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The gender ideology of separate spheres that emerged in nineteenth-century America prescribed public roles for men and private roles for women while, at the same time, asking clergy and women to serve together as moral guardians of the republic. The cultural no-man’s land they occupied proved to be dangerous territory. Four highly publicized trials reveal nineteenth-century Americans’ fascination and horror with clerical sexual misconduct and crimes against women: the 1832 murder trial of New England Methodist minister Ephraim Avery; the 1844 presentment for moral “impurities” of the Episcopal Bishop of New York, Benjamin Onderdonk; the 1857 criminal adultery trial of Boston pastor Isaac Kalloch; and the 1875 church hearing and civil trial for adultery of the renowned preacher, Henry Ward Beecher. The verbal and graphic images generated in each of these trials tapped deep cultural anxieties, showing clergy and women regularly transgressing the too permeable boundaries of separate spheres and calling into question their roles as moral guardians and the utility of gender ideals in regulating social and sexual behavior.

This chapter elaborates on the different aspects of the Beecher–Tilton scandal. The accusation that Henry Ward Beecher had an affair with Elizabeth Lib Tilton, one of his parishioners, did not come as news to the Beecher sisters. When Beecher was publicly accused, everyone was pressured to choose sides. Most of Henry's siblings decided to believe him innocent. Harriet admitted to her daughter that she could not even entertain the possibility of guilt. Harriet wrote George Eliot a long letter about Henry after the scandal was over that continues with a summary of the siblings' adult lives, in which Harriet emphasizes their similar beliefs and actions. She wrote one correspondent that she could not think of Henry as anything other than young and another that he is more angel than brother.

During the Gilded Age, a plethora of books and sermons provided portraits of heaven. Through their preaching and publications, urban revivalists, led by Dwight L. Moody, and prominent pastors, most notably Henry Ward Beecher, T. Dewitt Talmage, and Phillips Brooks, extolled the glories of the celestial realm and urged people to prepare properly for heaven. Theological liberalism, especially “Progressive Orthodoxy,” attracted many proponents who either repudiated or downplayed the conventional notion of hell and salvation. Religious leaders debated whether those who did not hear the gospel message on earth would have a chance to respond to it after death. Whether they were evangelicals or liberals, Gilded Age Christians emphasized the happiness, holiness, and love of heaven. They also accentuated, more than earlier generations, the concepts of vigorous and varied activities, progress, and personal growth, themes that became dominant in Progressive portraits of paradise.

Henry Ward Beecher was a student at Amherst College when he received the news from Harriet Beecher that Catharine Beecher and their father, Lyman Beecher, had gone out to Cincinnati to assess the prospects for removing the Beecher tribe to western soil. The West of the male imagination was a garden of possibility, an extension of the mission that had drawn the Puritans to the rocky coast of New England. Lyman Beecher understood that the great westward movement of the 19th century was dramatically altering the character of the republic. During the next eighteen months, he and Catharine conspired and planned their campaigns. Just as Lyman Beecher had viewed Catharine's Hartford Female Seminary as a fortress against Episcopalianism in Connecticut, so her female college and his male seminary would be bastions against infidelism and Roman Catholicism in Ohio. Edward Beecher had begun this western campaign by going to Jacksonville, Illinois, to assume the presidency of Illinois College.

Central to the slavery debate was the issue of how to use the Scripture. Three major positions emerged on the Bible and slavery. Theological conservatives usually defended a literal reading of the Scripture, which was held to provide a divine sanction for slavery. Radicals who wanted to abolish slavery sometimes agreed that the Bible sanctioned slavery, but that acknowledgment led them to disparage the Bible. In the middle were a distraught contingent of Bible readers who were troubled by their conclusion that the Bible sanctioned slavery, and who failed unsuccessfully in trying to combine faithfulness to Scripture and opposition to slavery. All factions, but especially the middle group, were constrained in their understanding of the Bible by the confluence (distinct to America) between traditional Christianity and commonsense republican principles.

In the late nineteenth century, American religion faced two kinds of challenges—the kind Darwinism posed to the idea of a morally coherent universe, and the kind that the industrial revolution posed to the idea that the free market is inherently just. In the face of these challenges, evangelicals proved to be nimble defenders of their civil religion, offering up ready answers. These answers, however, bifurcated into two distinct schools of thought—two opposing civil religions. Social class formed the line of division: While the working class rallied around a communitarian ideal known as the Social Gospel, articulated most famously by Walter Rauschenbusch, bourgeois Protestants like Henry Ward Beecher and Newman Smyth adopted a free market theology, drawing favorably upon evolutionary biology to present the market as the quintessence of freedom and as a divine engine of moral progress

This chapter explores how William Lloyd Garrison's critique of the church challenged the Puritans’ most direct institutional heirs, the “Presbygationalist” clergy, and how Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe continued their renowned father Lyman Beecher's effort to protect and update the Puritan errand by imagining “la belle Puritaine,” a lovelier Puritanism that could guide the nation on slavery.

This chapter recounts the history of the founding of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1866 by the American Missionary Association and a trio of its agents: Erastus Milo (E. M.) Cravath, Edward Parmelee Smith, and John Ogden. The school’s educational philosophy emphasized teacher training, theology, training for craft work, and liberal arts. George L. White, hired as treasurer, initiated an informal music program that grew into an avenue for generating profit and promoting Fisk’s educational agenda, thanks to a choir he put together with the assistance of Ella Sheppard, who as music teacher was the first and only black staff member at Fisk from 1870 to 1875. In public, the Fisk choristers sang music from the white popular tradition, known as “people’s song” in the words of composer George Frederick Root. In private they introduced their spirituals to the white teachers, doing so under some duress, as they associated the songs with an enslaved past to be forgotten. Around early 1871 George White began urging the American Missionary Association to let him take his choristers on the road to raise money for the school; the group would be modeled on “singing families” such as the Hutchinson Family Singers. After much debate his plan was approved, and after a few weeks on the road White named his choir the Jubilee Singers. Although initially a dismal failure, the troupe’s rebranding, decision to sing more spirituals and less people’s song, and the patronage of Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn led to a reversal of fortune. By early 1872 the Jubilee Singers were on their way to fame and fortune. They presented their concerts as a “service of song,” to remind the public that their singing was not entertainment but rather had a religious and moral mission.

The perception of a “peculiar” alliance between nineteenth-century Protestant clergy and their female parishioners emerges from contemporary sources such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) and the widely publicized adultery trial of Henry Ward Beecher (1875), and the influential monograph The Feminization of American Culture (1977) by Ann Douglas. By examining a wider variety of primary sources from mostly ordinary northern, white, Protestants, Gedge analyzes the similarities and differences between perceived, imagined, idealized, and experienced pastoral relationships, and identifies the cultural, spiritual, and psychological tensions they reveal. She outlines the argument that women were without benefit of clergy in the pastoral relationship. Though viewed as natural allies in their mission as moral guardians of the new republic, women and clergy were estranged by the same ideology that prescribed their alliance.

Chapter 3 traces the appearance of the first truly disastrous tornadoes as the new nation pushed westward into the Mississippi Valley during the nineteenth century. These calamities fueled an apocalyptic mentality among people of various religious groups, who regarded such events as the Great Natchez Tornado of 1840 as a sign of End Time tribulations. Later in the century, however, the emerging field of meteorology contributed to a Gilded Age cult of progress that presupposed a benevolent God and assumed that tornadoes could be explained and maybe even contained. Even a disaster as enormous as the St. Louis Tornado of 1896, which destroyed much of the city, was not enough to shake the optimism of some clergy and theologians, who thought that as the scientific mysteries of tornadoes were dispelled, fears of divine wrath in the storm would cease.

Chapter fifty-four examines the crowning achievement of Hodge’s publishing career, his three-volume Systematic Theology. Rather than simply compile and edit his theological writings of the past half century, Hodge took the opportunity to write his Systematic as an organic whole. Certain new stresses appear in the volumes. He emphasized Baconian scientific method and the role of the intellect in theological study to a degree that had not been the case in his theological lectures. He used his Systematic to argue for the importance of the intellect (over the emotions) in theological study, and he made his volumes and apologetic for God’s goodness and benevolent work in the world, even after the devastating events of the Civil War.

This chapter argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s My Wife and I (1871) and Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age (1873) dramatize the difficulty, but also necessity, of theorizing desire and love as simultaneously social adhesives and solvents. My Wife and I and The Gilded Age depict the emotionality of the free love movement, embodied by the radical reformer Victoria Woodhull, as an assault on property and responsibility—a form of “emotional insanity.” Together, they reveal a fraught engagement with love as a force capable of holding groups together and shattering existing institutions. An afterword to this chapter further discusses how this tension anticipates and complicates later efforts (by Le Bon, Freud, et al.) to denigrate the supposed irrationality of the crowd, as well as recent critical efforts to celebrate the putatively unmediated emotions of popular political movements.

In 1872 Henry Ward Beecher, the most prominent American preacher of the time, claimed that hymns, particularly those of Isaac Watts, shaped Americans’ theology in a uniquely powerful way. Hymns even apart from music—read aloud, memorized, and contemplated—found a special place in the inner lives of nineteenth-century Americans closely akin to that of Scripture itself. The roots of “religious emotions” in hymnody—especially for those generations of Americans who had learned hymns from childhood—were linked to a range of theological concepts. Crookshank examines how the poetry and music associated with the towering figure of Isaac Watts has been invoked and supported in a variety of religious settings for more than two hundred years.

This chapter examines how Americans read the Bible in response to the battle at Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War. In the North, Henry Ward Beecher set the tone in his sermon, “The Battle Set in Array,” which called on the Exodus story to rouse northerners to war. As Beecher preached it, the Exodus was a war story, a story of God’s deliverance of his people in battle, but it was also a story that warned people that they could not just rely on God – they would have to join the fight. Many northerners shared Beecher’s zeal, including Catholics, some of whom saw wartime service as a way to earn the respect of others in a predominately anti-Catholic nation. Overall northerners embraced the war, viewing it as a noble enterprise that would improve the moral resolve of a nation that had become materialistic, immoral, and weak.

Evangelicalism was the chief factor moulding the theology of most Protestant Dissenting traditions of the nineteenth century, dictating an emphasis on conversions, the cross, the Bible as the supreme source of teaching, and activism which spread the gospel while also relieving the needy. The chapter concentrates on debates about conversion and the cross. It begins by emphasizing that the Enlightenment and above all its principle of rational inquiry was enduringly important to Dissenters. The Enlightenment led some in the Reformed tradition such as Joseph Priestley to question not only creeds but also doctrines central to Christianity, such as the Trinity, while others, such as the Sandemanians, Scotch Baptists, Alexander Campbell’s Restorationists, or the Universalists, privileged the rational exegesis of Scripture over more emotive understandings of faith. In the Calvinist mainstream, though, the Enlightenment created ‘moderate Calvinism’. Beginning with Jonathan Edwards, it emphasized the moral responsibility of the sinner for rejecting the redemption that God had made available and reconciled predestination with the enlightened principle of liberty. As developed by Edwards’s successors, the New England theology became the norm in America and was widely disseminated among British Congregationalists and Baptists. It entailed a judicial or governmental conception of the atonement, in which a just Father was forced to exact the Son’s death for human sinfulness. The argument that this just sacrifice was sufficient to save all broke with the doctrine of the limited atonement and so pushed some higher Calvinists among the Baptists into schism, while, among Presbyterians, Princeton Seminary retained loyal to the doctrine of penal substitution. New England theology was not just resisted but also developed, with ‘New Haven’ theologians such as Nathaniel William Taylor stressing the human component of conversion. If Calvinism became residual in such hands, then Methodists and General and Freewill Baptists had never accepted it. Nonetheless they too gave enlightened accounts of salvation. The chapter dwells on key features of the Enlightenment legacy: a pragmatic attitude to denominational distinctions; an enduring emphasis on the evidences of the Christian faith; sympathy with science, which survived the advent of Darwin; and an optimistic postmillennialism in which material prosperity became the hallmark of the unfolding millennium. Initially challenges to this loose consensus came from premillennial teachers such as Edward Irving or John Nelson Darby, but the most sustained and deep-seated were posed by Romanticism. Romantic theologians such as James Martineau, Horace Bushnell, and Henry Ward Beecher rejected necessarian understandings of the universe and identified faith with interiority. They emphasized the love rather than the justice of God, with some such as the Baptist Samuel Cox embracing universalism. Late nineteenth-century Dissenters followed Anglicans in prioritizing the incarnation over the atonement and experiential over evidential apologetics. One final innovation was the adoption of Albrecht Ritschl’s claim that Jesus had come to found the kingdom of God, which boosted environmental social activism. The shift from Enlightenment to romanticism, which provoked considerable controversy, illustrated how the gospel and culture had been in creative interaction.