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God's Continent Divided: Politics and Religion in Upper Canada and the Northern and Western United States, 1775 to 1841

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Christopher Adamson
Christopher Adamson
Affiliation:
Hofstra University
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Extract

Following the American Revolution, the social foundation supporting a settled ministry and sustaining the Old World tradition of an established state church began to crumble, prompting Alexis de Tocqueville to observe that in the United States, “the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely intermingled that it is almost impossible to conceive of the one without the other.” Large numbers of ordinary Americans who had internalized egalitarian, anti-aristocratic attitudes while advancing the patriot cause began to search for and find spiritual meaning in evangelical forms of religious expression. Indeed, the revivals sweeping the northern and western states between the American Revolution and the Civil War have been described as “the Revolution at work in religion.”

Type
Religion and Politics
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , July 1994 , pp. 417 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1994

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101 Quoted in Banks, John, “American Presbyterians in the Niagara Peninsula, 1800–40,” Ontario History, 57 (09 1965), 136.Google Scholar

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104 See, for example, Brode, Patrick. Sir John Beverley Robinson—Bone and Sinew of the Compact (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wise, S. F., “John Macaulay, Tory for All Seasons,” 185–202, in To Preserve and Defend: Essays on Kingston in the Nineteenth Century, Tulchinsky, Gerald, ed. (Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1976), esp. 198.Google Scholar

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107 Quoted in Fahey, , In His Name, 98.Google Scholar

108 Quoted in Ibid, 94.

109 Finke and Stark, “How the Upstart Sects,” passim.

110 Moir, , Enduring Witness, 88.Google Scholar

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114 Quoted in Robinson, , The Unitarians, 55Google Scholar. On Spear's moral career, see Masur, Louis P., Rites of Execution: Capita! Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 117–40.Google Scholar

115 John Strachan did not address the question of criminal punishment in any of his published writings.

116 Wilson, Thomas H., “An Historical Study of the Relationship of the Anglican Church of Canada to Kingston Penitentiary, 1835–1913” (Ph.D. thesis, Department of Religious Studies, University of Ottawa, 1978), 26.Google Scholar

117 Ibid, 48–49; 63–64.

118 Ibid, 140, 153, 180–81, 237. Talman, J. J., “Hanibal Mulkins,” D.C.B., vol. 10, 536.Google Scholar

119 Cf. Mathews, , “The Second Great Awakening,” 43.Google ScholarHigham, John, “Hanging Together: Divergent Unities in American History,” Journal of American History, 61 (06 1974), 15–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Smith, Timothy L., “Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800–1850,” Journal of American History, 53 (03 1967), 679–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

120 Quoted in French, , Parsons, 224.Google Scholar

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