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.12But secular prejudice dies hard.Even though it is now admitted that thevoters were interested in religion, it is not universally admitted that religion was a real issue.Sometimes historians have offered evidence of ethnoreligious votingas an illustration of how little the ignorant masses really understood politics.Other times, historians have refused to accept the ethnoreligious interpretationbecause they feel it reflects badly on the rationality of the electorate.And even arespected and thoughtful practitioner of the new political history has expressedthe fear that it has led us into a blind alley by showing that nineteenth-centuryAmerican voters were concerned about something so politically irrelevant as re-ligion!13 In my opinion, a proper assessment of antebellum political life has to startby admitting the legitimacy and relevance of religious and moral commitments tothe politics of the age.Of course, all political issues didn t have a religious di-mension, but the ones that did antislavery, Indian policy, nativism, temperance,education, penal reform, treatment of the insane were no less momentous andworthy of attention (from either our point of view or that of nineteenth-centurycontemporaries) than internal improvements, currency, and the tariff.Revivalism and American Political CultureThe prominence of evangelical piety is one of the major continuities in Americanlife between colonial and national times.Indeed, for all the attention that hasbeen devoted to the so-called Great Awakening and its effects, it seems likely thatits nineteenth-century counterparts were even greater in their impact on Amer-ican culture and polities.John Murrin once remarked that the Great Awakeningand its legacy probably had even more to do with the Civil War than with theRevolution, and it is a perceptive comment.14 The later evangelicals became moreself-conscious as shapers of society and opinion, for they attached increasing im-portance to subjecting social institutions and standards to divine judgment and reforming that is, reshaping them accordingly.In both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, revivalism and democracywere interrelated phenomena.Each asserted popular claims against those of theelite, pluralism against orthodoxy, charisma against rationalism, competitivenessagainst authority, an innovative Americanism against European tradition.Such isthe thrust of a vast body of distinguished scholarship, from William WarrenSweet to Perry Miller, from Richard Bushman to Patricia Bonomi.15 Indeed, themore active that popular participation in American political life became, the moreimportant moral and religious issues came to be in politics.It is no accident that 126 A Protestant Erareligion was more potent a political factor in the second party system than it hadbeen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.It is a natural consequenceof the increasingly democratic nature of American politics.16Yet, the popular quality of the evangelical movement was only one side of it.Revivals did not spring forth from the populace spontaneously; they were workedup. Terry Bilhartz has reminded us (if we needed reminding) that revivals tookplace not simply because there was a receptive audience, but because evangelistswere promoting them.17 These evangelists had on their agenda a reformation oflife and habits, both individual and communal.They were demonstrating acontinuation of the historic concern for church discipline so characteristic ofthe early Protestant Reformers.Voluntary discipline represented Protestantism salternative to the authoritarianism of traditional society.If popular enthusiasmwas the soft side of the great evangelical movement, the new discipline was its hard side. The new discipline of the evangelical movement had far-reaching conse-quences.Its reforms did no less than reshape the cultural system of the Victorianmiddle class in both Britain and America.We remember its morality as strict, andindeed it was most notably in the novel restraints it imposed on the expressionor even mention of sex and the use of alcohol.But even its most punitive severitywas redemptive in purpose, as the words reformatory and penitentiary sug-gest.Put another way, the converse of Victorian discipline was the proper de-velopment of the human faculties.Education and self-improvement went alongwith discipline.The evangelical reformers characteristically opposed physicalviolence, campaigning against corporal punishment of children, wives, sailors,and prisoners, for example.They preferred mental coercion like solitary confi-nement to flogging and hanging.They were didactic modernizers and civilizerswho embodied their values in such institutional monuments as schools, univer-sities, hospitals, and insane asylums.18 Most extreme in their espousal of Victo-rian modernization were the abolitionists and the feminists.They applied theprinciples of human self-development, the fulfillment of noble potential and therepression of base passions, to different races and sexes alike.19The usefulness of evangelical moral reform to the new industrial capitalismof the nineteenth century has not escaped the notice of historians, and a vastliterature has developed, analyzing it in terms of bourgeois social control. Pro-southern and anti-Whig historians have been using this approach to discreditabolitionists and other reformers for a long time.20 But the interpretation took onnew vigor with the reception of neo-Marxism and the social thought of MichelFoucault in the American academy during the mid-twentieth century.Its ad-vocates have included Michael Katz, David J.Rothman, Paul Johnson, and in Religion and Politics in the Antebellum North 127its most sophisticated and broadly ranging form David Brion Davis.Davis smonumental volumes on slavery and antislavery in the modern world accord fullrespect to the moral integrity of the abolitionists and the justice of their cause.Butthey also portray the abolitionists as inadvertently promoting the hegemony ofbourgeois capitalism.Through natural human limitations coupled with a measureof self-deception, the reformers were blind to the full implications of what theywere doing.Without their being aware of it, the antislavery crusaders wereproviding a moral sanction for new capitalist methods of exploitation.Theircritique of chattel slavery indirectly legitimated wage slavery.In this interpreta-tion, social control, if no longer a conscious motive, is no less a consequence of thereformers actions and helps explain their success.21The interpretation of antebellum reform as social control, in both its pre-Marxian and neo-Marxian forms, has provoked an enormous critical reaction [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.12But secular prejudice dies hard.Even though it is now admitted that thevoters were interested in religion, it is not universally admitted that religion was a real issue.Sometimes historians have offered evidence of ethnoreligious votingas an illustration of how little the ignorant masses really understood politics.Other times, historians have refused to accept the ethnoreligious interpretationbecause they feel it reflects badly on the rationality of the electorate.And even arespected and thoughtful practitioner of the new political history has expressedthe fear that it has led us into a blind alley by showing that nineteenth-centuryAmerican voters were concerned about something so politically irrelevant as re-ligion!13 In my opinion, a proper assessment of antebellum political life has to startby admitting the legitimacy and relevance of religious and moral commitments tothe politics of the age.Of course, all political issues didn t have a religious di-mension, but the ones that did antislavery, Indian policy, nativism, temperance,education, penal reform, treatment of the insane were no less momentous andworthy of attention (from either our point of view or that of nineteenth-centurycontemporaries) than internal improvements, currency, and the tariff.Revivalism and American Political CultureThe prominence of evangelical piety is one of the major continuities in Americanlife between colonial and national times.Indeed, for all the attention that hasbeen devoted to the so-called Great Awakening and its effects, it seems likely thatits nineteenth-century counterparts were even greater in their impact on Amer-ican culture and polities.John Murrin once remarked that the Great Awakeningand its legacy probably had even more to do with the Civil War than with theRevolution, and it is a perceptive comment.14 The later evangelicals became moreself-conscious as shapers of society and opinion, for they attached increasing im-portance to subjecting social institutions and standards to divine judgment and reforming that is, reshaping them accordingly.In both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, revivalism and democracywere interrelated phenomena.Each asserted popular claims against those of theelite, pluralism against orthodoxy, charisma against rationalism, competitivenessagainst authority, an innovative Americanism against European tradition.Such isthe thrust of a vast body of distinguished scholarship, from William WarrenSweet to Perry Miller, from Richard Bushman to Patricia Bonomi.15 Indeed, themore active that popular participation in American political life became, the moreimportant moral and religious issues came to be in politics.It is no accident that 126 A Protestant Erareligion was more potent a political factor in the second party system than it hadbeen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.It is a natural consequenceof the increasingly democratic nature of American politics.16Yet, the popular quality of the evangelical movement was only one side of it.Revivals did not spring forth from the populace spontaneously; they were workedup. Terry Bilhartz has reminded us (if we needed reminding) that revivals tookplace not simply because there was a receptive audience, but because evangelistswere promoting them.17 These evangelists had on their agenda a reformation oflife and habits, both individual and communal.They were demonstrating acontinuation of the historic concern for church discipline so characteristic ofthe early Protestant Reformers.Voluntary discipline represented Protestantism salternative to the authoritarianism of traditional society.If popular enthusiasmwas the soft side of the great evangelical movement, the new discipline was its hard side. The new discipline of the evangelical movement had far-reaching conse-quences.Its reforms did no less than reshape the cultural system of the Victorianmiddle class in both Britain and America.We remember its morality as strict, andindeed it was most notably in the novel restraints it imposed on the expressionor even mention of sex and the use of alcohol.But even its most punitive severitywas redemptive in purpose, as the words reformatory and penitentiary sug-gest.Put another way, the converse of Victorian discipline was the proper de-velopment of the human faculties.Education and self-improvement went alongwith discipline.The evangelical reformers characteristically opposed physicalviolence, campaigning against corporal punishment of children, wives, sailors,and prisoners, for example.They preferred mental coercion like solitary confi-nement to flogging and hanging.They were didactic modernizers and civilizerswho embodied their values in such institutional monuments as schools, univer-sities, hospitals, and insane asylums.18 Most extreme in their espousal of Victo-rian modernization were the abolitionists and the feminists.They applied theprinciples of human self-development, the fulfillment of noble potential and therepression of base passions, to different races and sexes alike.19The usefulness of evangelical moral reform to the new industrial capitalismof the nineteenth century has not escaped the notice of historians, and a vastliterature has developed, analyzing it in terms of bourgeois social control. Pro-southern and anti-Whig historians have been using this approach to discreditabolitionists and other reformers for a long time.20 But the interpretation took onnew vigor with the reception of neo-Marxism and the social thought of MichelFoucault in the American academy during the mid-twentieth century.Its ad-vocates have included Michael Katz, David J.Rothman, Paul Johnson, and in Religion and Politics in the Antebellum North 127its most sophisticated and broadly ranging form David Brion Davis.Davis smonumental volumes on slavery and antislavery in the modern world accord fullrespect to the moral integrity of the abolitionists and the justice of their cause.Butthey also portray the abolitionists as inadvertently promoting the hegemony ofbourgeois capitalism.Through natural human limitations coupled with a measureof self-deception, the reformers were blind to the full implications of what theywere doing.Without their being aware of it, the antislavery crusaders wereproviding a moral sanction for new capitalist methods of exploitation.Theircritique of chattel slavery indirectly legitimated wage slavery.In this interpreta-tion, social control, if no longer a conscious motive, is no less a consequence of thereformers actions and helps explain their success.21The interpretation of antebellum reform as social control, in both its pre-Marxian and neo-Marxian forms, has provoked an enormous critical reaction [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]