Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [423]
32
The Destroying Demon of Debauchery
In the summer of 1829, an upstate Presbyterian evangelist named Charles Grandison Finney descended on New York City to establish the Kingdom of God in Manhattan. The revivalist’s energetic and colloquial style—“We must have exciting, powerful preaching,” Finney thundered, “or the devil will have the people, except what the Methodists can save”—had recently ignited a spiritual firestorm in sin-soaked towns along the Erie Canal. Unlike most millenarians, who believed Christ’s Second Coming would inaugurate the thousand years of holiness promised in Revelations 20, Finney argued that Jesus’ arrival would culminate—indeed be predicated upon—a ten-century reign of peace and justice. Finney’s millennium would be attained by human action, not divine fiat: pious men and women who had saved themselves had now to save society.
Finney’s upstate activities had brought him to the attention of the Manhattanbased Association of Gentlemen. This informal junta of transplanted Yankee merchants and bankers—among them Anson Phelps, Arthur Tappan, and David Low Dodge—had abandoned their parents’ gloomy belief in predestination. Self-made men, they believed that sinners could be saved by applying the kind of disciplined effort that garnered success in the business world. They begged Finney to bring his crusade to (as Phelps put it) “our Stupid, Poluted, and Perishing City,” promising him to put up the money for a “free” church that would allow the poor to attend without paying the pewrents still required by every denomination except the Methodists. Finney accepted, and by the fall of 1829 he had been installed as the temporary pastor of the First Free Presbyterian Church on Thames Street.
Finney’s arrival under the auspices of the Association of Gentlemen was a signal that the cause of social reform in New York had entered a new and more aggressively evangelical phase. Those genteel Knickerbockers who had dominated the work of charity and benevolence from 1790 to 1820 were passing away—Divie Bethune in 1824, Thomas Eddy in 1827, De Witt Clinton in 1828—and even the venerable John Pintard, now approaching seventy, was beginning to slow down. The wealthy Yankees who took over from them made no secret of their intention to do things differently. Nominally Presbyterians, they had lost patience with divines like Gardiner Spring of the Brick Presbyterian Church and Samuel Cox of the Laight Street Presbyterian Church, who opposed Finney-style revivals as theologically unsound as well as undignified. From the Yankee point of view, too, the older generation of reformers had been insufficiently concerned with a swarm of new threats to social stability and tranquility: trade unions, Tammany politicians, the Catholic Church, and the freethinkers flocking to Fanny Wright’s Hall of Science.
Over the next half-dozen years, accordingly, the Association of Gentlemen stepped up their support of Finney by providing him with bigger and better church buildings. In 1832 they converted the former Chatham Street Theater into the Chatham Street Chapel, also known as the Second Free Presbyterian Church. The huge barn of a place, hard by the burgeoning Five Points, had been deserted by fashionable patrons, while working-class customers opted for its competitor, the Bowery Theater. Finney worried about the neighborhood—“Is not the location too filthy for decent people to go there?” he queried Tappan—but it could seat twenty-five hundred