Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865

Afterword

Afterword Religious migrations were more than colorful—they were an important part of American history. The wanderings of Protestants from the 1630s to the 1860s influenced the settlement of regions and the course of cultural development in both the thirteen colonies and the young United States. These internal migrations spanned three centuries and involved a fascinatingly large number of groups, but the striking thing was the continuities among the movements of Protestant pilgrims. Understanding such continuities takes us back to the core question raised in the introduction: what was it about Protestantism and America’s dissenting culture that made Protestants so restless? The preceding eight chapters suggest three main, and closely related, answers: migrants within the Protestant world were searching for salvation, Christian community, or reform—and sometimes for all three. “Sinners” and the “reborn” alike sought salvation, consumed by thoughts of the afterlife and how to achieve everlasting happiness. As the experiences of Devereux Jarratt and others demonstrate, this search made people exceedingly restless. The effort to become reborn was a terrifying experience in many ways. Failure to achieve a new birth meant spending eternity in hell. Ministers as renowned as Jonathan Edwards and as obscure as Peter Cartwright loved to terrify their audiences with warnings that Lucifer’s fires awaited those who did not turn to Jesus. Yet the fear of damnation could run still deeper. Calvinists believed that God preordained who was saved and who was not, and they worried incessantly about whether they had been chosen . Non-Calvinistic Evangelicals had their own set of worries. For them the challenge was how to achieve and maintain rebirth. “Backsliding” bedeviled Alfred Brunson and a host of others, producing endless anxiety and restlessness among these tormented souls. At the same time, nonevangelical groups sweated the question of how followers could achieve salvation. The Hutterites believed that finding salvation rested in building strong communities 245 Afterword devoted to the Lord. The Mormons came up with the most elaborate theory involving a three-tiered cosmos in which mortals had the chance to become gods. Regardless of the group or its beliefs—evangelical or nonevangelical, utopian or nonutopian—seeking salvation introduced a palpable tension into the lives of Protestants, resulting in a longing that had many pilgrims moving about within America for answers. The search for salvation produced something else: a deep need for Christian community among seekers. For James Finley, the Methodist itinerant in Ohio, the solitude of the forest no longer sufficed; Samuel McCobb and other Scotch-Irish Presbyterians on the frontier clustered together in strong church-based communities. Seekers craved Christian companionship because they needed the support of fellow believers in the quest to stay reborn or to practice their religion. Migration provided these individuals with an important means to a crucial end, enabling them to overcome their flaws and to lead lives of Christian rectitude. Migrating to develop community was important as well. Methodists from Virginia established communities in a place far removed from the corrupting influence of slavery. Moravian parents wanted to raise their children in a wholesome Christian community and moved to backcountry North Carolina and painstakingly established settlements organized around the meetinghouse and the farm. Inspirationists created a tight communal settlement with some distance from the world. The Mormons demanded to live in communities of believers, free from the persecution of hostile outsiders and moved constantly to reach this goal. The seekers’ desire for community transcended time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the desire to escape European conditions helped to spur religious migrations and the building of communities in the New World. The Puritans in particular felt the need to flee an England they perceived as hopelessly corrupt. By migrating to America, these religious reformers could erect purer communities of believers that would set an example for all to emulate—John Winthrop’s City upon the Hill. Except for the Inspirationists, the nineteenth-century migration/communal impulse constituted a reaction not to developments in Europe but to the rampant individualism of the early national period. Religious utopians were especially uneasy with the greed, materialism, and selfishness associated with a market economy. Groups ranging from the Mormons to the Oneida Perfectionists exploited many Americans ’ unhappiness with individualism, instead stressing community and the need to sacrifice for a higher cause—for God.1 The third and final answer was closely related to the first two. These 246 Afterword pilgrims also migrated in an effort...