Who were the evangelicals?: conservative and liberal identity in the Unitarian Controversy in Boston, 1804-1833.

The years between 1794 and 1832 saw thousands of women and men received into membership in churches across the United States, marking an end to a drought that had left much of the religious landscape desiccated during the Revolutionary years and after. Especially in the Northeast, then rapidly being drawn into a net of complex market relationships, those entering upon the responsibilities of adulthood but also many of other life stages, and members of an emerging entrepreneurial class but also those of other stations and callings, were caught up in intensified religious expression. They experienced conversions, joined organizations designed to promote a host of benevolent causes, and swelled church rolls. They were Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists, and together they comprised a movement that historians in retrospect have called the Second Great Awakening.

Who were the evangelicals whose religious renewal took on such enormous political and social repercussions? A rich vein of scholarship has helped us know them better. In some places, we know that those who entered upon church membership were largely female and members of an expanding commercial society where traditional patriarchal family ties were eroding. In other locations, we can characterize them as rising entrepreneurs, whose close connection with country trade meant that relationships of personal reliability and responsibility remained important. Converted too were many of their salaried and waged employees, who adopted the religion of what became the middle class.(1) In New England in particular, the evangelicals have been described by scholars in general terms as "stressed rural Yankees [mobilized] for a profound and inescapable transformation of personality and behavior," individuals trying to negotiate the disruptions that the growth of the market brought to localist, land-oriented rural life. As corporatism eroded, more and more people found emotional sustenance and a satisfying symbolic model of the world within the evangelical fold.(2)

As Curtis Johnson warns us in his study of evangelicalism in rural upstate New York, however, we generalize across circumstance and region about those roused by the Awakening at our peril.(3) Although evangelicalism in the first third of the nineteenth century certainly shared some common characteristics, there were also differences worth attending to that can help us to be clearer on the diverse nature of the activist coalition that eventually became American evangelical religion. To the extent that we view the problem mainly through the lens of gender or of socioeconomic circumstance or of life stage psychology, we risk oversimplifying what was certainly a complex phenomenon, configured differently in different times and places. Whatever the Awakening was, it had more than one contributing cause and more than one type of social dynamic embedded within it.

In urban eastern Massachusetts, one result of the revival of religious fervor was a dispute between conservative (or orthodox) and liberal Congregationalists that has become known to us as the Unitarian Controversy. Discussed thoroughly in the historiography of American religion as a theological and ecclesiastical dispute among two factions of the ancient religion of New England, the rift eventually resulted in denominational separation and religious disestablishment in Massachusetts.(4) Less explored, in a literature that has focused on the controversy mainly as an example of the rise of denominationalism or of rational religion in America, have been the identity and the character of the dissidents against the prevailing Congregational liberalism, people who stood in the vanguard of evangelical expansion that scholars have seen as the Second Great Awakening. They were involved in activities that characterized the Awakening everywhere: they emphasized conversion and church purity; they involved themselves in benevolent voluntary organizations; and they linked individual behavior and conversion with the fate of the nation as a whole.

In assuming that the meaning of the Unitarian Controversy lies mainly in internecine disagreements over theology and church polity, scholars have neglected the degree to which the emergence of orthodox Congregationalism in Massachusetts during this period represented the crystallization of a cultural as well as a theological moment. Knowing more about who exactly these urban Congregational evangelicals were can improve our understanding of the nature of evangelical religious sentiment during the Awakening in one particular location, as well as provide a sharper view of the cultural fault lines in Massachusetts that ruptured during the Unitarian controversy. More than simply a quarrel over the beneficence or sovereignty of God, over the relative weights of reason and revelation in an enlightened religious sensibility, the Unitarian controversy involved the clash of two divergent cultures that had, until that moment, managed to see themselves as the same through reliance on a common tradition, vocabulary, and form of church polity.

Scholars have traditionally dealt with the two groups by distinguishing them theologically. The conservatives (known at various times in the controversy as the orthodox, the evangelicals, or eventually simply as the Congregationalists) eventually assumed a common identity around what they took to be the traditional tenets of the faith of New England Calvinism: the omnipotence of God, the necessity for conversion from human depravity and corruption, the significance of membership in a body of "Saints" identified through testimony of conversion experiences, reliance on the literal truth of scripture as the basis for belief, and the necessity for maintenance of purity of doctrinal and congregational integrity in the face of the rise of religious and political heterodoxy outside the congregation's bounds. The liberals (who came to be known over time as Unitarians) had been heavily influenced by secular Enlightenment rationalism. They narrowed the distance between God and believer by endowing Him with benevolent human attributes. They also denied the doctrine of the Trinity as unscriptural, although they placed a heavier emphasis overall on the preaching of ethics than on doctrine. They maintained no particular criteria designed to insure that membership was limited to the elect, and they saw the Bible as a book given to humans by God to be interpreted by the light of reason. Its truths, while important guides to the lives of people, were not necessarily to be understood in a strictly literal way.

The conservatives were active proselytizers, supporting missionary societies, Bible societies, young men's associations, and a variety of other organizational efforts in order to convert others to their point of view. The liberals were not only not evangelical, they were for the most part anti-evangelical until well into the 1830s, preaching the right of people to believe as the light of reason informed them, as long as they remained within the general rubric of Christianity and guided in some general way by the wisdom of sacred scripture. To the extent that they were involved with any organizational efforts, either religious or philanthropic, these were mainly educational endeavors meant to insure the development of their own learning in a variety of areas (not only, not even especially, theological and religious), and philanthropies designed to insure that the well-off met their obligations to attend with compassion to the needs of the poor.(5) The conservatives, in other words, were aggressively expansionist, the liberals more intent on maintaining strong institutional and civic leadership among groups with whom they were already entrenched.

Institutionally, these differences in belief and style resulted in a schism that proceeded gradually but by 1833 was complete with the disestablishment of religion in Massachusetts. In the course of their dispute, carried on by pamphlet and in the newspapers at a time when print production and consumption were expanding rapidly, each group claimed itself to be the heir of the established religious tradition of New England and the other the deviate. In 1805, in the first move to indicate the depth of the developing rift between the clergy of the two persuasions, conservatives, led by Connecticut-born and Yale-educated Jedidiah Morse, objected to the appointment of Henry Ware, a liberal, to the Hollis Professorship of Divinity at Harvard College. Morse had been recommended to the cosmopolitan and highly educated ministry of the Boston area on the strength of his publications in the field of American geography, not on the basis of his relatively conservative theological views. A central figure in the split, Morse pulled together various conservative, Yale-educated clergy in the Boston area into a network of opposition to liberal opinion.(6) Morse's allies by and large lived in outlying areas and had few connections to the Boston elite. Beginning with the Ware controversy, Morse was able to mobilize the conservatives into rejecting fellowship with liberals. Conservative ministers began to refuse pulpit exchanges with their liberal brethren; new conservative churches such as Park Street (1809) were founded, and a new conservative theological seminary, Andover (1808), opposed the heretical tendencies of the liberals now being promulgated at Harvard. Harvard in the meantime saw the appointment of a liberal clergyman as president in the year following the Ware controversy, and became increasingly marked by a tendency to support only the liberal religious and cultural ethos. Donors by and large were rich businessmen. Despite the fact that no formal denominational split had taken place among liberals and conservatives, it became increasingly clear that an alliance had been forged among liberal religionists, Harvard College, and the elite business and mercantile interests of Boston.(7)

By 1815, the rudiments of separate organizational structures existed, with a coalition of conservatives centered around Morse, Andover, and Park Street Church developing a style and rhetoric distinct from that of the liberal establishment. Hostilities reached their zenith in 1815 with the publication of a tract by Morse entitled Review of American Unitarianism, which flatly accused the liberals of infidelity.(8) Until this point, liberals had not done much by way of responding to conservative attacks. But now, William Ellery Channing, born in Newport, Rhode Island, educated at Harvard, and pastor at Boston's fashionable Federal Street Church, published an answer that spoke for the liberals. To charges that liberal ministers were dissimulating and hypocritical in not acknowledging their doctrinal views on the Trinity, Channing replied that although Unitarians did not preach the doctrine of the Trinity, they were also "not conscious of having contracted, in the least degree, the guilt of insincerity. . . . We have only followed a general system, which we are persuaded to be best for our people and for the course of Christianity; the system of excluding controversy as much as possible from our pulpits."(9)

This would be a note that Unitarians would maintain throughout the controversy. Congregationalists would charge the liberals with doctrinal heresy, and liberals would respond by claiming the fomenting of doctrinal controversy to be an evil they would rather avoid. "[W]e esteem it a solemn duty," Channing continued,

to disarm instead of exciting the passions of our people. We wish to promote among them a spirit of universal charity. We wish to make them condemn their own bad practices, rather than the erroneous speculations of their neighbour. We love them too sincerely to imbue them with the spirit of controversy. . . . I will venture to assert, that there is not on earth a body of men who possess less of the spirit of proselytism, than the ministers of their town and vicinity.(10)

Congregationalists emphasized communities of believers whose beliefs and actions were informed by scriptural truth; Unitarians, on the other hand, emphasized getting along ethically with members of the community who might potentially hold differing beliefs.(11) Religion for the conservatives was based on uniformity of belief and was exclusive; Unitarianism was a pluralistic belief system premised on toleration, the maintenance of a social ethic of maximum inclusiveness, and self-culture.(12)

From the 1815 attack by Morse onward, the formal separation of these two groups proceeded apace. A legal ruling in 1820 known as the Dedham decision recognized the right of the majority in the parish (not just the church members) to church property, thus effectively disenfranchising conservatives in the Boston area, who were usually in the minority. There was increased impetus, therefore, for them to withdraw to form their own churches. In 1825, recognizing that the rift between factions would never heal, the liberals formed the American Unitarian Association, in effect admitting that a formerly unified religious establishment had divided into two irreconcilable groups. It was only a matter of time until Massachusetts, which had had the strongest religious establishment in the United States, became the last state to disestablish religion. Supported by the orthodox, Who claimed to be heirs of the original establishment but who had been largely dispossessed by the Courts (which, they claimed, were dominated by liberal religionists), Massachusetts disestablished religion in 1833. The break was complete.

In the 1810s and 1820s, then, theological rift hardened into two different party lines. Congregationalists on the one hand were rhetorically almost restorationist and primitivist in sympathy, despite a gradual modification of their stance in most cases to admit of the possibility of human agency in the accomplishment of individual conversion - in fact a rather striking departure from most Calvinist practice of the prior century. Advocating in their construction of themselves a return to the old ways as a means of combatting the declensions of the new, they were selective in the traditions and theology to which they chose to cling. Unitarians rode the crest of Enlightenment "progressive" thinking, emphasizing human power to think, to reason, and to solve problems, both ethical and social. Each to the mind of the other was responsible for the problems that plagued society - Unitarians, to the minds of Congregationalists, because they did not support the cause of true religion, which alone could bring about social order; Congregationalists, to Unitarians, because they were rigid and intolerant, refusing to allow the human mind latitude to reflect rationally on religious and social problems.

In order to capture better the contrast between the conservative and liberal religionist styles, it is useful to look at the philosophies and orientations of two of the more prominent leaders of each "faction" in the 1820s, after the movements had clearly crystallized, in order to see how the two groups distinguished themselves from one another. Lyman Beecher was born in New Haven and educated at Yale, a conservative religionist who came to Boston in 1826 after periodically visiting to conduct revivals in order to save the city from heresy.(13) "As to the importance of the stand in Boston," he wrote upon moving to take charge of the newly formed orthodox Hanover Street Church,

I have never stood in such a place before, and do not believe that there is, all things considered, such another, perhaps, on earth. It is here that New England is to be regenerated, the enemy driven out of the temple they have usurped and polluted, the college to be rescued, the public sentiment to be revolutionalized and restored to evangelical tone. And all this with reference to the resurrection of New England to an undivided and renovated effort for the extension of religion and moral influence throughout the land and through the world.(14)

He came to Boston to stand at the head of "a united and simultaneous effort to rescue from perversion the doctrines and institutions of our fathers."(15) William Ellery Channing, on the other hand, we have already seen as the earliest and most articulate spokesman for the Unitarian establishment.(16) When we juxtapose the views of Beecher and Channing on manners and morals in the 1820s, we can get a better sense of what each party thought was at stake in the dispute - at least as reflected in the rhetoric of its principal advocates.

Beecher saw Unitarianism as quite simply a perversion of true religion. It seemed to him to emphasize watered-down ethics over solid meat-and-potatoes theology, and in the theology that it did preach, it disseminated dangerous heresy on the nature of God and of man which invariably had an effect on human behavior. "All the great designs which God has to answer by planting our fathers here in this nation and world depend, as I believe, on the efforts of this generation to rescue their institutions from perversion, and restore them to their native purity and glory," Beecher announced in his 1823 sermon, "The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints."(17) Thus he sounded the keynote of the orthodox effort to rescue the region from its recent religious "decay." "The faith delivered to the saints produced a stricter morality than any contemporaneous system," Beecher asserted, and such was the premise of the evangelical reform of society. Sabbath violators, drunks, and blasphemers could drag down the moral tone of society because liberal religion had become so oblivious to the design of God that it did not know sin when it saw it. The fruits of declension from the faith of the fathers, to whom Beecher referred repeatedly in his work, were plain to see everywhere; it had been forgotten "that men by nature do not love God supremely, and their neighbors as themselves." The solution was to be a revival of the faith of the fathers, replete with exclusive admissions criteria, confessional conversion narratives, and "the exemplary practice of those duties, which so honorably distinguished the first settlers of New England."(18) A strict and literal observance of scriptural mandates would restore good order to the community and godliness to the churches.

Evangelicals like Beecher were bent on a strict discipline within the church, an adherence to well-defined standards and a restoration insofar as possible of a consensual, well-integrated, and ideologically homogeneous community - although within the bounds of the church now rather than in society at large. "The congregation is full and solemn, and seems to be amalgamated into a homogeneous mass of belief and solemnity by the power of truth," Beecher wrote approvingly to his son of the church where he was preaching in July 1826. Evangelicals sought, in short, to reassert the authority of what they regarded as traditional religious values as a way of restoring social order, but developed them within the context of a "pure" and voluntary religious society that would provide a foil to a corrupt secular order. The godly of the church would leaven the city as a whole through their strict adherence to theological and moral standards. "Our fathers could enforce morality by law," was how Beecher put it, "but the times are changed, and unless we can regulate public sentiment, and secure morality in some other way, WE ARE UNDONE." The Bible itself, as Beecher pronounced in an 1817 sermon, was "a Code of Laws."(19)

If the evangelical belief system grew out of a striving to maintain clear agreement on the nature of truth and morality in the face of inescapable challenges to it, Unitarianism, its opponents claimed, was structured in a way precisely to undermine these goals. "The Orthodox regard the church as a body in covenant, and to consist of those, and those only, who believe the essential doctrines of the Gospel, and appear to have felt their efficacy upon their hearts," the orthodox periodical Spirit of the Pilgrims explained. "But by Unitarians, the church is regarded as a very different thing. The popular doctrine with them is, that the whole congregation is the church."(20) There was no distinction made between the regenerate and the unregenerate - and by implication, no recognition of what godliness entailed. Though the evangelicals published this view of the Unitarian church polity as accusation, it is not a view with which the Unitarians themselves would have likely disagreed. Their emphasis was, as their theology itself suggested, on unity and inclusivity in religion. Unitarians were perfectly willing to accept a wide latitude of theological differences under the umbrella of Christianity, so long as there was some agreement on the nature of morality and ethics sanctioned by a basic belief in the Christian story. Unitarians responded to the charges levelled against them with defensiveness at best, venom at worst. Like upstart politicians intent on mobilizing a gullible citizenry, the Unitarian leadership believed that these evangelicals were developing "a kind of irregular government."(21) Through their pressure tactics, their attempts to squelch dissent through moral suasion and through statute, and their appeals to the unchristian and intolerant sentiments of the multitudes, theirs were dangerous efforts to subvert the rights of conscience and establish a religious dictatorship.

Channing, as the most prominent of Boston's Unitarian clergyman of his time, laid out the central tenets of Unitarian Christianity at his famous 1819 sermon at the ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks in Baltimore. In another sermon, Channing would express the reluctance of the Unitarians to accept the evangelical model of Christian orthodoxy in this way:

I have no anxiety to wear the livery of any party. I indeed take cheerfully the name of a Unitarian, because unwearied efforts are used to raise against it a popular cry. . . . Were the name more honored, I should be glad to throw it off; for I fear the shackles which a party connexion imposes. I wish to regard myself as belonging not to a sect, but to the community of free minds, of lovers of truth, of followers of Christ, both on earth and in heaven.(22)

In his 1819 manifesto, Channing excoriated sectarian disputes rooted in a narrow literalism of doctrine and scriptural interpretation. He recommended instead a higher view of theology that would allow the individual a larger degree of latitude in interpretation - the rationalism in religion which had become the hallmark of Unitarianism. The individual had the duty to investigate religious truth according to the light of his own reason, he claimed. He hoped under the mild sway of rational religion to see a "glorious reformation in the church": "Our earnest prayer to God is, that he will overturn, and overturn, and overturn the strong-holds of spiritual usurpation, until HE shall come, whose light it is to rule the minds of men." "We must respect alike our own and others' minds," Channing preached in his 1830 Election Sermon, "Spiritual Freedom." "We must not demand a uniformity in religion which exists nowhere else, but expect, and be willing, that the religious principle, like other principles of our nature, should manifest itself in different methods and degrees."(23) Or again, in Remarks on Associations" (1829):

No man should part with his individuality to become another. No process is so fatal as that which would cast all men into one mould. Every human being is intended to have a character of his own, to be what no other is, to do what no other can do. Our common nature is to be unfolded in unbounded diversities. It is rich enough for infinite manifestations.(24)

The gap in the views of the leadership then is clear enough, with conservatives threatened by Unitarian heterodoxy and eager to restore their own version of "orthodox" religion. But the public rhetoric of the controversy leaves us with no sense of how people who were not articulate (in the sense of leaving well-developed apologias, a category which includes most people), or those who did not hold leadership positions, may have experienced the dispute. In order to investigate these questions, we need to know something more about the social and cultural climates in which the beliefs and values that came to characterize evangelical Congregationalism and Unitarianism respectively took root and grew. In the case of this particular dispute, that task means understanding some of the dynamic social developments taking place in Boston and its environs during this period.

Anyone who lived in the vicinity of Boston during the period from about 1800 to 1840 could recognize that something momentous was underway there, although the nature and scope of the changes only became describable in significant ways long after the changes that took place there were accomplished. During that period, Boston and its vicinity experienced rapid urban, industrial, and commercial change unrivalled in its earlier history. The city of Boston itself had developed from a provincial town of 15,000 in 1790, hardly a city by modern standards, to a metropolis of interconnected cities, suburbs, towns, and villages with a population of half a million by 1840. A network of turnpikes and railroads meant that even those places in New England that were once remote were becoming intimately linked with the market economy of the burgeoning urban center and the sources of information that issued from it. An explosion in the number of newspapers and periodicals occurred, bringing with it yet another means for drawing together isolated areas into a commercial and informational network with Boston as its nexus.(25) Boston's commercial economy grew in scope and complexity. Even work rhythms and patterns changed, as employees began to lose the intimate (though not always pleasant) interpersonal relationships with employers, and as apprentices and journeymen became instead the workers of a new order - waged or salaried employees with fixed responsibilities.(26)

Although the long term trends themselves were not always readily apparent to the individuals living through them, their effects impinged on the lives of everyone in one way or another. The increased segmentation of communities into a variety of interest groups - class, occupational, religious, and ethnic - led to a rise in conflict, evidenced by acrimonious party politics as different groups entered into open and bitter controversy over the direction society ought to take. In addition, groups of different origins, backgrounds, and class standing began to be segregated from each other residentially, leaving citizens increasingly with more impersonal impressions of those different from themselves.(27) The tendency to characterize people by group affiliation became more pronounced as opportunities for interpersonal contact across lines of difference became reduced to fleeting instrumental interactions.

These are the general social conditions that characterized Boston in the period of religious controversy. How can we tie the beliefs and values that characterized the two rival religious groups with particular kinds of social and economic experiences in this rapidly urbanizing milieu? We have a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence that begins to suggest some of the social dimensions of the split. The orthodox maintained from the very beginning that the Unitarians represented the rich, the privileged, the officer holders, the social prominent - and the complacent.(28) Even the Unitarians acknowledged as much. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, himself a Unitarian minister and the son of a Unitarian minister who served during the controversy, allowed that Unitarian ministers were

scholars and gentlemen; dignified, gracious, genuine, sweet; fond of elegant studies, of good English, of courteous ways, of poetic expression; of the amenities of life. They were conservative of existing institutions in so far as they allowed the free movement of cultivated mind, and desired no change except in the direction of mental emancipation. . . . [T]hey were contented with things as they were and disliked innovation.(29)

Their parishioners Frothingham described as "industrious, honest, faithful in all relations of life, charitable, public-spirited, intelligent, sagacious, mingling the prudence of the man of affairs with the faith of the Christian." They were not, however, "reformers, or ascetics, or devotees."(30) Of his grandfather, Peter Chardon Brooks - the richest man of his time in Boston and a Unitarian Frothingham wrote,

He joined the church, and was a consistent church member. . . . His was the calm, rational, sober belief of the thoughtful, educated, honorable men of his day. . . . Speculative theology he cared little or nothing about. He was no disputant, no doubter, no casuist; of the heights of mysticism of the depths of fidelity, he knew nothing. . . . [H]e said little about any thing connected with religion. His allusions to that subject were few. His concerns were with this world. . . . If others had convictions, he was glad of it, but such thoughts as he had he preferred to keep to himself.(31)

Beecher himself saw Unitarians as men of "stratagem and duplicity," who relied "upon wealth and the favor of the great" to advance their cause.(32)

We know far less anecdotally about the conservatives, beyond the fact that to their opponents they were bigots. Beecher spoke of his "labors among the middle class and the poor," and to judge by orthodox rhetoric about Unitarian wealth, it is a safe assumption that on the whole, the conservatives were less well-off socially and economically than the liberals.(33) Beecher also said of his congregation at Hanover Street, "There was a flock of young people of the middle classes."(34) From the wealth of organizations for young men supported by Beecher in particular and the orthodox in general, we might surmise that the orthodox rank-and-file may have been on the average younger as well.

Research by scholars both confirms and fills out our picture of the Unitarians. Conrad Wright, for example, in a 1985 study of ministers, churches, and the Boston elite, finds that "men of affairs" who participated most often in civic and benevolent societies were Unitarian.(35) Jane and William Pease, in an extensive study of occupation and church affiliation, found that the single most important factor associated with Unitarianism was wealth, the most frequently associated occupation that of merchant.(36) Richard Eddy Sykes, in a study of liberal religionists in Massachusetts as a whole in 1800, found them associated with people in the highest quartile of wealth, and disproportionately "engaged in trade, transport, and the professions," with Unitarian parishes through 1870 having "22 times the number of lawyers, 20 times the number of bankers, about twice as many merchants, and approximately 28 times the number of manufacturers which we could have expected if their membership had reflected the total working population."(37)

The elite involved in Unitarianism, then, were the people responsible for the developing structures and networks of mercantile and industrial capitalism, including foreign trade, banking, insurance, and real estate. They dominated civic and governmental institutions.(38) They were well-connected, well-educated, with many apparently rather lukewarm on the whole in their religious adherence, as the Congregationalists in fact charged. "[O]ur community is encumbered with rather an unusual proportion of . . . irregular adherents," Henry Ware, Jr., admitted in 1835. There was a segment in Unitarian congregations, he wrote,

who have attached themselves to us simply because we are not Orthodox; men who dislike Calvinism, but like nothing else; who think religion a good thing, that ought to be supported. . . . They will not forsake [religion], because to do so would put them out of good society; indeed, they are not without a vague traditional respect for it. They maintain a pew in church for the same reason that the worldly-minded merchant asks his minister to say grace when he has company to dine. It is decent, and is expected of him.(39)

This description is as close to one of a secular outlook among the respectable as we are likely to encounter in this commercializing and urbanizing milieu. "Almost every Unitarian clergyman," Frothingham adds to this picture, "had some pursuit outside of his profession."(40) Moreover, Unitarians appear to have been exclusive and insular in character despite their religious rhetoric of inclusiveness and toleration, limiting themselves to members of the appropriate social class. When the poor became a visible presence in Boston, the Unitarians built separate"chapels" for them, and instituted a paternalistic "ministry-to-the-poor" that attempted to maintain the ties of social obligation without integrating the poor into congregational life on anything like an equal basis. Not surprisingly, Unitarianism almost completely lacked adherents who were servants, laborers, or - at a later period of time - factory operatives.(41)

With Congregationalists, identifying the social correlates of orthodoxy requires a good bit more detective work. We know these things: 1) Between 1790 and 1810 - that is, before the split became substantial and institutionalized the combined Congregationalist/Unitarian group was highest in both socioeconomic status and in taxable income of any of the religious groups in Boston.(42) 2) After the split, Unitarians outnumbered Congregationalists among those with economic power chiefly as corporate directors, those with property assessed in the highest categories, those with moderate to high social status, and those with political power as public officials, at a ratio of about two to one.(43) 3) Conversion narratives required for entry into Boston's first separate orthodox church, Park Street, for most of the 181 Os show a large proportion of aspiring members to have migrated from the New England countryside to Boston, and many of them to have been young. A number of the conversion narratives late in the 1820s from Salem Street Church, a newly formed orthodox congregation, suggest roughly the same demographic profile. Often prospective members mention relatives or others they know who are already members of orthodox churches in the city, and with whom they may be living.(44)

We know that the conservatives were for the most part less well-off than their liberal counterparts, many probably younger, and more likely to have come from somewhere in the New England countryside outside Boston. We can piece together more relevant information from recent historiography that has little directly to do with religion, but which tells us a great deal about migratory patterns in this particular time and region. Through the 1830s, we know that most of Boston's swelling population were native-born in-migrants. (The foreign-born would not enter in large numbers until the late 1830s and 1840s.)(45) Most were young men "from an area extending from the coast of Maine across New Hampshire and Vermont, then contracting to the south to include Massachusetts east of the Connecticut River, a sliver of northern Rhode Island, and the peninsula of Cape Cod." These were precisely the areas in which more traditional versions of Congregationalism flourished, in contrast to liberal Congregationalism, which had established itself almost exclusively in the vicinity of Boston and in the eastern coastal areas near it. Most of the migrants came from small towns - actually, from farms located in small towns and were less well-off than the average person their age upon leaving home. Their mean age upon leaving home was eighteen; half of the single in-migrants arrived in their early twenties. Most were literate, Protestant, and already knew someone in Boston.(46) Many stated that they had had some experience of orthodox Congregationalism, even revivalism, in the hometowns from which they had come.

A rise in the number of propertyless households in both eastern and western Massachusetts, we know, led to massive migration to cities - particularly to Boston.(47) These migrants typically had been involved in local economies of trade, but not often in the abstract and long-distance economies that dominated the world of the Boston Unitarians. Many may have had some background in mechanical or artisinal crafts or as small shopkeepers, perhaps as sons of individuals engaged in those pursuits, before leaving for wider fields of opportunity.(48) During the 1820s and 1830s in western Massachusetts, they almost certainly would have had some prior exposure to revivalistic activity and evangelical publications, as missionary efforts geared themselves toward making sure that members of outlying settlements enjoyed the fruits of religion.(49) These, then, were people broken out of the traditional localist ties that maintained power and social order through their choice - whether more or less voluntary - to migrate to Boston in search of economic opportunity.

Beecher's Hanover Street Examining Committee records were lost in a fire that consumed his church as Unitarian firemen cheered in 1830. But many of his congregation migrated to the new Salem Street Church. Salem Street records, both Examining Committee and Pew Rental, remain extant, and analysis of them can help substantiate our picture of the orthodox evangelicals.(50) The data on the Salem Street congregation are drawn from its list of members received and removed (sampling period 1827 to 1831); from its records of pew rents for the years 1830 and 1831; and from its Examining Committee Records (1827-1831). We have knowledge, therefore, not only of church members, but of individuals with strong enough affiliations to the church to have paid pew rents even if they never were examined for formal membership. We also have data similar to those provided by Salem Street Church on a Unitarian church from the same period in Boston's North End. The Second Church during the period the records cover was pastored by Henry Ware, Jr., prior to his departure to Harvard to assume a professorship there. He was followed in his duties as pastor by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who served until his resignation in 1831. The extant records from Second Church cover admissions to church membership, payment of pew rents, baptisms, and marriages among this congregation. The records surveyed cover the period from 1822 to 1831 and provide a basis for comparison with the composition of the Boston's Salem Street Church. It would be problematic to assume that Second Church's congregation was representative of that of every Unitarian Church in the region. But knowing a fair amount about this particular congregation can suggest something about the composition of Unitarianism. Moreover, a comparison of two churches located in the same geographical area at about the same time can suggest a good bit about how people at a grass roots level in at least one neighborhood may have experienced the difference between Congregationalism and Unitarianism in social terms.

Comparative data for the two congregations are presented in Table 1.(51) What the records suggest is that both Salem Street and Second Churches were comprised mainly of people with respectable sorts of employment and some property. Table 2 lists the occupations of the men whose names appear in the records and who also appear in the Boston City Directories for the years 1829, 1830, 1831, and 1832. The same percentage of men for both congregations appear in the directory, and nearly the same percentage appear with their occupations listed. Both contrast with what we know of Boston's Bennett Street Methodist Episcopal Church (Table 3), a congregation which we might surmise to be constituted of individuals whose work and wealth would place them in the lower classes. The data yielded up from matching the latter congregation's membership records for the period 1830-1832 with the 1829 Boston City Directory suggest that both Salem Street and Second Church consisted of congregations with more economic and social stature than some others. That is to say, these two offshoots of old-time New England Congregationalism apparently did not represent a cross-section of the population of the area. Although we need to be cautious in reading Bennett Street's records as well - for one thing, the membership lists postdate the City Directory used to match the congregants, so Bennett Street individuals may be underreported - not nearly as high a proportion of the male Methodists were listed in the City Directory as was true for the Congregationalists or the Unitarians. Table 3 shows that fewer than half of the male individuals associated with the Methodists were listed, as compared with over three-fourths of the Congregationalist- and Unitarian-associated individuals. The Methodists appear to have been either more mobile or less propertied than their Congregational or Unitarian counterparts - perhaps both. Although a similar percentage of women are listed in the Directory for all three congregations, a much higher percentage of the female Bennett Street congregants appear with occupations listed than those for either Salem Street or Second Church, perhaps indicating a greater necessity on their parts to work for a living as single, widowed, separated, or abandoned women.

[TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 1 OMITTED]

Table 2

Occupations Represented in the Boston City Directories for 1829-32,
for Male Individuals Associated with Salem Street and Second
Churches

                              Salem Street (%)   Second Church (%)

Total Men                       221               251
In City Directories             171 (77.38)       195 (77.69)
Occupation Listed               164 (74.21)       181 (72.11)

Mechanics and                    71 (43.29)        40 (22.10)
Manufacturers
Importers and Merchants          17 (10.37)        34 (18.78)
Banking, Insurance, Finance      13 (7.93)         36 (19.88)
and Commercial Regulation
Shopkeepers                      45 (27.44)        28 (15.47)
Dry Goods                         9 (20.00)         8 (28.57)
Specialties                      18 (40.00)        11 (39.29)
Faneuil Hall Market               5 (11.11)         4 (14.29)
Grocers                          13 (28.89)         5 (17.86)
Educated Professions/            13 (7.93)          5 (2.76)
Agents
Laborers, Transport Workers      13 (7.93)          5 (2.77)
Miscellaneous                     3 (1.83)          5 (2.76)

No Occupation Listed/             7 (4.09)         14 (7.18)
Substantial Taxable Prop.

The records suggest, therefore, that both the Congregationalists and the Unitarians represented populations with a stronger stake in the standing order than some other populations we might examine - even some other religious populations. Yet they were not exactly the same in socioeconomic character. The membership profiles reinforce the anecdotal evidence we have regarding Unitarianism: that its adherents tended to be better off financially on the whole than the members of other denominations. Second Church contained almost twice as many merchants and importers (by percentage of the church affiliates as a whole) as Salem Street; more than twice as many of its male affiliates were associated in some way with the growing banking, insurance, or financial industries of the city (Table 2). Salem Street, on the other hand, counted twice as many mechanics and small manufacturers (artisans) among its numbers as a percentage of the whole as did Second Church. Moreover, shopkeepers represented more than a quarter of all male Salem Street affiliates who could be identified by occupation, while numbering something more than an eighth of Second Church's adherents. The evidence suggests, therefore, that Congregational evangelicalism indeed constituted "a shopkeepers' millennium," here as in Paul Johnson's Rochester, New York, with mechanics and artisans amply represented.(52)

The data on women reinforce the impression that Salem Street's congregants were somewhat less well off than their Unitarian counterparts. A higher percentage of Second Church's female affiliates were listed in the City Directories, but many fewer of them were associated with occupations. The Second Church women who surfaced in the Directory were by and large widows, with no stated source of financial support (Table 4). It is tempting to see them as perhaps on the average older than their Salem Street counterparts, and well-fixed enough not to need to advertise an occupation in the City Directory. Salem Street conversion narratives, in addition, identify many of the female adherents as younger women, many of whom had recently come to the city.

Table 3

Occupations Represented in 1829 Boston City Directory for
Individuals Associated with the Bennett Street Methodist Episcopal
Church

                                          Men             Women

Individuals Mentioned
in Records                              102 (26.63)    281 (73.37)
In City Directory                        48 (47.06)     39 (13.88)
Occupation Listed:                       44 (91.67)     17 (43.59)
Mechanics and
Manufacturers                            23 (52.28)
(*)Importers & Merchants                  1 (2.27)
Banking, Insurance,
Finance & Commercial
Regulation                                0
Shopkeepers                               4 (9.09)
Dry Goods                                 1
Specialties                               0
Faneuil Hall Market                       3
Grocers                                   0
Educated Professions, Agents              2 (4.55)
Laborers, Transport Workers              13 (29.55)
Baker                                                    1
Boarding House                                           2
English Goods                                            1
Mantuamaker                                              2
Milliner                                                 1
Nurse                                                    5
School                                                   2
Sempstress                                               1
Tailoress                                                1
Variety Shop                                             1

No. Occupation Listed/
Substantial Taxable Prop.                 0

* Listed as "Trader" in the City Directory.

Source: Boston, Massachusetts, Bennett Street Methodist Episcopal
Church, Mss. Records, 2 vols., Membership, 1831-1848, Boston
University School of Theology Library.

Moreover, of those from each congregation who appear in the 1829 tax list for Boston (more than twice as many of the male affiliates for Second Church as for Salem Street), Second Church adherents manifested more taxable property on average that their Salem Street counterparts, both as individuals and as members of partnerships (Table 5). Second Church individual taxable property represented on average about twice that of Salem Street. Although average partnership taxable income was nearly comparable for affiliates of both churches, more than three times the number of Second Church adherents (as a percentage of the total) than of Salem Street's were involved in partnerships possessing taxable property.

Table 4

Occupations Represented in City Directory, 1829-32, for Female
Individuals Associated with Salem Street and Second Churches

                                    Salem Street     Second Church

Boarding House                            5                1
Dressmaker                                2                1
Fancy Goods                               0                1
Instructress                              0                1
Mantuamaker                               1                0
Milliner                                  1                0
Nurse                                     3                0
Primary School                            0                1
Semptress                                 1                0
Stockmaker                                1                0
Straw Bonnet Maker                        0                1
Tailoress                                 1                0
Widow                                    18               17
Address Only                              6                2

Unitarianism surely was the religion of a more privileged social class, and Congregationalism that of an also propertied but somewhat less well-off class, many of whom had recently migrated to the city. Although the latter were marginalized enough from the ways of the urban elite to distrust their leadership and resist deference to them, they were not so disadvantaged that they were unable to organize, both politically and socially. The higher income levels for (some) Unitarians suggest also a fundamentally different social experience - and not just in terms of consumption and socioeconomic power. Second Church's adherents were far more heavily represented proportionally as members of professions where abstract and rule-bound economic transactions, often national or international in character, were common. They were more highly educated, and they were also more involved in partnerships that required cooperation and the pooling of resources in order to deal with others who might not be likeminded. Evangelicals, on the other hand, seem for the most part to have been equally enmeshed in the market, but far less likely in the course of day-to-day affairs to have to deal directly with worlds outside the local arena. If, in fact, many of them were migrants to Boston from rural areas of New England, their prior experience in their formative years also would suggest less cosmopolitan contact. In short, Unitarians - both by background and by profession - were far more likely to have had cosmopolitan types of experiences, and abstract and rule-bound understandings of experience, than their Congregational counterparts.

Table 5

Individuals Listed in 1829 Tax List for Boston

                             Salem Street         Second Church

Individuals                16 (7.24% of Men)    41 (16.33% of Men)
Avg. real                      $ 3,575.00           $ 7,334.15
Avg. Pers                      $ 2,118.75           $ 2,965.85

Avg. Total                     $ 5,693.75           $10,300.00

Partnerships                5 (2.26% of Men)    25 (9.96% of Men)
Avg. Real                      $ 4,320.00           $ 2,092.00
Avg. Pers                      $ 5,700.00           $10,440.00

Avg. Total                     $10,020.00           $12,532.00

The Congregationalists, for their part, were far more likely to be members of a socioeconomic stratum where the ethos of what some historians have called a "small producer tradition" may still have been at work. Such a tradition valued overall social equality, the acquisition of a skill, the practice of a trade, and local knowledge where intimate ties of custom and clientage held people together. Human relations were based on a community knowledge and an ethos in which the individual good was subordinated to that of the collective well-being of the whole, but individual responsibility was expected. Evangelical religion appealed to people with such a tradition and such experiences who craved collective commitment within a new urban, pluralistic environment where older forms of corporate integration had become so attenuated as to be almost unrecognizable.(53)

If the Congregational evangelical belief system in part grew out of the accommodation of a rural religious system to a new market-driven economic and social order as it existed in an urban environment, Unitarianism equally represented a symbolic version of this new social order, but one more attuned to a moral and social economy of liberalism than its counterpart.(54) For the Unitarians, there was less to be disturbed about in the new economically driven types of social relationships; there was more confidence that the values that they held dear could be preserved within their framework. Unitarianism dominated the sector of Massachusetts which had over a period of fifty years been gradually but inexorably drawn into the market nexus dominated by Boston. The Unitarian clergy, many of whom were the sons of the professional classes of this cosmopolitan elite, could feel comfortable in welcoming a latitude in religious opinion - both because within Unitarianism such theological diversity tended to be confined to the ranks of an elite already united by social and economic interests, and because Unitarian social and economic power insured that they benefited from lingering corporatist assumptions of paternalistic deference so long as there was no strong, organized, denominational opposition. Unitarians were perfectly willing to give a wide berth to doctrinal interpretation so long as there was some agreement on the nature of morals and ethics - that is to say, on the rules governing exchange, power relationships, and society in general in this expanding commercial world - and so long as those rules were their own. They were able and willing to tolerate a certain heterodoxy of feeling in the interests of achieving a broad consensus on rules of social interaction, so long as that consensus reflected their interests, as it did in Boston at least, throughout the period under consideration. The orthodox, in contrast, continued to see social interaction in terms of personal accountability and reliability that could only be guaranteed by a clear and common set of beliefs for which individuals had personal accountability. These stood as guarantors for a common set of values and were set in juxtaposition to a socioeconomic class whom they saw as lax, corrupt, and responsible for the decay of traditional communal values.

These two religious camps in Boston in the 1820s and 30s, then, represented two symbolic representations of order, both natural and supernatural. Each was differently positioned - socially, economically, and experientially - to deal with the increasingly irrepressible pluralism of a culture where social identity was becoming less and less associated with communities of geography, and more with communities of choice hinging on ideology, interest or perceived interest. The challenge which faced both Unitarians and the evangelical orthodox, as the two religious groups that represented the interests and traditions of the propertied classes, was how to bring about the "principled consensus" in the community that legitimized values and beliefs as appropriate bases for society. One did so in a way that embodied values of pluralism and toleration - easy values to espouse, so long as their wealth and position made them the hegemonic group. The other turned to the notion of sanctified communities of individuals who willed their own conversions and who could equally as well will the redemption of a corrupt secular order. The first group triumphed in the short run in Boston. The second articulated a view of social reality that, resonating with that of others in a variety of different geographic and social settings, led to an extraordinary wave of coalition building. It was finally they who came to set the terms of cultural and political debate in much of the Northeast right up until the Civil War.

Department of History Oxford, OH 45056

ENDNOTES

The author would like to thank Peter Williams and Andrew Cayton for suggestions and comments, as well as the participants in the American Studies seminar at the University of Bogazici, Istanbul, at which an earlier version of this paper was delivered. The University Professors Program of Boston University helped to fund the research for this essay, and the author thanks them as well.

1. Neither of these descriptions, of course, is mutually exclusive. See Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida Country, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, 1981); and Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York, 1978).

2. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991), 214. See also Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, 1990), 116, 209; John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (Cambridge, 1989), 239; Randolph A. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791-1850 (Cambridge, 1987), 92-98; and Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, 1994), 30-56.

3. Curtis D. Johnson, Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Upstate New York, 1790-1860 (Ithaca, 1989), 171-174.

4. The literature on the Congregationalist-Unitarian split, also known as the Unitarian controversy, is vast, in part because the parties who were involved were particularly literate and publishing groups who left a vast written record of their disputes. Some of it deals with the controversy itself, and some with the histories of Congregationalism and Unitarianism as distinct denominations. The most important secondary sources dealing with their parting of the ways include George Ellis, Half-Century of the Unitarian Controversy (Boston, 1857); Earl Morris Wilbur, History of Unitarianism, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1945, 1952); Conrad Wright, The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History (Boston, 1970), The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston, 1955), and, as editor, A Stream of Light: A Sesquicentennial History of American Unitarianism (Boston, 1975); Sydney E. Ahlstrom and Jonathan S. Carey, eds., An American Reformation: A Documentary History of Unitarian Christianity (Middletown CT, 1985); Conrad Wright, The Unitarian Controversy: Essays on American Unitarian History (Boston, 1994); Conrad Edick Wright, ed., American Unitarianism, 1805-1865 (Boston, 1989); Jacob C. Meyer, Church and State in Massachusetts from 1740 to 1833: A Chapter in the History of the Development of Individual Freedom (Cleveland, 1930); Joseph W. Phillips, Jedidiah Morse and New England Congregationalism (New Brunswick NJ, 1983). For brief treatments of Congregationalism and Unitarianism respectively during this period, see Mary K. Cayton, "Congregationalism from Independence to the Present," and Peter W. Williams, "Unitarianism and Universalism," both in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, I (New York, 1988), I, 481-498 and 579-594.

5. Many of the evangelical social reform movements of the period prior to the Civil War were spearheaded by Congregationalists. See John R. Bodo, The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues, 1812-1848 (Princeton, 1954); Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers' Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800-1865 (New Brunswick NJ, 1960); and Mary K. Cayton, "Social Reform Through the Civil War," in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, III, 1429-1440. On Unitarian paternalism, see Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Boston Unitarianism, 1820-1850: A Study of the Life and Work of Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (New York, 1890); Richard Eddy Sykes, Massachusetts Unitarianism and Social Change: A Religious Social System in Transition, 1780-1870," Ph.D. Diss., University of Minnesota, 1966; Eric C. Schneider, In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s (New York, 1992), 17-24. Joseph Tuckerman's Ministry-at-Large to the Poor of Boston was the primary instance of Unitarian philanthropy. As early as 1882, historiography on Unitarianism noted its lack of evangelical impulse and want of "the spirit of propagandism." See Rev. Andrew P. Peabody, "The Unitarians in Boston," in Justin Winsor, ed., The Memorial History of Boston, Including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880, III (Boston, 1882), 468.

6. Conrad Wright, "Ministers, Churches, and the Boston Elite, 1791-1815," in The Unitarian Controversy, 53-57.

7. See Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870 (Middletown CT, 1980), 34, 24-40.

8. Jedidiah Morse, Review of American Unitarianism (Boston, 1815).

9. William Ellery Channing, "A letter to the Rev. Samuel C. Thacher," in Sydney E. Ahlstrom and Jonathan S. Carey, eds., An American Reformation, 76; orig. published as A Letter to the Rev. Samuel C. Thacher on the Aspersions Contained in a Late Number of the Panoplist, on the Ministers of Boston and the Vicinity (Boston, 1815).

10. Channing, 82.

11. Channing expressed this point of view succinctly, for example, in his charge to the newly ordained Jared Sparks in his 1819 Baltimore sermon entitled "Unitarian Christianity":

You will remember, that good practice is the end of preaching, and will labor to make your people holy lives, rather than skillful disputants. Be careful, lest the desire of defending what you deem truth, and of repelling reproach and misrepresentation, turn you aside from your great business, which is to fix in men's minds a living conviction of the obligation, sublimity, and happiness of Christian virtue.

("Unitarian Christianity. Discourse at the Ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks, Baltimore, 1819," Works, 10th ed., III [Boston, 1849], 101.)

12. For more on the differing cultural values of Congregationalism and Unitarianism, see Mary Kupiec Cayton, Emerson s Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800-1840 (Chapel Hill, 1989), 83-111.

13. The principal source on Beecher's life and work remains his Autobiography, edited by his son Charles in two volumes (New York, 1865). Good secondary sources include Vincent Harding, A Certain Magnificence: Lyman Beecher and the Transformation of American Protestantism, 1775-1863 (New York, 1991), and Milton Rugoff, The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981).

14. Lyman Beecher, in Autobiography, vol. 2, 69.

15. Lyman Beecher to Dr. [Edward] Griffin, March 1, 1828, in The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, I, ed. Barbara M. Cross (Cambridge, 1961), 96.

16. On Channing's life and work, see Andrew Delbanco, William Ellery Channing: An Essay on the Liberal Spirit in America (Cambridge, 1981).

17. Lyman Beecher, "The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints," delivered at Worcester, Massachusetts, October 15, 1823, at the ordination of Rev. Loammi Ives Hoadley, in Works II (Boston, 1852), 259.

18. Beecher, Works I, 14; Spirit of the Pilgrims I, 1 (January, 1828): 3. Beecher named the periodical that was his mouthpiece and that of the evangelical party in Boston the Spirit of the Pilgrims and opened his Autobiography in later years invoking the spirit of the Pilgrims. The Pilgrim tradition that Beecher claimed to preserve and perpetuate had six features: it had "habitual reverence for the word of God"; it comprised "men of prayer"; it cultivated "the religion of the heart"; it sought "the prosperity of the church"; it included "men of great public spirit"; and it had "a true knowledge of human nature." [Spirit of the Pilgrims I, 1 (January 1828): 9-10.]

19. Beecher, Works II, 45; I, 391; II, 154.

20. "Thoughts on Religious Differences in Massachusetts; in a Letter to a Unitarian Friend," Spirit of the Pilgrims IV, 7 (July 1831): 361.

21. Channing, "Remarks on Associations," in The Works of William Ellery Channing, D.D. (Boston, 1898), 149.

22. Channing, A Discourse Delivered at the Installation of the Rev. Mellish Irving Motte, as Pastor of the South Congregationalism Society, in Boston, May 21, 1828 (Boston, 1828), 4.

23. Channing, Works, 181.

24. Channing, Works, 141.

25. For documentation of the dynamic changes within the Boston environs during these years, see especially William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843 (New York, 1985); Cayton, Emerson's Emergence.

26. The literature on work relations and capitalist transformation is now rather large. See, for example, Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class History (New York, 1976); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984); Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (Philadelphia, 1980); Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium.

27. On the tendency toward residential segregation, see Ronald Schultz, "God and Workingmen: Popular Religion and the Formation of Philadelphia's Working Class, 1790-1830," in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Religion in a Revolutionary Age (Charlottesville, 1994), 128.

28. See, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe: "All the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian," the daughter of Lyman wrote in retrospect; "all the trustees and professors of Harvard College were Unitarian; all the elite of wealth and fashion crowded Unitarian churches; the judges on the bench were Unitarian." (The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, II, 82; rpt. in Ahlstrom and Carey, 19.)

29. Frothingham, 2-3.

30. Frothingham, 93.

31. Frothingham, 101-102.

32. Christian Spectator (November 1820), 2:596.

33. Beecher, in Beecher, ed., Autobiography, vol. 2, 60. Barbara Cross, in her Introduction to Beecher's Autobiography, states that Beecher's Hanover Street congregation was not wealthy and that his churches continually struggled against poverty. Unitarians thought Beecher's parishioners to be "clerks and servants" who had been attending masters' churches perfunctorily (xxix).

34. Beecher to William Beecher, Boston, 10 April 1826, in Beecher, Autobiography, ed. Cross, vol. 2, 51.

35. Wright, "Ministers, Churches, and the Boston Elite," 37-58.

36. Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, "Whose Right Hand of Fellowship? Pew and Pulpit in Shaping Church Practice," in American Unitarianism, 1805-1865, 181-206.

37. Sykes, 122, 133.

38. See also Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana, 1982), 10-101, and Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy.

39. Ware, Sober Thoughts, in Ahlstrom and Carey, 365-366.

40. Frothingham, 72.

41. See Sykes, 141-145, and Schneider, 17-24.

42. Anne C. Rose, "Social Sources of Denominationalism Reconsidered: Post-Revolutionary Boston as a Case Study," American Quarterly 38 (1986): 243-264.

43. Pease and Pease, "Whose Right Hand of Fellowship?" See especially Table III, 185.

44. Of the first one hundred members of Park Street Church, seventy mention in their conversion narratives having been born or having lived in a place other than Boston for a substantial period of time. The place other than Boston was usually a small town in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, or New York. Twenty-nine mentioned having been in the city for less than four years, nineteen for less than two. The bulk of Beecher's original congregation at Hanover Street was admitted from Park Street Church. By 1827, when the Salem Street Church was established, many of those admitted had already held prior membership in Park Street, Hanover or Old South (orthodox), so their places of birth or early residence are not always immediately apparent. Of the 253 members admitted between 1827 and 1832, 111 (or 43.9%) reported prior membership at one of the city's other Congregational churches. Of those for whom we have indications of place of birth or prior residence, ninety (or 35.6%) explicitly reported have come from or spent considerable amounts of time in places outside Boston - mainly in the kinds of small towns in the New England hinterland that furnished the supply of emigrants for Park Street. Thirty-two of the members mentioned boarding with some other church member, suggesting their youth, and a number of others were sons and daughters of communicants. Park Street Church, Index of Members, 1809-1850, MS, Congregational Library, Boston; Salem Street Church, Boston, List of Members Received to the Salem Church from its Organization in 1827 Down to 1853 - Also Members Removed, MS, Congregational Library, Boston.

45. See William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress, 32; and Peter R. Knights, Yankee Destinies: The Lives of Ordinary Nineteenth-Century Bostonians (Chapel Hill, 1991), 15-31.

46. Knights, Yankee Destinies, 15-31.

47. Lemuel Shattuck, Report to the Committee of the City Council Appointed to Obtain the Census of Boston for the Year 1845 (Boston, 1846), 37, breaks down residents of Boston in 1845 captured by the census according to place of birth. Although his data come from a period somewhat later in time than that of the religious controversy, the numbers nevertheless suggest the magnitude of the migration to Boston from rural areas of New England.

                       Under 20         Over 20          All Ages

Born in Boston,     19,814 (17.3%)   11,077 (9.7%)    30,891 (27.0%)
American Parents

Born in Boston,     10,105 (8.8%)    80 (0.1%)        10,185 (8.9%)
Foreign Parents

Born in U.S., Not   10,207 (8.9%)    35,979 (31.5%)   46,186 (40.4%)
in Boston

Not Born in U.S.     6,265 (5.5%)    20,839 (18.2%)   27,104 (23.7%)

48. See Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1830 (Chapel Hill, 1994), 301-309; and Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 60, 64.

49. On the frontier missionary efforts of Congregationalists, see James R. Rohrer, Keepers of the Covenant: Frontier Missions and the Decline of Congregationalism, 1774-1818 (New York, 1995).

50. They represent, of course, not every conservative Congregational church of the time - but they go a fair way toward telling us something about what some evangelicals were like during this period of disputation.

51. The records drawn upon are not exactly comparable in the information they yield, because the kinds of information retained by each type of congregation differed according to the conception of what constituted important congregational knowledge. We must therefore be cautious in interpreting what they tell us. For example, the total number of names we can trace through the records is much greater for Salem Street than for Second Church, despite the fact that the Second Church records cover a much longer period of time. This fact might mean that the membership, both formal and loosely affiliated, of Salem Street was larger, but it might also mean that because the Congregationalists placed such emphasis on regular and disciplined church membership, they were much more careful than their Unitarian counterparts to retain evidences of conversions and admissions. Moreover, to all appearances, women constituted a much higher percentage of the Salem Street congregation than they did of Second Church. However, when we keep in mind that Salem Street conscientiously kept conversion narrative records in order to substantiate church admission, and that the majority of these members were women, while Second Church did not keep such records as systematically, we may be looking at a situation where women's presence in Second Church was underrepresented. On the basis of the records we have, it is simply impossible to tell.

52. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium.

53. See Schultz, "God and Workingmen: Popular Religion and the Formation of Philadelphia's Working Class, 1790-1830," 139-144, for an excellent discussion of this small producer ethos.

54. I am not arguing here that economic reality was finally determinative of religious persuasion. Such factors as regional origin, prior religious experience, and kinship networks also had a strong influence on the competing religious systems as they ultimately developed in Boston. However, I do draw here upon the sociologist George M. Thomas's notion of cultural isomorphism: where a significant modification of a cultural order occurs, it causes changes in other aspects of the cultural order in order to bring into being an integrated structure of ontological organization for the culture. In other words, there is a tendency among people in social groupings to try to make the various aspects of their existence fit together into a relatively coherent picture of reality. Where a significant change throws one part of the system out of whack, modifications are inevitably made in another. See Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in Nineteenth. Century United States (Chicago, 1989), 15-48.