perfectly common for two or three cockfights to 
regularly take place every week.” 
Such contests grew increasingly 
popular during the 1850s and 
often were staged by saloonkeepers doubling as sports impresarios. 
One of the best known was Kit 
Burns of New York City, who ran 
Sportsman Hall, a saloon frequented by prizefighters, criminals, and their hangers-on. 
Behind the saloon was a space—reached through a narrow doorway that could be 
defended against the police—with animal pits and a small amphitheater that seated 250 
but that regularly held 400 yelling spectators. 
Although most of the spectators were working men, a few members of the old aristocracy who rejected middle-class ways also attended these events. In 1861, for 
instance, 250 spectators paid as much as $3 each to witness a fight between roosters 
belonging to the prizefighter John Morrissey and Mr. Genet, president of the New York 
City board of aldermen. A newspaper estimated bets on the event at $50,000. Frederick Van Wyck, scion of a wealthy old New York family, remembered an evening spent 
at Tommy Norris’s livery stable, where he witnessed a fight between billy goats, a rat 
baiting, a cockfight, and a boxing match between bare-breasted women. “Certainly for 
a lad of 17, such as I,” he recalled, “a night with Tommy Norris and his attraction was 
quite a night.” 
Boxing 
Prizefighting emerged from the same subterranean culture that sustained cockfights and 
other blood sports. This sport, imported from Britain, called for an enclosed ring, clear 
rules, cornermen, a referee, and a paying audience. Boxing’s popularity rose during the 
1840s and 1850s, a time of increasing immigration and violence in poor city neighborhoods. Many of the fighters had close ties with ethnic-based saloons, militia units, fire 
companies, and street gangs such as New York’s (Irish) Dead Rabbits and (native) Bowery 
B’hoys, and many labored at occupations with a peculiarly ethnic base. Some of the best 
American-born fighters were New York City butchers—a licensed, privileged trade from 
which cheap immigrant labor was systematically excluded. Butchers usually finished work 
by 10 A.M. They could then spend the rest of the day idling at a firehouse or a bar and often 
were prominent figures in neighborhood gangs. A prizefight between an American-born 
butcher and an Irish day laborer would attract a spirited audience that understood its class 
and ethnic meaning. 
Prizefighting was a way of rewarding courage and skill and, sometimes, of settling 
scores through fair contests limited to two combatants. Nonetheless, the fights were brutal. Boxers fought with bare knuckles, and a bout ended only when one of the fighters was 
unable to continue. In an infamous match in 1842, for instance, the Englishman Christopher 
Lilly knocked down his Irish opponent Thomas McCoy 80 times; the fight ended with 
round 119, when McCoy died in his corner. 
Although boxing had close ties to ethnic rivalries, the contestants often exhibited a 
respect for one another that crossed ethnic lines. For example, native-born Tom Hyer, who 
had defeated Irishman James “Yankee” Sullivan in one of the great early fights, later bailed 
Sullivan out of jail. In 1859, when Bill Harrington, a retired native-born boxer, disappeared and left a wife and children, his former Irish-born opponent, John Morrissey, 
arranged a sparring match and sent the proceeds to Mrs. Harrington. 
An American Theater 
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, all American theaters were in the large seaport cities. 
Those who attended were members of the urban elite, and nearly all of the plays, managers, 
and actors were English. After 1815, however, improvements in transportation and 
communication, along with the rapid growth of cities, created a much broader audience. 
Theaters and theater companies sprang up not only in New York and Philadelphia but 
also in Cincinnati, St. Louis, San Francisco, Rochester, and dozens of other new towns 
west of the Appalachians, and traveling troupes carried theatrical performances to the 
smallest hamlets. Most of them catered to male, largely plebeian audiences. Before 1830, 
the poorer theatergoers—nearly all of them men—occupied the cheap balcony seats 
(with the exception of the second balcony, which was reserved for prostitutes); artisans 
and other workingmen filled benches in the ground-floor area known as “the pit”; 
wealthier and more genteel patrons sat in the boxes. Those sitting in the pit and balcony 
joined in the performance: They ate and drank, talked, and shouted encouragement and 
threats to the actors. The genteel New Yorker Washington Irving lamented the “discharge of apples, nuts, and gingerbread” flying out of the balconies “on the heads of honest 
folks” in the pit. 
As time passed, however, rowdyism turned into violence. The less genteel members of 
theater audiences protested the elegant speech, gentlemanly bearing, and understated 
performances of the English actors, which happened to match the speech, manners, and 
bearing of the American urban elite. Thus the protests were directed not only at the English 
actors but also at the ladies and gentlemen in the orchestra who were seen as adherents of 
an aristocratic English culture unsuitable in a democratic republic. 
The first theater riot occurred in 1817, when the English actor Charles Incledon refused 
a New York audience’s demand that he stop what he was doing and sing “Black-Eyed 
Susan.” Such assaults grew more common during the 1820s. By the 1830s, separate theaters offered separate kinds of performances for rich and poor, but violence continued. It 
culminated in the rivalry between the American actor Edwin Forrest and the English actor 
William Charles Macready. Macready was a trained Shakespearean actor, and his 
restrained style and attention to the subtleties of the text had won him acclaim both in 
Britain and in the United States. Forrest, on the other hand, played to the cheap seats. 
With his bombast and histrionics, he transformed Shakespeare’s tragedies into melodramas. Forrest and Macready carried out a well-publicized feud that led to a mob attack on 
Macready in 1849. Led by E. Z. C. Judson (who, under the pen name Ned Buntline, wrote 
scores of dime novels), the mob descended on Macready’s performance at the exclusive 
Astor Place Opera House. The militia was waiting for them, and 20 people died in the 
ensuing riot and gunfight. 
Playhouses that catered to working-class audiences continued to feature Shakespearean 
tragedies (Richard III, played broadly and with a lot of swordplay, was the favorite), but 
they now shared the stage with works written in the American vernacular. The stage “Yankee,” rustic but shrewd, appeared at this time, and so did Mose the Bowery B’hoy, a New 
York volunteer fireman who performed feats of derring-do. Both frequently appeared in 
opposition to well-dressed characters with English accents. The Yankee outsmarted them; 
Mose beat them up. 
Minstrelsy 
The most popular form of theater was the blackface minstrelshow.These shows were blatantly racist, and they were the preferred entertainment of working men (again, the audience was overwhelmingly working class and male) in northern cities from 1840 to 1880. 
The first minstrel show was presented in 1831 when a white showman named Thomas 
Rice blacked his face and “jumped Jim Crow,” imitating a shuffle-dance he had seen on 
the Cincinnati docks. Within a few years, a formula for these shows had emerged that 
every theatergoer knew by heart. 
The minstrel shows lasted an hour and a half and were presented in three sections. The 
first consisted of songs and dances performed in a walkaround, in which the audience was 
encouraged to clap and sing along. This was followed by a longer middle section in which 
the company sat in a row with a character named Tambo at one end and a character named 
Bones at the other (named for the tambourine and bones, the instruments they played), 
with an interlocutor in the middle. The Tambo character, often called Uncle Ned, was a 
simple-minded plantation slave dressed in plain clothing. The Bones character, usually 
called Zip Coon, was a dandified, oversexed free black dressed in top hat and tails. The interlocutor was the straight man—fashionably dressed, slightly pretentious, with an English 
accent. This middle portion of the show consisted of a conversation among the three, 
which included pointed political satire, skits ridiculing the wealthy and the educated, and 
sexual jokes that bordered on obscenity. The third section featured songs, dances, and 
jokes, most of them familiar enough so that the audience could sing along and laugh at the 
right places. 
The minstrel shows introduced African American song and dance—in toned-down, 
Europeanized form—to audiences who would not have permitted black performers on the 
stage. They also reinforced racial stereotypes that were near the center of American popular culture. Finally, hiding behind black masks, minstrel performers dealt broadly with 
aspects of social and political life that other performers avoided. 
Minstrel shows and other theatrical entertainments traveled the new transportation 
network to rural America. The Grecian Dog Apollo, for example, arrived in New York 
from London in 1827. Appearing at theaters and lecture halls, he played cards, solved 
problems in arithmetic, and answered questions on astronomy and geography. Apollo 
traveled the Erie Canal circuit, playing at Albany, Saratoga Springs, Utica, Rochester, 
Buffalo, and Niagara Falls before returning to Peale’s Museum in New York for the 
1828 season. Many actors traveled well-established circuits, calling on local amateurs 
for their supporting casts. Minstrel companies traveled the river system of the interior 
and played to enthusiastic audiences wherever the riverboats docked. Mark Twain 
recalled them fondly: “I remember the first Negro musical show I ever saw. It must have 
been in the early forties. It was a new institution. In our village of Hannibal [Missouri]. . . 
it burst upon us as a glad and stunning surprise.” Among Americans who had been 
taught to distrust cities by cultural leaders ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Emerson 
and Thoreau to the evangelical preachers in their own neighborhoods, minstrel shows 
and other urban entertainments gave rural folk a sense of the variety and excitement of 
city life. 
Novels and the Penny Press 
Few of the commodities made widely available by the market revolution were more 
ubiquitous than newspapers and inexpensive books. Improvements in printing and 
papermaking enabled entrepreneurs to sell daily newspapers for a penny. Cheap 
“story papers” became available in the 1830s, “yellow-back” fiction in the 1840s, and 
dime novels from the 1850s onward. Although these offerings were distributed 
throughout the North and the West, they found their first and largest audience among 
city workers. 
Mass-audience newspapers carried political news and local advertisements, but they 
were heavily spiced with sensationalism. The Philadelphia Gazette in late summer 1829, for 
instance, treated its eager readers to the following: “Female Child with Two Heads,” “Bats,” 
“Another Shark,” “More Stabbing,” “Fishes Travelling on Land,” “Dreadful Steam Boat 
Disaster,”“Raffling for Babies,” “Combat with a Bear,” “Lake Serpent,” “Atrocious Murder,” 
and much more. Henry David Thoreau commented on the “startling and monstrous 
events as fill the family papers,” while his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson reported that 
Americans were “reading all day murders & railroad accidents.” Even though such sensational stories are most remarkable for their variety, they all portrayed a haunted, often 
demonic nature that regularly produced monstrosities and ruined the works of 
humankind, as well as a human nature that, despite appearances, was often deceptive and 
depraved. 
Working-class readers discovered a similarly untrustworthy world in cheap fiction. 
George Lippard’s Quaker City (1845) sold 60,000 copies in its first year and 30,000 in 
each of the next five years, making it the best-selling American book before the sentimental blockbusters of the 1850s. Lippard’s book was a fictional exposé of the 
hypocrisy, lust, and cruelty of Philadelphia’s outwardly genteel and Christian elite. Lippard and other adventure writers (whose works accounted for 60 percent of all American fiction titles published between 1831 and 1860) indulged in a pornography of violence that included cannibalism, blood drinking, and murder by every imaginable 
means. They also dealt with sex in unprecedentedly explicit ways. The yellow-back novels of the 1840s introduced readers not only to seduction and rape but also to transvestitism, child pornography, necrophilia, miscegenation, group sex, homosexuality, 
and—perhaps most shocking of all—women with criminal minds and insatiable sexual 
appetites. The scenes of gore and sexual depravity were presented voyeuristically—as 
self-righteous exposés of the perversions of the rich and powerful and stories of the 
Founders’ Republic trampled upon by a vicious elite that pretended virtue but lived only 
for its appetites. 
Popular fictions—like most popular plays, Edwin Forrest’s Shakespeare, and much of 
what went on in blood sports, the prize ring, and the penny press—were melodramatic 
contests between good and evil. Evil was described in terms reminiscent of original sin: It 
provided the background of all human action, and heroes met a demonic world with 
courage and guile without hoping to change it. Melodramatic heroes frequently acknowledged evil in themselves while claiming moral superiority over the hypocrites and frauds 
who governed the world. A murderer in Ned Buntline’s G’hals of New York (1850) remarks, 
“There isn’t no real witue [virtue] and honesty nowhere, ‘cept among the perfessional dishonest.” By contrast, in middle-class sentimental novels, the universe was benign; good 
could be nurtured, and evil could be defeated and transformed. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 
slave driver Simon Legree—the best-known villain in American literature—is evil not 
because of a natural disposition toward evil, but because he had been deprived of a mother’s 
love during childhood. The world, in Stowe’s view, could be nurtured into being good. 
Most northern plain folk (whether they favored church or popular entertainments) did not 
want to fix an imperfect and often chaotic world. They wanted only to live decently and 
bravely within it. 
Family,Church,and Neighborhood:The White South 
Focus Question 
In what specific ways did evangelical Protestantism act as a conservative force 
within southern culture? 
The Beginnings of the Bible Belt 
In the first third of the 19th century, evangelical Protestantism transformed the South into 
what it has been ever since: the Bible Belt. That transformation began when poor and middling whites found spiritual alternatives to the culture of the gentry—to their formalistic 
Episcopalianism, their love of luxury and display, and their enjoyment of money and 
power. Early southern Baptists and Methodists demanded a crisis conversion followed by 
a life of piety and a rejection of what they called “the world.” To no small degree, the world 
was the economic, cultural, and political world controlled by the planters. James 
McGready, who preached in rural North Carolina in the 1790s, openly condemned the 
gentry: “The world is in all their thoughts day and night. All their talk is of corn and 
tobacco, of land and stock. The price of merchandise and negroes are inexhaustible themes 
of conversation. But for them, the name of Jesus has no charms; it is rarely mentioned 
unless to be profaned.” This was dangerous talk, as McGready learned when young rakes 
rode their horses through one of his outdoor meetings, tipped over the benches, set the 
altar on fire, and threatened to kill McGready. 
Southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians spread their message in the early 
19th century through the camp meeting, and this too was subversive of southern social 
distinctions. Though its origins stretched back into the 18th century, the first full-blown 
camp meeting took place at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801. Here the annual “Holy 
Feast,” a three-day communion service of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, was transformed 
into an outdoor, interdenominational revival at which hundreds experienced conversion 
under Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist preaching. Estimates of the crowd at Cane 
Ridge ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 persons, and by all accounts the enthusiasm was 
unprecedented. Some converts fainted, others jerked uncontrollably, and a few barked 
like dogs, all of them visibly taken by the Holy Spirit. These exercises fell upon women 
and men, whites and blacks, rich and poor, momentarily blurring social hierarchy in 
moments of profound and very public religious ecstasy. A witness to a later camp meeting 
recounted that “to see a bold and courageous Kentuckian (undaunted by the horrors of 
war) turn pale and tremble at the reproof of a weak woman, a little boy, or a poor 
African; to see him sink down in deep remorse, roll and toss, and gnash his teeth, till 
black in the face, entreat the prayers of those he came to devour . . . who can say the 
change was not supernatural?” (Southern white men, even when under religious conviction, sometimes resisted this loss of mastery and self-control. One preacher remembered a “fine, strong, good-looking young man” who felt himself giving in to campmeeting preaching. He “found no relief until he drew a large pistole out of his pocket, 
with which he intended to defend himself if any one should offer to speak to him on the 
subject of religion.”) 
The early southern evangelicals irritated and angered the elite and white men generally, for they seemed to question not only worldliness but the white male dominance 
that held the southern world together. The conversion of wives and children (not to 
mention slaves) could trouble southern families; the conversion of white men could 
 “unman” them and render them “womanish. But the governors of southern farms and 
southern families found that they had little to worry about. The Baptists, Methodists, 
and Presbyterians of the South, though they never stopped railing against greed and 
pride, found that they could conquer the South and live comfortably with a system of 
fixed hierarchy and God-given social roles—with slavery and father-dominated families 
in particular. 
Slavery and Southern Evangelicals 
Slavery became a major case in point. For a brief period after the Revolution, evangelicals joined with an elite minority of slaveholders (see chapter 9) to oppose slavery. 
Methodists and Baptists preached to slaves as well as to whites, and Bishop Francis 
Asbury, the principal architect of American Methodism, admired John Wesley’s statement that slavery was against “all the laws of Justice, Mercy, and Truth.” In 1780, a conference of Methodist preachers ordered circuit riders to free their slaves and advised all 
Methodists to do the same. In 1784, the Methodists declared that they would excommunicate members who failed to free their slaves within two years. Many lay Methodists 
took the order seriously. On the Delmarva Peninsula (Delaware and the Eastern Shore 
of Maryland and Virginia), for instance, Methodist converts freed thousands of slaves in 
the late 18th century. Other evangelicals shared their views. As early as 1787, southern 
Presbyterians prayed for “final abolition,” and two years later, Baptists condemned slavery as “a violent deprivation of the rights of nature and inconsistent with a republican 
government.” 
The period of greatest evangelical growth, however, came during the years in which the 
South committed irrevocably to plantation slavery. As increasing numbers of both slaves 
and slave owners came within the evangelical fold, the southern churches had to rethink 
their position on human bondage. The Methodists never carried out their threat to excommunicate slaveholders, confessing in 1816 that southerners were so committed to slavery 
that “little can be done to abolish the practice so contrary to moral justice.” Similarly, the 
Baptists and Presbyterians never translated their antislavery rhetoric into action. By 1820, 
evangelicals were coming to terms with slavery. Instead of demanding freedom for slaves, 
they suggested, as the Methodist James O’Kelly put it, that slave owners remember that 
slaves were “dear brethren in Christ” who should not be treated cruelly and who should 
be allowed to attend religious services. After 1830, with large numbers of the planter elite 
converted to evangelicalism, this would evolve into a full-scale effort to Christianize the 
institution of slavery. 
Gender, Power, and the Evangelicals 
Southern men, yeomen as well as planters, distrusted the early evangelicals for more than 
their views on slavery. The preachers seemed even more grievously mistaken about white 
manhood and the integrity of white families. Southerners were localistic and culturally 
conservative. While the new northern middle class nourished a cosmopolitan culture, an 
individualism, and a domestic sentimentalism that subverted traditional authority, southerners distrusted outsiders and defended rural neighborhoods grounded in the sovereignty 
of fathers over their property and families, and in the power, judgment, skills, and physical prowess of those fathers. 
The early evangelicals seemed to threaten southern patriarchy. They preached individual salvation to women, children, and slaves—often hinting that the “family” of 
believers could replace blood ties. Churches sometimes intervened in family disputes or 
disciplined family members in ways that subverted patriarchal control. Perhaps worse, 
many of the preachers failed to act out the standards of southern manhood in their own 
lives. James McGready and other camp-meeting preachers often faced hecklers and rowdies. When attacked, they either ran off or quietly took their beatings. White men often 
met the turn-the-other-cheek meekness of the preachers (not to mention the celibacy of 
the Methodists) with suspicion and contempt. They felt the same about the hugging, 
kissing, crying, and bodily “exercises” acted out in evangelical meetings. 
As they had with slavery, southern evangelicals came to terms with the notions of manhood and the father-centered families of the South. The preachers learned to assert traditional forms of manhood. Their fathers and often themselves, they said, had fought the 
British and Indians heroically. They revealed that they had often been great drinkers, gamblers, fighters, and fornicators before submitting to God, and they also began fighting back 
when attacked. Peter Cartwright, who conquered much of Kentucky and southern Illinois 
for Methodism, told numerous stories of how he outwitted and often outfought rowdies 
who attacked his meetings. On many occasions, he walked out of the pulpit to confront 
hecklers, and punched more than a few of them. The preachers also made it clear that they 
would pose no threat to the authority of fathers. They discouraged the excesses of female and 
juvenile piety. At the same time, church disciplinary cases involving adultery, wife-beating, 
private drunkenness, and other offenses committed within families became more and 
more rare. 
Religious Conservatism 
More fundamentally, evangelicals upheld the southern world of fixed hierarchy and God-given 
social roles, and their churches reinforced localistic neighborhoods and the patriarchal family. Some southern communities began when a whole congregation moved onto new land. 
Others were settled by the chain migration of brothers and cousins, and subsequent revivals 
spread through family networks. Rural isolation limited most households to their own company during the week, but on Sundays church meetings united the neighborhood’s cluster of 
extended families into a community of believers. In most neighborhoods, social connections 
seldom extended beyond that. The word “church” referred ultimately to the worldwide community of Christians, and the war between the “church” and the “world” referred to a cosmic 
history that would end in millennial fire. But in the day-to-day understandings of southern 
evangelicals, the church was the local congregation and the world was local sins and local 
sinners. Churches disciplined members for such worldly practices as drinking, gambling, 
dancing, swearing, fornication, and adultery, and even for giving the impression of sinful 
behavior. Mount Olive Baptist Church in North Carolina, for example, expelled Mary Bivens 
because she was “too thick with young men.” While they patrolled their own congregations, 
however, southern evangelicals seldom thought about changing the world. 
Southern evangelicalism rested on the sovereignty of God, a conviction of human 
imperfection, and an acceptance of disappointment and pain as part of God’s grand and 
unknowable design. When the young son of a planter family died, the mother was certain that God had killed the child because the parents had loved him more than God: “But 
God took him for he saw he was our idol.” A grieving South Carolinian received this consolation from a relative: “Hope you are quite reconciled to the loss of your darling babe. 
As it was the will of God to take him, we must obey, and He will be angry at us if we go 
past moderate grief.” Francis Pickens, another South Carolinian, wrote after losing his 
wife and child, “I had almost forgot there was a God, and now I stand the scattered . . . 
and blasted monument of his just wrath.” It was a far cry from the middle-class North’s 
sentimentalism and the romantic, redemptive deaths of children in sentimental fiction. 
Within this flawed and dangerous world, patriarchal social relations were crucial to 
Christianliving. Southerners revered the patriarch and slaveholder Abraham more than any 
other figure in the Bible, and John C. Calhoun would proclaim “Hebrew Theocracy” the best 
government ever experienced by humankind. The father must—like Abraham—govern and 
protect his household, the mother must assist the father, and the women, children, and slaves 
must faithfully act out the duties of their stations. Eternal salvation was possible for everyone, 
but the saved lived out their godliness by striving to be a good mother, a good father, a good 
slave. By the same token, a Christian never questioned his or her God-given social role. 
Pro-Slavery Christianity 
In revolutionary and early national America, white southerners had been the most radical 
of republicans. Jeffersonian planter-politicians led the fights for equal rights and the 
absolute separation of church and state, and southern evangelicals were the early republic’s 
staunchest opponents of slavery. By 1830, however, the South was an increasingly conscious minority within a democratic and capitalist nation. The northern middle classes 
proclaimed a link between material and moral progress, identifying both with individual 
autonomy and universal rights. A radical northern minority was agitating for the immediate abolition of slavery (chapter 12). 
Southerners met this challenge with an “intellectual blockade” against outside publications and ideas and with a moral and religious defense of slavery. The Bible provided 
plenty of ammunition. Southerners preached that the Chosen People of the Old Testament 
had been patriarchs and slaveholders, and that Jesus had lived in a society that sanctioned 
slavery and never criticized the institution. Some ministers claimed that blacks were the 
descendants of Ham and thus deserved enslavement. The most common religious argument, however, was that slavery had given millions of heathen Africans the priceless 
opportunity to become Christians and to live in a Christian society. Thornton Stringfellow, 
a Virginia Baptist minister, insisted that “their condition . . . is now better than that of any 
equal number of laborers on earth, and is daily improving.” 
Like their northern counterparts, southern clergymen applauded the material improvements of the age, but they insisted that moral improvement occurred only when people 
embraced the timeless truths of the Bible. The South Carolinian William F. Hutson put it 
simply: “In religion and morals, we doubt all improvements, not known to certain fishermen who lived eighteen hundred years ago.” Northern notions of progress through individual liberation, equal rights, and universal Christian love were wrong-headed and dangerous. The Presbyterian John Adger asserted that relations of dominance and submission 
(and not “barbarism and personal savage independence”) were utterly necessary to both 
social and individual fulfillment, and that the distribution of rights and responsibilities was 
unequal and God-given. “The rights of the father are natural, but they belong only to the 
fathers. Rights of property are natural, but they belong only to those who have property,” 
and such natural rights were coupled with the awesome duties of fatherhood and proprietorship. In the end, southern pro-slavery intellectuals rejected Jefferson’s “self-evident” 
equality of man; Edmund Ruffin, for instance, branded that passage of the Declaration of 
Independence as “indefensible” as well as “false and foolish.” 
The Mission to the Slaves 
By the 1820s, southern evangelicalism had long since abandoned its hostility toward slavery, and slaveholders commonly attended camp meetings and revivals. These prosperous 
converts faced conflicting duties. Their churches taught them that slaves had immortal 
souls and that planters were as responsible for the spiritual welfare of their slaves as they 
were for the spiritual welfare of their own children. One preacher remarked that it was 
difficult “to treat them as property, and at the same time render to them that which is 
just and equal as immortal and accountable beings, and as heirs of the grace of life, 
equally with ourselves.” A planter on his deathbed told his children that humane treatment and religious instruction for slaves was the duty of slave owners; if these were 
neglected, “we will have to answer for the loss of their souls.” After Nat Turner’s bloody 
slave revolt in 1831 (chapter 9), missions to the slaves took on new urgency: If the 
churches were to help create a patriarchal Christian society in the South, that society 
would have to include the slaves. The result after 1830 was a concerted attempt to 
Christianize the slaves. 
To this end, Charles Colcock Jones, a Presbyterian minister from Georgia, spent much of 
his career writing manuals on how to preach to slaves. He taught that no necessary connection 
linked social position and spiritual worth: there were good and bad slaveholders and good and 
bad slaves. He also taught, preaching from the Epistles of Paul (“Servants, obey your masters”), 
that slaves must accept the master’s authority as God’s, and that obedience was their prime religious virtue. Jones warned white preachers never to become personally involved with their 
slave listeners—to pay no attention to their quarrels, their complaints about their master or 
about their fellow slaves, or about working conditions on the plantation. “We separate entirely 
their religious from their civil condition,” he said, “and contend that one may be attended to 
without interfering with the other.” The catechism Jones prepared for slaves included the 
question, “What did God make you for?” The answer was, “To make a crop.” 
The evangelical mission to the slaves was not as completely self-serving as it may seem. 
For to accept one’s worldly station, to be obedient and dutiful within that station, and to 
seek salvation outside of this world were precisely what the planters demanded of themselves and their own families. An important goal of plantation missions was to create safe 
and profitable plantations. Yet that goal was to be achieved by Christianizing both slaveholders and slaves—a lesson that some slaveholders learned when they were expelled from 
their churches for mistreating their slaves. As for the slaves, we have seen that they listened 
selectively to what white missionaries preached, and turned evangelical Christianity into a 
religion of their own (chapter 9.) 
Southern Entertainments 
Southerners of all classes and races were leisure-loving people, but the rural character of 
the South threw them upon their own resources rather than on commercial entertainments. They drank, told stories, engaged in wrestling and boxing matches, and danced. 
For evangelicals who withdrew from such entertainments, church socials and camp meetings filled the gap. Books were not as readily available as they were in the North. Whereas 
the big publishing houses produced many titles aimed at northern and western readers 
and at such specialized constituencies as dairy farmers or middle-class housewives, the 
southern literary market was too small to justify such special attention. Most southern 
families owned a Bible, and wealthier families often read histories, religious and political 
tracts, and English (seldom American) literature, with Shakespeare leading the way and 
Sir Walter Scott’s tales of medieval chivalry not far behind. English rural sports persisted 
in the South. Hunting and fishing were southern passions. Fox and deer hunts provided 
the gentry with an opportunity to display their skill with horses and guns, while the 
hunts of poorer whites and slaves both provided sport and enhanced their threatened 
roles as providers. Although state laws forbade slaves to own guns or dogs, thousands of 
slave owners overlooked the laws. Thoroughbred horse racing was concentrated in the 
South, with prominent planters—Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay among them—leading the way. 
Commercial entertainments in the South were concentrated in the larger towns and 
along the major rivers. Showboats brought theatrical troupes, minstrel shows, animal acts, 
and other entertainment to the river towns. New Orleans, the great market town of the 
Southwest, was a center of theater, music, and other entertainments. It was also the only 
southern city where one could watch a professional prizefight, and violent contests seem 
to have appealed to New Orleans audiences. In 1819, a New Orleans impresario pitted a 
bull against six “of the strongest dogs in the country”; six bulldogs versus a Canadian bear; 
a “beautiful Tiger” versus a black bear; and 12 dogs versus a “strong and furious Opeloussas 
Bull.” The advertisement further promised: “If the tiger is not vanquished in his fight with 
the Bear, he will be sent alone against the last Bull; and if the latter conquers all his enemies, several pieces of fireworks will be placed on his back, which will produce a very 
entertaining amusement.” The impresario also stated that the premises had been 
inspected by the mayor of New Orleans, and that children would be admitted at half 
price. Although such events were outlawed in later years, they continued on the sly. In 
1852, a crowd of 5,000 gathered outside New Orleans to watch a bull and a grizzly bear 
fight to the death. 
Race 
Americans in the first half of the 19th century revised the racial order as well as the religious 
and domestic order of their society. White Americans had long assumed that Africans 
belonged at the bottom of society, but they assumed that others belonged there as well. In a 
colonial world in which many whites were indentured servants, tenants, apprentices, and 
workers who lived in their employers’ homes, where increasing numbers of blacks were formally free and many others were hired out as semi-free, few Americans made rigid distinctions 
concerning the “natural” independence of whites and the “natural” dependence of blacks. (All 
Americans, after all, were colonial subjects of the British king.) The language of colonial social 
division separated gentlemen from the “middling sort,” and relegated the propertyless and 
dependent to the “lower orders” or the “lower sort.” While the better-off whites were far from 
color blind, they wrote off poverty, disorder, drunkenness, and rioting as the work not of 
blacks but of an undifferentiated substratum of “Negroes, sailors, servants, and boys.” 
Modern racism—the notion that blacks were a separate and hopelessly inferior order of 
humankind—emerged from developments in the early 19th century: national independence 
and the crucial new distinction between Americans who were citizens and those who were 
not, the recommitment to slavery in the South, and the making of what would be called “free 
labor” in the North. Whites who faced lifetimes of wage labor and dependence struggled to 
make dignity and self-respect out of that situation. At the same time, freed slaves entered the 
bottom of a newly defined “free labor” society and tried to do the same. With plenty of help 
from the wealthy and powerful, whites succeeded in making white democracy out of the 
rubble of the old patriarchal republic. In the process, they defined nonwhites as constitutionally incapable of self-discipline, personal independence, and political participation. 
Free Blacks 
There had been sizable pockets of slavery in the northern colonies, but revolutionary 
idealism, coupled with the growing belief that slavery was inefficient, led one northern 
state after another to abolish it. Vermont, where there were almost no slaves, outlawed 
slavery in its revolutionary constitution. By 1804, every northern state had taken some 
action, usually by passing laws that called for gradual emancipation. The first of such 
laws, and the model for others, was passed in Pennsylvania in 1780. This law freed 
slaves born after 1780 when they reached their 28th birthday. Slaves born before 1780 
would remain slaves, and slave children would remain slaves through their prime working years. By 1830, only a handful of aging blacks remained slaves in the North. 
Gradual emancipation did not stop at the Mason-Dixon Line. We have seen (chapter 9) 
that thousands of Chesapeake slaveholders freed their slaves in the decades following the 
Revolution. Virginia seriously considered abolishing slavery outright. In 1832, a Virginia 
constitutional convention argued the question of immediate emancipation by state law. 
With the western counties supporting abolition (but insisting that freed blacks be transported from the state) and some of the eastern, slaveholding counties threatening to secede 
from the state if abolition won, the legislature rejected emancipation by a vote of 73–58. 
In the Deep South, where slavery was a big and growing business, whites did not talk 
about emancipation. They assumed that slavery was permanent, and that the only proper 
status for blacks was bondage and submission to whites. 
From Virginia on north, the rising population of free blacks gravitated to the cities and 
towns. Despite the flood of white immigrants from Europe and the American countryside, 
African Americans constituted a sizable minority in the rapidly expanding cities. New York 
City’s black population, 10.5 percent in 1800, was still 8.8 percent in 1820. Philadelphia, 
the haven of thousands of southern refugees, was 10.3 percent African American in 1800 
and 11.9 percent in 1820. 
Blacks in the seaports tended to take stable, low-paying jobs. A few became successful (occasionally wealthy) entrepreneurs, while some others practiced skilled trades. 
Many of the others took jobs as waiters or porters in hotels, as merchant seamen, as barbers, and as butlers, maids, cooks, washerwomen, and coachmen for wealthy families. 
Others worked as dockworkers and laborers. Still others became dealers in used clothing, or draymen with their own carts and horses, or food vendors in the streets and in 
basement shops. (In New York, oysters were a black monopoly.) As never before, free 
black faces and voices became parts of the landscape and soundscape of cities and 
towns—hawking buttermilk, hot corn, and oysters, talking and laughing in the streets, 
jostling their way through city crowds. More than a few whites were disturbed. The New 
York journalist Mordecai Noah, like many other elite whites, had expected freed slaves 
to be grateful and deferential to their former masters, but “instead of thankfulness for 
their redemption, they have become impudent and offensive beyond all precedent.” 
African Americans with money established businesses and institutions of their own. At 
one end were black-owned gambling houses, saloons, brothels, oyster cellars, and dance 
halls, which often served a mixed clientele. At the other end were institutions built by selfconsciously “respectable” free blacks to assert their dignity and to “uplift” their oncedependent people. Most prominent among these were churches, which sprang up wherever African Americans lived. In Philadelphia, black preachers Richard Allen and Absalom 
Jones rebelled against segregated seating in St. George’s Methodist Church and, in 1794, 
founded two separate black congregations; by 1800, about 40 percent of Philadelphia’s 
blacks belonged to one of those two churches. The African Methodist Episcopal Church 
grew from Allen’s church, and established itself as a national denomination in 1816. 
Schools and relief societies, usually associated with churches, grew quickly. Black Masonic 
lodges attracted hundreds of members. Many of the churches and social organizations 
took names that proudly called up the blacks’ African origins. In Philadelphia, for instance, 
there were African Methodists, Abyssinian Baptists, the Daughters of Ethiopia, the African 
Dorcas Society—to name only a few. Not only their names and activities, but their presence as black-owned buildings filled with respectable former slaves caught the attention of 
their white and black neighbors. It was from this matrix of black businesses and institutions that black abolitionists—David Walker in Boston, Fredrick Douglass in New Bedford 
and Rochester, the itinerant Sojourner Truth, and many others—would emerge to demand 
abolition of slavery and equal rights for black citizens. 
The Beginnings of Modern Racism 
In post-revolutionary America, the most important social and political distinction was not 
between black and white or rich and poor. It was between the heads of independent households and the women, slaves, servants, apprentices, and others who were their dependents. 
Wage labor and tenancy reduced the number of northern whites who were, by traditional 
measures, independent. They fought that threat in a number of ways: their skills and labor, 
they said, constituted a kind of property; their manhood conferred judgment and strength 
and thus independence. These were assertions of worth and independence that had little to 
do with the ownership of property. In ways that were sometimes subtle but just as often brutal, they often made those assertions at the expense of African Americans. Along with the 
value of their labor and their manhood, white men discovered the decisive value of white 
skin. 
Whites in the early 19th century began refusing to work alongside blacks, and some of 
the earliest and most decisive racist assaults came when whites asserted their control over 
some occupations and relegated blacks to others. They chased blacks out of skilled jobs 
by pressuring employers to discriminate, and often by outright violence. As a result, 
African Americans were almost completely eliminated from the skilled trades, and many 
unskilled and semiskilled blacks lost their jobs on the docks and in warehouses. In 1834, 
a Philadelphian reported that “colored persons, when engaged in their usual occupations, 
were repeatedly assailed and maltreated, usually on the [waterfront]. Parties of white men 
have insisted that no blacks shall be employed in certain departments of labor.” And as 
their old jobs disappeared, blacks were systematically excluded from the new jobs that 
were opening up in factories. 
Even whites who remained in positions of personal dependence (servants, waiters, and 
other jobs that were coming to be defined as “black” work) refused the signs and language 
of servility. White servants refused to wear livery, which became the uniform of black servants of the rich. Whites also refused to be called servants. As early as 1807, when an 
Englishvisitor asked a New England servant for her master, the woman replied that she 
had no master. “I am Mr. ___’s help,” she said. “I’d have you know, man,that I am no sarvant, 
none but negars are sarvants.” The Englishwoman Frances Trollope, who spent the late 
1820s in the United States, explained: “It is more than petty treason to the republic to call 
a free citizen a servant.” 
There was trouble off the job as well. As early as the 1790s, whites had disrupted 
African American church meetings, and they frequently attacked black celebrations of 
northern emancipation and Haitian independence. Black neighborhoods and institutions 
came under increasing attack. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, every northern city experienced antiblack rioting. In 1829, white mobs destroyed black homes and businesses in 
Cincinnati. Hundreds of blacks fled that city for Canada; many others sought refuge in 
slaveholding Kentucky. Another major race riot would break out in Philadelphia in 1834 
between working-class whites and blacks at a street carnival. While blacks seem to have 
won the first round, the whites refused to accept defeat. Over the next few nights, they 
wrecked a black-owned tavern, broke into black households to terrorize families and steal 
their property, attacked whites who lived with, socialized with, or operated businesses 
catering to blacks, wrecked the African Presbyterian Church, and destroyed a black church 
on Wharton Street by sawing through its timbers and pulling it down. 
Sporadic racial violence wracked the city throughout the 1830s and 1840s, reaching its 
height in 1849. That summer a firehouse gang of Irish immigrants calling themselves “the 
Killers” attacked the California House, a black-owned tavern and gambling hall. The black 
patrons had anticipated the attack and had armed themselves, and in the melee five Killers 
were shot. For two months, tempers simmered. Finally, the Killers set a fire at the California House that spread to nearby houses. They fought off neighborhood blacks, rival firemen, and the police. The riot ended only when the city sent in four companies of militia. 
Mobs often targeted whites who socialized or cooperated with blacks. Integrated taverns, dance halls, brothels, and boarding houses were burned in city after city, and whites 
who helped blacks became special targets. Free blacks who built churches, schools, and 
other institutions of respectability often had the assistance of whites (usually middle-class 
evangelicals) in their attempts to “uplift” the survivors of slavery. Black leaders and a small 
number of white reformers dreamed of an America in which godly behavior—and not skin 
color—would win entrance into the American community of respect. By the early 1830s, 
they formed antislavery societies that called not only for immediate and universal emancipation but for equal rights as well. (see chapter 12). These became the targets of some of 
the most vicious mobs. In July 1834, for instance, a New York City mob sacked the house 
of the white abolitionist merchant Lewis Tappan, moved on to the Rev. Charles Finney’s 
Chatham Street Chapel, where abolitionists were said to be meeting, and finished the 
evening by attacking a British (and thus supposedly aristocratic) actor at the Bowery theater. 
The manager saved his theater by waving two American flags and ordering an American 
actor to perform popular minstrel routines for the mob. Democracy and working-class 
aspirations, it seemed, were in league with racism. 
Above all, white populists pronounced blacks unfit to be citizens of the republic. Federalists and other upper-class whites had often supported various forms of black suffrage; lessprivileged whites opposed it. The insistence that blacks were incapable of citizenship 
reinforced an equally natural white male political capacity. The most vicious racist assaults were 
often carried out beneath symbols of the revolutionary republic. Antiblack mobs in Baltimore, 
Cincinnati, and Toledo called themselves Minute Men and Sons of Liberty. Philadelphia 
blacks who gathered to hear the Declaration of Independence read on the Fourth of July were 
attacked for “defiling the government.” The antiabolitionist mob that sacked Lewis Tappan’s 
house destroyed his furniture, but they rescued a portrait of George Washington and carried 
it as a banner during their later attacks on Finneyite evangelicals and English actors. 
The more respectable and powerful whites had long been worried about the mixed-race 
underclass of the cities and towns. Now, as the disorder that they expected of the lower 
orders took the form of race riots, the authorities responded. But rather than protect the 
jobs, churches, schools, businesses, friends, and political rights of African Americans from 
criminal attack, they determined to stop the trouble by removing black people—from 
employment, from public festivities, from their already-limited citizenship, and, ultimately, 
from the United States. 
Wealthier and better-educated whites shared their compatriots’ belief that the United 
States would never be a racially integrated democracy. By far the largest organization 
that addressed itself to problems of slavery and race in these years was the American 
ColonizationSociety, which envisioned sending freed blacks (but not slaves) “back” to 
Africa. The Society held its first meeting at the end of 1816—in the chamber of the House 
of Representatives, with Bushrod Washington, stepson of George Washington, as president. 
Early members included Henry Clay, John Taylor of Caroline, Andrew Jackson, and other 
political and social leaders of the West, the Middle States, and the Upper South. The Colonizationists did not see slavery as the problem. Like white rioters, they saw the problem as 
black freedom. African Americans, they said, would continue to suffer from white prejudice 
and their own deficiencies as long as they stayed in the United States. They would exercise 
freedom and learn Christian and republican ways only if exported to Liberia, on the west 
coast of Africa. 
A few free blacks took them up on the offer, but most adamantly refused, insisting that 
colonization was not an offer of freedom but an attempt to round up native-born citizens 
who were not white and make them disappear. Colonizationists frequently denounced 
white violence against free blacks. Just as often, however, they blamed the “degradation” 
of blacks as the root of the problem. Colonization remained the principal racial doctrine 
of white respectables—in a chronological line running from Henry Clay to Abraham Lincoln— 
north of the Lower South until the end of slavery. 
Citizenship 
The transition from republic to democracy—and the relation of that transition to the decline 
of patriarchy and efforts to shore up white manhood—took on formal, institutional shape in 
a redefinition of republican citizenship. The revolutionary constitutions of most states 
retained colonial freehold (property) qualifications for voting. In the yeoman societies of the 
late 18th century, freehold qualifications granted the vote to between one-half and threequarters of adult white men. Many of the disfranchised were dependent sons who expected 
to inherit citizenship along with land. Some states dropped the freehold clause and gave the 
vote to all adult men who paid taxes, but with little effect on the voting population. Both the 
freehold and taxpaying qualifications tended to give political rights to adult men who headed 
households, thus reinforcing republican notions that granted full citizenship to independent 
fathers and not to their dependents. Arthur St. Clair, the territorial governor of Ohio, argued 
for retention of the Northwest Ordinance’s 50-acre freehold qualification for voting in territorial elections in set-piece republican language: “I do not count independence and wealth 
always together,” he said, “but I pronounce poverty and dependence inseparable.” When 
Nathaniel Macon, a respected old revolutionary from North Carolina, saw that his state 
would abolish property qualifications in 1802, he suggested that the suffrage be limited to 
married men. Like St. Clair’s proposition, it was an attempt to maintain the old distinction 
between citizen-householders and disfranchised dependents. 
Between 1790 and 1820, republican notions of citizenship grounded in fatherhood and 
proprietorship gave way to a democratic insistence on equal rights for all white men. There 
were several reasons for that development. First, the proportion of adult white men who 
could not meet property qualifications multiplied at an alarming rate. In the new towns 
and cities, artisans and laborers and even many merchants and professionals did not own 
real estate. And in the west, new farms were often valued at below property qualifications. 
This became particularly troublesome after the War of 1812, when a large proportion of 
veterans could not vote. In Shenandoah County, Virginia, for instance, 700 of 1000 men 
at a militia muster claimed that they were disfranchised. In 1829, the “Non-Freeholders of 
the City of Richmond” petitioned for the right to vote, arguing that the ownership of property did not make a man “wiser and better.” “Virtue” and “intelligence,” they insisted, were 
“not among the products of the soil.” Even the aging Thomas Jefferson had come to 
believe, by 1824, that property restrictions violated “the principal of equal political rights.” 
Under the impetus of growing disenfranchisement (and of Jeffersonian legislatures and 
state conventions eager to increase their constituencies), state after state extended the vote 
to include all adult white men. In 1790, only Vermont granted the vote to all free men. Kentucky entered the Union in 1792 without property or taxpaying qualifications. Tennessee 
followed with a freehold qualification, but only for newcomers who had resided in their 
counties for less than six months. The federal government dropped the 50-acre freehold 
qualification in the territories in 1812. Of the eight territories that became states between 
1796 and 1821 none kept a property qualification, only three maintained a taxpaying 
qualification, and five explicitly granted the vote to all white men. In the same years, one 
eastern state after another widened the franchise. By 1840, only Rhode Island retained a 
propertied electorate, primarily because Yankee farmers in that state wanted to retain 
power in a society made up increasingly of urban, immigrant wage earners. (When Rhode 
Island finally reformed the franchise in 1843, the new law included a freehold requirement 
that applied only to the foreign-born, and explicitly withheld the franchise from blacks.) 
With that exception, the white men of every state held the vote. 
Early 19th-century suffrage reform gave political rights to propertyless men, and thus 
took a long step away from the Founders’ republic and toward mass democracy. At the same 
time, however, reformers explicitly limited the democratic franchise to those who were 
white and male. New Jersey’s revolutionary constitution, for instance, had granted the vote 
to “persons” who met a freehold qualification. This loophole enfranchised property-holding 
widows, many of whom exercised their rights. A law of 1807 abolished property restrictions 
and gave the vote to all white men. The same law closed the loophole that had allowed propertied women to vote. The question of woman suffrage would not be considered again until 
women raised it in 1848. It would not be settled until well into the 20th century. 
New restrictions also applied to African Americans. The revolutionary constitutions of 
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine—northeastern states with tiny black 
minorities—granted the vote to free blacks. New York and North Carolina laws gave the vote 
to “all men” who met the qualifications, and propertied African Americans (a tiny but symbolically crucial minority) in many states routinely exercised the vote. Post-revolutionary laws 
that extended voting rights to all white men often specifically excluded or severely restricted 
votes for blacks. Free blacks lost the suffrage in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, 
Connecticut, Maryland, Tennessee, and North Carolina—all states in which they had previously voted. By 1840, fully 93 percent of blacks in the North lived in states that either 
banned or severely restricted their right to vote, and the restrictions were explicitly about 
race. A delegate to the New York constitutional convention of 1821, noting the movement 
of freed slaves into New York City, argued against allowing them to vote: “The whole host 
of Africans that now deluge our city (already too impertinent to be borne), would be placed 
upon an equal with the citizens.” At the Tennessee convention that eliminated property and 
residence requirements for whites while it stripped the vote from free blacks in 1834, delegate G. W. L. Marr declared that “We the People” meant “we the free white people of the 
United States and the free white people only.” The convention declared blacks “outside the 
social compact.” A year later, the old republican Nathaniel Macon told a North Carolina 
convention that in 1776, free blacks had been “no part of the then political family.” 
Thus the “universal” suffrage of which many Americans boasted was far from universal. 
New laws dissolved the old republican connections between political rights and property, 
and thus saved the citizenship of thousands who were becoming propertyless tenants and 
wage earners. The same laws that gave the vote to all white men, however, explicitly barred 
other Americans from political participation. Faced with the disintegration of Jefferson’s 
republic of proprietor-patriarchs, the wielders of power had chosen to blur the emerging 
distinctions of social class while they hardened the boundaries of sex and race. In 1790, 
citizenship had belonged to men who were fathers and farm owners. Forty years later, the 
citizenry was made up of those who were (the phrase came into use at this time) “free, 
white, and twenty-one.” Much more explicitly and completely than had been the case at 
the founding, America in 1830 was a white man’s republic. 
Conclusion 
By the second quarter of the 19th century, Americans had made a patchwork of regional, 
class, and ethnic cultures. The new middle classes of the North and West compounded 
their Protestant and republican inheritance with a new entrepreneurial faith in progress. 
The result was a way of life grounded in the self-made and morally accountable individual and the sentimentalized (often feminized) domestic unit. 
Their means of proposing that way of life as a national culture for the United States 
often offended others. The middle class met resistance, first of all, from poorer urban 
dwellers and the less prosperous farmers in their own sections—a northern and western 
majority that remained grimly loyal to the unsentimental, male-dominated families of their 
fathers and grandfathers, to new and old religious sects that continued to believe in human 
depravity and the mysterious workings of providence, and to the suspicion that perfidy and 
disorder lurked behind the smiling moral order of market economics and sentimental culture. 
In the South, most white farmers persisted in a neighborhood-based, intensely evangelical, and socially conservative way of life; when asked their opinions, they often talked like 
classic Jeffersonian yeomen. Southern planters, although they shared in the northern elite’s 
belief in material progress and the magic of the market, were bound by family values, a system of slave labor, and a code of honor that was strikingly at variance with middle-class
faith in an orderly universe and perfectible individuals. And we have seen (chapter 9) that 
slaves in these years continued to make cultural forms of their own. Despite their exclusion 
from the white world of liberty and equality, they tied their aspirations to the family, to an 
evangelical Protestant God, and to the individual and collective dignity that republics 
promise to their citizens.