Kindle Notes & Highlights
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January 30 - February 6, 2018
1820s through the 1840s. These were the peak years of the market revolution that took the country from the fringe of the world economy to the brink of commercial greatness. They were also (not coincidentally) years of intense religious excitement and sectarian invention, the culmination of what historians have called the Second Great Awakening.
Indeed it was the joy of romantic union with Sarah that propelled Elijah into a life of missions and perfectionist reform. And it was her death that deranged his faith and prepared him for the Prophet Matthias. In its odd and touching way, the life of Elijah Pierson is a love story.
By standards that Elijah Pierson would later adopt, the immutable inequality of this tight-knit patriarchy was a perfect model of injustice. That women, slaves, and propertyless men should stand subordinate to the likes of Benjamin Pierson—or any other mortal—would one day look to Elijah like the negation of Christ’s Word. But for those raised within it, Morristown’s regime held out the example of mutual care and obligation: under the rule of fathers, widows stayed warm in winter, deaf people took the best seats in church, and men like Usual Crane kept their dignity. For generations of
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Middle-class missionaries—Ward Stafford and his female colleagues—took their places with an entirely different approach to the problem. As evangelicals they preached that poverty and disorder resulted neither from original sin nor God’s design but from failed families and bad moral choices. “The sufferings of the poor in this, and other cities,” Stafford insisted, “are the immediate effect of ignorance and vice.” Charity was useless among men who drank, avoided work, and brutalized their families. The poor did not need handouts. They needed preaching, moral instruction, and the spiritual
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Once inside, they worked effectively with their unfortunate sisters and “the children of poor and careless parents” who were the chief targets of reform. Working in pairs, the women left Bibles and tracts, prayed with the sick, made note of children who belonged in Sunday school, and coaxed destitute, frightened mothers and daughters out of their houses and into church. In the process, they provided poor people, the men of their own class, and (just as important) each other with demonstrations of the dignity, competence, and spiritual courage of an emerging evangelical womanhood.
His prospects ruined, Matthews moved what was left of his family (himself, his wife, their toddler daughter, Isabella, and three small sons) to even cheaper quarters. Like thousands of other American men, he had experienced the market revolution not as a liberating triumph but as a fitful, agonizing descent into wage labor. Never again would he regain his economic independence.
Matthews’s sympathies may have been instantly aroused by the sight of African Methodists at prayer. Along with the Quakers, the Methodists, and some smaller denominations, the Anti-Burghers had stood in the religious vanguard of American anti-slavery since the end of the eighteenth century. Although Matthews would never register any formal anti-slavery commitment, he would have learned as a boy to regard human bondage as a cruel blasphemy, a violation of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. He also would have learned to reject the cruder forms of racialist dogma. Anti-Burgher churches, including
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The state of things in 1832 was the result of eighteen hundred years of Christian misrule. At the center of Christian deviltry was a system of preaching and teaching that destroyed Truth. The Spirit of Truth, Matthias explained, was the spirit of male government. God wanted women to have none of it. In the proper order of things the governing spirit passed from father to son in a fixed system of spirit genealogy.
Parts of the Prophet’s food code, however, had nothing to do with even the most wildly imagined Judaism. The ban on puddings and pies and the insistence that meat be boiled and never roasted stemmed not from Matthias’s kinship with the ancient Hebrews but from his hatred of new-fangled, middle-class ways introduced by the market revolution.
The illiterate slave girl also heard people talk about Jesus, and assumed that He was like Lafayette, Washington, and other eminent men. She grew certain that one day she would meet Jesus.
the Matthias story hit the police blotter just as a new genre of daily newspapers, the so-called penny press, was making its debut,
Yet if the story of Matthias went largely ignored by later generations, the penny-press journalism it helped to inspire had an impact on American life and literature that, according to one aficionado, Edgar Allan Poe, was “probably beyond all calculation.”
Yet the larger anti-Finneyite revival of which the Kingdom was a part did not disappear so suddenly. In the hands of more inspired and capable organizers—above all the Mormons Joseph Smith and Brigham Young—revelations not entirely unlike those of Matthias survived public hostility to carve out an important place among America’s churches. Matthias’s actions may have been more outlandish than most, even mad; his failure to codify and publish his revelations, coupled with his vengeful assaults on the Finneyites, doomed whatever small chance he had of enlarging his flock. But his prophecies were
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To be sure, the social background to these movements has changed enormously over the past century and a half. Yet repeatedly, Americans caught in bewildering times have made sense of things primarily with reference to alterations in sexual and family norms, and a perceived widespread sexual disorder. Some Americans have appeared to welcome such disorder, as a sign that ancient hierarchies and discriminations are about to dissolve at last; others have seen it as threatening, even ungodly—the overthrow of all that is natural, a desecration of their parents’ world, the root of all other forms of
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