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WORK TITLE: Skepticism and American Faith from the Revolution to the Civil War
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CITY: Williamsburg
STATE: VA
COUNTRY: United States
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PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Yale University, New Haven, CT, Ph.D., 1992.
ADDRESS
CAREER
College of William and Mary, professor of history, 1999-; William and Mary Quarterly, editor, 2000-13.
WRITINGS
Contributor of academic articles in publications, including William & Mary Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, and Journal of American History.
SIDELIGHTS
Christopher Grasso writes and edits books on early American history, the Civil War, and American religious history. In 1999 he began teaching at the College of William and Mary and is now professor of history. He also edited the William and Mary Quarterly. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.
A Speaking Aristocracy
In 1999, Grasso published A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-century Connecticut, which explains how post-Revolutionary intellectuals, preachers, and polemicists transformed the way they participated and spoke in public discussions. In the first half of the eighteenth century, only clergyman addressed the public, however, by mid-century, lay people took advantage of the print medium to publish essays in newspapers and developed new rhetorical strategies with the purpose of instructing or persuading an audience.
Writing in Journal of Church and State, Bill Pitts called Grasso’s book superb saying that he uses “an overriding contemporary interest” in describing how rhetoric and language influence society. Stephen R. Grossbart said online at H-Shear: “Grasso does an exquisite job presenting evidence on how Connecticut’s post-Revolutionary gentry used public discourse to fashion themselves as a natural aristocracy most fit to rule in the new Republic.”
Bloody Engagements and Skepticism and American Faith from the Revolution to the Civil War
Grasso edited the Civil War memoir, Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War in 2017. Kelso (1831-91) was a Methodist preacher and Missouri schoolteacher who believed in the republic and was disillusioned by slavery who became a Union Army foot soldier, cavalry officer, and spy. He battled first-hand the Confederate guerilla outlaws, offering detailed information on the concealment, deception, ambush, and shock tactics used by both sides during irregular operations in the Missouri countryside. A reviewer online at Civil War Books and Authors remarked: “Editor and publisher are to be applauded for bringing to print a military memoir of Civil War Missouri that represents both the conventional and unconventional aspects of the conflict as uniquely as this one does.”
Grasso next wrote the 2018 Skepticism and American Faith from the Revolution to the Civil War, a look at how religious skepticism and faith developed and shaped everyday life. Highlighting skepticism of the Bible, the church, and personal experience, Grasso explores how ministers, merchants, physicians, schoolteachers, slaveholders, and soldiers questioned their faith. He addresses events like religious revivals, missions, moral reform societies, Christian tracts, and church building. “Grasso uses dozens of familiar and unfamiliar figures to explore the spiritual and practical consequences of these debates,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Online at Wall Street Journal, D.G. Hart reported: “Mr. Grasso’s book shines a light on an aspect of America’s cultural history that is too often neglected. His chief contribution is to put on center stage a cast of skeptics and freethinkers whom historians often relegate to the wings.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Church and State, Winter 2001, Bill Pitts, review of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth Century Connecticut, p. 154.
Publishers Weekly, May 28, 2018, review of Skepticism and American Faith from the Revolution to the Civil War, p. 93.
ONLINE
Civil War Books and Authors, https://cwba.blogspot.com/ (April 27, 2017) review of Bloody Engagements.
H-Shear, https://networks.h-net.org/ (February 1, 2000), Stephen R. Grossbart, review of A Speaking Aristocracy.
Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/ (August 22, 2018 ), D.G. Hart, review of Skepticism and American Faith.
Christopher Grasso is professor of history at the College of William and Mary and was the editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. He is the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut and the editor of Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso's Civil War.
Christopher Grasso
Professor, History
Office: Blair 351
Email: cdgras@wm.edu
Regional Areas of Research: Atlantic World, Early America, United States
Thematic Areas of Research: Cultural/Intellectual, Religion
Background
Christopher Grasso earned his PhD from Yale in 1992, taught at St. Olaf College, and came to William and Mary in 1999. From 2000 to 2013 he served as the Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. He has published A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (OIEAHC/ UNC Press, 1999), and articles in, for example, William & Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the Journal of American History. He has edited a Civil War memoir for Yale University Press and is working on a biography of the same character: “Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso” (also for Yale). His most recent work, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War appeared with Oxford University Press in 2018. His specialization is American religious history to 1900.
Q&A with Christopher Grasso, author of Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War
July 10, 2018
By Christopher Jones
in Interview, Interviews with Historians, Recent Scholarship
Tags: doubt, Faith, religion, religious history, Skepticism
1 Comment
Christopher Grasso earned his PhD from Yale in 1992, taught at St. Olaf College, and came to William and Mary in 1999. From 2000 to 2013 he served as the Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. He is the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (OIEAHC/UNC Press, 1999) and the editor of Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017). His most recent book, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War, was just published by Oxford University Press earlier this month. Dr. Grasso generously agreed to answer a few questions about the book.
JUNTO: You started this book nearly two decades ago, at a time when there was little to no research on the subject of religious skepticism in early America. In the meantime, the subject has been taken up by a number of historians, including books by Amanda Porterfield, Eric Schlereth, and Leigh Eric Schmidt. How has the project changed from its inception to its publication, and how does it differ from the other books on the subject?
CHRISTOPHER GRASSO: There have been ambitious attempts to chart the hegemony of American Christianity in the nineteenth century. (Prominent studies that do this in very different ways include those by Nathan Hatch, Jon Butler, Rodney Stark and Roger Fink, Mark Noll, and David Sehat.) Some scholars have recently refashioned the old secularization thesis and see the nineteenth century, even with the constant churn of religious dispute, as the emergence of a “secular age” produced by the structural changes of modernity operating, as it were, behind people’s backs (see Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, John Lardas Modern, and collections edited, with others, by Craig Calhoun and Michael Warner). My book examines a more contested and fraught dynamic by highlighting the important dialogue of skepticism and faith. I do pay attention to specific skeptics, people who publicly challenged the truth claims of traditional religion—deists, freethinkers, and even atheists such as Ethan Allen, Frances Wright, and Ernestine Rose. But I’m equally interested in skepticism as a position and an experience of people who were also, sometimes, even mostly, faithful. I show how skepticism was so important not because of the numbers of publicly self-proclaimed skeptics, but because many recognized that the private struggle with doubt was a common experience, and worried about it as a central challenge to a nation of faith. The book doesn’t posit either “secularization” or “Christianization” as the driving force of historical change. Skepticism and faith, too, are not binary opposites in a dialectic producing some neat synthesis at the end of the story—presumably something in the late nineteenth century closer to the world we have now than to the eighteenth-century world we have lost. Skepticism and faith are in an on-going dialogue with important personal, social, and political ramifications—a dialogue that has conceptual similarities but often different cultural functions as we move across time and across the American landscape.
My views on recent scholarship can be found in “The Religious and the Secular in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, 36, 2 (July, 2016): 359-88. I’ve engaged with and learned from the books you mention, but their projects are different from mine. Amanda Porterfield’s Conceived in Doubt (2012) is a provocative rejoinder to Nathan Hatch’s influential Democratization of American Christianity (1989). Rather than carrying the revolutionary ethos into the churches, Porterfield’s Americans doubt all authority in the turbulent 1790s and then rush back to church, nostalgic for the lost Father King, to reestablish patriarchal authority. Both Hatch’s thesis and Porterfield’s inversion of it are plausible, with several caveats, for some people in some places, but I find neither convincing as an over-arching interpretive argument. Both are good books to think with, however. Schlereth’s Age of Infidels (2013) and my book share some of the same characters in the 1775-1830 period. His study focuses more exclusively on the place of religious “infidels” in public political debate, and is more sanguine than I am about how much challenges to Christianity became normalized by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Schmidt’s fine Village Atheists (2016) concentrates mostly on the later nineteenth century.
JUNTO: In the book’s introduction, you argue that “the problem of skepticism and faith in the United States … needs to be seen not just as a contest of opposing ideas but as a lived experience: lived religion, and lived irreligion, too.” What do you mean by lived irreligion?
GRASSO: Scholars used to call for studies of “lived religion”—that is, historical inquiries that looked beyond the doctrines promulgated by churches to religion as embedded in the fabric of people’s daily lives, to the experience of religious faith through practice. Doubts about religion—and the indifference or animosity towards it that doubt can help produce—need to be similarly embedded. So do the practices—socialization, education, politics, and just daily being-in-the-world—that can arise as alternatives to those grounded in religious faith. This aim has produced a book with a lot of what I hope are compelling case studies and mini-biographies of people wrestling with faith and doubt in their everyday lives.
JUNTO: Skepticism and American Faith is organized into four thematic parts, arranged chronologically: “Revolutions, 1775-1815,” “Enlightenments, 1790-1840,” “Reforms, 1820-1850,” and “Sacred Causes, 1830-1865.” What does attention to religious skepticism and faith tell us about revolution, enlightenment(s), reform, and the Civil War?
GRASSO: Debates over the meaning of the American and French Revolutions prominently featured arguments about the role that religious faith ought to have in public life and patriotic citizenship. Was America a Christian nation? Did religious liberty include the freedom to be irreligious? With the separation of church and state, how could a Christian majority legitimately exert its power over non-believers in a democracy? Believing and doubting were rarely just matters of private predilection. From the founding, these issues linked the personal to the political.
Americans in this period did not talk about “The Enlightenment” (a later historiographical construct), but they did argue about what it meant for a person or a society to become “enlightened,” and the role of skeptical reasoning and religious faith in that process. The dialogue of skepticism and faith, therefore, echoed through the effort to produce and disseminate knowledge in the early republic. American Protestants in particular anointed themselves as the vanguard of Western civilization, claiming all the “enlightened” values and practices previously championed by the eighteenth-century philosophes: free inquiry, open debate, the broad dissemination of print, and the triumph over superstition. But they always supplemented and corrected worldly learning with divine revelation. More radical champions of enlightenment argued that the truth claims of the churches and the Bible needed to be investigated, debated, and rationally evaluated just like any others, and rejected if found wanting.
Similarly, the reform projects that sprang up in the second quarter of the nineteenth were an application of the dialogue of skepticism and faith to the profound social and economic changes of the era. Some argued that families and communities, the relations of capital and labor, and the institutions wielding political and cultural power needed to be remade. For some reformers this meant re-rooting all these things in the ethos of the Christian gospel. For other religious believers, worldly reform seemed to be a dangerous distraction to the message of salvation. For a smaller group, religion itself—especially in how it cultivated an irrational faith in supernatural powers and a deferential obedience to self-interested ecclesiastical authorities—was a central institution that had to be replaced in any effective project for social and moral reform.
As American nationalism broke in half during the sectional crisis, Northerners and Southerners alike rallied around God and country. In the South, proslavery politics had been thoroughly Christianized, and public skepticism effectively silenced, in the two decades before the Civil War; criticizing the Bible came to be seen as an attack on the slave regime. In the North, too, speakers and writers articulated a religious nationalism that erased skepticism from the nation’s history and either blurred Protestant evangelicalism and patriotism or fashioned the Union itself into a sacred idol. None of these things “just happened.” They did not emerge as the natural consequence of the colonial past, or out of a reaction to the Revolution, or as a byproduct of the denominational competition ushered in by the separation of church and state. They were hammered out by nearly continuous dialogue, debate, and struggle over skepticism and faith—argued in print, whispered in fireside conversations, and sometimes shouted on city streets and village lanes.
JUNTO: In addition to the expected cast of historical figures featured in a book on this subject (Elihu Palmer, Robert Dale Owen, etc), your book investigates lesser known individual and incidents in early America, including free and enslaved African American skeptics, freethinker and feminist Frances Wright, and the failed Presbyterian experimental society in Marion, Missouri. Is there a favorite story, source, or anecdote you discovered that you’d like to tell readers more about?
GRASSO: Hard to choose! It’s quite a cast of characters. The project began when I was reading in the papers of Ezra Stiles, watching him squirm uncomfortably as a closeted religious skeptic in the 1750s and then preaching about the political threat of deism and skepticism at the end of the Revolutionary War. I became fascinated, too, by a story involving Stiles: the reaction to William Beadle, the self-proclaimed deist in the 1780s who murdered his family and then killed himself. He became an object lesson of the danger of straying from orthodox Christianity, even as others who strayed, like the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, were becoming more visible and prominent. My graduate student Chad Sandford introduced me to the nearly unknown journal of the Methodist mystic Sarah Jones, and I explored her relationship with the remarkable itinerant Jeremiah Minter, who had himself castrated for Christ. The skeptical, irascible polymath Thomas Cooper took me through thousands of pages of obscure texts as he battled with both Federalists and Democratic-Republicans in Pennsylvania and then Presbyterians and politicians in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis. The story about the dramatic failure of a model college and city in Marion, Missouri–an experiment in Christian enlightenment headed by Ezra Stiles Ely, promoter of a Christian party in politics, and David Nelson, crusader against religious infidelity–was a complete surprise from the archives. Historians had written about the prolific health reformer William Alcott, but they had missed the anonymously published memoir of his struggle with religious skepticism, which explains so much about him and his reform project.
Of all of these, I confess that I’m partial to characters who change their minds—who move to different points on the spectrum of skepticism and faith rather than living their whole lives on one spot: the skeptics who become believers, and the believers who become skeptics; or George Bethune English, a Christian who became a skeptic and then was thought to have converted to Judaism and then to Islam; or Orestes Brownson, who progressed from Presbyterianism to Universalism to freethinking socialism to quasi-Transcendentalism to Roman Catholicism. It’s not hard to admire honest conviction, though, wherever you find it: in the shoemaker John Scarlett, finding faith on the streets of New Jersey, or in the feminist atheist Ernestine Rose, attacking the biblical roots of patriarchy. For my very favorite source, character, and story, however, I have to tip my hat to John R. Kelso.
JUNTO: I agree that John Kelso — the Methodist preacher and Missouri schoolteacher-turned-Union Army spy, guerilla fighter, and religious skeptic — is one of the more fascinating figures in your book. Earlier this year, Yale University Press published his Civil War memoirs, which you edited, and you are actively at work on a fuller biography of him. What can you tell us about that project, and when can readers expect to see it on bookshelves?
GRASSO: I came upon the papers of John R. Kelso (1831-1891) soon after the Huntington Library had purchased them: 800 manuscript pages of poems, speeches, lectures and a partial autobiography. He is the focus of the last half of the last chapter of Skepticism and American Faith. Drawn into his story, I published, as you mention, an edited and annotated version of the twelve Civil War chapters of his memoir as Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War for Yale University Press in 2017. When that book was in page proofs, as I was working on a full biography of Kelso, I was contacted by a direct descendant of his who had the missing second half of Kelso’s autobiography—another 80,000 words, taking the story from 1863 to 1885. This remarkable nineteenth-century figure offers an extraordinary vantage upon important dimensions of American culture. Kelso was many things: teacher, preacher, soldier, spy; congressman, scholar, lecturer, author; Methodist, atheist, spiritualist, anarchist. He was also a strong-willed son, a passionate husband, and a loving and grieving father. In the center of his life was what he depicted as the thrill and the trauma of the Civil War, which challenged his notions of manhood and honor, his ideals of liberty and equality, and his beliefs about politics, religion, morality, and human nature. Throughout his life, too, he fought his own private civil wars—against former friends and alienated family members, rebellious students and disaffected church congregations, political opponents and religious critics, but also against the warring impulses in his own complex character. My biography for Yale University Press, Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso, will not take nearly two decades, like Skepticism and American Faith. I have about half the chapters drafted; it will be out in a couple years.
Christopher Grasso F'16
Christopher Grasso
Professor
History
College of William & Mary
last updated: 09/21/18
ACLS Fellowship Program 2016
Professor
History
College of William & Mary
Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War
The American dialogue about religious skepticism and faith was crucial to the development of American culture between the American Revolution and the Civil War. It shaped and was shaped by struggles over the place of religion in politics in the Revolutionary era; by different visions of knowledge and education in an “enlightened” society; by reformers’ reconsiderations of the relation of the individual to society in an era of economic transformation, territorial expansion, and social change; and by the making and eventual unmaking of nationalisms in the United States. Although the standard historical narratives stress the dominance of evangelicalism in the period, the debate between skepticism and faith affected more lives than might be expected.
Skepticism and American Faith from the Revolution to the Civil War
Publishers Weekly. 265.22 (May 28, 2018): p93.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Skepticism and American Faith from the Revolution to the Civil War
Christopher Grasso. Oxford Univ., $34.95 (664p) ISBN 978-0-19-049437-7
In this revealing study, Grasso (Bloody Engagements), professor of history at William & Mary, argues that the American experience of and engagement with skepticism was a significant driver of social, cultural, religious, and political ferment in the young republic. Skeptics who questioned the three "grounds of faith"--the Bible, tradition, and personal subjectivity--prompted debates over many aspects of early American society, including epistemology, interpretation of the Bible and the Constitution, the appropriate response to poverty, the right of the faithful majority to be shielded from the "insult" of public skepticism, and the roots of faith and doubt in the anatomy of the brain itself. Grasso uses dozens of familiar and unfamiliar figures to explore the spiritual and practical consequences of these debates. His analysis of the ways race and gender shaped claims to knowledge and authority is strongest when considering black and white female skeptics such as 18th-century slaves who cultivated "deism, skepticism, universalism" and Methodist reformer Sarah Anderson Jones. Grasso uses a large appendix to define and explain the grounds of different faiths and their relationships to skepticism; general readers may find it helpful to begin in the appendix. True to its title, Grasso's book demonstrates the centrality of skepticism in understanding how the American inclination to faith has been "forged in the foundry of culture." (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Skepticism and American Faith from the Revolution to the Civil War." Publishers Weekly, 28 May 2018, p. 93. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541638871/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5bb16bae. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541638871
A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth Century Connecticut
Bill Pitts
Journal of Church and State. 43.1 (Winter 2001): p154.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Oxford University Press
Full Text:
A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth Century Connecticut. By Christopher Grasso. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 528 pp. $24.95 paper, $59.95 cloth.
Christopher Grasso's A Speaking Aristocracy is superb. In 1967 Richard Bushman published his study of the transformation of colonial Connecticut with the memorable title From Puritan to Yankee. Grasso also pursues the theme of social transformations in colonial Connecticut, but with an overriding contemporary interest in the way rhetoric and language shape authority in society. This is a large book with ample space in its eight chapters to develop the role of leading Connecticut "speaking aristocrats," many of them connected to Yale and many of them ministers. Grasso also introduces their opposers and challengers; their conflicts set the agendas for discourse.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pitts, Bill. "A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth Century Connecticut." Journal of Church and State, Winter 2001, p. 154. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A73064934/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=42ef272e. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A73064934
Grossbart on Christopher Grasso, 'A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut' and Grasso, 'A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut'
Author:
Christopher Grasso
Reviewer:
Stephen R. Grossbart
Christopher Grasso. A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. vii + 511 pp. Christopher Grasso. A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. viii + 511 pp. $27.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-4772-5; $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-2471-9.
Reviewed by Stephen R. Grossbart (Independent Scholar) Published on H-SHEAR (February, 2000)
In the years immediately following the American Revolution, Christopher Grasso detects a dramatic transformation in Connecticut. Public discourse, which had been dominated by learned clergy in the colonial era, became rapidly dominated by others who claimed the right to speak. In describing the role of the clergy in the seventeenth-century, one Connecticut minister saw this group of men as "a speaking Aristocracy in the face of a silent Democracy" (p. 1). After the American Revolution, that democracy was no longer silent. "Speakers, institutions, and rhetorical occasions multiplied" rapidly in what Christopher Grasso describes as a "scramble for membership in the post-Revolutionary speaking aristocracy" (p. 394).
As Grasso writes, "In the first half of the century, assumptions about social legitimacy, personal authority, and religious calling regulated who could speak or write to a general audience and anticipate its attention and respect" (p. 2). In the hierarchical society that marked colonial British America, this speaking elite functioned as an aristocracy. Their dominance of public discourse began to transform in the 1740s as the series of religious revivals known as the Great Awakening undermined the legitimacy of the clergy.
The pace at which these new voices emerged quickened in the post-Awakening decades. "After midcentury . . . newspapers, essays, and eventually lay orations began to compete with sermons for public attention, introducing new rhetorical strategies to persuade and instruct an audience. . . . Lawyers challenged the clergy's dominance in intellectual life. Learned men with the Enlightenment's faith in progress and practical knowledge encouraged a scientific attitude. Writers in the Revolutionary era cultivated literary sensibility by publishing satirical verse and epic poetry" (p. 4). What was once a tightly defined aristocracy of public speakers was now far more fluid. Who could speak in public? This question became harder to answer. By the end of the eighteenth century, it is clear that many voices and writers assumed this right. Grasso tends to focus on a narrow group of Yale trained intellectuals who, though more broadly self-defined in the 1780s and 1790s than had been the case in the early 1740s, nonetheless still conceived of themselves as a "speaking aristocracy."
Certainly, Grasso is in step with a number of cultural and intellectual historians who view the Revolution as a transforming event. In this sense, Grasso's analysis supports Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), who sees a significant shift from an aristocratic and monarchical colonial society to a bourgeois democratic one by the early nineteenth century. But Grasso does not fully argue that the transition of post-Revolutionary Connecticut society went as far as Wood contends. This is striking since the most important theoretical work that Grasso cites in Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1963, 1991). While Habermas examines the growth of bourgeois literary and political self-consciousness, Grasso never argues that the events he studies in post-Revolutionary Connecticut represent the development of a self-conscious bourgeoisie. Instead, Grasso does an exquisite job presenting evidence on how Connecticut's post-Revolutionary gentry used public discourse to fashion themselves as a natural aristocracy most fit to rule in the new Republic. But in doing so, he opts to neglect the eclipse of the gentry by a middle class that had embraced America's democratic revolution.
Grasso's provides a refreshing analysis of the transformation of Connecticut society by using the lives of six impressive literary figures -- Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Clap, Jared Eliot, Ezra Stiles, John Trumbull, and Timothy Dwight -- to illustrate how public discourse and writing changed.
Jonathan Edwards becomes the vehicle for understanding the Great Awakening's impact on discourse. The Awakening itself was marked by rhetorical flurries. First, George Whitfield's dramatic revival preaching and writings electrified Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic. Whitfield was mimicked by scores of other evangelists, most notably James Davenport and Gilbert Tennent. In Connecticut, this was quickly followed by sharp ideological divisions between Old Lights and New Light revivalists that in turn generated large bodies of "polemical sermons, treatises, and testimonies" from both sides of the ecclesiastical fence. Finally, the Awakening led to "institutional formation and reformation" that included anti-revival legislation and illegal church separations (p. 87).
In reviewing the revival itself, and the ideological divisions it spawned, Grasso shows how Jonathan Edwards attempted to "regulate public religious discourse" in the aftermath of the Great Awakening (p. 88). Edwards's attempts, however, proved unsuccessful as New England in general, and Connecticut in particular, turned to repressive legislation in the face of church schism and separation. Writing in the 1740s and 1750s, Edwards's attempt at regulating public religious discourse entailed "control [over] the meaning of signs in a community and to redefine the language of Christian community." Regulation for Edwards meant that the "minister, not the parishioners, set the terms of debate (p. 110)." This included the important question of how the church membership would be defined. In his rhetorical thrusts, Edwards staked out the middle ground between Old Lights and Separate-Baptist New Lights, laying the foundation for the conservative New Divinity theology that would dominate Congregational theological discourse (and little else) within the religious establishment during the Revolutionary era. Edwards (and the New Divinity's) approach to control discourse and definitions of key points of debate, "fueled" rather than ended "antagonisms between laity and clergy" (p. 143).
His chapter on Yale President Thomas Clap addresses the growth of legal rhetoric. Clap, an Old turned New Light Calvinist, adopted legalist language to defend Yale's special privileges. Though an ordained minister, Clap's arguments in the face of a concerted Old Light efforts to strip Yale of its privileges "signaled the growing power of legal discourse," as the "law became more formal and technical" between 1740 and 1763 (p. 146). Clap, thus signaled the "the growing rhetorical power of lawyerly language" (p. 145). His rhetoric represents the passing of the intellectual "baton" from the clergy to the legal profession (p. 147). His defense of Yale was in response to Old Light attacks on the institution, but Grasso notes with irony that the number of graduates who went on to become ordained Congregational ministers declined under Clap's presidency. Though, the law had not yet become the dominant profession for Yale graduates the movement in that direction was clear. Clap, motivated first by his attempt to curb the excesses of the Awakening, then to protect Yale from Old Light attacks on his authority, ultimately paved the way for "a period of new enthusiasms for politics and law" (p. 184).
Jared Elliot, a physician and clergyman, wrote extensively about agricultural practices in the late 1740s and 1750s. Elliot's writings, which attempted to "produce and disseminate practical knowledge" represent "the social, intellectual, and ideological transformations that redefined mid-eighteenth-century America" (p. 191). Elliot's work introduced the drill plow to New England farmers. Though not widely adopted until the nineteenth century, Elliot attempted to reach a wide audience--essentially the "readers of almanacs," which were essentially "farmer's handbooks" (p. 209). This chapter, which will certainly appeal to agricultural historians, argues that Elliot and other writers who focused on scientific and practical knowledge foreshadowed "the shifting relationship between learned writers and the audiences they addressed . . . when the authoritative ministerial voice was challenged by plain speakers exploring new genres" (p. 228).
One of the most fascinating men in eighteenth-century New England had to be Ezra Stiles. In his chapter on this Yale President, Grasso provides an important supplement to Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795 (New Haven, 1962). Stiles, the son of a New Haven Old Light, gained the reputation for promoting "harmony" among Congregational ministers torn apart by the Great Awakening. After settling in Newport, and having flirted with the thought of becoming an Anglican, this Old Light moderate preached at the installation of the New Divinity theologian Samuel Hopkins. Stiles is, for Grasso, "a case study of the webs of ideas and cultural styles know as 'Puritanism' and the 'Enlightenment'" (pp. 231, 233). Stiles focused his early life and writing on his attempt "to mediate between what polemicists of his day set up as dichotomies: Arminianism versus Calvinism, intellect versus the affections, and deism versus scriptural faith" (p. 234). Stiles worked hard to discount the extreme positions in the theological debate between Old and New Lights. Having flirted with both deism and Arminianism after the Great Awakening, Stiles returned to the Puritan faith he had been raised into.
His battle with deism, both personal and public, increasingly shaped Stiles's preaching after 1765. So did the colonists' struggle with Britain. Stiles's preaching style became increasingly evangelical, using outlines rather than written texts while speaking from the pulpit. He, thus, adopted a rhetoric that Grasso characterizes as "Puritan (not New Light) evangelicalism" (p. 247). This shift coincided with Stiles's embrace of the patriot cause in 1765 and his growing belief that Anglicanism posed a threat to American religion.
After the war began, Stiles was forced to leave British-occupied Newport and accepted the Yale presidency in 1777. At Yale, Stiles became involved in "struggles to realign church and state, to redefine the power of clergymen and 'civilians' over higher education, and to recast the relationship between religious and political life in the young Republic" (p. 264). Stiles used Yale to promote his belief that "a scholarly elite needed to do useful work and help promote practical knowledge and social progress . . . while keeping more speculative matters to itself. Yet, Stiles came to understand that the enlightened republic of letters could not broaden to become the public sphere of the American Republic without institutional safeguards protecting religious orthodoxy and church tradition." Stiles used his position at Yale to promote "state support of the church and clerical control of higher education" to "ensure that learned and Christian [read Congregational] men would continue to guide the public toward wisdom." This philosophy would be Stiles's legacy. Grasso, while acknowledging that the theological traditions of the Congregational "Second Great Awakening" were tied to the Edwardsean New Divinity men, owed its "sober revivalism and social control" as much to Stiles as to the New Divinity (p. 277). Few other historians have credited the Yale president with this role.
Grasso examines the literary life of the poet John Trumbull, and yet another Yale President, Timothy Dwight, to understand the Revolutionary era. Trumbull, most famous for his patriotic poem M'Fingal (1776, 1782) is representative of "the rise of the local press and the development of a new Connecticut literary culture" (p. 282). Dwight, on the other hand, provides for Grasso answers to "the place of the learned man in the new Republic, the relationship between religion, politics, literature, and intellectual life" (p. 283).
Trumbull wrote at a time when Connecticut's public sphere evolved rapidly. Three important transformations are represented in Trumbull's literary life. First, his famous M'Fingal poem -- a dispute between Whig and Tory set in a New England town meeting --satirized the "traditional conceptions of face-to-face communication." His series of "Correspondent" essays in the late 1760s promoted the "ideals of republican print" and helped "establish a civic forum in the local press." Finally, Trumbull worked actively to create copyright laws and helped lay the foundation for "the liberal literary marketplace" of post-war Connecticut (p. 323).
Timothy Dwight, much like Jonathan Edwards and Ezra Stiles, believed it was the role of learned and pious men "to instruct the 'public mind.'" But unlike Edwards and Stiles who often found themselves attempting to bridge theological (and political) gaps within Connecticut society, Dwight, as Grasso reluctantly labels him, was "a representative Federalist crank." Dwight hoped "to restore a more coherent moral order" in the face of political assaults from democrats and religious assaults from Baptist and Methodist dissenters, as well as imagined threats from Deists (pp. 328-329). Dwight invested much of his literary energy into attacking religious toleration and repelling threats of infidelity. Yet unlike his predecessors, Dwight's writings led to vigorous public challenges. Reponses appearing in the local press reflected the new encouragement offered within the public sphere for the "people to answer the speaking aristocracy of clergymen." Dwight seems to be a throwback to a different era when he objected to the "open debate" within the press that "legitimized the existence of diverse opinions" (p. 340). On the one hand, Grasso demonstrates how this prominent Federalist speaker attempted to cling to old notions about deference and hierarchy. But in the aftermath of a democratic revolution, it is hard to view the speaking aristocracy's attempts to retain its dominant voice as anything but futile. His political opponents held out Dwight for ridicule and criticism.
Many of Dwight's religious-political views became clear during the heated debates over toleration during the 1790s in Connecticut. In 1793, when religious dissenters and liberal rationalists challenged recent legislation that called for appropriating proceeds from western land sales to support clerical salaries, Dwight rose to defend the state supported church. Over a two-year period, Connecticut's press aired numerous essays on both sides of the issue. When it appeared that supporters of religious toleration would not only succeed at repealing the legislation, but also drive several of the established church's staunchest supporters from high office, Dwight published a three-piece essay defending his political allies and the parish preacher from anti-clerical assaults. He focused much of his attack on the "morally lax 'enemies of Christianity'" whom he believed were the driving force behind the attack on Connecticut's established ministers (p. 348). Grasso is probably correct that Dwight believed he could appeal to religious dissenters and drive a wedge between the Baptists and the state's anticlerical liberals -- Deists and Masons-- all of whom opposed the Appropriation Act. Yet Dwight's political tack instead drew some of those anticlerical liberals back into the Federalist mainstream while failing to unite the state's New Lights.
Grasso, though correctly noting that Dwight became convinced that the real threat to the establishment came "with infidelity [rather] than with radical pietism" (p. 350), gives Dwight's own warped sense of reality too much weight in evaluating political conflict in the 1790s. A careful analysis of the political developments of this period reveals a far more pronounced political role for dissenters. One has to wonder why men like Dwight did not recognize the threat from the rapidly growing Baptist and Methodist denominations? Here Grasso seems as elitist as Dwight himself: "Libertine legislators and Yale students duped by Denis Diderot were more dangerous than backwoods farmers who weeped with semiliterate itinerant Methodists." For Grasso the exciting (and literate) group was "a new breed of learned men." They were "infiltrating Connecticut's natural aristocracy, and their hands were reaching for the levers of power" (p. 350). While Grasso finds this group of Yale graduates intellectually intriguing, Dwight was horrified by their rhetoric.
We can attribute Dwight's failure to perceive the greater threat from religious dissenters to the fact that he was a "crank." Surely, Dwight could have noticed the increasingly large number of Baptists arriving to vote at the semi-annual election day meeting, or the growing number of dissenters elected to the legislature who never voted on his side. But why does Grasso largely sidestep key work that demonstrates the importance of religious dissent in post-Revolutionary America? For Grasso's argument to stand, he really needs to deal more fully with such works as Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989) and Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820 (Chapel Hill, 1990).
Religious dissenters in Connecticut, and throughout the nation, would play an essential role in forging a strong and viable Republican Party. Grasso, I believe, misreads Dwight's opposition when he argues that "anticlerical liberals were more vocal and politically engaged; they not Baptists and Methodists, were the most vigorous spokesmen" against the Appropriation Act. Here Grasso's reliance on literary sources undermines his interpretation. The newspapers did not identify the religious affiliations of those opposed to the act. Nor did the papers give a running tally of the proportion of Baptists, Methodists, or Episcopalians who voted Republican. Only by digging into church and association records, could Grasso learn that many of the men he cites as attacking Dwight's views were religious dissenters--not "anticlerical liberals." Baptists and Separates, such as Elisha Hyde, Moses Cleaveland, and Elisha Paine were key actors in the attack on the clergy. Another group Grasso neglects is Episcopalians. Ephraim Kirby was one of the most outspoken and published opponents of the clergy, and his religious views certainly help explain his political positions. Another key (and often overlapping) group is members of the Mason Order. The importance of Masons (many who were also either Baptist or Episcopalian), in attacking the Appropriation Act, may also explain Dwight's insane attack on the Bavarian Illuminati. Grasso would have benefited in this discussion of Connecticut politics by citing a few neglected works including James R. Beasley, "Emerging Republicanism and the Standing Order: The Appropriation Act Controversy in Connecticut, 1793-1795," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 29 (Oct. 1972), 587-610 and Dorothy Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut (Princeton, 1977).
Maybe Dwight's greatest significance lies in how his writing represented the Federalist belief that they were a natural aristocracy privileged to rule and lead the republic of Connecticut. Dwight's writings emphasized the need "for a republic of Christian virtue" (p. 357). During the 1790s, Dwight's attempt to move political "debate away from constitution making and back toward a Christian public virtue was also an attempt to reclaim control over the public agenda, to recast political arguments as social and moral problems and give ministers rather than magistrates the stronger voice" (p. 358). By tying this development in Dwight's writings to political events, Grasso has uncovered a significant trend in late eighteenth-century Federalist politics. The clergy's defeat over the Appropriation Act can be attributed to a temporary anticlerical political coalition. Opponents of the Appropriation Act included Masons and Episcopalians who would split between the Federalist and Republican parties during the Quasi-War with France. Dwight's efforts may have driven anticlerical Federalists away from their more radical Republican counterparts. Prominent anticlerical Federalists included men such as Zephaniah Swift, David Daggett, Joshua Coit, and Jonathan Ingersoll, but after 1797 they would not openly challenge the religious Standing Order. (Only Ingersoll, an Episcopalian, would break with the Federalists as the party began to collapse upon itself after the War of 1812.) The anticlerical coalition also included religious dissenters, Episcopalians, and Masons who would unite to form the state's Republican Party. This group included such men as Kirby, Pierpont Edwards, Asa Spalding, and Gideon Granger. As divisions over foreign policy issues hardened, few pro-toleration Federalists were willing to speak out against Dwight on social issues. Preserving power from the threat posed by Republicans was too great for Federalists to venture into this arena again. In Connecticut, and elsewhere, as both Lipson and Steven C. Bullock Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill, 1996), demonstrate, Masons became far more constrained in their political behavior. In Connecticut, the pro-toleration wing of the Federalist Party quieted down and let men like Dwight lead on social-religious issues. Their own attempts to define themselves a natural aristocracy were merged with those efforts by the established clergy.
Grasso's last chapter departs from the biographical focus of the book's preceding six chapters and provides, in broad strokes, a picture of Connecticut political life in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. This chapter is by far the book's strongest, but it also suggests some fundamental weaknesses in Grasso's approach. Entitled "Political Characters and Public Words," the chapter might have been better titled, "Democracy shouting down the Aristocracy." After six orderly chapters outlining how the speaking aristocracy defined and defended itself, Grasso's final chapter presents a cacophony of competing voices.
Having read Grasso's dissertation, draft versions of three book chapters a few years back, and now, in reviewing the book for H-SHEAR, I still do not fully comprehend Grasso's strategy in constructing this key chapter and his brief conclusion. He writes that in post-Revolutionary Connecticut, Yale students "sensed that professional achievement and public reputation would now more than ever before depend upon mastery of the arts of oral persuasion. In the scramble for membership in the post-Revolutionary speaking aristocracy, speakers, institutions, and rhetorical occasions multiplied. Yet, the enthusiasm for rhetoric was related to more than personal ambition. Speeches, proclamations, and addresses were rooted in institutions--colleges, churches, the legislature, town governments, the courts, the militia, voluntary societies--and were given on ritualized occasions that conveyed social meanings far beyond the speaker's or writer's particular message to his audience" (p. 394). The words in this passage--ones that I suspect will be the book's most frequently quoted--sum up why Grasso's work is so important for understanding the transforming effects of the Revolution. The multiplication of rhetorical occasions was driven by and helped drive the revolutionary transformation of American society. Yet the chapter represents less the continued dominance of the speaking aristocracy, than the transformation of the public sphere that had now led to the creation of a self-conscious bourgeoisie. Many of the men Grasso cites, in particular Abraham Bishop, do not represent an aristocracy, as he seems to argue, but the emerging middle-class culture that would grow to dominate Connecticut politics by the second decade of the nineteenth century. (For a different interpretation of post-Revolutionary Connecticut politics and Abraham Bishop, see David Waldstreicher and Stephen R. Grossbart, "Abraham Bishop's Vocation; or, The Mediation of Jeffersonian Politics," Journal of the Early Republic (Winter 1998), 617-657.)
Grasso examines the multiplication of rhetorical occasions by focusing on new schools for rhetoric, and public societies such as Yale's Phi Beta Kappa and the Linonia Society that appeared in post-Revolutionary Connecticut. But the increase in occasions for public speaking also affected rhetoric and writing in ways that the speaking aristocracy could not have approved. Here I am confused by Grasso's argument. He writes that in the early 1780s, though "theoretically open to all members of the body public, in practice formal public discourse in Connecticut after the Revolution remained thoroughly dominated by a speaking aristocracy of propertied white men" (p. 415). Yet, Grasso cites numerous examples of the post-Revolutionary speaking democracy. The most studied example is the Painite rhetoric of mechanic Walter Brewster in the early 1790s. Brewster's radical attack on the privileges enjoyed by the state's aristocracy was soon joined by others. "By century's end . . . other common men were beginning to speak out and answer for themselves in print" (p. 418). If so, then why does Grasso keep coming back to Yale-trained voices to understand public discourse? Grasso's study needs to focus more on the growth of a speaking democracy. There was more give and take between Connecticut's gentry and popular speakers and writers than Grasso is willing to concede.
Grasso's conclusion draws a quick comparison between two very different residents of New Haven, Timothy Dwight, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, and the prominent Republican orator Abraham Bishop, the protege of Edwards's non-religious son Pierpont. Grasso readily recognizes that by the end of the century "a sovereign people had demanded that government heed the public voice. Opposition leaders had their own rhetorical occasions. Political character appeared to be built less on local reputation and deference to long experience than upon speech making and a masterly of legal jargon" (p. 479). But Grasso does not reach the conclusion that Connecticut's speaking aristocracy if not silenced was increasingly irrelevant. Instead, despite the expansion of non-aristocratic voices, Grasso maintains that "in 1800, those able to exploit the power of public discourse were still, for the most part, elite men like Dwight and Bishop" (p. 481)."
Grasso concludes his story with a series of rhetorical questions. He wonders and writes openly about the meaning of his work. Was the transformation of public discourse about "intellectual freedom and democratic revolution" or the reformulation of "patriarchal power"? Was this "a story about democratization or the reconstitution of elite hegemony"? Then he concedes that "the moral and political judgement we pass upon the eighteenth century, however, may ultimately have less to do with that century than with our own" (p. 485).
I do not find Grasso's concluding rhetorical questions gratifying. By conflating the rhetoric of a fading aristocrat like Dwight with a self-conscious democratic spokesman, like Bishop, Grasso leaves this reader just a bit perplexed. The problem is that our aristocratic gentry endured too long for us historians. As David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997) demonstrates, Federalists, especially in New England, were adept at claiming popular occasions--such as Fourth of July celebrations--as their own. And nowhere were they more adept at holding onto power than in Connecticut. Grasso's story is thus about both democratization and elite hegemony. Maybe more clearly, it is about how a democratic revolution changed the public sphere. Grasso's story tells us about one critical part of this transformation. By focusing on Yale-trained writers and orators, he demonstrates how learned men weathered and contributed to this rapidly transforming public sphere.
Grasso's book will stand out for a number of reasons. It is an important contribution to the growing list of studies that examine how culture transformed during a revolutionary age. This book will also stand out as probably the most important study of eighteenth-century Connecticut since the publication of Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). In a field dominated by simplistic studies that emphasize how different Connecticut was from other states, Grasso has demonstrated how profoundly literary culture, education, religion, and politics, here as elsewhere, were affected by the Revolution.
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Thursday, April 27, 2017
Review of Grasso, ed. - "BLOODY ENGAGEMENTS: John R. Kelso’s Civil War"
[Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War by John R. Kelso, edited by Christopher Grasso (Yale University Press, 2017). Hardcover, maps, photo, notes, appendices, chronology, index. 264 pp. ISBN:978-0-300-21096-5. $35]
In 1861, Buffalo, Missouri (Dallas County) schoolteacher John Russell Kelso embarked on an incredibly varied and eventful Civil War career, and his memoir reveals much about the irregular conflict in the southwest part of the state. Kelso's "Auto-Biography" disappeared at the time of his death in 1891, but an important part of it covering his life story up to 1863 (copied in Kelso's own hand) was discovered and survives. It is the Civil War sections of this manuscript copy that historian Christopher Grasso has edited for release as Bloody Engagements.
Though hazy on dates and tainted throughout by heavy doses of immodesty, Kelso's highly descriptive writings nevertheless offer valuable firsthand views of a host of lesser-known wartime events that occurred in Missouri and Arkansas. His frightening portrait of life behind the lines in a rural Ozark county, with each side's adherents alternately preying upon the other, is an especially revealing one [no stranger to stealing from enemy sympathizers, Kelso would have his own house and farm destroyed by vengeful neighbors]. Many of the narrative's gaps and deficiencies are ably remedied in Grasso's footnotes, which also regularly temper Kelso's flightier claims with accounts of the same events from other sources.
As his memoir demonstrates at great length, Kelso served the Union cause in many different capacities. Although, like many fellow pro-Union Missouri residents, Kelso joined a Home Guard regiment, his personal motivations appear to have been primarily ideological (vs. localist) in nature. In the summer of 1861, while operating in the countryside against secessionists, Kelso and his Dallas County Home Guard comrades missed the Battle of Wilson's Creek.
Kelso soon after enlisted in the 24th Missouri Volunteer Infantry. He and his regiment initially conducted antipartisan sweeps in the SE Missouri "Bootheel" and guarded bridges from enemy raids. As with Wilson's Creek before, the October 21 Battle of Fredericktown was fought without him. The 24th then joined General Samuel Curtis's Army of the Southwest for the winter campaign into SW Missouri and NW Arkansas that would lead to the Battle of Pea Ridge, which Kelso also missed after being detached from his unit in February for recruitment duty back in Missouri.
Being both trustworthy and familiar with the Missouri Ozarks region, Kelso was frequently detached by Curtis for solo scout/spy missions behind enemy lines in SW Missouri. According to his own accounts, these were thrilling escapades replete with daring acts of deception and narrow escapes that in the end successfully produced valuable intelligence for his superiors. However, the narrative doesn't provide any specific examples of Kelso's information shaping his commander's planning.
In March 1862, Kelso took up arms in yet another unit, when he and his recruits (with Kelso appointed first lieutenant) were transferred into the 14th Missouri State Militia cavalry. The federally-sponsored MSM regiments were vital to suppressing guerrillas and maintaining Union control over the state, yet their actions during the war, along with the men and units involved, remain only sparsely recognized in the published literature. Thus, Kelso's extensive writings of this particular period of his Civil War service represent a very valuable firsthand record of the 14th's leadership and contributions to the Union war effort in Missouri. In addition to documenting a number of 1862 patrols conducted by his MSM unit in Missouri and Arkansas, Kelso recounts in great detail the 14th's combat history, which included an embarrassing rout at Neosho on May 30, a victory at Ozark on August 1, and a successful August 4, 1862 skirmish at Forsyth (for the last, Kelso was not present but includes a copy of his captain's AAR). Kelso also describes at length what he witnessed of the January 8, 1863 Battle of Springfield, where he led a mounted flank guard detachment east of the town.
Kelso's narrative is highly informative regarding the concealment, deception, ambush, surprise, and shock tactics employed by both sides during irregular and counterirregular operations in the Missouri countryside. The depths of violence and contradiction inherent to the state's unconventional war also grimly emerge. At one point, Kelso hotly opposes the cynical plundering and sexual misconduct of his fellow officers of the 14th, but he also freely admits earlier to robbing and threatening civilians himself, even going so far as to deliberately murder an unarmed old man and seriously wound a young boy inside their home.
At the rear of the book, Grasso appends to the memoir narrative the texts of two Kelso speeches, as well as an unfinished late-life work (titled Government Analyzed) that questions the war and the part Kelso played in it. According to Grasso, Kelso became a self-described "anarchist" in the years before his death, and the rhetoric contained in many of the bizarre passages in Analyzed seem to support this radicalized outlook [ex. "This war is known to have been the result of a vast conspiracy of the capitalists of Europe and of America" (pg. 207)]. Though the memoir ends abruptly, the book's biographical chronology finishes Kelso's Civil War story, which was highlighted by further irregular service in Missouri, election to the House of Representatives in 1864, and brevet promotion to colonel.
Editor and publisher are to be applauded for bringing to print a military memoir of Civil War Missouri that represents both the conventional and unconventional aspects of the conflict as uniquely as this one does. Bloody Engagements is highly recommended. Grasso is also working on a Kelso biography, and this volume's fascinating insights into the Union officer's controversial life certainly heightens the anticipation level for it.
‘Skepticism and American Faith’ Review: Believe It or Not
A strong current of religious belief ran through the young American nation, but so did a countercurrent of doubt and freethinking. D.G. Hart reviews “Skepticism and American Faith” by Christopher Grasso.
Federalist cartoon from 1800 showing God’s eye as it watches an American eagle prevent Thomas Jefferson from sacrificing the U.S. Constitution on the altar of French despotism.
Federalist cartoon from 1800 showing God’s eye as it watches an American eagle prevent Thomas Jefferson from sacrificing the U.S. Constitution on the altar of French despotism. PHOTO: THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA
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By D.G. Hart
Aug. 22, 2018 6:44 p.m. ET
Religious nationalism is now out of favor for many Americans, but as recently as 1942 you could hear Franklin Roosevelt justify America’s involvement in World War II with biblical rhetoric. In his State of the Union address that year, Roosevelt declared not only that the world was too small for “Hitler and God” but that the United States was fighting “inspired by a faith that goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.” The idea that “God created man in His own image,” he said, was the reason to fight and “uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God.”
Of course, it would be wrong to imply that FDR was drawing on a continuous and unquestioned cultural tradition of piety and biblical reverence. Only 17 years before, William Jennings Bryan had become an object of ridicule during the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tenn., for his fundamentalist beliefs about creation. Even the Declaration of Independence presents a less than clear picture of the role of religion in the national idea. The 1776 justification of the country’s founding appealed to “Nature’s God” and grounded unalienable rights in a “Creator’s” decree. But the author of that language, Thomas Jefferson, was not an orthodox Christian by any means, preferring a deist Unitarianism to traditional Protestantism.
‘Skepticism and American Faith’ Review: Believe It or Not
PHOTO: WSJ
SKEPTICISM AND AMERICAN FAITH
By Christopher Grasso
Oxford, 649 pages, $34.95
Christopher Grasso, who teaches history at the College of William and Mary, is keenly aware of the tension between believers and nonbelievers in American history. Indeed, that tension is the theme of “Skepticism and American Faith,” a revealing look at religion in the new nation. The period he covers runs from roughly 1800 to the Civil War, a time during which, Mr. Grasso argues, disagreements over belief and skepticism were especially acute.
Pursuing this theme requires Mr. Grasso to devote a lot more space to books, speeches, pamphlets and newspaper accounts—the places where such ideas play out—than to the laws and policies of the federal and state governments, where politicians and voters matter more than the authors of books. At times the lives of the people arguing for either faith or skepticism take a back seat to the ideas they espouse. Those deficiencies notwithstanding, Mr. Grasso’s book shines a light on an aspect of America’s cultural history that is too often neglected. His chief contribution is to put on center stage a cast of skeptics and freethinkers whom historians often relegate to the wings.
Some of these figures may well be familiar, like the patriot Ethan Allen. Most of us know him for his military successes—he and his Green Mountain Boys, of course, became heroes for capturing Fort Ticonderoga from the British early in the Revolutionary War—and not for his arguments against “priestcraft.” In 1785, Mr. Grasso reminds us, Allen published “Reason, the Only Oracle of Man,” a book that “urged readers to discard the warped theologies derived from ancient biblical fables.”
Many other skeptics in Mr. Grasso’s chronicle are obscure, like John Fitch, the inventor of an early steamboat well ahead of Robert Fulton. He went from Universalism (the belief that everyone will be saved) to deism, which featured a belief in the Creator but in few tenets of Christianity. In Philadelphia, Fitch helped to form the Universal Society, a kind of philosophical discussion club whose leader, Elihu Palmer, a former Baptist preacher, proudly denied the divinity of Christ. Later in Mr. Grasso’s chronicle comes the remarkable tale of John R. Kelso, a schoolteacher, Civil War combatant (fighting Confederate guerrillas in Missouri) and congressman. In his autobiography, written in the third person, Kelso described his despair, in the 1840s and ’50s, at being unable to find the faith that he believed to be essential to his salvation. “Therefore, he went boldly forward and having once dared to use his reason, he soon emerged from the darkness of ignorance and superstition, and into the light and gladness of truth. His fetters were broken and he became a free man.” And yet Kelso returned to a kind of deism after the war. Mr. Grasso takes Kelso to be an emblem for many Americans of the period, caught between reason and faith.
For the side of Christianity, Mr. Grasso includes the obvious (e.g., Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards’s grandson, who presided over Yale College) along with the all but forgotten, like Jedidiah Morse, a prominent New England Congregationalist who defended both Calvinism and the Federalist Party at the turn of the 19th century to help keep the American Revolution from turning into a version of the French one, with its religious skepticism and political radicalism. On the eve of the Civil War, James Henley Thornwell, a South Carolina Presbyterian, attacked abolitionists, who, he thought, favored a lamentably loose interpretation of the Bible because they discarded the parts they found objectionable. Mr. Grasso also tells the story of Ezra Stiles Ely, a Presbyterian minister who founded Marion College, on the western banks of the Mississippi in Missouri, a school that would prove, he hoped, faith’s compatibility with reason. The institution failed not so much because of skepticism’s success but because flood waters and the financial panic of 1837 sank the college.
These efforts and disputes, Mr. Grasso contends, were at the center the country’s search for a self-definition. Was America to be a society that owed its stability to faith or was it going to foster liberty in such a way that made freethinking the norm? By 1861 the need for a civil religion supplied the answer. Mr. Grasso lets Lincoln, by no means an orthodox believer, have the last word. Lincoln knew firsthand the appeal of freethinking but contended that unbelief should not “insult the feelings” of the majority’s faith. The appeal of such civil religion is one reason that American presidents in times of crisis—from Lincoln to Roosevelt and beyond—appeal more often to God than to reason.
Mr. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College and is the Novakovic Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.