propagate his faith without hindrance, or to start a new religious organization if he so desired. This combination of circumstances had never before existed. These factors in the environment are immensely important for our study.

Since the movements which produced the Disciples of Christ began so near the beginning of the nineteenth century, we may take the year 1800 as a suitable point at which to make a cross section of the United States and observe, in a very general way, the state of the nation.

America in 1800

George Washington had died the year before. John Adams was president. The country consisted of sixteen states, only Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee having been added to the original thirteen. It had a population of 5,308,483, less than 10 per cent of whom lived west of the Alleghenies. (Twenty years later, in spite of the great westward movement, 73 per cent of the people were still on the Atlantic slope.) The population, wealth, industries, and cultural institutions were very largely concentrated not only east of the mountains but in the eastern part of the area east of the mountains. The Atlantic tidewater belt, from Boston to Charleston, contained the great preponderance of everything that made this a nation—except its land, its undeveloped resources, and its pioneering spirit. But the eastern cities that loom so large in history were still small: Philadelphia, 28,522; Boston, 24,037; New York, with 60,515 within the boundaries of present-day Manhattan, had already taken first place. In the summer of 1800 the seat of the national government was moved from Philadelphia to the unfinished buildings in the almost uninhabited area that was to become the city of Washington.

The vast region now occupied by the five populous states west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River had a grand total of 51,000 inhabitants. It had been organized as the Northwest Territory under the Ordinance of 1787, and the Indians had been moved out of the eastern and southern parts of it in 1795 under a treaty forced upon them after Anthony Wayne’s expedition against them. Pittsburgh was a town of 1,565, the head of navigation on the Ohio. In 1803 the state of Ohio was carved out of the Northwest Territory. By 1830 it had a population of more than 900,000. So urgent was the drive toward the open frontier and so rapid the development of its communities that, while trying to realize the newness and emptiness of the region at a given period, one must be on guard against failing to realize the rate of change. Moreover, some parts of the area were much more advanced than others.

Kentucky was about a generation ahead of the adjacent Northwest Territory in settlement and culture. It had a college, the first west of the mountains, even before it got statehood in 1792. By 1800 it had a population of 220,000. Lexington, a town of 1,797 (including 439 slaves), its metropolis, the seat of the college, and the social and economic center of the Bluegrass Region, could make a plausible claim to the title, “the Athens of the West.” The churches came to Kentucky, as they did everywhere, with the first wave of settlers. By 1800 the Presbyterians had a synod and several presbyteries. The most numerous body was the Baptists, who reported 106 churches with 5,000 members. The Methodists, with perhaps half that number in the state, organized a Western Conference the next year, composed of circuits in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Northwest Territory. These were the three vigorous and aggressive churches on the frontier.

The Mississippi River was the western boundary of the United States (until 1803), and Florida was still a Spanish possession. Louisiana Territory and Florida were both held by Roman Catholic powers, and Protestant churches were not permitted.

American Churches in 1800

The term, “the Church,” had little meaning in America at and after the beginning of the federal period. There was no Church, either as a visible and functioning reality or as an ideal; there were only churches. If we call them “sects,” it is not to criticize but simply to describe the fact that the church had been cut into many parts. In view of the kind of compulsory unity (or attempted unity) in European and British Christianity out of which these sects arose, the divisions were not to their discredit. Sectarianism was a stage through which Christianity had to pass on the road to freedom and unity. But the fact of division is the one now before us.

The largest denominations were the Congregational, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist. There were also important bodies of Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, French Huguenots, Lutherans, Quakers, and Roman Catholics, and such smaller groups as the Moravians, Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, and the Ephrata Society.

The original settlement of the first Atlantic Seaboard colonies, especially Virginia and New England, combined the religious with the economic motive. Even the nationalistic impulse to extend British power was as much religious as political, for it included zeal for the extension of Protestantism on a scale to match and check the Spanish Roman Catholic empire which already included Florida, the West Indies, Mexico, and most of South America.

Virginia was Anglican by intention, but from the start the Puritan element in both the company and the colony was strong. When the first settlement was made, and for a good while after, the Puritans were still a party in the Church of England. Episcopacy remained established in Virginia until the Revolution, though there was a strong influx of Scotch-Irish (Presbyterian, of course) and of Baptists in the eighteenth century. Since there was no Anglican bishop in America during all these years, there could be no confirmations. As always with established churches, nominal adherents greatly outnumbered communicants, and many were content with a “gentlemanly conformity.” Episcopacy was established also in North and South Carolina, though it never had a majority in either colony, and in New York after the British took it from the Dutch in 1667.

The great Puritan migration to New England had for its religious purpose the founding of a Puritan state somewhat on the pattern of Calvin’s Geneva. The developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced, instead, a group of colonies—states in the American union by 1800—in which Congregationalism was the “standing order,” or established church, and one state, Rhode Island, in which, thanks to Roger Williams and the Baptists, complete religious liberty, deliberately adopted as a matter of conviction, got its first fair trial as a principle of government. But Congregationalism, though clinging to some of its legal advantages, had also grown tolerant, partly because dissenters and noncommunicants had become so very numerous. As early as 1760, the president of Yale estimated that 12 per cent in the four New England colonies were dissenters, and that not more than one-fifth of the others were communicant members of Congregational churches.

New England Congregationalism, though already disturbed by the theological controversy which later produced the Unitarian defection, was in the main soundly Calvinistic. It differed from Presbyterianism only in its tradition of the independence of the local church, and even this was qualified by the growth of what was called “associationism” by those who viewed it with alarm. So, when an interest in home missions began to appear, about 1800, the Plan of Union was formed under which Congregationalists and Presbyterians cooperated until 1837 in carrying the