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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2013
The decades before the Civil War witnessed a series of battles over the meaning and legal status of the American Sabbath. Scholarship has focused on the Sabbatarian movement, a cluster of evangelical churches that sought to institutionalize the Sunday Sabbath. This article takes a new approach by investigating the anti-Sabbatarian movement. In a series of controversies, from Sunday mail in the Jacksonian era to the running of Sunday streetcars on the eve of the Civil War, anti-Sabbatarians rallied against Sabbath laws as an infringement of civil and religious liberty. Though diverse in orientation, anti-Sabbatarians agreed that religion and politics should be kept apart, and that the United States was not, in constitutional terms, a Christian nation. A study of anti-Sabbatarianism is thus of rich significance for the history of Church-State relations in the United States.
1 The Sabbatarian campaign to ban Sunday mail has attracted most analysis. See John, Richard R., “Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (Winter 1990): 517–567CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, “Prelude to Abolitionism: Sabbatarian politics and the Rise of the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 58 (September 1971): 316–341CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rohrer, James R., “Sunday Mails and the Church-State Theme in Jacksonian America,” Journal of the Early Republic 7 (Spring 1987): 53–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fuller, Wayne E., Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2003)Google Scholar; John, Richard R., Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; West, John G., The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996),137–70Google Scholar; McCrossen, Alexis, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 25–26Google Scholar. For a general survey, see McCrossen, Alexis, “Sabbatarianism: The Intersection of Church and State in the Orchestration of Everyday Life in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Religious and Secular Reform in America: Ideas, Beliefs and Social Change, eds. Adams, David K. and Van Minnen, Cornelis A. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 133–158Google Scholar.
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19 HR 21A-G15.3, n.d.
20 Ibid.
21 HR 21A-G15.3, February 22, 1830.
22 Ibid., January 1830.
23 [untitled newspaper clipping], HR 21A-G15.3.
24 HR 20A-G14.2, January 1829.
25 HR 21A-G15.3, January 16, 1830.
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27 HR 21A-G15.3, January 20, 1830.
28 HR 20A-G14.2, December 1828.
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74 Ibid., July 19, 1859.
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