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Article Excerpt
In preparation for the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, Abraham Lincoln set down notes for a speech differentiating the Republican view of slavery from that of his Democratic rival, Stephen A. Douglas. Put simply, to Republicans slavery was "not only morally wrong, but a 'deadly poison' in a government like ours, professedly based on the equality of men." Angry controversy over slavery could not be forced to subside, as Democrats promised, by leaving the issue of its future expansion to voters in the territories or to justices on the Supreme Court. While Douglas professed not to care one way or the other about slavery's future, "nearly everybody" else had strong feelings on the issue. Rancorous conflict over slavery, which Democrats hoped could be "quieted and forgotten," was instead increasing. Furthermore, the poisonous dispute was not confined to politics: "Presbyterian assemblies, Methodist conferences, Unitarian gatherings, and single churches to an indefinite extent, are wrangling, and cracking, and going to pieces on the same question." (1)
The themes found in these notes became staples in the ensuing campaign, in which Lincoln repeatedly emphasized the failure of Democratic policies to put an end to escalating public conflict over slavery. Because one passage rehearses the theme that "a house divided against itself cannot stand" and warns that "the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," it is possible that the notes constitute an early draft of the June 16, 1858, "House Divided" speech given at the Republican state convention that named Lincoln their candidate for the U.S. Senate. (2) But at the political convention he did not refer specifically to the fracturing of religious denominations, let alone to bitter divisions in local churches.
Lincoln does not appear to have spoken about religious conflict until a dramatic moment in the seventh and final of the debates with Douglas. On October 15, 1858, before a crowd of 5,000 or more in the city of Alton, Douglas charged, as he did frequently, that irresponsible agitation by Republican politicians, not slavery, was endangering the peace between North and South. This time, Lincoln replied that it was not just the government whose endurance was threatened; rather, the divisive effect of the slavery controversy was felt in all American institutions and, in particular, in the churches.
Does it not enter into the churches and rend them asunder? What divided the great Methodist Church into two parts, North and South? What has raised this constant disturbance in every Presbyterian general assembly that meets? What disturbed the Unitarian Church in this very city two years ago? What has jarred and shaken the great American Tract Society recently--not yet splitting it, but sure to divide it in the end? Is it not this same mighty, deep seated power that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting and stirring them up in every avenue of society--in politics, in religion, in literature, in morals, in all the manifold relations of life? (3)
Despite the drama inherent in this moment when Lincoln connected important events in the nation's politics to religious strife, some of it right in Alton, there has been almost no commentary on this passage. (4) Our purpose here is to show what in fact had happened in Alton two years before (or as another reporter heard Lincoln say, "a few years ago") and to consider what those events tell us about the slavery controversy as a moral crisis reaching well beyond politics. (5)
Alton enjoyed an advantageous location on the Mississippi River a little north of St. Louis, close to the mouth of the Missouri River, and at the western end of a road crossing the Illinois territory from Vincennes, Indiana. Founded as Indian warfare subsided at the end of the War of 1812, its fortunes rose with the advent of steamboat commerce on the Mississippi. By the 1830s civic leaders, with eastern financial backing, had high aspirations to make Alton the state capital, to develop railroad and canal connections with other towns to south and east, and to overtake nearby St. Louis as a leading shipping center on the Mississippi. Educational institutions and churches, including the Unitarians, were counted on to temper the commercial preoccupations and boisterous street culture of a booming river port. Its economic and political aspirations took a hard fall in the depression of 1837, but it began to revive during the Mexican War, when it was a mustering station and shipping site. The Chicago & Alton Railroad, completed in 1853, bolstered the city's importance as a gateway to the trans-Mississippi West. The city's population in the 1850 census was 3,585, with an additional 1,309 residing on the bluffs in Upper Alton. Even as it profited from the nation's westward expansion, Alton was a divided city, with a lower town with docks, warehouses, and packing houses whose laborers had mostly traveled up from southern states (including a "free colored" population of 170) and an upper town with a business class of merchants and lawyers, many of whom still had family and financial ties to the Northeast. Conflict over slavery had led in 1837 to the event most closely attached to Alton's reputation--the murder of the antislavery "martyr" Elijah Lovejoy. Tensions over slavery resurfaced in the 1850s, when antislavery emigrants came from Chicago by railroad and transferred in Alton to boats that would carry them to Kansas. (6)
The specific events that Lincoln cited in Alton as examples of disturbances occurring throughout society were the emotional resignation from his pulpit by an antislavery minister in 1856 and bitter conflict at a conference of western Unitarians a year later. These events received attention in the contemporary press as instances of a controversy over "political preaching," but they receded from memory in later years. Today, some readers may believe that Unitarians were predominantly abolitionists, and thus it may be puzzling to find them singled out as an example of the fracturing of American churches. In 1852, however, a remarkably thorough assessment of slavery and the denominations concluded that, though their ranks included some earnest and prominent abolitionists, Unitarians were "divided on the abolition question, as other sects are." (7) Lincoln's audience in Alton and readers of the debates elsewhere in the North would not have been surprised to hear Unitarianism mentioned in a larger context of denominational conflict.
The rending of great Protestant denominations into northern and southern sects occurred well before the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and in most cases the divisions continued long after the Civil War. In a historiography that has emphasized the growth and continuity of denominational Christianity, they have been hard to explain and, though examined in some excellent books, remain somewhat neglected subjects. (8) Abolitionist majorities did not dominate the northern churches--that is why there were breakaway movements on the part of antislavery minorities--but there was sufficient antislavery agitation to launch irreconcilable disputes over organizational issues. (9) The Methodists were divided in 1844 over the issue of whether a slaveholding bishop--even one who came reluctantly into slave property by inheritance and who was forbidden to emancipate by state law--could retain his national office in the church. The Baptists divided in 1845, in their case in a dispute over whether slaveholders could be appointed missionaries. (10) As with the Methodists, this was a conflict in which northerners drew a line against their own connection with slavery and southerners withdrew in protest that their equal rights and privileges within the organization seemed compromised.
Presbyterianism underwent a series of schisms. In 1837 Old School Presbyterians "exscinded" synods in New York and Ohio from the denomination; New School Presbyterians in other states joined the outcasts in launching their own movement. In 1838 the two clashing parties met simultaneously in the same meeting hall before going their separate ways. Though slavery had been a smoldering issue for several years, the conflict was not entirely over slavery and the line of division was not strictly sectional: the New School included a minority of southerners, and the Old School objected to revivalist as well as reformist tendencies that undermined Presbyterianism's orthodox Calvinist tradition. Still, the New School included virtually all abolitionists in the denomination, and the victorious Old School depended on proslavery support for its takeover. As Lincoln's remarks indicated, slavery and sectionalism remained divisive issues within New School Presbyterianism and in 1853 and 1858 led to new schisms. Old School Presbyterianism was generally successful in avoiding discussion of slavery and thereby stayed intact until 1861.
The controversy that jarred and shook the great American Tract Society (ATS) is less familiar and less well studied. Founded in 1825 with a mission to publish and disseminate short works encouraging religious devotion and morality, the ATS was a principal component of "the evangelical arsenal" that helped make the United States an intensively Christian nation even as its population spread westward. (11) Its publishing committee, made up of six representatives of the major evangelical denominations, drew criticism from antislavery reformers because of its refusal to include slavery or even the slave trade among the sinful practices its tracts denounced and its silent elimination of antislavery passages from works it published. (12) In 1851 some western critics founded a rival American Reform Tract and Book Society (ARTBS), but others were reluctant to give up on such an important institution of evangelical outreach as the ATS. In 1856 antislavery moderates succeeded in passing a resolution permitting publication of tracts on the moral obligation of slaveholders to treat their slaves in a manner consistent with Christianity. No such tracts appeared, and at the 1858 annual meeting, as antislavery moderates continued to press for tracts on the Christian duties of masters, abolitionist radicals insisted on tracts on the sinfulness of slavery. In the showdown, both were decisively defeated; and Boston moderates seceded from the ATS and created their own new tract society. This new society disappointed abolitionists with tracts on the duties of masters that stopped short of outright denunciation of slaveholding. The ATS continued on its own much more influential course, avoiding all criticism of slavery, until the Civil War. (13)
In an important study, C. C. Goen contends that denominational schisms set the "scenario" for political disunion and civil war. That is how political leaders regarded the schisms as they occurred. (14) Besides premonitions of future political breakdown, however, there were other reasons to be disturbed by the schisms. They may well have been painful in the present to families who took pride in the growing strength of a denomination to which they gave their allegiance, to religious communities that longed for a unified church of all Christians, and to religious leaders and voluntary societies who cherished aspirations of Christianizing the West. The staffing, conduct, and message of evangelizing missions were at issue in the Baptist and Presbyterian schisms and were central to the ATS breakup. A leading historian of evangelicalism in the United States has noted that the denominational schisms marked the "high tide of evangelical outreach." After that point, evangelical religion remained energetic, but never again came "so close to converting the nation." (15)
Projects to Christianize the West, especially in places like Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Alton, where emigrants from the South and Northeast converged, were always at risk of disruptive conflict over slavery. In 1832, in one well-known example, Lyman Beecher left a prominent pulpit in Boston for the presidency of a new seminary in Cincinnati that would train western men for God's work in the West. As he explained in A Plea for the West (1835), a work seeking financial support for schools and seminaries, "the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided" in the West. Outstanding teachers and clergymen could make up for the cultural and religious deficiencies of the vast territories into which paupers from despotic Europe and Catholics under the domination of Papal authority were pouring. Beecher's move to Cincinnati occasioned conflict from two directions. Old School Presbyterians, who opposed his appointment, forced him through a trial for heresy; and after protracted debates over slavery, a band of students began teaching local blacks and, when attacked for doing so, ignored Beecher's cautions and deserted the seminary--an event often narrated as a key moment in the advance of radical abolitionism. (16)
Protestant evangelism collided with the slavery issue a few years later in the career of another New Englander, Elijah Lovejoy, who had come out to St. Louis in 1827 and, after conversion in a revival, went back east to study at Princeton Theological Seminary. He returned to St. Louis to found a Presbyterian church and launch a newspaper, the St. Louis Observer, in which he denounced moral vices like...
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