Southcott in Southey’s review of Abdiel Holmes’s American
Annals, Quarterly Review, 2 (1809), 319-37.
1. Art. IX. American Annals; or, a Chronological History of America from its
Discovery in 1492 to 1806. By Abiel Holmes, D.D. Fellow of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Member of the Massachusetts
Historical Society, and Minister of the First Church in Cambridge. 2
vols. 8vo. Cambridge (in America).
2. [pp. 319-337]
3. There is scarcely any medium in America between over-godliness and a brutal
irreligion. In many parts of the southern states baptism and the burial service
are dispensed with. The ceremony of marriage is performed by a justice of the
peace, and pigs are suffered to root in the church-yard and sleep in the church!
From superstition to infidelity is an easy transition, and it is as easy from
infidelity to superstition. America has its age of reason, and it has also its
Dunkers [1] and its Shakers. [2] The
all-friend Jemima Wilkinson, [3] and her prophet Elijah, will have a chapter in the
next history of heresies with our Joanna Southcote, and her four and twenty elders. Methodism is even
more obstreperous there than it is with us. Our fanatics, though their name is
legion, have not yet ventured to hold camp-meetings. These meetings, as the name
implies, are held in the open field, and continue, day and night, sometimes for
a fortnight. Thousands flock to them from far and near, and bring with them, as
the official advertisement recommends, provisions, and tents, or blankets; ‘all
friendly ministers and praying people are invited to attend said meeting’. The
friendly ministers work away, and as soon as the lungs of one fail, another
relieves him. ‘When signs of conversion begin to be manifest’, says Mr. Janson,
‘several preachers crowd round the object, exhorting a continuance of the
efforts of the spirit, and displaying in the most frightful images the horrors
which attend such as do not come unto them. The signs of regeneration are
displayed in the most extravagant symptoms. I have seen women jumping, striking,
and kicking, like raving maniacs, while the surrounding believers could not keep
them in postures of decency. This continues till the convert is entirely
exhausted; but they consider the greater the resistance the more the faith, and
thus they are admitted into what they term the society’. [4]
Notes
[1] A Protestant sect founded in
1708 in Schwarzenau, Germany, which practised adult baptism by immersion
(hence its nickname). BACK
[2] The Dancing or Shaking Quakers, or Shakers—the United Society
of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—were a charismatic Protestant sect
brought from England to New York in 1774 by prophet ‘Mother’ Ann Lee
(1736-84). Worship took the form of long, sometimes all-night, meetings at
which the spirit would move worshippers to shake or dance. BACK
[3] Jemima
Wilkinson (1752-1819), a Quaker by upbringing who, after an illness,
declared a prophetic mission to be the ‘Public Universal Friend’ to all.
Preaching the Ten Commandments and sexual abstinence, she practised
hospitality and benevolence and attracted a community of followers in upper
New York state. BACK
[4] Charles William
Janson, The Stranger in America (London, 1807), p. 107. The
quotation also appears in the course of a review of Janson’s work in the
British Critic, 30 (1808), 590-601 (p. 600). BACK
