Gods of the Mississippi

4 Looking for the New Jerusalem: Antebellum New Religious Movements and the Mississippi River

4 Looking for the New Jerusalem antebellum new religious movements and the mississippi river Thomas Ruys Smith You wouldn’t like to be concerned in the New Jerusalem, would you? . . . It stands on the Mississippi —Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, 1857 In 1830, in common with many of his contemporaries, Lyman Beecher was looking to the West. As he described in a letter to his daughter Catherine, what he saw in that direction was of the utmost importance: “The moral destiny of the nation, and all our institutions and hopes, and the world’s hopes, turn on the character of the West.” Beecher himself was about to transplant his family to Cincinnati in order “to spend the remnant of my days in that great conflict, and in consecrating all my children to God in that region who are willing to go.” The stakes were high, and Beecher was resolute about the potential significance of the struggle that waited for him there: “If we gain the West, all is safe; if we lose it, all is lost . . . this is not with me a transient flash of feeling, but a feeling as if the great battle is to be fought in the Valley of the Mississippi.”1 In many ways, Beecher was right: throughout the antebellum years the Mississippi valley was a spiritual battlefield. Given the role that the Mississippi River played in popular thought, this is perhaps unsurprising. On the one hand, it was commonplace to think and write about the Mississippi River in theological terms. As Alexis de Tocqueville marveled in 1835, “The valley watered by the Mississippi seems to have been created for it alone; it dispenses good and evil at will, and it is like the valley’s god.” “The Mississippi Valley,” Looking for the New Jerusalem | 75 he continued, “is all in all, the most magnificent dwelling that God has ever prepared for the habitation of man.”2 It was also commonplace to think of the river in biblical terms. In particular, the Mississippi was often asserted to be, in Zadok Cramer’s words in 1814, “this Nile of North America”—a description that brought with it a variety of associations.3 For all the typology, it was also common to think of the river frontier as a location in dire need of spiritual reformation. As missionary Timothy Flint admitted in the early nineteenth century, “This whole region . . . wears an aspect of irreligion.”4 The spiritual vacuum did not last for long: the western rivers were subject to a flood of preachers and circuit riders in the antebellum years. Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and an assortment of Protestant evangelists all made their presence felt in the area. In his autobiography, pioneering Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright wondered at “the insurmountable disadvantages and difficulties that the early pioneer Methodist preachers labored under in spreading the Gospel in these Western wilds in the great valley of the Mississippi.”5 As William Henry Milburn noted in 1860, the separate denominations generally coexisted in a “sort of pugnacious rivalry or ‘free fight’” that was characteristic of the frontier: “There is an active, rough, resolute courage, independence, and pluck about the western people, which inclines them to close scuffling and grappling . . . and their clergy are not free from the same peculiarities.”6 But their influence was profound. The frontier sermonizing of popular figures like Peter Cartwright, Lorenzo Dow, and Barton Stone helped to drive what David S. Reynolds has described as “a widespread shift of popular religious discourse from the doctrinal to the imaginative.” In their wake, “popular sermon style . . . came to be dominated by diverting narrative, extensive illustrations, and even colloquial humor.”7 As influential as these pioneering preachers undoubtedly were, they only tell part of the story of religion along the western rivers in the antebellum years. For alongside the evangelizing of the major denominations, the river frontier was also a very fertile environment for new religious movements. Despite their numerous doctrinal differences, they were united by a common trajectory—one that was entirely characteristic of the age and in keeping with the movement of the nation. They tended to ferment in the “Burned-Over District” of New York State, an area, in Whitney Cross’s words, “extraordinarily given to unusual religious beliefs, peculiarly devoted to crusades aimed at the perfection of mankind and the attainment of millennial happiness.”8 They then followed the line of emigration, traveling down the Ohio until reaching the Mississippi—and, sometimes, stepping across into the...