Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform

Abstract

Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform. By Leo P. Hirrel. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,1998. Pp. x, 248. Illustrations. $39.95.) Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan. By John W. Quist. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Pp. xi, 562. Tables. $29.95.) We know more about the ideological extremes in antebellum America that threatened to pull the country apart than about social and political middle ground, where efforts to foster social and political cohesion occurred. But that is beginning to change. These two monographs on and reform join a growing body of new scholarship on political moderation that examines its religious content and considers its moral ambiguity. Leo P. Hirrel and John W. Quist have written case studies of Protestant benevolence and moral reform that explore interactions of and republicanism, not in the new nation where we have been accustomed to looking, but during the antebellum generation; not in Protestant proselytizing and theology but in voluntary Christian benevolence. Hirrel focuses on Congregationalist followers of Nathaniel William Taylor and on New School Presbyterians, both liberal Calvinists whose optimistic view of human destiny and middle class paternalism predisposed them to equate the building of the Kingdom of God with succoring the poor and attacking evils of ignorance and alcohol. In an ambitious regional comparative study, Quist compares Protestant churches in Washtenaw County, Michigan, and Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. Together, the two books triangulate Protestant America: Hirrel on the urban Northeast and Quist on the Upper Middle West and Lower South. Throughout the nation, benevolent reformers sought to tame the rogue energies of a sinful society by massive dissemination of printed material and by diligent recruitment of church people into benevolent organizations. Hirrel mines the Congregationalist Quarterly Christian Spectator for evidence of both print media moralizing and organization building. It is impossible in the very nature of things that our civil and political institutions can long survive our public morals, the Spectator editorialized; it is . . . impossible that our public morals can flourish, or be preserved, without religion (84). Hirrel effectively makes the connection between the religious print media and social order, for example in Sabbatarian politics: Does not the gift of prophecy . . . foretell that if the Holy Sabbath cannot be sustained in these happy, exalted States, our free institutions will fail and our fair and glorious civil fabric, the hope of other nations, will sink into ruin with the republics of ancient days (84). Quist reveals the ways in which Congregationalists used Michigan newspapers to infuse society with antislavery and temperance advocacy and mobilize reform activists. He also notes how Baptists in Alabama-including some slaveholders-advocated temperance as a means of constructing a sober society in which white males could exercise a moderating influence on all social relationships. In the Northeast, Christian moral reformers had their own denominational periodicals whereas in the Lower South and Upper Midwest, reformers used local newspapers as vehicles for indoctrination and mobilization of a professional, church-going elite by their better educated social equals. Quist's rich empirical findings are especially illuminating and, in places, dramatic. An Alabama newspaper, The Independent Monitor (the title itself suggestive of the moral and social roles of the press), carried an 1843 account of a well publicized and carefully organized temperance lecture in Tuscaloosa. The article was written by one of the organizers of the event and featured an impromptu address, following the main lecture, in which Felix Grundy McConnell confessed his own too free indulgence in the use of ardent spirits with overwhelming effect and pathos. …