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James McCarty was born into slavery in the late 1710s in Shrewsbury, Monmouth County, New Jersey, before being emancipated in 1744. As a successful free man he accumulated property before he died intestate in 1763. Leading New Jersey and Pennsylvania Quakers then worked to fulfill McCarty’s wish that his wealth be used to secure the freedom of his relatives who were still enslaved. It took the Quakers involved almost five years before they achieved their goal because they had to overcome discriminatory laws, enslavers’ resistance, and divisions within the Quaker community itself. Over the ensuing decades, they exhibited a persevering, paternalistic benevolence in protecting and caring for McCarty’s kinfolk. Their experience in the McCarty imbroglio changed the Quakers’ thinking about slavery and emancipation and advanced the emerging antislavery movement during a seminal period on the eve of the American Revolution.

This book analyzes the debate over the proper connection between religion and society that took place in southern New England during the fifty years after the American Revolution. It finds that a Christian social ideology, descended from the region's Puritan origins, endured and evolved during the era of the early republic, in contrast to interpretations that emphasize the individualization and secularization of American public life during the period. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, the Congregational clergy articulated a corporate ethic that emphasized the superintendence of divine Providence over communal affairs and the importance of social morality for the survival of the new nation, although Baptists and other religious minorities dissented and called for the disestablishment of Congregationalism. By the early nineteenth century, the first party competition between Federalists and Democratic‐Republicans politicized and transformed the debate over public Christianity. Congregationalists became disillusioned with their prophecies of America's millennial role and soured on their partnership with the Federalist magistracy, while dissenters joined Jeffersonians in agitating for disestablishment. At the same time, however, the Congregationalists found cause for optimism amid the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. The experience of Worcester County, Massachusetts was typical, where religious revivals and clerical networking at the grassroots fostered a new vision of the godly community. In the years after 1815 partisan acrimony declined, and the Congregationalists split into Unitarian and orthodox camps. As a result, an evangelical coalition of orthodox Congregationalists, Baptists, and others emerged that charted the way for renewed activism on the part of a Christian electorate and mobilized church. The transformed public Christianity of the 1820s and 1830s made a seminal contribution to the emergence of a variety of reform movements, such as temperance, Sabbatarianism, and antislavery.

Dr Sassi examines the debate over the proper connection in society between religion and public life, that took place in the fifty years following the American Revolution.

This book examines the debate over the connection between religion and public life in society during the fifty years following the American Revolution. Sassi challenges the conventional wisdom, finding an essential continuity to the period's public Christianity, whereas most previous studies have seen this period as one in which the nation's cultural paradigm shifted from republicanism to liberal individualism. Focusing on the Congregational clergy of New England, he demonstrates that throughout this period there were Americans concerned with their corporate destiny, retaining a commitment to constructing a righteous community and assessing the cosmic meaning of the American experiment.

Sassi contends that during the first fifteen years of the 19th century the political conflict of the first party period catalyzed an ideological reevaluation for the ministerial thinkers involved. Clergymen across the denominational spectrum transformed the ways they reconciled religious commitments with life in a democratic society.