Introduction

Beginning with a discussion of partisan politics in Catharine Sedgwick’s juvenile letters and her autobiographical fiction, the introduction makes a case for considering five prominent New England women authors (Sedgwick, Judith Sargent Murray, Sally Sayward Wood, Lydia Sigourney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe) as profoundly influenced by and invested in a Federalist understanding of religion in a republic. This investment, which treats Protestant Christianity as a force necessary for public morality in democratic life, shaped their writing careers and forms an unacknowledged contribution to political and religious debates about church and state in the early republic and nineteenth century. Situating this argument as a contribution to scholarship in literary studies, postsecular studies, and political history, the introduction explains contributions to each area.

Lydia Sigourney in the Land of Steady Habits

This chapter examines Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s early writing (Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse and Sketch of Connecticut) and her life writing to understand her projects of affiliating with Connecticut Federalism and narrating continuity between Connecticut Federalism its political successors after the War of 1812. It examines her historical portrayal of conflicts over social class, religion, and government, including the Hartford Convention and the state watershed election of 1818, Congregationalism and religious toleration, and Mohegan evangelism and Samson Occum, as well as Sigourney’s autobiographical portrayal of her own shifting position in these conflicts. This analysis complicates two scholarly tendencies: to portray Sigourney as a democratic, working-class poet and to oppose mass market sentimental piety with the old order of New England Puritanism and established religion. It shows instead that Sigourney represented herself as a Federalist daughter harkening back to and adapting the vision of a classically republican organic society. Her treatment of religious tolerance is shown to be central to this project insofar as it was both a means to deflect criticism of the Federalists and to adapt arguments for state religion to a new era of religious privatization.

Suspending Unbelief

This chapter interprets Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s novel Redwood as her response to a challenge posed by William Ellery Channing: to add an accession of feeling to overly-cool Unitarianism. Redwood responds to Channing’s challenge and to the period’s larger orthodox backlash against Unitarianism by reconciling liberalism with the conviction of belief, a balance that Sedgwick presents as essential for national cohesion in a post-revolutionary context. The novel portrays this post-revolutionary context as threatened by various forms of radicalism (slave revolts, class resentment, Shaker enthusiasm) that the novel links to memories of the French Revolution. It offers sentimental Protestant Christianity, characterized by a balance of zealous belief and broadminded tolerance, as the solution, albeit one that is expressly intolerant to non-Christians and unbelievers. The chapter draws on correspondence, sermons, and religious print culture to explain these theological and political problems and imagined solutions in Sedgwick’s novel.

Universalists and Jacobins in Judith Sargent Murray’s The Gleaner

This chapter describes a perceived conflict between Judith Sargent Murray’s liberal religious Universalism and her identity as a Federalist. It argues that she attempted to address and resolve this perceived conflict in her writing. Drawing on legal discourse, newspaper writing, sermons, and letters, the chapter shows Murray situating her ideas in two related contexts. The first context is the debate around Massachusetts religious establishment, in which Universalists challenged orthodox ideas of divine justice and legally pursued religious equality, and the second is the transatlantic reaction to Jacobin de-Christianization during French Revolution. Responding to both conflicts in The Gleaner: A Miscellaneous Production, Murray seeks to differentiate Universalists from Jacobins, using the form of the miscellany to argue that privatized liberal Christianity can serve the public purpose that Federalists assigned to religion in a republic.

Conclusion

Departing from Alexis de Tocqueville’s discussion of American religion as a political institution that strengthens the moral tie as political ties are relaxed, the conclusion briefly restates the major arguments of the book: (1) that the authors discussed treated the issue of religion in a republic by using ideas and tropes drawn from New England anti-Jacobin sentiment during and after the French Revolution; (2) that this led them simultaneously to oppose and to reinforce secularity as it appeared in various forms: Enlightenment reason, pluralistic belief, and the technocratic utility of state church establishment; and (3) that their writings thus engage with enduring questions regarding whether and how morality and virtue should be fostered in a diverse republic for the common good, avoiding pitfalls of narrow-minded bigotry or neoliberal elevation of private individual interest. The conclusion also considers how these arguments and the book as a whole responds to two trends in literary scholarship: the study of women writers rooted in feminist recovery and the turn away from historicist critique seen in recent work by Rita Felski and others.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Evangelical Story of Disestablishment

This chapter examines Harriet Beecher Stowe’s depiction of the separation of church and state in her regional New England novels, Oldtown Folks and Poganuc People, both set in the early republic. It argues that while Stowe’s evangelical vision of religion led her to praise the purification of religion from politics, her simplified story of disestablishment enables a more complicated intertwining of Christianity with democracy. Drawing on family lore and regional history for both novels, Stowe criticized the New England Federalists and Calvinists of her father Lyman Beecher’s generation for treating religion as a political tool, but she also credited them with safeguarding Christianity from the forces of secularization that she associated with the French Revolution. Her novels thus seek to adapt state religion by depicting sites of intense, irrational belief (Spiritualism in Oldtown Folks, Christmas wonder in Poganuc People) that leaven Federalist and Calvinist rationalism with enchantment for the purpose of democratizing Christianity. Stowe’s historical progress narrative depicts Christianity made more democratic when it is seized from the hands of elites and politicians, yet this shift transforms it into a more powerful tool for regulating society. Strengthening the moral efficacy of religion, Stowe’s vision depicts a weakening of the state and public polity, because in Stowe’s libertarian New England history, democracy of the “people” and the “folk” is reassigned to Christianity in the private sphere.

The Wonder of Rational Christianity

This chapter examines Sally Sayward Wood’s 1800 novel Julia and the Illuminated Baron in the context of the Bavarian Illuminati crisis, arguing that Wood engaged this conflict in order to address concerns about secularity in the early republic. These concerns stemmed from several developments: the rising liberal conception of rational Christianity, the New England Federalist conception of established religion as an efficient means of promoting morality in a republic, and the fragilization of faith that Charles Taylor has associated with religious pluralism. The chapter argues that Wood’s use of gothic form sought to stave off feared secularization by combining an aesthetic sense of religious wonder with Enlightened rationalism. The chapter interprets this blend as a postsecular expression of intertwined modernity and Protestantism that was essential to Wood’s Federalist conception of religion in a republic. The chapter also considers the theological and political influence of Wood’s father Nathanial Barrell’s Sandemanisnism on Wood’s conception of rational Christianity.