7

Religion and Women

Toward a More Compassionate Home Life

All eyes in the nation turned toward Kentucky in the summer of 1801; the topic of the day was the great evangelical revival under way six miles east of Paris at the Presbyterian Cane Ridge Meetinghouse. Everyone was invited, and Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist ministers spoke to large crowds that gathered—as many as twenty-five thousand on some afternoons. The meetings were extremely emotional, but many converts were faithful to their commitment the rest of their lives. Two new denominations, the Christian Church and the Disciples of Christ, were born as a result, and Baptist and Methodist churches greatly increased in membership. In those days of patriarchal home life, the “king” at the head of the home was never to weep—it was unmanly. But, at Cane Ridge, heads of households by the thousands dropped to their knees in repentance and in public for the first time had streams of tears running down their cheeks. The great beneficiaries were their wives and women who married young men converted at the revival because from that day forward converted husbands tempered their rule with a love that had been absent previously. Women also received the personal fulfillment of experiencing religious faith themselves, the comfort of church membership, and a feeling of being completely involved in a meeting that had great impact on the nation.¹

Almost as soon as Kentucky settlers made a clearing in the forest, they participated in a religious service; on Sunday, May 28, 1775, under an elm tree at Boonesborough, Anglican minister John Lyth led a worship service that included a prayer for the king of England. After the Revolutionary War, some religious groups, such as the Baptists, moved to Kentucky to escape persecution in the East.² However, observers of Kentucky in the 1790s commented on the lack of interest in religion on the part of many residents. While Kentuckians themselves were not irreligious, a mix of superstition, animism, and Christianity seemed to emerge in many areas. Baptist preacher David Barrow described the religious persuasion of Kentuckians as “anythingarians” in 1795. As the nineteenth century approached and the numbers of residents in the state increased, conditions for a revival movement came together. The result was the birth of the Great Revival. The effects of the movement created religious diversity within Kentucky and played a major role in the shaping of American religious history.³

Kentucky's revival movement began, not in the center of the state, but in the Green River area in western Kentucky. As historian John Boles pointed out, Logan County in 1800 was ready for a significant religious awakening.⁴ There was a sense of expectation, and the population was young. In addition, recent immigrants to the state came from areas where organized church activities were an important part of life, and many of these migrants looked to join another church. Into this atmosphere came James McGready, a Presbyterian minister born in western Pennsylvania in 1760. McGready was licensed to preach in North Carolina in 1788 and became known for very fiery and pointed sermons to both the plain folk and planters of Orange County. For example, in his sermon “Terms of Discipleship,” he declared: “All mankind are passing to the eternal world—hastening to heaven or hell—as fast as time, with his rapid flight, can bear them.” Most people, he said, seek pleasure and happiness in this world, but a minority, “a lonely few, are seeking happiness beyond the grave—seeking an inheritance—a kingdom, an eternal crown of unfading glory.” His congregants were not all in favor of such preaching, and, after several acts of vandalism that McGready interpreted as death threats, he moved to Kentucky in 1796 to join several former parishioners in Logan County. By the next year, he was preaching in three local churches—Gasper River, Muddy River, and Red River.⁵

McGready prayed, and, as he rode the circuit of the three churches, attendance increased in the spring and summer months for the next two years, and he began to feel a sense of spiritual renewal in his congregations. Then suddenly, one Sunday in July 1799 at the Red River Church, several people came under conviction and fell to the ground. It happened again at Gasper River in August, and word spread through the county that people were being converted and baptized. When warm weather returned in June 1800, McGready scheduled a combined meeting of all three churches in the Red River Meetinghouse, and everything seemed normal. McGready invited the participation of his fellow Presbyterian ministers John Rankin and William Hodge, and services spread over several days. On the fourth day of the meeting, John and William McGee stopped as they were passing through the region. William, who had earlier been converted by McGready, was asked to speak but was so overcome by emotion he could not rise. His brother John, a Methodist minister, stood and began to exhort the assembled crowd. Shouts and cries filled the air, and some of the congregation fell to the ground in a semiconscious state. At the conclusion of the meeting, word spread through the countryside, and McGready called for a second meeting at the Gasper River Church the following month. The last weekend in July at Gasper River the first “camp meeting” was held. The crowds grew larger each of the three days of the meeting. The Kentucky Synod sent representatives to investigate. The events of that July would come to shape religious activity throughout Kentucky and much of the nation for the next several years. In fact, the camp meeting became a well-known feature of churches throughout the South well into the twentieth century.⁶

In the central portion of Kentucky, the Presbyterian minister Barton W. Stone heard about the revivals in Logan County; he traveled there in 1801 to witness a meeting. He returned with the desire to re-create such a meeting in Bourbon County in August 1801. He sent out publicity, but, because word of the revivalism in western Kentucky had already stirred interest, it did not take much for a large crowd to gather when the meeting began on August 8 at Cane Ridge. Crowd estimates ranged from a low of ten thousand to a high of twenty-five thousand. While the meeting had been organized and was hosted by the Presbyterians, an ecumenical slate of ministers expounded the word of God to those gathered. The ministerial contingent also included African American ministers who spoke to the African Americans in attendance. The physical manifestations that are typically associated with revivalism began here. People threw themselves to the ground, some appeared as dead, others shouted or grunted, and yet others wept both for sorrow and for joy. The revivalism of Cane Ridge spread throughout Kentucky into Tennessee and, ultimately, throughout the South and the rest of the nation. Protestantism was greatly strengthened in Kentucky and the Greater South and was dominated by the spirit of religious revivalism. John Boles pointed out that the southern mind-set, which emphasized individualism, localism, and the importance of conversion, derived from the revivalism of this period.⁷

While the Great Revival began at Presbyterian meetings, the Presbyterians did not reap the benefits. After investigating the physical manifestations of the revivals, the synod attempted to put an end to such displays and take control of the conduct of the meetings. Several Presbyterian ministers condemned the emotionalism of the movement and objected to the sermons of the uneducated Baptist and Methodist ministers. The result was a split in the Presbyterian Church. Those who favored the enthusiasm of the revivals, who did not hold to the necessity of a credentialed clergy, and who looked on predestination in a different way were called New Lights. Among them were Barton W. Stone, Richard McNemar, Robert Marshall, John Dunlavy, and John Thompson.⁸ McNemar was called before the synod to explain his preaching on the nature of salvation in September 1803. When the group revoked his authority to preach, McNemar, Stone, and five other dissenters declared their independence from the synod. The dissenters formed the Springfield Presbytery, but McNemar still chafed under the hierarchical nature of the denomination. He met Reverend Rice Haggard of Virginia, who had long advocated that all denominations end and that believers call themselves simply Christian. McNemar liked the idea and worked to support the Christian Church until joining the Shakers in 1806.⁹

The Presbyterian Church had already attempted to respond to the revival movement when in 1802 it divided the Transylvania Presbytery in two. The newly formed Cumberland Presbytery, which encompassed the southern portion of the Transylvania Presbytery, including Logan County, was controlled by leaders who approved of the revivals, and they appointed ministers without traditional credentials for ordination. These actions led to increased tensions and problems with the synod, and, in October 1806, the Cumberland Presbytery was abolished. While some ministers like James McGready bent to the will of the synod, others rejected the synod and left to organize the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in 1810. The group hoped to be recognized by the denomination, but its efforts failed, and in 1813 it formed the Cumberland Synod with the Cumberland, Logan, and Elk presbyteries. By 1850, the denomination had a membership near seventy-five thousand.¹⁰

Barton W. Stone, who opposed Richard McNemar's extremist move into Shakerism, continued to preach New Light theology. In 1824, Stone met Alexander Campbell, a Scotch-Irish minister who with his father, Thomas, came to the United States in 1807. The two rejected ecclesiastical organizations and missionary societies in an effort to rebuild the traditional New Testament church in unity, but they joined the Redstone Baptist Association in Pennsylvania in 1813 in an attempt to reform the denomination from within. By 1830, however, the Campbells' belief and teaching that the act of baptism was not just a symbol but a requirement for a sinner's regeneration drove them from the Baptist association. Barton Stone recognized similarities between his own theology and a desire for Christian unity and that of Alexander Campbell. On January 1, 1832, the Stonites, known as Christians, and Alexander Campbell's larger Disciples of Christ merged at Hill Street Church in Lexington. Three different religious sects ultimately emanated from the merger—Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Christian Church, and the Church of Christ. The Disciples of Christ numbered about 22,000 in the United States at the time of the merger, and they grew to 192,000 by 1860, with 45,000 members in Kentucky.¹¹

The religious denominations that most benefited from the Kentucky revivals were the Baptists and the Methodists. In Kentucky, membership of the six Baptist associations tripled from 1800 to 1802, and the district membership of the Methodist Church in Kentucky and Tennessee likewise increased threefold. The nature of these denominations appealed to many on the frontier. The lack of a central hierarchy and the independent nature of Baptist congregations allowed for congregations to develop with varying beliefs, particularly along the lines of Calvinism or Arminianism.¹² Methodist and Baptist churches were very democratic in nature and held great appeal to both young men and young women on the frontier. Their view of equality before God and the openness of salvation for all afforded both groups a measure of freedom within a hierarchical and patriarchal society. Stephen Aron wrote: “For people enmeshed in webs of deference, the affective bonds of evangelical churches were liberating indeed. Gone were ceremonies designed to confer honor and connote rank; in were rituals that celebrated Christian fellowship, without regard to age, sex, and sometimes even race.” James D. Smith wrote: “Rebirth meant making a Christian man gentler, more relationship-centered than the one pursuing public praise for his skill at macho self-assertion.”¹³

The revival movement at Gasper River and Cane Ridge opened the door to nontraditional evangelical denominations. The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming, known as the Shakers, came to the United States in 1774 when the founder, Ann Lee, and several followers arrived in New York from England. Lee, who had joined a group of Shaking Quakers in England, professed to be in direct contact with God, and this belief in direct communication with the Almighty became a basic tenet of the Shaker faith. Other beliefs included celibacy, communal living, pacifism, and the perfectibility of human beings. Shakers believed that the Millennium had begun with the life of Ann Lee, whom many viewed as the second incarnation of Jesus Christ in female form. Lee was imprisoned in England for her disruption of an Anglican church, and she came to America seeking religious freedom. The first Shaker community in America began near Albany, New York, but Lee died in 1784 and left her followers in charge of expanding the movement. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Shakers had several communities spread throughout New York and New England, and leaders began to look westward for new converts.¹⁴ Attracted by reports of the unfettered enthusiasm of the Great Revival in Kentucky, Shaker missionaries Benjamin Seth Youngs, Issachar Bates, and John Meacham left New Lebanon, New York, for Kentucky in the spring of 1805. Malcolm Worley, a very enthusiastic New Light, was one of the first to speak with the missionaries, and he accepted their message of millennialism, perfection, and Christian love. Richard McNemar, a New Light dissenter who had already left the Presbyterian Church, found the message of the Shakers attractive. He and New Light leaders Matthew Houston and John Dunlavy joined the United Society of Believers. McNemar brought his congregation into the fold, and the Presbyterian minister John Rankin joined with his congregation and large family, which consisted of him, his wife, and their ten children.¹⁵

Forty-four converts signed the first family covenant to form a Shaker community in Mercer County in 1806. They agreed to communal ownership of property and to support each other. This first community, known as Shawnee Run, began with 140 acres given by convert Elisha Thomas. The group moved to a nearby location in 1808 and began to call the community Pleasant Hill. The community prospered and purchased adjoining land, ultimately owning 4,369 acres. At its height in the 1830s, Pleasant Hill had approximately five hundred members. The Shakers believed in celibacy and communal living; therefore, when converts entered the community, they were separated according to gender, and all property they brought with them was shared by the larger group. By 1812, the Pleasant Hill community had divided into three “families”—East, Centre, and West. A North family existed as a place where new converts began the process of assimilation into the Shaker community before being placed in an existing family group. Families were headed by two elders and elderesses, and all work was directed by deacons and deaconesses. The “family” was a semiautonomous unit with its own residences, barns, shops, livestock, and fields. Overall economic and production planning was made by trustees at the community level, while each family controlled the cultivation and production of goods.¹⁶ At Pleasant Hill, they grew tobacco, wheat, rye, corn, hemp, and flax. Orchards and vegetable gardens made the community self-sufficient but also allowed for surplus crops to be sold to locals or preserved for the winter and for sale to distant markets. Beef cattle, milk cows, hogs, and sheep brought more income to the community in the 1830s than either the crops or the mills. The quality breeding program of the Pleasant Hill Shakers was as well-known as their seed and furniture.¹⁷

Richard McNemar, the New Light leader who converted to Shakerism, moved to the Green River area after the founding of Pleasant Hill along with converted minister John Rankin and twenty others from the Gasper River Church. In 1807, they organized the second Shaker community in Kentucky, located at South Union in Logan County. While South Union was not as large in population as Pleasant Hill, having about 350 members in the 1840s and 1850s, it did have more significant landholdings—approximately six thousand acres—on which corn, oats, wheat, hemp, and flax were grown. There were also apple and peach orchards as well as trees for the production of maple sugar. South Union Shakers also involved themselves in several industries, including sawmills, a gristmill, a fulling mill, and a tanyard. Locally, the Shakers sold fruit, cider, cheese, bread, and vegetables.¹⁸

Much of the income that the Shakers lived on came from such sales and the numerous trips made by community trustees, beginning in the 1820s, to sell surplus goods. As the market revolution began to sweep America, select Shakers participated to the fullest extent, taking trips on foot, by horse and carriage, and by flatboat to local and regional markets and markets as distant as New Orleans. Goods produced for the market included brooms, hats, flour, herbs, fabric, baskets, barrels, bonnets, and books on Shaker theology. The South Union Shakers came to be known for their thriving sale of seed and preserves. The irony is that, as the Shakers took advantage of the growing market, ultimately the same market in turn limited their ability to compete as the nineteenth century progressed. Machinery in wool production and woodworking drove overall prices down and increased supply, while the ability of the steamboat to transport goods faster and to new areas made Shaker handmade goods barely profitable.¹⁹ As one study concluded: “The crushing weight of American progress itself was against the order.” The Shakers adopted the use of new machinery, particularly farm implements, but the changes in markets in combination with westward expansion caused many younger Shakers to leave the community following the Civil War.²⁰

Shaker beliefs and practices attracted community attention and sometimes government action. As pacifists, the Shakers did not participate in the War of 1812. At both Pleasant Hill and South Union, Shaker men drafted by the militia paid for substitutes or a one-hundred-dollar fine for not serving. At South Union, four to five hundred soldiers moving south caused a stir when they camped near the village. A group of about forty militiamen entered South Union looking for Native Americans who were rumored to be hiding in the meetinghouse, and several rode their horses up and down the streets making a loud commotion.²¹ But trouble for Shaker communities did not just stem from their pacifist views. Many Kentuckians held suspicions of the sect because it practiced celibacy and communal living. Much of early-nineteenth-century Kentucky was still a frontier where every member of a family played a significant role in survival. For Shakers to look on all sexual intercourse, and not just illicit sex, as immoral was something many Kentuckians with large families could not understand. Also, the Shakers' emphasis on gender equality and Ann Lee as the second incarnation of Christ set many male-dominated churches and families against the group. Responding to pamphlets and newspaper editorials attacking the Shakers as “deluded” and a threat to democracy, members of the Kentucky legislature attempted to place restrictions on them and their practices. In 1811, a bill introduced in the General Assembly to prohibit the education of Shaker children in groups failed to pass. The next year, however, the legislature enacted a law permitting spouses of individuals who joined the Shaker order to divorce and obtain custody of their children and possession of some of their property.²²

The communal aspect of Shaker life created problems, not only for spouses who did not join the order, but also for Shakers who decided to leave. A key Shaker tenet was that, when a person joined the order, all private property was given to the community and controlled by the legal stewards or trustees. In the late 1820s, several members of the Pleasant Hill community decided to leave the group, and they wanted to reclaim the property. Society elders refused, and the former members sued the community in the Lincoln County Circuit Court. They were emboldened by a law enacted in 1828 authorizing civil proceedings against communal organizations, a law obviously directed against the Shakers that responded to renewed attacks on them in newspapers after the War of 1812. The law gave the county sheriff authority to post a summons on the door of the organization's meetinghouse. The Shakers objected on the grounds that the civil actions violated freedom of conscience, and the leaders of the group realized that the community would go bankrupt if it had to return property and even possibly wage compensation to former members. As the meetinghouse door at Pleasant Hill became littered with notices from the sheriff, the community was taken to court in the case of Gass and Banta v. Whilhite in the Lincoln County Circuit Court on April 6, 1829. The case was dismissed in 1831 because the plaintiffs failed to produce evidence in support of their case, but an appeal was made to the Kentucky Court of Appeals. Here, the court ruled that the plaintiffs had no right to make a claim for their property, and the court sustained the idea that the Shakers were a communal organization. The Shakers were relieved, knowing that their bankruptcy by future litigation had been averted; however, they paid one thousand dollars in legal fees, and, even though not required by the courts, they paid the plaintiffs thirteen thousand dollars.²³

The Shakers had no formal position on the institution of slavery, yet in their actions and personal writings a distinct antislavery stand emerges. Both South Union and Pleasant Hill hired slaves from local owners to work in the kitchen, in the shops, or as farm laborers. Several converted, and one African American woman rose to the position of kitchen deaconess. African Americans were treated as equals during worship but appear to have lived in separate buildings. The Shakers would purchase some slaves in order to prevent their sale further south, and these were ultimately freed. At South Union, manumissions began in 1819, and the last ones took place in the 1830s.²⁴ As the slavery debate heated up in the 1840s, the Shakers' apparent stand on the issue left the group open to attack. Around Christmas 1843 in South Union, several windows were broken and shots fired in the early evening hours by a group of men. The demonstration moved to the cabin of several South Union freedmen, and attempts were made to frighten them into leaving. The evening ended with shouts, clanging, and the playing of a fife through the streets.²⁵

The Civil War was difficult for the Shakers, not only because of their pacifist beliefs, but also because the war would destroy the southern markets to which both Kentucky communities had sold numerous goods for the past half century. At South Union, Shakers feared that their pacifist stand would not be recognized by the larger community, which held a distinct Confederate sentiment. They realized that, in order to maintain their conscientious-objector position, they must treat both sides of the conflict the same. As early as 1861, South Union Shakers fed Confederate cavalry troops for free and then later did the same for Federal troops. Realizing that they could not afford to offer free meals and still survive, they began to charge seventy-five cents per soldier for overnight lodging and two meals. Government receipts for payment were occasionally issued to the Shakers, but they were just as often not paid for their hospitality. At Pleasant Hill, Shakers heard rumors in July 1862 that Confederate cavalry troops under John Hunt Morgan would soon attack the settlement. Horses were hidden or driven away to prevent their capture, but, when Morgan's men arrived, they requested only a meal before moving on. In October 1862, the community served meals to both Confederate and Federal troops before and after the Battle of Perryville, which was fought only seventeen miles away. The Shakers estimated that ten thousand troops came through Pleasant Hill following the battle, and they had served between eight and nine thousand meals without charge.²⁶ The difficulties of the war, the changing markets, and changes in society led to a drop in numbers at both Pleasant Hill and South Union until they finally stopped operating as working Shaker communities in the twentieth century.²⁷

The Catholic Church in Kentucky did not face as many difficulties during the Civil War because it had not taken many political stands in the years leading up to the war. Early Catholic settlers emigrated to Kentucky from Maryland, the earliest known being the William Coomes family, who settled at Harrodsburg in 1775. A few Catholics had lived in Kentucky without any clergy or church for a decade before the first priest, the Reverend Charles Maurice Whelan, arrived in 1787. However, the relationship between pastor and parishioners did not go well, and Whelan left Kentucky in 1790. Events in Europe proved beneficial to the small community of Catholics in the state. The French Revolution led many Catholic priests to flee the Continent and come to America. Bishop John Carroll, who led the Catholic Church in the United States from Baltimore, sent Stephen Theodore Badin, the first priest ordained in the United States, to Kentucky in 1793. Badin, himself a Frenchman fleeing the Revolution, arrived in Baltimore to finish his studies at St. Mary's Seminary and was paired with an older priest, Michael Bernard Barrieres, to minister to the growing number of Catholics in Kentucky. The two men walked to Pittsburgh, where they obtained passage on a flatboat to Limestone; they then finished their trek to Lexington on foot. They arrived in late November 1793, and Badin celebrated his first mass in Kentucky the next Sunday. After only four months, Barrieres returned east and left Badin alone to care for the approximately three hundred Catholic families in the state. Most Catholics lived in Nelson and Scott counties, and Badin originally settled in Scott County, where he opened a chapel for worship. He soon moved to Nelson County, which had a larger Catholic population. Like the early Baptist and Methodist ministers on the frontier, Badin adopted the method of traveling great distances to visit the homes of Catholics and offer the sacraments, hear confessions, baptize babies, officiate at weddings, and perform other ministries. The only other priest within hundreds of miles was John Rivet at Vincennes in the Indiana Territory. Indeed, Badin's area of responsibility was larger than the nation of France, where he was born. A few years later, in the late 1790s, he received help when three other priests arrived. However, by 1803, two had died, and the third had left because of his unpopular Federalist and abolitionist views and because he was a poor horseman and, thus, became discouraged by circuit riding.²⁸

As the Great Revival increased the numbers of Baptists and Methodists in Kentucky, the number of Catholics in the state also increased steadily after 1805 through natural growth, additional immigration from Maryland, and, in later years, the arrival of German and Irish immigrants in Louisville. In 1805, the help Badin so desperately needed arrived when Reverend Charles Nerinckx came to Kentucky. Nerinckx was born in Belgium, studied in France, and was serving as a priest in France when he came under persecution and sought refuge in America in 1804. Bishop Carroll sent him to Georgetown College to study English and then quickly moved him to Kentucky to work with Badin. Nerinckx left Baltimore in the spring of 1805 with a group of Trappist monks on their way to Kentucky to open a monastery in Washington County. Anxious to get to his post, Nerinckx left the slow-moving monks at Bedford, Pennsylvania, and purchased a horse to ride on to Kentucky. Badin was overjoyed with his arrival. The two men traveled together to visit all fifteen congregations in the state before Badin turned over leadership of six of them to Nerinckx. Nerinckx was well liked, had a special rapport with the children in his congregations, and worked very hard throughout the state, ultimately building fourteen new churches before he left for Missouri in 1824.²⁹

The Trappist monks that Nerinckx had started with from Baltimore finally arrived in Louisville in September 1805. The group purchased land in Clementsville and opened the first Catholic school in Kentucky along with a clock and watch works. The spartan lifestyle of the Trappists was made more difficult by the hard life on the frontier. The group practiced a self-imposed silence and slept only four hours a day on boards with a single blanket and one canvas pillow. A diet of plain food and long fasts resulted in severe illness for many. They abandoned the Kentucky settlement and moved north of St. Louis to Monk's Mound in the spring of 1809 but returned to France in 1813 after the fall of Napoléon. Another group of Trappists emigrated from France to Kentucky in 1848 and settled in Nelson County, where they opened Our Lady of Gethsemani.³⁰

In 1808, Rome made Baltimore the archdiocese of the United States and established dioceses in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and the first inland diocese at Bardstown. Pope Pius VII appointed Benedict Joseph Flaget the first bishop of Bardstown. The diocese was very large and stretched from the Allegheny Mountains in the east to the Mississippi River in the west and from Tennessee in the south to Michigan in the north. Flaget, born in France in 1763, had served as a priest at Vincennes, Indiana, and as a teacher at Georgetown College in Washington, DC, at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, and in Cuba. He arrived in Kentucky in the spring of 1811 and lived for a year with Badin in a log cabin in the part of Washington County that formed Marion County in 1834. Flaget moved to Bardstown the next year and lived there until 1841, when the pope moved the diocese headquarters to Louisville. He established good relations with Protestant groups in the region. He was a slaveholder but expressed concern that African Americans be extended pastoral care. He served as bishop until his death on February 11, 1850. His successor, Martin John Spalding, wrote: “As a good and devoted laborer in the religious field, the late bishop Flaget was, we think, entitled to the high regard of all Christians. It is true that he was very anxious for the growth of his own sect, but his dedication to what he considered duty was a virtue of so much richness and so much luster as to be worthy of all admiration.”³¹ Under his leadership, the church increased in membership, opened schools, and trained numerous clergy and missionaries throughout the country.³²

The good relations Catholics and Protestants developed in Kentucky continued throughout most of the nineteenth century. With the small number of Catholics in the state, few Protestants feared papal influence on local or state politics. However, an outbreak of nativist sentiment grew in the early 1850s as the German and Irish populations of Louisville increased. By 1855, almost half of Louisville's sixty thousand people were foreign born. When in 1849 the German newspaper Louisville Anzeiger advocated the continued use of the German language and German customs, many citizens began to take note of the immigrants among them. In 1853, a visit by Archbishop Gaetano Bedini to the United States sparked riots, and a protest occurred when he stopped in Louisville. He was preceded by ex-priest Giacinto Achilli, who delivered a series of inflammatory speeches at the Louisville YMCA alleging that the Vatican was opposed to civil and religious liberty. During the archbishop's visit, some shouted protests, and he was burned in effigy. The tense feelings had been further fueled by Bishop Spalding's request that Catholic students be permitted to use the Douay Version of the Bible in Louisville public schools rather than the King James Version.³³

Anti-Catholic and antinativist sentiment reached its climax with the “Bloody Monday” election day riots on August 6, 1855. Scattered attacks on German and Irish citizens took place with between nineteen and twenty-two dead; Irish homes were burned, and Bishop Spalding turned the keys to the Cathedral of the Assumption over to the mayor for civil protection.³⁴ Many in the Catholic community called for retaliation, and rumors abounded that the Catholics had arms and men in waiting to exact revenge, but Spalding, who had taken over as bishop after the death of Flaget in 1850, called for reconciliation. He wrote a statement calling for peace that was published in the Louisville Journal on August 8, 1855:

To all whom the influence of my voice can in any way reach, I beg to say that I entreat them, in the name of Jesus Christ, the God of Peace, to abstain from all violence, to remain quietly at home or attending to their business, to keep away from all excited assemblies, and if they think they have been injured to return good for evil, and to pray for those who have wronged them…. I entreat all to pause and reflect, to commit no violence which they would regret in their cooler moments, to believe no idle rumors, and to cultivate that peace and love which are the characteristics of the religion of Christ. We are to remain on earth but a few years; let us not add to the necessary ills of life those more awful ones of civil feuds and bloody strife.³⁵

Throughout the city, the tensions subsided, and other issues, such as slavery, began to take precedence over anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant feelings. Bishop Spalding's nonpolitical stance, a hallmark of his term, served to keep the church in good standing. Spalding also did not choose a side in the slavery debate, and, when the Civil War came, Kentucky Catholics did not suffer any split over the issue.

The issue of slavery did, however, cause divisions within denominations in the country as a whole. The Presbyterians split into northern and southern alliances in 1836–1838, while the Baptists and Methodists broke apart in 1845.³⁶ Christianity gave great meaning to the lives of many African Americans, and, with the growth of an African American subculture in the state, more slaves may have sought out church membership as a means of support and companionship among the African American community.³⁷ As early as the Great Revival in 1801, African Americans involved themselves in worship services and church activities. Most joined Baptist and Methodist groups, which attracted poorer congregants and had simpler, more emotional services. In Kentucky, blacks and whites usually worshiped together, but the blacks sat in the church balcony or a segregated section at the back of the church building. The belief that all persons were equal in the eyes of God played out in the fact that both blacks and whites worshiped together, took communion together, and were often baptized together, and records indicate that church discipline was also meted out equally. In some churches, black members participated in votes pertaining to church business. Masters did not require regular church attendance for slaves, so, clearly, active participation in church activities was personally meaningful to African Americans both free and slave.³⁸ However, Marion B. Lucas has pointed out that African American church members held no illusions concerning their real position within the church body. They understood what it meant to sit in the back and to be told at the end of the service: “Now you black ones, if you wish to commune, come down.” The lack of respect for black families was evidenced in the lack of condemnation of white church members who separated slave families through sale. And, although they could not call for the church discipline of white members, African Americans were often expelled on the issues of adultery and abandonment.³⁹

Most African tribes believed in a supreme being and lesser gods. When white slaveowners introduced Christianity to slaves from a sense of duty and as a means of social control, the idea of one God appealed to many Africans. God was viewed as good and providing comfort for those in trouble. African religions did not have any orthodox texts and, therefore, could develop in many ways, but African religious teaching stressed moral conduct that included hard work, kindness, truthfulness, and honesty. Religion was an integral part of the African way of life, and evangelical religion appealed to many slaves. After 1800, with the end of the international slave trade and the acculturation of most of the black population of the United States, more African Americans turned to Christianity.⁴⁰

In the early nineteenth century, African Americans desired to hold services for themselves. Black ministers, men with charismatic personalities and strong leadership abilities, began teaching in Sunday schools. These men would visit members of the black community to pray for and offer comfort to the sick, and they would look for opportunities to preach in unauthorized services in the nearby woods. Eventually, black ministers received official recognition by the white community and were ordained by a council of white ministers. Black preachers obtained freedoms and benefits that many other blacks did not have. A talented and “called” slave minister might be set free by a religious owner, and black preachers traveled to provide services to both the slave and free black communities.⁴¹

Most African Americans remained members of white churches in Kentucky until after the Civil War. But, in the nineteenth century, several separate black congregations emerged from white churches when the African American membership grew in number and sought a measure of autonomy. The oldest black church in the state was in Lexington. Services began in the 1780s in the cabin of a slave named Peter who is believed to be the first African American preacher in Kentucky. Peter, also known as “Old Captain,” began the First African Baptist Church in 1801 despite opposition from the white Baptist church. However, the growth of the congregation to over three hundred members created opposition in the white Baptist association, which granted only partial recognition to the black church. “Old Captain” served as pastor until he was replaced by London Ferrill, a former slave, in 1820. Although the change in leadership initially split the church, under Ferrill's guidance the church was admitted to the Elkhorn Baptist Association in 1824 and grew into the largest church in the state, with 1,828 members.⁴²

Other black congregations appeared throughout the state. Georgia-born Henry Adams came to Louisville in 1829 and began as the minister to the black members of First Baptist Church. Adams, who was ordained in 1825 at the age of eighteen, studied hard and became proficient at biblical languages. The black membership grew under his leadership, and, by 1841, it totaled half the population of the church. At that point, Adams and other black leaders met with the white leadership to draw up articles of separation. The black committee members affirmed the tenets of faith and church covenant, while the white committee members agreed to provide protection for the black church while allowing its members to direct their “internal affairs in their own way.” The new Colored Baptist Church with Henry Adams as pastor met for the first time in April 1842. The Baptist Church of Stamping Ground is an example of the growth of independent congregations outside the urban centers of Kentucky. Beginning in the fall of 1840, white church leaders asked select black members to keep order among the increasing numbers of black attendees at services. Eventually, the number was so great that the African Americans held separate services under the supervision of white leaders. By 1850, the group was collecting funds to build its own building, which was completed in 1855. The African Baptist Church opened in February of that year with an all-black ministerial staff and maintained a good deal of independence from the white mother church. At the beginning of the Civil War, Kentucky had seventeen black churches.⁴³

Just as evangelical denominations offered African Americans a place to belong and a sense of control over at least the spiritual aspect of their lives, white women also found that church membership and activities enabled them to step outside the bonds of patriarchy. Conversion in and of itself is an individualistic act that goes beyond the control of a dominant male figure. As historian Stephen Aron commented, during Great Revival camp meetings church attendance gave women an “escape” from isolation, and a sense of female community developed.⁴⁴ As the nineteenth century progressed, church activities allowed for socialization as well as personal spiritual fulfillment. Within the auspices of Christian activity, women could begin to seek opportunities outside the home; however, Christian reform societies did not grow as rapidly as they did in northern cities and communities.⁴⁵ The Catholic church organized two convents in 1812 that provided formal religious service opportunities for women. The Sisterhood of Loretto, a teaching order, was established in Marion County, and the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth opened near Bardstown. The Sisters of Charity opened schools and orphanages and provided nursing services for victims of the 1833 cholera epidemic and soldiers wounded during the Civil War.⁴⁶

Religion also supplied women with solace when experiencing the harsh realities of nineteenth-century life. Although Kentucky began to move beyond the frontier life filled with fears of Native American attacks and living in forts and stations, the lives of white women continued to be dominated by the running of a household and caring for children. Marriage and motherhood were virtually the only occupations open to women in the first half of the nineteenth century. While white women of the upper classes could expect help from slaves and have some time for parties and travel, most women found their time monopolized by concerns for the well-being of their children and domestic duties. Lucretia Hart Clay, wife of Kentucky statesman Henry Clay, came from one of the leading families of early Kentucky. Born March 18, 1781, in Hagerstown, Maryland, Lucretia was well-known, not for her beauty, but for her kindness and domestic abilities. She married Clay at the age of eighteen in 1799 and had the first of their eleven children in 1800. As discussed above, Henry Clay greatly benefited from the match because his wife's family connections proved invaluable in his early career, and Lucretia's abilities as a domestic manager kept the family in good economic standing. Clay left the household and plantation in her capable hands when he was away from home. She gave instructions to overseers and began a lucrative business of selling milk, butter, and hams to locals for extra income. She preferred life with her family and her Lexington home to the social scene of Washington, DC, and after 1835 she never again accompanied Clay to the capital.⁴⁷

Marriage was probably the most important decision that a woman of the nineteenth century could make. A woman's happiness, both personal and economic, often depended on the husband she chose. Parents offered advice about suitable mates but generally allowed children their own choices. Because divorce was uncommon and required an act of the Kentucky legislature, women who found themselves tied to abusive, lazy, or adulterous husbands had little recourse. In addition, following the tradition of British common law, when a woman married, she was legally bound to her husband. In the eyes of the law, she was no longer a feme sole but a feme covert—all her property became the property of her husband, and this included land, slaves, furnishings, and any wages she might earn. Later in the nineteenth century, laws were passed in several southern states, including Kentucky, to protect the property of married women from profligate husbands, but in reality the women's property laws fell short of granting women independence and failed to give women a sense of independence.⁴⁸

Before turning their minds to marriage, some young women in Kentucky had opportunities for education. With the rise of the idea of the republican mother following the American Revolution, female education beyond learning only the necessary domestic skills took on importance.⁴⁹ French schools appeared in the mid-eighteenth century on the Eastern Seaboard, and, as the population moved westward into areas like Kentucky, such schools followed. Mary Menessier Beck opened an academy in Lexington in 1805. Beck offered courses in geography, astronomy, logic, rhetoric, and philosophy. One of the best-known early female academies in Kentucky was Mentelle's for Young Ladies, also in Lexington. Charlotte Victorie (Leclere) Mentelle left Paris during the Revolution with her husband, Augustus Waldermarde Mentelle. The couple arrived in Lexington in 1798 and opened a French school at Transylvania Seminary. Around 1820, the school moved to Rose Hill on five acres near Henry Clay's Ashland estate. French schools, often run by widows or unmarried women, commonly taught French and decorative embroidery. Some operated as day schools and others as boarding schools offering a broad range of subjects, such as drawing, music, dancing, grammar, geography, history, arithmetic, and languages. The Mentelles accepted both day students and boarders; these students studied literature, dancing, French, and social etiquette. Mary Todd Lincoln was a student who boarded at Mentelle's from 1832 to 1836. In 1825, Julia Tevis opened the Science Hill Female Academy in Shelbyville with the support of the Methodist church. Her husband, John, a Methodist minister, remarked that a Protestant school was much needed in the area so that families would not have to send their girls to the numerous Catholic schools in the Louisville vicinity. The school offered rigorous courses in mathematics, chemistry, languages, and the classics. The cholera epidemic in the 1830s almost destroyed it, but it remained open until 1939. There were over two hundred students in the school in the late 1850s, and it attracted students from all over the South.⁵⁰

Although not all white women in Kentucky received a formal education, most women in the state could expect to become mothers. Married women throughout the South became pregnant every two years; therefore, families were large. While birthrates dropped overall throughout the country in the antebellum period, the rate of decline was not as pronounced in the South as it was in the North. One reason for a higher birthrate in the South was the fact that the mortality rate there was high. Margaretta Brown, wife of the first U.S. senator from Kentucky, John Brown, lost two sons who were less than a year old. When she later had a daughter named Euphemia, Margaretta worried that she too might die as an infant. The child survived infancy but contracted a sudden illness and died when only seven. Family members commented that the girl's death drained the life from her mother.⁵¹

Lucretia Clay gave birth to eleven children, six girls and five boys. However, she outlived all but three of the eleven. In July 1825, Henry and Lucretia Clay were on their way to Washington, DC, with their twelve-year-old daughter, Eliza, to begin Clay's service as John Quincy Adams's secretary of state. In Cincinnati, Eliza took a fever, but the party continued until they reached Lebanon, Ohio. There, a doctor ordered the family to wait for the child's condition to improve. After a delay of several weeks, Clay resumed the trip alone, believing that Eliza would soon be well enough to travel with her mother. Just before reaching the capital, he read in the National Intelligencer that Eliza had died on August 11. Lucretia suffered the death of her only unmarried daughter alone.⁵² Clay wrote to her: “I cannot describe to you my own distressed feelings, which have been greatly aggravated by a knowledge of what your's must have been, in the midst of strangers, and all your friends far away.”⁵³ When Lucretia arrived in Washington, their sorrows were compounded by the death of their daughter Susan Clay Duralde from yellow fever in New Orleans. Clay received a report that her last words were: “I regret to die without Seeing my Father & mother.” Susan was only twenty years old and left two small children.⁵⁴

For some women, Kentucky was not their first home. Many who came with husbands seeking advancement or opportunity in the West found the state wild and unrefined compared to their homes in the East. Mary Austin Holley moved to Lexington from Boston when her husband became president of Transylvania University in 1818. She criticized the women of Lexington for wearing satin and silks as they made their rounds of morning visitations. For the proper Bostonian matron, Lexington's finest appeared provincial and pretentious: “No Boston lady would ever be so conspicuous. ‘How is Dr. Holley,’ they would ask and would adjust their flounces, scarcely touching their backs to the parlor chair lest they form a wrinkle or disturb a hair.”⁵⁵ Margaretta Brown, who came to Kentucky from New York City in 1801, settled in the very small capital town of Frankfort. While she came to love her adopted state, she still found the democratic nature of life in this western area somewhat difficult for her aristocratic sensibilities. After attending a political assembly in Frankfort, she remarked to her husband: “We had twenty-two ladies, and as many gentlemen…. Mr Pearson (the tavern keeper) was there also. He is probably looking out for another wife. This equality, my Love, is a mighty pretty thing upon paper, and a very useful thing in the common intercourses of life, but does not suit a regular Assembly quite so well.”⁵⁶

Kentucky native and Louisville belle Sallie Ward found that her Kentucky attitudes did not fit into the upper classes of Boston when she married Timothy Bigelow Lawrence in a lavish wedding in 1848. Sallie was born September 29, 1827, in Scott County to wealthy merchant Robert J. Ward and his wife, Emily Flourney Ward. She spent most of her childhood at the family mansion on the corner of Second and Walnut streets in Louisville, and she was sent to a French school in Philadelphia, where she finished her education in 1844. Sallie could speak French, enjoyed music and art, and had a love of clothing and accessories. She introduced the use of opera glasses to Kentucky, and she was one of the first women in Louisville to use cosmetics. She was called the “belle of Louisville”; over time, anything that was considered fine or grand might be termed a Sallie Ward. There were steamboats, horses, and children named after her; merchants sold Sallie Ward slippers and lavender.⁵⁷ Her marriage in 1848 at the family's Louisville mansion was the social affair of the season, and reports of it appeared in newspapers from Boston to Charleston. “The bride was the belle of all the West, and there were great times at her wedding. Some 500 or 600 persons, including hosts of distinguished men, were present. The costume of the bride cost $5,000,” announced the Charleston Mercury.⁵⁸

However, Sallie's high-spiritedness and fashion sense did not find a welcome audience among the old Puritan families of Boston. Her husband's family and society did not appreciate her “painted” face or frequent changes of clothes, and at a ball Sallie wore the new fashion designed by Amelia Bloomer. An early biographer noted: “Socially conservative Boston was agog, and Lawrence achieved through his wife unenviable notoriety.”⁵⁹ By 1850, Sallie was back at her parents' home in Louisville and had petitioned the Kentucky legislature for a divorce. Just as the wedding made headlines, so the divorce proceedings were reported in Louisville, Boston, New Orleans, and New York newspapers. Sallie petitioned on the grounds that Lawrence had “caused to be advertised, without justifying circumstances, and in an unwarrantable manner, that she had abandoned him and forewarning all persons from ‘harboring and trusting her on his account, as he would not be responsible for any debts contracted by her.’”⁶⁰ Sallie's counsel, William Preston, argued that Lawrence was well aware of her departure to Kentucky, had made no efforts to stop her, and knew that she would be staying with her parents and need not acquire credit under her husband's name. Preston described Lawrence's act as “a stab—a malignant and revengeful back-thrust at the fame of his wife, who, confiding in the honor and refined sentiments of a husband whom she had been induced to love, has been foully, grossly, and wantonly slandered.” Kentucky gentlemen did not respond in such a manner, and Preston told the jury that Lawrence “deserves the execration and contempt of every citizen who esteems the honor of his wife or the happiness of his household.”⁶¹ Obtaining a divorce was not easy, but the jury granted her request, probably in part because of her family's social position.

In the months following, reports that Lawrence was circulating private letters between his wife and her parents to prove his own position in the divorce made their way to newspapers in Louisville, Boston, and New York. While Kentuckians continued to defend Sallie's conduct and condemned Lawrence as ungentlemanly, editors at the New York Herald believed that the entire incident was a clash of cultures—the established East versus the untamed West:

Very different views of the conventional conduct of life seem to be entertained between the distinguished families in Massachusetts and Kentucky. The climate and atmosphere of society are different in both States. In Boston, all is sober, discreet, staid, formal, cold and intellectual. In Louisville, all is impulsive, wild, free, unreserved, warm and lively. Boston delights in lectures and orations. Louisville runs into the frolics of balls and masquerades. One city is the home of conventionalities—the other is the domain of impulses and action. Contrasted, they are opposite in ideas of elegance, refinement, gay life, liberty and happiness. Such, at least, seems to be the case, if we may judge by the history of that alliance, which was designed to blend the characteristics of two families, at the head of these two cities.⁶²

Even as late as 1850, some people on the Eastern Seaboard perceived Kentucky as a far-flung country whose aristocratic women seemed impulsive and overly exuberant. The Great Revival greatly increased diversity in religious life in Kentucky, and some women gained independence from the domination of patriarchal home life by joining the Shakers. Others found enrichment for themselves and their families as members of the Roman Catholic Church or one of the evangelical Protestant denominations that emerged from the revival with greater strength. Baptists called each other sister and brother and on an individual basis felt liberated and empowered since lay members governed the local congregation and pastors related to the laity with humility and kindness.⁶³