Almost America: From the Colonists to Clinton: a "What If" History of the U.S.
416
Almost America: From the Colonists to Clinton: a "What If" History of the U.S.
416Paperback(LST ED.)
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Overview
- What if the President Nixon had refused to resign and instead faced impeachment.
- What if George Bush had dropped Dan Quale from the 1992 Republican ticket?
- What if Teddy Roosevelt had outlawed the new American sport of football as he threatened to do in 1906.
- What if IBM hadn't asked Bill Gates and Microsoft to write computer code for its first personal computer?
Decisions were made. The rules were set. The battles were won. But there was always the possibility of another outcome. Almost America unravels the threads of our nations history — from the Puritan preachers of the 1970's to the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton — and takes you to America ( or Americas) that might have been.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780380800919 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2000 |
| Series: | Quill |
| Edition description: | LST ED. |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Sales rank: | 983,673 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.94(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
The Slumbering American Spirit
The New Lights effected a great and revolutionary spiritual revival in the colonies. What if their preachers had been cowed by the government that opposed them?
In the late summer of 1775, American commander Benedict Arnold and his small ragtag army of rebels prepared for battle by following a bizarre ritual. The troops and their chaplain assembled in a Presbyterian church in Northampton, Massachusetts. Following a sermon, the chaplain, Arnold, and his officers stepped behind the pulpit and lowered themselves into the brick tomb of a minister, George Whitefield, who had died five years before.
Standing in the tomb, the chaplain removed the lid of the mahogany-colored coffin, revealing Whitefield's skeleton. The chaplain then cut up small pieces of the collar and cuffs of Wrhitefield's burial gown and distributed the small scraps of cloth to the officers, including Arnold.
Just a few months earlier, Arnold's army had successfully captured the British fort at Ticonderoga, New York, but now a much more daunting challenge faced them. They planned to march through Maine in winter and attack the city of Quebec, and the officers hoped that the small pieces of fabric would serve as talismans in the coming campaign.
Whitefield, a staunch man of God, never would have expected that one day he himself would be seen as a sort of patron saint of an armed insurrection. Thirty years before the American Revolution, he and two other prominent pastors, Jonathan Edwards and Gilbert Tennent, had transformed American life with their sermons. They had hoped to change the wayAmericans thought about their relationship with God, and they had succeeded, leading to a great religious revival that became known as the Great Awakening. But the religious movement had done much more: A generation later, it would provide many of the philosophical underpinnings of American democracy.
Like many popular movements, the Great Awakening didn't really have a defined beginning or a definite end. The religious revival first appeared sometime around 1720, and after a few years it seemed to just fade away. Those who participated in the movement believed that every man is the same in the eyes of God-that is, every man is a failed sinner. The followers were known as New Lights, and they believed that everyone should strive to lead moral, useful fives and that education was necessary to serve and understand God.
The best known of the New Lights was Jonathan Edwards, a remarkable man who had gone to Yale when he was thirteen years old and by the age of twenty-one had become the head tutor there. Edwards is familiar to students of early American literature for his famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and for its well-known opening, "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked."
When he would launch into one of his fiery messages, Edwards didn't make any effort to temper his harsh words with soothing glances; he preached while staring above the audience, never taking his eyes off of the bell rope that hung from the steeple at the back of the church. Even as the people rushed to the pulpit and cried for Edwards to stop, he continued preaching his damning message. Instead of rejecting Edwards's uncomfortable words, thousands of believers were drawn to the message in waves of people that astounded nearly all who witnessed the phenomenon.
Edwards, whose rebellious Puritan Congregationalists would take the name "Baptists," wasn't the only person preaching a new way of looking at life and at the church that dominated colonial society. Across the Atlantic in England, John Wesley, leader of a new group of believers, was preaching a new type of personal involvement in spiritual fife. Because Wesley's group practiced a specified method of scheduling spiritual activity, such as fasting on certain days of the week, they soon became known as Methodists. George Whitefield was a colleague of Wesley's, and he traveled to America thirteen times to present this new form of Christianity. Whitefield was a skillful preacher-some claimed that Whitefield could make people swoon just by saying "Mesopotamia" — and he became America's first widely known celebrity.
The reaction of one Connecticut colonist, a man named Nathan Cole, was typical of that which greeted Whitefield when he arrived in an area. Cole recorded in his journal, "I was in my field at work. I dropped my tool that I had in my hand and ran home to my wife, telling her to make ready quickly to go and hear Mr. Whitefield preach at Middletown, then ran to my pasture for my horse with all my might, fearing that I should be too late."
Of course, despite its terrific popularity, the Great Awakening movement had its doubters. Benjamin Franklin attended one of Whitefield's sermons to see if what he had been hearing was true. Before he went, however, he vowed to himself to drop nothing in the collection plate. "I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles of gold," Franklin wrote in his autobiography. "As he proceeded I began to soften and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all."
Franklin also doubted the size of Whitefield's audiences, which the believers boasted were up to twenty-five thousand people. Franklin didn't believe that a man could be heard above a crowd of that size, certainly not to the outer edges, and in his usual scientific way he set out to investigate. Traveling to hear Whitefield preach from the steps of the Philadelphia courthouse, Franklin walked to the edge of the crowd and began his calculations: "Imagining then a semicircle, of which my distance [from Whitefield] should be the radius, and that it was filled with auditors, to each of whom I allowed two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand." In his newspaper, Franklin noted that the effect of Whitefield's preaching was so persuasive that "one could not walk thro' the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street" replacing "idle songs and ballads" throughout the city.