Thanks to the work of scholars such as Richard R. John, we know a great deal about Sabbatarianism, the movement to institutionalize the Sunday Sabbath. Long considered a minor partner to abolition and temperance, Sabbatarianism is now recognized as a dynamic and influential expression of reform-minded evangelicalism.Footnote 1 From the early Republic to the eve of the Civil War, Protestant evangelicals across the United States mobilized in defense of the Sunday Sabbath. Sabbatarians shared two key convictions. The first was that scripture dictated that the Sabbath be celebrated on the first day rather than, as in other religious traditions, the seventh. Their second claim was that the state should actively intervene to protect the pious and reverent character of the day. To that end, Sabbatarians demanded the strict enforcement of statutes against Sabbath violation.
We know much less, however, about anti-Sabbatarianism. Campaigns for the enforcement of Sabbath laws sparked a vigorous backlash, resulting in a series of battles over the meaning and legal status of the American Sabbath. Scholars of Sabbatarianism have noted this opposition, particularly in the clash over the delivery and transportation of Sunday mails in the Jacksonian era.Footnote 2 But anti-Sabbatarianism has rarely been the focus of comprehensive analysis in its own right.
This lack of scholarly attention to anti-Sabbatarianism is in part due to the absence of a distinct organizational framework. Sabbatarians mobilized through a dizzying number of organizations, from county, city, and state-based Sabbath associations to national coordinating bodies, such as the American and Foreign Sabbath Union. As a result, the scholar of Sabbatarianism has a wealth of records and polemical material. Anti-Sabbatarianism, however, is harder to pin down. A handful of anti-Sabbatarian conventions and meetings were held, and some notable figures, such as the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, maintained a lifelong commitment to the cause. But anti-Sabbatarianism tended to be episodic, erupting into view during times of controversy without coalescing into a clear or sustained organizational shape.
Another reason for the neglect of anti-Sabbatarianism is the perception that it was a minor sideshow to an evangelical juggernaut. As many studies have documented, evangelicals were a rising force in the early Republic and antebellum eras. Protestant dissenters provided much of the impetus to sweep away the last remnants of religious establishment in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Once a non-preferential regime had been enacted, these evangelicals then set out to forge a Christian republic. Whether defending Sabbath restrictions, promoting national fast days or lobbying for temperance laws, evangelicals, energized by the Second Great Awakening and inspired by a post-millennial vision of social reform, sought to make public policy and social behavior conform to a Protestant moral code.Footnote 3 In his recent work, David Sehat describes this evangelical activism as constituting nothing less than a “moral establishment.” Evangelicals employed the coercive powers of legislatures and of courts to enforce their hold over public policy. As Sehat argues, “for much of its history, the United States was controlled by Protestant Christians who sponsored a moral regime that was both coercive and exclusionary.”Footnote 4
This moral establishment imposed its stamp on the Sabbath in the years before the Civil War. European travelers to the United States were horrified by the deathly nature of the American Sunday. Louis Xavier Eyma, a young French writer and journalist, visited Philadelphia in 1848, and recorded the transformation of a generally bustling and spirited city into a site of mournful tranquility on the Sabbath. On that day, he wrote for his French audience, it was impossible even to have a cooked meal; the only food served was the remains of the day before. The one exception to this rule was boiled potatoes, but even these were prepared as early on Sunday as possible so as to avoid offending religious sensibilities. The grim nature of the American Sunday, he concluded, was a sign of the tyranny of religious zealotry in a democratic republic.Footnote 5
Nevertheless, a study of anti-Sabbatarianism is long overdue. First, while often in the minority, anti-Sabbatarians nevertheless rallied thousands of Americans to their cause. Campaigns to keep Sunday mails, or overturn restrictions on Sunday travel, were in the end won by anti-Sabbatarians because of the support of large numbers of both the elite and the working-class. Furthermore, whilst Sabbatarians were often successful in keeping secular intrusions at bay, their hold on the first day was more tenuous than foreign observers realized. By the 1850s residents of New York were crowding onto Sunday ferries to travel to New Jersey. Philadelphians who could afford the fare were taking advantage of Sunday excursions to seaside destinations such as Atlantic City, while newspapers were filled with advertisements for Sunday steamboat trips on the Schuylkill and Delaware. Interstate train operators offered Sunday services, often with the approval of stockholders. In 1850, the stockholders of the Pennsylvania Railroad voted on a proposal to continue the running of mail and passenger services on Sundays; the measure was approved with a majority of 421.Footnote 6 Private carriages also were not barred from running on the Sabbath.
Secondly, a study of anti-Sabbatarianism can provide a valuable contribution to current scholarly debates over the role played by religion in the public square in the first half of the nineteenth century. Many scholars argue that the Protestant “moral establishment” described by Sehat was founded on a near-unanimous public support. The “vast majority of Americans,” in the words of one historian, “assumed theirs was a Christian, i.e. Protestant country, and they automatically expected that government would uphold the commonly agreed upon Protestant ethos and morality.”Footnote 7 For Derek Davis, very few Americans “seriously questioned the right of religious persons and organizations to influence law and public policy . . . in keeping with their religious viewpoints.”Footnote 8 Thomas Jefferson's metaphor of the wall of separation between Church and State, which he first articulated in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1803, had, according to Daniel Dreisbach, no popular currency.Footnote 9 The majority of Americans agreed that no particular Christian denomination should receive preferential treatment. But once this level-playing field was achieved with disestablishment in Massachusetts in 1833, there was nothing to stop evangelicals from flooding into the public square. The first Amendment to the federal Constitution was understood to bar a national church but not a Christian republic. Until late in the nineteenth century, Donald Drakeman concludes, there was no “prominent and consistent voice for a truly secular reading of the [Constitution's] establishment clause.”Footnote 10
A study of anti-Sabbatarianism challenges these arguments by revealing a significant constituency for the proposition that religion and politics should be kept apart in the decades before the Civil War. Anti-Sabbatarians argued that the Constitution mandated the removal not just of preferential treatment for certain denominations, but of all contact between organized religion and government. Religion, they argued, was a matter of individual conscience with no direct bearing over the laws of the nation. This did not make anti-Sabbatarians secularists, if we understand by that term a rejection of religion. Opponents of Sabbath laws often framed their arguments in terms of theology and the interests of religion. But they regarded with dread the prospect of an activist clergy bringing courts and legislatures under its control.
This hostility to clerical interference in the public sphere united the diverse strands of anti-Sabbatarianism. Some anti-Sabbatarians dismissed any connection between the Sabbath and the Sunday. A day of rest from labor was entirely justified, they argued, but there was no need for it to be on the first day rather than any other. This was particularly urgent for religious minorities which kept the Saturday Sabbath. In another argument that became increasingly common in the decades before the Civil War, other anti-Sabbatarians maintained the Sunday Sabbath, but sought to redefine its meaning. The Sabbath, as they envisaged it, would be a day of uplifting recreation rather than dutiful worship, and thus filled with cheerful conversation, family outings to the countryside, visits to libraries and museums, and popular concerts.Footnote 11
Where all anti-Sabbatarians came to agreement was in their conviction that the legal enforcement of Sabbath laws was a violation of constitutional freedoms. The Sabbatarian clergy had no right, they argued, to enforce their religious doctrine through the coercion of law and courts; in so doing, it had brought the corruption of the Old World into the New. The fact that the majority of the population was sympathetic to the Christian creed was irrelevant. The law of the nation was a blank page on the question of religion. This was a conviction that united working-class agitators, dissident Quakers, social reformers, and Senators. The United States could not be considered, in constitutional or legal terms, a Christian nation.
This article begins with the controversy which first brought anti-Sabbatarianism to the fore, the Sunday mail clash in the Jacksonian era. I then examine the decade of the 1840s, when agitators such as William Lloyd Garrison fought against an intense wave of Sabbatarian activism. Finally, this article turns to the 1850s, when the introduction of a revolutionary advance in urban transit, the horsedrawn street-car, opened up a new field of battle. Focusing on the greatest controversy, that of Philadelphia in 1859, I examine the manner in which anti-Sabbatarianism once again emerged as a mass movement as Philadelphians rallied against Sabbath restrictions on travel.
I. The Clash over Sunday Mails, 1827–1831
Anti-Sabbatarianism first emerged as a social and political force in response to an evangelical campaign to ban the transportation and delivery of mail on Sunday. Under the 1825 regulations, postmasters were obliged to open their offices “on every day on which a mail shall arrive,” and also to deliver this mail to its recipients “on every day of the week.”Footnote 12 Sabbatarians were outraged that the federal government was not only tolerating but in fact mandating this Sabbath violation. Postal employees had no choice but to break the Fourth Commandment, thus putting their souls at risk. The pious spirit of the Holy Day would be disturbed by the hubbub of men and women gathering at local offices to collect letters and to swap news. More broadly, in sanctioning this practice, the federal government was inviting a national catastrophe. The United States, Sabbatarians believed, had a special covenant with the Lord. In so blatantly defying His will to keep the Sabbath holy, the entire nation was thus inviting Divine retribution. In 1827, Sabbatarians began campaigning for a law “prohibiting the transportation of the Mail and the opening of Post offices on the Sabbath.” In a testament to their organizational efficiency and individual zeal, more than 700 petitions had been sent to the House and Senate Committees on Post-offices and Roads by the end of 1830.Footnote 13
This Sabbatarian campaign sparked a backlash. From 1828, anti-Sabbatarians launched their own petition campaign demanding that Sunday mails be explicitly guaranteed by law. This counter-campaign was in part organized by merchants fearful of the commercial disruption which any ban on Sunday mails would entail. In New York, an organizing committee under the patronage of two wealthy and influential businessmen, Preserved Fish and Robert Bogardus, coordinated anti-Sabbatarian petitioning and organized large rallies in support of Sunday mails. But the strongest merchant voice came from the booming towns along the recently opened Erie Canal which were dependent on commercial linkages to New York. In their petition, merchants in Rochester voiced this fear of any break in the transmission of commercial information. “This information,” they warned, “is indispensable, and without it their business would be far more hazardous.”Footnote 14
Judging by the petitions, however, the main impulse came from local organizations of townspeople rather than merchants. While some anti-Sabbatarian petitions carry hundreds, even thousands of signatures, the majority contain fewer. Many of these express a fear that the views of their community had been misrepresented. Petitioners in Bloomfield, Illinois regretted that a Sabbatarian petition “conveys the idea that a majority of the people in this state do not wish the mail to be carried on Sunday,” an idea which was “highly erroneous.”Footnote 15 One petitioner from the Southwark district of Philadelphia wrote to the Committee that “not one in twenty” of the citizens he met “had any desire to discontinue the Mail” on Sundays.Footnote 16
Pitted against the formidable mobilizing force of Sabbatarianism, defenders of Sunday mails were at a numerical disadvantage. John West has determined that three-quarters of the petitions to Congress were opposed to Sunday mails.Footnote 17 But anti-Sabbatarians still sent more than 200, and did not see themselves as a beleaguered minority. Instead they accused their opponents of inflating their petitions with false names. A New York petition denounced evangelicals for forcing Sunday School teachers to list the names of their pupils, thus making them “instruments of deception, to influence and mislead the political authorities of this country.”Footnote 18
The anti-Sabbatarian argument blended religious doctrine with republican principle. Some petitioners rejected, on theological grounds, any attempt to enforce dogma through law. True Christianity required no legislative scaffolding, they argued, but should be left to stand on its innate virtue and truthfulness. “All legislative interference in matters of religion,” the General Assembly of the State of Indiana declared, “is contrary to the genius of Christianity.” Furthermore, the Assembly continued, “there are no doctrines or observances inculcated by the Christian religion which requires the arm of civil power either to enforce or sustain them.”Footnote 19 Secular power, many petitioners reminded the Congressional committee, was ever a threat to the purity of faith. A series of printed petitions that were distributed across Pennsylvania denounced “the corrupting hand of secular power” which, much more than infidelity, imperiled the progress of Christianity.Footnote 20
Anti-Sabbatarian petitioners further accused their opponents of infringing the principle of religious equality. “Those who hold Sabbath on the seventh day,” petitioners from Woodtown, Pennsylvania declared, “are entitled to protection as much as those on first.”Footnote 21 Among these were Christian groups, such as Seventh-Day Baptists, but non-Christians as well. Petitioners from Morristown, Ohio affirmed that the Constitution, “alike protects the Christian, Jew and Mohomedan.”Footnote 22 At a public meeting in Salina, New York, anti-Sabbatarians similarly declared that all citizens, whether “Christian, Heretic or Infidel,” were entitled to the equal protection of the law.Footnote 23
The argument for equality was joined by an insistence that the State be protected from religious domination. This was a precious Revolutionary inheritance that anti-Sabbatarians believed it was their duty to defend. “That one great and leading object in the adoption of the constitution of the United States,” defenders of Sunday mails in Poughkeepsie declared, “was to exclude or separate religion from the affairs of state.”Footnote 24 Anti-Sabbatarian petitions were filled with references to the “wise framers” who had designed a system in which religion was a matter of private conscience rather than public regulation. “The wise framers of the Constitution,” the citizens of Columbia, New York declared, “placed Religion where it ought to stand as the concern of each individual only.”Footnote 25 Legislating to protect the Sabbath would, in phrases repeated again and again, be “contrary to the spirit and letter of the Constitution,” “derogatory to the spirit of the Constitution,” and a violation of “our great national Compact, the Constitution.”
Their opponents, in turn, stood accused of betraying this Revolutionary legacy by seeking to construct a union of Church and State. Faced with this charge, Sabbatarians protested their innocence. A recognition of the particular status of the Sunday Sabbath was merely an acknowledgement of the Christian sensibilities of the majority of the population, and in no way constituted a religious establishment. Sabbatarians in Erie County, New York were typical in declaring that they were among the “warmest and most strenuous opposers” of any “Church-State combination.”Footnote 26 But anti-Sabbatarians were not persuaded, and detected a lurking conspiracy to subvert republican freedoms. They warned of “crafty and ambitious men” with “vast funds at their disposal” who were working to construct a theocracy.Footnote 27 The battle over Sunday mails was just the opening gambit of a deeper plan. The passage of a law to ban Sunday mails would, one New York petition argued, “be the first step of uniting Church and State.”Footnote 28 The Sabbatarian campaign, another group of petitioners warned, was “the first link to unite Church and State in one indissoluble bond of connexion.”Footnote 29
The Sunday mail battle was won by anti-Sabbatarians. In two reports issued in the name of its chair, Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, the Committee on Post-offices and Roads firmly rejected any measure to stop Sunday mails. But the reports went further, arguing that it was a fundamental principle of the American system that religion should have no sway over law and public policy. “Our government is a civil and not a religious institution,” the 1829 report declared.Footnote 30 In the same manner as the anti-Sabbatarian petitions, the report warned of an accelerating evangelical campaign to bring religion and politics together, and thereby import the religious strife of Europe into American life. There were “extensive religious combinations” at work, the report warned, whose aim was “to effect a political object.”Footnote 31 Their goal was far greater than banning Sunday mails. “If the principle is once established, that religion, or religious observances, shall be interwoven with our legislative acts,” the report warned, “we must pursue it to its ultimatum.” The American government would be tarred with the corruption of the Old World, where priests were paid employees of the state, favored faiths received preferential treatment, and minorities were persecuted.Footnote 32 When Sabbatarians continued their campaign regardless, a second report in 1830 forcibly restated this view. While Sabbatarians sought to revive the issue in the following decades, Sunday mails continued for the rest of the century.
II. From the Chardon Street (1840) to the Melodeon Hall Convention (1848)
In the wake of this defeat at the national level, evangelicals shifted their energy to state campaigns for the enforcement of laws against Sabbath violation. Too many of their fellow citizens, they lamented, had turned away from the Lord's Day. Boats ran up and down the nation's expanding canal network. Ferries and steamboats were crowded with city dwellers seeking a change of air. Irish and German immigration brought new challenges. Sabbatarians were appalled by the advent of what they termed the “Continental Sabbath,” with its dances, beer-gardens, and concerts. In the words of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, “the larger part of our foreign population, having been trained in communities where the sacredness of the Lord's Day is utterly unknown, endeavor to bring in upon us the wretched immoralities of European society.”Footnote 33
Sabbatarians channeled their zeal through a host of local and national organizations. The Philadelphia Sabbath Association was formed in 1840; its equivalent in Baltimore in 1843. In the same year the American and Foreign Sabbath Union was established to coordinate the work of city and state-based Sabbath associations. County and state conventions brought together Sabbatarian activists.Footnote 34 At the Lord's Day Conference in Baltimore, former President John Quincy Adams urged Americans to seize an unprecedented opportunity. “The world has never witnessed,” he declared, “the spectacle of an universal obedience to the Sabbath.” The United States could thus be the first nation to benefit from the Sabbath's “full power to bless a nation.”Footnote 35
As it had a decade earlier, this Sabbatarian campaign incited a response. In November 1840, a group of clergy and reformers gathered at the Chardon Street Hall in Boston to “examine the validity of the views . . . as to the divine appointment of the first day of the week as the Christian Sabbath.”Footnote 36 The figure most responsible for this gathering was the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, already notorious for his hostility to the Protestant clergy on the grounds that it supported, tacitly or explicitly, chattel slavery. Garrison was a committed anti-Sabbatarian. In an 1838 letter to fellow abolitionist Samuel May, he explained his opposition to Sabbath laws. He could find, he wrote, no scriptural basis for the particular status of the first day rather than the seventh. Furthermore, treating one day as holier than others was the mark of merely ceremonial religions, with their emphasis on outward show rather than inner conviction. “The soul that is sanctified,” he wrote to May, “sanctifies all time.”Footnote 37
No official account of the Chardon Street Convention was published. As Garrison later explained, Maria W. Chapman had written extensive notes, but then went overseas, and in any case funds were lacking for such a publication.Footnote 38 Nevertheless, accounts of the meeting were produced by various participants. The best known was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who left a slightly mocking picture of an eclectic group of reformers. “If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque,” he wrote, bringing together “men of every shade of opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy.”Footnote 39 The poet John Greenleaf Whittier similarly saw a “queer gathering of heterogeneous spirits.”Footnote 40 Among these was the reformer Bronson Alcott and radical abolitionists such as Theodore Parker and Edmund Quincy. Another abolitionist and rival of Garrison's, the Reverend Amos A. Phelps, spoke for four hours in favor of Sabbath laws, and later published an extensive account of his speech as well as those of his opponents, including Garrison.Footnote 41 For Garrison, Phelps and his fellow Sabbatarians were the embodiment of a shallow faith preoccupied with displays of morality rather than true goodness. Christ, he said, “came to deliver us from the burden of rites, and forms, and holy days.”Footnote 42 After three days the meeting adjourned without agreeing on a resolution.
At the Chardon Street Convention, Garrison voiced his belief that there was no necessary connection between the Sabbath and Sunday. “Men are to be holy everywhere,” he proclaimed, “and at all times.”Footnote 43 In the following years, the argument against sanctifying Sunday was taken up energetically by religious minorities. Seventh-Day Baptists, who kept a Saturday Sabbath, were a prominent voice. They blamed the advent of the Sunday Sabbath on the Catholic Church, and argued that the Reformation would only be complete when the Sabbath returned to its true, biblical position on the seventh day. Though numbering only 6000 adherents, these Baptists produced hundreds of tracts and pamphlets attacking the legislative enforcement of the Sunday Sabbath. In addition, they founded a weekly newspaper, the Sabbath Recorder, to disseminate their views, and petitioned legislatures for exemptions to laws requiring military or jury service on a Saturday. Advocates of the Sunday Sabbath, they argued, should rely on moral suasion alone; the recourse to law and punishment was “the old resort of the religious intolerant.”Footnote 44 Their efforts met with mixed success. In November 1847, the State of New York revised its statutes to exempt those religious groups which kept the Saturday Sabbath from military or jury duty on that day, except in times of invasion, insurrection, or war.Footnote 45 The next year, however, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Seventh-Day farmer for laboring on the Sunday.Footnote 46
Jews also began to agitate against laws protecting the Christian Sabbath. In 1845 a group of Jews presented a petition to the City of Richmond, Virginia, requesting the repeal of an ordinance which increased the fine for Sunday labor. “No class of citizens,” the petitioners stated, “has a right, on constitutional grounds, to require them to rest on the first or any other day.” Furthermore, by “assigning to Sunday-keeping Christians more legal protection than is accorded to Jews,” the measure violated both the federal and state constitutions.Footnote 47 The petition failed, but Jewish newspapers and advocates continued their campaign. One of the leading voices was Isaac Leeser's Occident and Jewish American Advocate. In April 1846, the paper applauded the decision by an Ohio judge which overturned the conviction of several Jews for transacting business on a Sunday.Footnote 48 A similar decision in Charleston, in 1847, which rescinded a fine imposed on a shopkeeper who had sold a pair of gloves, was also celebrated as a triumph for religious liberty. There was no doubt, Leeser argued, that a day of rest was “promotive of happiness.” But in seeking to dictate which day should be kept holy, and enforcing this through fines and other punishments, Sabbatarians were guilty of an “assumption of tyrannical and unconstitutional power against the claim to equality.”Footnote 49
As this language suggests, what particularly infuriated anti-Sabbatarians of all stripes was the prospect of a clerico-political alliance. Whatever their religious affiliation or preferred line of argument, anti-Sabbatarians were agreed that in moving beyond a strategy of moral persuasion to one of outright coercion, their opponents were guilty of subverting fundamental republican liberties. This would be the central theme of the 1848 Melodeon Hall Convention in Boston. Garrison was again the driving force, and was joined by, among others, Lucretia Mott, Theodore Parker, Elizur Wright, and Henry C. Wright. Several speakers argued that there was nothing in the New Testament to support the notion of a Sabbath. John W. Browne dismissed the Sunday Sabbath as “an old piece of Hebrew cloth sewed upon the new garment of Christianity.”Footnote 50 Other speakers accepted that Sunday should be a day apart, but challenged the Sabbatarian hold over its meaning. The abolitionist Theodore Parker insisted that Sunday should be regarded as the day in the week especially consecrated to moral uplift, but that this purpose could be accomplished by wholesome secular activities. Instead of a day which was “stern, dark, and disagreeable,” Parker looked forward to a Sunday devoted to “innocent and inoffensive callings.”Footnote 51 In a forerunner of the disputes which would break out in the following decade, Parker included Sunday travel amongst such activities. The Convention agreed, passing a resolution calling for Sunday train services at reduced prices in order to “promote the health, morality and well-being” of the urban masses “confined to toil and poverty during six days of the week.”Footnote 52
A range of arguments was thus put forth. But throughout the discussions, the presumptuousness and hypocrisy of the Sabbatarian clergy was a constant theme. Their ambition was boundless: Sabbath laws, one speaker declared, were “first step to the State dictating all aspects of religion.”Footnote 53 Laws punishing Sabbath desecration were “an unhallowed union of Church and State” supported by a priestly caste intent on “subverting civil and religious liberty.”Footnote 54 What particularly irked many of those present was the contrast between the zeal for Sabbath laws and the indifference to slavery. The auction of slaves aroused no protest in the Sabbatarian clergy, Henry C. Wright observed, as long as it came to an end on Saturday evening.Footnote 55 Just as galling was the obstacle to reform work posed by Sabbath restrictions. As Parker observed, Sunday provided the best opportunity of “gaining access to men's hearts.”Footnote 56 But church doors were barred to the advocates of peace, temperance, and abolition wishing to lecture on these topics on the Sunday Sabbath.
III. The Role of Anti-Catholicism
By the 1840s, anti-Sabbatarians were increasingly employing another ideological weapon, anti-Catholicism. In much recent scholarship, the principle of the separation of Church and State is described as anti-Catholic in origin. Philip Hamburger argues that there was little support for separating Church and State in nineteenth-century America until the mass Catholic immigration of the 1840s and 1850s raised the prospect of Vatican domination.Footnote 57 The belief that the Catholic Church sought temporal as well as spiritual domination was common in antebellum America. Protestant nativists, Hamburger argues, became the most ardent defenders of a wall of separation not because of their allegiance to Jeffersonian principle, but solely as a means of thwarting Catholic ambition. For this reason, he concludes, the intellectual roots of the modern-day argument for the wall of separation lie for the most part in religious bigotry.
An analysis of anti-Sabbatarianism suggests, however, that anti-Catholicism was most likely to be wielded not by evangelicals but by their opponents. Many anti-Sabbatarians were hostile to the Catholic Church, whose political ambitions they regarded with suspicion. But they turned this hostility to their advantage by accusing Sabbatarians of acting in the same sinister manner. The true threat to the division between Church and State came, in their view, not from the Catholic Church, but from evangelical Protestants seeking to impose their beliefs on society though the agency of legislatures and courts. Anti-Sabbatarians thus capitalized on the widespread anti-Catholic prejudice in antebellum America to unmask, as they saw it, the theocratic ambition of their opponents.
This accusation was first voiced in the Sunday mail controversy. Unless the Sabbatarians were stopped, one group of petitioners warned in 1829, “an ecclesiastical hierarchy will be established in this country, as oppressive and dangerous in its effects as ever was exerted by the pope of Rome.”Footnote 58 The influx of large numbers of Irish and German Catholics in the late 1840s, and the accompanying upsurge in anti-Catholic agitation, made the recourse to such language even more effective. At the Melodeon Hall, Garrison denounced the dire warnings of Divine retribution for Sabbath-breaking as akin to the worst superstitions of the Catholic Church. Stories spread by evangelicals of Sabbath desecrators who were disfigured or killed in accidents, or towns which had strayed from the Holy Day destroyed by fire were, Garrison thundered, as “absurd, revolting or impious” as the “legends of the Romish church.”Footnote 59
The Mexican-American War provided another opportunity to drive home the parallels between Sabbatarians and the Catholic hierarchy. There had been howls of protest, C. C. Burleigh reminded the audience, when American soldiers entering Mexican churches were ordered to uncover their heads and bow before the Catholic host. Protestant churches had denounced this as proof of Catholicism's “rank despotism.” But were Sabbatarians acting any differently in demanding that all Americans conform to their own prejudices?Footnote 60 Speakers also raised the great specter of Catholic intolerance, the Inquisition. As the call for the convention announced, by imposing “pains and penalties” on those who did not share their beliefs, Sabbatarians were guilty of acting in the same spirit as those who had once employed “the dungeon, the rack, the gallows and the stake.”Footnote 61
IV. Sunday Streetcars in Philadelphia
Missing from the anti-Sabbatarian movement in the 1840s was a mobilizing controversy which could ignite mass popular support. In the following decade, however, such a controversy arose with the advent of the urban streetcar.
By the 1850s, horse-drawn streetcars were revolutionizing urban transit in the United States. Their major technological innovation was the fixed rail on which the cars ran. The previous omnibus system had required large numbers of horses to pull wheeled carriages over rough streets. Running smoothly on their fixed rail, streetcars were comfortable, fast, reliable and, since requiring at most two horses, cheaper to operate.Footnote 62 Their growth was astounding. Philadelphia was one of the last major cities to introduce streetcars, but just twelve months after the first line opened in January 1858, five companies were operating on fifty miles of track. Two years later, the number of companies had jumped to eighteen, and more than 160 miles of track had been laid.Footnote 63 In 1863, the chief engineer and surveyor of Philadelphia, Strickland Kneass, reported that nine lines had carried 30,841,000 passengers in 309 cars over the preceding twelve months.Footnote 64 The profits of the private companies, which were chartered to build and operate the lines, attest to their success. In 1861, the Green and Coates Street line, reported to the state legislature that it had carried over two million passengers, experienced no major accident, and recorded a net profit of $32,671.79.Footnote 65
The question that immediately came to the fore was whether these cars should run on Sunday. Sabbatarians were adamant in their opposition. Sunday travel, Sabbatarians argued, was an invitation to personal vice and social disorder. Allow men and women to indulge in secular recreation on the Sabbath, Sabbatarians insisted, and the holy nature of the day would soon be lost to a wave of drunkenness and gambling. In the words of the Pennsylvania German Reformed Messenger, Sunday travel would “open the door to a progeny of other sins, which would crimson the cheek of any professedly Christian community.”Footnote 66 No exceptions were allowed. The Presbyterian John Holmes Agnew rejected Sunday travel even if undertaken for wholesome reasons. Agnew gave the example of a husband returning home to spend the Sabbath with his family; in such a case, Agnew argued, the husband was at fault for not better planning his trip.Footnote 67
The first major controversy over Sunday cars occurred in Brooklyn, where in 1856 a group of petitioners requested that the City Council overturn an existing ban. In 1857, Mayor Samuel S. Powell persuaded the Common Council to approve Sunday cars. The alleged evils of Sunday travel, he announced in his annual message, were “founded more in the imagination than in fact.” For proof, he pointed to New York, where travelers on Sunday cars were “as quiet and orderly as any class of our citizens.”Footnote 68 By May of that year, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was reporting that the Sunday cars were filled with “respectable people” and that no “rowdies or bad characters desired them or have used them.” Sunday cars, the paper concluded, were already “an established institution.”Footnote 69
But the greatest clash over Sunday cars occurred in Philadelphia. On Saturday July 9, 1859, the Greene and Coates Street line and the Ridge Avenue and Manayunk Railway Company announced their intention to run cars the next day.Footnote 70 The announcement won immediate praise from leading commentators in the city. One of the most fervent supporters was Thompson Westcott, a journalist, historian and editor of the Sunday Dispatch. He applauded what he saw as a direct challenge to the dominance of the city's Sabbatarians. “The fanatical spirit of persons who proclaim that because they desire to go to church, nobody else shall be allowed to go elsewhere,” Westcott declared, “has tyranized [sic] over the community too long.”Footnote 71 The Sunday service immediately won a large patronage. One reporter who rode in the cars noted that they were overcrowded, and that a doubling of services would be required for the demand to be met. Some of the cars contained, he estimated, no less than sixty to seventy passengers.Footnote 72 Most were heading to the recently developed park at Fairmount which stood on the fringes of the consolidated city.
The evidence of popular support, however, did not deter Sabbatarians from mobilizing against Sunday cars. Their main target was the Green and Coates Streets line which ran through the built-up areas of the city. Worshippers at the Green Street Methodist approach led a delegation to Mayor Alexander Henry complaining that their services had been disrupted by the jangling of the horse-car bells and the noise of passengers. Public meetings composed of the “friends of the Sabbath” were held on July 12 and July 16, with many present calling for boycotts of those lines which had violated the Sabbath, and sermons in defense of the Sabbath were preached throughout the city.
In response to this evangelical campaign, Mayor Henry instructed his police chief, Samuel G. Ruggles, to prevent the passage of any cars on the following Sunday, July 17, on the grounds that the running of cars “necessarily disturbs the religious observance and the rest of that day,” and thus by its nature constituted a breach of peace.Footnote 73 That Sunday, the first car had only travelled three blocks before it was stopped by the police, and its driver, William Jeandell, arrested. Evangelical forces applauded the move. The Young Men's Christian Association passed a resolution congratulating the mayor for his decisive action in defense of the Sabbath.Footnote 74 The shutting down of the Sunday cars, however, only intensified the agitation on the issue. “Wherever we went,” the North American reported the following day, “people were engaged in discussing the question . . . Go where you might, this was the general topic.”Footnote 75
Defenders of Sunday travel organized two mass rallies. The second, held at Independence Square on July 30, 1859, was described by a journalist as one of the “most numerous and orderly assemblages we have ever seen.”Footnote 76 Thousands cheered as speaker after speaker denounced the evangelical churches which were held responsible for the ban on Sunday cars. Their opposition to Sunday travel was based, one speaker declared, on “religious intolerance, Pharasaical pride and sectarian bigotry.”Footnote 77 The meeting ended with the election of a committee to push not only for an immediate reinstatement of the service, but also for the passage of a law specifically allowing Sunday travel. Some of the members of the committee were the commissioners of street-car companies, who stood to profit from such a measure. These included William Read and Hugh Clark, two of the thirty-six commissioners who organized the Green and Coates street line which was at the center of the controversy. However, the committee was composed of a diverse group of influential citizens. Several were editors of newspapers which had agitated for Sunday travel. These included the publishers of the Sunday Dispatch, Robert Everett and John Lawler, the publisher of the Public Ledger, William H. Swain, as well as the editor of the German-language FreiePresse, Theo Kell. The movement also attracted some influential members of the city's Jewish community. Gustavus Remak was a member of the Philadelphia bar who would serve as one of the Fairmount Park commissioners after the Civil War.Footnote 78 Charles Stein was a prominent member of the Mercantile Club, the oldest and largest Jewish club in the city.
Over the next weeks the anti-Sabbatarian campaign brought together a range of arguments and constituencies. Religious figures were prominent. The Quaker William Logan Fisher had attended the Melodeon Hall gathering in 1848. The founder of the Wakefield Mills Manufacturing Company, Fisher campaigned tirelessly against attempts by the Philadelphia Sabbath Association to shut down the operation of the state's canal network on the Sabbath. Although poor health prevented Fisher from taking part in the 1859 controversy (he died in 1862 after a long illness), one of his works, History of the Institution of the Sabbath Day, was republished in an expanded version that year. For Fisher, the Sabbath was a Jewish custom which, in his reading of scripture as well as the practices of the early Church, was not binding on Christians. The Sabbath, he wrote, was “antiChristian in its nature.”Footnote 79 But he also rejected Sabbath laws as violating the Constitutional provisions which outlawed any contact between religion and politics. Judicial decisions upholding Sabbath laws had, he wrote, “introduced the Christian religion into the American Constitution, with which it has no connection.”Footnote 80 The Constitution, he wrote, was “a civil contract, having no relation to religious rites.”Footnote 81
As it had in the previous decade, anti-Catholicism became a potent weapon for opponents of Sabbath restrictions. In 1859, several newspapers used the term “Protestant Jesuits” to refer to the pro-Sabbath forces. Thompson Westcott saw nothing less than an Inquisition being established in his city. “A new Inquisition is set up,” he lamented, “and Presbyterian Jesuits on the bench and in the pulpit are its officers.”Footnote 82 For the editors of the Sunday Atlas, Sabbatarians were more of a threat to the separation of Church and State than the Vatican. Evangelicals, the paper declared, were “a sect far more dangerous, at least more bigoted, than the American Catholics have ever been.”Footnote 83
V. Sunday Cars and the Working Classes
The battle over Sunday cars soon became a contest for the allegiance of the city's working classes. Sabbatarians tried to convince workers that the Sabbath was their best defense against the greedy “nabobs” of industry. In a sermon which was subsequently reprinted in many of the city's newspapers, the Reverend Joseph Berg claimed that, without the Sabbath, “the poor man is at the mercy of a heartless employer.” Rescinding the laws protecting the Sabbath, Berg continued, would “put a rod of iron into the hands of covetous, soulless corporations.”Footnote 84 Such arguments were also made in the City Council, when a draft ordinance containing a clause which specifically prohibited Sunday cars was debated. In an address in favor of the retaining the clause, George F. Gordon pleaded for an alliance between Sabbatarians and the city's workers. The devotion of the Sabbath to commercial pursuits, he declared, would result in the “debasement and enslavement of the working masses.” Were Sunday cars to be instituted, the poor would be compelled to labor for the profit-hungry company owners, and at the same time denied the chance “for more leisure, more relief from toil and more enduring happiness.”Footnote 85
However, the effort by Sabbatarians to convince the city's workers that they were allies in a joint campaign against rapacious employers appears to have failed. To begin with, the committee for Sunday travel included a sizeable number of skilled workers. In fact, some eighteen percent of the committee fall into this category.Footnote 86 Anecdotal evidence suggests significant working class participation at the two mass meetings in favor of Sunday cars. At the first, on July 23, the chairman was Aquila Pasco, described as a “master plumber.” The first speaker at that meeting was referred to as “a young artisan, just out of his apprenticeship.” In 1858, a petition in favor of Sunday cars was submitted to the city's Common Council on behalf of group called the “American Workingman's League.”Footnote 87
A further sign of working-class hostility to Sabbatarianism was the frequent recourse to the language of privilege. The city's evangelicals, anti-Sabbatarians argued, were an aristocracy using religion as a pretext to maintain their privileges. Chief among these was the use of private carriages on the Sabbath. The Sunday Dispatch honed in on the hypocrisy of clergymen who sought to ban Sunday cars while riding in their own carriages. The Dispatch began printing lists of what it called “Sunday-riding clergymen” to show “that many who preach against the right of a poor man to ride in the car, do not hesitate to ride in the carriage.” Among the offenders was one of the leading Sabbatarians of the city, the Reverend John Chambers who had, the paper revealed, several years before announced to his congregation that he was cutting short his sermon in order to travel to Baltimore that very night.Footnote 88 Letters to the press painted vivid images of the city's poor denied the comforting solace of fresh air and green countryside while what were termed “lordly Sabbatarians” rode freely in their carriages. The “aristocratic churches,” one letter declared, had long blocked up the city streets with their “silver-mounted carriages.”Footnote 89 Meanwhile, with the ban on Sunday cars, the “poor needle woman or shop girl” could no longer travel to the countryside so that “the sweet breath of heaven may visit her sallow cheek.”Footnote 90
This hostility to the clergy does not mean that the city's working classes were irreligious. As a number of studies have shown, some labor advocates drew on a vision of social reform which had its roots in evangelical Christianity.Footnote 91 In Philadelphia, Presbyterians and Methodists had long been active in recruiting the working classes in areas like Southwark and Northern Liberties. Such efforts may have had some success. Ronald Schultz has argued that in the period of the early Republic, some workingmen were attracted to the vision of communal solidarity and personal redemption offered by these rising evangelical churches.Footnote 92 Even if not formally joining an evangelical church, much of the working class employed, according to some studies, a language of evangelical fervor. In his analysis of working-class religion, Jama Lazerow points to an association of working men and women in Philadelphia in the 1850s, the “Pioneers of the Second Coming of the Savior,” whose campaign for social justice was heavily tinged with the tone and imagery of evangelicalism.Footnote 93
Nevertheless, such evidence of working-class religiosity should not disguise the deep-seated resentment of a clergy seen as aloof from the masses and politically ambitious. Throughout the Sunday travel controversy in Philadelphia, derision for the city's Methodists and Presbyterians was a constant feature. Several speakers at the mass rallies pointed to the irony of the driver of the Sunday car, William Jeandell, standing accused of breaching the peace when it was the churches themselves who made the most noise on Sundays. Imagine, one speaker told his audience, a poor workingman who, after six days of hard labor, tries to sleep in on Sunday morning, only to be woken by the “jingling of church bells.” [According to reports, the response of the crowd at this point varied from “Give ‘em another one” to “good and great cheers.”] The raucousness of the Methodist service was a particular focus of ridicule. One correspondent to the Public Ledger recounted that he had been forced to change residence by the repeated “howling, groaning and screaming” from a nearby Methodist Church. A journalist reported hearing one man in the crowd who lived near a Methodist church, complaining of being kept awake by the “hideous howling and ranting of those going through the second birth.”Footnote 94
VI. Victory for Sunday Cars
The popularity of Sabbatarians compared to their opponents is difficult to determine. The Public Ledger reported that the majority of its correspondence was in favor of Sunday cars.Footnote 95 However, it is clear that Sabbatarians retained a great deal of support in the city, as well as in the more conservative rural areas of Pennsylvania. The strongest evidence for the strength of Sabbatarianism comes from the decision of the stockholders of the Green and Coates street line, which was the focus of the controversy, to back down. At a meeting on Tuesday, October 18, stockholders voted, by a majority of 2,593 to none, to cease the operation of Sunday cars. For the directors and stockholders, the financial risks were too great. Defying the Sabbath laws would, as one stockholder argued, “offend the religious sentiments of a large portion of the community” and, by inciting boycotts of the line, result in a “significant pecuniary loss.”Footnote 96 In his annual address, Mayor Henry congratulated the companies for their “commendable spirit.”Footnote 97 The Philadelphia Sabbath Association recorded its satisfaction with the outcome. “The question,” according to the Reverend J. Miller, “is now settled.” He was convinced, he went on, that “the enemy has but a gloomy prospect before them.”Footnote 98
Philadelphians would have to wait until after the Civil War for Sunday cars. In 1865, the Union Passenger Railway company won a federal government contract to carry mail on its streetcars to and from the Baltimore Railroad depot on Sundays. This was an extremely limited service—one car only would run late in the evening on a route that was well beyond the central part of the city—and, as a service carrying mail, protected by federal law. Undaunted, Sabbatarians mobilized in opposition. A member of the Philadelphia Sabbath Association, John Sparhawk, launched a suit in equity against the streetcar company on the grounds that the running of cars on the Sabbath constituted a breach of peace. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, however, rejected the argument. In itself, the running of a Sunday street car did not, Justice James Thompson ruled, constitute such a breach. The plaintiff had not presented sufficient evidence that religious services were being disrupted by the passing of streetcars.Footnote 99
This decision did not invalidate Pennsylvania's 1794 Sabbath Act, under which all worldly activities on the Sabbath were banned, except those of necessity and charity. But the penalty for violations of this Act was a paltry four dollars. In an even more disturbing development for Sabbatarians, Justice John M. Read launched a fierce attack on Sabbath laws themselves. Citing a range of authorities, from John Calvin to Martin Luther, Read concluded that the Sabbath was not divinely ordained. Read also reiterated the claims made in 1859 that the ban on Sunday cars privileged the rich at the expense of the poor. We should not, he concluded, “oblige the working man to confine himself to his own narrow, stifling room, and forbid him to enjoy the fresh air of heaven.”Footnote 100
As a result of Sparhawk, the ban on Sunday travel became unworkable. The Philadelphia Sabbath Association recorded its “deepest regret” over this outcome, while hoping that the legislature might formally enact a ban on Sunday cars.Footnote 101 On November 9, 1867, the Union line resumed its Sunday service, and most of the other lines, including the Green and Coates Street line, followed. By then, other cities had abolished Sunday travel restrictions. In 1867, a referendum in favor of Sunday cars narrowly passed in Baltimore. Sunday cars were now running in Boston, New York, Albany, Troy, Brooklyn, Hoboken, Jersey City, Nashville, Cincinnati, Washington, and St. Louis. Despite the best efforts of Sabbatarians, Sunday streetcars had become a feature of the urban landscape in the United States.
VII. Conclusion
Anti-Sabbatarians in the decades before the Civil War were a diverse group. Some cited their understanding of scripture to argue that the true Sabbath was the seventh day rather than the first. Others adhered to the notion of a Sunday Sabbath, but sought to replace its stern and punitive character with an emphasis on rational recreation. No doubt many of the crowds who protested against bans on Sunday travel simply sought to benefit from the convenience such a service offered. But uniting all these strands was a deep-seated hostility to the political pretensions of the Sabbatarian clergy.
The anti-Sabbatarian movement in pre-Civil War America was a striking example of a popular movement espousing the principle that religion and politics should be kept apart. Defenders of Sunday mail or streetcars went well beyond the demand that the State treat all Christian denominations equally and fairly. To this demand for religious equality anti-Sabbatarians joined an admonishment that the laws of the republic never be entangled with religion and religious controversy. The fact that the majority of the populace considered themselves Christians did not make the United States, they argued, a Christian nation. In the midst of the Philadelphia controversy, the editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, summed up the attitude of many Americans. Christianity, he argued, had no formal status in the American Constitution. The religion, he declared, “of the Mormons, or of the Jews, or of the Mahomedans, or of John Chinaman [are] as much the religion of the United States, in any legal or constitutional sense, as the religion of Jesus Christ.”Footnote 102
The victory for Sunday cars in Philadelphia and elsewhere did not signal the demise either of Sabbatarianism or of the efforts on the part of Protestant evangelicals to influence public policy. Despite widespread hostility, Sabbatarians managed to prevent the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia opening to the public on Sundays. In the last decades of the century, there was a resurgence in Sabbatarian activism, with a host of Sabbath associations founded across the nation. It is not my contention that the evidence of popular support for anti-Sabbatarianism repudiates the argument, put by Mark E. Noll, Richard J. Carwardine, and others, that evangelicals were the most dynamic subculture within antebellum America. But the anti-Sabbatarian backlash reveals that, even in the midst of a wave of intense evangelical activism, Americans were far from agreed on the proper role of religion in their republic. In his analysis of the battles over disestablishment in the early Republic, Mark McGarvie suggests that the federal Constitution, far from settling the question of religion's role in the public sphere, was a “declaration of war between two groups of Americans harboring contesting worldviews.”Footnote 103 A fuller appreciation of anti-Sabbatarianism opens a revealing window onto an important historical phase of that war.
