Antebellum Innovations

The decades leading up to the American Civil War were an extremely fertile period in American religious history. The antinomian spirit unleashed by the Second Great Awakening led to many new movements and sects. Some movements were a reaction to the undercurrent of materialism that defined the universe as one vast machine. Some movements reacted vociferously, most notably during the 1840s and 1850s, when a whole series of “come-outers”—a series of groups related to the spiritualists and abolitionists—who “came out” from the churches because they believed that they had become “poisoned by association with economic injustice or chattel slavery.” ^{19David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage, 1996), 238.} GOP 239.1

Spirituality during the antebellum period was in a large part shaped by a wide variety of cultural developments during mid-nineteenth-century America. ^{20Ibid., 235.} This progressive optimism was characterized by the distributor Fowler & Wells, who popularized a whole host of new ideas. Phrenology became “an all defining system of self-help that took into account all aspects of the human being, physical and spiritual.” ^{21Ibid., 236.} Mesmerism, another area Fowler & Wells popularized, became even more popular in America than in Europe. “By the late forties the nation was flooded with mesmeric healers who used a language of magnetism, electricity, healing, and clairvoyance” personified in the poetry of Walt Whitman. ^22Ibid. GOP 239.2

American religion, reflecting the Barnum and Bailey circus, became increasingly showmanlike in nature. The surge of revivalism, marked by a transition from an agrarian to a market economy, along with the spread of mass print culture made America a remarkably fertile place for new religions—and especially prophets. Several new movements were based upon sacred writings. Joseph Smith reportedly had directions from Jesus to found a new religion. He claimed to find golden plates that he translated into The Book of Mormon (1830). Other inspired texts included Andrew Jackson Davis’s The Great Harmonia (1850) and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures (1875). Even secular writers such as Ralph W. Emerson famously saw a “transparent eye-ball” in which he announced himself “part or particle of God.” ^{23David S. Reynolds, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 253.} Harriet Beecher Stowe claimed it was God, not she, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. These illuminist texts were in keeping with the illuminist spirit of the era. ^{24Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 257.} Inspiration was viewed as an ongoing process with present revelation superseding earlier inspired sources, including the Bible.GOP 239.3