Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [316]
Their open identification with the poor, their scorn for fancy educations and fine clothes and high-toned manners, their biblical literalism, millennialism, and mysticism—all of these qualities located the evangelicals in a tradition of charismatic “mechanick preachers” going back to the days of Cromwell. Dow in particular employed a “colloquial vulgarity” to which Palmer, much less Priestly, never stooped even though it purportedly attracted “large multitudes” of the city’s laboring poor whenever he preached. Dow “understood common life,” admitted a contemporary, “and especially vulgar life—its tastes, prejudices and weaknesses; and he possessed a cunning knack of adapting his discourses to such audiences.” At the same time, their frequent appeals to reason, science, natural justice, and the Rights of Man—Dow often began his sermons with quotations from Paine—linked the evangelicals to the radical republicanism let loose by the revolutions in America and France. Unlike George Whitefield a half century earlier, Dow and his fellow revivalists made it a point to steer newborn Christians away from the suffocating metaphysics and imposed authority of the established denominadons. Theirs was to be a democratized Christianity—a religion of, for, and by the people in which the individual conscience blazed its own, independent trail toward salvation, free at last of sectarian organization, inherited theological systems, and clerical oppression.
Respectable people, inevitably, stressed the connection between this disdain for conventional forms of piety and the tenets of mechanic republicanism. In 1785 the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York and New Jersey pointed to the burgeoning interest of working people in universalism, rationalism, freethinking, deism, and other newfangled theologies closely identified with the international republican movement—a “mighty flood of errors,” in their words, that threatened the very foundations of the faith.
Nothing, however, concentrated attention on republican religion in the city quite so effectively as Tom Paine, who had returned to the United States from France in 1802. His first destination was Washington, D.C., where the resumption of his old friendship with President Jefferson caused such an uproar in the Federalist press that he decided to settle on the farm in New Rochelle that the State of New York had given him in recognition of his services to the nation. When he reached Manhattan in March 1803, his supporters, including many radical immigrants from England, Scotland, and Ireland, hailed him with a dinner at the City Hotel. Over the next year or two Paine often came down from New Rochelle to visit with freethinkers and republicans, stroll the streets, and attend parties (one evening he dined and jousted good-humoredly with John Pintard). In 1804 Elihu Palmer, who had proclaimed Paine “probably the most useful man that ever existed on the face of the earth,” drafted him to write articles on religion for the Prospect. Paine obliged with a series of forceful essays that reiterated his belief in God but emphasized that a narrow-minded, dogmatic, bigoted Christianity was inconsistent with a pluralistic and democratic republic.
Paine’s enemies retaliated with scurrilous personal attacks, he ran out of money, and his erstwhile admirers began to desert him, embarrassed now by his aspersions on Christianity, his increasingly unkempt appearance, and his unpaid bills. Mrs. Elihu Palmer, the young portraitist John Wesley Jarvis, Thomas Addis Emmet, and a few