United States

The American Revolution also dramatized the economic importance of women. Women had always contributed indispensably to the operation of farms and often businesses, while they seldom acquired independent status; but, when war removed men from the locality, women often had to take full charge, which they proved they could do. Republican ideas spread among women, influencing discussion of women’s rights, education, and role in society. Some states modified their inheritance and property laws to permit women to inherit a share of estates and to exercise limited control of property after marriage. On the whole, however, the Revolution itself had only very gradual and diffused effects on women’s ultimate status. Such changes as took place amounted to a fuller recognition of the importance of women as mothers of republican citizens rather than making them into independent citizens of equal political and civil status with men. Willard M. Wallace

Americans had fought for independence to protect common-law rights; they had no program for legal reform. Gradually, however, some customary practices came to seem out of keeping with republican principles. The outstanding example was the law of inheritance. The new states took steps, where necessary, to remove the old rule of primogeniture in favour of equal partition of intestate estates; this conformed to both the egalitarian and the individualist principles preferred by American society. Humanization of the penal codes, however, occurred only gradually, in the 19th century, inspired as much by European example as by American sentiment.

Religious revivalism

Religion played a central role in the emergence of a distinctively “American” society in the first years of independence. Several key developments took place. One was the creation of American denominations independent of their British and European origins and leadership. By 1789 American Anglicans (renaming themselves Episcopalians), Methodists (formerly Wesleyans), Roman Catholics, and members of various Baptist, Lutheran, and Dutch Reformed congregations had established organizations and chosen leaders who were born in or full-time residents of what had become the United States of America. Another pivotal postindependence development was a rekindling of religious enthusiasm, especially on the frontier, that opened the gates of religious activism to the laity. Still another was the disestablishment of tax-supported churches in those states most deeply feeling the impact of democratic diversity. And finally, this period saw the birth of a liberal and socially aware version of Christianity uniting Enlightenment values with American activism.

Between 1798 and 1800 a sudden burst of revitalization shook frontier Protestant congregations, beginning with a great revival in Logan county, Kentucky, under the leadership of men such as James McGready and the brothers John and William McGee. This was followed by a gigantic camp meeting at Cane Ridge, where thousands were “converted.” The essence of the frontier revival was that this conversion from mere formal Christianity to a full conviction in God’s mercy for the sinner was a deeply emotional experience accessible even to those with much faith and little learning. So exhorters who were barely literate themselves could preach brimstone and fire and showers of grace, bringing repentant listeners to a state of excitement in which they would weep and groan, writhe and faint, and undergo physical transports in full public view.

Early 19th-century Methodist camp meeting. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

“Heart religion” supplanted “head religion.” For the largely Scotch-Irish Presbyterian ministers in the West, this led to dangerous territory, because the official church leadership preferred more decorum and biblical scholarship from its pastors. Moreover, the idea of winning salvation by noisy penitence undercut Calvinist predestination. In fact, the fracture along fault lines of class and geography led to several schisms. Methodism had fewer problems of this kind. It never embraced predestination, and, more to the point, its structure was democratic, with rudimentarily educated lay preachers able to rise from leading individual congregations to presiding over districts and regional “conferences,” eventually embracing the entire church membership. Methodism fitted very neatly into frontier conditions through its use of traveling ministers, or circuit riders, who rode from isolated settlement to settlement, saving souls and mightily liberalizing the word of God.