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William Bentley was a Congregationalist pastor in Salem, Massachusetts, during the first few decades of independence. He was also a figure quite unlike anyone else in all of America. In talent, vision, and most importantly ideas, he was a unique and heretofore underappreciated member of the founding generation. To study his life is to study the intellectual world in which he moved and through which he cut a unique and illustrative path. In theological terms, he was both an Arminian and what this book calls a “Christian naturalist,” a combination that was both unique and volatile. For if his belief in the Arminian view of salvation put him at odds with his Calvinist contemporaries (including his senior colleague at the East Church), his unique denial of post‐biblical supernaturalism and his unique embrace of Socinianism (a denial of the divinity of Jesus more radical than what others would call “Unitarianism”) put him also at odds with other Arminians. But it was the only way that Bentley could keep both what he thought essential to Christianity and what he thought true about the natural world. In the realm of social ideology, he was both a classical liberal and a republican at the same time, but if he was able in the 1780s to be both, the 1790s would pull apart these dualities and see him move along the path to Jeffersonian Republicanism. But even here he was, among the New England clergy, alone, drawn to the party not by its support for disestablishment so much as by his unique approbation of Rousseau's state of nature theorizing. William Bentley's life, ministry, and thought allow a singular exploration of theology and philosophy as well as of ideology: of the social politics of race and class and gender, the ecclesiastical politics of establishment and dissent, and between minister and laity, the ideological politics of republicanism and classical liberalism, and the party politics of Federalism and Democratic‐Republicanism.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, British and American men and women began criticizing the slave trade and slavery as violations of the principles of Christianity, natural rights, and political security. A black spokesman for abolitionism was Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833), one of the first African Americans to publish. Haynes served as a minuteman in the American War of Independence and began writing against the slave trade and slavery in the 1770s. After ordination in a Congregational church, he assumed a pulpit in Rutland, Vermont, where he became a leading controversialist, defender of the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and interpreter of republican ideology. He was dismissed from his pulpit in 1818, because his affiliation to the Federalist Party and his opposition to the War of 1812 offended his congregation. The last 15 years of his life were characterized by pessimism about the ability of Americans of the early republic to defeat racism as well as by a defense of Puritanism, which he believed could guide the creation of a free, harmonious, and integrated society.

This book analyzes the debate over the proper connection between religion and society that took place in southern New England during the fifty years after the American Revolution. It finds that a Christian social ideology, descended from the region's Puritan origins, endured and evolved during the era of the early republic, in contrast to interpretations that emphasize the individualization and secularization of American public life during the period. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, the Congregational clergy articulated a corporate ethic that emphasized the superintendence of divine Providence over communal affairs and the importance of social morality for the survival of the new nation, although Baptists and other religious minorities dissented and called for the disestablishment of Congregationalism. By the early nineteenth century, the first party competition between Federalists and Democratic‐Republicans politicized and transformed the debate over public Christianity. Congregationalists became disillusioned with their prophecies of America's millennial role and soured on their partnership with the Federalist magistracy, while dissenters joined Jeffersonians in agitating for disestablishment. At the same time, however, the Congregationalists found cause for optimism amid the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. The experience of Worcester County, Massachusetts was typical, where religious revivals and clerical networking at the grassroots fostered a new vision of the godly community. In the years after 1815 partisan acrimony declined, and the Congregationalists split into Unitarian and orthodox camps. As a result, an evangelical coalition of orthodox Congregationalists, Baptists, and others emerged that charted the way for renewed activism on the part of a Christian electorate and mobilized church. The transformed public Christianity of the 1820s and 1830s made a seminal contribution to the emergence of a variety of reform movements, such as temperance, Sabbatarianism, and antislavery.

This book provides a revisionist history of the constitutional controversy over a national bank (1791-1832), and uses that history to reinforce and refine broader propositions respecting American constitutional development. While the controversy is traditionally presented as a recurring two-sided struggle over the meaning of the Necessary and Proper Clause, with national bank advocates repeatedly pushing a “broad” reading of the provision and their opponents pressing for a “strict” understanding of it, the book reveals both that a larger and more diverse set of constitutional claims were deployed and that these claims varied over time. In particular, several post-1815 iterations of the national bank controversy featured claims respecting Congress’s ability to charter the institution pursuant to its power under the Coinage Clause of Article I, Section 8. The book demonstrates that much of the variation in constitutional claims between 1791 and 1832 is attributable to three factors: ideological strife within Jefferson and Madison’s Republican party, institutional change within the national bank itself, and economic stress that commenced during (but continued after) the War of 1812. The book argues that collectively, these three factors help to reinforce the broader proposition that American constitutional development is routinely driven as much by politics as by law. Those same factors also help to furnish more specific developmental propositions, including the idea that the terms of a long-running constitutional dispute may shift in response to change in the underlying object of disputation.

A major contribution to our understanding of slavery in the early republic, this book illuminates the white South's twisted and tortured efforts to justify slavery, focusing on the period from the drafting of the federal constitution in 1787 through the age of Jackson. Drawing on primary sources, including newspapers, government documents, legislative records, pamphlets, and speeches, this book recaptures the varied and sometimes contradictory ideas and attitudes held by groups of white southerners as they debated the slavery question. The book conveys the political, intellectual, economic, and social thought of leading white southerners, vividly recreating the mental world of the varied actors. The book also shows that there was not one antebellum South but many, and not one southern white mindset but several, with the debates over slavery in the upper South quite different in substance from those in the deep South.

Giving close consideration to previously neglected debates, this book challenges the common contention that slavery held little political significance in America until the Missouri Crisis of 1819. It demonstrates that slavery and politics were enmeshed in the creation of the nation, and in fact there was never a time between the Revolution and the Civil War in which slavery went uncontested. The American Revolution set in motion the split between slave states and free states, but the book explains that the divide took on greater importance in the early nineteenth century. The book examines the partisan and geopolitical uses of slavery, the conflicts between free states and their slaveholding neighbors, and the political impact of African Americans across the country. Offering a full picture of the politics of slavery in the crucial years of the early republic, it demonstrates that partisans and patriots, slave and free—and not just abolitionists and advocates of slavery—should be considered important players in the politics of slavery in the United States.

The life of Horace Holley (1781–1827) recalls a time of intellectual promise in the American republic. The New England–born, Yale-educated, Unitarian minister was an unlikely choice for the presidency of Transylvania University in Kentucky, the first college west of the Allegheny Mountains. Kentucky’s religious leaders questioned his orthodoxy; elected officials doubted his abilities; others simply found him arrogant and elitist. As president, however, Holley ushered in a period of sustained educational and cultural growth. Transylvania blossomed under his oversight and received national attention for its scientifically progressive, liberal curriculum. Lexington, Kentucky, the seat of Transylvania, benefited directly from his efforts. An influx of students and celebrated faculty lent the city a distinguished atmosphere and gave credibility to the appellation “Athens of the West.” But Holley’s story is greater than the sum of these experiences. As a young student at a rising American university, a Calvinist minister in a rural New England town, a Unitarian urbanite of national acclaim, a relocated northern Yankee in Kentucky, and president of the first and most prosperous university of the early American West, Holley symbolizes a period of rapid transformation. His experiences reflect a time when westward expansion and social progress ran against developing religious expectations and regional identities. Holley also figures prominently in the history of education in America. His innovations and missteps, successes and defeats, personal connections and bitter advisories make him an important figure not only in the evolution of an emerging state university but also in the emerging state of higher education in early America.

From 1793-1805, yellow fever devastated American port cities, killing thousands and prompting a desperate search for its cause. The question of the fever’s origin divided disease investigators into rival camps: “contagionists” thought it came from abroad and could be transmitted from person to person, while “localists” believed it arose from domestically-situated miasmas. Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds uses correspondence, newspaper and periodical articles, as well as published fever pamphlets to resurrect the course of the debate and to explore its significance in the history of American science. Localists gradually pushed the argument in their favor, winning more and more converts to their view, and the contagionists increasingly retired from the debate. Without proving that yellow fever arose from miasmas, localists rationalized it as a more plausible element in God’s world. Their success showcases the high value of common sense as an ingredient in scientific knowledge-making, and it shows that claims about disease causality were inseparable from other realms of thought, including assumptions the investigators made about how to develop reliable knowledge about the natural world, their understanding of God’s nature and activity, and their experiences with political conflict in the early American Republic. The localist victory came at a cost, however. Years of bitter fighting left rival parties wanting to exert greater top-down control over scientific knowledge-making. The breakdown exposed the fragility of common-sense science and facilitated the removal of science from the public sphere.