The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [21]
We know this: he came from sturdy stock. His mother, Lucy Eells, was born in a log cabin in 1819 near the Genesee River in Rochester, then just a tiny village of a few hundred people in what were still the wild and forested frontier lands of western New York. When her parents decided to seek a better future in an even more remote Michigan, they left young Lucy in the care of an aunt and uncle—and never returned for her.
This was the time—and place—when modern industry, in the form of the Erie Canal, which opened six years after Lucy’s birth, met The Last of the Mohicans, published a year later and celebrating an era that was fast disappearing. The mighty hand-hewn waterway—363 miles of deep ditch dug out of rock and mud—would cut through American Indian lands, adding to the pressure on the tribes to move west or die. The canal was not just a symbol of the new nation’s vigor, it added to that force, opening what was then the western frontier to easy transportation and the commerce that came with it. By 1830, Rochester had ninety-two hundred people and was, thanks to an abundance of waterfalls on the Genesee and a canal that cut transportation costs by over 90 percent, a humming hub of flour mills. By 1838 the city had doubled its population and was the largest flour-producing city in America—and arguably the nation’s first “boomtown.” It was the first of many such booms in America’s push westward, that transformed towns and cities all along the canal route between Albany and Buffalo.
The canal was also a thoroughfare of ideas—“the Internet of its era,” as commentator David Ronan put it many years later. Much of central and western New York became an epicenter of political and ideological ferment. And it put the region in the grip of the spiritual revival movement then in full flower. The Second Great Awakening, as it has been dubbed, was one of several periods of intense Christian evangelism in a country that was, and still is, whipsawing between high secularism and fervid religiosity. Historians have put the bookend dates on this Awakening at 1790 and 1840, a period of time when Francis Bellamy’s parents were growing up in a region where the new evangelism enjoyed many adherents, including Joseph Smith, Jr., who claimed to have had his first “vision” of God on a hill near Manchester, New York, just thirty miles east of Rochester and on the Erie Canal. Smith said an angel named Moroni had given him a set of golden plates, which he translated and published in 1830, describing the hill as a place where, centuries earlier, 230,000 Nephite soldiers were killed in a final battle with the Lamanites.
And side by side with this intense spiritualism, equally intense political crusaders were gathering. In 1847, Frederick Douglass, the former slave, founded the abolitionist newspaper The North Star in Rochester, and the following year he attended the first women’s rights convention in nearby Seneca Falls. This convention, and its resulting Declaration of Sentiments, marks what most historians now call the birth of the women’s rights movement in the United States.
In 1855, when Francis Bellamy was born in Mount Morris, New York, twenty-five miles south of Rochester, the region was a bubbling cauldron of progressive social, religious, and political activism and upheaval. In this mix it is perhaps not surprising that Francis’s mother, from pioneer stock, married a child of old New England. David Bellamy was the oldest of four sons born to a dry-goods merchant in Kingsbury, New York, not far from Lake George. David had passed up an offer by his father to go to college, accepting instead a thousand dollars to start his own business. He set up shop in a tiny village in the country town of Ellery, near Lake Chautauqua and Lake Erie, with his first wife, Eliza Benedict. But after only a few years of commerce, he was called to a religious life and was ordained a Baptist minister, like his great-grandfather Joseph and younger brother Rufus. Joseph Bellamy, a Yale graduate, was a preacher, author, and theologian of some note in the latter