The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1402: The Road to Civil War Pt. 17 - The Abolitionists - w/ George Bagby

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

77 MinutesSafe for WorkGeorge Bagby is a content creator and publisher of long-forgotten books. George joins Pete to continue a series detailing the long lead up to America's Civil War.George's "Buy Me a Coffee"George's Twitter AccountGeorge's Pinned Tweet w/ Links George's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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You can get the show early and ad free over there. If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinae show. George Bagby is back and we're going to continue the series on the lead up to America's Civil War. How are you doing today, Mr. Bagby? I'm doing very well. I'm happy to be back with you. Making notes for this evening's discussion today, doing lots of good reading. I think I mentioned last time I've been working with Avery Craven lately. I'm not getting, I'm actually not getting much of my information tonight

out of Craven, but I've really been enjoying reading him. His coming of the Civil War is a wonderful book for anyone that's been enjoying this podcast. It's a classic of the genre. And Craven is kind of known as a revisionist in that his thesis, or I should say his conclusion, is ultimately that the Civil War was not worth fighting. that war should have been avoided, that this was a terrible and unnecessary blood-letting and destructive event in American history, and that it wasn't worthwhile. So that's a really surprising conclusion to come from for a lot of people, but I have a

tremendous amount of sympathy with his position, as I think that you will appreciate if you've been following the course of the discussion on this series. So I'm going to start out with some quotes from Craven. He talks about the rise of the radical abolitionist movement in the north, which we're now coming up to, we're going to go back into political narrative here after a couple of episodes, I expect, and talk about the political events leading up to the war. But Craven devotes a lot of material to the cultural origins and the discourse, specifically about slavery, which is worth paying a lot of attention to here. So here is Craven. The old assumptions that the

movements against slavery arose entirely from a disinterested hatred of injustice and that the results were good beyond question can no longer be accepted without reservations. Those who force the settlement of human problems by war can expect only an unsympathetic hearing from the future. Mere desire to do right is no defense at the bar of history. So Craven uses the word fanaticism frequently to describe the growth of the radical abolitionists. Another favorite writer of mine, Richard M. Weaver, also talks a lot about fanaticism in this context and in others. Weaver offers a definition of fanaticism as one who redoubles their efforts while losing the goal that they seek. So if you're making an effort and you keep your goal in mind, then you're going

to be more cooperative. You're going to identify the points of value your opponent has, and you're going to be amenable to his concerns to some degree. If you have a goal in mind, your first recourse is not to grab a gun and go on the attack. It's not mortal combat. That's the last recourse for achieving your goals. And that's also the one that takes the most justification. It should be the last recourse, right? You've retreated into your bedroom to protect your wife and family, and you pull out your gun. No, that's a very plausible grounds for force. And similarly, when it comes to state action, war should. should be the last recourse. Diplomacy should be exhausted beforehand. When it comes to your

fellow citizens, political deal making is the mode for that. You have to respect the position of your fellow citizens that live under the same law as you do and share common history as yourself and all the rest. So the fanatic is someone that loses sight of the goal and the goal is a kind of social harmony. The fanatic is someone who is willing to risk all kinds of things, including civil peace, in order to achieve his goal. And in that extremism, the fanatic even loses the goal for which he seeks. For an example, just because it's something on our minds right now and we hear a lot about it right now. Now, if the goal was to keep the straight-of-form moves open for traffic, then that's one that you can easily achieve.

Don't start a war over the straight-of-horm moves, right? Or call for a ceasefire, accept tolls on the straight-of-war moves, or whatever, whatever the situation might be. If that's the priority, then it's fanaticism to pursue force on it when you lose the goal you say that you're seeking. I don't mean to make it too coincident with current political events, but I think that we can rather see how that works there. The fanatic loses what he's pushing for, ultimately. Going back to Craven. slavery as a reality and slavery as a symbol about which sectional conflict raged for a generation were two different things.

The first was a very ancient labor system, drastically adjusted to local American traditions, and one which may have been almost ready to break down of its own weight in one of the last corners left to it on the face of the earth. earth. The second was the creation of an inflamed imagination, which endowed the institution with all the ills possible in its theory, and assigned to the slave owner all the qualities desirable in a bitter rival. So this is something that we encounter every time we attempt to discuss slavery. This was the most, most perilous moment of my career in teaching history.

And towards the last years in which I taught it, including 2020, the Summer of Love, famously, I remember students coming to me and saying, are you saying slavery wasn't all that bad? Which is a loaded question and one with with a lot of information contained in it. The contention that slavery was the worst thing to happen in Western history. And there's some discussion about the Holocaust in comparison with slavery.

There's a slavery museum in Louisiana. that pitches itself as the American Auschwitz, for instance. They expect to get plenty of tourism by advertising themselves that way. It wasn't a death camp, whatever else we might say about the Holocaust. Slavery was a way of life. Slavery was an ancient way of life. It was an ancient labor system. And the point of slavery was not to kill the slaves.

That's preposterous. The point of slavery was to get productive work out of the slaves and to maintain them in that work for as long as possible. Because slavery was not viable as an economic system without production from the slaves. That's more or less the whole point of it. So there's a certain friction there that deserves to be noted. But nevertheless, it's a very powerful myth. It's a very negative myth. And whenever we talk about the realities of the institution of slavery, we come into a very tense environment where we are undermining abstract impressions of slavery, which Craven very succinctly describes here.

the inflamed imagination that approaches slavery as the worst thing that you can imagine becomes a very important American myth even before the Civil War. So when you try to approach it on grounds of information, any frank historical material that we have to present about the institution of slavery, any specific instance of how slavery worked on a particular estate, for instance, will be grounds for someone to challenge, being that this is a sacred kind of myth. This is a foundational narrative of American history from the establishment of our day. It is a very risky maneuver to talk about any of that stuff in detail.

So we see the friction between the reality of the thing, what we can actually know about it, and even generalize about it, what the institution was, how it generally worked, versus our imaginations being carried away about an institution none of us have ever seen. And I dare say, scarcely anyone would ever wish to see. just an aside, my own personal opinion, I think the fact that we live in a time where we have no institutionalized slavery is quite anomalous. It is vanishingly, I mean, this is the only time in the history of the world where most people, do not have a personal experience of slavery. That's really, really unusual. And given that slavery is so universal in history, in all recorded law, going back to Hamarabi and the law of Moses,

up until very recent times, is anomalous. I have no desire to see an institution of slavery, no desire to participate in it. I certainly do not want that kind of responsibility. It's enough for me to take care of my own. I have no desire to have any more responsibility than that and don't think that the elites of my own time

would make good use of the institution at all. I have far more confidence in any other number of civilizations to run an institution of slavery more than I would the elites of my own society. But I rather expect the institution to reemerge again. This incidentally was the thesis of Hilar Belloc's remarkable work, The Servile State, where he prophesies, foretells predicts that overreaching government apparatus will enslave their citizens and laments the fact. No doubt that would be a different kind of slavery, but nevertheless, I'd rather expect slavery will emerge, reemerge once again. And I'm not particularly happy about that. I would like to avoid falling into it myself.

But that's my suspicion anyway, given my historical perspective for what it's worth. So Americans deal with the anomaly of slavery in a number of ways. the most obvious point on this matter is the assertion of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are a life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the government. So there is a basic liberal route in American institutions, an idea of universal applicability. There's nothing there about any unique European heritage that is the origination of these views or these institutions.

There should have been, it would have been more applicable and realistic. but it was the product of an optimism, an enlightenment sort of view of how human beings ought to live, an idea of liberation from old institutions like monarchy, like the established church of the old world, things like that. and is manifest in the origin of American systems. So there is a tension there from the beginning. And the founding generation, the generation that inaugurates American independence, builds our institutions, is very famous for abolishing slavery by gradual means in the northern states. Now, in this case, this is a very low-risk kind of operation.

There are not large populations of slaves in the northern states, and most of them get sold south before the limits of gradual emancipation actually take effect. So they're kind of skirting the state-mandated gradual manumission of the slaves. and realize some profit from the institution. In the South, the situation is obviously far different. When you go to the colony of South Carolina, there are many areas where the slave population outnumbers the free population. There is nothing comparable in the north,

nothing north of the Potomac that is comparable to that at all. There are a sizable number of slaves in Maryland, just as an example. Most of the slaves in Virginia are in the Tidewater region where the tobacco plantations are far fewer in the Piedmont and in the mountains. Most of the slaves are in the deep south. But the view at the time is that slavery has exhausted the coast. the tobacco in coastal Virginia has destroyed the nutrition in the fields where it's been planted for several generations the yields are dropping they're opening up places for cultivation in central Virginia it's not so good of a land for the crop down in south side Virginia they still

do grow tobacco there today, but it is not so conducive for slave labor in larger scales. In the coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina, where they're growing cotton, it's very labor intensive. They only have a few varieties. They only grow on the sea islands and so on. The view of slavery at this stage is that slavery is not at a few economical. It does not have crops that are conducive with the geography inland, that it is a failing system. It's rapidly failing by 1800. And many people expect the institution to die out, to become so economical that anyone engage, uneconomical, that anyone engaging in plantation slavery will go bankrupt. Because the expenses outweigh the benefits.

This changes for a few reasons that we've discussed previously. The invention of the cotton gin, the invention of new strains of cotton that can be planted inland, the explosion of cotton cultivation across the deep south into central Georgia, into Alabama, into the Mississippi Valley, the acquisition of Louisiana, the expansion of slavery, into the south of Louisiana for sugar and for other crops. This is a time when slavery is greatly expanding. But the tension remains. The founding generation was, they commonly held the belief that slavery was on its last legs,

that it would soon be economically exhausted and bankrupt. And they were looking for solutions for this large and ethnically distinct laboring class, the slaves of North America and the black freedmen of North America. Their solution was the American Colonization Society. And for all of its optimism about colonizing freed slaves or slaves freed for the purpose of colonization, the limits of that optimism were quickly realized. Only 12,000 slaves got colonized abroad in the whole history of the American Colonization Society. The most famous result of that effort was the colony later country of Liberia in West Africa.

But we're talking about very few numbers of people involved. There was opposition to the colonization movement. It was a rare criticism that the goal of the colonization movement was to remove black Americans from America. But that was a criticism that was made. That was certainly part of part of the operation, something that Abraham Lincoln himself believed in and stated publicly, something that we'll get to at a later time. There were an awful lot of gradual abolition societies that aimed for political solutions in the Deep South to gradually manumet and settle former slaves. This was an interesting episode. This lasts from independence all the way up to

the Civil War itself, though it goes into an eclipse with the rise of the radical abolitionists. They become associated through name with the radical abolitionists. They want to distinguish themselves from it and they are quite demoralized by the radical abolitionists. The gradual abolition societies proliferate in the upper south. So this is an important region to consider. They are popular in places like Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Ohio Valley, places like Southern Ohio and Southern Indiana. The gradual abolition societies contend for a political solution to end slavery. In the 1830s, Virginia seriously discusses the compensated and gradual abolition of slavery

in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It coincides actually with the Nat Turner Rebellion. The Nat Turner Rebellion takes place the same year this is being discussed in the Virginia legislature. And the paranoia that results from the rebellion, Rui sabotages the effort. Nevertheless, there is a close vote on the state-funded gradual abolition of slavery in Virginia. Now, to understand why this was thought to be viable at the time, the tidewater areas of Virginia to this day are devoid of much nutrition in the soil. Even with modern agricultural techniques, this is an agriculturally poor area because of the

cultivation of tobacco in those tidewater peninsulas. And this meant a tremendous burden in Virginia. The practical solution, what was finally done in on some scale, was selling the slaves to the West, moving them physically long distances to the Mississippi Valley and populating Arkansas and Louisiana and Missouri and Western Tennessee and places like that with the slaves of Virginia. So they took them over the Alleghenies and transported them down the Ohio River because the land was played out and there just wasn't anything for them to do anymore. But nevertheless, gradual emancipation as a political project gained ground in the Upper South and the gradual abolitionist societies were made predominantly of Southerners. There were over a hundred of these societies in the 1830s, 106 of the 130s gradual abolition societies

were in the upper south and the lower Ohio Valley in 1827, just as an example. Now, we must distinguish the gradual emancipation societies with the radical movement. The radical movement is outside of American political discourse. In politics or in political discourse, there is no discussion to be made with someone who says, your way of life is wicked and I intend to despoil you.

I intend to take what is yours. You do not have any political discussion with such a person. That person is threatening you. He is not offering to make you a deal. He is threatening your way of life in a fundamental way. The radical abolitionists took this very tack. They said that the institution of slavery had no legitimate existence, that it was an affront to their religious scruple.

and they propose to immediately end it. This is a far cry from gradual emancipation, which was about making political deals. Gradual emancipation in Massachusetts, in New York, the discussed legislation in Virginia back in the 1830s. This involved compensation. Yes, we think that slavery is a bad institution. We would like to get rid of it.

We have plans to settle the slaves somewhere, give them some means to eke out a living on the land, perhaps some kind of homestead bill and some sort of state funding to get them set up for such a life or perhaps even colonization. The radical abolitionists said slavery offends us and we must end it now. now. And we will not give compensation for it because it is a wicked thing. So we want to punish those that are engaged in it by seizing their slave chattels. Now, what happened to the slaves afterwards was not much of a concern to these people. This was not something they had any connection with. Indeed, radical abolitionists tended to have no personal experience of slavery at all. For them, it was a very abstract institution. It was far removed from their

experience. And so they were concentrated in northern cities and frequently had no experience south of the sectional line. They were very public-facing people, though they did not have any major political party that was backing them. The abolitionist would flock to third parties on occasion, though even the third parties, such as the Free Soil Party, which was active in the 1850s and 1840s, the Free Soil Party was not talking about radical abolitionism. They merely emphasized limiting the territorial expansion of legal slavery. They wanted to limit slavery in the Western territories. It was a single issue party, more or less.

They still won abolitionist support, but they weren't talking abolitionist talking points because this was not a political position. You could not get support in areas with slavery, with a radical abolitionist position. And what is more interesting to us, perhaps, is that this was a very unpopular position in the North because it threatened the Union. Everyone knew that this issue was a red line for the southerners. And most northerners were actually more political than that. They did not want to alienate the South.

They did not want to risk a fight over this issue, a real division in the Union over the issue. And so most northerners prefer to ignore the issue. But there was a subset, a minority, a minority never explicitly courted by any political party, including Abraham Lincoln, which is an important note. Lincoln constantly distances himself from the radical abolitionists. He does not want people to associate the Republican Party with the radical abolitionists. with the radical abolitionist faction. Perhaps the most important radical abolitionist

was William Lloyd Garrison, who began his famous newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831, in Boston. Interestingly, the Liberator has a second life and is still part of our periodical case in the bookshops and newsstands. the Liberator became the Nation magazine, a leftist periodical that is still in publication today. But in 1831, William Lloyd Garrison issued his inaugural volume of The Liberator in Boston

and his address to the public to justify his publication is apropos. This is what Garrison said. Ascenting to the self-evident truth maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population. In Park Street Church on the 4th of July 1829, in an address on slavery, I unreflectingly assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition.

I seized this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recapical, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren, the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice, and absurdity. A similar recantation from my pen was published in the Genius of Universal Emancipation at Baltimore in September 1829. That's another abolitionist newspaper. My conscience is now satisfied. I am aware that many object to the severity of my language, but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice.

On this subject, I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. No, no, tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm. Tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher. Tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen. But urge me not to use moderation in the cause like the present. I am in earnest. not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard. So we see the comparisons he makes with this labor system of a baby in the fire, of a woman in the hands of a rapist, of a house on fire.

very interesting comparisons. Certainly the common opinion about the institution of slavery. Most people find just thought of it totally intolerable and we go to the most outrageous things we could imagine

in relation to the institution. Now, this obviously was cause for consternation in the North as well as the South, the North did not want to force violent confrontation over the issue because this was not a political way. This was outrageous. This was immoderate, as Harrison says. This was not political to demand the immediate and unplanned abolition of slavery. In another episode, we will talk more explicitly about the response to this rhetoric.

But first, I want to get into some of the associations with this radical movement. The radical abolitionists are pretty strong in New England, and there are some reasons for this. New England is changing very rapidly at this point. point. The growth of cities, the growth of industry is changing the character of the area very, very quickly. They're also getting a great deal of immigration from Europe. This is far more the character of New England and New York and Philadelphia than it is in a southern region. The southern regions do get a measure of immigration, but nothing compared to the character of the North.

There is increasing political advocacy for working people, for the conditions of the laboring classes. Even in Jackson's administration in the 1820s, there is a organization of the 1820s, there is a organization of the Democratic Party, Jackson's party, in the north. Jackson becomes popular in New York City, in New England even. And the growth of Jackson's support there is of the mechanics, the working people for his policies against that of the establishment of the East Coast, which are more allied with the Whigs, a connection that you can well imagine some of the incentives for. The growing political advocacy for labor and for the conditions of the working classes is a growing concern in this period. We're talking about the 1820s, 30s, 40s.

And this has a lot of religious connections in the north. You see an awful lot of clergymen that are contending for this. And there is a connection there with their conception, their sense of religious obligation, their sense of a humanitarian cause to advocate for the oppressed, for the economic outsider, for those who have no capital. no investment in society and the like. This is certainly the stance of the Jacksonian Democrats of the day. Their constituency is the free farmer, the small farmer, as opposed to the large plantation owner, which tend to be more whiggish in their political associations. The small businessman, the entrepreneur, as against the establishment,

business interests, the Bank of the United States and the friends of Nicholas Biddle. Those are the wigs of the day. The entrepreneur, the man that's moving westward and establishing business operations in new towns in Ohio or Illinois or Iowa, that's the constituency of the Democrats in these days. But there's a certain correspondence with these humanitarian reformers in northern cities, which also is illustrated in lots of religious-themed reform movements. We see the rise of the transcendentalist humanitarians. A very important group, still very well known for those that read the literature,

of the time, people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, very interesting writers, famous essayists and poets. They are mostly liberal Unitarians. And this is an interesting contrast we've made in our last episode when we were talking about the religious heritage of New England and how it evolves over time. The Unitarians are the new religious establishment in New England. They have deteriorated away from the Calvinist, Congregationalist Puritans, their forbearers. They have a number of things still in common with them. For instance, Emerson, he is the grandchild of great Puritan clergy. He is a Massachusetts Brahman.

He is a blue blood of Massachusetts. He is a Unitarian. And just as his forbearers illustrate in the speech of John Winthrop, that they have this idealistic conception of what New England can accomplish, given their discipline and their focus and their vision, that they will build the shining city on the hill, that they believe themselves capable of setting themselves up as an example for the rest of the world to model. Emerson also believes this, though he has given up all the Calvinist Orthodox doctrine.

He no longer believes in the fall of man. He no longer believes that man is inclined towards evil, that is only the grace of God that can save man. The Unitarians flip the script on those things entirely. They believe in the goodness of man. They believe in the divinity of man, the natural goodness of man. They believe that human planning can solve all human problems. And in fact, it's the fault of that old Calvinist orthodoxy, that's what is holding us back, that people believe themselves limited, that people feel themselves subordinate to these religious authorities or old traditions, stuffiness, backwards ways of thinking, and they want to liberate themselves from these things. And so they are properly described as liberal in the sense that they want to

liberate themselves from old notions of all sorts. However, they're very famous for their new notions, for their outrageous new plans, for the future of humanity. They're constantly talking about humanity as well. They have a very universalist conception of the human species, that we're all in this together and we're going to liberate the world and that the precepts of the Declaration of Independence are something applicable to all of mankind and this is the mission of America. All of these things are obviously very familiar to us these days because their conception of the American mission is very popular and has become the mainstream. The transcendentalists have this idea of the Holy Commonwealth, which corresponds to their own unique regional tradition when they're talking about the Shining City on the Hill.

They speak of America as the Holy Commonwealth. And like the Puritan forebears that they came from, they want to set up a system so good that the system is going to require the righteousness that they aspire to. This is going to be the product of human construction of their own enlightened ideas of how the world ought to look. And like their Puritan ancestors, they believe that the proper. The properly ordered community can eliminate the old evils that they hate. Now for them, slavery becomes a very important symbol. It's the symbol of everything wrong with the old world that they want to separate from.

In this, the Unitarians have a lot in common with the Puritans. The Puritans want to separate from the Church of England. They believe it encourageable and tainted with all sorts of Catholic trappings. They believe this is satanic. Enthatically, they believe it to be satanic. And this is why they take all of the Israeli extreme reforms to rid themselves of these things. This is why when they come to America, among other things, for a time, they take a Jacobin-style reform effort to get rid of weights and measurements that were familiar to the English.

They want to get rid of the foot and replace it with the biblical cubit. They want to get rid of the pound and replace it with the biblical talent from the Old Testament. This is the extent that they're willing to go. This is incidentally similar to the origin of the metric system, though the Jacobin revolutionaries in France were emphatically atheist. They want a clean break with the past. And in this, the Unitarians have a number of things in common with the Puritans. The Puritans are trying to recreate a

primitive biblical society, which is why they're trying to use these biblical measurements from the Old Testament when they found their own community in Massachusetts. That doesn't work. Nobody knows what a talent is supposed to be. There's a tremendous amount of argument among them back in colonial days, lots of different takes about just how much a talent amounted to in weight comparison to a pound. And it proved to be far too confusing and also too controversial even among the clergy for them to implement the plan. So it didn't come to anything.

But in the decades before the Civil War, the secular Unitarians, they're using religious language. They're appealing to the more Orthodox-believing Protestant element in the America with their rhetoric, even though they deny all the tenets of basic Christian faith. They contend for temperance movements to limit the legal use of alcohol, the production of alcohol, the consumption of it. They start contending for women's suffrage on the ground of universal human rights and political participation. They contend for pacifism. They say that in their perfect, planned, holy

commonwealth, there will be no more war if they can only get their ideals enshrined in law. A great many of them go in for utopian communes of a non-religious nature more frequently among the Transcendentalists. Some of them also advocate for the abolition of marriage and for a system of free love. Now we get to the religious aspect of this in New England and in the North more broadly. Mostly we're talking about upstate New York and northern Ohio, which I believe I mentioned in our last lecture, Northern Ohio was set aside in the Northwest Ordinance for the settlement of New Englanders. So it has that same tone. Also upstate New York, because it's directly west of

New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, and is still a large wilderness area up in Adirondacks, this was the frontier, the natural frontier to the west of the New England states. And so a great many of them went there and a huge number of them settled in northern Ohio. So we see the phenomenon in the decades just before the Civil War of the second great awakening. Now, this is a very important religious movement in America. it is led by the lower church Protestant groups, so Baptists, Methodists, and the like,

who are peeling away with personal religious appeals, members of more liturgical Protestant groups. So Methodists tend to absorb Episcopalians for instance. Baptists tend to absorb Methodists and Presbyterians and such. These people focus on an individual religious experience and they proliferate during the Second Great Awakening through revival meetings, which are very popular in the Ohio Valley and in the Northeast. So traveling preachers of various stripes will go into communities, preach a number of sermons, often in the open air or in tents, hold community meetings, religious meetings, for a week at a time, or even

more, give a whole series of sermons, and make personal political appeal, or I say political, personal religious appeals for spiritual decisiveness and commitment, for personal conversion experiences and the like. And then people that had been raised in the Methodists say, they had been baptized in infancy, they had been bred in the church, will feel powerful religious inclinations to do things. to make personal decisions, feel conviction, and respond to these meetings. These meetings are often very emotional and character. And so we see a widespread proliferation and popularity of these lower church Protestant sects

that come out of the Second Great Awakening. One important figure there is Charles Brandeson Finney. He's active in the from the 1820s to the 1830s. He eventually goes to teach at Oberlin College in Northern Ohio. Now, a school that's still around that is famous for championing every avant-garde leftist cause that you could name. Oberlin College wants to be on the forefront of those things. And we might say that they were at the forefront from the start. Finney is sympathetic towards temperance movements.

Finney is known to call on women to lead prayer in his meetings. Finney is known for his outspoken abolitionist sympathies, his public conviction that slavery is an evil that needs to be undone quickly. So he has certain prominence and popularizing abolitionism as a religious dogma, especially in northern Protestant circles. Now, really, he is more of the mainstream in all of this and a more mild figure. Finney is important, I think, in that he emphasizes the emotional response. He says what he's really trying to get out of his revival meetings. He was very famous for this.

He travels a great deal in his career, holding revival meetings all over the place. He believes that the emotional response is far more important than any religious community discipline. like being a member of a church, like participating in the rights and rituals of the church community and having more subdued experiences in religion. He believes that religion should be a powerful emotional experience and has a certain romantic view towards religion, that it should be something that, is engaged with religious ecstasy and emotional response and that if you don't have the emotional element involved then it is not genuine so this is a very romantic approach

to religious conviction and practice what is much more colorful are the other religious movements that come out of the Second Great Awakening. Most of the people involved with the Second Great Awakening are, they're much more traditional in their response. They're not innovating doctrines inside of Christian perspective. They're not presenting new Gospels of Jesus Christ, for instance. They're not trying to abolish marriage. They're not trying to do away with Christian ritual practices, such as baptism or the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper, however we might term it. They're still participating in those things. And I want to be clear, Finney believed in those things. Finney wanted his converts,

his proselytes, to continue doing those things. But what is more colorful from this same period of religious revival, however we might describe this, religious outpouring, religious innovation of these decades is important to note. So we have the Shakers who are a branch of the Quakers. Their founder, who was an English woman named Mother Anne Lee, she started out as a Quaker and then has a number of visions. She claims that she's a prophetess. She eventually declares that she's the female incarnation of Jesus Christ and his manifestation. in his second coming to earth, which is a really wild thing to claim.

She preaches a number of very novel things. She says that because the kingdom of heaven has now been established on earth, presumably in her life, that she is the second coming of our Lord, that all private property ownership should cease and all marriage should cease. And obviously all war should cease as well, that she is inaugurating the kingdom of heaven on earth. And so she makes a really stunning call to her followers. And what's even more surprising is after her death,

the shakers become very popular. So in the decades before the Civil War, the shakers become a popular commune movement. They bring in thousands of proselytes. Mother Anne Lee, incidentally, she moved to upstate New York in 1787 and dies a couple decades later, leaving behind a lot of published material and a few shaker colonies. But the Shakers become very popular during the Second Great Awakening. And so they build communes all over the place. They do not marry.

They do not have children. They live in communes in sex segregated dormitories. They become economically successful. They basically operate a kind of joint stock industrial corporation. And they're famous for their arts style. So they make things out of wood. They make furniture. They make cabinetry and such.

And this is still a famous American artistic style. It's renowned for its simplicity. The shaker style. Like shaker furniture, shaker style cabinetry. These are things they're well known for. And their colonies still litter the landscape in the northeast and even as far down as Kentucky, where there was a shaker colony at one point. Another community, well, the shakers, by the way, are abolitionist, pacifist, and T-Total.

They do not use alcohol. They disbelieve in the legitimacy of slavery. They say slavery is a totally illegitimate institution and a moral affront. they are on the cutting edge of some of these ideas, but they put it in a religious format. You also have the Oneida community. The Oneida community is founded by the Harvard graduate John Humphrey Knowles of Rattlebro, Vermont. He's a graduate of the Divinity School. he's supposed to be

well I guess he may have been trained as a congregationalist it's possible he may have been meant to be a Unitarian I don't really know what Harvard's seminary affiliations were when he was going to school

but what's important is that he comes out of that with a novel doctrine and that is perfectionism. So he comes out and writes a bunch of books and tracks and such, and he says, I am a Christian, which means that I am perfect. I do not have bad inclinations. I do not do anything that is bad. I do not sin anymore. I have been perfected by the spirit of God. and he starts a religious movement, and they are sometimes called the perfectionists. They are much better known for their practice of plural marriage.

So in the noise community, they are all married to each other. All the adult men and adult women in his community, community share one another. They wife swap, basically. Now, what's curious about this is that John Humphrey-Noise organizes the whole thing. So when someone has an eye for someone else, they're supposed to go to Reverend Noyes, who manages the mating of the members of his community. Now, this becomes much more important as the community develops over time. So obviously they generate children from these unions and John Humphrey Noyes then tries to make sure that incest is not committed in the community. So he keeps track of who has had children with whom and so on. They practice

what's called complex marriage. Similar to the shakers, they also form a commune in Oneido, New York. And also similar to the shakers, they have this joint stock corporation. They all live in this giant mansion together, which is still there. I understand it's available for tours these days. The community all lives under the same roof together. They have these industrial operations, and they are best known for their flatware and for their dishes. They start making silverware. They start making dinner plates and the like. And this was a major American brand.

You can go into any secondhand store around the country. It may still be in production. I don't actually know if it is or not. But look for Oneida plates. look for Oneida forks and knives. There are lots of them out there. They actually started that company, and it was successful. Later on, a couple generations later, the whole thing disbands.

Now, they also practiced temperance, and they are also abolitionists. And that's interesting. An anomaly. Not very popular. And indeed, persecuted. they get chased out of Vermont. The Vermonters aren't going to tolerate that kind of thing. They go down to upstate New York, and that's where they found their colony.

The most famous and long-lived of all of the movements to come out of this period is the Latter-day Saints. So we have Joseph Smith, again, of Vermont, who has most extraordinary story. He says that he's seen visions of God and Jesus, and they have told him of a lost gospel that is buried on a hilltop in Vermont in the form of golden plates in which is inscribed Reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics, which can be read thanks to the Urum and the Thumum, which are the magical seeing stones spoken of in the Old Testament and the province of the high priest of Israel. So Joseph Smith is led by divine inspiration to the hilltop in Vermont. He digs up the golden plates and translates the Book of Mormon, which is said to the

be another gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and the record of the ministry of Jesus Christ among the Jewish people who had colonized North America before the Native American nations and indeed were completely obliterated by the Native American nations. before European contact. So this is a really extraordinary story. Now, the most touching aspect of this in what I find what I find

maybe most appealing about the whole story of Joseph Smith is that he expresses in his introduction to his accounts of his accounts of himself and to the book of Mormon, that all the religious revivals that had swept through his area had greatly confused him and had disillusioned the people of the region to all sorts of religion.

So the revival meeting goes by, the preacher has a certain doctrine or another revival meeting goes by, and there is another doctrine there. And people are left confused, people have strong emotional responses to these things, and it doesn't correspond with their upbringing, and it doesn't correspond with any church in the neighborhood. It was just a passing revival meeting with some novel teaching or doctrine or some such. and Joseph Smith recounts in his remembrance of this that he is speaking to God, he's speaking to some spiritual apparition, more inclined to think that he was speaking to some spiritual apparition. I just don't believe it was God,

but he says, what are we supposed to think? what are we supposed to do? What are we supposed to believe? And his message is quite compelling. And I'd like to reframe it slightly. Perhaps you've met someone who feels like he's been lied to by all the authorities he should trust. and that same person starts thinking, well, where did they start lying to me? Exactly. When did the lies begin?

Did we land on the moon? Are we being ruled by malevolent lizard people? You know, just how far does the treachery go? Joseph Smith is a restorationist. This is a technical term for what he's proposing. Joseph Smith says the apostles corrupt the message of Jesus Christ, and the church ceases to exist in that first generation. The true message of Jesus Christ is not communicated in history.

Therefore, the real church Christ is supposed to have established in his ministry is being restored through the mission of Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints. This is the theological position that he's taking. and the really audacious historical claim that he's ultimately making in his career. Also, the Latter-day Saints, they reject stimulating beverages, including alcohol, so they have a measure of the temperance movement. They also reject things like coffee as too stimulating. they do practice slavery for a time. They do eventually reject that.

They're more famous for practicing polygamy. And they eventually remove themselves to the west, first to Illinois. They found a town called Navu on the Mississippi River. they remove themselves again to Missouri after persecution and the lynching of Joseph Smith in Illinois. And then Brigham Young leads one part of the Latter-day Saints Church. There are a number of different splits in those early years. He leads the predominant number of them all the way to Utah, which is where the major branch of the Latter-day Saints are based today.

So there are several secular groups as well, but I think that I've covered enough today. I think I will return to some of these groups that emerge out of the Second Great Awakening and then knit them back into the rhetoric of the anti-slavery discourse, the radicals in that movement, put in some of the religious aspects before we move on to the southern response to the anti-slavery movement. So I mean to give a part two for these innovations in coming mostly out of the Northeast. And then I will talk about the southern response to these claims. specifically about slavery. So that's my syllabus for this evening. It's truly remarkable how many novel teachings came about in the 19th century, isn't it?

It is. And I think America is very important for that. I alluded to that in our last episode together where I was saying, the new world is a place for new institutions, for new ideas, for new attempts to organize society. And we'll see in our next session together how it attracts a number of people from abroad who have new ideas, who have new organizations and such. And they have their own kind of influence on things here. All righty. I look forward to it.

Please tell people where they can buy, buy your books and find your work. Absolutely. You can find my occasional comments and such on X at Tallman Books. I will announce new titles for my press there occasionally. You can find most of my books on my website, which is www. Tallmanbooks.com. And thank you very much.

Of course, of course. And I have all those length in the show notes. So thank you very much, Mr. Bagby. Until we talk again. It's a pleasure. Thank you.