276 Chapter 10 The Making of Middle-Class America
environs, and throughout the burned-over district.
Apparently without consciously intending to do so,
women challenged the authority of the paternalistic,
authoritarian churches they so fervently embraced.
Then, by mixtures of exhortation, example, and affec-
tion, they set out to save the souls of their loved ones,
first their children and ultimately their husbands too.
Finney,What a Revival of Religion Isat
myhistorylab.com
Evangelical Religion & Politics, Then and Nowat
myhistorylab.com
The Era of Associations
Alongside the recast family and the “almost revolution-
ized” church, a third pillar of the emerging American
middle class was the voluntary association. Unlike the
other two, it had neither colonial precedents nor con-
temporary European equivalents. The voluntary associ-
ation of early nineteenth-century America was unique.
“In France,” Tocqueville wrote of this phenomenon,
“if you want to proclaim a truth or propagate some
feeling... you would find the government or in
England some territorial magnate.” In America, how-
ever, “you are sure to find an association.”
The leaders of these associations tended to be
ministers, lawyers, or merchants, but the rank and file
consisted of tradesmen, foremen, clerks, and espe-
cially their wives. Some of these associations were
formed around a local cause that some townspeople
wished to advance, such as the provision of religious
instruction for orphaned children; others were affili-
ated with associations elsewhere for the purposes of
combating some national evil, such as drunkenness.
Some, such as the American Board of Commissioners
of Foreign Missions, founded in Boston in 1810,
quickly became large and complex enterprises. (By
1860 the board had sent 1,250 missionaries into the
“heathen world” and raised $8 million to support
them.) Others lasted only as long as it took to
accomplish a specific good work, such as the con-
struction of a school or a library.
In a sense the associations were assuming func-
tions previously performed in the family, such as car-
ing for old people and providing moral guidance to
the young, but without the paternalistic discipline of
the old way. They constituted a “benevolent empire,”
eager to make society over into their members’ idea
of how God wanted it to be.
Backwoods Utopias
Americans frequently belonged to several associations
at the same time and more than a few made reform
their life’s work. The most adventuresome tested
WatchtheVideoReadtheDocumenttheir reform theories by withdrawing from workaday
American society and establishing experimental com-
munities. The communitarian point of view aimed at
“commencing a wholesale social reorganization by
first establishing and demonstrating its principles
completely on a small scale.” The first communitari-
ans were religious reformers. In a sense the Pilgrims
fall into this category, along with a number of other
groups in colonial times, but only in the nineteenth
century did the idea flourish.
One of the most influential of the earlier commu-
nities were theShakers, founded by an Englishwoman,
Ann Lee, who came to America in 1774. Mother Ann,
as she was called, saw visions that convinced her that
Christ would come to earth again as a woman and that
she was that woman. With a handful of followers she
founded a community near Albany, New York. The
group grew rapidly, and after Ann Lee’s death in
1784 her movement continued to expand. By the
1830s her followers had established about twenty suc-
cessful communities.In 1839 Mary Cragin, 29, became a convert to John Humphrey
Noyes’s “communism of love” and persuaded her husband to move
with her to the commune. In 1846, after having an affair with another
member of the commune, she and Noyes developed an attachment.
After a meeting of the church, Noyes proposed that he and Cragin’s
husband share each other’s wives. In an understatement, he called
the arrangement a “complex marriage.”