Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [424]
By the end of the decade, Finney’s crusades in New York had spawned eleven “free” churches with several thousand members, all bundled into a Third Presbytery created by the Synod of New York (the alternative being schism). He saved disappointingly few working-class men, however: three-fourths of his followers consisted of working-class women, many of them recent rural migrants employed as domestics and seamstresses. (Frances Trollope wrote that evangelical congregations often consisted of “long rows of French bonnets and pretty faces,” resembling “beds of tulips, so gay, so bright, so beautiful.”) Most of the men Finney did manage to win over were affluent merchants, manufacturers, retailers, and professionals who, like the Associated Gentlemen, believed that an awakened Christian asceticism was the answer to urban poverty and vice. Many more were drawn from the city’s embryonic middle class—shopkeepers, small master craftsmen, clerks, salesmen, bookkeepers, and bank tellers—who embraced evangelicalism as a way to dissociate themselves from both the dissolute poor and the idle rich.
ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS
The real measure of Finney’s impact on the city wasn’t the number of souls he saved but rather the boost his preaching gave to a wide range of evangelical efforts during the 1830s. Reform projects that had once absorbed a relative handful now enlisted the energies and emotions of much greater numbers of middle- and upper-class New Yorkers.
Evangelical fervor revitalized the old American Tract Society, which by 1835 had over a thousand men and women distributing its publications in the city’s stores, taverns, countinghouses, markets, asylums, and hospitals. The reinvigorated American Bible Society embarked on a “general supply” campaign to deliver a Bible to every family in the United States by the end of 1831 and actually managed to distribute 481,000 copies—well short of its goal but an impressive display of renewed organizational resolve and sophistication. Thanks largely to Finney, moreover, these groups, along with Sunday schools, home missions, and a steadily growing number of other such organizations, found it easier to raise money and develop a national outreach. Each May, generals and foot soldiers from moral uplift organizations throughout the country descended in great numbers on New York for conclaves at the Chatham Street Chapel or the Broadway Tabernacle, underscoring the city’s position as headquarters of the Benevolent Empire. By 1830 the thirteen leading societies had already received contributions of $2.8 million, compared to the $3.6 million Congress had spent on internal improvements since the founding of the republic. Soon their annual receipts would surpass the annual federal budget.
Mainstream Christian denominations struggled to keep up with the evangelical juggernaut. Anglicans, under the leadership of Benjamin Onderdonk (consecrated as bishop of New York in 1830), established a Protestant Episcopal City Missionary Society to open free churches in poor neighborhoods. That initiative was followed by the Bible and Common Prayer Book Society, the Protestant Episcopal Tract Society, and the New York Protestant Episcopal Sunday School Union, which by 1833 embraced twenty-four schools with some sixty-two hundred pupils. Finney-style exhortations had no part in the Anglican program, however. “The transformation of character we propose to effect,” said the Episcopalian New York Mission Council in 1832, would be achieved “by the simple agency of plain instruction and cheering counsel.”
In 1835, several years after the formation of the evangelical