Great Awakening?

Historiography

The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War

Perry Miller, 1965 (posthumous)

Perry Miller was one of those names I felt obligated to read. I was pretty sure, going in, that it wasn’t going to be the most fun and I wasn’t mistaken, but there were some interesting things in this, even by my own admittedly “outside the box” standards.

Miller began his first chapter on “the Grand Era” of evangelism by quoting Charles Grandison Finney, saying “A revival of Religion presupposes a declension.” Miller accepted this assessment and clearly supposed this declension to have been a bad thing. Miller welcomed the Second Great Awakening as opportunity for America to get itself back on track. While admitting that “several surviving leaders of the Revolution...were rationalistic to the point of overt Deism...[and] that Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason (1795) circulated among village dissidents, and especially among the rude settlements of the frontier...and in 1795 Elihu Palmer did gather an out-and-out Deistic Society in New York,” Miller minimized these challenges to Christian hegemony in early America. He claimed that evangelists saw the small number of radical freethinkers as less dangerous to their cause than the large number of nominal christians who had no interest in attending or supporting their local congregations. Miller cited works like A Correct View of that Part of the United States which lies West of the Allegheny Mountains with regard to Religion and Morals (1814) as demonstrating a missionary project on the part of eastern religious leaders and their university divinity students. It’s interesting to think of this work as not evangelical but missionary, with all the elite condescension and even colonialism the term implies. “Incredible though it might seem to the evangelicals,” Miller admitted, “there was a stubborn opposition to the work of God.” Maybe that was because their evangelism was not filling a void, as the missionaries claimed and Miller seems to have believed, but were actually trying to displace a consciously and conscientiously chosen irreligion that was an important element of early republicanism.

Throughout the book, Miller repeatedly turned to James Fenimore Cooper and the character he contributed to American mythology, Natty Bumppo. The archetypal early West frontiersman is a character I should definitely return to, for closer study, as are Cooper himself and probably his father, William Cooper. My typical mental reservations regarding the use of literary characters rather than actual people as “voices of the people”, were a little less engaged while I was reading Miller. Not because Miller was less of an offender -- in fact, he was probably one of the worst I’ve seen. But it fit with his project; he was not pretending to be a social historian. The element I had more difficulty swallowing was MIller’s reverence for the concept of the “sublime” as the “inner, if not the central, mainspring of the missionary exertion.” I was amazed, reading the section on the “Event of the Century,” (Miller’s “Third Great Awakening” of 1857) how Miller managed to avoid talking about the Panic of 1857 as a motivator of revivalism. He mentioned it briefly in the context of contemporary commentaries, but did not seem to give it much credit himself. The life of the mind apparently had not so much to do with the life of the pocketbook, social displacement, bankruptcy, or the empty stomach.

“The people of this state, in common with the people of this country, profess the general doctrines of Christianity,” Miller quoted from James Kent’s New York decision in the blasphemy case, The People v. Ruggles. That this bland statement served as a preface and justification for a blasphemy conviction, and that Miller saw this as an unproblematic example of the “impression” that “prevails among our statesmen that the Bible is emphatically the foundation of our hopes as a people,” was alarming. Miller added that “Besotted Ruggles vanished thereupon from history, and nobody then or since tried to make him a martyr, as Abner Kneeland became in Boston of 1838.” Of course, there’s an extensive record of Kneeland’s five-year long legal ordeal.  Ruggles was actually so absent from the historical record that many doubt his actual existence and claim that James Kent fabricated him as an excuse to expound on the role of religion in the American State.

The second section of Miller’s book is a 155-page discussion of the eclipse of English-derived common law by a codified legal system dominated by a professionalized attorneys. Despite popular law books like John McDougal’s The Farmer’s Assistant (1815) that tried to reduce regular people’s dependence on the new legal elite, Miller consistently dismissed popular distrust of lawyers as “Anti-intellectualism.” And he went out of his way to establish the “union of Christianity and the law,” which was “asserted most comprehensively by Chief Justice Shaw in 1838 when passing sentence upon Abner Kneeland.” This sentiment found its logical conclusion in the 1859 claim of a Georgia jurist that “no Lawyer properly imbued with the teachings of his Profession, can be an infidel or a skeptic.” If this was the common opinion of the “best” minds of the 1850s (Miller suggested it was and didn’t see anything particularly troubling in that), is the Civil War any great surprise?

One of the ironies of Miller’s book is that he did not really challenge the self-justifications of these early republic elites. Miller quoted “an amazingly frank” 1843 article in the first issue of The American Law Magazine, which contended that “the real concern of society is the protection of property” and that the threats were real and imminent. “Democracy, says this writer, is incurably hostile to the possessions of the few,” and therefore the law must protect those possessions and that elite few. “That government can scarcely be deemed free,” claimed lawyers in 1830, “where the rights of property are left solely dependent upon the will of a legislative body.” I don’t necessarily disagree with that statement, but it’s telling that it should be the agenda of the legal profession that “the policy of the law preserves equality and political rights among the citizens; but equality of wealth and condition cannot exist among men, so long as they are divided into the provident and the improvident, the idle and the diligent.” (quoting Judge Thacher in the 1834 Ursuline Convent decision) Seems like American lawyers and clerics were well on their way to a Social Darwinism in which it was accepted that some people must be poor, and it’s their own fault. That’s the life of the mind in antebellum America?