Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, xxxix:4 (Primavera, 2009), 471–495.
CREATING SOCIAL CAPITAL
Johann N. Neem
Creating Social Capital in the Early American
República: The View from Connecticut To Connec-
ticut’s Congregational ministers, something had gone wrong.
Hardly had independence been won when ordinary people began
challenging elite authority at home. In the newer settlements of
the Old Northwest, many former Connecticut residents did not
even go to church, an activity that had long been at the heart of
the commonwealth. Without religion, not only would individuals
be condemned to live their lives without knowing God, but soci-
ety would also dissolve as individualism and egalitarianism re-
placed the hierarchical organic social order that had long held
people together. Something had to be done. People were starving
for religion, and they needed access. Members of Connecticut’s
elite Standing Order, the small group of elected ofªcials and state-
supported ministers who had long presided over Connecticut,
saw themselves as entrusted with the responsibility of looking out
for the good of their fellow citizens. They would not let their em-
igrants down.
The Connecticut Missionary Society (cms) was organized in
1798, the same year as the passage of the Alien & Sedition Acts, a
time when Federalists felt under siege by the growing Jeffersonian
Republican opposition. New England’s ministers sought to re-
mind their ºock that the republic’s future depended on preserving
an organic social order. This social order also had to be built out
Oeste, where New England migrants were heading in record num-
bers to make new lives on land that was both plentiful and more
fertile. There they faced what Roth called the fundamental “dem-
ocratic dilemma,” how to reconcile freedom with the need for or-
der. The original trustees of the cms had the most to lose from the
Johann N. Neem is Associate Professor of History, Western Washington University. He is the
author of Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts
(Cambridge, Masa., 2008); “Squaring the Circle: The Multiple Purposes of Civil Society in
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,” Tocqueville Review, XXVII (2006), 99–121.
The author thanks Peter Onuf and an anonymous reader for their comments, and Kath-
arine Neem Destler, Julie Dugger, Vicki Hsueh, Niall Omurchu, and Jennifer Seltz for
thoughtful conversations.
© 2009 por el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts y The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Historia, Cª.
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472 | JOHANN N. NEEM
egalitarian spirit of Jeffersonian republicanism. Like other volun-
tary associations of the time, the cms was formed by elites. Desde
asociaciones, like corporations, were public entities, it made sense
that they would be run by public men. The trustees’ goal was both
to reassert their authority at home and to create a similar moral or-
der in the fast-growing frontier. They were sincerely concerned
with ensuring that their former citizens had access to religious
teachings in their new western homes.1
Despite their intentions, sin embargo, the efforts of the cms
trustees in the West helped to create a civil society vastly different
from the one in which they worked, and one that previewed what
would soon happen in Connecticut. This article details the irony
of how the attempt to preserve an old way of life resulted in a new
one.2
The prevailing assumption today is that voluntary associations
1 The most important study of the cms is James R. Rohrer, Keepers of the Covenant: Frontier
Missions and the Decline of Congregationalism 1774–1818 (Nueva York, 1995). See also Amy
DeRogatis, Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier (Nueva York, 2003);
Charles Roy Keller, The Second Great Awakening in Connecticut (nuevo refugio, 1942), 70–108.
For the Federalists, see Joanne B. Hombre libre, “Explaining the Unexplainable: The Cultural
Context of the Sedition Act,” in Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (editores.),
The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton, 2003), 20–49;
Seth Cotlar, “The Federalists’ Transatlantic Cultural Offensive of 1798 and the Moderation of
American Democratic Discourse,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David
Waldstreicher (editores.), Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early
American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2004), 274–299; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of
Federalism (Nueva York, 1993); Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jef-
fersonian America (Ítaca, 1970); James M.. Banner, Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federal-
ists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (Nueva York, 1970). Questions
concerning the relationship between voluntarism and social order are raised in Randolph A.
Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religión, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River
Valley of Vermont, 1791–1850 (Nueva York, 1987); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in
America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Masa., 1978); DeRogatis, Moral Geography. On the idea of
public trusteeship, see Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early
National Massachusetts (Cambridge, Masa., 2008), 10–80; Peter Dobkin Hall, Inventing the
Nonproªt Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonproªt Organizations (Balti-
más, 1992); ídem, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900: Private Institutions, Elites
and the Origins of American Nationality (Nueva York, 1982); Clifford S. Grifªn, Their Brothers’
Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1865 (New Brunswick, NUEVA JERSEY., 1960).
Rohrer, Keepers of the Covenant, discounts the importance of Federalism and the fear of social
disorder in shaping the Standing Order’s actions but rightly points out that Connecticut’s
ministers were animated also by other, more noble, motivations, including their honest desire
to help emigrating New Englanders receive God’s word.
In The “Lively Experiment”: The Shaping of Christianity in America (Nueva York, 1963), Sid-
2
ney Mead noted the role of space and the frontier in shaping the development of America’s
religious and social institutions (1-15, 103–133).
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 473
foster shared norms, social solidarity, and civic engagement among
ordinary people and that Americans are not forming enough of
a ellos. In Putnam’s now famous phrase, people are “bowling
alone.” This article examines why and how one group of Ameri-
cans came to think that bowling together was good for society. Él
looks ªrst at how the elite trustees of the cms learned to rely on
voluntary associations to produce order out of chaos on the fron-
tier and then how they, and other members of the Standing Order,
followed a similar learning curve back home in the East. In es-
sence, the members of Connecticut’s Standing Order discovered
that ordinary people could generate social capital.3
Social capital is a term with a complicated history and an often
unclear meaning. The word capital suggests a conceptual correla-
tion with the more traditional form of capital, dinero. Coleman
and Bourdieu, the two most prominent theorists of social capital,
both consider social a modiªcation of capital. “Social capital,"
Coleman wrote, “is deªned by its function.” Its purpose is to “fa-
cilitate certain actions of actors.” Like wealth, “social capital is
productive, making possible the achievement of certain ends that
in its absence would not be possible.” Yet, unlike money, social
capital “inheres in the structure of relations between actors and
among actors.” Because it is produced through interpersonal in-
teraction, it cannot be stored by the actors themselves nor con-
verted into physical things. Its generation requires people to be in-
volved in networks that serve as tools allowing them to achieve
their ends in society. People with abundant social capital are in a
good position to draw from society’s resources for their own
beneªt.4
3 Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of De-
mocracy, VI (1995), 65–78; ídem, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(Nueva York, 2000). See also Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Man-
agement in American Civic Life (Norman, 2003); Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, y
Henry E. Brady (editores.), Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge,
Masa., 1995). For a skeptical appraisal, see Jason Kaufman, For the Common Good? Americano
Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity (Nueva York, 2003); idem and David Weintraub, “So-
cial Capital Formation and American Fraternal Association: New Empirical Evidence,” Diario-
nal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXVI (2004), 1–36.
James S. Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of
4
Sociology, Supplement, “Organizations and Institutions: Sociological and Economic Ap-
proaches to the Analysis of Social Structure,” XC (1988), S95–S120. For a historical overview
of the idea of social capital, see James Farr, “Social Capital: A Conceptual History,” Political
Teoría, XXXII (2004), 6–33; Steven Brint, “Gemeinschaft Revisited: A Critique and Recon-
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474 | JOHANN N. NEEM
Bourdieu similarly deªnes social capital as “the aggregate of
the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession
of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships
of mutual acquaintance and recognition—or in other words, a
membership in a group.” Social capital for Bourdieu, as for Cole-
hombre, is a resource from which an individual or class may draw to
maintain or to achieve power within a particular society.5
The most prominent use of social capital today, sin embargo,
comes from Putnam’s study Bowling Alone. Following Coleman,
Putnam argues that social capital is composed of the networks in
which people are embedded, aunque, for Putnam, the beneªts ac-
crue not primarily to individuals but to communities. Social capi-
tal generates the “norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness” that
make democratic public life possible. Life within “a dense net-
work of reciprocal social relations” encourages people to do the
kind of things for others that will eventually pay dividends for
ellos mismos. Social capital thus “lubricates social life” and checks
egoistic individualism. In shifting the focus of social capital from
the individual to the community, Putnam also makes the concept
of social capital useful for those interested in how societies pro-
duce the shared norms and values that result in social solidarity.
Such is the understanding of social capital invoked in this article.6
Putnam’s conception of social capital, though distinctive,
shares much with a long scholarly tradition that examines how a
capitalistic and individualistic society like that of the United States
manages to cohere at all. In his famous observations of American
voluntarism, Tocqueville recognized that, among other functions,
the associations of civil society encourage social solidarity and thus
check what he considered to be an excessive American individual-
struction of the Community Concept,” Sociological Theory, XIX ( 2001), 1–23. My under-
standing of social capital also relies on Bob Edwards and Michael W. Foley, “Civil Society and
Social Capital: A Primer,” in Edwards, Foley, and Mario Dani (editores.), Beyond Tocqueville: Civil
Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective (Hanover, N.H., 2001), 1–14;
Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, “Making Sense of the Civic Engagement Debate,” in idem
(editores.), Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, CORRIENTE CONTINUA., 1999), 27–71. See also
Robert I. Rotberg, “Social Capital and Political Culture in Africa, America, Australasia, y
Europa,” Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, XXIX (1999), 339–356—the introduction to a spe-
cial double issue on the subject of social capital, entitled “Patterns of Social Capital," Diario de
Interdisciplinary History, XXIX (Autumn and Winter 1999), 339–782.
5 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in John G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of The-
ory and Research for the Sociology of Education (Westport, 1986), 241–258.
6 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 19, 21.
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 475
ismo. In associations, Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America,
“feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart expands, and the human
spirit develops only through the reciprocal action of human beings
on one another.” In other words, citizens who join associations
glean an appreciation of community and the obligations that come
with it.7
More recently, Bellah and his team, invoking Tocqueville,
argued that Americans need to renew those “habits of the heart,"
and the institutions in which they are forged, in order to over-
come the sense of alienation that seems to pervade American cul-
tura. They concluded that many Americans in the mid-1980s
lacked the language to understand how their own well-being was
intimately connected to that of others. Similarmente, Wolfe advised a
return to the lessons of the eighteenth-century Scottish theorists of
civil society, whose primary contribution was to recognize “that
people are capable of participating in the making of their own
moral rules.” In distinct ways, Tocqueville, Bellah, lobo, y
Putnam all suggest that in civil society, ordinary people are the
progenitors of the norms and values that enhance social solidarity,
reconciling democratic freedom and social order.8
The assumption that shared norms and social solidarity can be
produced by the voluntary actions of ordinary people is radical. En
earlier centuries, Western thinkers believed that society was held
together through a vertical hierarchy, a great chain of being that
connected the lowly peasant to his lord and ultimately to his king
and God. This chain sustained social solidarity through enforced
inequality. In Tocqueville’s view, aristocratic societies inherently
connected people to each other, as well as to their ancestors and
progeny, whereas democracies rip the “fabric of time,” leaving
people on their own, in the moment, in perpetual competition.
The greatest dangers in ages of equality are alienation and a lack of
7 Alexis de Tocqueville (trans. Arthur Goldhammer), Democracy in America (Nueva York,
2004; origen. pub. 1835), 598. On this reading of Tocqueville, see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann,
“Democracy and Associations in the Long Nineteenth Century: Toward a Transnational Per-
perspectiva,” Journal of Modern History, LXXV (2003), 269–299; James T. Kloppenberg, “Life Ev-
erlasting: Tocqueville in America,” in The Virtues of Liberalism (Nueva York, 1998), 71–81. Para
a discussion of the multiple ways in which Tocqueville thought of associations, see Neem,
“Squaring the Circle: The Multiple Purposes of Civil Society in Tocqueville’s Democracy in
America,” Tocqueville Review, XXVII (2006), 99–121.
8 Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
(berkeley, 1985); Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (berkeley,
1989), 12.
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476 | JOHANN N. NEEM
institutional barriers to state power, which invite tyranny. Accord-
ing to Tocqueville, a strong civil society could check these ten-
dencies, not only because associations foster a more cohesive com-
munity but also because they act as a buffer against expanding state
fuerza. But Tocqueville’s observations came at a time when vol-
untary associations had already started to spread, and many Ameri-
cans had begun to learn his lessons.9
Scottish social theorists may have been among the ªrst to ar-
ticulate the idea of civil society as a self-regulating ethical realm.
Francis Hutcheson and Henry Home, Lord Kames, believed that
human beings were naturally social and moral. In The Theory of the
Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that soci-
ety and the economy could be, at least to a large degree, self-
regulating. But New England’s Standing Order was not easily
convinced. To them, social order had to be imposed on an unruly
población. Committed to an older organic idea of society, ellos
did not initially accept the Scottish theorists’ assertions. Only as
their experience with voluntary associations grew, ªrst on the
frontier and then back home, did they become convinced other-
wise.10
Recent research makes clear that New England’s elite politi-
cians and ministers, far from envisioning a civil society comprised
of voluntary associations, were proponents of what Brooke called
the “consensual public sphere,” over which they would preside,
reinforcing their authority through institutions and words. En
respuesta, egalitarian-minded Jeffersonian Republicans organized
rival groups during the 1790s—self-proclaimed and self-created
“democratic societies” that challenged the Federalists’ dominance
of civil society. The people, Republicans averred, had the right to
assemble, especially when their leaders threatened their liberties.
9 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 586–587; 198–223, 595–609 (discussion of volun-
tary associations). On the hierarchical nature of colonial American society, see Gordon S.
Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution (Nueva York, 1991), 11–92. See also Brendan
McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Capilla
Colina, 2007).
10 Marvin B. Becker, The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century: A Privileged
Moment in the History of England, Escocia, and France (Bloomington, 1994); lobo, Whose
Keeper? 27–104. On Smith, see John Dwyer, “Ethics and Economics: Bridging Adam Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations,” Journal of British Studies, XL (2005), 662–
687; ídem, The Age of the Passions: An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment
Cultura (East Linton, Escocia, 1998); Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith,
Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Masa., 2001).
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 477
The Republicans opened a space for self-organization in the
1790s, but their unitary conception of “the people” made them
generally fearful of privately organized entities, which they, como
their Federalist opponents, suspiciously viewed as cabals, or special
interests, opposed to the people’s will.11
By overcoming these assumptions, civil society’s architects
ultimately carved out a realm of largely middle-class associations
that generated the social capital that had once been (ideally) im-
posed from above. Missionary societies in the 1790s and early
1800s experimented with the voluntary model by founding
churches in what they perceived as the anarchic West. The initial
goal of the cms was to re-create the consensual public sphere on
the frontier, but frontier circumstances forced it to build a new
kind of civil society, more like the modern version in which citi-
zens create their own communal norms and social solidarity. Estafa-
necticut’s Standing Order discovered that social capital could
develop from below through the voluntary actions of ordinary
people in horizontal relationships rather than the vertical hierar-
chical ties that had long deªned the ideal social order. The frontier
model ultimately found its way back East when the Federalist
Standing Order lost state support and popular deference and thus
had to adopt voluntary methods to achieve its ends. In Modern So-
cial Imaginaries, Taylor deªned modernity as the replacement of a
natural, transcendent, timeless social order with a setting in which
individuals establish their own order in secular time. Connecti-
cut’s elites, raised in the Puritan-Congregational tradition, had as-
sumed the existence of a natural order. The American Revolution
John L. Brooke, “Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and
11
the Public Sphere in the Early Republic,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Alberto (editores.),
Launching the Extended Republic: The Federalist Era (Charlottesville, 1996), 273–377. See also
Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners; Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us To-
gether”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (Charlottesville, 2007);
Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century
Connecticut (Chapel Hill, 1999); Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 451–461; Saul Cor-
nell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828
(Chapel Hill, 1999), 195–218. To Jefferson and his followers, associations remained danger-
ous. Although they agreed that people could generate their own social order, they preferred
the civic community to the alternative communities of civil society. In Jefferson’s ward re-
publics, individuals would gather and forge consensus, whereas associations might fragment
rather than enhance Americans’ efforts to form a cohesive republican society. On ward repub-
lics and participatory democracy, see Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of Thomas
Jefferson (baltimore, 1991), 67–72.
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478 | JOHANN N. NEEM
called this idea into question. An examination of how Connecti-
cut’s elite ministers learned how to create order from the bottom
up reveals one aspect of how Americans became modern.12
experimenting in the west
En 1764, the General Association of
the Congregational Church in Connecticut established a commit-
tee to recruit and support missionaries in Vermont. Their mission-
ary efforts gradually expanded to western New York, Pennsylva-
nia, and Ohio. By the third decade of the nineteenth century,
the missionaries were active throughout the western frontier. En
1800, solo 45,000 persons lived in Ohio; en 1810, la población
reached 231,000. Not all these residents were from Connecticut,
but many of them were, especially in the Ohio area known as the
“Western Reserve.” In 1792, the General Association, the primary
body of Connecticut ministers, asked the state assembly for ªnan-
cial assistance, realizing that the missionary needs of frontier settle-
ments were greater than they had anticipated. They were not
solo. The Massachusetts and New York missionary societies en-
gaged in similar activities. Por 1810 many denominations had local
and regional missionary organizations of their own. The frontier
became the site for both denominational competition and the
transfer of eastern social, cultural, and ªnancial capital.13
The missionary efforts of the General Association did not
grow out of a vacuum. Letters from Connecticut’s emigrants in
the northern or western frontiers often noted the difªculty of se-
curing and supporting a Congregational minister. The absence of
ecclesiastical institutions was certainly a source of frustration for
many of the settlers who had come from a state with an established
church. The General Association received numerous requests for
asistencia. A group of settlers from Surlough County in the
Otsego region of New York wrote, “We . . . [son] desirous to have
the gospel preached among us and not being able to support a
preacher on account of our juvenile state in Agriculture.” In Ver-
mont, a state notorious for its democratic tendencies, a group of
12 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, 2004).
13 United States Department of Commerce, Department of the Census, Historical Statistics
of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, CORRIENTE CONTINUA., 1975), I, Series A, 195–201; Vir-
ginia and Robert McCormick, New Englanders on the Frontier: The Migration and Settlement of
Worthington, Ohio (Kent, Ohio, 1998); Robert A. Rodador, “The Literature of the Western
Reserve,” Ohio History, C (1991), 101–128.On the distinctions between social, cultural, y
ªnancial capital, see Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital.”
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 479
settlers thanked the “Revd Association in Connecticut” for send-
ing someone “to preach to the vacant towns in the northerly part
of the state of Vermont,” although their letter also acknowledged
that many Vermonters resisted the missionary efforts of the Con-
necticut establishment: “Certain men, in these parts, have treated
the Revd. Señor. Smith very disrespectfully.” Nonetheless, ellos
hoped that this “incivility [would] not abate the arder [sic] de [el
General Association’s] benevolence and zeal in the least.”14
Such communications reminded the General Association of
the importance of their missionary activity but also made them
aware of the extent of the problem. Frontier settlers could not
found and maintain churches. En 1798, the General Association es-
tablished the cms to better address this problem. The new society
emphasized that its intent was to provide Connecticut’s frontier
settlements with ministerial teachings and to promote “the order
and stability of civil government” there. The cms’ roots lay as
much in their own fears about frontier settlements as in their
awareness of the Congregational church’s structural needs. El
settlers’ lack of funds and ministers meant that they could not re-
main tied to the church without the aid of Connecticut money.15
Not withstanding its good intentions, the cms associated so-
cial order with its own religious teachings, wary of the growing
strength that other churches were showing, both at home and on
the frontier. Settlers exploited the trustees’ distrust of other de-
nominations. Por ejemplo, one congregation in Vermont ex-
plained, “The Town is of so many various denominations as it
makes but as it were few of the Congregational order . . . [y]
there being no settled minister of the order for a great distance
thus we seem to be as sheep without a shephard [sic] and are in
danger of being scattered.” Another letter written in 1815 de
Seneca Falls, Nueva York, noted that in their village, “A very small
14 Residents in Surlough County, Otsego, Nueva York, to Connecticut Missionary Society,
Junio 13, 1793, in Missionary Society of Connecticut Papers (hereinafter cms papers) (Glen Rock,
NUEVA JERSEY.), Reel 13 de 20; from Georgia, Vermont, Aug. 30, 1793, ibid.
15 Constitution of the Missionary Society of Connecticut, Junio 21, 1798, cms Papers, Reel 16; Un
Address of the General Association to the Good People of Connecticut, Junio 21, 1798, ibid.; Rohrer,
Keepers of the Covenant, 15–52. In The Transformation of Charity in Postrevolutionary New England
(Bostón, 1992), 107–111, Conrad Edick Wright argues that New Englanders’ awareness of so-
cial problems emerged only after they formed organizations. By identifying a problem and
creating an organization, the extent and nature of that problem became more visible than it
was before.
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480 | JOHANN N. NEEM
portion . . . pay any regard to the preaching of the word, in addi-
tion we have mixed among us a society of Methodists & Baptists,
so that the number willing to support the Presbyterian system in
English is very small” (the reference to English was due to the large
number of Germans who inhabited the village).16
Connecticut’s frontier settlers desired more than just occa-
sional missionaries. Unlike Methodists, who relied on itinerant
circuit riders combined with local meetings, Congregationalists
and Presbyterians expected and needed settled pastors. As frontier
congregations gained strength and stability, they petitioned the
cms for permanent clergy. The trustees ªrst confronted this issue
en 1800 when the Rev. Seth Willington, who was in their employ,
requested permission to reduce his missionary service on behalf of
the cms to half of the year so that he could spend the other half
meeting the needs of a parish in General Matthew Patterson’s set-
tlement. The trustees complied with the request, but imposed four
condiciones; (1) that each of his missionary tours last at least four
semanas; (2) that the district in which his missionary work took
place be determined by the cms; (3) that he continue to send re-
ports about his missionary work; y (4) that this new arrange-
ment last no more than a year.17
The cms response suggests, Por un lado, that the trustees
understood the importance of settled ministers—the very the heart
of the Congregational system. De hecho, their earliest efforts to re-
cruit missionaries during the 1790s proved unfruitful because
many settled ministers refused to leave their stations, and many
congregations were unwilling to permit them to do so. Sobre el
other hand, the cms wanted to retain control of its missionaries
and to serve as many people as possible on a limited budget. By es-
tablishing the terms in Willington’s case, the cms hoped that his
missionary efforts would continue to meet the exigencies of the
frontier.18
Part-time missionaries
like Willington soon became the
norm. The cms discovered that it could hire more missionaries if it
shared the ªnancial burden with capable frontier congregations.
16 From Monkton[?], Vt., Feb. 25, 1800, cms Papers, Reel 13; from Seneca Falls, Ene. 10,
1815, ibid.
17 Board of Trustees minutes, Puede 7, 1800, cms Papers, Reel 14.
18
Keepers of the Covenant, 37–39.
See the incoming correspondence, cms Papers, Reel 13. For discussion, see Rohrer,
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 481
Ministers often would be in cms employ half the time and settled
during the other half. En 1811, the cms approved a request by a
congregation in Burton, Ohio, on the condition that if they
“should procure a man to settle with them . . . who is approved by
this Board or the Committee of Missions, the said minister shall be
appointed a missionary, and be allowed eight dollars per week for
the time that he shall labor as a missionary.” In other words, el
cms desired to be responsive to the needs of congregations on the
frontier while retaining oversight of the missionaries on its pay-
roll.19
At stake was the nature of civil society. Rather than a corpor-
atist, covenanted community, frontier religion was voluntary. No
established church existed in either Vermont or Ohio. Some Ver-
monters sought to re-create the hierarchical social order of older
New England but could not implement this vision when faced
with the egalitarian assumptions and the religious diversity of the
state’s settlers. During the constitutional convention of 1802 en
Chillicothe, Ohio, the question of religion attracted little discus-
sión. Even if Ohioans had desired to establish a state religion, ellos
would have had trouble choosing one from the various denomina-
tions gaining adherents in the state. Además, each denomination
and sub-denomination had the ªnancial assistance of a national or-
ganization, such as the Presbyterian Missionary Society (1799), el
Baptist Missionary Society of Massachusetts (1802), and the com-
mittee on missions in the Presbyterian General Assembly (1802),
not to mention the cms.20
Despite these organizational and institutional changes, a civil
society built on voluntary associations was hardly self-evident in
the eyes of the elite trustees of the cms in Hartford. For one thing,
Connecticut retained much of its inherited civic culture. El
church, Por ejemplo, received tax support until 1818. More im-
portant, the division between voluntary associations and public
ofªce had not yet taken place. The cms remained a public organi-
19 Trustees minutes, Ene. 2, 1811, cms Papers, Reel 14.
20 Roth, Democratic Dilemma, 31–79. Federalist William Cooper also sought to use associa-
tions to re-create a hierarchical social order in Cooperstown on the western New York fron-
tier. See Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early
American Republic (Nueva York, 1995), 205–217. Journal of the Convention of the Territory of the
United States Northwest of the Ohio . . . (Chillicothe, Ohio, 1802); Lois Banner, “The Protestant
Crusade: Religious Missions, Benevolence, and Reform in the United States, 1790–1840,”
unpub. Doctor. diss (Columbia Univ., 1970).
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482 | JOHANN N. NEEM
zación, even after it was disconnected from the General Associa-
ción. Its trustees were either prominent (and Federalist) politicians
or established ministers. Jonathan Treadwell (1745–1823), its ªrst
chairman, was lieutenant governor from 1801–1809 and then gov-
ernor for one term. He was also a member of the Governor’s
Council, the Continental Congress, and the Yale Corporation; a
deacon in his local church; and a delegate to the infamous Hart-
ford Convention that urged New Englanders to rethink the value
of their membership in the United States. Jonathan Brace (1754–
1837), the second chairman, had a similar career, serving ªve years
in the state legislature, as well as stints in the Governor’s Council
and in various judgeships. Oliver Ellsworth (1745–1807), otro
trustee and member of the Governor’s Council, was a congress-
man from 1777 a 1783, an attendee at the Constitutional Con-
vention in 1787, a judge on the Supreme Court of Connecticut
y, de 1796 a 1800, Chief Justice of the United States.21
These men believed in and embodied the consensual public
sphere. The position of cms trustee was simply an extension of
their public duty. Trusteeship was as much a public ofªce in Con-
necticut during this era as was the ministry itself. When the cms
was chartered in 1801, this connection became even more ex-
plicit. Corporate charters in early national New England created
agencias del Estado; the charter was a grant of state privilege for public
trabajar. By being incorporated, the cms conªrmed its work as being
in the public interest and approved by the people’s elected repre-
sentatives. Between 1800 y 1830, more than half of the cms an-
nual income came from donations in parishes by act of the state
legislature.22
The trustees imagined that the civic culture in which they
operated could be approximated on the frontier, although they
were never naive enough to think that they could reproduce
Connecticut exactly in Ohio, especially after 1801 when the gov-
ernance of the territories was under the national Republican ad-
ministration. As early as 1798, the North Association of Hartford
21 Biographical information from J. t. Blanco (ed.), National Cyclopedia of American Biogra-
phy (Nueva York, 1895–1984).
22 Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the
American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (Cambridge, Masa., 1969); Sala, “Organizational
Values and the Origins of the Corporation in Connecticut, 1760–1860,” Connecticut History,
XXIX (1988), 63–90; Purcell, Connecticut in Transition, 204–206.
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 483
County suggested that the difference between Ohio and Connect-
icut raised concerns about the moral future of society. In its mes-
sage to “the piously and benevolently disposed,” the Association
called for donations to support the new cms missionary efforts.
Reminding Connecticut citizens that the frontier settlers “are our
brethren, children and friends,” they pointed out that settlers
could not “defray the expenses of the regular administration of the
gospel.” More important, the North Association insisted that the
existence of a moral, corporate society hung in the balance:
“Many of them [the new settlers] look back, with painful anxiety,
to the evangelical privileges which they enjoyed while among us,
and are ready to weep at their destitute condition. The happiness
of our new-forming settlements, rapidly rising in the wilderness,
the order and stability of government in future times, the general
welfare of the rising generation, and indeed of civil society, call
loudly for charitable assistances.”23
The North Association clearly believed that frontier settle-
ments in regions like Ohio and Vermont were very different from
Connecticut; they were qualitatively inferior. Después de todo, if churches
were necessary elements of a moral society, the state was obligated
to support them. Frontier settlers could not afford to establish a
church for the simple reason that they lacked tax support and had
to compete with other denominations. Por eso, the North Associa-
tion understood that it would take effort from settlers to retain the
beneªts of their home state’s institutions within a vastly different
contexto.
The cms trustees hoped to check the egalitarian frontier spirit
that threatened their preferred social order. In the absence of
sufªcient missionaries, the trustees sought to distribute books and
printed sermons for Congregationalists to use in their services.
Unlike the egalitarian-minded Baptists and Methodists, Congre-
gationalists remained convinced that the church,
like society,
rested on authority. En 1795, the General Association urged fron-
tier Congregationalists to gather for worship, “reading the scrip-
23 For an intriguing discussion of the cms’ effort to recreate its ideal social order in a fron-
tier setting, see DeRogatis, Moral Geography. andres. l. Cayton, “Radicals in the ‘West-
ern World’: The Federalist Conquest of Trans-Appalachian North America,” in Doron Ben-
Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (editores.), Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville, 1998); “The North
Association of Hartford County: To the Piously and Benevolently Disposed within Our
Limits," Octubre 4, 1797, cms Papers, Reel 13.
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484 | JOHANN N. NEEM
tures and the best sermons [that they could] obtain”—the “best
sermons” being those shipped to them by the cms whenever pos-
sible so that they would not have to rely on their own authority
but could draw from the religious teachings of the Standing Or-
der, replicating as best they could the religious experience of the
hierarchical society that they had left.24
Por 1817, the tone of the cms remained somber, but a new so-
lution was in the works. In a statement written by a committee
that included the Revs. Timothy Dwight and Lyman Beecher, el
cms contrasted Connecticut, where “institutions and habits are
bien, [y] . . . operate as so many checks upon the corrupt pro-
pensities of our nature,” to the frontier where settlers were “alone
in the wilderness,” lacking any “public eye” to watch over them
and no “moral institutions” to ensure social order. What is most
striking about this address is not that the Standing Order showed
concern about frontier society but that the cms seemed to be
counting on voluntarism to check moral degradation. Noting that
“human depravity is ever impatient of restraints” and therefore re-
quires “strong barriers,” the authors implored the settlers “by all
medio [a] unite, form churches and societies, as early as possible.”
Perhaps voluntary religious and moral societies could act in lieu of
the established church and the corporate Standing Order.25
The cms trustees’ urgency may have been fueled, en parte, por
their growing awareness of the challenges of forging social order
in the “wilderness.” In 1812/13, the cms, in cooperation with the
Missionary Society of Massachusetts, sent Samuel J. Mills and
John D. Schermerhorn, both graduates of Andover, to measure
the charitable needs of frontier settlers. Their ªndings were trou-
bling to committed philanthropists in New England. Mills and
Schermerhorn suggested not only that the moral condition of
frontier settlements was weakened by the dearth of churches (Alabama-
though Methodists and Baptists certainly had a strong presence)
but also that many houses lacked even a Bible. Their report shows
how the cms trustees came to ascertain frontier needs; it also acted
as a spur for local Bible and tract societies.26
24 Quotation and discussion from Rohrer, “The Connecticut Missionary Society and Book
Distribution in the Early Republic,” Libraries & Cultura, XXXIV (1999), 17–26.
25 General Association of Connecticut, An Address to the Emigrants from Connecticut, and from
New England Generally, in the New Settlements in the United States (Hartford, 1817).
26 Colin B. Goodykoontz, Home Missions on the American Frontier, with Particular Reference to
the American Home Missionary Society (Caldwell, Idaho, 1939).
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 485
The success of the cms, sin embargo, suggested new possibilities.
The Society’s roots may have lain in solving the speciªc problem
of limited resources on the frontier, but by the 1820s it had man-
aged to enlist a large group of missionaries and to establish many
churches; it had become proªcient at organizing and distributing
people and money. Although its trustees remained tied in theory
to the inherited civic culture of Connecticut, they were proving
that organized voluntarism could build social capital. The theory
behind the established church—that it was necessary for republi-
can government—could be changed. In their 1817 announce-
mento, the trustees suggested that the burden of responsibility could
be shifted to individuals and families acting through voluntary or-
ganizations. The trustees’ exhortation that frontier settlers “unite”
“by all means” was not empty rhetoric. Without a state to act as
agent, the settlers themselves (in association with organizations
like the cms) would inherit the responsibility of establishing moral
institutions.
the struggle back home Although Connecticut’s Standing
Order was organizing frontier society on a new, voluntary basis—
composed of the consensual actions of free, equal citizens—it
fought to protect the hierarchical organic social order at home. Por
1818, every state except Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Mas-
sachusetts had disestablished the church. In an effort to appease
dissenters, Connecticut Federalists had passed “An Act for the
Support of Religion and Literature” in October 1816. The act
proposed to divide the money owed Connecticut by the federal
government for war expenses between, in descending order, Estafa-
gregationalists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, and Yale. Fed-
eralists hoped to enable continued state support of religion by
making monetary distribution available to all denominations. C.A-
cording to McLoughlin, this tactic “proved to be the worst blun-
der the Federalists could possibly have made.” It enabled their
Republican opponents, united with Episcopalians and other dis-
senters under the Republican-Toleration party, to win the 1817
elections.27
The bill favored Congregationalists and left out such smaller
27 William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent: 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation
of Church and State (Cambridge, Masa., 1971), II, 1034; II, 1025–1062 (discussion of disestab-
lishment). See also Richard J. Purcell, Connecticut in Transition: 1775–1818 (Middletown,
1963), 211–264.
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486 | JOHANN N. NEEM
denominations as Quakers and Universalists. Baptists and Meth-
odists, who emphasized the importance of absolute separation of
church and state, took the unequal distribution of money as an af-
frente. Republican victory led to a constitutional convention and
ultimately disestablishment in 1818. Such is the context in which
the cms trustees viewed the contrast between Ohio and Connecti-
cut in their address. The chaos that they hoped to overcome in
Ohio was now becoming a reality in their home state. The moral
and good institutions that Connecticut exported to the new settle-
ments were under ªre, and the civic culture of Ohio seemed to
signify the future.
Following disestablishment, the former Standing Order had
no choice but to embrace the methods that had appeared in the
Oeste. The reaction of the Rev. Lyman Beecher, who had been
one of the most vocal proponents of the old order, provides in-
sight into this intellectual transformation. En 1812, he convinced
his fellow ministers to organize the Connecticut Society for the
Promotion of Good Morals (cspgm). In his inaugural sermon, “A
Reformation of Morals Practicable and Indispensable,” Beecher
reiterated that social order was imposed from the top down, call-
ing for the old moral laws to be re-invigorated. He argued for “re-
straint” and against “[conciliating] the favour of the ºagitious.”28
Beecher blamed a misplaced Jeffersonian conªdence in the
people’s natural goodness for the breakdown of order, mocking
“the imported discovery, that human nature is too good to be
made better by discipline, that children are enticed from the right
way by religious instruction, and driven from it by the rod, y
kept in thraldom [sic] by the conspiracy of priests and legislators.”
These attacks against authority threatened Connecticut’s “ancient
institutions.” He implored Connecticut’s ministers to challenge
a ellos: “Our fathers” understood that “man is desperately wicked,
and cannot be qualiªed for good membership in society” without
the cooperation of “pastors and churches, and magistrates.” He
described Connecticut’s old order as “the most perfect state of so-
ciety, probably, that has ever existed in this fallen world.” Con-
28 On the formation of the cspgm, see Mead, “Lyman Beecher and Connecticut Ortho-
doxy’s Campaign against the Unitarians, 1819–1826,” Church History, IX (1940), 222–223;
Keller, Second Great Awakening in Connecticut, 143–150. For a discussion of Beecher’s early ef-
forts at forming voluntary associations, see McLoughlin, New England Dissent, II, 1029–1032.
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 487
necticut’s salvation lay in “upholding those institutions and habits”
that had long sustained the social order.
How to do it? According to Beecher, the only way was for
Connecticut’s “wise and good men”—the elite—to “diffuse”
moral instruction by forming local associations and instilling a
sense of shame into an immoral population. Recognizing that the
state was no longer a reliable ally, given the ascendance of the Jef-
fersonians, Beecher urged each community’s virtuous elite to “cre-
ate a public opinion, which nothing can resist.” Arguably, Beecher’s
recognition of the importance of public opinion was a genuine
innovation—as he was to claim in his Autobiography—but his com-
mitment to a hierarchical social order premised on authority cer-
tainly was not. In his view, public opinion was the domain of the
pocos, not the many.29
Beecher vociferously opposed the separation of church and
estado, hoping instead to reinforce the established church. In his
sermon “Building Waste Places,” he urged his fellow ministers
in Connecticut to form a missionary society to ensure that all of
Connecticut’s parishes would have their own minister. En esencia,
Beecher was proposing that they adopt the same methods at home
that were used on the frontier. He believed that only the law
could ensure religiosity; “mere voluntary associations,” or volun-
tary religion, could never succeed. Voluntarism would “under-
mine the deep-laid foundations of our civil and religious order.”30
Despite his initial fears, sin embargo, Beecher later conceded that
disestablishment had been a blessing in disguise, enhancing rather
than undermining the social inºuence of religion. “By voluntary
efforts, societies, missions, and revivals,” he wrote, ministers “ex-
ert a deeper inºuence” than before. Following his conversion
to voluntarism, Beecher helped to ease the transition from the
29 Beecher, A Reformation of Morals Practicable and Indispensable, a Sermon Delivered at New-
Haven on the Evening of October 27, 1812 (Andover, 1814; repr. in Edwin S. Gaustad [ed.],
Lyman Beecher and the Reform of Society: Four Sermons 1804–1828 [Nueva York, 1972]); ídem (ed.
Barbara Cross), Autobiography of Lyman Beecher (Cambridge, Masa., 1961), I, 191. For a critical
assessment of Beecher’s memory, see Keller, Second Great Awakening, 61–62, 145–146; for a
discussion of Beecher as innovator, Donald M. Scott, From Ofªce to Profession: The New Eng-
land Ministry, 1750–1850 (Filadelfia, 1978), 32–34; for a nuanced examination of New Eng-
land ministers’ approach to public opinion, Neil Brody Miller, “Proper Subjects for Public
Consulta: The First Unitarian Controversy and the Transformation of Federalist Print Cul-
tura,” Early American Literature, XLIII (2008), 101–135.
30 Beecher, Autobiography, 200–201. On Beecher’s domestic missionary efforts, see Keller,
Second Great Awakening, 105–108.
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488 | JOHANN N. NEEM
viejo, organic social order to the new, voluntary regime of ordinary
people—not just of the wise and the good—replicating in Con-
necticut what the cms had done out West.31
The transformation in Beecher’s and, more generally, the for-
mer Standing Order’s understanding of how to bring order to a
democracy is evident in a comparison between the two phases of
the sabbatarian movement. The ªrst phase began in 1810 cuando
Congress mandated that post ofªces be open whenever mail ar-
rived, including Sunday. The law challenged Connecticut’s social
orden, in which all citizens ideally attended their local Congrega-
tional church on the Sabbath. Por 1814, Connecticut’s ministers
had joined the national protest, initiated by the Presbyterians,
sending a petition to Congress demanding repeal of the law. Por
the end of 1815, aproximadamente 100 such petitions had reached
Congress from various parts of the country. Purporting to be from
the residents of particular towns, these petitions were probably
signed by congregants at the request of their minister. The process
reinforced the existing order, emanating from the top of the
church hierarchy and claiming to speak for an entire, uniªed com-
munity.32
Por 1826, sin embargo, the religious community devised a new
strategy that depended less on the structure of existing institutions
than on support recruited from people at large. The Presbyterian
General Assembly urged boycotts of any transportation company
traveling on the Sabbath. En 1828, during “Anniversary Week”—
an annual meeting of the trustees from such national voluntary as-
sociations as the American Tract Society, the American Bible So-
ciety, and the American Sunday School Union in New York
City—the Presbyterian elder Josiah Bissell, Jr., convinced the
ministers present to launch a crusade to protect the Sabbath. El
result was the formation of the General Union for the Promotion
of the Christian Sabbath (gupcs). Beecher was one of the found-
ing members.
31 Beecher, Autobiography, 253.
32 Richard R. John, “Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath,
and the Transformation of American Political Culture,” Journal of the Early Republic, X, (1990),
538–539, 542–543 (petition numbers). For sabbatarianism, see also Bertram Wyatt-Brown,
“Prelude to Abolitionism: Sabbatarian Politics and the Rise of the Second Party System,"
Journal of American History, LVIII (1971), 316–441; Rohrer, “Sunday Mails and the Church-
State Theme in Jacksonian America,” Journal of the Early Republic, VII (1987), 53–74.
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 489
On the face of it, the gupcs looked much like earlier associa-
ciones, formed by a national elite composed mostly of ministers.
Pero, as John argues, the gupcs, unlike the earlier effort to enforce
the Sabbath, was “unabashedly democratic—and, en efecto, almost
populistic.” The gupcs appealed directly to the people. Any per-
son could become a member by pledging to boycott transporta-
tion companies that violated the Sabbath. Instead of relying on the
authority of church leaders alone, the new organization sought to
cambiar, in Beecher’s words, “public sentiment” by addressing the
public’s conscience and judgment. Unlike in 1812, esta vez
Beecher disavowed the use of state “coercion,” instead urging his
fellow citizens to observe the Sabbath and to boycott violating
businesses voluntarily. Each citizen, not the state nor even the
Standing Order, had the duty to ensure that public morality be
preserved.33
The result of this new effort was impressive. Por 1829, 467 pe-
titions had reached Washington urging Congress to repeal the
regla; por 1831, the number had topped 900. Ministers mobilized
citizens so effectively that for a few years, the gupcs claimed more
than 1 percent of the American population. The sabbatarian
movement spoke in the name of, and relied on the consent and
actions of, ordinary people in concert. It taught many Americans
that they could shape the social order.34
The gupcs is one of many institutions that comprised what is
often called “the Benevolent Empire.” During the 1810s and
1820s, new societies emerged throughout Connecticut and the
nation—including the American Bible Society, the American
Tract Society, the American Temperance Society, and the Ameri-
can Sunday School Union. En 1829, the American Temperance
Society claimed more than 100,000 miembros. Grifªn counted
33
John, “Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously," 538. A similar story can be told for the
antimasonic movement of the late 1820s/early 1830s. As Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary
Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order 1730–1840 (Capilla
Colina, 1996), argues, antimasonic leaders—many of whom were sabbatarians as well—trans-
formed the public sphere by placing “public opinion and conscience at the heart of their
thinking” (294–295).
[Beecher], The Address of the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian
34
Sabbath, to the People of the United States, Accompanied by Minutes of the Proceedings and in its For-
formación . . . (Nueva York, 1828); John, “Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously," 538. El 1 % statistic
is from Skocpol, Diminished Democracy, 26–28.
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490 | JOHANN N. NEEM
1,000 antislavery societies, 900 Bible societies, y 3,000 tract
societies in 1839.35
Though often founded by elites, these new national organiza-
tions differed from the cms in their reliance on the unpaid services
of middle-class male and female volunteers at the local level. Para
ejemplo, the American Bible Society (abs), despite its ªnancial
dependence on its auxiliaries, was more than simply an umbrella
organización. Like the cms, it sought to build social capital. Its
trustees hired agents to meet with local citizens to form auxiliaries.
The increase in Bible societies and tract societies at the local level
reºected both local responses to national problems by an evangeli-
cal middle class and the efforts of national or regional elites to fos-
ter a vibrant voluntary sphere by teaching citizens how to form
their own associations. What leaders of the abs and other national
reform networks discovered was that appeals to ordinary people
could actually work.36
Many historians have seen little difference between the vol-
untary crusades that started in the 1810s and the Standing Order
that preceded them, largely because they were initiated by a ruling
elite. The Standing Order’s Republican opponents came to much
the same conclusion. Critics of the social-control thesis respond
that it grants too much power to elites and too little agency to or-
dinary people, treating as conspiracy the avowed positions of min-
isters and other citizens and discounting what evangelical ideas
meant to people at the time. Many scholars fail to realize, cómo-
alguna vez, that disestablishment and the subsequent spread of mass-
membership, voluntary associations created a social order that was
fundamentally different from the old one. Even if Beecher’s obser-
vation that ministers were more inºuential following disestablish-
ment is correct, citizens were no longer taught to defer blindly to
authority—whether that of church or state—but were invested
35 For the development of voluntary associations in Connecticut, see Keller, Second Great
Awakening, 109–187. For numbers, Ver Robert H.. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform
and the Religious Imagination (Nueva York, 1994), 86–90; Ronald G. walters, American Reformers,
1815–1860 (Nueva York, 1978), 126–127; Grifªn, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 83.
36 Mary P. ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, Nueva York, 1790–
1865 (Nueva York, 1981); Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-
Century America (Ítaca, 1994), 62–88; Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners, 81–113; Wright,
Transformation of Charity, 96–111. See also American Tract Society, “The American Colpor-
teur System” (Nueva York, 1836).
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 491
with the authority once held by elites. The message that ministers
preached had changed from complete obedience to personal ini-
tiative. Society was formed through horizontal connections be-
tween free and equal citizens rather than through the vertical con-
nections that had been the Standing Order’s original stock in
comercio. Ordinary Americans had become active participants in forg-
ing social order and communal norms.37
This new order, sin embargo, had limits. As many scholars have
noted, it was fundamentally middle-class. Voluntary associations
not only helped form middle-class identity; they also served as ve-
hicles to impose middle-class norms on minorities and lower-class
workers, especially immigrants. But to many middle-class Ameri-
cans, the opportunity to cultivate their own social order was liber-
ating and, compared to the ancien regime, egalitarian. It also meant
that the form the social order was to take could and would be an
object of civic concern and deliberation. The new social order
could thus be subject to the challenges of motivated citizens on
the same grounds as those who sustained it. If the social order was
not divinely ordained, citizens could turn to voluntary associations
to transform it even further. Americans undertook their new re-
sponsibilities with earnest seriousness—hence the myriad outreach
efforts by middle-class Americans to the poor and immigrant pop-
ulaciones. They recognized that the social order could be changed
by their own actions, whether for such conservative purposes as
sabbatarianism and temperance, or for such radical ones as aboli-
tion and female suffrage. The moral order, Americans discovered,
was their own creation, not just something inherited and eternal.
This was indeed something new under the sun, a new civil society
with a radical foundation even if it was often employed for conser-
37 On Republicans, see Rohrer, Keepers of the Covenant, 62–69; New London Bee, 22 Julio
1801. Variations in approach to the social-control question include Grifªn, Their Brothers’
Keepers; Charles Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Capilla
Colina, 1960); Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order; Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium:
Society and Revivals in Rochester, Nueva York, 1815–1837 (Nueva York, 1978); Christine Stansell,
City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Nueva York, 1986). See also R. j. morris,
“Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780–1850: An Analysis,“Diario Histórico,
XXVI (1983), 95–118. For critical assessments, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God
Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Nueva York, 2007), 164–202; Banner, “Re-
ligious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation,” Journal of American
Historia, LX (1973), 23–41; Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian
Sensibility, Part One,” American Historical Review, XC (1985), 339–361.
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492 | JOHANN N. NEEM
vative purposes. In Scott’s words, by the 1820s, ministers and their
evangelical supporters had developed “a whole new social gram-
mar—a new and distinctive way of perceiving how the social or-
der was composed, operated, and maintained.”38
Abolitionists took this lesson to heart. Rather than appealing
solely to lawmakers, as elite antislavery advocates like Benjamin
Franklin had done after the American Revolution and as the elite-
run American Colonization Society continued to do, abolitionists
formed voluntary associations in towns across the North and the
Oeste. Por 1838, the American Anti-Slavery Society claimed more
than 1,300 auxiliary associations. Throughout Connecticut and
the nation, abolitionists mobilized women and men from ordinary
backgrounds. Activists signed petitions, attended lectures, donated
money and time, and sought to convert their neighbors. Aboli-
tionists explicitly sought to alter the social order from the bottom
arriba, even in the face of intense hostility from political elites and
many ministers. The new civil society could both forge social or-
der and disrupt it, since it was subject to the deliberative processes
of the citizenry.39
Desde esta perspectiva, the theological conºicts within New
England Congregationalism become more comprehensible. Many
Congregationalists felt the need to adapt the authoritarian Calvin-
ist God to one more compatible with a democratic social order.
During the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, sympathetic
ministers emphasized the fact that ordinary people could save
ellos mismos. Although some ministers may have tried to sustain the
idea of an omnipotent god who dispensed grace by predestination,
Americans were being taught that by attending revivals, joining
churches, and participating in voluntary associations, they could
save themselves and their society. As New England’s divines
38 Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840 (Cha-
pel Hill, 2002); Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the
American City, 1760–1900 (Nueva York, 1989), 192–229; John S. Gilkeson, Middle-Class Provi-
dencia, 1820–1940 (Princeton, 1986); ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Stansell, City of Women;
Scott, From Ofªce to Profession, 36–51.
39 The best study of the abolitionists’ strategies is Richard S. Hombre nuevo, The Transformation
of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002). See also Su-
san Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Cha-
pel Hill, 2003); Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners, 163–170.
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 493
adapted to modernity, they also helped to lay its theological foun-
dations.40
However hesitantly, Connecticut’s leaders ªnally embraced the
new civil society that they had fostered in the West. The founding
of voluntary churches and other associations became the dominant
strategy to produce moral order and social capital in the United
Estados. Once the type of hierarchical authority exempliªed by the
Standing Order, as abetted by state legislation, had dissolved,
America’s ministers and ordinary citizens had no choice but to
adapt.
In Vermont, voluntary associations provided a vehicle for
communitarian-minded citizens to forge social cohesion without
the coercive mechanism of the state, thus producing order with-
out offending the egalitarian sentiments of post-Revolutionary
Americans. Doyle’s study of a nineteenth-century frontier Illinois
town demonstrates the important role that settlers assigned to vol-
untary associations in integrating a disorderly and often divided
comunidad. Utica, Nueva York, also generated communal norms
through voluntary associations. As Mathews suggested, the Sec-
ond Great Awakening was an “organizing process” by which reli-
gious leaders sought to use associations to create order in a country
undergoing dramatic economic, social, and geographical change.
Similarmente, residents newly arrived in American cities, si
from farms or foreign countries, could ªnd themselves living in an
atomistic environment, sorely missing the social institutions that
had once held them in place. Voluntary associations often ªlled
the void for them. Wherever it emerged, the new order combined
Revolutionary egalitarianism with the recognition that all societies
require shared values and norms.41
40 On modernity and theological foundations, see especially Scott, From Ofªce to Profession,
36–51; in relation to individuals, Sidney Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil
War Reformers (baltimore, 1995). See also Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 166–176; Mark A.
noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Nueva York, 2002); Nathan O.
Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (nuevo refugio, 1989); Joseph Haroutinian,
From Piety to Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (Nueva York, 1932); Keller, Sec-
ond Great Awakening, 224–230. On the effort of theologians to sustain Calvinism amid change,
see William Breitenbach, “The Consistent Calvinism of the New Divinity Movement,” Wil-
liam and Mary Quarterly, XLI (1984), 241–264.
41 Roth, Democratic Dilemma, 80–116; Don H. Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Commu-
nity: Jacksonville, Illinois 1825–70 (chicago, 1978); ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Donald G.
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494 | JOHANN N. NEEM
According to a recent study by Gamm and Putnam, the leg-
acy lasted well into the nineteenth century. Gamm and Putnam
located most voluntary associations in the smaller and relatively
stable cities of the Midwest and West during the latter half of the
siglo XIX. Their conclusions, based on close analyses of
city directories and associational membership lists, challenge the
assumption that industrialization, urbanization, and pluralism were
the primary motives for forming associations. In their view,
“America’s civic core was in the periphery, away from the big cit-
ies and outside the Northeast” during the seventy years following
the Civil War. En esencia, social capital ºourished in the small, ho-
mogenous cities of the Old Northwest.
Gamm and Putnam do not explain this phenomenon. Él
might well be a legacy of the northeastern elite’s association-
building efforts during the ªrst half of the century. Después de todo, el
Midwest was the site of the Standing Order’s ªrst experiments in
creating social order through voluntary organization. If this expla-
nation is true, it helps to reconcile Gamm and Putnam’s view with
Skocpol’s. She criticized Gamm and Putnam’s “small-is-beautiful”
paradigma, pointing instead to the expansion of the federal state
and the activities of translocal organizers as the primary causes of
associational development. The efforts of the cms suggest, cómo-
alguna vez, that both perspectives have merit. Organizations like the cms
provided the ªnancing and the personnel that helped frontier set-
tlers to organize themselves. Sucesivamente, frontier towns developed
their own conception of how to create a social order that endured
throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth cen-
tury, as Gamm and Putnam documented. The local conditions
and the needs of the frontier combined with the ambitions of east-
ern elites to develop the rich associational life that characterized
nineteenth-century middle America.42
Mathews, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypoth-
esis,” American Quarterly, XXI (1969), 23–43. See also T. Scott Miyakawa, Protestants and Pio-
neers: Individualism and Conformity on the American Frontier (chicago, 1964). Boyer, Urban
Masses and Moral Order; Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present
(Nueva York, 1977).
42 Gerald Gamm and Putnam, “The Growth of Voluntary Associations in America, 1840–
1940,” Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, XXIX (1999), 511–557; Skocpol, Marshall Ganz, y
Ziad Munson, “A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Voluntarism in
the United States,” American Political Science Review, XLIV (2000), 527–546; Skocpol, “How
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CREATIN G S OCIAL CAPI TAL | 495
Americans’ experience with voluntary association shows how
a society in which, as Wood wrote, “no one was really in charge,"
could discover “harmony emerging out of such chaos.” Connecti-
cut’s Standing Order concluded from both their frontier experi-
ence and their later adoption of similar strategies back home
that voluntary horizontal networks might effectively produce
social capital, or the networks that facilitate trust, social coopera-
ción, reciprocity, and social solidarity. Voluntary associations and
churches helped to shape the mores of America’s growing middle
class and, Sucesivamente, those same institutions allowed middle-class
Americans to become participants in forging social order. This so-
cial order, sin embargo, was precarious. The very mechanism that
formed it could challenge it. Antebellum America saw voluntary
associations used in both capacities. In Taylor’s framework, el
cms contributed to secular modernity by replacing the social or-
der’s natural foundations with human artiªce. Regardless of how
we characterize the new social order, it has had a lasting legacy on
American culture and thought.43
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Americans Became Civic,” in idem and Fiorina (editores.), Civic Engagement, 27–71; ídem, Dimin-
ished Democracy, 32, 37, 72–73, 89–98.
43 Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 359.
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