Chapter 1: America, Republic without Grace
Supplement to Endnotes
Endnote 1) For short elucidation on how revolutionary mythology, especially the deep veneration of George Washington, touched the lives of George Cole’s contemporaries, see here.
Cornelius Cole’s recollections of childhood make it clear that the Cole family and local children regarded military manhood with special esteem. The Cole family participated in the widely popular fourth-of-July celebrations where young boys would dress like soldiers, tote squirrel guns, and marvel at the aging veterans who were decked out in uniforms. Cornelius wrote as if these celebrations left the deepest marks in the minds of young boys. This jibes with Alfred Young’s claim that in Boston, at least, political celebrations were not nearly as popular as military ones. Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), pp. 132-33.
About the timing of George’s birth. If Rachel had weaned her two-year-old daughter off the breast, and her menses had returned, she likely missed a menstruation cycle some time in July, and suspected her pregnancy then.
Endnote 2) On how a young George might have first learned about the connections between manly success, land and interest, see 1.2 here.
Endnote 4) For more on the Revolution, meritocracy and ambition, see 1.4 here.
Endnote 6) The children studied Noah Webster’s Speller, and Jedidiah Morse’s popular textbook on geography, a massive work that included maps of the United States, its frontier, and the world, peppered with teachings about religion, military matters, the Constitution and history. The Morse book that Cole read was probably either, Geography Made Easy: Being an Abridgment of the American Universal Geography, or, The American Geography. On the title page of the 1806 edition of Geography Made Easy, it states “Among those studies which are usually recommended to young people, there are few that might be improved to better use than GEOGRAPHY.”
Endnote 8) Luther, who also grew up in a farming village in rural New York, went on from district school to attend the Pompey Academy. About the academy, a local paper would later boast, “it cannot be doubted that more men who have become celebrated in the highest seat of the State, legislators, judges, disciples of Blackstone [lawyers], M.D’s, army generals, clergymen, foreign ministers, poets, etc have been educated within these walls than any other school of its kind…” Cole’s parents successfully adopted this same strategy of using boarding schools and seminaries to move their sons from the plow toward legislative halls, medical school, courtrooms, and foreign consuls. George’s older brother, Cornelius, who seems to have led the way for his younger brothers, attended district school in rural Lodi, New York, then transferred to Ovid Academy, then to Lima Seminary, and finally Wesleyan University of Connecticut where George also attended. Cornelius Cole, Memoirs of Cornelius Cole (New York: McLoughlin Brothers, 1908), 1-3. About the Hiscock farm see: Census report of Richard Hiscock, New York State Census, Pompey, 1865. About Pompey Academy, see: Dwight H. Bruce, Onondaga's Centennial (Boston History Co., Publishers, 1896), 608-11.; Carroll E. Smith and Charles Carroll Smith, Pioneer Times in the Onondaga County (Syracuse, N.Y: C.W. Bardeen, 1904), 129-33., and Weekly Recorder, September 25, 1879.
Endnote 12) Books, schools and schooling introduced tensions in families between. See more on self-made men and education, see 1.12 here.
Endnote 15) On letter to James S. Griffin: What is interesting to me about George’s letter is that though he speaks of family death and depression he does not directly mention God a single time. James Griffing (to whom the letter was addressed) would go on to become a prominent Methodist minister. I have found no record of explicit religious talk until George had a breakdown of some sort in jail.
Endnote 18) On friendship and ambition: George, in a way, was fulfilling the vision of the nation’s Founders. His hopes to rise in the world had relied on friendship and horizontal connections, more than vertical ties to his father or traditional authority figures. A solid republic, the Founders believed, would be held together through friendship and natural affections, not coercive relationships of fathers, kings and masters. See: Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Anthony Rotundo, “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Autumn, 1989), pp. 1-25; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 75-91.
Endnote 19) On Calvinism, Work and Grace: Many antebellum Americans believed not only that they could earn their way into heaven, but also that with enough planning and good behavior, they could hasten the return of Christ to a purified earth, making Him come to them.
The middle third of the nineteenth century -- from George’s birth to the eve of when he left for war -- saw a climax of confidence in the individual’s ability to assure his or her own salvation, cleanse the body of its impurities, remake the world by severing traditional hierarchical ties, establish Zion, end slavery, reform drunkards and criminals, and move upward in purpose and influence. (George’s father and older brother were involved in health reform; it appears that both of them practiced the “water cure” and owned “The Magnetic Spring Cure” in Havana. See: History of Seneca County, New York, with Illustrations (Philadelphia: Everts, Ensign & Everts, 1876), p. 144.
The first Protestant colonists, especially Puritans, believed that humans could not work their way to heaven. This belief fostered a kind of obsession about ordinary work itself. According to Puritans’ Calvinist faith, believers could not force God’s saving hand no matter one’s effort or desire; instead, believers had to tarry their way through life’s valley of tears, searching daily for signs of their unearned salvation. Protestants didn’t have the ornate cathedrals and dense rituals that comforted Catholics and Anglicans with the promise of salvation. Instead, they had to interpret their lives for signs that promised their election. These signs could be as startling as an angelic vision or voice from heaven; but more often the signs were communicated through subtle, everyday assurances that God had elected them and shaped them into new creatures.
They believed that those whom God plucked from damnation would be transformed into steady laborers on earth. Diligent work, therefore, was a sign of grace. And prosperity was a sign of this diligence. As any good Protestant knew, every man had a “vocation,” a calling in ordinary life to some divinely infused labor. Colonial Americans, and especially their Yankee descendants, came to believe that labor was a blessing, a moral good. This zest for industry was a rejection of age-old beliefs that toil was a necessary evil, a curse placed on Adam and Eve as God banished them from the garden. A saved soul, they believed, could be assured of its salvation by reading the accumulation of ordinary details -- in the ornate furnishings of one’s home, the bounteous harvest yield, the clean lines under the craftsman’s awl, the regularly kept diary, the intricate patterns of needle work.
Divinely inspired labor ensured prosperity over time. Worldly success, therefore, naturally followed true conversion as prosperity required the same virtues -- like sobriety, self-control, steady dedication, and the delaying of gratification -- that God looked for in His redeemed children.
Yet, over time, the logic of Calvinism, manifested through this Protestant vision of work, invited tension between work and salvation. Within a century of New England’s founding -- during the days of Benjamin Franklin’s rise to prominence -- descendants began to prize the signs of grace more than grace itself. Grace was not quite as irresistible as its fruits. The proof of conversion became an end in itself. Franklin wrote a trove of aphorisms about hard work, rising early, and stretching one’s pennies. His teachings revealed how the praise of work could survive with scant praise given to God. See: Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee; Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Calvinism did much to create a nation of strivers. Its decline did even more. Over the first decades of the nineteenth century, belief in Calvinist predestination and human depravity came under attack; these beliefs after all ran crosswise with the Revolution’s Enlightenment doctrines about human perfectibility, and the supposed power of citizens to control their own destinies. In the decades surrounding George’s birth, many Christians adopted new ways of talking and thinking about salvation. A new breed of ministers and congregants focused more on the inherent goodness and perfectibility of the soul. Unlike Christians of previous generations, they believed that God’s sinning children held salvation in their own hands. Damnation was arrived at through foolish personal choices; heaven through good ones. Like their colonial forebears they claimed that the fruits of a Christian life -- esteem within the community, stable private and public relations, charitable acts, and material prosperity -- reflected a well-ordered soul. But crucially, as many evangelicals came to view it, individuals did the greater part of the ordering.
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Endnote 20) On revivals, the Erie Canal, etc. The fires of revival burned white hot in manufacturing and mill towns, and regions changed by commercialized agriculture -- places settled by toilers who, like their Puritan ancestors, transformed the wilderness into places of commercial prosperity. By the 1830s in western New York, manufacturers and landowners had spun webs of trade that connected them to distant cities and ports. (When George was born, the Erie Canal had just been completed, connecting the small village to the Hudson River, to New York City and beyond.) As folks along the Erie Canal expanded webs of trade, more and more of them severed intimate, paternalistic ties that once bound community and family together. Master craftsmen and apprentices had once slept, like sons and fathers, under the same roof. Increasingly, though, masters became mere shopkeepers. They employed wage earners who lived in separate parts of town. Instead of communing with their master behind the workbench over a dram of rum, hired men drank amongst themselves in grog shops after work.
The disappearance of fathers and masters who guided and watched their dependents, often requiring them to attend church and avoid vicious habits, made a gospel that celebrated free agency seductively useful. Men who had recently turned their dependents out from their immediate care wanted to believe that salvation came, not through tightly bound community, or stewardship, or societal covenants, but through individual effort. A gospel that promised spiritual mobility had obvious appeal to wage earners and all men and women bent on rising in the world. But such a gospel also drew in shop owners and new professionals seeking to shake their guilt over a world of dissolving obligations. Ministers and their willing converts changed the Puritan God into a loving, passive father who waited patiently to shower his grace upon those who lifted themselves closer to heaven. More than the need for church community, or trained clergy, believers needed a personal relationship with Jesus, and even he would not coerce them into righteousness. See: Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). Johnson’s creative work relies too heavily on class conflict to explain religious experience. And he has a hard time explaining why so many other kinds of folks in the region were drawn into the revivals. Perhaps by taking seriously what people shared -- a profound commitment to upward mobility -- he could have made some sense of why so many wage earners joined in. Johnson even admits that “a startling number of them seized opportunities to become masters themselves”-- suggesting that their enduring focus on uplift and their investment in self-making resonated deeply across class lines. The new evangelical message confirmed for men from various stations that men could and should rise according to their own merits. (see p. 140-41).
William McLoughlin, Jr., saw the early nineteenth-century awakenings as a way for antebellum northern society to adjust to its emerging emphasis on self-reliance and independence. William G. McLoughlin, Jr., Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York, 1959); Charles Sellers sees the market revolution through the prism of religion and the growing divide among “antinomian” Christians made up of subsistence farmers who valued democracy, egalitarianism, and communal love; “arminians,” on the other hand, were more cosmopolitan and tied salvation to their own labors. But it was evangelicals like Charles Grandison Finney who combined the self-discipline of Arminianism with the communal love of antinomians, preparing many Baptists and Methodists -- formerly holdouts from market society -- for emerging capitalism. Richard Carwardine, though, has shown how early nineteenth-century Methodists, though certainly poorer than other stripes of Christians gained respectability by midcentury. This was not because they were lured away from their anti-market principles by slick-talking prophets of the market, but because from the beginning Methodists emphasized self-generated conversion, industry and self-improvement. See: Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991); Richard Carwardine, “‘Antinomians’ and “Arminians’: Methodists and the Market Revolution” in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880, edited by Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), pp. 282-307.
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Endnote 22) More on Cole family religion. When George’s grandparents moved their family to the western frontier of the Empire State they moved beyond the weakened grasp of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Calvinist Reformed congregations were still recovering from the fallout and divisions of the Revolution. The Reformed Church -- scrambling to stave off decay in its base in the East -- could only watch as enthused evangelicals won over believers along the frontier in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. The Reformed Church’s ties to the Dutch language and intellectually rigorous Calvinism didn’t help. See: James W. Van Hoeven, “The American Frontier” in Piety and Patriotism: Bicentenniel Studies of the Reformed Church in America, 1176-1976, edited by James W. Van Hoeven, The Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America, No. 4 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1976), pp. 34-55.
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Endnote 23) Methodism and American Ambition, see: 1.23, here.
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Endnote 24) On Fisk’s tenure: Fisk implemented the textbook by Wayland, perhaps the most popular proponent of American Common Sense. See Richard Carwardine, “‘Antinomians’ and ‘Arminians’: Methodists and the Market Revolution” in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880, edited by Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 286; Wilbur Fisk, The Science of Education: An Inaugural Address, Delivered at the Opening of the Wesleyan University, In Middletown, Connecticut, September 21, 1831 (New York: McElrath & Bangs, 1832), pp.10-11. David Potts argues that despite the president’s sway many of Wesleyan’s early students still clung to a more classical education. Why this would be he does not explain. See: David B. Potts, Wesleyan University, 1831-1910: Collegiate Enterprise in New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, p.40.
About a decade before George’s arrival at Wesleyan, the college adopted an influential textbook authored by Francis Wayland. Wesleyan scholars were required to memorize vast portions of their textbooks. Wayland’s primer on “moral science” broke the human into orderly, comprehensible parts. All human actions and motives could be mapped out and thus directed toward duty and morality. Through studying the map of the human self and planning a personal course toward success, students imagined that they possessed the power to shape their own faculties. Wayland was perhaps the most prominent American disciple of Scottish Common Sense Realism (for American thinkers, a massively important school of thought from the Scottish Enlightenment). His work could be applied to the bustling world of business and opportunity that young American students needed confidence to brave. Wayland’s work provided the link between Scottish Enlightenment teachings and American entrepreneurial ambition.
On the kinds of textbooks used, see: David B. Potts, Wesleyan University, p.24; John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp.44-47; D.H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. vii-xiv, 35-42, 63-69, 133-145; Much of moral science was laced with evangelical language, but the teachings themselves based their claim to authority on science and reason, not biblical veracity or divine revelation.
Endnote 25) These statistics included graduates from 1833 to 1881 when George’s living peers would have been in their 50s and therefore still part of the equation. But these numbers may reflect a surge of business interests in post-Civil War generations. Though, as David Potts argues, early on (in the 1850s and 60s) an unusually large percentage of the students went into education and the ministry. If so, George was something of a bellwether for young men who followed him at Wesleyan. See: Alumni Record of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, Volumes 1881-1883 (Hartford: Case, Lockwood and Brainard Company, 1883.Third Edition), pp. 525-526; David B. Potts, Wesleyan University, p.43.
Endnote 28) More on President Olin: Olin was the virtual successor of Fisk after a short interim by Nathan Bangs. Stephen Olin, Early Piety. The Basis of Elevated Character. A Discourse to the Graduating Class of Wesleyan University, August 1850 (New York: Lane & Scott, 1851), pp. 4, 12-26, 30-31, 54; About Olin’s preaching style, see: The Life and Letters of Stephan Olin, Volume 2., pp. 105, 108-109.
Dr. Olin preached in Lima Seminary in 1843, perhaps while George was there. See: Alumni record of Wesleyan university, Middletown, Conn, Volumes 1881-1883, By Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.).
In what may seem absurd to us, Olin even evoked historical examples of the ways in which the French Revolution had called forth the vigor of young men like Talleyrand, William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte. Even the ambition of these men, he suggested, could be made holy. With conversion “the most vaulting ambition” could be deployed to serve Jehovah. In truth, the college president told the sons of farmers that Jesus could symbolically crown any worldly man, even the head of Napoleon (who literally crowned himself in a church).
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