A History of the American People

tribulations overcome by courage and persistence, fits into frontier life well and the movement
attracted thousands.
Smith was murdered by an Illinois mob in 1844 but his successor Brigham Young (1801-77),
another Vermonter and a man of immense determination (and appetites) and considerable skills
of organization, led the Biblical remnant' in a historic trek over the plains and mountains to Salt Lake City, 1846-7, where he virtually created the territory of Utah, of which Washington made him governor in 1850. When he proclaimed the doctrine of polygamy in 1852, taking himself twenty-seven wives who bore him fifty-six children, President James Buchanan removed him from office. The row over polygamy (eventually renounced in 1890) delayed Utah's admission as a state until 1896 but it could not prevent Young and his followers from expanding their Church of Latter Day Saints into a world religious empire of over 3 million souls and making the people of Utah among the richest, best educated, and most consistently law-abiding in the United States. In no other instance are the creative nation-building possibilities of evangelical religion so well illustrated. Some of the by-products of the Second Great Awakening verged on the cranky. When fervent Americans were stirred up by a camp-meeting or a passing preacher, and they found Baptism or Methodism too tame, they had a wide choice of spicier beliefs. The esoterical reinterpretation of the scriptures produced in thirty-eight huge volumes by the 18th-century philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg became an immense quarry into which American sect-founders burrowed industriously for decades. Mesmerism and homeopathy came from Europe but were eagerly adopted and adorned with rococo additions in America. Spiritualism was definitely home-grown. In 1847, John D. Fox, a Methodist farmer who had beentouched' by the Second Awakening,
moved into a Charles Adams house in Hydesville, New York, and the two youngest daughters
quickly established contact with a Rapper, at the command Here, Mr Splitfoot, do as I do.' Less than two centuries before, this kind of girlish joke-hysteria might have led to witchhunting as at Salem in the 1690s. In mid-I9th-century America, already keen on sensation and media-infested, it led to the two girls being signed up by the circus-impresario P. T. Barnum (1810-91) and Horace Greeley (1811-72), the great editor of the New York Tribune. So Spiritualism was born. It seems to have had a strong attraction, right from the start, for political liberals, like Robert Owen, son of the utopian community-founder. Owen read a paper about it at the White House in 1861 which led to Abraham Lincoln's memorable observation at the end:Well, for those who
like that sort of thing, I should think it is just about the sort of thing they would like.' This did not
prevent Mrs Lincoln taking it up after the President's death-with its ability to communicate with
the dear departed it had a natural attraction for widows. By 1870 Spiritualism had 11 million
followers, not only in America but throughout Europe, and it attracted outstanding intellects, like
Victor Hugo and William James.
Many of these new sects, which sprang out of the fervor of the 1810s and 1820s, tackled not
only the problem of death, like Spiritualism, but the even more everyday problem of pain.
America was already developing one of its most pronounced characteristics, the conviction that
no problem is without a solution. Faith-healing flourished in the American mid-century, and
Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), who suffered dreadful pain in her youth, for which the doctors
could do nothing, believed she had been relieved by a Mesmerist, P. P. Quimby; and from this
she created her own system of spiritual healing based upon the belief that mind is the only reality
and all else an illusion. After her third marriage to Mr Eddy, a first-class businessman, her creed
began to flourish on sound commercial principles. She opened the First Church of Christ
Scientist in Boston in 1879, followed by the Metaphysical College in 1881 and what became one