THE MORALS OF THE CITY
When Robert W. Cushman explained to his Baptist congregation why he barred his pulpit to the foremost Baptist evangelist, Elder Knapp, he surprisingly argued (he was almost the first to say so) that a revival did no good in a city, that it was in fact an affliction. Whatever it may accomplish in agricultural areas, in a large town it only accelerates the “pleasure-party," which thereafter recoils from a fright proved to be groundless. If earnest revivalists were becoming worried about the inner contradictions of their movement, said Cushman, they had only to look at their failures in large towns. Boston had been subjected to its share of crusades, notably that of Lyman Beecher and of the Park Street Church, with the result that the morals of the city have been steadily deteriorating. “Even the temperance reform, which, up to that period, had been advancing, has since been manifestly on the decline."
Such blunt speaking gave a jolt to the whole benevolent wagon, because it brought the drivers up short before an obstacle they had hitherto pretended did not exist. Cushman was saying that the inveterate corruption of the city would resist the most generalized, the most undenominational of the Revival's benevolent enterprises. Even worse: the preaching of temperance in a city would only accelerate consumption.
There is no need here to retell the often-told story of the Temperance Societies, the Washingtonians, et cetera, which played a vigorous part in the social scene of the early nineteenth century. Had they not set in motion the impetus which carried through to the “great experiment" of the Eighteenth Amendment, they would be only curiosities. I need merely remark that within the framework of the Revival, temperance provided the platform on which the evangelical sects could most heartily come together. More than any other form of association, it was uncontroversial. As Charles Sprague said early in the movement, in 1827, we do not need laws, we speak only to “the unwritten majesty of Public Opinion." Here was the ideal issue on which the Revival could work with a minimum of internal friction, with a maximum of pious co-operation.
Political institutions, said Theodore Grimke in a moving address of 1833, supply no life-giving energy. We should rely solely on our socie-
ties, which are regenerating the country, “carrying it onward to a state of more beauty, grandeur, and felicity, of which the present generation can form but an imperfect estimate.” Because the mass of temperance literature was, of course, devoted to the deleterious effects of alcohol upon physiology, we are apt to dismiss it as cranky. We thus lose sight of the central motive in the movement, which was, as Grimke explicitly declared, to discover a cause that was simultaneously Christian and American. In it “the principle of individual responsibility and social influence has ever been manifested.” It makes every allowance for American individualism, but also holds persons responsible to the common stock. “The Temperance Reformation is peculiarly Christian, AMERICAN.” If there was a “reflex” action of missions upon consolidating the religious community, how much more would temperance unite them! “We appeal only to experience to show the power of union for the sake of momentous truths and the influence of proclaimed principles of utility and virtue to temper the waywardness, and finally take captive the hearts of man.” In essence, this is the program of the Revival, narrowed down to a single, a feasible issue. When we come to the innermost mechanism of the campaign, temperance reform was simply the most direct road toward the millennium. Intemperance, cried Albert Barnes in 1834, “stands in the way of revivals, and of the glories of the millennial morn. Every drunkard op poses the millennium; every dram-drinker stands in the way of it; every dram-seller stands in the way of it.”
Interestingly enough, this passage comes from a volume which Barnes entitled Intemperance in Cities. Colton, the year before, in his authoritative treatment of the History and Character of American Revivals of Religion, pointed out that they flourished principally in communities where “every body knows every body,” and Finney never made any bones about the effectiveness of a public spectacle in which all those present recognized at once the individual who surrendered to the anxious bench. By 1841, Barnes, in his equally authoritative Sermons on Revivals, was already speaking nostalgically. In country villages the infidel “usually stands alone.” All men know their neighbors, and are accustomed to sympathize with them; there “the joy of conversion will strike a responsive chord throughout the community.” But in New York or Philadelphia, alas, it often happens in a revival that one “stratum” of society is affected, but not the others. The combinations and alliances of sins are so complex that nothing can destroy them, not even the power of Cod in a revival. If this were really true—Barnes endeavored to show that nevertheless new methods might contend with the city—then the Revival was in danger of dis-
integration both from within and from without—from its internal confusions and its inability to cope with a growing challenge which neither Cane Ridge nor Connecticut had anticipated, the metropolis.
The tardiness of the evangelicals in realizing that the city presented an immovable obstacle to their irresistible force is, naturally, an index of the overwhelmingly agrarian character of their society. The mind of America was everywhere slow, or deliberately reluctant, to admit the fact of urbanization. The literary intelligence, as we shall see, was likewise hesitant; it is not, interestingly enough, until this same decade of the 1840’s, when the revivalists confess their dilemma, that a group of New York writers endeavor to make capital out of the buzzing confusion, and betray by their bumblings that they have no technique for mastering it, though by this time all Americans, including most of the religious, were reading Charles Dickens, and wallowing in the sights and smells of London. Still, the notion that these burgeoning American cities were already such cesspools as that displayed in Oliver Twist was difficult to admit, even though every respectable citizen knew of the existence of the Five Points, and his New York hosts in 1842 arranged that Dickens should visit the noisome slum.
There had, of course, been premonitions both in literature and in the Revival. Finney came to Philadelphia and New York in 1830 determined to assault the Devil in his citadel. Early in the century there were infused into the American imagination forebodings about what ultimately their "empire” might become; both preachers and poets expressed their dread of its irresistible course, until the worry had become a staple of conversation and pictorial representation. But it took the evangelical mentality another decade or so fully to comprehend the danger. In 1853 (while Walt Whitman was composing Leaves of Grass) E. H. Chapin set it forth in a series of lectures, Moral Aspects of City Life, which in the realm of religion is as telling a recognition of the urban onslaught as was, in the theater, Benjamin Baker’s A Glance at New York of 1848.
Though the Reverend Mr. Chapin would certainly object to having his book linked to so bawdy a play, still, just as the adventures of Mose the Fireman broke with the succession of romances which had dominated the stage and positively reveled in the vulgarity of New York, so Chapin discarded the literary convention that had dominated his age, according to which virtue dwelt in the country and cities were utterly vile. On the contrary, he said, "the interest of the city is as superior to that of the country, as humanity to nature; as the soul to the forms and forces of matter; as the great drama of existence is to the theatre in which it is enacted.” However, by the time he has unrolled the
panorama of New York, where conventionality stifles natural impulse, where men are driven by a passion for flaring wealth, where substantial citizens are heedless of their neighbors “in the Lower Depths," and where intemperance “dilates into the horribly sublime," we find that in spite of his obvious delight in the city he must declare eternal enmity between it and the Spirit of Christ. As more than one revivalist sadly admitted, while depravity is the same whether in the forests or in the city, still “in a metropolis, sin is more crowded and overt."
In the early 1850's evangelicals grew more and more gloomy. Perhaps the Methodists, who as Bishop Bangs said were “begotten, fostered, and grew up under the influence of the spirit of the revival," were the most apprehensive. The original Methodists had proclaimed their gospel with the sound of trumpets, said Abel Stevens in 1855, but what instruments have we that can be heard in the city? He proposed that circuit riders on the old model be concentrated in the cities, and that preaching deal more with actualities of urban life—gambling, business morality. But little or no progress was apparently made. “What remedy for these sad defects?" moaned J. T. Hendrick in 1857, and answered that obviously nothing but a true revival “can save the church from the fatal spell by which Satan now holds her bound under the delusive spirit of worldliness." The prospect was all the darker because “there never was a time, since the settlement of the country, when the churches have been in such danger from worldly prosperity." Religion had flowered resplendently among the gaunt hills of Kentucky, but amid the opulence of New York, what hope could there be for even its survival?