NOTES

Introduction

¹Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley, trans.
Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 1:311-326; 2:21-29.

²Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Donald
Smalley (New York: Vintage Books, 1949), pp. 74-81; 107-115; 124-128; 167-175;
210-212; 274-277.

³Fine treatments of revivalism in this period are found in the works of
William G. McLoughlin, Jr.: Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to
Billy Graham (New York: Ronald Press Company,1959); The American
Evangelicals, 1800-1900: An Anthology (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row,
Publishers, 1968); and Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform; An Essay on Religion
and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (Chicago and London; University of
Chicago Press, 1978).

A classic explanation of the American voluntary system and revivalism was
published in Scotland in 1843 by the American Presbyterian Robert Baird.
(American editions appeared in 1844 and 1856.) Baird explained that the
evangelical denominations were engaged in a common task of evangelizing the
young nation. See Robert Baird, Religion in America, or, an Account of the
Origin, Relation to the State, and Present Condition of the Evangelical Churches
in the United States. With Notices of the Unevangelical Denominations (New
York: Harper & Brothers, 1856).

⁴Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America: An Historical Account of the
Development of American Religious Life, 2nd ed. (New York:Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1973), p. 181. A general treatment of the social and religious ferment in
America, at this time, is found in Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom's Ferment: Phases of
American Social History from the Colonial Period to the Outbreak of the Civil
War (New York; Harper & Brothers. 1962).

⁵These categories are developed in the seminal essay of A. Leland Jamison,
"Religions on the Christian Perimeter," in Religion in American Life, ed. James
Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison (Princeton, New Jersey, 1961), 1:162-231.

⁶The opening of the Erie Canal and the "Morgan Incident" both contributed
to social flux in the 1820s. The breakdown of the older Calvinist theology and its
replacement by modified Calvinism, Arminianism, or rationalistic theology
contributed greatly to the intellectual ferment.

Winthrop S. Hudson, "A Time of Religious Ferment," in The Rise of
Adventism: Religion and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Edwin
S. Gaustad (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974), pp. 1-17, argues that the
general American openness to religious innovation was combined with specific
conditions in upstate New York to produce a sectarian hothouse. The general
conditions were the absence of legal inhibitions, the lack of a unified
ecclesiastical tradition, the sense that the present was pregnant with possibility,
and space in which to experiment and institutionalize novelties. The specific
conditions in the Burned-over District favorable to experimentation included
intense revivals, a mixed population, a climate of perpetual excitement conducive
to speculation and innovation, and the presence of individuals who were
emotionally disturbed or unfulfilled by the revivals and therefore receptive to new
prophets.

⁷The term "sect" is employed in the specialized sense developed by Ernst
Troeltsch. Troeltsch, H. Richard Niebuhr, and others have argued that religious
groups evolve along a sociological continuum from "sectarian" beginnings to
"churchly" maturity. Sects tend to be informal, emotional, and voluntaristic,
while churches (or "denominations" in the American context) tend to be formal,
doctrinal, and traditional. See Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the
Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Company,
1931), especially 1:331-343; and H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of
Denominationalism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1929).

⁸The classic treatment of these movements in upstate New York is
Whitney Cross, The Burned-over District; The Social and Intellectual History of
Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca, New York;
Cornell University Press, 1950).

⁹HC 1:1-80 gives Joseph Smith's account of his calling, the translation of
the Book of Mormon, and the organization of the Mormon Church.

¹⁰AIexander Campbell, in the Millennial Harbinger 2 (February 1831):85.

¹¹ See Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience; A
History of the Latter-day Saints (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 20-43,
for an excellent treatment of the appeals of early Mormonism.

¹²In 1834 the church became known as the "Church of the Latter Day
Saints," to distinguish it from Campbellite and other churches employing the name
"Church of Christ." In 1838 the two names were conflated into the "Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints."

¹³F. Mark McKiernan, The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness; Sidney
Rigdon, Religious Reformer 1793-1876 ([Independence, Missouri:] Herald Hourse,
1979), pp. 11-37.

¹⁴Arrington and Bitton, The Mormon Experience, p. 21.