These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

millennialism: its most ardent converts believed that they were on the verge of eliminating sin from the world, which would make possible the Second Coming of Christ, who was expected to arrive in as short a time as three months and to come, not to the holy lands, to Bethlehem or Jerusalem, but to the industrializing United States, to Cincinnati and Chicago, to Detroit and Utica. Its ministers preached the power of the people, offering a kind of spiritual Jacksonianism. “God has made man a moral free agent,” said the thundering, six-foot-three firebrand Charles Grandison Finney.5 And the revival was revolutionary: by emphasizing spiritual equality, it strengthened protests against slavery and against the political inequality of women. “It is not the color of the skin that makes the man or the woman,” wrote Stewart, “but the principle formed in the soul.”6 The democratization of American politics was hastened by revivalists like Stewart who believed in the salvation of the individual through good works and in the equality of all people in the eyes of God. Against that belief stood the stark and brutal realities of an industrializing age, the grinding of souls. I. THE UNITED STATES was born as a republic and grew into a democracy, and, as it did, it split in two, unable to reconcile its system of government with the institution of slavery. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, democracy came to be celebrated; the right of a majority to govern became dogmatic; and t...