United States

The revival spirit rolled back eastward to inspire a “Second Great Awakening,” especially in New England, that emphasized gatherings that were less uninhibited than camp meetings but warmer than conventional Congregational and Presbyterian services. Ordained and college-educated ministers such as Lyman Beecher made it their mission to promote revivalism as a counterweight to the Deism of some of the Founding Fathers and the atheism of the French Revolution. (See Sidebar: The Founding Fathers, Deism, and Christianity.) Revivals also gave churches a new grasp on the loyalties of their congregations through lay participation in spreading the good word of salvation. This voluntarism more than offset the gradual state-by-state cancellation of taxpayer support for individual denominations.

Lyman Beecher, detail of an oil painting by Chester Harding; in the Yale University Art GalleryCourtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery, gift of W.T.R. Marvin

The era of the early republic also saw the growth, especially among the urban educated elite of Boston, of a gentler form of Christianity embodied in Unitarianism, which rested on the notion of an essentially benevolent God who made his will known to humankind through their exercise of the reasoning powers bestowed on them. In the Unitarian view, Jesus Christ was simply a great moral teacher. Many Christians of the “middling” sort viewed Unitarianism as excessively concerned with ideas and social reform and far too indulgent or indifferent to the existence of sin and Satan. By 1815, then, the social structure of American Protestantism, firmly embedded in many activist forms in the national culture, had taken shape. Bernard A. Weisberger

The United States from 1789 to 1816

The Federalist administration and the formation of parties

United States: 1783–1812The United States, 1783–1812.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Triumphal arches, such as these near Philadelphia, were erected throughout the United States to commemorate the inauguration of Pres. George Washington on April 30, 1789.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.The first elections under the new Constitution were held in 1789. Washington" class="md-crosslink">George Washington was unanimously voted the country’s first president. His secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, formed a clear-cut program that soon gave substance to the old fears of the Anti-Federalists. Hamilton, who had believed since the early 1780s that a national debt would be “a national blessing,” both for economic reasons and because it would act as a “cement” to the union, used his new power base to realize the ambitions of the nationalists. He recommended that the federal government pay off the old Continental Congress’s debts at par rather than at a depreciated value and that it assume state debts, drawing the interests of the creditors toward the central government rather than state governments. This plan met strong opposition from the many who had sold their securities at great discount during the postwar depression and from Southern states, which had repudiated their debts and did not want to be taxed to pay other states’ debts. A compromise in Congress was reached—thanks to the efforts of Secretary of State Jefferson—whereby Southern states approved Hamilton’s plan in return for Northern agreement to fix the location of the new national capital on the banks of the Potomac, closer to the South. When Hamilton next introduced his plan to found a Bank of the United States, modeled on the Bank of England, opposition began to harden. Many argued that the Constitution did not confide this power to Congress. Hamilton, however, persuaded Washington that anything not expressly forbidden by the Constitution was permitted under implied powers—the beginning of “loose” as opposed to “strict” constructionist interpretations of the Constitution. The Bank Act passed in 1791. Hamilton also advocated plans for the support of nascent industry, which proved premature, and he imposed the revenue-raising whiskey excise that led to the Whiskey Rebellion, a minor uprising in western Pennsylvania in 1794.