Whitney Cross' The Burned-Over District Book Brief
Episode available on Apple and Spotify.
“History seems often to glide in a smooth current for a time, until certain forces, gathering like a brewing storm, break forth to ruffle the surface and alter the direction of flow. Some dramatic event or masterful man, a product of the accumulating tokens of change, then sets off the reservoir of energy which whips the stream to turbulence till flooding waters dig new channels” (113). – Whitney R. Cross
(Charles Finney)
----- intro (00:00:46)
This is the book brief episode of Whitney Cross’ The Burned-Over District. Before introducing Cross’ book, I’m going to spend a minute at the methodological level. So I’m going to talk briefly here about the study of history as a study, as a discipline and activity one undertakes, and then we’ll dive in.
Historians are always themselves within history: we necessarily come after that which we are studying. And so our studying and our subject are both always in some way already tainted. There is no pure history. And so there is always a worry with history that in some sense we are only finding the bread crumbs we’ve already laid down for ourselves. When we study the Enlightenment, for example, it has already been handed down to us as such, neatly distinguished from what came before it, designated as a pivot point that guided humanity to where we are today. But who or what determines such things? What year did the Enlightenment begin? What month? What regions took part in the Enlightenment? What sorts of people took part in it? Surely it wasn’t everybody? And for those that did, did they know they were in this thing we call the Enlightenment?
This general worry might be a worry for us as we try to understand the Burned-Over District, the subject of our study today. The Burned-Over District was a slice of New York state that we’ve already somehow distinguished from other geographical locations and to which we’ve assigned a somewhat discrete chronology. But what gives us the authority to divide space and time up in such a way, to divide up humanity in this way, to say that there is such a thing called the Burned-Over District?
Whitney Cross’ 1950 manuscript is history writing as its best and does as good a job as any history book can at defending its subject as a subject. The lines of tiny font comprising the footnotes that underline each page are little windows into the days and months and years of primary source research he carried out to produce this book. Cross perused not just thousands of pages of newspapers, journals, pamphlets, personal correspondences, and sermons, but also reviewed census data, school registers, railroad and canal use records and accounting statements, and church conference minutes, not to mention other historical scholarship. To give you a flavor of some of his citations:
- “The Trade and Trade Routes of Northern New York from the Beginning of Settlement to the Coming of the Railroad”
- Report of the auditor of the canal department of the tolls, trade and tonnage of the New York canals 1854
- Minutes of the Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1840
- A History of Auburn Theological Seminary, 1818-1918
- Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools, Documents of the assembly of the state of New York, 56th session
So for us, history starts there, within these and countless other documents. We were not there, so what we have are these documents, this litany of lists of facts. But while what happened, what took place, is a list of facts, documented to greater or lesser degree by various people in the texts just referenced, it is too much. There are too many facts from too many events. What are we to make of it all? Moreover, how reliable is the documentation handed down to us? And what wasn’t documented that took place in those times and places? These three simple questions are enough to convince us that history cannot be a list of facts, but it is the connections and ordering of those facts, selected and arranged by the historian. History is the judgment of the historian, always aided by the passage of time and a scholarly remove. History is the relationship between the past and the historian.
And here with Cross what reveals itself through his judgment leads to a modest yet firm thesis: there is no tidy anthropological story here, but its opposite, the religious hypothesis, which is always either too vague or overly exclusionary, doesn’t hold up either. And yet, there really was something distinct about this time and place in America, something worthy of the name “the Burned-Over District.” So regardless of what produced it, as Cross notes in his preface, this place, this place worthy of this name, has something to tell us.
So for the book brief today, we’re going to cover two topics. First, we’ll discuss at a high level the general context he finds in Western New York state. And then secondly, without getting into too many details, we’ll take a moment to reflect on the simple fact that so many sects with their competing and often contradictory doctrines could all spawn, grow, and in some cases thrive within that context. And then looking ahead, in the deep dive episode for this book, which will come out in a week or two, we’ll cover two topics I won’t really discuss here today: the new methods of preaching at this time, what Cross calls “New Measures”, and then the theme of apocalypticism. My big takeaway from reading this book, and while this certainly isn’t the thesis of his book, I don’t think he’d object, is that apocalypticism is central not just to the religions that were founded and thrived in the Burned-Over District, but also to religions in general. We are finite beings, beings in space and time, beings with histories and with hopes and aspirations. And whatever religion is, one thing it does is make sense of our past and our future. And sometimes, that means giving us new ones.
----- Secular or Sacred Causes of the Burned-Over District (00:07:02)
The Burned-Over District of western New York state was one of two crucibles for the Second Great Awakening, a period of time in the United States when various forms of Protestant Christianity flourished (the other region being in and around the state of Kentucky). This awakening included increases in church attendance, changes in social and moral behavior, as well as the very personal, emotional, what some might call spiritual, experiences felt by many at the time. And then, over time, this enthusiasm flamed out.
So the natural question banging around in our modern minds is: what caused this fire of religious enthusiasm that exploded with heat and intensity? And, then, what led to it being snuffed out?
Well, I’ve already delivered the punchline in the introduction today: Cross refuses to answer the question. There was either a secular or a sacred cause. On the secular cause, he refuses to argue that either material conditions or broader sociological conditions caused the fire that swept through the Burned-Over District. As he says, “[n]o direct cause of an economic or social nature can be therefore ascribed to the whole mass of movements or to any one of them but the culture which produced them did create fairly definite limitations within which they operated” (74) So that’s that. And if you were thinking of arguing for the religious hypothesis, he would politely stop you from heading down that path and inform you that “[w]hether a certain brand of theology was instrumental in creating evangelistic excitement and benevolent activity or whether the emotion and social emphasis generated the theology in justification, is ultimately to be decided only by a subjective judgment” (28).
So this is probably upsetting to, well, almost everyone. The humanist atheist is dead-set on uncovering the material conditions that agitated the inhabitants of western New York state. Or at the very least, they’d want to argue that these New York staters were deluded or duped by new forms of preaching. And the religious historian will want to believe that it was God who lit the spark. And Cross will simply shake his head.
We’ll get to the religious perspective in the next section. But on the material and social conditions, no doubt there were certain circumstances that stoked or stifled enthusiasm. But while poverty can lead to more religious sentiment, sometimes it can mean you’re too busy trying to live to worry about church or listen to a pastor. Living in a city can drown out the voice of God, but living in too rural of an area can mean you don’t come into contact with religious people. Maybe there is a goldilocks zone of just the right sociality and just the right prosperity and just the right education; but that’s not something we’ll be able to pin point with any accuracy. Material conditions are messy.
----- Orthodoxy and the many Sects of the Burned-Over District (00:10:20)
There were Unitarians, Shakers, Millerites, Baptists, Methodists, Church of Christ practitioners, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practitioners (Mormons), Presbyterians, Pentacostals, and probably some others. And while they didn’t kill themselves over orthodoxy like their Christian forebearers, they had their fair share of debate over doctrines such as original sin, predestination, baptism, communion, the concept of the trinity, atonement, direct revelation, and so on. And here is how Cross tells us the battle lines were more or less drawn: “[a]ll Protestant churches united in condemning the Catholics. All evangelical sects united, too, against the Universalists and Unitarians. Baptists and Presbyterians cooperated in damning Methodists and Freewill Baptists. Presbyterians all too often proved disagreeably intolerant of Baptists. To cap the climax, both Baptists and Presbyterians, particularly the latter, maintained a constant and bitter strife between the enthusiasts and the conservatives in their own ranks” (43). And for a funny anecdote, sometimes in the smaller, poorer towns, the same building would be used by two different sects. And some town residents could be found attending both. As one autobiography at the time put it: “While all were attending the alternating school house meetings, ‘the members… would report to their preacher what had been said against their doctrine, and a reply would be hurled back, and a constant religious warfare was maintained” (50).
Oh and then there were the non-religious -isms fueled too by the general enthusiasm of western New York State too. Cross spends some time describing the relationships between the various protestant Christian sects cataloged above and movements like: Jeffersonianism, the tolerance movement, women’s suffrage, masonryism, anti-masonryism, abolitionism, and the lesser known Fourierist communism, and Swedenborgianism. As Cross puts it, “[i]ntent upon the eradication of evil and launched in radical ways, Burned-over District folk could be expected to join zealously in any campaign against sin, wherein a victory might launch the millennium” (217). More on this millennium business in the deep dive, but the broader point can be seen there.
So when I conclude that the religious hypothesis isn’t satisfying either, this is what I’m talking about. Ok, God did it. But which one? Which Protestant sect had the orthodox doctrine? And let’s not forget the branches who are vaguely Christian but also their own thing as well: 7th day Adventists (which came from the Millerites) and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Burned-Over District spawned those religions too. So you can say God did it, but there sure were a lot of secondary effects beyond just sparking the “correct” flame, whichever one it was.
So we end where we began: the reality of the Burned-Over District is too messy for either a humanist/materialist causal story or a religious one. And yet, supported by all the facts and figures Cross lays out for us (which I chose to avoid in this summary), it really was a distinct enough place and time relative to what came before and after it and compared to other regions within the United States, that it remains worthy of the name.
My best speculation, which is theory only and will never be proven true within the reams of paper reviewed by Cross, but nonetheless is still plausible from where I’m sitting, is that there was a disconnect between these early American’s expectations, and what reality was giving them. Sometimes that gap was filled by material prosperity, and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes social guidelines gave structure to their lives and sometimes they just didn’t jive with life on the ground. So that’s more a secular hypothesis than a sacred one. But that’s the best I got.
So while we’ve destroyed any hope of a causal story, in the deep dive episode, we’ll spend some time on a guaranteed catalyst of this religious enthusiasm: the New Measures taken up by preachers at the time. Then we’ll look at a vey common feature of the religions spreading in the Burned-Over District: apocalypticism. That’s all I have for you today. I thank you for your time. And we’ll see each other soon.