In this engaging and imaginative book, Adam Jortner introduces the widespread culture of the miraculous, as well as the “political problem of miracles” (185), in the early American republic. While claims of special providences had been common since the early colonial period, Jortner argues that after the American Revolution, divine interruptions of the natural order became apologetic tools for new religious movements including the Shakers and the Mormons, as well as for those led by the pan-Indian prophets Neolin and Tenkswatawa. In the new American republic, however, claims of miracles and prophetic authority were especially troubling, and advocates of republicanism cast the miracle workers as anti-republican incendiaries and agents of tyranny. Violence against the miracle-working sects had political origins. As Jortner explains in one of his typically apt phrases: “The miraculous was the enemy of the people” (184).

The fact that radical sects in the early national and antebellum periods claimed to work miracles will not be surprising to many readers. But Jortner demonstrates just how common such claims were among a variety of groups over a long period of time. The sects asserted powers such as the ability to heal, to exorcise demons, to discern witches, and to speak in tongues. They sometimes also claimed to have physical encounters with angels and to control meteorological phenomena. Other individual episodes of people casting spells and performing magical cures suggest that, whatever the progress of “Enlightenment” anti-supernaturalism, it had hardly snuffed out recourse to and expectation of the supernatural in the everyday life of many men and women. Indeed, Jortner argues that the evidentiary basis of American and Scottish philosophy—the belief in the senses’ ability to adjudicate fact and fiction—fueled the growth of the sects. Their leaders invited all observers to come and see whether the miracles were true or not.

Jortner describes his own approach to the early republic's miracles as “antirealist,” an awkward term but helpful concept taken from the work of Stuart Clark (4). The antirealist approach to supernatural claims does not engage with the question of the miracles’ facticity, nor does it try to discern the “natural” reasons behind the ostensibly supernatural events. Jortner argues that when confronting claims of the miraculous, the “focus should be on what kinds of decisions about reality people made, and the effects of their decisions to believe or disbelieve in supernatural phenomena” (5). One does not come away from reading Blood from the Sky with the impression that Jortner is actually open to the miracles’ ultimate veracity, but neither does he waste time trying to explain away these phenomena.

Jortner is more interested in explaining why the miracle workers garnered such intense scorn, and sometimes violence, from republican critics. He contends that the republican focus on a virtuous people, accompanied by the disestablishment of the state churches, made early national republicans especially touchy about the radical sects’ claims. Religious liberty had clear theological boundaries, and those who made assertions about modern-day miracles were beyond the pale.

This framework makes sense at a theoretical level, as the fledgling republic presumably needed to guard its conceptual borders from anything that smacked of absolutism. For example, the tenuousness of the republican experiment made the Mormon leader Joseph Smith's claims of prophetic authority, and his ambitions for the presidency and “theodemocracy,” intolerable. It led to his murder. But it is not clear just how novel these concerns were in the early nineteenth century. Nor is it clear that the republican experiment gave “added weight” to the fear of religious deception and impostors (70). Claims of miracles, including visions, healings, and angelic visitations, were known throughout much of the colonial era, including the Great Awakening period. The most radical sects in the colonies, such as the Baptists, fell under harsh persecution. Their tormentors offered many of the same reasons as did persecutors of the miracle workers in the early republic. The fear of impostors and the political threat they represented, likewise, were hardly new to the early republic. The accusation of imposture was commonly directed at sectarian groups in the colonial era. In the early 1700s, writers in Britain and America routinely worried about the threat of imposture and compared the leaders of contemporary radical religious movements to Muhammad, who represented the arch impostor for Christian polemicists. Republican critics in Blood from the Sky made those same types of connections from time to time.

One of the most precedent-setting “imposture” books was Humphrey Prideaux's frequently reprinted The True Nature of Imposture Displayed in the Life of Mahomet. It was originally published in 1697, and I am confident that some of Jortner's republican polemicists had read the book in American editions a hundred years later. If identical accusations such as those in Jortner's book appeared a century earlier, it makes me wonder how much the instability of America's new republican era actually created the backlash against the miracle workers. Perhaps this was a story of continuity more than change.

But the fact that there was a sometimes-murderous backlash against radical sects in the early republic is undeniable. Whether its roots came from pre-Revolutionary sources or not, this backlash was critical for establishing what American religious liberty meant in practice. Jortner makes a convincing case that the claims to the miraculous undergirded a surprising number of the new religious movements of the early 1800s. The types of miracles they manifested were remarkably similar. More intriguingly, the way that the sectarians defended the miracles came straight out of the Enlightenment rationalist playbook. In its portrayal of the miraculous accounts, then, and in its assessment of the miracles’ troubling political implications for republicans, Blood from the Sky is as an indispensable resource for the religious history of the American nation's formative years.