Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865 Rating :
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New Look at American Migrations
By gi
The common view of the early migrations both to and within America stresses the lure of land for Europeans who came from a world where land ownership was reserved for hereditary elites. This book enlarges and in some ways challenges that view.
By studying eight important early migrations, from those involving Massachusetts Bay Colony to the the settlement of Utah by Mormon migrants, Rohrer demonstrates that some of the most important American migrations were motivated primarily by religious beliefs. In early America, he shows, a great many Protestants moved in search of salvation, Christian community, religious reform, and combinations of all these motives.
The availability of land in America, Rohrer suggests, encouraged migration because it provided the space for those wanting to find or establish a community wherein they might achieve a purer religious life or find a haven from religious persecution. In many cases, as with the Scots-Irish, religion and ethnicity were so intertwined that church services became a symbolic affirmation of ethnic identity as well as an affirmation of faith.
Community formation was virtually identical with church membership.
While most will not be greatly surprised by the broad outlines Rohrer sets down, his examination of particular cases greatly enriched my awareness of the power religious belief and particular forms of worship exerted in lives of Americans who lived in the ante-bellum period. At a time when the early life of the nation is seen chiefly in terms of economics or the thought of eighteenth-century rationalists like Thomas Jefferson, this book provides a needed corrective.
One problem that plagued early religious communities was the lack of spiritual leadership. The Anglican church, a state-supported institution, provided the orthodox a community where religion, neighborhood, and state overlapped. Dissenters, however, had to fend for themselves, and in their determination to secure and maintain ministers may be seen the seriousness of religion in their everyday lives.
One example Rohrer cites in this book involves a group of Ulster Scots whose ship went astray and deposited them in the Massachusetts Bay Colony instead of their original destination, Philadelphia. The group tried to make the best of their situation and set about establishing up a Presbyterian community. As might be expected, the good fathers of the Bay Colony would have nothing of this plan and gave the group a choice of becoming good, practicing Puritans or getting out of the colony.
They chose the latter and moved to a coastal area in Boothbay, Maine, where their leaders had found sufficient good land along an inlet. The group had already been trying to secure a minister, and with the move, they accelerated their efforts. Presbyterians in America always had a problem finding ministers because the church required its clergy to be educated and trained. Scotland simply could not turn out enough clergymen to meet the needs of the scattered communities of Presbyterians in the American colonies.
The Maine group managed to lure a likely but reluctant candidate to its precincts. Whether he found the region, the people, or the salary unappealing is not clear, but he ended by telling his hosts he was returning to Scotland and was unlikely to return to America. Well, they asked, should you return, will you agree to become our minister? He agreed, shook hands with the elders, and departed for Philadelphia, whence he had come.
There, he found a changed situation. The most important church in the area had lost its minister and implored him to fill the position. Despite his announced plans and his casual commitment to the Boothbay Ulster Scots, he accepted the position.
Learning of his decision, the Boothbay group promptly reminded him of his earlier pledge, to no avail. Letters passed. Church officials became involved. Finally, a meeting was called by the American Presbytery between representatives of the Maine group, the sought-after minister, and church officials. Seeking to defuse the situation, officials suggested the man might not feel particularly well-desposed to the would-be congregants, given the commotion they had created. They replied they were not seeking friendship, just a trained minister. They had already secured attorneys and filed a suit in their effort to force him to make good his promise and they were willing to go forward with it. In the end, they prevailed. The minister went to Boothbay, organized the group into four parts, each of which was catechized and preached to bi-weekly and ministered to weekly. The church and community thrived.
The pervasiveness of the spirit that motivated the Boothbay group is illustrated in a variety of incarnations. The Virginia Methodists whose migration to Ohio was spurred by the desire to live in a state free of the taint of slavery, the Inspirations who formed the Amana colonies, the various Baptists and Congregationalists of New Jersy who had to carve out places for themselves in a Separatist world, the Mormons who sought to set up their earthly paradises and ended up fleeing persecution to the unsettled and unsought lands of the Great Basin of Utah---Rohrer examines all of these.
This book does not offer the kind of detail a scholar of a specific group might desire, but such coverage cannot be expected over such a broad field. I also found the author's frequent quotations from secondary sources a little surprising in a book published by a university press.
But the narratives are interestingly written and enlarged my own view of the migrations that defined the ever-westward moving American frontier. I found myself thinking of the book, carving out time so that I might read it. In it I discovered origins of attitudes still present in many of the areas originally established by migrants driven not by desire for independence or land, but by the desire to establish communities of faith. In short, it enlarged my view of a subject that interests me.
A good read. I recommend it.
Product Description
Popular literature and frontier studies stress that Americans moved west to farm or to seek a new beginning. Scott Rohrer argues that Protestant migrants in early America relocated in search of salvation, Christian community, reform, or all three.
In Wandering Souls, Rohrer examines the migration patterns of eight religious groups and finds that Protestant migrations consisted of two basic types. The most common type involved migrations motivated by religion, economics, and family, in which Puritans, Methodists, Moravians, and others headed to the frontier as individuals in search of religious and social fulfillment. The other type involved groups wanting to escape persecution (such as the Mormons) or to establish communities where they could practice their faith in peace (such as the Inspirationists). Rohrer concludes that the two migration types shared certain traits, despite the great variety of religious beliefs and experiences, and that "secular" values infused the behavior of nearly all Protestant migrants.
Religion's role in transatlantic migrations is well known, but its importance to the famed mobility of Americans is far less understood. Wandering Souls demonstrates that Protestantism greatly influenced internal migration and the social and economic development of early America.
Popular literature and frontier studies stress that Americans moved west to farm or to seek a new beginning. Scott Rohrer argues that Protestant migrants in early America relocated in search of salvation, Christian community, reform, or all three.
In Wandering Souls, Rohrer examines the migration patterns of eight religious groups and finds that Protestant migrations consisted of two basic types. The most common type involved migrations motivated by religion, economics, and family, in which Puritans, Methodists, Moravians, and others headed to the frontier as individuals in search of religious and social fulfillment. The other type involved groups wanting to escape persecution (such as the Mormons) or to establish communities where they could practice their faith in peace (such as the Inspirationists). Rohrer concludes that the two migration types shared certain traits, despite the great variety of religious beliefs and experiences, and that "secular" values infused the behavior of nearly all Protestant migrants.
Religion's role in transatlantic migrations is well known, but its importance to the famed mobility of Americans is far less understood. Wandering Souls demonstrates that Protestantism greatly influenced internal migration and the social and economic development of early America.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #2104611 in Books
- Published on: 2010-03-01
- Released on: 2010-02-11
- Original language:English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.49" h x6.26" w x1.02" l,1.38 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 328 pages
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