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New England’s Religious Wars in Poganuc People

New England’s Religious Wars in Poganuc People

Last updated on: December 11, 2025 at 8:41 am by Philip Jenkins

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New England’s Religious Wars in Poganuc People 2025-12-11T08:41:20-04:00 Philip Jenkins

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I posted last time about the 1878 novel Poganuc People, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (hereafter, HBS), with a focus on its Christmas stories. By way of reminder, the novel depicts life in a fictionalized version of Litchfield, Connecticut, in the 1820s, where HBS’s father Lyman Beecher was a venerated Calvinist preacher. (In the book he appears as the learned Dr. Cushing). But the book also has a lot to tell us about the Episcopal church, of which the author was a faithful member, and generally about religious history in New England around that time. Writing as a remarkably good church historian, she perfectly catches a moment of traumatic division among the area’s Protestant believers.

Disestablishment

By way of background, Connecticut at the time of the novel had just passed through a sweeping religious/political revolution. From Puritan times, the Congregational church had been the established religious authority, and in the early nineteenth century it was intimately allied with the dominant Federalist Party. But that old-style establishment was crumbling fast across the rest of New England, and in 1816 a new Toleration Party was formed with the support of Democratic/Republicans, supported by the other Protestant sects – Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, and (who is surprised?) dissident Congregationalists. A new state constitution in 1818 formally disestablished the state’s Congregationalist church, in what we can see as a highly symbolic move, effectively the end of the two centuries-long Puritan religious regime in New England. That church ceased to be THE CHURCH and instead, became a mere denomination, one of several.

Poganuc People not only describes the transition in some detail, but pays close attention to the factions and the wider ramifications of the change. HBS portrays the stern establishment that existed until the end of the eighteenth century:

There was the one meeting-house, the one minister, in every village. Every householder was taxed for the support of public worship, and stringent law and custom demanded of every one a personal attendance on Sunday at both services. If any defaulter failed to put in an appearance it was the minister’s duty to call promptly on Monday and know the reason why. There was no place for differences of religious opinion. All that individualism which now raises a crop of various little churches in every country village was sternly suppressed. For many years only members of churches could be eligible to public offices; Sabbath-keeping was enforced with more than Mosaic strictness, and New England justified the sarcasm which said that they had left the Lords-Bishops to be under the Lords-Brethren. In those days if a sectarian meeting of Methodists or Baptists, or an unseemly gathering of any kind, seemed impending, the minister had only to put on his cocked hat, take his gold-headed cane and march down the village street, leaving his prohibition at every house, and the thing was so done even as he commanded.

Enter the Episcopal Church

But the Revolution changed much:

It was but a little while after the close of the war that established American independence that the revolution came which broke up the State Church and gave to every man the liberty of “signing off,” as it was called, to any denomination that pleased him. Hence arose through New England churches of all names. The nucleus of the Episcopal Church in any place was generally some two or three old families of ancestral traditions in its favor, who gladly welcomed to their fold any who, for various causes, were discontented with the standing order of things. Then, too, there came to them gentle spirits, cut and bleeding by the sharp crystals of doctrinal statement, and courting the balm of devotional liturgy and the cool shadowy indefiniteness of more æsthetic forms of worship. Also, any one that for any cause had a controversy with the dominant church took comfort in the power of “signing off” to another. In those days, to belong to no church was not respectable, but to sign off to the Episcopal Church was often a compromise that both gratified self-will and saved one’s dignity; and, having signed off, the new convert was obliged, for consistency’s sake, to justify the step he had taken by doing his best to uphold the doctrine and worship of his chosen church.

The account here of the appeal of the Episcopal Church precisely fits what we know from many other sources about its appeal for HBS personally.

As HBS notes, the Episcopalian heritage was troubled, as it was so strongly bound up with memories of royal and Tory oppression, but the church definitely had a stubborn local presence. In the 1780s, Connecticut became a key base from which surviving Anglicans reconstructed themselves into a new Episcopal church. It was in Woodbury, fifteen miles from Litchfield, where ten clergy gathered in 1783 to elect Samuel Seabury as the first Bishop of Connecticut, a pivotal moment in the history of the emerging church. He then traveled to Scotland to seek proper ordination. (HBS does not mention this story in the novel).

The Episcopal Church as a Radical Plot

As we saw in my last post, the Episcopal church gained support for very varied reasons, but in the context of the time, its greatest appeal was the ritual and ceremonial it offered, and above all at Christmas time, when it made such a great show. A Puritan like Dr. Cushing abhors this as near-pagan, but more specifically, he understands it as a manifestation of the partisan spirit that had so subverted his own Congregationalist establishment. The linkage might seem strange to modern readers, but HBS spells it out effectively. When told that the Episcopalians are decorating their church, he replies,

“My dear, I haven’t the least objection to their dressing their church and having a good Christian service any day in the year if they want to, but our people may just as well understand our own ground. I know that the Democrats are behind this new move, and they are just using this church to carry their own party purposes—to break up the standing order and put down all the laws that are left to protect religion and morals. They want to upset everything that our fathers came to New England to establish.”

As HBS knows, the Episcopal tradition is anything but democratic in spirit: “there is no religious organization in the world in its genius and history less likely to assimilate with a democratic movement than the Episcopal Church.” But in this particular context, it had an insurgent quality. She describes contemporary political affairs in some detail:

Just at this point in the history of New England affairs, all the minor denominations were ready to join any party that promised to break the supremacy of the State Church and give them a foothold. It was the “Democratic party” of that day that broke up the exclusive laws in favor of the Congregational Church and consequently gained large accessions to their own standard. To use a brief phrase, all the _outs_ were Democrats, and all the _ins_ Federalists. But the Democratic party had, as always, its radical train. Not satisfied with wresting the scepter from the hands of the Congregational clergyman, and giving equal rights and a fair field to other denominations, the cry was now to abolish all laws in any way protective of religious institutions, or restrictive of the fullest personal individualism; in short, the cry was for the liberty of every man to go to church or not, to keep the Sabbath or not, to support a minister or not, as seemed good and proper in his own eyes.

This was in fact the final outcome of things in New England, and experience has demonstrated that this wide and perfect freedom is the best way of preserving religion and morals. But it was not given to a clergyman in the day of Dr. Cushing, who had hitherto felt that a state ought to be like a well-governed school, under the minister for schoolmaster, to look on the movements of the Democratic party otherwise than as tending to destruction and anarchy. This new movement in the Episcopal Church he regarded as but a device by appeals to the senses–by scenic effects, illuminations and music—to draw people off to an unspiritual and superficial form of religion, which, having once been the tool of monarchy and aristocracy, had now fallen into the hands of the far more dangerous democracy; and he determined to set the trumpet to his mouth on the following Sabbath, and warn the watchmen on the walls of Zion.

I should stress that HBS is not trying to give fair and balanced coverage to denominations, and in fact, the Episcopal church was not central to the concerns of the real-life Lyman Beecher, or his New England counterparts. Heading their list of nightmares was the then-surging Unitarian movement, which really did cause them genuine panic, and compared with which the Episcopalians were a marginal annoyance. To understand why they were so alarmed, just look at the lengthy list of historic Unitarian churches in New England that stand on the site of older Congregationalist bodies, which evolved to accept those new insights. By way of chronology, this was the era when Boston’s brilliant William Ellery Channing led the Unitarian movement, and the American Unitarian Association was founded in that city in 1825. For Congregationalists in those years, Episcopalians were irritating; Unitarians were terrifying. HBS talks so much about the Episcopal church because that was where her own interests and commitments lay.

Losers and Gainers

As HBS knew well, Dr. Cushing’s cause is doomed, in that the old one-party establishment is not coming back. But she is equally certain that her own beloved Episcopal church is not destined for much wider success than it has already achieved. She portrays the villagers who have joined the church in various acts of dissension and rebellion, and they try hard to follow its ways. But their hearts are not really in it, and they remain faithfully cranky New Englanders, solidly rooted in the old Puritan culture. This is personified in Zeph Higgins, who is doggedly determined to be loyal to a church he has adopted, but which he frankly can scarcely understand.

The gulf is mainly aesthetic:

He not only did not like symbolic forms, but he despised them as effeminate impertinences; and every turn and movement that he was compelled to make in his new ritualistic surroundings was aggravating to his temper. To bend the knee at the name of Jesus, to rise up reverently when the words of Jesus were about to be read in the Gospel of the day, were acts congenial to his wife as they were irksome to him; and, above all, the idea of ecclesiastical authority, whether exercised by rector, bishop or church, woke all the refractory nerves of opposition inherited from five generations of Puritans.

By the book’s end, we hear that the Episcopal tradition still survives in Poganuc, but in quite a pallid form:

“Our Poganuc folks somehow ain’t made for ‘Piscopals. A ‘Piscopal church in our town is jest like a hill o’ potatoes planted under a big apple-tree; the tree got a-growin’ afore they did, and don’t give ’em no chance. There was my wife’s father, he signed off, ’cause of a quarrel he hed with his own church; but he’s come back agin, and so have all his boys, and Nabby, and jined the Doctor’s church. Fact is, our folks sort o’ hanker arter the old meetin’-house.”

“Who is the rector of the Episcopal church?”

“Oh, that’s Sim Coan; nice, lively young feller, Sim is; but can’t hold a candle to the Doctor. Sim he ain’t ‘fraid of nobody—preaches up the ‘Piscopal doctrine sharp, and stands up for his side; and he’s all the feasts and fasts and anthems and things at his tongue’s end; and his folks likes him fust rate. But the church don’t grow much; jest holds its own, that’s all.”

The Episcopal church would grow mightily during the nineteenth century, in New England as elsewhere, but it had to build whole new foundations.

I will have more to say about Poganuc People. And Christmas. And reindeer.

Philip Jenkins

Congregationalist church

connecticut

Episcopal Church

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Poganuc People

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