We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.

In the eighteenth century the heirs of the Puritans played a key role in the American Revolution. “Puritanism,” notes the religious historian Mark Noll, “is the only colonial religious system that modern historians take seriously as a major religious influence on the Revolution.” In the generations following the Revolution, Congregationalists and Presbyterians from New England carried their campaigns of evangelical Calvinism into the upper Midwest and other areas of the Puritan diaspora, and by the 1830s their voluntary organizations of evangelization and moral reform had combined budgets larger than that of the federal government. They brought with them their distinctive brand of “moralistically inflected republicanism.” “Wherever you go, you will be a polis”: the watchword of the ancient Greek city-states as they created new colonies could also apply to the Puritan polis, whose people brought with them their own matter-of-fact assumptions of moral rectitude and cultural superiority. A writer in the proslavery United States Democratic Review in 1855 paid rueful tribute to the Puritans in language that almost mirrored the motto of the ancient Greeks. Referring to what he called “the New-England hive” established by the Puritans, he wrote, “No class of people are so prone to emigration. … But wherever they go they are sure to combine together, and act in concert for the furtherance of their own peculiar opinions and interests.” Harriet Beecher Stowe said the same thing but more admiringly: “New England has been to these United States what the Dorian hive was to Greece. It has always been a capital country to emigrate from, and North, South, East, and West have been populated largely from New England, so that the seed-bed of New England was the seed-bed of this great American Republic, and of all that is likely to come of it.” Despite sometimes fierce resistance from Catholics and midwesterners, by the outset of the Civil War “the Puritanization of the United States” had become a fact of life throughout most of the North, and the war itself marked the beginning of its century-long march into the heart of the South.

[They placed] emphasis on human passivity, a passivity that hardly seems compatible with an ethical community. If humans are utterly passive in receiving God's grace, then outward behavior ("works") has nothing to do with salvation. But what is ethics if not outward behavior? And how can a political community function without ethics? There is a disturbing note of fatalism here. If I have been selected from eternity for heaven, and if my conversion comes to me via God's "free grace" without the least effort on my part, why should I worry excessively about how I act toward my neighbor? No doubt I should be as pleasant as possible, but there does not seem to be any categorical imperative to behave well if my behavior is not causally linked to the fate of my soul. Emery Battis, the author of the standard work on the antinomian controversy, notes the popularity of spiritism with the better-off elements of Boston society. He suggests that one reason for it was that many of the wealthy Boston merchants engaged in sharp practices—buying cheap and selling dear—at variance with well-understood community norms. Free grace seemed to give them a free ride.

Before the antinomian controversy broke out, the differences between the spiritists and the preparationists were expressed in the etiquette of Christian fellowship. They could even be papered over by saying that, yes, we are passive in receiving God’s grace, but we can have our hands extended to receive it. It was the spiritists in the Boston congregation who forced the crisis by accusing John Wilson, the minister of the Boston church, of preaching a graceless, pharisaical legalism, a doctrine of works rather than grace. Wilson barely escaped a censure vote, and Hutchinson and her followers were so contemptuous of him that they would leave the meeting whenever he rose to give a sermon. Not content to express these sentiments within their own church, Hutchinson’s followers journeyed to other towns and heckled the ministers during their sermons. Winthrop later termed the antinomian challenge “the sorest trial that ever befell us since we left our Native soil.” The virus of subjectivism was always lurking in Protestant doctrine, but Hutchinson’s followers came close to making it an epidemic by presuming to judge the state of the souls of those duly elected to the ministry of their communities. It is hard to dispute the contention of Thomas Shepard (who had once flirted with spiritism but later became the ministry’s chief enemy of the antinomians) that such an approach would “make every man a king” and result in “the destruction of civil government.” Edmund S. Morgan, a respected intellectual historian not given to hyperbole, calls antinomianism “seventeenth-century nihilism.”

In those days the “religious” and the “secular” were not sealed into watertight compartments. Public officials freely discoursed on religion—Jefferson even re-wrote the New Testament to suit his sense of what Jesus must have been like—and clergymen freely wove the events of politics and history into their sermons. The clergy at that time played a different role than they do today. Today, except in African American congregations, respectable churchgoers often get uncomfortable when sermons venture outside the religious box. It was not so in those days. The exhortations of the clergy were not always followed, but they were respected. In the eighteenth century there was still something left of what the seventeenth-century minister Samuel Stone said about the ministry in his own time, that it was “a speaking Aristocracy in the face of a Silent Democracy.” There was, to be sure, a two-way process going on; sometimes the clergy themselves were dragged along by lay sentiments. But in this dialogic relationship, the views of the clergy carried weight and authority. In some ways they were comparable to modern-day "scientific experts," whose pronouncements are cited, often selectively, by partisans on all sides of an issue.

In the internal struggles of nations there are winners and losers, but in most cases the losers do not simply melt away. They stay around in their own survival communities, keeping alive the memories of what they were and what they believed. In America the losers in the seventeenth-century antinomian struggles went a step further: they stayed around in the memories and consciences of those who defeated them. As we saw in the last chapter, the spiritists—Anne Hutchinson and others who took her approach to Puritan orthodoxy—were quickly defeated by the preparationists, whose members included Governor Winthrop. Yet the victors were never entirely at ease with their victory, for the questions raised by the spiritists could never be entirely quieted. How do we know that our religious and spiritual leaders are really godly men? How do we know we are saved? How do we know we are saved? Puritanism is often, and rightly, associated with great external changes in the world, but it is also a deeply subjective religion which emphasizes, to an almost unbearable degree, the need for self-examination. We are not, after all, saved by external works, but solely by faith. And how do we come by faith? Not by works, certainly. Then how? And how do we know when we have it?

The preparationists, victors in the contest, were activists, practical men who wanted to be up and doing, but as orthodox Puritans they could hardly ignore these vexing questions. Their solution was to shift the emphasis from the individual to the faithful community. We call ourselves saints because we have testified to our conversion experiences, but we may well be pharisees and hypocrites. Yet our community is holy, because we have bound ourselves together in covenant with God. Therefore, we may at least hope for individual salvation as long as we as a community remain faithful to the covenant.

Laissez-faire may encourage individual energy in pursuit of happiness, but collectively it is a doctrine of-passivity. It is, indeed, the economic counterpart of antinomianism: let every individual take care of himself and God will take care of us all.

This was the milieu from which the abolitionist movement emerged: a Puritan-derived evangelical reform movement. Almost without exception, the abolitionists began as born again Christians confronting slavery as they had all the other sins that needed to be eradicated before the millennium. But abolition was different from all the other imperatives in the reform agenda, and it affected them differently. It consumed them.

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They were religious, then, but many of the leading abolitionists had cut their moorings to biblical Christianity. They came from more or less orthodox backgrounds, but by the 1840s many had become so disaffected with organized religion in America that they discarded most of its theological foundations. In Boston, Garrison, who began as a Baptist and underwent a born again experience under Beecher, later questioned the authority of the Bible and drifted off into his own private religion of perfectionism and “non-resistance.” His associate James G. Birney, secretary of the AASS [American Anti-Slavery Society], who had often been criticized by Garrison for subordinating abolition to the claims of orthodoxy, eventually came around to Garrison's position. In his 1850 diary entries Birney expressed his doubts about eternal punishment and divine authorship of the Bible. Henry C. Wright, another Garrison protégé, was asked if he would believe slavery to be right if God declared it to be. “No,” he answered, “I would fasten the chain upon the heel of God, and let the man go free.” Still another of the Garrison group, Stephen Foster (not the songwriter) attended the New England Antislavery Convention of 1844 holding in one hand an iron collar and in the other a set of manacles. Waving the two before the audience, he shouted, “Behold here a specimen of the religion of this land, the handiwork of the American church and clergy.” Garrison's group in Boston was especially prominent in the movement toward secularization of America’s cultural elites: the group was cosmopolitan, contemptuous of popular taste and manners, and dismissive of most Christian theological doctrines. George Fitzhugh, the southern apologist for slavery, showed rare insight on the changes that had come over “the Puritans of the North,” as he called them, by describing them as a people “who began by persecuting people who would not conform to their faith, and are ending by having no faith at all—whose religious convictions were too strong in the beginning; and whose infidel convictions are now as obtrusive and intolerant as their former religious bigotry.” Yet the abolitionists were not simply secularists or “infidels,” for they behaved very much like men and women of profound faith, willing to work—and suffer—for their beliefs in ways Christians could envy. If they were skeptical of traditional religion, they were deeply committed to the secular religion of abolition.

John Brown: Puritan Martyr

In his biography of John Brown, David S. Reynolds notes that both the friends and enemies of Brown "considered him a deep-dyed Puritan," and "they were right": "He was a Calvinist who admired the works of Jonathan Edwards. He was proud of his family roots in New England Puritanism. He patterned himself after the Puritan warrior Cromwell, to whom he was often compared. He had an astounding sincerity of faith, so that his letters and speeches were more often than not lay sermons. He was willing to die for his utter belief in the word of the Bible, which he interpreted without mediator, like a true Puritan." Almost all of Brown's life was spent within the Puritan diaspora.

Born into a deeply religious family in Connecticut in 1800, he moved to Ohio as a young man, then to Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and upstate New York, meanwhile acquiring a large family (he would eventually father twenty children). He worked intermittently and unsuccessfully as a merchant, land surveyor, and farmer, but in 1847 he began his real career, as a militant abolitionist. Frederick Douglass met him that year and wrote afterward that Brown, "though a white gentleman, is in sympathy a black man." It was at that meeting that Brown outlined his plan to form a guerrilla army in the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia. Initially skeptical, after listening awhile Douglass conceded that the plan "had much to commend it" and left the meeting convinced, at any rate, that he had never before been "in the presence of a stronger religious influence."

Brown's abolitionist crusade turned violent shortly after he arrived in Kansas Territory in 1856 to join the antislavery forces in battle against proslavery "Border Ruffians." En route, after hearing that the ruffians had sacked the antislavery town of Lawrence and burned the Free State hotel, Brown vowed revenge. On the night of May twenty-fourth, Brown and seven others, including four of his sons, headed into an area near Pottawatomie Creek known to be populated by slavery sympathizers. They knocked on the door of James Doyle and ordered him and his sons, William, twenty-two, and Drury, twenty, outside. Two of Brown's sons fell on the three, using broadswords to hack to death the two sons. The father, severely wounded in the chest, was finished off by Brown with a pistol shot to the head. The party then visited two more cabins in the neighborhood, dragged out the men and killed them in similar fashion. In all, five unarmed men were shot or butchered by Brown and his party.

Brown returned to the East and sought money for the guerrilla army project he had earlier discussed with Douglass. On October 16, 1859, he launched its first—and last—offensive when he and twenty-one other men marched into the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to capture weapons. A black railway porter, Shephard Hayward, was shot and killed after confronting the raiders. Local militia companies surrounded the armory, cutting off Brown's escape routes, and in the ensuing gunfight three townspeople were killed, including the mayor. The fight ended after the Marines, under the command of Robert E. Lee, arrived and stormed the armory. Brown was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, found guilty, and hanged in Charles Town on December 2, 1859.

A contemporary photo of Brown, with his grim, cruel mouth and his glowering eyes, shows the face of a homicidal maniac. Yet Brown was lionized by the abolitionists and their literary allies, and at his death they gave him the crown of martyrdom. Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced him "a true idealist, with no by-ends of his own." For Henry David Thoreau he was "a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles." Wright insisted that Brown had been entirely justified "in resolving...to shoot down all who should oppose him in his God-appointed work." Phillips saw him as a rare political savior: "Out of the millions of refuse lumber God selects one in a generation, and he is enough to save a State." Garrison, who had been

piously insisting on nonviolence, was at first ambivalent about Brown (declaring him to be "well intended" but "misguided, wild, and apparently insane") but eventually brought himself to the Orwellian conclusion that Brown's violence was "a positive moral growth; it is one way to get up to the sublime platform of non-resistance."

After his execution he was widely celebrated in poetry by William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Walt Whitman, among others. The novelist Lydia Maria Child compared him to St. Stephen, Christianity's first martyr.

How could all these high-minded people have been attracted to Brown? Richard J. Ellis probably has it right when he suggests it was Brown's apparent sincerity that captured their imagination. It absolved him of guilt and gave him an air of "authenticity and inner truth." The very fact that his idea of raiding a federal arsenal and forming a guerrilla army had so little chance of success was an indication of its purity and of Brown's selflessness. Courage like that of Brown "charms us," said Emerson, "because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind."

"Sincerity is all in all," wrote Richard Sibbes and John Davenport in 1629, and it was this premise that underlay Anne Hutchinson's determination to expose ministers who (so she suspected) had not undergone a true conversion experience and thus were living according to worldly standards. Brown, whom abolitionist writers often identified with Puritanism, was among the purest of the Puritans because his ideas were unconnected to the world.

Nationally, the abolitionists enjoyed about the same popularity in the 1850s that the Communists enjoyed a century later. The South, however, was not aware of how truly unpopular it was in the North. The Liberator, Garrison's newspaper, had a minuscule circulation there, but excerpts from it were widely reprinted in the southern newspapers as examples of typical Yankee attitudes. This set off a furious overreaction in the South, which ultimately turned northern opinion against it. Thus the great irony that the abolitionists, who had largely failed to rally public opinion to their side in the North, provoked southern defenders of slavery into a polemical offensive that turned northern opinion decisively against them.

First, they tried to argue that slavery was not simply a fact of life but a positive good, good both for the masters and the slaves. This attempt to justify the master-slave relationship as the foundation of the good society directly conflicted with the individualist culture of the North. Second, and to make matters worse, they backed up their arguments with the threat of secession if all else failed. This was the most serious miscalculation, since even conservatives in the North regarded secession as anathema.

When the Southerners made good on their threats by withdrawing from the Union and cannonading a federal fort in one of their "sovereign" states, the war began. The North's stated aim in the war was solely to force the eleven seceding states to rejoin the Union. The sermons of many, perhaps most, ministers in the North stressed the duty of obedience to magistrates, not the sin of slavery. They blamed the coming of the war on the breakdown of authority and on "atheistic"—hence anarchistic—theories of government. For conservative evangelicals in the North, the Union was sacred, and many a "moderate" on the slavery issue became an anti-secession militant. But as the war escalated, grinding up young men at an average rate of 2,995 a week, something grander, more transcendent, was needed to justify the carnage.