A History of the American People

children, one of them being Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin-believed that
this revivalist spirit was essential to the creation of the rapidly expanding American nation.
Based upon a free market in land and everything else, it was necessarily driven by a strong
current of materialistic individualism, and only religious belief and practice, hot and strong,
could supply the spiritual leavening and community spirit-could, in effect, civilize this thrusting
people. Religion, politics, and culture all went together, he argued, and it is plain that the religious and political destiny of the nation is to be decided in the west.' Revivalism, what is now called fundamentalism, was the only way the scattered frontiersmen and women could be reached and gathered. But when the itinerant preachers passed on, all the churches benefited. Some of the older churches, especially the Episcopalians, sniffed at camp-meetings, saying More souls are begot than saved there,' but that was because they failed to adapt their
evangelism to the new trends. It was the uninhibited Methodists who profited most from
revivalism, keeping up the passionate intensity and drumming it into regular, settled
congregations. By 1844 they were the biggest church in the United States. Next came the
Baptists, radiating from Rhode Island and its great theological seminary, later Brown University
(1764). Like most Calvinist sects, they split from time to time, generating such factions as
Separatist and Hard-Shell Baptists, but they were enormously successful in the South and West.
By 1850 they had penetrated every existing state and had a major theological college in almost
all of them.
But revivalism did more than recruit for the existing churches. It created new ones. Thus one
Baptist, William Miller (1782-1849), was inspired by the Second Great Awakening to conduct a
personal study of the scriptures for two years, and in 1818 declared that all the affairs of our present state' would be wound up by God in a quarter of a century, that is in 1844. He recruited many thousands of followers, who composed a hymn-book, The Millennial Harp, survivedThe
Great Disappointment' when nothing happened in the appointed year, and even the death of their
founder. In 1855 they settled at Battle Creek, took the title Seventh-Day Adventists six years
later, and eventually, with 2 million worldwide members, became the center of a vast vegetarian
breakfast-cereal empire created by John H. Kellogg (1852-1943), first president of Battle Creek
College and one of the earliest modern nutritionists.
The way in which the Adventists popularized cereals throughout the world was typical of the
creative (and indeed commercial) spirit of the sects which sprang out of the Second Great
Awakening. This kind of intense religion seemed to give to the lives of ordinary people a focus
and motivation which turned them into pioneers, entrepreneurs, and innovators on a heroic scale.
Kellogg himself was the protege of Ellen G. Harmon (1827-1915), a simple teenager who
conceived her vision of sanctified breakfast-food while in a religious transport. And what could
be more American than cornflakes, a nutritious food with moral overtones made from the Indian
crop which saved the lives of the Pilgrim Fathers? Another very ordinary young man was Joseph
Smith (1805-44) born on a hard-scrabble farm in Vermont, who caught a whiff of spirituality
from the Second Great Awakening in Palmyra in upstate New York, where in 1827 the Angel
Moroni showed him the hiding place of a set of golden tablets. From behind a curtain and with
the aid of seer-stones called Urim and Thurim he translated the mystic utterances they contained,
which others transcribed to his dictation. This 500-page Book of Mormon, put on sale in 1830 (at
which point Moroni removed the original plates), describes the history of America's pre-
Colombian people, who came from the Tower of Babel, crossing the Atlantic in barges, but
survived only in the form of Mormon and his son Moroni, who buried the plates in AD 384. The
language of the Book clearly derives from the King James Bible but the narrative, with its