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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
It was half past nine on a quiet Monday night in April 1818. Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury, known throughout Worcester as “Madame Salisbury” in deference to her family's wealth and social position, was passing a serene evening at home with her niece and adopted daughter, Eliza Weir. Her husband, Stephen, a merchant and the town's wealthiest Citizen, was away on business. The Salisbury mansion's comfortable drawing room was pleasant, graced by Elizabeth's harp and a piano bought expressly for Eliza.
Suddenly, the peace was shattered as something crashed violently against the front window. Salisbury immediately “call'd in the people” (the servants) for protection. Venturing outside, they spotted no one lurking about but did find two good-sized stones, one weighing over half a pound. Peering out into the now still night, Elizabeth Salisbury noted that “it was very dark, & no one appeared to be in the street. [Y]ou may suppose I did not recover my tranquil[l]ity very soon.”
1. Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury to Stephen Salisbury, April 7, 1818, Salisbury Family Papers, box 18, folder 3, Manuscript Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts (hereafter cited AAS); Meyer, Susan M., The Salisbury Family Mansion: A Plan for Furnishings (Worcester, Mass.: Worcester Historical Museum, 1986).Google Scholar
2. Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury to Stephen Salisbury, April 7, 1818.
3. Ibid. The raid on his foliage was a personal affront to Waldo, a patron of the Massachusetts Agricultural Society, an early promoter of the Worcester Agricultural Society, and a supporter of local cemetery beautification. See the letter from J. N. Lorrell of the Massachusetts Agricultural Society to Daniel Waldo, February 2, 1818, Waldo Family Papers, box 2, folder 3, Manuscript Collection, AAS; Lincoln, William, History of Worcester, Massachusetts (Worcester, Mass.: Moses D. Phillips, 1837), 325-26Google Scholar; and Levi Lincoln's Memorial to Daniel Waldo, July 9, 1845, Waldo Family Papers, box 2, folder 5. Waldo, a Federalist, was elected to the Massachusetts State Senate in 1816 and served three consecutive one-year terms. According to the family, Waldo declined renomination in 1819. Less sympathetic sources insisted Waldo knew he would not be renominated. See Lincoln's Memorial to Waldo; Worcester National Aegis, April 8, 1818, and March 10, 1819; and Worcester Spy, April 8, 1818.
4. Elizabeth Salisbury to the First Church, undated but January 1819, in Origin and Progress of The Late Difficulties in The First Church in Worcester, Mass. (Worcester, Mass.: Manning and Trumbull, 1820), 33 (hereafter cited as Origin).
5. For the feminization of American Protestantism, see Welter, Barbara, “The Feminization of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Hartman, Mary and Banner, Lois (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), 137-57Google Scholar; Cott, Nancy F., “Young Women in the Second Great Awakening in New England,” Feminist Studies 3 (Fall 1975): 15–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cott, Nancy F., The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman's Sphere’ in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Shiels, Richard D., “The Feminization of American Congregationalism, 1730-1835,” American Quarterly 33 (Spring 1981): 46–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ryan, Mary P., “A Woman's Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the Families of Utica, New York, 1800-1840,” American Quarterly 30 (Winter 1978): 602-23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 83–109 Google Scholar and Appendix C, 257; and Stout, Harry S. and Brekus, Catherine A., “Declension, Gender, and the ‘New Religious History,’” in Belief and Behavior: Essays in New Religious History, ed. VanderMeer, Philip R. and Swierenga, Robert P. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 15–37.Google Scholar In The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), Ann Douglas argues that the feminization of religion extended to the feminization of American culture when middle-class educated women, disestablished by their gender, joined forces with ministers, disestablished by disestablishment, to produce a sentimental mass culture. In a critique of Douglas, David Schuyler found little evidence for this thesis, arguing that the relationship between ministers and their congregations needs more thorough analysis before the feminization argument can substantiated. See Schuyler, David, “Inventing a Feminine Past,” New England Quarterly 51 (September 1978): 291–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6. For the demoeratization of Protestantism, see Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 387–509 Google Scholar; and Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
7. McCoy, Genevieve, “The Women of the ABCFM Oregon Mission and the Conflicted Language of Calvinism,” Church History 64 (March 1995): 62–82, quote from 64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8. Juster, Susan, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 12.Google Scholar Catherine A. Brekus also finds that the establishment of formerly dissenting churches sparked pressure to limit women's religious leadership and autonomy. See Catherine A. Brekus, “‘Let Your Women Keep Silence in the Churches’: Female Preaching and Evangelical Religion in America, 1740-1845” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1993). See also the collection of essays in Wessinger, Catherine, ed., Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Terry D. Bilhartz argues against the feminization model, although for different reasons, in “Sex and the Second Great Awakening: The Feminization of American Religion Reconsidered,” in Belief and Behavior, ed. Vander-Meer and Swierenga, 117-35. David S. Reynolds proposes that feminization was paired with religious “masculinization” in the form of a “muscular Christianity” in “The Feminization Controversy: Sexual Stereotypes and the Paradoxes of Piety in Nineteenth-Century America,” New England Quarterly 53 (March 1980): 96-106. Reynolds' argument is supported by Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz in their study of the antebellum New York cult of Matthias, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in Nineteeth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Johnson and Wilentz suggest that the appeal for some men of the Prophet Matthias lay in his reassertion of patriarchal authority in the face of a feminized evangelicalism. Johnson and Wilentz do not, however, analyze why some women found this message appealing.
9. The case for feminization has largely relied on the numerical dominance of women in the churches as well as the emotionalism of the Second Great Awakening. The first contention was true as early as the seventeenth Century, when no such conclusion of feminization is asserted. See, for example, Cott, , The Bonds of Womanhood, 126.Google Scholar The second contention is questionable, since the emotionalism of the revivals appealed to men as well as to women; indeed, the “new measures” of Charles Grandison Finney were expressly intended to remind men (and women) of the necessity of setting aside earthly cares for spiritual concerns. See Charles Finney, Grandison, “Measure to Promote Revivals,” in Lectures on Revivals of Religion by Charles Grandison Finney, ed. McLoughlin, William G. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 250-76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10. By the 1840's, Worcester was the center of numerous railroad lines and a favored site for political and social Conventions in the antebellum era, including the first national women's rights Convention. Its Citizens also participated actively in the region's political, social reform, and religious movements. For secondary works on Worcester politics and economics, see, for example, Brooke, John L., The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Doherty, Robert, Society and Power: Five New England Towns, 1800-1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977).Google Scholar
While no Community may accurately be said to reflect all others, an argument for Worcester 's suitability as a test case for the feminization thesis can be made. Neither large nor small, rural nor urban, old nor new, Worcester shared many of the characteristics of developing towns in New England and New York, the areas most affected by the Second Great Awakening and the areas usually cited in studies of feminization. Most important, however, Worcester is especially well suited for such an analysis due to the unusually rich local history collections at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). Founded in Worcester just as the crisis in the First Church began, the extensive church records available at the AAS permit the kind of close institutional analysis necessary to test the feminization thesis.
11. Indeed, conflicts between ministers and their congregations were so common in the early years of the nineteenth Century that they earned the sobriquet “difficulties.” For the evolution of American religion generally, see Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People; Gaustad, Edwin Scott, A Religious History of America (New York: Harper and Row, 1966)Google Scholar; McLoughlin, William G., Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and McLoughlin, William G., New England Dissent, 1630-1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar
12. Daniel Waldo often spoke for the women in the early stages of the dispute; however, because he was not a full member of the First Church but only a member of the parish, he was not a party to the subsequent proceedings against the dissidents. A third Waldo sister, Elizabeth, eventually joined the Calvinist Church but does not seem to have been involved in the quarrel with the First Church. None of the Waldos ever married; they lived together in the Waldo mansion on Main Street.
13. In 1827, the Calvinist Church assessed the estate of each Waldo sister at $35,500; when they died two decades later, each was worth about $50,000. In 1846, Elizabeth Salisbury controlled an estate of $125,200. The bulk of her husband's estate went to their son, Stephen Salisbury II, whose property in 1846 was assessed in excess of $320,000. See Central Church Records, folio vol. “W,” vol. 4, Manuscript Collection, AAS (by the 1830's, the Calvinist Church was known as the Central Church); Papers of Daniel Waldo, Waldo Family Papers, box 2, folders 3-5; and List of Persons Assessed in the Town of Worcester, for the Town and County Tax (Boston: Samuel N. Dickinson, 1846), 30, 31, 34.
14. Edward Pessen has estimated that, in the antebellum era, owning property worth in excess of $50,000 placed an individual in the top 1 percent of the population. Pessen, Edward, Riches, Class, and Power before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973), 36.Google Scholar
15. For discussion of the theology of the New Divinity ministers, see Ahlstrom, , A Religious History of the American People, 403-14.Google Scholar For Samuel Austin, see Lincoln, , History of Worcester, 157-61Google Scholar; Sprague, William B., Annals of the American Pulpit, 9 vols. (New York: R. Carter and Brothers, 1857 Google Scholar; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 1:221-26; and Bacon, Leonard, A Historical Discourse Delivered at Worcester, in the Old South Meeting House, September 22, 1863; The Hundredth Anniversary of Its Erection (Worcester, Mass.: Edward R. Fiske, 1863), 12.Google Scholar In the 1790's, Worcester's First Church, which had long endorsed the Halfway Covenant, agreed to renounce it if Austin would be their pastor. See Sprague, , Annals of the American Pulpit, 1:223.Google Scholar
16. The town decided in favor of the Unitarians, but the courts eventually ruled in favor of the First Church. See Butler, Charles Evans, Walking in the Way: A History of the First Congregational Church in Worcester, 1716-1982 (Worcester, Mass.: The Society, 1987), 69–70, 72-74.Google Scholar For the disestablishment of Congregationalism in New England, see McLoughlin, , New England Dissent, 2:1065–1274.Google Scholar
17. Letter from the “qualified voters” to the Assessors of the First Parish, Jury 1, 1816, Old South Church Records, box 1, folder 10, AAS. The First Church was also known as the Old South Church.
18. Origin, 4. Origin recounts the First Church's version of events.
19. McLoughlin, , New England Dissent, 1:661, 2:1102.Google Scholar On the question of disestablishment, see also McLoughlin, William G., Soul Liberty: The Baptists' Struggle in New England, 1630-1833 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1991), 293–301.Google Scholar David Schuyler highlights the significance of church taxation and suggests that who paid the minister's salary was pertinent to the question of feminization. The findings from Worcester support Schuyler's insight that, with or without State sanction, church taxpayers, as opposed to church members, would have a disproportionate influence over the minister. See Schuyler, “Inventing a Feminine Past,” 298.
20. See editor's note, Remarks on the Late Publication of the First Church in Worcester, of Which the Rev. Charles A. Goodrich Was Pastor, Relative to the “Origin and Difficulties” in That Church (Worcester, Mass.: Manning and Trumbull, 1821), 121 (hereafter cited as Remarks). The pamphlet was the dissidents’ response to Origin. The quotation is from from Origin, 9.
21. The first ministerial candidate had been vetoed by Opposition orchestrated by the Waldos. See Origin, 4.
22. Origin, 4-5; Butler, , Walking in the Way, 73.Google Scholar Daniel Waldo never became a member of the church, that is, he did not undergo conversion. However, as a member of the parish, he participated actively in church affairs, served frequently on church committees, and could vote in parish meetings. See Remarks, 9.
23. Remarks, 9 (emphasis in original). The origin of this accusation is suggested in Goodrich's later introduction to a book by a sixteenth-century English dissenter, in which Goodrich, a Student of history, criticized Calvin's rigid rule of Geneva. Calvin's “rude and fierce soldiery” against “popery,” Goodrich asserted, led him to abolish “many most useful laws and practices … merely on account of their adoption by the church of Rome.” Goodrich deemed Calvin's zealotry regrettable and no longer necessary Opinions such as these perhaps prompted the “cart-ropes” remark that so scandalized the Waldos. Goodrich, Charles A., ed., Actes and Monuments of the Church: Book of Martyrs, or, A History of the Lives, Sufferings and Triumphant Deaths of the Primitive as Well as Protestant Martyrs: From the Commencement of Christianity, to the Latest Periods of Pagan and Popish Persecution (New York: William W. Reed, 1831), 47–48.Google Scholar
24. Remarks, 7-12; Daniel Waldo to the First Church, December 20, 1820, in Remarks, 8.
25. This assessment of Goodrich can be found in Remarks, 7; see also 26-27. The quotation is from ibid., 7. Elizabeth Salisbury concurs with this assessement in her letter to the First Church, undated but January 1819, in Origin, 32-33.
26. Minority report to the Ecclesiastical Council, December 1818, cited in Origin, 19-20.
27. In 1816, Daniel Waldo, at fifty-three, was the eldest of the dissidents; Sarah Waldo was forty-nine, Elizabeth Salisbury was forty-eight, and Rebecca Waldo was forty-five. See Lincoln, Waldo, Four Generations of the Waldo Family in America (Boston: David Clapp & Son, 1898)Google Scholar; and Daniel Waldo to Charles A. Goodrich, April 29, 1817, Old South Church Records, box 1, folder 10. Samuel Austin, fifty-seven years old in 1816, had been a minister since 1784; he came to Worcester in 1790. For the relations between the two families, see the letter from Jerusha Hopkins Austin to Elizabeth Salisbury, April 18, 1818, Salisbury Family Papers, box 18, folder 2; Sprague, , Annals of the American Pulpit, 1:223-24Google Scholar; Meyer, , The Salisbury Family Mansion, 30 Google Scholar; and Lincoln, , History of Worcester, 160.Google Scholar The ties of respect and friendship between the departed pastor and his supporters were strengthened when Austin's nephew and adopted son, John Hubbard, married Eliza Weir, the niece and adopted daughter of Elizabeth Salisbury.
28. Austin's preaching was described by his contemporary Bacon, Leonard in A Historical Discourse Delivered at Worcester, 45 Google Scholar; Goodrich's characterization is from Remarks, 9, 27 (emphasis in original).
29. Records, box 2.
30. Rebekah Salisbury was married to Stephen Salisbury II, Elizabeth Salisbury's son and the Waldos' cousin. Rebekah Dean Salisbury (Worcester) to Catherine Dean Flint (Boston), May 7, 1839, Waldo Flint Papers, manuscript box F, box 6, folder 8, AAS. See also the sermon by the Reverend Seth Sweetser, “No. 735, Preached on Sunday after the death of Miss Sarah Waldo,” March 23, 1851, Seth Sweetser Papers, octavo vol. 2, manuscript vol. “S,” AAS.
31. Origin, 6-7; the Reverend Auretius B. Hüll (First Church, Worcester) to the Reverend Joseph Goffe (Milbury Church, Milbury, Massachusetts), February 1824, Old South Church Records, box 2, folder 2, AAS.
32. That this was the intent of the First Church is suggested by the discipline petition from the church members to the Reverend Charles A. Goodrich, March 1818, Old South Church Records, box 1, folder 11, AAS.
33. Letter from the Reverend Charles A. Goodrich to Daniel Waldo, April 1817, cited in Origin, 7.
34. The First Church noted that “it was thought by many that the character and dignity of the Church, and the honour of religion required that something should be done. After the above controversy arose, discipline was inexpedient, and, considering the embarrassed State of the Church, might have been impossible. It was therefore conceded, that, until that question were at rest, nothing could properly be attempted.” The controversy referred to were subsequent attempts to return Austin to the Worcester pulpit. Origin, 25-26.
35. The Reverend Samuel Austin (Worcester) to Miss Betsey Flagg (Boylston), August 3, 1814, Samuel Austin Papers, box A, folder 6, AAS. The ecclesiastical Council that mediated the dispute granted Flagg a dismission and recommendation upon the condition that she apologize to the brethren, which she did. Thus, while Flagg was in a sense vindicated, it came at the cost of her acknowledgment that she was equally in the wrong. Susan Juster analyzes the gender implications of “crimes of the tongue” among Baptists in Disorderly Women, 88-107.
36. The voting majority was, of course, itself a minority of the church, since it was limited to the male members of the parish and was not composed of the church as a whole. In 1816, women comprised 72 percent of the First Church membership; men comprised 28 percent. “The Old South Parish,” Proceedings of the Worcester Society of Antiquity, vol. 22 (Worcester, Mass.: Worcester Society of Antiquity, 1907), 174-78.
37. Butler, , Walking in the Way 74.Google Scholar
38. Remarks, 12; Origin, 10; Elizabeth Salisbury to Stephen Salisbury, April 13, 1818, and April 2, 1818, respectively, Salisbury Family Papers, box 18, folder 2.
39. Origin, 12-13, quotation from 13 (emphasis in original). To underscore his position, Austin signed his correspondence to the First Church “Your affectionate copastor.” Letter from the Reverend Samuel Austin (Burlington, Vermont) to the First Church (Worcester), September 26, 1818, cited in Origin, 18-19.
40. Lincoln, , History of Worcester, 161-62Google Scholar; Origin, 20-21.
41. Origin, 24, 25. According to the mutual Council, the pro-Goodrich majority represented four-fifths of the congregation.
42. Daniel Waldo was not a party to these proceedings, possibly because he was not a member of the church but only of the parish.
43. Charles A. Goodrich to Elizabeth Salisbury, January 17, 1819, Salisbury Family Papers, box 19, folder 1.
44. Origin, 41.
45. Sarah Waldo and Rebecca Waldo to the First Church, undated but January 1819, in Origin, 31-32.
46. Elizabeth Salisbury to the First Church, undated but January 1819, in Origin, 32-33.
47. Elizabeth Salisbury, Sarah Waldo, and Rebecca Waldo to the First Church, undated but January 1819, in Origin, 39-40.
48. Ibid., 40. The records of the dispute indicate that, while the men of the church participated personally in church meetings and ecclesiastical Councils, the women of the church participated only via written petitions. This has had the ironic result of better documenting the women's views than the men's, which, given orally, were not recorded.
49. Ibid., 40-41.
50. See Central Church Records, octavo vol. “W,” vol. 5. The quotation is from Butler, , Walking in the Way, 10.Google Scholar
51. “Records of the Ecclesiastical Council,” August 2, 1820, Central Church Records, octavo vol. “W,” vol. 5. The First Church bitterly denounced this ecclesiastical Council on the basis that it was an ex parte Council. There is merit to this argument, for it was not a mutual Council but one gathered at the dissenters' request. See letter from the Reverend Auretius B. Hull (Worcester) to the Reverend Joseph Goffe (Milbury), February 1824, Old South Church Records, box 2, folder 2.
52. Samuel Austin to John Nelson, March 2, 1824, cited in Cutler, U. Waldo, The First Hundred Years of the Central Church in Worcester, 1820-1920 (Worcester, Mass.: Central Church, 1920), 18–19.Google Scholar Although well out of the dispute by this point, Samuel Austin followed it with great interest. The Calvinist Church chose the Reverend Loammi Hoadley as its first pastor; it is not clear why Austin was not a candidate, although he resigned the presidency of the University of Vermont in 1821.
53. Men as well as women constituted the dissenters who left the First Church to found the Calvinist Church, but the procedures for leaving an established church for a disputed church differed as a result of the gender inequities of church membership, which was linked to the question of taxpaying. The First Church dismissed without recommending five individuals— Sarah Waldo, Rebecca Waldo, Elizabeth Salisbury, and Rebekah Richards and her husband, David Richards—but refused to dismiss seventeen others, maintaining that they were still part of the First Church and proposing a mutual Council to decide the issue (Origin, 80). Subsequently, the male members of this group, in essence, found a loophole: they separated themselves from the First Church by filing certificates with the town clerk to join the Baptist church in Worcester, as was their right under the Religious Freedom Act of 1811. While the First Church in Worcester initially opposed their actions, ultimately it accepted that the men had left the church (Origin, 53; Remarks, 57). However, certification was required only for church taxpayers; since women were not subject to the church tax unless they were heads of households, married women did not certificate, leaving open the question of their institutional affiliation. The First Church apparently considered the married female dissenters still under its watch and ward and subject to its discipline. When the Calvinist Church was formed in 1820, and Lydia Taylor and Anna McFarland petitioned to be dismissed and recommended to it, the First Church was confronted with a novel problem, namely, did these non-taxpaying married women have the right to leave the First Church for what it considered to be an outlaw church?
54. Anna McFarland and Lydia Taylor to Charles A. Goodrich, October 4, 1820, Central Church Records, octavo vol. “W,” vol. 5.
55. See tax lists for 1827, 1832, 1837, 1842, 1845, Central Church Records, folio vol. “W,” vol. 4; and List of Persons Assessed in Worcester.
56. Charles A. Goodrich to Anna McFarland and Lydia Taylor, undated but October 1820, Central Church Records, octavo vol. “W,” vol. 5.
57. Anna McFarland and Lydia Taylor to the Calvinist Church, October 14, 1820, Central Church Records, octavo vol. “W,” vol. 5.
58. Computed from the list of members, Calvinist Church of Worcester, Manual of the Calvinist Church (Worcester, Mass.: Goddard, 1877). The Worcester data confirm the findings of other historians that a substantial number of antebellum churchgoers did not attend Services with their spouses. Paul E. Johnson, Mary P. Ryan, and Harry S. Stout and Catherine A. Brekus reach similar conclusions in their studies of Rochester, Utica, and New Haven churches, respectively. See Johnson, Paul E., A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 18151837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 95–115 Google Scholar; Ryan, , Cradle of the Middle Class, 257 Google Scholar; Stout and Brekus, “Declension, Gender, and the ‘New Religious History,’” 30.
59. “Copy of the Hon. Daniel Waldo's Deed,” July 29, 1826, Central Church Records, folio vol. “W,” vols. 1 and 2. Elizabeth Salisbury was not included in the Charter, likely because she did not formally join the Calvinist Church until 1830.
60. Central Church Records, March 28, 1823, octavo vol. “W,” vol. 5. For the election of John S. C. Abbott, pastor from 1830 to 1835, see octavo vol. 8, undated entry for late 1829; for David Peabody, pastor from 1835 to 1838, see octavo vol. 8, April 22, 1835; for Seth Sweetser, pastor from 1838 to 1878, see folio vol. “W,” vol. 10, undated entry for 1838.