 Hi everyone, this is Dan O'Neill, the executive director of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. Before we get to our third Sunday presentation, I would like to thank the following businesses for sponsoring today's lecture. They made a vital investment in our museum and their support is why we are able to bring you this lecture series at no charge. I am very pleased to bring you Dr. Shelby Balick. She is an associate professor of history at Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado. Her expertise is in early American history, American religion, American slavery and its legacy and historical memory. She also has expertise in political philosophy and K-12 public education. Her talk today is entitled Preachers Behaving Badly, Religious Scandal in Early Vermont. I hope you enjoy. So if you were to eavesdrop on Sabbath meetings and religious conversations in early Vermont, so I'm talking about the decades right after the Revolutionary War, you might hear about church building and you might hear about missionaries crisscrossing the back roads, or you might hear about new denominations popping up with some odd rituals and sensibilities, and you might hear about revivals and public conversions. And it's entirely likely that you would have heard about scandal. For in the seemingly lawless frontier of early Vermont, there were several maverick preachers running around. This should not be a surprise. For early Vermont really was a known destination for religious seekers. It was popular both among missionaries of long-standing denominations like the Congregationalists and also for experimental communities like the shakers. It was a stopping place for religious radicals like Samuel E. Lee, who was a minister who used Vermont as a refuge in between agrarian uprisings in Massachusetts and Maine. It was home to those who would one day make names for themselves as religious nonconformists like Joseph Smith, who later founded Mormonism, and John Humphrey Noyes. Noyes eventually founded the utopian community Oneida in New York, but before that he gathered the Putney community in Vermont, where many of the practices that would make him famous, like complex marriage, became common. So preachers going against the norm was nothing new in Vermont. Some of them were visionaries who simply rejected orthodoxy. Some simply didn't fit in to the more conventional face and practices. Maybe their habits, their beliefs, or even their charisma drew followers away from the churches of their youth. Some were autocrats making both financial and romantic decisions for their disciples and in doing so creating new churches and communities of their own design. And some were scam artists using the pretense of religion to hide from the law or separate disciples from their money. Whatever their stories, these unconventional ministers, scandal and all fit right into the messy and often ragged patchwork of faiths in early Vermont where religious life was often subject to contention, disruption, but also discovery and revelation. So who were these mavericks and what scandals did they cause? I'd like to start today by exploring three religious scandals before we talk about what they meant for Vermont's religious culture at this particular historical moment. So we can start with the angel delusion, which took place in Springfield, Vermont between 1805 and 1811. At the center of the controversy was a free will Baptist minister William Smith Babcock and his wife Betsy Merrill Babcock. The free will Baptists were at the time a relatively new denomination. They emerged from a radical network of evangelical preachers who were traveling the area between New Hampshire, Maine and Nova Scotia. They synthesized doctrine and rituals that they borrowed from both the Baptists and the Methodists. They emphasized a mystical conversion experience and believers baptism. In other words, the baptism of people who had already undergone conversion as opposed to infant baptism, which is what other denominations preferred. The sect spread slowly from a core group of towns along the main New Hampshire border into communities throughout northern New England. They also had a hub in South Carolina, but there really wasn't a whole lot of communication and there was no common governance between those two branches of the movement. Anyway, it's preachers set out on itinerant roots. They hope to spark local revivals with their charismatic preaching. They tried to take advantage of divided or conflicted churches so they could draw discontented mainline Baptists away from their congregation along with others into the free will Baptist network. Their growth was halting and it was often hampered by conflict. But eventually in the 1790s, the free will Baptist had a fairly stable governing body, a consistent church covenant and a well-established network of itinerant preachers. They emphasized voluntary submission to the church and mutual discipline between members. And so they created a spiritual community that sheltered members from worldly affairs, even though they were still on the fringes of religious life in New England, partly because they wanted it that way. They still began attracting followers by the thousands and that was largely due to the efforts of their traveling preachers who extended the free will Baptist network into new towns. Now, one of these preachers was William Smith Babcock. Babcock traveled among the hill towns of Southern New Hampshire and Vermont. He gathered a fledgling congregation of about 25 people in Springfield in 1801. He had trained for the ministry at Yale, presumably to be a congregationalist minister, but he wandered away from that Orthodox faith. And like many spiritual seekers, he found himself in Northern New England and that's where he found and joined the free will Baptists. We might call Babcock a visionary. He had long experienced mystical episodes. He sensed divine portents during prayer. He had prophetic dreams and he believed and some other people believed as well that he could possess the gift of healing. But he was also frustrated in his spiritual and social ambitions. His church was fragile. He ran into obstacles when he tried to reform the free will Baptist practices. And at nearly 40 years old, he had not yet found a wife and started a family, which would have been an important badge of respectability. Even worse, rumors of bizarre practices and sexual scandals followed him in his itinerant travels, which led him to complain of loneliness, rejection and dwindling congregations. But for a time, he would rise to a level of authority and power that he had never achieved before. And after it was all over, he would never achieve again. When William Babcock met Betsy Merrill, the woman he would one day marry, he was, as he described himself, a man on the brink. And I'm quoting here without mother, brother, sister, wife, children, house, land or any proper home. And he was already thinking of leaving his preaching career. But Betsy changed all of that for not long after he met her in Springfield, he began to hear about her dreams, animated vivid dreams in which she sighed loudly, she groaned, she talked in her sleep. And so these dreams or manifestations, as they called them, brought William and Betsy together by 1805. William began to talk about Betsy, to talk about these visions with Betsy. And soon after that, he dedicated himself to the task of proving the dreams authenticity, which he tried to do through a series of tests, which brought him ever closer to her bedside. So these dreams now took the the form of full fledged conversations with an angel and they became more and more animated. And so William watched and he took notes as Betsy entered these trance-like states and she held up her end of the conversation with the angel before falling into a deep sleep. And it appears that William may have on occasion joined her. He was fascinated and probably a little jealous of Betsy's gift and he was falling in love and so he proposed marriage. However, they did not wed right away. Instead, the two became entangled in a sexual scandal, which was not surprising when you consider the amount of time that William spent at her bedside and his romantic frustrations. So William, to kind of cool things down a little bit, left town on a long preaching tour. As a result of that, the two did not marry until 1809. But almost as soon as they married, their household became the center of a short-lived charismatic movement that transfixed the church and nearby communities. These included the Free Will Baptist congregations in Springfield and then also Fishersfield, New Hampshire, which was just across the Connecticut River, where William Babcock also founded a congregation. Eventually, the angel visited not only Betsy, but also a small circle of women who related his revelations in sensational episodes. And I'm referring to the angel as a masculine form because at the time angels were always characterized as male. All told, the angel made over 200 visits, not just to Betsy, but also to the other women who were communicating with him and exercised tremendous spiritual and social power in the town. Before long, members of Babcock's congregation were seeking advice from the angel on matters ranging from travel plans and financial decisions to questions of doctrine, discipline, and church governance. The angel told William through Betsy when to preach, whether to buy property, how to compose his church's declaration of faith, and so on. He also saw Betsy through three difficult pregnancies that bore even more difficult results. She had a son who died after a few hours, after birth. Then she had a miscarriage. And then she had another son who lived only a year. Ultimately, though, the angel stirred too many tensions. He gave bad financial advice. He meddled in romantic relationships. He attempted to marginalize skeptics. And the women who claimed to channel the angel's messages, which were often contradictory, started to turn against each other. Through these women, the angel started accusing members of the community of immoral conduct. And then the male elders of the church and other prominent male church members voiced opposition to the angel. After Betsy gave birth to a son in 1810, the visions then slowed to a halt. In their wake, the Springfield-Fisherfield monthly meeting, which was already troubled and divided, broke up. The Babcock sold their farm. They moved to Barrington, New Hampshire, where William, with his reputation now in tatters, finally did retire from preaching. We know quite a bit about William and Betsy Babcock because William was a prolific diarist. His name comes up often in free will Baptist records, especially in the angel delusion controversy. So we have a pretty good paper trail on him. We know quite a bit less about Isaac Bullard. He was a prophetic leader who brought his followers to Woodstock, Vermont in 1817. Bullard left no written records himself, or at least none that have survived. So we really know him only through his detractors. And because of the annoyance that they expressed and their letters and the derogatory language they used in newspaper articles, it's a little bit of a task to read between the lines to try to figure out what was really going on. So we have less information, but here's what we do know. Isaac Bullard preached in lower Canada, more or less the eastern part of present day Quebec before crossing into Vermont. He was a visionary millennialist who preached that Christians needed to restore the primitive church and prepare for the end times. Whereas William Smith Babcock was a Yale trained congregationalist who left that denomination, Bullard never seems to have attached himself to a denomination at all as far as we know. He in fact railed against organized denominations, especially the congregationalists and the regular Baptists for corrupting true religion with trained ministries. And as he saw it, unscriptural practices. We do know, at least from observers that he cut an imposing figure. He was a very tall man, he had a long red beard, he must have stood out in a crowd. When he was still in lower Canada he joined an apostolic community who wished to gather a primitive church. He gained respect there as a preacher of above average character and abilities. And at some point after joining that church he rose to a leadership position. Not long after that, he began to experience visions that he believed were divine revelations. He interpreted these visions as a sign that he was to assume authority within this church and he began to act like a prophet, exercising greater and greater control over his followers. In 1816 or 1817, however, they ran into a bit of trouble. They had already started to meet with a chilly reception among their neighbors and they were preparing to uproot themselves in any way, but then something happened that made them move more urgent. Somebody in the community apparently acting on what they believed to be divine orders fed an infant a concoction that included the extract of some poisonous bark. The child died and Bullard's followers as a group were charged with murder. The court failed to reach a verdict because there was no conclusive evidence but by this point Bullard's followers met with so much resistance from their neighbors that they rushed their departure, they traveled south and they ended up in Woodstock by early 1817. Woodstock at the time was home to one of the oldest congregationalist churches in Vermont, but it was also a hotbed of experimental and unconventional religion. It was nestled right there in the Connecticut River Valley, pretty close to the New Hampshire border. And as a result, it was a crossroads for itinerant preachers representing the Methodist, the Baptist, the Free Will Baptist, Congregationalists, and others. It was also a hub for the Christian connection and the shakers, both of which were primitive sex that rejected denominationalism. And the shakers in particular rejected traditional family life instead living in highly ordered and celibate communities. So when Bullard and the Pilgrims chose a small settlement on the outskirts of South Woodstock, they frankly fit right into his energetic and fluid religious climate. But they did not fit in for long. Bullard drew many of his followers from the ranks of disaffected Christians. And like Babcock, he capitalized on those divisions and fragmentation in existing churches to try to draw people out of those churches and into his community. He also separated families, at least a few people who joined his community left spouses and children in order to do so. His followers despised sectarian differences and doctrine. They rejected the idea of a professional clergy and instead they relied on revelation and divine inspiration for spiritual understanding. Those preferences in and of themselves were frankly not terribly unusual. But the Pilgrims also had some unconventional and conspicuous practices that raised a lot of eyebrows. Bullard referred to his infant child as the second Christ which most people would have objected to. During worship, the Pilgrims danced, they experienced charismatic episodes and they spoke in tongues. And in fact, from the babble, observers picked up the meaningless word mummy jump and they used it as a derogatory term for the sect. Bullard became increasingly authoritarian. He required his followers to follow strict regiments of self-deprivation, usually some kind of physically taxing penance like fasting or sleep deprivation or something along those lines to prove their virtue and their spiritual strength. Bullard's followers annoyed their neighbors with their reluctance to bathe. And also their habit of wearing animal skins instead of regular clothing and their penchant for communal property. One observer reported the Bullard himself did not change his clothes for seven years, although we really can't rely on that testimony as reliable because Bullard never stayed any place long enough for somebody to document that he didn't change his clothes for seven years. But on top of all of this, they outraged critics with their practice of spiritual wifery, which was an arrangement that sanction promiscuity that critics were reluctant to describe in detail, but we get the picture. Under Bullard's rule, the Pilgrims sacrificed almost everything that would have signified membership and respectable society at the time. Their belongings, their property, their previous family and communal ties, not to mention their control over romantic and financial decisions and even their personal hygiene and their clothing. Their presence in Woodstock in the end was short-lived. By late 1817, the Pilgrims chafed against their hostile neighbors and they looked to the West thinking that they might find the promised land that they were seeking there and they could then plant their millennial kingdom. So after they left Woodstock, they first sought fellowship with the shakers, but the Pilgrims quickly discovered that their hygienic and sexual habits really did not comport with the shaker sense of discipline and celibacy and modesty. So they followed then a meandering path through the Northeast. They attracted attention and scorn whenever they went. They also attracted some press coverage, still searching for a new home. They then headed to Ohio where their ranks ballooned at first and then quickly declined as their journey dragged on. Eventually, they followed the Mississippi River South to what is now Arkansas, where they finally settled. But by that point, they must have been a very, very tiny group of stragglers. By 1819 or 1820, the community really had been reduced to very, very few people, one of whom was Bullard's wife. We don't know exactly when Bullard died. It was likely before 1824 when pastors by stopped to see what was left of the community and made no mention of his presence. Bullard's movement, like many charismatic sects of the 19th century, did not outlive its leader or at least not by much, but not all religious scandal took place within charismatic movements. Leonard Frost, a Methodist circuit rider, also fell into trouble and it was entirely within the parameters of his denomination. The Methodist Church had, by the time Leonard Frost got into trouble in the late 1820s, had been a rapidly growing church in the United States since 1786. And really, Methodism was present in the American colonies prior to the revolution because George Whitfield, who was responsible for so many of the revivals of the Great Awakening and afterwards was in many ways a Methodist before there was a denomination by that name. He was a radical Anglican. The Methodist denomination became official when other radical Anglicans came to the United States then in 1786 and officially planted the faith and started the institution. The Methodist, as the name suggests, used methods. They used religious methods and rituals to create a religious community and draw people in. Their rituals were numerous, but they included things like washing of feet, public confession, a love feast which combined the rituals of breaking bread with spiritual confession, and then the ever-popular camp meeting which promoted a revivalist atmosphere and lay preaching and public conversions. Camp meetings and public rituals helped the Methodist attract followers, but how do they manage their growing population, especially as the denomination focused more and more of its activities in the very, very fluid backcountry life? Well, the Methodist built in a well-structured and authoritative episcopacy or hierarchy intended to manage its laity and clergy and to ensure communication and enforcement of doctrine at vast, you know, across vast distances. The hierarchy began at the bottom with the class meeting which was really just a prayer group within a church that met at least once per week for Bible study, prayer, and confession. This was the only division that might have been led by a lay person. Above that, everything else was led by clergy. So above the class meeting, there was a local church with its station preacher and then several local churches would have been part of a circuit in which a circuit riding minister oversaw the faithful in several towns and ran monthly meetings. The district then was composed of several circuits and then several overseen by an elder and then conferences led by bishops included several districts. The circuits, excuse me, the districts led quarterly meetings and then the conferences led annual meetings. And then attached to these units, the meetings, they were significant because they brought clergy and laity together at regular intervals to police each other on manners of doctrine, to enforce uniformity in belief and behavior. And so you can imagine over the course of the year between weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings, people are running all over the place, right? In various towns where the meetings circulated. The Methodists like many other evangelical denominations at the time enforced a strict moral code that prohibited members from drinking, dancing, reading novels, which were thought to provoke sinful thoughts, gambling, wearing immodest fashions and marrying outside the faith. The hierarchy enforced a kind of built-in discipline to make sure that Methodists, even in hard to reach places, were never really out of reach because the lines of communication were so well established. The Methodists spent considerable time during their meeting quizzing their ministers on matters of doctrine, questioning them about suspect behavior and asking them about the members of their congregations. And so it was through these constant meetings that the New England Conference discovered that one of their circuit riders, Leonard Frost, had a habit of asking women to marry him. We do not know a whole lot about Leonard Frost other than what's in the trial and what shows up periodically in Methodist Conference and Meeting Records. We don't know where he was from originally. We don't know when he converted to Methodism or whether he was raised in the faith. But we do know that he started to show up in the records of the New England Conference around 1813 when he was preaching in the New Grantham Circuit in southern New Hampshire near the Connecticut River. It partly crossed over into Vermont. From there, he transferred between a number of circuits that hugged the Vermont-New Hampshire border. None of this was unusual for Methodist circuit riders. The conferences revised the boundaries of circuits pretty frequently as elders identified new receptive audiences or churches. And they preferred that circuit riders not get too personally invested in the congregations and the lady themselves so that they might focus instead on the entire flock in the circuit. In fact, circuit riders were encouraged to remain single so as not to disrupt their focus on their religious duties. But Frost was already likely widowed. It's probable that he had been married and had been widowed. We know he had a son. And many widows and widowers in early America tended to try to remarry pretty quickly after losing a spouse because the responsibilities of maintaining a household were generally more than a single parent could reasonably handle, especially a circuit rider who was on the road as often as Frost would have been. And frankly, Frost did not appear to be handling the duties of fatherhood particularly well. Even by 19th century standards, he seems to have been an abusive parent. We know that the Methodist elders castigated him for beating his child with a stick and perhaps the pressures of fatherhood or maybe his distaste for it were making the task of finding a wife seem more urgent. One of the objects of Frost's attention reported that he had told her that, and here I'm quoting her, I'm quoting her, he was determined to get him a companion soon. And as it turned out, the mobile life of the circuit rider gave him plenty of opportunity to do just that or so he thought. Now, it appears that Frost had been in conversation about marriage with two women at first. One was Orpha Way of Lancaster, New Hampshire. And the other was Purse's Partridge of Littleton, New Hampshire. All of this was around 1828 or 1829. This map shows us the many loves of Leonard Frost. But then things got more complicated. He parted with Orpha Way, explaining that he could not marry her because she was not a converted Christian. But then rather than simply choose partridge who actually already agreed to marry him and got her parents permission, he started to explore other options. There was Betsy Hidden of Craftsbury whom he met at a camp meeting. There was a woman named Mary from Berry who I could not have planned that rhyme better myself but that's what it was. And then also there was an Eliza Dearborn of Plymouth, New Hampshire. And one other woman whose name in hometown do not appear in the record so we can't quite locate her but she was mentioned distinctly from the others. He had been corresponding with all of these women when his housekeeper discovered their letters in his home and turned them over to the conference elders and they promptly held a trial to determine Frost's fitness to continue in the ministry. Now Frost defended himself. He claimed that he nervous disorder dating from his childhood had led to what he said was partial mental derangement and also memory loss. But at the same time, he insisted that he was unjustly persecuted that the women who reported him concocted evidence against him despite the written record of what he had done and he pleaded to remain in his position in the church. But there appears to have been more going on than what he claimed. Not surprisingly, the women's account suggested that he was manipulative of an even cruel or if away the first woman to have rejected him reported that he had delayed breaking off their engagement. Even though her status as an unconverted Christian more or less necessitated that course of action. He similarly kept Betsy hidden in limbo for so long that she assumed he had married someone else but he hadn't. And then when his housekeeper, Diantha Temple found and reported his letters, he flew into a rage. He claimed that she had killed him that she had murdered him. I'm using his phrases there and that she was responsible for breaking his engagements. In the end, the conference elders really did not buy his self-defense. They convicted him on charges of dishonorable and un-Christian conduct and of committing acts of falsehood. And then they overwhelmingly voted to expel him from the ranks of the clergy and from the church. So if we take into account the misadventures of William Smith-Badcock, Isaac Bullard and Leonard Frost not to mention all of the other religious mavericks and non-conformists who came out of Vermont in the early 19th century, what can we learn? How can we explain these preachers and their behavior and their impact on their followers? It helps to look at them in the context of their times of course which were marked by tremendous upheaval. Changes in the economy, the social structure, family life and yes, even religion were happening at a dizzying pace and navigating these changes could be confusing and disorienting. I would like to examine the significance of these scandals and others like them by considering how they and the people involved, the events and the people involved responded to three major areas of change in 19th century America. The rise of the market economy, the combined changes of gender roles and family life and the explosion of new denominations and sects. The rise of the market economy often called the market revolution was one of the central transformations that touched almost every aspect of everyday life. It lay at the foundation in some way or another of all the religious scandals that we've talked about today. When I talk about the market economy, first of all, what am I talking about? I'm referring to the economic transition that included the decline of the household economy, the gradual rise of factory production, the gradual population shift from rural to urban areas, the fundamental changes in social and political structures that resulted from all this. This shift which really happened gradually and span the entire 19th century. And so it was just beginning really during the period that we're discussing today caused a wholesale transformation of the economic and labor system in which household production was replaced by commercial agriculture, by manufacturing, and then modern financial institutions that began handling more complex transactions. And as the old economic systems that had existed in colonial America and throughout the 18th century were then replaced by capitalism. What is all this matter though for our purposes and talking about religious scandals? Because the market revolution was profoundly disconcerting to those who experienced it, it really had ramifications in every aspect of life in the 19th century. On the one hand, there was more opportunity. There were new fields of work, there were new professions that opened up for people that helped expand the middle class. And the middle class in turn achieved really true economic and political power for the first time. These professions included teaching, the ministry, white collar clerical work, the law, and managerial positions in factories. Now as far as the ministry, this was particularly significant because many new denominations unlike the older ones did not require a college educated clergy. And so people could enter this profession for the first time with relatively little education. So for them, there was more opportunity for upward mobility and for achieving a position of respectability. But on the other hand, far more people lived on the margins in this new system. Middle class jobs were linked to a fast moving commercial world and that commercial economy was very unstable. And so many families who only recently had joined the middle class could drop out of it just as suddenly. And the middle class wasn't the only marginal group. People in the working class who in earlier generations might have hoped to learn a trade were now relegated to unskilled factory jobs. They were dispensable workers and their employers treated them as such. All the while, the gap between rich and poor grew wider, leaving more and more people more and more vulnerable to economic crashes. And as fewer people were tied to farms and other family businesses, the population became more mobile and fluid. Communities were less stable than they had been before and people were more likely to live beyond the reach of the kinds of emotional supports and constraints that were likely to come with living with family and friends. All of these factors made for social and economic climate that was competitive, fragile and anxiety-provoking. So we ask again, what did any of this have to do with religious life? Well, in the context of the market revolution, not only were communities unstable, but so were churches. This was especially true in a place like Vermont where so many people arrived from elsewhere. In the decades after the American Revolution, the fragile and tenuous American economy caused enormous dislocation. People lost businesses, they couldn't find jobs, they couldn't buy land, or in many cases, farmers and business owners went into foreclosure. So they had to leave to find cheaper land someplace else that might offer more opportunity and one of those places was Vermont, where many newer migrants wrote of feeling lonely, they felt jarred by the experience of living among strangers. Well, one of the institutions that could offer a sense of belonging was church, but there was a shortage of ministers. And the relatively impoverished population could not support stable churches and could not pay ministers salaries, right? So they didn't have consistent preaching. So churches gathered and then they dispersed. Some managed to stay viable, but many others kind of limped along with meager memberships relying on late leadership and part-time preaching to keep them afloat. William Smith Babcock and Leonard Frost were typical of these part-time preachers. Both of them traveled itinerant circuits and they both tried to oversee mobile and fluid populations of followers. And for Isaac Bullard, of course, movement and living on the margins was interwoven into the life of his community. The turn to mysticism and the rejection of worldly amenities were also typical of religious responses to the market revolution. We see these trends in all three of the religious movements we talked about today. The freewill Baptists embraced mystical experiences that were generally unavailable to mainline Protestant denominations like the Calvinist Baptists from which most of the freewill Baptist converts came. Something like the angel delusion was unusual even among the freewill Baptist congregation, but experiential religion and encounters with the supernatural were really not uncommon. Particularly in the remote and awe-inspiring natural settings of the Northern New England backcountry, converts of many face reported having mystical experiences as they encountered severe landscapes and familiar forests and dramatic weather. Isaac Bullard took these experiences of the supernatural even further by making them a regular part of religious ritual for his community. Mystical or visionary experience was one way to separate the faithful from worldly affairs. So was a religious culture that rejected materialism and the cultural trappings of the market revolution. And new denominations often required that members separate themselves and that was increasingly common during the early 19th century during the early American Republic. Their Vermont pilgrims were an obvious example. They sacrificed all their worldly goods right down to their clothes and their homes and they severed relationships with their families. The free will Baptist and Methodist also demanded that their members practice modesty and dress and comportment, avoid conspicuous displays of wealth and reject any activities that might suggest frivolity or leisure, right? Like dancing, reading novels, going to the theater and any activity like gambling, for example, that could trigger sinful behavior. These religious groups were certainly not alone in expecting their followers to avoid the frills of modern middle-class leisure and consumerism. Several denominations adopted some version of the free will Baptist and Methodist behavioral restrictions. The shakers austere aesthetic was a reflection of their piety, which rejected individualism, it rejected conspicuous display, it rejected the pursuit of individual gain. Sylvester Graham was one of many religious leaders who connected physical and spiritual bigger and he promoted temperance, a vegetarian diet of raw foods and whole grains and he was not alone in promoting dietary reform for religious reasons. In fact, some forms of abstinence, particularly temperance, right? The refusing alcohol became part of mainstream religious culture in the 19th century. The Mormons thought mainstream American culture was so fraught with sin that they chose to head west to create a society of their own design. We can interpret all of these examples as efforts to reject or at least mitigate the effects of the market revolution. In other words, by instilling self-control and some degree of communal isolation in their members, many of the early 19th century faithful hoped to shelter themselves from cutthroat competition, from materialism and from the individualist ethic of the era. The new market economy was also closely related to shifts in gender roles and family structure because one of the central changes underway was the visible separation between home and work. Now, prior to the beginnings of the industrial economy, there really was no such separation. In farming families, for example, home was work. Men and women might have had different roles and they might have made different contributions but the work that they did was considered to have economic value. And the home was the most important unit of production and consumption. This was true even among non-farming families for whom production and other kinds of work also took place at home. One of the major shifts that came along with the new market economy was that home became severed from work at least in popular perception. Men and even older children who held jobs often did them from someplace else like factories, workshops, and other kinds of businesses that took place outside the home. Now, most families still actually did work at home. Farming families' lives did not change very much. Working-class women still performed work for money in the home, whether they took in laundry or took care of borders. And enslaved women were not part of this picture at all even though the work that they did was in the places that they lived. But the popular perception was that home was now a place that was sheltered from work. It was a place where work did not happen. Now, what did this mean for women and families? The separation of home and work gave rise to an idea that you might be familiar with called the Cult of Domesticity which upheld women as the so-called angels of the home meant to provide nurturing spiritual and virtuous guidance for their husbands and children and to keep the home a charming and safe retreat for the family. Magazines, religious leaders, and other cultural authorities began to talk about separate spheres meaning that men occupied the world of work and women occupied the world of home and there was increasing economic and social division between the two realms. Now, the image that they presented was very romantic. The angelic mother at the center of a calm home surrounded by angelic children who were all reading or embroidering or playing musical instruments by the hearth and then cheerfully welcoming the father home at the end of the day. And so the idea was that men left the home to pursue their proper role laboring out in the world and women were left to create a protected, clean and beautiful space for children and to provide refuge for their husbands. Each gender possessed a particular kind of power in the system. Women and especially mothers were supposed to exercise spiritual and moral authority in the home and men were supposed to exercise the kind of mastery that came from having political and economic power. Now, this image of course did not reflect reality but the point of an ideal is the ideal. It's not the reality. And in this case, it was an ideal that many people aspire to as a mark of respectability. We can see this when we consider the cases of William Smith Babcock and Leonard Frost both of whom were so desperate to settle into marriages that fit the image of the domestic ideal. We know more about what Babcock was thinking because he told us in his diaries. He was frustrated at having failed to marry. He had already flirted with scandal in his quest to find a wife. And in Betsy Merrill, he saw an opening not just for religious revelation but also for domestic happiness. We know less about what Frost was thinking but his actions and the testimony of the women he courted suggest that here was a man who was similarly desperate for a wife. Frost's situation was a little different from Babcock's of course. As for one thing, we can surmise that he had already been married as he had already had a son but in both of these cases we can see how the ideal of domesticity motivated both men. But these men's experiences and Isaac Bullard's as well reveal even more about changes in gender roles. For even as we see Babcock and Frost pursuing a very traditional household ideal we also see the opposite not just the breakdown of that ideal but also the upending of power dynamics between men and women. Isaac Bullard's pilgrims dismantled the notion of a traditional family. His community rejected monogamous marriage and monogamous sexuality. And even some of the women among his followers had left their husbands and children to join the Vermont pilgrims. In Betsy Merrill Babcock's prayer circle the women who claimed to speak with the angel used those communications to manipulate romantic financial and religious decisions for the men in their community. Even the women who accused Leonard Frost were in their own way seizing power. They negotiated terms of a possible marriage and they asserted their power in these relationships and when they felt betrayed they provided testimony to bring down a respected minister. Clearly, none of these women was as desperate for a husband as Frost was for a wife. But even though the women in these communities challenged the constraints of domesticity so too were they constrained by patriarchy. The women in Betsy Babcock's prayer circle only exercised power by pretending to be weak and helpless. The angel communicated through them while they were in trances or having dreams. They never asserted power in their own voices. The men in the community eventually stepped in and suppressed women's interactions with the angel. Isaac Bullard held uncontested authority among the pilgrims including over the women in the community. And the Methodists which allowed really no control by laity in their congregations had very, very few avenues where women could exercise authority within the congregations and in the denomination except by deciding not to accept a marriage proposal. Still all of these women in some way rejected the expectations that the cult of domesticity placed upon their shoulders and they were not alone. There were other religious groups who rejected domesticity at least in the sense of monogamous marriage and family life. And the shakers of course were among them. They required celibacy of all their members. They rejected marriage as a means to procreate and instead they favored more communal living arrangements. There were also the public universal friends. That group began when a young Rhode Island woman named Jemima Wilkinson had a vision that when she was on what everybody thought was her deathbed, she had this vision and then she revived and she revived as a gender fluid and otherwise nameless person called the universal friend. That's what Wilkinson now the universal friend called themself. The universal friend often went by masculine pronouns and preached a mystical theology that emphasized spiritual gifts like prophecy and healing. They also criticized a political economy that linked private property to male citizenship. Although the universal friend was androgynous kind of leaning toward identifying as male their followers gathered in a community led by women. It was the women who handled the finances and the property in their communitarian settlement in New York. They also, there were plenty of other examples at this time. There were utopian communities that violated sexual and social norms. Women served as itinerants and preachers and denominations often rejected the traditional family model. Now, this is not to say that all of these movements posed a cohesive attack on religious orthodoxy and middle-class family life or that they even had a realistic chance of dismantling a social structure that was becoming ever more entrenched. In fact, their efforts were often suppressed in the interests of patriarchy. Women preachers were never licensed as ministers. They never had authority over congregations in mainstream denominations. The shakers kind of peaked in the 1840s or so and then faded in importance. The public universal friends lost ground when men in the nearby communities contrived to seize control of the group's property from the women who had been in power and the local government allowed it. Later communitarian movements that challenged family norms like the Oneida community in New York, like the Church of Latter-day Saints were firmly under the authority of men. Patriarchy endured, but those who challenged assumptions about gender norms and family authority nonetheless offered a radical vision of what gender meant in the early republic. Finally, another piece of the context that we have to consider has to do with the religious marketplace. In fact, we can think of this period not just in terms of a market revolution but also in terms of a spiritual one. Due to the combination of religious disestablishment, meaning the separation between church and state, a mobile population, and the revivalism that started in the 1790s. New England, it started in the 1790s in New England and then blossomed into the second grade awakening. The early 19th century witnessed a stunning proliferation of new religious movements as well as the growth of long-standing denominations. This growth happened everywhere, really, in all regions in urban and rural areas, but the revivals occurred in the highest concentrations in three places. New England, especially Northern New England, Kentucky, and Western New York. All of these were areas that were undergoing rapid demographic and economic growth and the denominations that succeeded the most were the ones that were prepared to accommodate the mobile and transient population, much like the Methodists who used their Episcopacy to oversee vast territories and far-flung churches. Traveling preachers like William Smith Babcock and Leonard Frost tried to meet the need for clergy, as did others who joined missionary societies or represented denominations that depended upon itinerancy. In Northern New England, clergy representing the Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Free Will Baptists, Universalists, members of the Christian connection and others were traversing crisscrossing paths over the hill country and across rivers to remote communities that might otherwise not have seen preachers for months or even years, sometimes they reported. But regardless of region, the revivals all shared some common characteristics. These included evangelical preaching, in other words, preaching intended to bring about conversion, an emotional style that appealed to the heart rather than the head, and an emphasis on what individuals could do to bring about their own conversion and ultimately salvation. The second grade awakening left Americans with an unprecedented number of religious choices, but at the same time, it created an atmosphere of cutthroat competition between religious groups and clergy, not at all unlike the competitive environment of the market economy. Although some congregations and denominations managed to find ways to collaborate, sometimes out of necessity, to pool their resources, competition was more often the rule with ministers trying to undercut each other to snag every last conversion and score every last parishioner. Well, how can the second grade awakening help us understand the scandals that I've talked about today? Well, for one thing, two of the people involved, both Babcock and Frost, were members of some of the most rapidly growing denominations of the time. Babcock followed a very familiar pattern of rejecting an older group for a new one, the Free Will Baptists. And during his ministry, he became frustrated at his failed efforts to further the Free Will Baptist growth even more. For a time, he was trying to actually forge ties between his own denomination and the Methodists by organizing shared camp meetings. That was a project that met with some enthusiasm from the Methodists, because they figured they could probably leech some members off of him, but outright scorned by the Free Will Baptist who didn't wanna risk losing followers. There was another familiar pattern at work as well. Both the Free Will Baptist and the Methodists were among those who welcomed preachers who met spiritual, but not necessarily academic qualifications for preaching. Babcock was an exception to this rule, having been well-educated at Yale, but we don't really know how Frost entered the ministry and very, very few people who entered the Methodist preaching core had received that kind of an education. The lack of clear professional standards opened up, as I mentioned before, many opportunities for gifted ministers, but also allowed many unqualified people to enter the profession. The Methodists in particular devoted an enormous amount of time during their regular conference meetings, sorting out disciplinary problems among their traveling clergy. Sometimes poor preparation or incorrect doctrine, but also financial misdealings. There were some people caught embezzling. There were sex scandals, lying, unspecified immoral conduct, even violence, and sometimes just poor performance and inspiring preaching at the pulpit. It was no coincidence that all preachers spent a lot of time in probationary status under the Methodist before they moved into a permanent position on a circuit, and many of them turned out to be unqualified. Although Leonard Frost had been a Methodist preacher for some time, so clearly he had at some point passed those tests, he was far from the only one to be removed from his post for reasons relating to the kinds of crimes that he committed. So we know how Babcock and Frost fit into the larger pattern, but what about Bullard? Well, even as tens of thousands of Americans were rushing headlong into new denominations, quite a few of them were recoiling at the thought of submitting to denominational hierarchies, prescribed creeds, and organized ritual. And even though the Baptists and Methodists were the fastest growing Protestant denominations in the country, there were plenty of smaller charismatic sects like the Vermont Pilgrims who rejected denominationalism, you know, just at the very start. In other words, they didn't like the structure, right, that was offered by distinctive creeds, a trained clergy, and a hierarchy. What were the people who joined those sects looking for? Many of them believed that the trappings of organized churches were unscriptural, and there was really just one true apostolic faith, and they were looking for supernatural experiences that they believed would place them closer to God. They found charismatic Christianity empowering because anyone could claim the authority that derived from experiential religion. They didn't need a minister, right, to mediate. And many of them wanted to escape from the constraints of both religious and economic competition. And they believed that charismatic movements would give them safe harbor from the troubling changes that were already afoot in the secular world outside the church. The primitivist nature of many of these movements attracted those who rejected the worldly race for status, for prestige, and for wealth. The communitarian mindset and lifestyles that many of these movements favored likely offered an alternative to the sense of dislocation that came with the fast-paced world of industry and capitalism. Many of these movements really were just flash in the pan groups. There were too many of them to count. Most of them did not survive their founders and the Vermont pilgrims were among those. Some, like the shakers, grew rapidly and then declined slowly over time. There's still, I think, two shakers living in Sabbath Day Lake, Maine. And then others, like the Mormons, grew steadily and amassed more and more power over time until they more or less resembled the mainstream denominations that they once scorned. The scandalous preachers I discussed today have received relatively little attention from historians. William Smith Babcock may be the best known of the three as his diaries have provided fascinating material for scholars. There has been minimal coverage of Isaac Bullard and no work at all that I know of on Frost whose trial records sit in a folder in the records of the New England Conference of the Methodist Church. Does that mean they were not significant? No, I don't think so. Perhaps the reason they are relatively unstudied is that the press at the time of the scandals was very local and news of the scandal, however, salacious really just did not travel far. Of these three, the only one who received coverage and attention beyond his immediate region was Bullard. And that was mainly because he was beyond his immediate region. He dragged his pilgrims on a journey through most of the regions of the nation and he was covered by local press as he went. But one thing we know for sure, Americans' appetite for religious scandal continued unabated. In the 1840s and 1850s, the publishing industry began to modernize. They traded out small local presses for much larger ones centralized in a few cities like New York or Philadelphia. And so the growing industry, the publishing industry might meet demand for reading material more efficiently through economies of scale. Sure enough, by the mid-19th century, the presses were meeting Americans' demand for salacious content. There were published accounts of trials that were distributed nationally. One example was the trial of the Episcopal Bishop, Benjamin Underdonk, who was accused of sexual improprieties. It turns out he was groping many of his female parishioners. Rumors were flying in the press like the account which was later proven false of Maria Monk's sexual escapades and infanticide in a Canadian convent. That sort of thing was used to fuel anti-Catholicism. And readers even devoured fictional accounts like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which deals with a relationship between a Puritan minister and one of his parishioners. As we are all surely aware, the American obsession with religious scandal has not exactly slowed down. If anything, with the advent of mass media, the 24-hour news cycle, and then most recently social media, these scandals have only peaked our curiosity. So we need to ask ourselves what drives this particular cultural trend? Is it that Americans continued to hold ministers to a higher standard, and thus are all the more fascinated when these men fall? Is it that these stories represent a kind of escapism from the pressures of regular secular society? And what about the clergy themselves? How do we explain why scandals like this keep cropping up in the first place? Is there a particular kind of social control that some clergy are able to exercise if they wish? Or is there a need to assert power? Or can we simply connect religious scandals to moments of broader crisis and upheaval, which is easy enough to do because when is the United States not in a moment of broader crisis and upheaval? And these are questions that I will not try to answer here, but I invite you to consider them. And with that, I hope you enjoyed this talk and I welcome your questions. Thank you, Dr. Baylick, for a wonderful presentation that was incredibly informative. Next month, we are excited to bring Rokabee Museum Director Lindsey Varner for an in-depth discussion of the museum's seasonal exhibit, A Modern Artist, The Commercial Art of Rachel Robinson Elmer. We hope to see you then. And as always, if you enjoyed this presentation and would like to support the Ethan Allen Homestead, please go to the donation link in the description box below or on our website, ethanallenhomestead.org. Thank you very much and we'll see you next month.