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 world-
ending 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
The weakening of patriarchal authority and attempts to
Joseph Smith
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 and a covenanted relationship with God, and Jesus had
visited them following his crucifixion and resurrection.
Joseph Smith later declared that his discovery of The 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.
A New Popular Culture
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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, and 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 re-
stored 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 and militia 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 under pressure.
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 increas-
ingly 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 amphithe-
ater 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
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