- The American Revolution and the early federal republic
- The transformation of American society, 1865–1900
- Imperialism, the Progressive era, and the rise to world power, 1896–1920
Religious revivalism
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Religion played a central role in the emergence of a distinctively “American” society in the first years of independence. Several key developments took place. One was the creation of American denominations independent of their British and European origins and leadership. By 1789 American Anglicans (renaming themselves Episcopalians), Methodists (formerly Wesleyans), Roman Catholics, and members of various Baptist, Lutheran, and Dutch Reformed congregations had established organizations and chosen leaders who were born in or full-time residents of what had become the United States of America. Another pivotal postindependence development was a rekindling of religious enthusiasm, especially on the frontier, that opened the gates of religious activism to the laity. Still another was the disestablishment of tax-supported churches in those states most deeply feeling the impact of democratic diversity. And finally, this period saw the birth of a liberal and socially aware version of Christianity uniting Enlightenment values with American activism.
Between 1798 and 1800 a sudden burst of revitalization shook frontier Protestant congregations, beginning with a great revival in Logan county, Kentucky, under the leadership of men such as James McGready and the brothers John and William McGee. This was followed by a gigantic camp meeting at Cane Ridge, where thousands were “converted.” The essence of the frontier revival was that this conversion from mere formal Christianity to a full conviction in God’s mercy for the sinner was a deeply emotional experience accessible even to those with much faith and little learning. So exhorters who were barely literate themselves could preach brimstone and fire and showers of grace, bringing repentant listeners to a state of excitement in which they would weep and groan, writhe and faint, and undergo physical transports in full public view.
“Heart religion” supplanted “head religion.” For the largely Scotch-Irish Presbyterian ministers in the West, this led to dangerous territory, because the official church leadership preferred more decorum and biblical scholarship from its pastors. Moreover, the idea of winning salvation by noisy penitence undercut Calvinist predestination. In fact, the fracture along fault lines of class and geography led to several schisms. Methodism had fewer problems of this kind. It never embraced predestination, and, more to the point, its structure was democratic, with rudimentarily educated lay preachers able to rise from leading individual congregations to presiding over districts and regional “conferences,” eventually embracing the entire church membership. Methodism fitted very neatly into frontier conditions through its use of traveling ministers, or circuit riders, who rode from isolated settlement to settlement, saving souls and mightily liberalizing the word of God.
The revival spirit rolled back eastward to inspire a “Second Great Awakening,” especially in New England, that emphasized gatherings that were less uninhibited than camp meetings but warmer than conventional Congregational and Presbyterian services. Ordained and college-educated ministers such as Lyman Beecher made it their mission to promote revivalism as a counterweight to the Deism of some of the Founding Fathers and the atheism of the French Revolution. (See Sidebar: The Founding Fathers, Deism, and Christianity.) Revivals also gave churches a new grasp on the loyalties of their congregations through lay participation in spreading the good word of salvation. This voluntarism more than offset the gradual state-by-state cancellation of taxpayer support for individual denominations.
The era of the early republic also saw the growth, especially among the urban educated elite of Boston, of a gentler form of Christianity embodied in Unitarianism, which rested on the notion of an essentially benevolent God who made his will known to humankind through their exercise of the reasoning powers bestowed on them. In the Unitarian view, Jesus Christ was simply a great moral teacher. Many Christians of the “middling” sort viewed Unitarianism as excessively concerned with ideas and social reform and far too indulgent or indifferent to the existence of sin and Satan. By 1815, then, the social structure of American Protestantism, firmly embedded in many activist forms in the national culture, had taken shape.
The United States from 1789 to 1816
The Federalist administration and the formation of parties
The first elections under the new Constitution were held in 1789. George Washington was unanimously voted the country’s first president. His secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, formed a clear-cut program that soon gave substance to the old fears of the Anti-Federalists. Hamilton, who had believed since the early 1780s that a national debt would be “a national blessing,” both for economic reasons and because it would act as a “cement” to the union, used his new power base to realize the ambitions of the nationalists. He recommended that the federal government pay off the old Continental Congress’s debts at par rather than at a depreciated value and that it assume state debts, drawing the interests of the creditors toward the central government rather than state governments. This plan met strong opposition from the many who had sold their securities at great discount during the postwar depression and from Southern states, which had repudiated their debts and did not want to be taxed to pay other states’ debts. A compromise in Congress was reached—thanks to the efforts of Secretary of State Jefferson—whereby Southern states approved Hamilton’s plan in return for Northern agreement to fix the location of the new national capital on the banks of the Potomac, closer to the South. When Hamilton next introduced his plan to found a Bank of the United States, modeled on the Bank of England, opposition began to harden. Many argued that the Constitution did not confide this power to Congress. Hamilton, however, persuaded Washington that anything not expressly forbidden by the Constitution was permitted under implied powers—the beginning of “loose” as opposed to “strict” constructionist interpretations of the Constitution. The Bank Act passed in 1791. Hamilton also advocated plans for the support of nascent industry, which proved premature, and he imposed the revenue-raising whiskey excise that led to the Whiskey Rebellion, a minor uprising in western Pennsylvania in 1794.
A party opposed to Hamilton’s fiscal policies began to form in Congress. With Madison at its center and with support from Jefferson, it soon extended its appeal beyond Congress to popular constituencies. Meanwhile, the French Revolution and France’s subsequent declaration of war against Great Britain, Spain, and Holland further divided American loyalties. Democratic-Republican societies sprang up to express support for France, while Hamilton and his supporters, known as Federalists, backed Britain for economic reasons. Washington pronounced American neutrality in Europe, but to prevent a war with Britain he sent Chief Justice John Jay to London to negotiate a treaty. In the Jay Treaty (1794) the United States gained only minor concessions and—humiliatingly—accepted British naval supremacy as the price of protection for American shipping.
Washington, whose tolerance had been severely strained by the Whiskey Rebellion and by criticism of the Jay Treaty, chose not to run for a third presidential term. In his Farewell Address, in a passage drafted by Hamilton, he denounced the new party politics as divisive and dangerous. Parties did not yet aspire to national objectives, however, and, when the Federalist John Adams was elected president, the Democrat-Republican Jefferson, as the presidential candidate with the second greatest number of votes, became vice president. Wars in Europe and on the high seas, together with rampant opposition at home, gave the new administration little peace. Virtual naval war with France had followed from American acceptance of British naval protection. In 1798 a French attempt to solicit bribes from American commissioners negotiating a settlement of differences (the so-called XYZ Affair) aroused a wave of anti-French feeling. Later that year the Federalist majority in Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which imposed serious civil restrictions on aliens suspected of pro-French activities and penalized U.S. citizens who criticized the government, making nonsense of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free press. The acts were most often invoked to prosecute Republican editors, some of whom served jail terms. These measures in turn called forth the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, drafted respectively by Madison and Jefferson, which invoked state sovereignty against intolerable federal powers. War with France often seemed imminent during this period, but Adams was determined to avoid issuing a formal declaration of war, and in this he succeeded.
Taxation, which had been levied to pay anticipated war costs, brought more discontent, however, including a new minor rising in Pennsylvania led by Jacob Fries. Fries’s Rebellion was put down without difficulty, but widespread disagreement over issues ranging from civil liberties to taxation was polarizing American politics. A basic sense of political identity now divided Federalists from Republicans, and in the election of 1800 Jefferson drew on deep sources of Anti-Federalist opposition to challenge and defeat his old friend and colleague Adams. The result was the first contest over the presidency between political parties and the first actual change of government as a result of a general election in modern history.