Why religion played a role in threats to secede.
New England differed from the rest of the country when it came to religion. The Congregationalist Church was the state-sanctioned church of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Church and state were not separate. Would you expect anything else from an area colonized by Puritans?
The clergy preached politics from the pulpit. They linked God’s will with the Federalist view. Jefferson was anathema to New England’s clergy. New England’s clergy were anathema to Jefferson.
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“[New England] will be the last to come over, on account of the dominion of the clergy, who had got a smell of the union between Church and State, and began to indulge in reveries which can never be realized in the present state of science.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1801 [1]
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Carey was born and spent his early years in Ireland where the Irish Anglican church was the state religion. Both Roman Catholics and Presbyterians were subject to politically and economically punitive laws. In Ireland, Carey was exposed to the Enlightenment ideal of separation of church and state. When New England’s clergy thundered secession from their pulpits, Carey was deeply offended.
“To Rev Dr Osgood, Rev Dr Gardiner, Rev Dr Parrish and the Rev Dr Morse.
With a degree of horror and indignation commensurate with the atrocity of your crimes, has the public seen you for years prostituting the pulpit for the vilest and basest purposes…you denounce damnation upon all who dare dissent from your opinions. While you are dishonouring and disgracing your Sacred functions by preaching rebellion and civil war, you denounce as worthy of “hell-fire” those rulers who are legally chosen to govern us…Open your Bible. There learn your civil duty…”
Mathew Carey [2]
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What is your understanding of the separation of church and state?
Mathew Carey disseminated public documents in the Olive Branch. Public documents are available today over the Internet, but who reads them?
There are two ways of making sure information is available but not read. The first is to write a document that resembles a plate full of spaghetti, with long clauses entangling thoughts in a heap of confusion that requires a fork, a knife, a lawyer, or a reporter to sort things out. The second is to write so much that no one has time to read it. “Spare time” is history. Who has it? Combine complex sentences with numerous pages and you have a document that says something that really says nothing. A lot can be hidden in plain sight. We depend on those who report the news to summarize public issues and documents for us.
Modern news often blends fact with opinion. The same was true in the Early Republic. Jefferson and Madison founded a party that opposed the Federalists by starting a newspaper.
Next: How Newspaper Politics Fueled New England’s Discontent
Look for it Monday, December 10.
[1] Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, March 23, 1801; quoted in Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1986) 213.
[2] Mathew Carey, Miscellanies II, ms. (c. 1834), 221-5.
