1833

Pastor Perry G. Cole, conducting services at the second church building, designated the "Church on the Rocks," because it sat on a rocky ledge overlooking the Sawkill about ¾ mile east of our present location (that is, north of present-day Route 212, across from the country club).

Pastor Cole lived in Saugerties and served Athens and West Camp as well as Woodstock.

During this time, many ordinary American citizens were caught up in the the Second Great Awakening. At religious revivals, preachers would be "inviting" people to come forward to be saved. (To enlarge the picture, just click it.) This practice was started in the Erie Canal region by itinerant preacher Charles Grandison Finney, who understood the Gospel to be a means of societal change as well as personal salvation; such social reforms as the temperance movement, women's suffrage, and abolition were all linked with the evangelism of the Second Great Awakening. Even Lutherans were affected:

Lutherans were not immune, particularly those who used the English Language.… [There were] reported protracted meetings in Lutheran congregations, periods of special interest and emotional excitement in pulpit and pew, and sudden extraordinary growth in church membership. There was much debate as to the proper methods for Lutherans to use in stimulating these revivals. Sharp distinction was drawn between the traditional methods of catechization and the high-pressure appeal to the emotions. One was called "responsible accessions to our congregations," the other was called "the new measures."(1)

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From Anderson, Mark J., For All the Saints: Christ's Lutheran Church, Woodstock, New York, 1806-2006 [Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2006], pp. 45-46, citing Wentz, Abdel Ross, A Basic History of Lutheranism in America [Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1955], p. 92. (Close)

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so powerful and extensive has been the work of the Holy Spirit that upwards of 1,000 souls have been hopefully converted and admitted into the church.(2)

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Here Anderson, p. 46, is citing Kreider, Harry J., History of the United Lutheran Synod of New York and New England, Volume I, 1786-1860 [Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1954], p. 87. (Close)

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• Next year on the church →

Henry P. Shultis, 42, was Woodstock Town Supervisor.

All over the Catskills, including along our Sawkill, smelly tanneries were converting animal hides into leather, using chips and powder from hemlock bark in the tanning (softening) process and thereby leaving millions of bark-skinned hemlocks to die while standing. The largest such operation was the New York Tannery in the factory town of Edwardsville (present-day Hunter), autocratically run by Colonel William Edwards, 63. In the atypically neat factory town of Prattsville, workers in the factory of Zadock Pratt lived in some hundred handsome classical-style houses, with pilasters and sunburst gable windows. A 224-foot covered wooden bridge crossed the Schohariekill, and a thousand elms, maples, and hickories lined the streets. There were fine churches and a three-story school. Pratt boasted that by getting rid of the hemlocks, he was providing pastureland to the village, so that in time, butter produced by cows grazing there would rival the famous butter from Orange County.

As hard times now struck the tanning business (like many other businesses in the region) and the price of leather plunged, Pratt printed mottoes to be distributed throughout his village: "Honesty in the best policy," "Do well, and doubt not," "Be just, and fear not," and so on; his business muddled through. Other tanneries were not so lucky. New York City leather barons Smith and Schultz stopped their construction of a large Margaretville tannery and put it up for sale. Tanner Solomon Carnright of Shandaken tried to unload much of his inventory--including 1,200 cords of hemlock tanbark ready to be used and a warehouse full of leather--but he could find no takers. A series of tannery fires struck the Catskills, many of them suspiciously connected with insurance. Many turnpikes that reached the hemlock stands were now neglected or partly abandoned.

Region historian Alf Evers(3)

The typical official arrangement under which the tenant held his land was the "three-life lease": A tenant would be permitted use of Livingston land for three generations, and after the grandson of the original tenant died, the lease "fell in"--that is, the land would revert to Livingston. Stipulated in the typical lease was an annual rent of fifteen to twenty bushels of wheat per hundred acres, plus three or four "good fat hens" and from one to three days' work with team on the common land. A tenant could sell his leasehold, but he had to pay the landlord one-sixth of the sale.

Livingston--through his agent, John S. Wigram, residing on Wigram Lane (Rock City Road) near the barn now known as Parnassus Square and riding around town on his horse while wearing his "fine plug hat"--initiated several legal proceedings against recalcitrant tenants: those who failed to pay rent or who cut the landlord's timber for sale as boards, shingles, and other uses. Livingston "regarded the tenants' own shiftlessness and dishonesty as responsible for most of their troubles."

The life of the tenant on Livingston land was not especially easy. The men worked at subsistence farming, they hunted, they logged, they produced maple sugar, they did part-time blacksmithing, and--with wood harvested from the still-large Woodstock forests (much of it belonging to the Livingston landlord, its harvesting thus constituting trespassing)--they produced charcoal and made such wood products as shingles and barrel and hogshead staves. In the late spring or early summer they peeled hemlock bark used for tanning, piling it in the woods and in the winter hauling it by sledge to smelly tanneries of John C. Ring or of Samuel, Philip A., or John Culver on the Tannery Brook in the heart of Woodstock hamlet. (A few Woodstock tenants were sawmill operators [on sites reserved by the Livingston landlord] or tavern owners.)

Women cooked and baked in fireplaces, washed on the rocks beside a stream, sewed and spun flax and wool, churned butter, gave birth to children and then cared for them, and helped with the farm work, especially at harvest and slaughtering times: They made soap from ashes and animal fats, they dried apples, they pickled and preserved.

Meanwhile, Livingston was having trouble managing the resources on his manor lands. Trees cut down on Livingston land were taken to non-Livingston sawmills, and the sawed boards taken to market with little attempt at concealment. As for the Livingston sawmills, the operators apportioned inferior boards for the landlord's share, selling the better ones for their own profit. Livingston hired people to visit his sawmills weekly to claim decent wood to be sent off to Clermont. Nonetheless, trespassing and unlawful lumbering continued, becoming part of the Woodstock way of life by indigent tenants (termed "beggars" or "rascals" by Livingston agents), in spite of deputy sheriffs being sent to Woodstock to discourage the practice. Livingston agent A. D. Ladew, who ran a tannery and sawmill in present-day Mount Tremper and who had "bark rights" on Livingston land and kept an eye out for lumber poachers in the Beaverkill Valley, wrote the landlord that he had

detected William M. Cooper, Isaac Elting St., Elias Short and Jonas Wisple [usually spelled Whispell] trespassing in our oak bark.(4)

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This and the following quote are from ibid., p. 169, citing Ladew-Livingston correspondence of August 16, 1833, and August 26, 1833. (Close)

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a couple of old foxes and must be narrowly watched.

Livingston, who had long proposed a railroad to link the Esopus Creek to his boom at Columbus Point (now Kingston Point), instead secured a charter for the Esopus Creek Navigation Company.(5)

the Esopus Creek, ramified into numerous branches, rises in and flows through a country heavily timbered with Hemlock and many other kinds of timber; that from the numerous Tanneries which have been and are about to be established in said region of the country, a great destruction of said timber must necessarily follow… the bad state of the roads rendering it unprofitable to transport said timber to market.…

Two glass factories in Bristol (Shady), both just over the boundary from Livingston land--the Woodstock Glass Manufacturing Company and the New York Crown and Cylinder Glass Company--continued, with inefficient operation, to produce window glass and bottles, shipping their products down the Glasco Turnpike to the Hudson River landing in Glasco (from "Glass Company") and then by sloop on to New York City. Unfortunately, their operation required vast amounts of fuel, principally wood, which denuded the forests around Woodstock and, as a result of the deforestation, caused massive erosion of the mountainside soil.

One of Woodstock's only resident doctors was Dr. Larry Gilbert Hall, who had thorough academic training and a good medical library and who lived in the house later torn down to make room for the present Woodstock Library. Dr. Hall was the owner of Woodstock's first recorded bathtub (described in his estate inventory as a "bathing trough"). Dr. Hall employed many herbal remedies:

[T]ake equal parts of bloodroot and sweet flag--dry and pulverize--used as snuff 5 or 6 times a day--is said to relieve deafness.… [For] dissolving gravel in the bladder, [use] the bark of red thorn berry [probably a blackberry] and high blackberry made into a tea with plenty of flaxseed tea to prevent acrimony in the urine. Tried it on Matthew--it works.(6)

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All quotations and other information in this section on medicine are from ibid., pp. 204-7. (Close)

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An "Indian doctor" on Tinker Street was said to be able to cure consumption by herbal means. His doctoring involved "powing-wowing," the use of incantations inherited from ancient Indian medicine men.

Milo Barber's inn in Shandaken on the shore of the Esopus was a favorite of trout fishermen.

James Powers's 10-year-old commodious hotel, the Catskill Mountain House (also called the House on the Pine Orchard)--near Kaaterskill Clove and just a few minutes walk southeast of North Lake and South Lake and affording a dramatic view of the Hudson River and much of the entire region--enjoyed a respectable tourist season (with more guests than rooms, the surplus obliged to sleep outside), benefiting from the lower Hudson River steamboat fares from the 1824 Supreme Court decision Gibbons v. Ogden, from the fact that steamboat tourists could see the hotel in the mountains, from romantic descriptions of the region in Washington Irving's 1819 tale of Rip Van Winkle and James Fennimore Cooper's 1823 novel The Pioneers, and from the Hudson River School paintings of famous "romantic realist" landscape painter Thomas Cole. Visiting English actress Frances Anne Kemble viewed the Catskills from a river steamer wrote the following:

[A fellow passenger told me] long stories like fairy tales, of caverns lately discovered in the bosom of these mountains, of pits black and fathomless, of subterranean lakes in gloomy chambers of the earth, and tumbling waters which fall down in the dark.… How I should like to go there. Oh, who will lead me into the secret parts of the earth, who will guide me to the deep hiding places, where spirits are?(7)

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Quoted from Evers, Alf, The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1972, p. 380, citing Kemble, Frances A., Journal of Frances Anne Butler, 2 vols., Philadelphia, 1835, vol. 2, pp. 172-73. (Close)

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The House is one of the choses à voir in passing along the Hudson, which the tourist, whether of American or European paternity, neglects not to see. Latterly indeed, it has become, during three of the summer months, quite a place of fashionable resort, in consequence of the superior accommodations furnished by a handsome and spacious hotel lately erected there by a joint-stock company, and where the double advantage is enjoyed of a fresh and pure air during sultry weather, and of a magnificent prospect.(8)

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The Tudor quotes are from ibid., citing Tudor, Henry Narrative of a Tour in North America, London, 1834, pp. 145-46. (Close)

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Here I first tasted the sweets of a corduroy road. This is composed of whole trees of which the leaves and branches have been divested, placed side by side, in a transverse direction, without the interstices being filled up so as to form something approaching an even surface. The effect of such a turnpike, you may easily fancy, without much effort of imagination. We were jerked, and bounced, and tumbled about in a most unphilosophical manner, receiving withal sundry contusions, and undergoing the risk of various dislocations; and I believe, on balancing the account of profit and loss, after our return to the hotel to breakfast, beautiful and romantic as were, I confess, the falls and the scenery around them--setting off our bruises against the landscape, and our exhausted patience against the rocks and cascades--we found we had gained but little interest, in this instance, on our capital stock.

Unfortunately, the capital stock of the hotel itself, along with its corporation, the Catskill Mountain Association, was not doing very well. It had never shown a profit, its bills were paid slowly, its note regularly went to protest, and it was falling behind in interest payments to the Catskill Bank. Its expenses could not keep pace with its revenues: Bringing the sides of beef and bottles of wine up the mountain incurred steep transport costs; horses and oxen charged with the steep hauling frequently died and needed replacement. And now it faced a new enemy: the Greene County Temperance Society had been formed and condemned the heavy drinking in the region, especially among the guests of the Catskill Mountain House.

In desperate response to its difficulties, the hotel announced reduced charges: Board lowered to $10 per week ($188 per week in 2006 dollars), and the stage trip from Catskill to the hotel down from $1.25 to $1.00 ($23.51 to $18.81). In spite of these changes, however, the hotel continued losing money. Its new manager resigned at the end of the season, and the fate of the hotel was in doubt--and even more in doubt when, in the autumn, businesses all over the Northeast were collapsing. According to observer Philip Hone,

The change is melancholy and has fallen upon us so suddenly that men feel the blow and known not whence it comes. Public confidence is shaken, personal property has no fixed value, and sauve qui peut is the maxim of the day.(9)

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Quoted from ibid., p. 378, Hone, Philip, Diary, New York, 1927, vol. 1, p. 108. (Close)

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James Booth, residing in the upper Sawkill Valley, began planning for the Woodstock Blue Mountain House on Overlook (then known as South Peak, or sometimes Woodstock Mountain), to rival (with an elevation a thousand feet higher) the Catskill Mountain House. With somewhat shaky syntax, he promised that at his hotel,

secure from dust and the noises and perplexities of city life, the artist, the merchant, the traveller and all others may find a refreshing retreat from the rays of a summer sun, abounding in scenery, hunting and fishing grounds in its vicinity, for the amusement alike of the sportsman, the poet, and the philosopher.(10)

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Quoted from Evers, The Catskills, op. cit., p. 398. (Close)

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[The] fancy is instantly regaled in this bright expansion appearing between heaven and earth: and if there is anything between heaven and earth that can regale the romantic imagination, it is here whether we speak of beauty or of sublimity in unbounded variety. Beneath we beheld a cloud suspended and tinged with all the colours of the rainbow. In full sight were the North [Hudson] River and her sloops and steam and ferry boats and small craft, Albany, Hudson… the Livingstons… [and many more localities, with] at the foot of the mountain Woodstock and Marbletown, with all the varieties of farms and woodlands interspersing openings with delightful prospects on the beautiful expanse.… [Looking out from the summit meant] tracing Nature up to Nature's God.(11)

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Quoted from Evers, Woodstock, op. cit., p. 250. (Close)

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Former New Paltz slave Isabella Bomefree Van Wagenen, 36, originally from Hurley and now residing in New York City, continued her job as a domestic while she pursued her religious interests. She felt that she was in direct communication with God. With other believers, she often went to large revival meetings up the Hudson River in Sing Sing (to enlarge the picture, just click it). Beguiled by the animistic, mystical preachings of the self-proclaimed prophet Matthias, she was now a member of his Zion Hill sect.

• ← Preceding year on the region
• Next year on the region →

Andrew Jackson (Democrat), 66, was President. The newly elected 23rd Congress was in session. A dollar in that year would be worth $18.81 in 2006 for most consumable products.

Indoor lighting came from whale-oil lamps and tallow and spermaceti candles.

Housewives preserved food by drying, salting, and smoking. The fireplace or woodstove fire had to be stoked relentlessly, and it invariably extinguished itself during the wee--and coldest--hours of the night. The kitchen in summer was sweltering.

The standard bathtub, for those who believed in bathing at all, was a wooden box lined with copper or zinc, filled with buckets from the stove. With water needing to be heated over the stove, little wonder than irregular bathing was the norm. Many people, convinced that bathing caused colds and other illnesses, bathed their bodies no more than once a year.

Frontier folk were stricken often with fevers and agues.(12)

Nearly every household had an outdoor privy (hardly anyone had a water closet, which, anyway, was considered very unsanitary).

South Carolina Senator John Caldwell Calhoun, 51, who just had taken his seat in the Senate and sworn to uphold the Constitution, published a lengthy Address, accepting full leadership of the his state's movement to nullify the federal tariff laws. When President Andrew Jackson read the Address, he said,

The Union will be preserved.

Jackson asked the new 23rd Congress to give him authority to use military forces to collect the customs. When Congress was slow to act, the President, as Commander-in-Chief, readied a proclamation warning that he was ready to march with troops. If the Governor of Virginia tried to block the movement of troops toward South Carolina, Jackson threatened:

I would arrest him at the head of his troops.… Union men, fear not. The Union will be preserved.(13)

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Quoted in Garraty, John A., The American Nation: A History of the United States, New York: Harper and Row, 1966, p. 267. (Close)

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The 23rd Congress, with Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, 51, pictured on the left, and Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, 51, cooperating for once, passed the Force Bill (known in South Carolina as the "Bloody Bill"), giving Jackson authority to use the military to enforce the tariff laws. Jackson was prepared to call out 200,000 troops and lead them himself.

At the same time Congress, through the efforts of Henry Clay of Kentucky, 56, pictured on the right, was debating a compromise tariff that would reduce the Tariff of 1832 by about 10 percent over a period of 8 years. The now thoroughly alarmed Senator Calhoun wanted to avoid a showdown. He persuaded the South Carolina authorities to postpone nullification, pending the outcome of the compromise tariff. Those from the North and West--in particular, Congressman Gulian C. Verplanck of New York--were willing to make concessions. According to New York Senator Silas Wright,

People will neither cut throats nor dismember the Union for protection. There is more patriotism and love of country than that left yet. The People will never balance this happy government against ten cents a pound upon a pound of wool.(14)

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Quoted in ibid., pp. 267-68. (Close)

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Congressman Robert P. Letcher of Kentucky, a close friend of Clay's, moved in the House to strike out every word of the bill except its enacting clause, and insert in lieu of it a Senate compromise bill of Clay's, which abandoned the "American System." In the Senate, Calhoun objected to parts of Clay's compromise "most emphatically." Delaware Senator John Middleton Clayton, a National Republican, offered to mediate, but Senator Webster, lobbied by the Northern manufacturers who wanted no lowering of the tariff rates, objected to any further compromise:

No! It will be yielding great principles to faction. The time has come to test the strength of the Constitution and the government.(15)

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Quoted in Wellman, Paul I., The House Divides: The Age of Jackson and Lincoln, from the War of 1812 to the Civil War, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1966, p. 139. (Close)

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Calhoun and Clay were deadlocked. Letcher sounded out President Jackson on further compromises. Jackson responded vehemently:

Compromise! I will make no compromise with traitors. I will have no negotiations. I will execute the laws.

Tell… the Nullifiers from me that they can talk and write resolutions and print threats to their hearts' content. But if one drop of blood be shed there in defiance of the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.

I would hang them higher than Haman!

When Jackson begins to talk about hanging, they can begin to look for the ropes.(16)

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Quoted in Garraty, op. cit., p. 266; Athearn, Robert G., ed., American Heritage Illustrated History of the United States, vol. 5, Young America, New York: Choice Publishing, 1988, p. 400; Wellman, op. cit., p. 140. (Close)

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Clayton and Clay assembled the manufacturers who were against tariff cuts and persuaded them to withdraw their opposition. Clayton realized that the Calhoun faction's votes were needed for the compromise, not to pass it (the faction was a minority) but to obviate any plea from them of "unconstitutionality." He appealed to the faction, but they refused to yield an inch. Clayton finally threatened that if the faction would not support the compromise in its entirety, he would move to table it, thereby leaving the old tariff in force. He said:

The President will then be free to execute the laws with full vigor.

a measure against which, at that very time, and at his instance, troops were being raised in South Carolina, and because of which secession was being determined by that state.

Nothing can be secured unless his vote appears in favor of the message.

So the 23rd Congress passed the Compromise Tariff Act (119 to 85 in the House of Representatives, 29 to 16 in the Senate), which gradually reduced U.S. tariffs until 1842, when no rate was to be higher than 20 percent. The South Carolina convention reassembled and rescinded its Ordinance of Nullification. (At the same time, to save face, the convention nullified the now-moot Force Bill.) There were celebrations throughout the nation that civil war had been averted. The nullies in Charleston, insisting that they had won, gave a gala "victory ball" for the South Carolina volunteer troops.

President Jackson predicted that the "next pretext will be the Negro, or slavery question."

The nullifiers in the South intend to blow up a storm on the slave question.… This ought to be met, for be assured these men will do any act to destroy this Union and form a southern Confederacy, bounded, north, by the Potomac River.

President Jackson made a triumphal tour of the North, receiving ovations in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and all the other places he visited. When Harvard College conferred upon him an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, Massachusetts Congressman John Quincy Adams, 66, pictured, the former U.S. President and a Harvard alumnus, asked,

Is there any way to prevent this outrage?

None. As the people have twice decided that this man knows enough law to be their ruler, it is not for Harvard College to maintain that they were mistaken.(19)

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Quoted in Wellman, op. cit., pp. 165-66. (Close)

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President Jackson decided that public funds should be withdrawn from the Bank of the United States, which he charged was a monopoly, and deposited in state banks. He directed his Secretary of the Treasury Louis McLane, 47, to carry out the order. But McLane was worried that the state banks were unsafe, so he refused; Jackson "promoted" him to Secretary of State and appointed William J. Duane as his new Treasury Secretary. But Duane felt that it would not be "prudent" to entrust government money to "local and irresponsible" banks. Jackson fired Duane and appointed Attorney General Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland, 56, to replace him. (The Senate refused to confirm this last appointment.) Taney began to deposit new revenues into seven state banks in Eastern cities, the "pet banks," while continuing to meet expenses with drafts on the Bank of the United States.

The business of banking… should be open as far as practicable to the most free competition,

Jackson's war on the Bank upset many of his Democratic Party supporters in New York State: the Albany Regency, who worried that a prohibition on issuing bank notes would upset the plans for making Wall Street the nation's financial center. As a result, there was a split in the ranks of the New York Democrats.

Meanwhile, Nicholas Biddle, 47, pictured, president of the Bank of the United States, faced with the loss of $9,868,000 in government funds ($185.6 million in 2006 dollars), began to contract his operations. He decided to exaggerate the contraction by calling in all state banks notes and checks for conversion to hard money, hoping that the resulting credit shortage would be blamed on Jackson.

Nothing but the evidence of suffering… will produce any effect.

Nobody buys; nobody can sell,

The French Chamber of Deputies continued to stall on the first installment of the $80.7 million ($1.5 billion in 2006 dollars) the French government was supposed to pay the United States, according to an 1831 treaty.

Thousands of Irish and German immigrants came to the United States.

A visitor to a textile mill in Lowell, MA, left this observation:

There are huge factories, five, six or seven stories high, each capped with a little white belfry… which stands out sharply against the dark hills on the horizon. There are small wooden houses, painted white, with green blinds, very neat, very snug, very nicely carpeted, and with a few small trees around them.(21)

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Quoted in Davidson, James West, and Stoff, Michael B., The American Nation, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986, 1995, p. 300. (Close)

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The operatives work 13 hours a day in the summer time, and from daylight to dark in the winter. At half past four in the morning the factory bell rings, and at five the girls must be in the mills.… So fatigued… are numbers of girls that they go to bed soon after receiving their evening meal, and endeavor by a comparatively long sleep to resuscitate their weakened frames for the toil of the coming day.(22)

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Quoted in Bailey, Kennedy, and Cohen, op. cit., p. 311. (Close)

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The Andover & Wilmington Railroad Company was chartered in Massachusetts.

Boston merchant Frederic Tudor loaded his ship Tuscany with 180 tons of ice, plus apples, butter, and cheese, for Lord William Bentinck and his nabobs of the East India Company in Calcutta. In the voyage over 4 months, half the ice was lost, but Tudor still made a handsome profit.

Bell-voiced preacher Charles Grandison Finney, 41, pictured here, probably the greatest American evangelist, conducted religious revivals in country settlements in the Northeast and Midwest, urging true Christians to join reform movements. (To enlarge the revival meeting picture, just click it.) Finney was part of the "Second Great Awakening."(23)

The exaltation of the individual, whether black or white, was the mainspring of a whole array of humanitarian reforms.(24)

The great breeding ground of mid-century 'isms' was… the area peopled by [transplanted New England] Yankees in the rolling hills of central New York and along the Erie Canal. These folk were so susceptible to religious revivals and Pentecostal beliefs that their region was called "The Burned-Over District" from all the hellfire and brimstone sermons preached there. There antimasonry began and the temperance movement gathered strength.

Joseph Smith, 28, pictured here, now of Kirtland, OH, was the "Prophet" of the 3-year-old "Church of Christ" (later called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), with the followers called "Saints" (or Mormons), whose doctrine was based on the alleged revelations Smith said he had been receiving for several years from the angel Maroni, now all gathered, translated, and published in the 522-page Book of Mormon. The book claimed that the New World aborigines (the Indians) were descended from the lost 10 tribes of Israel, who had sailed from the Near East 2,500 years earlier, and who had received a visit from Jesus Christ after his resurrection in Palestine. Smith and his followers were commanded to redeem these lost Israelites from the paganism they had fallen into. The book also sanctioned polygamous marriage. The ever-growing congregation was now based in Kirtland (in spite of the hatred from local "gentiles" [non-Mormons]) but was waiting for word from its scout Oliver Hervy Pliny Cowdery, 27, who had been commissioned to find the sect's "Zion" somewhere in the vicinity of Missouri (and had started a satellite congregation in Independence, MO). Meanwhile, construction work on the church's first temple was begun in Kirtland.

The Second Great Awakening was one of the most momentous episodes in the history of American religion.(25)

At times there was a tent for the revivalists, but more often the eager congregations sat on wooden benches in the open and listened to the exhortations of the evangelists who preached from wooden platforms. Unlettered and rude, the frontier cared little for tolerant religion. What it craved was violence in the pulpit, a strong smell of brimstone and fire, furious declamation, and turgid polemics. The Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian persuasions all lent themselves easily to such pulpit pyrotechnics.

There were, of course, plenty of sinners in the West, and since the object of each revival was to bring as many converts as possible to the "mourner's bench"--thus turning each camp meeting into a sort of scoring contest for the evangelists--the field for conversions was rich. Thousands of spiritually starved souls "got religion" at these gatherings and in their ecstasy engaged in frenzies of rolling, dancing, barking, and jerking. Under the lashings of tongue from the preachers, men, women, and even young children, rolled upon the earth, shrieked, shouted, went into contortions, and wept, in a perfect saturnalia of emotional excitement. While it is to be doubted that all who were thus "struck with conviction" remained godly for long--whiskey barrels stood conveniently about the camp meetings and religion was, after all, thirsty work--it cannot be denied that many remained as godly as they knew how to be for the rest of their lives.(26)

The westward movement also molded the physical environment. Pioneers in a hurry often exhausted the land in the tobacco regions and then pushed on, leaving behind barren and rain-gutted fields.

The first wave of settlers to farm the Old Northwest(27)

A free public library opened in Peterborough, New Hampshire--the first in the United States.

John Humphrey Noyes, 22, a divinity student at Yale Theological Seminary, helped to found the Free Church of New Haven.

Boston merchant Thomas Handasyd Perkins died at the age of 69, deeding his home to the New England Asylum for the Blind, which, with the invaluable help of Samuel Gridley Howe, 32, and Michael Anagnos (comrades from the war for Greek independence) he had founded and which now changed its name to the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind.

Boston abolitionists David Lee Child and his wife, Lydia Maria Francis Child, 31, published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, advocating that blacks be educated.

Schoolmistress Prudence Crandall of Canterbury, CT, was imprisoned for admitting black girls into her school, in violation of a special act of the Connecticut legislature.

Massachusetts poet John Greenleaf Whittier ("the Quaker Poet"), 25, published the antislavery pamphlet Justice and Expediency.

Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, 28, pictured here, discussed Southern Congressmen:

We would sooner trust the honor of the country… in the hands of the inmates of our penitentiaries and prisons than in their hands.… [T]hey are the meanest of thieves and the worst of robbers.… We do not acknowledge them to be within the pale of Christianity or republicanism, or humanity.

Abolitionist groups from New York and New England, under Theodore Dwight Weld, 30, Arthur Tappan, 47, and his brother Louis Tappan, 45, founded the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Hicksite Quaker preacher Lucretia Coffin Mott, 40, pictured here, continued delivering sermons against slavery. She helped found the Philadelphia chapter of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with the help of her husband, James Mott, 45. Then she founded the Female Anti-Slavery Society.

Oberlin College, admitting both men and women, was established in Ohio as a hotbed of abolitionism. The college opened with 44 students--29 men and 15 women.

Slavery had a corrosive effect on the personalities of Southerners, slave and free alike.(28)

Historian Stanley Elkins has drawn an interesting parallel between the behavior of slaves and that of the inmates of Hitler's concentration camps, arguing that in both cases such factors as the fear of arbitrary punishment and the absence of any hope of escape led to the disintegration of the victim's personality--to childishness, petty thievery, chronic irresponsibility, and even to a degrading identification with the master race itself. The comparison is somewhat overdrawn, for the plantation was not a concentration camp [with Endlösung as the ultimate objective]. In any case, a psychological explanation is not really necessary. The whole system in the South made the Negro submissive and childlike and discouraged if it did not entirely extinguish independence of judgment and self-reliance. These qualities are difficult enough to develop in human beings under the best circumstances; naturally, when every element in society encouraged slaves to let others do their thinking for them, to avoid questioning the status quo, to lead a simple, animal existence, many, probably most, did so willingly enough. Of course this did not mean that they liked being slaves, but it surely undermined their basic human dignity. Was this not slavery's greatest shame?

A cholera epidemic swept through major American cities.

Attorney Aaron Burr of New York, 77, married the lovely widow Eliza Bowen Jumel, probably 65, who boasted that she had slept with both George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. Burr began spending her money as fast as he could.

George Fibbleton, who called himself the "Ex-Barber to His Majesty, the King of England," set himself up as a barber in New York City. His shaving machine cut off more skin than whiskers, however.

The General Trades Union was founded in New York City.

British entrepreneur John Matthews manufactured a compact apparatus for carbonation and sold bottled carbonated water to New York City merchants.

New York publisher Benjamin Day, 23, founded the New York Sun, a 1-cent daily. To attract readers, it depended on sensation, crime stories, society gossip. and a little bit of serious news.

Emma Hart Willard, 46, had been matron of the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, NY, for the preceding 12 years. She wrote later how she upset people by teaching her students about the human body(29):

Mothers visiting a class at the Seminary in the early thirties were so shocked at the sight of a pupil drawing a heart, arteries and veins on the blackboard to explain the circulation of the blood, that they left the room in shame and dismay. To preserve the modesty of the girls, and spare them too frequent agitation, heavy paper was pasted over the pages in their textbooks which depicted the human body.

Baseball ("Town Ball") was played (using cricket rules) by the Olympic Ball Club in Philadelphia.

The Utica & Schenectady Railroad applied for a charter, and the New York State legislature, under pressure from Erie Canal interests, stipulated that the railroad could carry only passengers and their baggage--no freight.

The Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company was chartered in Pennsylvania.

Horatio Greenough sculpted a colossal marble statue of George Washington in the half-draped classical style, but it was too heavy for the floor of the Capitol and it began to deteriorate outside. (It was eventually moved into the Smithsonian.) Many considered the statue obscene.

Flamboyant Virginia Senator John Randolph of Roanoke died at the age of 60.

Hardy Ivy founded, with a single cabin, the "village" of Atlanta, GA, on land ceded by the Creek Indians at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

After his decisive victory over Henry Clay in the previous year's election, President Jackson felt he had a mandate for his anti-Indian policies. Most of the Choctaws and a considerable number of Cherokees had already been forced to emigrate west of the Mississippi, but there were plenty of Indians remaining: 22,000 Creeks in Alabama, 18,000 Cherokees in Georgia, and 5,000 Seminoles in Florida.

Ohio completed two 8-year canal projects: one from Cleveland to Portsmouth, the other from Cincinnati to Toledo.

John Chapman, 58, known as "Johnny Appleseed," continued distributing Swedenborgian religious tracts and apple seeds to settlers in the Ohio Valley. A small, wiry man with "eyes that sparkled with a peculiar brightness," he had a reputation for loving children and all living creatures, even mosquitoes. He made friends with all the Indians he encountered. He traveled barefoot, dressed in cast-offs or a coffee sack. He liked to read to settlers from the New Testament, calling it "news right fresh from heaven."

Some 300 lake vessels arrived in Chicago (population 350), most having used the Erie Canal.

Chicago carpenter Augustus Deodat Taylor invented the "balloon-frame house" of nailed-together two-by-fours that would eventually replace the heavy mortise-and-tenon construction.

Prussian Prince Alexander Philip Maximilian of Wied, 51, accompanied by painter Carl Bodmer, 24, continued their 2-year natural science expedition in America--from Boston to St. Louis and up the Missouri River the year before, now they reached Fort McKenzie (near Great Falls, MT), and then back to St. Louis. Maximilian collected specimens, studied the Indians, and kept detailed accounts in diaries and other documents. Bodmer painted and drew the landscapes, vegetation, animals, and Indians they saw.

Army Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bourneville, 37, continued his wagon-train expedition (including Independence, MO, trapper-guide Joseph Reddeford Walker, 35, from Fort Osage on the Missouri River bound for the Columbia River. Walker made a side trip across the Sierra Nevada Range, discovering the pass to be named after him, and exploring the Yosemite region.

Science and technology in America: Specifics

Jacob Ebert of Cadiz, OH, and George Dulty of Wheeling, VA, took out a patent for a soda fountain.

Virginia agriculturalist Edmund Ruffin, 39, began publishing Farmer's Register, urging crop rotation, contour plowing, drainage furrows, and the use of lime and fertilizers.

Ornithologist Thomas Nuttall published a guide to North American birds; Massachusetts geologist Edward Hitchcock, 40, completed a geological survey of Massachusetts; Connecticut physician William Beaumont, 48, published Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion, suggesting that digestion was the result of chemicals released by the stomach wall; and Massachusetts legalized the dissection of cadavers in medical schools. Professor Denison Olmsted of Yale University studied the great Leonid meteor shower of that year (which the superstitious were sure heralded the end of the world) and demonstrated that the meteors were particles from comets passing through the Earth's atmosphere.

Arts and culture in America: Specifics

Lydia Howard Sigourney, 42, published her banal, sticky-sweet, and very popular Letters to Young Ladies.

The Roman emperor look continued to be fashionable for men.

Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee was published and became a bestseller.

Popular periodicals included the Niles' Weekly Register, the American Journal of Science, American Farmer, Christian Watchman, Saturday Evening Post, New York Mirror, National Preacher, Ladies' Magazine Lady's Book (Godey's Lady's Book), Ladies' Companion, Knickerbocker Magazine, Liberator (abolitionist), Emancipator (abolitionist), and Spirit of the Times. Aristotle's Masterpiece, an anonymous sex education book, illustrated with explicit woodcuts and describing sexual mechanics, was popular among young men, who read it behind the barn.

Popular songs included "Home Sweet Home" and "America."

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Scots navigator Sir James Clark Ross, 56, returned from his second Arctic expedition.

In Lower Canada French Canadian Louis Joseph Papineau, Speaker of the Assembly, had combined with Scots liberal John Neilson and Irishman Edmund B. O'Callaghan to agitate for a government more accountable to the people than the "château clique," led by Chief Justice Jonathan Sewall (son of an old Massachusetts Loyalist). Patriotic demands had been incorporated into 92 resolutions, rejected by the authorities. Even the minimum proposal, to let the voters choose the legislative council, was rejected. The patriots were now boycotting British goods and wearing homespun. Young men began organizing as Fils de la liberté ("Sons of Liberty"), and the countryside was secretly arming, displaying the tricolor, and calling extralegal conventions.

In Upper Canada (Ontario) newly arrived settlers struggled for political equality with the United Empire Loyalists (those who had left the United States after the Revolution) and their descendants. Liberals wanted to make the executive responsible to the Assembly and threatened to secede from the British Empire. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists--recent immigrants from the British Isles and the United States--pressed for public money from the dominant old-Tory Anglicans and Northern Ireland Presbyterians, as well as for an overhaul of the public land system. But a Tory oligarchy called the "Family Compact," led by Anglican Archdeacon John Strachan and John Beverley Robinson (a Loyalist whose background was Virginia and New York), insisted on reserving a seventh of every 640-acre township for the Crown and another seventh for the Church--reserves that obstructed roads, retarded settlement, and were generally a nuisance. In addition, the clique granted immense untaxed private lands to favorites. The Opposition was led by William Lyon Mackenzie, 37, publisher of the Colonial Advocate, of York; he was repeatedly elected to the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada, and was repeatedly expelled for libel.

The few hundred black slaves owned by the Québecois and in Upper Canada by Loyalists were emancipated.

The Canadian S.S. Royal William crossed the Atlantic in 25 days.

Joseph R. Walker, 35, led an expedition over the Sierra Nevada, reaching Yosemite in Mexican Alta California.

Antonio López de Santa Anna, 39, pictured here, was elected President of Mexico. The country was on the verge of civil war.

Texas empresario Stephen Fuller Austin, 40, considering himself a Mexican citizen, traveled to Mexico City to negotiate a separate status for Texas, which was still just a part of the Province of Coahuila. His views offended Mexican authorities and he was imprisoned, for a time in the old dungeons of the Inquisition.

Meanwhile, swashbuckler and former Tennessee Governor Sam Houston, 40, pictured here, a Jackson protegé who had been living among the Cherokees in present-day Oklahoma and then in Texas, wrote to U.S. President Andrew Jackson the following report from Natchitoches, Louisiana, disguised to give the President some deniability:

Gen. Jackson, Dear Sir: Having been son far as Bexar [San Antonio], in the province of Texas, I am in possession of some information that may be calculated to forward your views, if you should entertain any, touching the acquisition of Texas by the United States. That such a measure is desirable by nineteen-twentieths of the population of the Province I cannot doubt. They are now without laws to govern or protect them. Mexico is involved in civil war. The Government is essentially despotic and must be so for years to come. The rulers have not honesty and the people have not intelligence. The people of Texas are determined to form a State Government and separate from Coahuila, and unless Mexico is soon restored to order and the Constitution revived and re-enacted, the Province of Texas will remain separate from the confederacy of Mexico. She [Texas] has already beaten and expelled all the troops of Mexico from her soil, nor will she permit them to return. She can defend herself against the whole power of Mexico, for really Mexico is powerless and penniless. Her [Mexico's] want of money taken in connection with the course Texas must and will adopt, will render the transfer of Texas inevitable to some power. If Texas is desirable to the United States, it is now in the most favorable attitude perhaps that it can be to obtain it on fair terms--England is pressing her suit for it, but its citizens will resist, if any transfer should be made of them to any power but the United States.(30)

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Quoted in Wellman, op. cit., p. 143. (Close)

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Argentina protested to the United Kingdom for its occupation the year before of the Falkland Islands. Argentina also protested to the United States, claiming that had it not been for the actions of U.S. Captain Silas Duncan, the 40 Argentine gauchos would have been able to drive off the British "invaders." The United States insisted, under the terms of the Monroe Doctrine, that the Falklands were a legitimate British colony (since 1771) and that Captain Duncan's action had been a response to piracy.

The British Parliament, after a long campaign by philanthropist politician William Wilberforce, who died this year at the age of 74, outlawed slavery by August 1834: Children under 6 would be freed immediately, other slaves would become apprentices for a year, and owners would receive compensation of £120 million.

Parliament, over the vehement objection of Tories and many Whigs, passed the Factory Act, mandating the inspection of textile factories and outlawing the employment of children under the age of 9 in the textile factories. The labor of children between 9 and 13 was restricted to 9 hours a day, of those 13 to 18 to 12 hours a day. All children were given a certain period to eat the lunch they had brought from home. All children under the age of 13 were to receive 2 hours of schooling every day. State-supported public education was provided.

Robert Dale Owen, 62, organized the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union in London.

English temperance reformer R. Turner, who stammered during his speeches, urged "toototeetoteetotal abstinence," thus coining the term teetotalism.

Charity bazaars became popular in England.

Former Oxford tutor John Keble, 41, preached the Assize Sermon on National Apostasy, thus initiating the Oxford Movement, with its Tractarian disputes, in protest against Parliament's reducing the number of bishoprics in the Church of Ireland: Was the Church of England a department of the Hannoverian state, to be governed by the forces of secular politics, or was it an ordinance of God? Were its pastors priests of the Catholic Church (as the Prayer Book insisted) or ministers of a Calvinistic sect? Did baptism bestow an indelible character on the soul? What does "consecration" of the eucharistic elements signify? Was the Reformation and Elizabethan Settlement a release from papal bondage, a disaster imposed by a heretical state, or a sophisticated via media between these two extremes? How were the "golden ages" of the early Church Fathers and Seventeenth Century Anglican theology to be recovered? John Henry Newman, 32, supported the movement (and composed the hymn "Lead, Kindly Light"), and Edward Bouverie Pusey, 33, began his association with the movement.

King William IV of the United Kingdom, still the Elector of Hannover, granted a liberal constitution for Hannover.

German states, members of the German Confederation, organized under the Zollverein ("customs union"), to eliminate trade barriers among them.

Economist Friedrich List, 44, suggested extending the German railroad system.

German jurist and criminal law reformer Anselm Feuerbach died at the age of 58.

The repressive King Ferdinand VII of Spain died at the age of 48. He was succeeded by his daughter, Isabella II, 2, who was proclaimed the Queen of Spain, with her mother, Maria Christina of Naples, as Regent.

Portuguese civil war

Ottoman dissolution

Prince Otto of Bavaria (second son of King Ludwig) arrived in Nauplia, Greece, to accept the throne of Greece as King Otto I.

Scots explorer Alexander Burns, 28, crossed the Hindu Kush range in Central Asia.

Edmund Roberts, "special agent for the United States," sailed on the sloop-of-war U.S.S. Peacock to negotiate treaties with the King of Siam and the Sultan of Muscat.

Earl Grey, the British Prime Minister, took away the prized monopoly that the British East India Company had been enjoying with the China trade.

World science and technology

German physician Friedrich Adolphe Wilde invented the rubber cap diaphragm contraceptive; German scientist Johannes Peter Müller, 32, began writing The Handbook of Human Physiology; French mathematician Siméon-Dénis Poisson, 52, published Treatise on Mechanics; French chemists Anselme Payen and Jean-François Persoz extracted the enzyme amylase from malt; English chemist-physicist Michael Faraday, 41, coined the terms electrolysis, electrolyte, anode, and cathode; English physicist Samuel Hunter Christie, 49, devised a "bridge" to determine electrical resistances, inductances, and capacitances (later called the "Wheatstone bridge"); and English astronomer John Herschel, 41, embarked on a trip to the Southern Hemisphere to make astronomical observations. French mathematician Adrien Legendre died at the age of 81.

Arts and culture in the British Isles

World arts and culture

Italian engraver Raffealo Morghen died at the age of 75.

Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti, 36, produced Lucrezia Borgia; Polish composer Frédéric François Chopin, 23, composed his Twelve Etudes (Opus 10); Russian composer Alexis Feodorovich Lvov produced "God Save the Emperor"; German composer Heinrich Marschner, 38, produced the romantic opera Hans Heiling; and German composer Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn, 24, produced Die erst Walpurgisnacht and Italian Symphony (Symphony No. 4 in A Minor) (Opus 90) in London.

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