Few of the commodities made widely available by the mar-
Penny Press
ket revolution were more ubiquitous than newspapers and
inexpensive books. Improvements in printing and paper-
making enabled entrepreneurs to sell daily newspapers for a penny. Cheap “story
papers” became available in the 1830s, “yellowback” 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 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.” These sensational stories 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 that 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
Family, Church, and Neighborhood: The White South
361
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
The southern states experienced cultural transformations of a more conservative
nature—transformations grounded in persistent localism, in the father-centered
family, and in the pervasive influence of a traditionalist evangelical Christianity.
The Beginnings
In the first third of the 19th century, evangelical Protestant-
of the Bible Belt
ism 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 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. 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
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