Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T23:20:42.526Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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
Affiliation:
Hofstra University

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
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America, Lawrence, George, trans., and Mayer, J. P., ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), vol. 1, 293Google Scholar. The voluminous literature on the role of religion in bringing about the American Revolution is synthesized in Noll, Mark A.. “The American Revolution and Protestant Evangelicalism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23 (Winter 1993), 615–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Mathews, Donald G., “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis,” American Quarterly, 21 (Spring 1969), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An earlier generation of historians took it for granted that the Second Great Awakening began with the great revival of August 6, 1801, at Cane Ridge in Kentucky and reached its heyday with the Finneyite revivals of the 1820s and 1830s in New York State. See Cross, Whitney, The Burned Over District (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950).Google Scholar However, New England's upland hill country experienced numerous revivals between 1776 and 1783; Virgínia and the Carolinas were evangelized by Baptists during the 1780s; sections of Baltimore were awakened by Methodists between 1800 and 1810; and the gathering at Cane Ridge marked the mid-point, not the beginning, of a series of revivals sweeping across Kentucky. Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia. See Marini, Stephen A., Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Butler, Jon, Awash in a Sea of Faith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 221Google Scholar; Boles, John B., The Great Revival, 1787–1805 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 3689Google Scholar; McLoughlin, William G., Modern Revivalism (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1959), 9Google Scholar; Bilhartz, Terry, Urban Religion and the Second Great Awakening (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. The year 1845, following recent schisms among Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists, has been used to demarcate the end of the Second Great Awakening. See Miller, PerryThe Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965). 5Google Scholar. However, this termination date would exclude the evangelical revivalism of the 1850s, notably the spectacular growth in revivals in 1857–58. See Carwardine, Richard, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 53Google Scholar. For definitions of the Second Great Awakening, see Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 220–6Google Scholar; Wright, Conrad E., The Transformation of Charity in Postrevolutionary New England (Boston: Northeaster University Press, 1992), 199206.Google Scholar

3 On the cultural significance of the American Revolution for religion in the United States and Canada, see Lipset's, Seymour MartinContinental Divide (New York: Routledge, 1990), 7489Google Scholar; and Revolution and Counterrevolution (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 3163.Google ScholarPubMed

4 Wilberforce, Samuel, A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America (London: James Burns, 1844), 400.Google Scholar

5 Clark, S. D., Church and Sect In Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948), 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On evangelical religion in Upper Canada, see Christie, Nancy. “‘In These Times of Democratic Rage and Delusion’—Popular Religion and the Challenge to Established Order, 17601815,”Google Scholar and Gauvreau, Michael, “Protestantism Transformed: Personal Piety and the Evangelical Social Vision, 1815–67,” in The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1760–1990, Rawlyk, George A., ed. (Burlington, ON: Welch, 1990), 997Google Scholar. 11. For an overview, see Rawlyk, , “Politics, Religion and the Canadian Experience: A Preliminary Probe,” in Religion and American Politics, Noll, Mark A., ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 253–77Google Scholar. On the evangelical character of the Sunday School movement in Upper Canada, see Greer, Allan, “The Sunday Schools of Upper Canada,” Ontario History, 68 (09 1975). 169–84.Google Scholar

6 Cf Hiller, Harry H., “Continentalism and the Third Force in Religion,” Canadian Journal of Sociology, 3 (Spring 1978), 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 McLoughlin, William G.. “Pietism and the American Character,” American Quarterly, 17 (Summer 1965), 165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Hatch, Nathan O., “Sola Scriptum and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” 59–78 in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, Hatch, Nathan and Noll, Mark, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. On democratization, see Douglass, Elisha P., Rebels and Democrats: The Struggle for Equal Political Rights during the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Young, Alfred F., The Democratic Republicans of New York-The Origins, 1763–1797 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Adams, Willi Paul, The First American Constitutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 99117Google Scholar: Wood, Gordon S., The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991), 96, 106, 229–30Google Scholar. On anti-lawyer sentiment, See Ellis, Richard E., The Jejfersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the New Republic (New York: Norton, 1974), 111–22Google Scholar; Bloomfield, Maxwell, American Lawyers in a Changing Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 3258Google Scholar. On the distrust of physicians, see Stan, Paul, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Harper, 1982).Google Scholar

9 Hatch, , Democratization, 22Google Scholar. Wood, Gordon S., “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,” New York History, 61 (09 1980), 359–86.Google Scholar

10 Hatch, Quoted in, “The Christian Movement and the Demand for a Theology of the People,” Journal of American History, 67 (12 1980), 548.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Richey, Russell E., “The Four Languages of Early American Methodism,” Methodist History, 28 (04 1990), 160Google Scholar. Boles, , The Great Revival, 145–6.Google Scholar

12 Rawlyk, , Ravished by the Spirit: Religious Revivals, Baptists and Henry Alline (Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1984), 145Google Scholar, note 28. Sectarian splintering occurred among the largely loyalist Society of Friends as early as 1781, when a group of disowned Quaker patriots in Philadelphia, led by Samuel Wetherill, Jr., established the Society of Free Quakers (Barbour, Hugh and Frost, J. William, The Quakers. [New York: Greenwood Press, 1988], 144).Google Scholar

13 Quoted in Patrick Carey, W., “Republicanism within American Catholicism, 1785–1860,” Journal of the Early Republic, 3 (Winter 1983), 423, 427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Sommers, Charles G., Memoir of The Rev. John Stanford, D. D., Late Chaplain to the Humane and Criminal Institutions in the City of New York (New York: Swords, Stanford, 1853), 108Google Scholar. On anticlericalism, see Miller, Perry, Life of the Mind, 7Google Scholar; Howe, Daniel Walker, “Religion and Politics in the American North,” in Noll, Religion and American Politics, 131.Google Scholar

15 On Freewill Baptist theology, see Marini, , Radical Sects, 140–4Google Scholar. On Henry Alline's influence on the Free Will Baptist movement, see Rawlyk, . Ravished, ch. 2.Google Scholar

16 Roth, Randolph A., The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform and Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Marini, , Radical Sects, 6875,94Google Scholar. Robinson, David, The Unitarians and the Universalists (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985) 6566Google Scholar. For an account of the divisions among Baptists in post-Revolutionary New England and the competitive threat to Isaac Backus's Separate Baptists posed by Universalists, Methodists, Shakers, and Christians, see McLoughlin, William G., New England Dissent, 1660–1833 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 697750.Google Scholar

17 Quoted in Boles, , The Great Revival, 128.Google Scholar

18 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Holy Fairs—Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 5964.Google Scholar

19 Despite the singing and shouting which went on for days at Cane Ridge, the traditional features of the Scottish communion service—the action sermon, the successive servings at tables, the Monday thanksgiving service—were preserved. Only Presbyterian ministers presided over the communion tables. See Boles, , The Great Revival, 53Google Scholar; Schmidt, , Holy Fairs, 64Google Scholar; Conkin, Paul K., Cane Ridge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 91.Google Scholar

20 Boles, , The Great Revival, 143–64.Google Scholar

21 i Finke, Roger and Stark, Rodney, “How the Upstart Sects Won America: 1776–1850,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 28:1 (1989), 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Quoted in Ibid. 35.

23 Hatch, , Democratization, 83Google Scholar (quotation on 55; for information on camp meetings, see 257, note 1). On the apostolic and heroic character of the early itinerants, see Wakeley, J. B., Lost Chapters Recovered from the Early History of American Methodism (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1858), especially 570–6Google Scholar. Garber, Paul Neff, The Romance of American Methodism (Greensboro: Piedmont Press, 1931)Google Scholar. On the physical hardships faced by itinerants, see Brunger, Ronald A., “Methodist Circuit Riders,” Michigan History, 51:3 (1967), 267.Google Scholar

24 Quoted in Conkin, , Cane Ridge, 89.Google Scholar

25 On the shift away from doctrinal Calvinism in the thinking of evangelical Presbyterians in New York City, see Rosenberg, Carol Smith, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York Mission Movement, 1812–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 84Google Scholar. On the shift among Congregationalists in Boston, see Harding, Vincent, A Certain Magnificence: Lyman Beecher and the Transformation of American Protestantism, 1775–1863 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1991), 173–92.Google Scholar

26 Wood, Gordon S., “The Significance of the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic. 8 (Spring 1988), 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution. Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 137236.Google Scholar

27 Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 60104, especially 67–72 for evidence of Presbyterian distrust of Methodists and Baptists.Google Scholar

28 Mathews, , “The Second Great Awakening,” 36.Google Scholar

29 Cayton, Andrew L. and Onuf, Peter S., The Midwest and the Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 49.Google Scholar

30 Cayton, , The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1986), 59.Google Scholar

31 Quoted in Lewis, W. David, From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), 278.Google Scholar

32 Finley, James B., Sketches of Western Methodism (Cincinnati: R. P. Thompson, 1856), 412, 336Google Scholar. See also Memorials of Prison Life (Cincinnati: L. Swormstedt and J. H. Power, 1850)Google Scholar. The conversion experiences of many prisoners are described by Luckey, Rev. John in Life in Sing Sing (New York: N. Tibbals, 1860), 84108Google Scholar. The pioneer in catering to the spiritual needs of prisoners was the Baptist minister, John Stanford, who was chaplain in nine public institutions in New York City, including Newgate Prison, the municipal almshouse, b?dewell and penitentiary at Bellevue, Magdalen House, the orphan asylum, the city hospital and marine hospital, and the house of refuge for juvenile delinquents, which he was instrumental in founding. In the year 1820, as chaplain to “nearly three thousand souls,” Stanford preached 620 sermons (Sommers, , Memoir of John Stanford, 196, 240).Google Scholar

33 Quoted in Boles, , The Great Revival, 172.Google Scholar

34 Hamm, Thomas O., The Transformation of American Quakerism, 1800–1907 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 10, 24Google Scholar. Eddy, Thomas. An Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House in the City of New York (New York: Collins, 1801), 9.Google Scholar

35 Rosenberg, . Religion and the Rise of the American City, 125Google Scholar; Howe, , The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 161Google Scholar; McLoughlin, , “Pietism and the American Character,” 169.Google Scholar

36 Quoted in Marsden, George M., The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 21.Google Scholar

37 Quoted in Hatch, , The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 173.Google Scholar

38 See Birdsall, Richard D., “The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order,” Church History, 39 (09 1970), 357Google Scholar. Conforti, Joseph A., Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1981), 184.Google Scholar

39 See Howe, , “Religion and Politics in the Antebellum North,” and “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North during the Second Party System,” Journal of American History, 77 (03 1991), 1216–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Though he defended a harshly predestinarian soteriology. Hopkins argued that moral regeneration produced a lifelong commitment to benevolent activity among those who had experienced it. See Marsden, , Evangelical Mind, 3435Google Scholar. Conforti, , Samuel Hopkins, 5, 175–93Google Scholar. On Timothy Dwight's role in the humanization of New England Calvinism, see Berk, Stephen E., Calvinism vs. Democracy: Timothy Dwight and the Origins of American Evangelical Orthodoxy (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1974), 7490Google Scholar. For an analysis of how Taylor's rationalistic and democratic revisions to Calvinist doctrine provided a coherent rationale for an evangelical style of proselytizing directed at moral reform, see Sutton, William R., “Benevolent Calvinism and the Moral Government of God: The Influence of Nathaniel W. Taylor ort Revivalism in the Second Great Awakening,” Religion and American Culture, 2 (Winter 1992), 2348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 On the changing organizational and professional role of the New England clergy, see Scott, Donald M., From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 68Google Scholar. On the growing conflict between the evangelical reformers and politicians, see Reale, M. J., “From City Fathers to Social Critics: Humanitarianism and Government in New York, 1790–1860,” Journal of American History, 63 (06 1976), 2141Google Scholar. Compared to the Methodists, who rarely earned more than $100, clergymen employed by the national benevolent societies earned between $400 and $500, plus expenses (Foster, Charles I., An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960], 143).Google Scholar

42 Harding, , A Certain Magnificence, 174Google Scholar. Jenks, William, “Memoir of Louis Dwight,” in Boston Prison Discipline Society (hereafter B.P.D.S.), First Annual Report, 1826 (reprint, Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1972), 29.Google Scholar

43 Henry Bamford Parkes, “Samuel John Mills,” Dictionary of American Biography [hereafter, DAB.], Vol. 7, 16. On Mills' attitude toward Baptists, Methodists, and other “sectaries,” see Schermerhorn, John F. and Mills, Samuel J., A Correct View of That Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains, with regard to Religion and Morals (Hartford: Gleason, 1814), especially 3545Google Scholar. Fuess, Claude M., “Justin Edwards,” D.A.B. Vol. 3, 40Google Scholar. Butler, Awash, 278. By 1834, Americans had formed over 5,000 separate temperance societies (Cole, Charles C., Jr., The Social Ideas of the Northern Evangelists, 1826–60 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1954], 120)Google Scholar. For a case study of the formation of a local temperance society, see Harris, Marc L., “The Process of Voluntary Association: Organizing the Ravenna Temperance Society, 1830,” Ohio History, 94 (Summer/Autumn 1985), 158–70.Google Scholar

44 Nathan Bangs, agent of the Methodist Book Concern in New York, contended that the officially interdenominational organizations comprising the evangelical united front actually constituted a Presbyterian conspiracy. Wanting Methodism to be more respectable, more central to the political life of the nation, Bangs resented those who typecast Methodists as backwoods preachers or Five Points revivalists. See Hatch, , Democratization, 201–5Google Scholar; Marsden, , The Evangelical Mind, 19.Google Scholar

45 Distrust of prosperity—an age-old tenet of pietism—found expression in the writings of evangelical Calvinists and Unitarians alike. Dorothea Dix attributed increased crime to “our wealth and prosperity” (Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States [1845; reprint, Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1967], 25).Google Scholar

46 Howe, , “Religion and Politics,” 128Google Scholar. See also Griffin, Clifford S., Their Brother's Keepers: Moral Stewardship ín the United States, 1800–1865 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1960), especially 57Google Scholar. Johnson, Paul E., A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).Google Scholar

47 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969).Google Scholar

48 Cole, , Social Ideas of Northern Evangelists, 127.Google Scholar

49 Harlow, Ralph V., Gerrit Smith, Philanthropist and Reformer (New York: Henry Holt, 1939), 93, 101.Google Scholar

50 Duffield, George, The Divine Organic Law (Detroit: Garrett and Geiger, 1848), 27Google Scholar. Beecher, Lyman, Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasion, Signs, Evils and Remedy of Intemperance (New York: American Tract Society, 1833), 7.Google Scholar

51 Beecher, , A Reformation of Morals Practicable and Indispensable: A Sermon Delivered at New Haven on the Evening of October 27, 1812 (Utica: Merrell and Camp, 1813), 1718Google Scholar. Boylan, Anne M., Sunday School, The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) 64Google Scholar; Foster, , Errand of Mercy, 127Google Scholar; Thomas, N. Gordon, The Millennial Impulse in Michigan, 1830–1860 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 26–7. B.P.D.S., Second Annual Report (1827), 90.Google Scholar

52 Banner, Lois, “Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation,” Journal of American History, 60 (06 1976), 40Google Scholar. See also Bodo, John R., The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues, 1812–1848 (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1980), 54Google Scholar. For a discussion of the political uses of biblical imagery, see Noll, , “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation. 1776–1865,” 3958, in The Bible in America, Noll and Hatch, eds.Google Scholar

53 Hatch, , Sacred Cause, 167Google Scholar. See also Bloch, Ruth, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54 Quoted in Marsden, , Evangelical Mind, 13Google Scholar. See also Noll, , “The Irony of the Enlightenment for Presbyterians in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, 5 (Summer 1985), 167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 Ryon, Roderick N., “Moral Reform and Democratic Politics: The Dilemma of Roberts Vaux,” Quaker History, 59 (Spring 1970), 314CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the contributions of Finney's Arminianized Calvinism to evangelical social reform, see McLoughlin, , Modern Revivalism, 11121Google Scholar; Hatch, , Democratization, 196201Google Scholar; Hardman, Keith J., “Charles G. Finney, the Benevolent Empire and the Free Church Movement in New York City,” New York History, 67 (10 1986), 411–35Google Scholar. See also Moorhead's, James H.Social Reform and the Divided Conscience of Antebellum Protestantism,” Church History, 48 (12 1979), 418CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Charles Finney and the Modernization of America,” Journal of Presbyterian History, 62 (Summer 1984), 95–110.Google Scholar

56 Quoted in Banner, , “Religious Benevolence,” 36.Google Scholar

57 Mead, Sidney, “The ‘Nation with the Soul of a Church,’” Church History, 36 (1967), 262–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 On the specific provisions pertaining to the Church of England in the Constitutional Act of 1791, see Talman, J. J., “The Position of the Church of England in Upper Canada, 1791–1840,” in Historical Essays on Upper Canada, Johnson, J. K., ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975)Google Scholar. On Simcoe's social and military vision of Upper Canada, see Mealing, S. R., “The Enthusiasms of John Graves Simcoe,” in Historical Essays.Google Scholar

59 On the ethnic and religious diversity of the Loyalist population, see Grant, John Webster, A Profusion of Spires (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 2051CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregg, William, Hlstory of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (Toronto: Presbyterian Publishing, 1885), 143–90Google Scholar. Clark, , Church and Sect, 9091Google Scholar; Landon, Fred, Western Ontario and the American Frontier (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967), 71127Google Scholar. Moir, John S., “American Influences on Canadian Protestant Churches before Confederation,” Church History, 36 (12 1967), 447–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Firth, Edith G., “Jabez Collver,” D.C.B. Vol. 5, 196–7.Google Scholar

60 On the beginnings of Methodism in Upper Canada, see Sanderson, J. E., The First Century of Methodism in Canada, vol. 1. (Toronto: Briggs, 1908), 2361Google Scholar. Lamb, J. William, “William Losee,” D.C.B., vol. 4, 404–6Google Scholar. Thompson, F. F., “A Chapter of Early Methodism in the Kingston Area,” Historic Kingston, 6 (12 1957), 3245Google Scholar. Mrs. Tolan, Stanley C., “Christian Warner—A Methodist Pioneer,” Ontario Historical Society, Papers and Records, 37 (1945), 7478Google Scholar. Moir, J. S., “Early Methodism in the Niagara Peninsula,” Ontario History, 43:2 (1951), 54Google Scholar. For a description of Bangs' early experience as an exhorter and for an account of the camp meeting at Hay Bay, see Clark, , Church and Sect, 151–4Google Scholar: French, Goldwin, “Henry Ryan,” D.C.B., vol. 4, 670–6.Google Scholar

61 Grant, , Profusion, 58, 45Google Scholar. For a description of the camp meetings held in Upper Canada, see McNairn, Norman A., “Mission to Canada,” Methodist History, 13 (07 1975), 5253.Google Scholar

62 McNairn, , “Mission,” 53Google Scholar; Grant, , Profusion, 49.Google Scholar

63 Magrath, T. W., Authentic Letters from Upper Canada (Dublin, 1833), 194Google Scholar. For a discussion of the effectiveness of Methodist organization in Upper Canada, see Clark, , Church and Sect, 148–52.Google Scholar

64 French, Goldwin, Parsons and Politics (Toronto: Ryerson, 1962), 42.Google Scholar

65 McNaim, , “Mission,” 54.Google Scholar

66 On the dominance of Anglicans and a few Loyalist Presbyterians in, and the exclusion of Methodists from, the province's political, legal, and business establishments, see Johnson, J. K., Becoming Prominent-Regional Leadership in Upper Canada, 1791–1841 (Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989), 26, 3336, 9799, 134–5Google Scholar. Saunders, R. E., “What Was the Family Compact?,” Ontario History, 49 (08 1957), 165–78Google Scholar; Nelles, H. V., “Loyalism and Local Power: The District of Niagara 1792–1837,” Ontario History, 58 (06 1966), 99114Google Scholar. Read, Colin, “The London District Oligarchy in the Rebellion Era,” Ontario History, 72 (12 1980), especially 205Google Scholar. Romney, Paul, “A Struggle for Authority: Toronto Society and Politics in 1834,” in Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto, Russell, Victor L., ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), especially 12.Google Scholar

67 Moir, , “Early Methodism in the Niagara Peninsula,” 52.Google Scholar

68 Simcoe to Sir Henry Dundas, 30 June 1791, in The Correspondence of Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, Cniikshank, E. A., ed. (Toronto, 1923), Vol. 1, 31.Google Scholar

69 Grant, , Profusion, 64.Google Scholar

70 Johnson, , Becoming Prominent, 102, 128Google Scholar. This kind of action by the governing party convinced the discerning De Witt Clinton, who visited Niagara in 1810, that “a great majority of the people prefer the American government, and on the firing of the first gun would unite their destinies with ours” (The Life and Writings of De Witt Clinton, Campbell, William W., ed. [New York: Baker and Scribner, 1849], 126).Google Scholar

71 Lamb, , “William Losee,” 405.Google Scholar

72 Craig, G. M., “John Strachan,” D.C.B., vol. 9, 752.Google Scholar

73 Quoted in French, , Parsons and Politics, 53.Google Scholar

74 Grant, , Profusion, 69Google Scholar. Landon, , Western Ontario, 102Google Scholar. Gregg, , History of Presbyterian Church, 180.Google Scholar

75 Moir, , “American Influences,” 449Google Scholar. McNaim, , “Mission,” 50, 60Google Scholar. Grant, , Profusion, 69Google Scholar. Sanderson, , First Century of Methodism, 73.Google Scholar

76 French, , “James Richardson,” D.C.B., vol. 10, 615.Google Scholar

77 The Methodist Episcopal Church in Upper Canada doubled in size between 1817 and 1820. French, , “Henry Ryan,” 673Google Scholar. See also Moir, , “Early Methodism,” 57Google Scholar; Tolan, , “Christian Warner,” 77.Google Scholar

78 In 1820, the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, meeting in Baltimore, rejected an Upper Canadian proposal to establish a separate conference but altered the discipline to state that “all Christian ministers” are “subject to the supreme authority of the country where they may reside and (are) to use all laudable means to enjoin obedience to the powers that be” (Quoted in French, , “Henry Ryan,” 673).Google Scholar

79 Fahey, Curtis, In Nis Name: The Anglican Experience in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991), 27, 91.Google Scholar

80 Quoted in Ibid, 95.

81 Quoted in Ibid, 97.

82 Quoted in Wilkinson, Anne, Lions in the War (Toronto: Macmillan, 1956), 56, 58. 41.Google Scholar

83 Quoted in Clark, , Church and Sect, 210.Google Scholar

84 On Canadian Methodist losses to the British Wesleyans in Montreal, Cornwall, York, and Niagara, see Ibid, 199–201.

85 Quoted in French, , “Henry Ryan,” 672. Colonial Office and Anglican suspicions were not allayed by the decision of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States to agree to the creation of a separate Canadian conference in 1828.Google Scholar

86 Cooper, Elizabeth. “Religion, Politics, and Money: The Methodist Union of 1832–33,” Ontario History, 81 (06 1989), 89108.Google Scholar

87 French, , Parsons and Politics, 137Google Scholar. Cooper, , “Religion, Politics, and Money,” 102–4Google Scholar

88 Watson to Goderich, November 22, 1832 (Quoted in French, , Parsons and Politics, 140).Google Scholar

89 French, , “James Richardson,” 615.Google Scholar

90 On the decline of the evangelical camp meeting, see Clark, , Church and Sect, 218, 263–4Google Scholar. On Wesleyan opposition to camp meetings, see 213–14; 263–5; and Westfall, William, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth Century Ontario (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989), 71–3.Google Scholar

91 French, , “James Richardson,” 616.Google Scholar

92 On Baptist missionaries to Upper Canada and the relationship between American and Scottish Baptists, see Landon, , Western Ontario, 95100Google Scholar; Clark, , Church and Sect, 204–5, 228–31Google Scholar; Ivison, Stuart, “Is There a Canadian Baptist Tradition,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, Grant, J. W., ed. (Toronto: Ryerson, 1963), 5368.Google Scholar

93 J. S. Moir has pointed out that Upper Canadian Loyalists were naturally suspicious of Presbyterian missionaries because of “the stigma of treason (which) clung to the American Presbyterian Church.” See Enduring Witness—A History of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (The Presbyterian Church of Canada, 1987), 35Google Scholar. American-born Presbyterians were no doubt aware of Loyalist prejudice. Jabez Collver, for example, did not mention his ordination as a Presbyterian minister when he petitioned for 1,000 acres of land in Norfolk County in 1794 (Firth, , “Jabez Collver,” 196).Google Scholar

94 Gregg, , History of the Presbyterian Church, 168–9, 171, 183, 187.Google Scholar

95 Moir, , “Robert McDowall,” D.C.B., vol. 5, 558Google Scholar. Landon, , Western Ontario, 102.Google Scholar

96 Gregg, , History of Presbyterian Church, 191212.Google Scholar

97 Affiliation with the Anglican Church was an opportunity structure. Prominent Loyalist Lutherans and Presbyterians had little difficulty embracing Anglicanism. Rev. John Bethune, for example, had no qualms about sending his sons to be educated by John Strachan at his Cornwall school. The Presbyterian minister, William Smart, reported that he and Robert McDowall were approached to join the Anglican Church and that the higher salary was “a tempting consideration.” The influential Methodist politician and speaker of the assembly in the ninth parliament, John Willson, became an Anglican in later life (Gregg, , History of Presbyterianism, 168, 210Google Scholar; Fraser, Robert L., “John Willson,” D.C.B.., vol. 8, 945–7).Google Scholar

98 Russell, Peter A., “Church of Scotland Clergy in Upper Canada: Culture Shock and Conservatism on the Frontier,” Ontario History, 73 (06 1981), 94Google Scholar. Gregg, , History of the Presbyterian Church, 382–9.Google Scholar

99 See Bridgman, H. J.. “John McKenzie,” D.C.B., vol. 8, 560–1; “Robert McGill,” D.C.B., vol. 8, 544–6.Google Scholar

100 On the revivals in the Niagara district, see Gregg, , History of the Presbyterian Church, 534–51. The Niagara revivalists were joined by a number of American ministers, including missionaries dispatched to Upper Canada by the American Home Missionary Society.Google Scholar

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

102 Gregg, , History of the Presbyterian Church, 548.Google Scholar

103 Schmidt, , Holy Fairs, 208.Google Scholar

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,” 185202, 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

105 Archdeacon Strachan to Lieutenant Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland, 10 March 1826. Quoted in Baker, G. Blaine, “So Elegant a Web: Providential Order and the Rule of Secular Law in Early Nineteenth-Century Canada,” University of Toronto Law Journal, 38 (1988), 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

106 Charge to the Grand Jury, Western District, 1836 (Quoted in McMahon, Donald J., “Law and Public Authority; Sir John Beverley Robinson and the Purposes of the Criminal Law,” University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review, 46 (Spring 1988), 415).Google Scholar On Strachan's Christian Loyalism, see Wise, S. F., “‘God's Peculiar Peoples,’” 3661, in The Shield of Achilles, Morton, W. L., ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968Google Scholar), and “Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History,” 79–97 in Preindustrial Canada, 1760–1849, Cross, Michael S. and Kealey, Gregory S., eds. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982).Google Scholar

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

111 Grant, , Profusion, 39.Google Scholar

112 Millar, W. P. J., “The Remarkable Rev. Thaddeus Osgood: A Study of the Evangelical Spirit in the Canadas,” Histoire Sociale/Social History, 10 (05 1977), 61, 64, 67.Google Scholar

113 Landon, Western Ontario, ch. 9. On the American evangelical influence on temperance reform in Upper Canada and Anglican resistance to it, see Barron, F. L., “The American Origins of the Temperance Movement in Ontario. 1828–50,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 11 (Fall 1980), 131–59.Google Scholar

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), 1518CrossRefGoogle 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

121 Westfall, , Two Worlds, passim.Google Scholar