USA > New York > A short history of New York State > Part 32
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A basic core of belief lay beneath the surface disagreements of Protestantism. Practically all churches agreed that the Bible was divinely inspired and was therefore the final authority on all matters of faith. Christians of almost every variety held that the moral law undergirded the universe, which was God's own handiwork. Most Protestants believed that a better world was coming. Those more secular in thinking sub- scribed to the theory of inevitable progress; those who believed in the
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literal validity of the Bible expected that Christ would soon come again. All expected improvements in society since morally responsible indi- viduals would perform good works to help establish the Kingdom of God on earth.
All churches, with the exception of the Roman Catholic, the Protestant Episcopal, and the Unitarian, considered conversion a more or less dramatic transformation of the individual from a state of sin to a state of grace. To stimulate this conversion most Protestant churches relied upon revival meetings at which preachers invoked divine guidance and called on men to repent. Perhaps the somewhat unfriendly comments of George Templeton Strong of New York City in 1858 will explain the impact of revivals upon the population:
One should think and speak cautiously of any thing which so many good men receive as a special manifestation of the Holy Spirit, but I confess that this movement does not commend itself to me. It is becoming daily more and more heated and morbid. Irreverence, presumption, indecency, and other symp- toms of a mere epidemic religious fever multiply as the revival develops. . . . The great object of the meeting seems to be to drug men up to a certain point of nervous excitement and keep them there. Was told today on good authority of an incredible hymn said to be popular among "revived" Method- ists, of which this is one verse:
Ye Saints rejoice, give cheerful thanks, For Awful Gardner's joined your ranks. And, while the lamp holds out to burn, There still is hope for Patrick Hearne.
Why was upstate New York so receptive to religious appeals? First of all, the population, largely Yankee in origin, was greatly influenced by the religious movements in New England. The Second Great Awakening in Connecticut, beginning late in the 1790's and continuing for several decades, was carried to New York by settlers and by missionaries sent out by benevolent societies. As a result, revivalism had appeared in New York long before 1825. Secondly, the gradual shift to commercial agri- culture enabled the children of the pioneers to have more leisure for education and religion. Thirdly, leaders of great power and religious intensity emerged to direct the movement.
Charles Grandison Finney was the outstanding religious figure of this period. Born in a Connecticut manse, he grew up on the frontier of cen- tral New York. At first he turned to the law, but the inner spirit called the handsome orator to the ministry. He attracted national attention in 1825 by leading a revival at Western, a small town near Rome. The ex- citement spread to Rome, Utica, and throughout Oneida County. People in other sections beseeched Finney to visit their churches and set sinners
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free. In 1830 Finney moved to Rochester and conducted one of the most significant revivals in American history. More important than the thou- sands of converts were the deepening of the faith of older members and the training of hundreds of lesser leaders.
The evangelist moved to New York City in 1832, answering the call of the Tappan brothers, two silk merchants who used their wealth to promote benevolent societies. Finney failed to stir the metropolis as deeply as he had the upstate regions. His preaching led to the formation of several "free churches," which charged no rent for the pews. His articles appearing in the New York Evangelist spread his views across the country.
Finney was not an original thinker in theological matters; rather he reflected changes already cracking the iron front of orthodox Calvinism. He neatly bridged the old doctrinal debate over the relative merits of faith and works by stating, "Genuine faith always results in good works and is itself a good work." A sinner, therefore, could not by his own will cast out sin. For Finney and his followers, the regeneration of the indi- vidual led to the reformation of society.
Finney was more original in devising new methods of conducting his revivals. He adopted a direct, extemporaneous style of preaching. Harsh invective would burst out at times: "Oh God smite that wicked man. ... God Almighty, shake him over Hell." He prayed for sinners by name, encouraging them to come forward to the "anxious seat," where the congregation might watch their soul searchings. Finney was a skillful leader and seldom permitted the meetings to get out of control. But scores of less skillful evangelists followed his methods and actually encouraged groaning, shouting, and other sensational excesses.
The conservative clergy opposed the "new methods," pointing with outraged finger to the emotional excesses, to the un-Christian invective, to the dangerous practice of allowing women to participate in public and private meetings, and to the charlatans who disgraced the cause of religion. Even more serious was the belief that some evangelists spread heresy and caused divisions within local churches and denominations.
Revivalism reached its peak in the early 1830's, although stirring re- vivals later swept the churches in 1843 and 1857. There were several reasons for the gradual decline of the revival in New York. The Irish and German immigrants showed little interest. As denominational loyalties grew stronger, churches relied more on settled clergymen rather than on itinerant evangelists, and the excesses of some revivalists disturbed the average church member. Many of the followers of Finney in the 1840's and 1850's drifted away from purely religious activities and threw them- selves into abolition and temperance movements.
Probably the comment of William Reed about the revivalists is as
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sane and reasonable as we shall find: "They set the whole community in commotion, disturbed old sinners, rubbed the ears of lazy Christians and probably did some good, if not so much in converting sinners as in setting people to thinking."
Diversity was another American religious characteristic amply demon- strated in New York. The Empire State had the most cosmopolitan popu- lation in the country. As a result, a great variety of sects deriving from European sources was to be found among the inhabitants, who intro- duced and maintained churches with which they were familiar. To add to the complexity, New York was the birthplace of several new sects.
New York remained overwhelmingly Protestant in this period, although Roman Catholicism was making great gains, especially in New York City. The first religious census, in 1855, showed that Roman Catholics numbered 242,225 out of a total population of 3,466,212. The various Protestant denominations claimed only 457,971 members, but the ma- jority of those not belonging to any church were Protestant in back- ground.
The Methodists (140,196) and the Baptists (89,713) were the most aggressive of the major Protestant sects in seeking converts in the city and countryside. Both relied in the main upon uneducated clergy and laymen to spread their doctrines, which emphasized the importance of the individual's own efforts to win salvation.
The Presbyterians (92,712) and Congregationalists (25,946) stressed a trained clergy and doubted man's ability to free himself from sin. They opposed emotionalism even though the greatest revival of the period was set in motion by a Presbyterian, Charles Finney. Earlier in the century the two denominations had co-operated in setting up frontier churches and in supporting interdenominational agencies, but the Congregationalists be- gan to show more denominational feeling, and they dropped out of the Plan of Union which had operated so largely to the advantage of the Presbyterians. In 1834 they organized a state association in New York, and in 1852 the first meeting of American Congregationalism was held in Albany.
Presbyterianism suffered a disastrous division in 1837. The members coming from New England found themselves at odds with the stern ortho- dox Calvinists of Scotch-Irish descent in Pennsylvania and the southern states. Having been reared in the Congregational church, they naturally favored congregational autonomy, and their views reflected the New England trend toward a more liberal theology. Their leaders shocked the conservatives because they damned slavery more vigorously than they warned of eternal damnation. An alliance of Presbyterians of the South, who were affronted at the charge that slaveholding was a sin, and of the Old School Presbyterians in Philadelphia and Princeton, who feared the
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spread of heresy, excised the presbyteries of Utica, Geneva, and Genesee as well as Western Reserve in Ohio. When the New School group organ- ized a separate church, most of the membership within New York joined this new denomination. In 1850 it claimed 69,000 members in the state as compared with 23,000 members of the Old School.
The Protestant Episcopal church continued the gains begun before 1825 under the energetic leadership of Bishop Hobart. Its membership rose from 6,700 communicants in 1832 to 33,000 in 1859. Several factors favored the growth of this church: able leadership, the removal of the Tory taint, the stimulus provided by the High Church movement, the dignity and beauty of the service, and its appeal to fashionable and wealthy persons.
The Dutch Reformed church was centered largely in New York City. Its members and the Episcopalians claimed most of the families of wealth and position descended from the pre-Revolutionary population. Since most of the first generation of "new" families making their money in trade and manufacturing came from New England, they usually belonged to the Presbyterian-Congregational group.
Various German denominations, particularly the Evangelical Lutheran, expanded with the influx of Germans to this country after 1840. Large numbers of Germans settled in New York City, Rochester, and Buffalo.
Over 80 per cent of the Protestants belonged to these seven largest bodies. Other nationality and racial groups, such as the Welsh, French, and Negro, established denominations to which they had previously be- longed. Among the smaller sects were the Free Will Baptists, Univer- salists, Unitarians, United Presbyterians (formed in 1858), Christians, and Friends.
A torrent of Irish and German immigration made the Roman Catholic church by mid-century the largest religious group in New York State. Most Catholics lived in cities, particularly the metropolis of New York, which had approximately 100,000 Catholics in 1850. In addition to the Irish and Germans, there were thousands of French, Italian, Swiss, and Spanish- speaking members. The Catholic clergy showed great ability in keeping most immigrant groups loyal to the church.
Catholic leaders faced many difficulties in ministering to their rapidly growing membership. Nevertheless, the number of congregations grew steadily, despite the lack of funds to construct church buildings, not to mention schools and orphanages. The poverty of many of its members, the hostility of some Protestants, the shortage of clergymen, the resentment by German and French Catholics of Irish domination, and the fight over state aid to education were some of the more troublesome problems facing the Catholic church.
Bishop John Hughes (1838-1864) was the most forceful and dynamic leader of Roman Catholicism in this period. Equally vigorous in disciplin-
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ing lay trustees, in hitting back at nativists, and in setting up new churches, Hughes was particularly determined to reassert the traditional powers of the priesthood and bishops in church government. After several contro- versies, especially with German congregations, Hughes asserted his au- thority. The legislature in 1863 agreed to pass a church incorporation law ensuring control by the clergy. The law provided that a church corporation for the Catholic communion was to consist of the bishop, the vicar general, the pastor, and two lay trustees.
The common school system of New York City was not acceptable to Bishop Hughes for several reasons. The Public School Society, administer- ing the schools for the city, was dominated by private directors of pro- nounced Protestant views. Furthermore, many teachers and textbooks were unsympathetic to the Catholic church, and the daily readings from the King James Version of the Bible were anathema to good Catholics. Church leaders organized a parochial school system in which Catholic doctrine as well as secular subjects were taught. But the shortage of build- ings and trained teachers prevented the church schools from taking care of all the children of Catholic parentage. In 1840 Governor William Seward recommended that schools be established in which foreigners "may be instructed by teachers speaking the same language with them- selves and professing the same faith." Catholic citizens of New York City immediately petitioned the Common Council for a share of the public school money. This action irritated the Public School Society and its backers, and in 1841 Samuel F. B. Morse ran for mayor on a Native Amer- ican ticket. Bishop Hughes countered with the organization of a third party, called the Carroll Hall ticket, which held the balance of power in 1842. A new law of that year compromised the issue: the church schools received no public money, but the Public School Society made way for the publicly managed school system in New York City.
Nativism continued to harass the Catholic church throughout this period. The workingmen's fear of immigrant competition was the most important factor, but pauperism among immigrants and the political power exercised by the church in city elections were also influential in stimulating native Americans to organize secret societies, such as the Know-Nothings of the 1850's.
The Jewish synagogue, like the Catholic church, was a unifying force for its people. For most Jews life revolved around the congregation, which administered dietary laws, directed charitable and educational activi- ties, and conducted the ceremonies associated with birth, marriage, and death. The Jewish community, centering in its one synagogue of 1825, gradually split up into several congregations, each ministering to Jews of differing backgrounds. It has been estimated that in 1860 New York City had twenty-seven synagogues.
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The strange enthusiasms and peculiar cults of upstate New York have fascinated succeeding generations, but their importance has been greatly exaggerated. For example, Oneida Community and the Mormon church enrolled only a few hundred people within this state. One must repeat that these unusual movements do not compare in importance with the less spectacular but far more significant work carried on by the major denominations in organizing and maintaining churches for frontier farm- ers and city dwellers.
The Church of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons ) was the most im- portant new sect originating in New York, but its later development took place almost entirely outside the state's borders. Joseph Smith professed that the angel Moroni appeared to him in Palmyra and told him that the Golden Plates of a new Bible lay buried near by. After digging up the plates, Smith (behind a curtain) dictated the Book of Mormon, which purported to describe the history of America from its settlement by one of the tribes dispersed at the Tower of Babel. Smith's miracles, prophecies, and revelations impressed a few neighbors, but most remained skeptical .. A series of lawsuits and other troubles, combined with the attractions of the West, caused Smith to move, in 1831, to Kirtland, Ohio. Subsequently the Mormons moved to Illinois and Missouri and finally to Utah. In the 1840's and 1850's Mormon missionaries toured western New York and recruited several hundred candidates to live in the Desert Zion. The Mor- mon church, however, never took firm root in New York.
Another station along the broad "psychic highway" across central and western New York was Oneida Community, world famous for its experi- ments in communal living. Its success is wrapped up in the figure of John Humphrey Noyes, a genius at organization and leadership, who guided the community for several decades. He stated:
Our warfare is an assertion of human rights: first the right of man to be governed by God and to live in the social state of heaven; second the right of woman to dispose of her sexual nature by attraction instead of by law and routine and to bear children only when she chooses; third, the right of all to diminish the labors and increase the advantages of life by association.
Certainly these ideas were radical for his, or any, generation!
"Perfectionism" had won adherents in villages in central New York during the early 1840's. Its believers preached that true Christians could live without sin. In 1848 Noyes came to Oneida in central New York from Putney, Vermont, where his "Bible School" had shocked the neigh- bors by sharing everything in common, including the women.
Oneida Community was unique among "communitarian" communities within New York because it was an economic success and because it
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lasted for almost four decades. Fortunately for the group, Sewall New- house's trap for small animals provided the community with a steady income to supplement what they earned from farming. Outsiders were shocked by the system of "complex marriage" in which every woman was theoretically the wife of every man. Less controversial was the care of the children in the community nursery. The perfectionists at Oneida adopted other advanced ideas. Women were granted equality, wore bloomers, and bobbed their hair. As criticism mounted, the leaders of Oneida Community gradually abandoned their unusual practices. They permitted individual marriage and in 1879 divided the property among the members of the community.
The doctrine that Christ will return to the world to usher in the mil- lennium has attracted Christian enthusiasts ever since the first century. In the 1830's and 1840's several thousand New Yorkers, as well as others in the northeastern part of the United States, adopted the views of William Miller, who preached that the world would come to an end in 1843 or 1844. After service in the War of 1812, Miller returned to his home in Washington County determined to prove that the Bible was pure revela- tion. He was a sincere, humble man, convinced that the symbols in the book of Revelations indicated that the world would come to an end about 1843. At first, few people were interested, although many Christians had a vague belief in the imminence of the Second Coming. Gradually Miller attracted more followers by his lectures and writings. As the date ap- proached excitement grew. Thousands came to the tent meetings held in Rochester in 1843. Miller enjoyed a great triumph when Elon Galusha, the most prominent Baptist in the state, endorsed his conclusions.
As March 21, 1843 approached, the Millerites gathered together in pro- tracted meetings to hail the millennium. Some neurotic individuals at- tached themselves to the movement and displayed hysterical behavior. Although nonbelievers have perpetuated a good deal of folklore about scandalous orgies, ascension robes, gatherings on hilltops, abandonment of business, and insanity in connection with the movement, the op- ponents of Miller showed the worst behavior by their attacks on Adventist meetings. Some followers slipped away after the fateful day passed with- out any cataclysm, but most of them accepted Miller's revised date of 1844. The stubborn continuation of the world after March 1844 naturally caused numerous defections, but the more resolute continued to hold on to their faith with some modifications. They decided to live as though the "Bride- groom" were coming at any moment. In 1845 Miller and his associates formed in Albany, an Adventist organization which later suffered from much internal strife. Another group of Adventists in western New York made a loose tie-up with the Seventh-Day Baptists of Maine and followed the westward-moving pioneers to the Middle West.
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The rise of spiritualism provided the main religious excitement of the 1850's, as Millerism had in the 1840's. The latter had appealed to the or- thodox, but spiritualism tended to attract religious liberals, such as the Universalists. The liberals had drifted far from a literal interpretation of the Bible and had seized upon scientific theories as the most fruitful ex- planation of the universe. Strangely enough, the mystical ideas in the highly abstruse writings of the Swedish philosopher, Emanuel Sweden- borg, furnished the basis for a revival as emotional as earlier manifesta- tions.
Swedenborgianism combined many of the liberal religious doctrines with the new sociological ideas of the time. By 1848 these concepts had deeply penetrated the thinking of the Universalists and some of the Quak- ers. But until the Fox sisters allegedly made communication with the dead it was too highly intellectual to appeal to the public at large. In March 1848 the two daughters of John Fox of Hydesville reported strange rap- pings at night. More remarkable was their claim that they had com- municated with a spirit who had answered their questions. The news of this phenomenon spread rapidly after the two girls were introduced to Rochester society. The spirits demanded public séances, and thousands of people were convinced that the barrier between the quick and the dead had been breached. Soon crowds were witnessing such phenomena as table moving and the "speaking in tongues." Subsequently the Fox sis- ters admitted that they made the rapping sound by cracking the joints of their toes, but the spiritualists claimed that the recantation had been made under duress.
Spiritualism won many converts even among educated classes. William Cullen Bryant, Horace Greeley, and Robert Dale Owen were inclined to believe the phenomena of presentiments, second sight, and dreams. In- tellectuals trained in the Swedenborg tradition received messages from the great men of the past. These usually turned out to be platitudinous homilies upon the necessity of following the rules of common sense. For these people spiritualism was a way station to so-called free thought or "modernism" in religion. The common people, however, looked for a direct message from loved ones no longer on earth, and to fill this need there sprang up a tribe of mediums, some of them obvious frauds and charla- tans. Some spiritualist leaders encouraged experiments in unconventional sex practices and as a result public opinion turned against them.
By 1855 the spiritualists claimed over a million converts throughout the world, with perhaps a third of them in New York State. They published over a score of magazines and had established centers in several parts of the state. One legacy of the spiritualist movement is Lily Dale, a camp meeting ground on the shores of Chautauqua Lake.
The "burned-over district," a term applied to the region of central and
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western New York where habitual revivalism occurred, gradually lost its distinctive character as a spawning ground for religious aberrations. Sev- eral factors tended to diminish interest in religious extremism. The public and many reformers became intensely interested in political issues, espe- cially the question of slavery. Neither the Catholic Irish nor the Germans showed much interest in cults; indeed, the growing strength of the immi- grants created another issue, namely, nativism, which absorbed some of the energetic individuals formerly active in religious extremism. The ex- cesses of emotionalism and the unfulfilled promises of the utopians caused many people to regard all religious enthusiasm with suspicion. Undoubt- edly the Civil War diverted the minds of many from religious matters and, in general, caused a lowering in the moral tone. At any rate, New York after the Civil War lost its reputation as the nursery for strange cults.
The leaders of evangelical Protestantism, concentrating at first upon the regeneration of the individual soul, next turned their attention to the reformation of society. The Christian ideals of love, charity, and justice stirred their consciences and became the major inspiration behind vir- tually all the humanitarian reforms so characteristic of this period.
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