Historical Eras in the Early 1800s

I’m fascinated by American history: How people of different races, creeds, cultures, and economic backgrounds arrived on this continent, how we as a people have done things that were good and things that were bad and in some cases downright evil, and how our deeds and beliefs help make us who we are today.

Gideon Stoltz, the fictional sheriff in my historical mystery series, was born in 1813. His wife, True, was born in 1815. (Having godlike authorial power, I get to decide such things.) What I’m not free to change is the actual history. The lives of Gideon and True and the residents of 1830s Colerain County, Pennsylvania, play out during certain periods in American history. Here’s a brief overview of how historians identify those eras, many of which overlap.

The Second Great Awakening (1800 to 1840) saw the burgeoning growth of evangelical Protestant Christianity. (The First Great Awakening took place during colonial times.) In the early nineteenth century, religion was more central to many people’s lives than it is today. The most popular Protestant denominations were the Methodists (True and Gideon attend a humble Methodist church in Adamant), Baptists, and Presbyterians. A huge number of other denominations and sects existed: at least seven kinds of Baptists and eight sorts of Presbyterians, along with Lutherans (Gideon grew up Lutheran), German Reformed, Brethren, Quakers, Shakers, Millerites, Campbellites, Rappites, Universalists, Transcendentalists, Adventists, and many more.

1836 methodist camp meeting. credit: smithsonian institution

The Second Great Awakening spread across the nation. Western New York became known as the Burned Over District because the religious fervor was so hot there that it seemed to scorch the ground. Tent-meeting revivals happened frequently. These were social as well as religious events. Preaching, often by multiple ministers, might go on for days. People were sometimes seized by a spiritual frenzy: they fainted, spoke in tongues, fell down like wheat before the scythe, and rolled around in the dust. In my first mystery, A Stranger Here Below, Gideon and True get together at a revival for purposes unrelated to religion. Later, they find a revival preacher who agrees to marry them.

Manifest Destiny (1812 to 1860) expressed the intensely nationalistic belief that God had ordained Americans – white Protestants of British or European origin – to claim the North American continent as their own. Wherever Americans chose to settle, whether the South or the Great Plains (then occupied by beleaguered and often bellicose Native Americans), or Texas or California (both owned by Mexico), or Oregon (Great Britain and the U.S. argued over ownership), people strongly felt that the federal government should remove or pacify any earlier inhabitants, and protect the new settlers and their holdings. When the press began trumpeting the phrase in the 1840s, Manifest Destiny became part of the American lexicon. In the 1830s, the frontier stretched from roughly Wisconsin to Iowa to Texas. The Gideon Stoltz mysteries refer to things like Texans’ struggles for independence and local people pulling up stakes and moving west to places like Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa.

The Era of Good Feelings (1817 to 1825) coincided with the presidency of James Monroe, who tried to downplay partisan politics and boost national unity. In fact, the political atmosphere remained divisive and strained. (When has American politics been otherwise?) Our country’s two-party system arose during this period. Gideon and True probably took no notice of such matters. Gideon was a boy on a farm in Lancaster County speaking Pennsylfawnish Deitsch (Pennsylvania German), and True was growing up on Panther Ironworks, the barely educated daughter of a collier and a housemaid.

The Plantation Era stretched from around 1700 until the Civil War began in 1861. Sometimes called the Antebellum (“pre-war”) Era, it saw an economic boom in the South, where an elite class of wealthy landowners exploited people of color as slaves. (There were enslaved people in the North, too, including in Pennsylvania, but there the economy did not depend on slavery.) Southern planters forced these hostages to labor at growing cotton and other crops, and often treated them with horrifying cruelty. As a movement to abolish slavery gained strength, relations grew increasingly tense between anti-slavery Northerners (the North also profited from slavery through selling food and manufactured goods to the South, and using southern cotton to weave cloth) and Southerners wanting to maintain their “peculiar institution” of owning other humans as chattel slaves. I’m now working on a third Gideon Stoltz mystery, which focuses on freedom-seeking people fleeing north to Pennsylvania and Colerain County, and the kidnapping of free people of color to be illegally sold into slavery.

The Jacksonian Era (1829 to 1849) promoted the rise of the common man. Starting when Andrew Jackson assumed the presidency, the period was characterized by an expansion of voting rights to most adult white males over the age of 21. Many of those men voted for the populist Jackson, also known as “Old Hickory” and “The Hero” in recognition of his valorous military service during the War of 1812, and who served as president for two terms before his handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, was inaugurated in 1837.

The Panic of 1837 (1837 to mid-1840s) marked the first genuine depression in the U.S. economy. Cotton prices fell in England, which had been buying American cotton for weaving into cloth. British banks called in loans they had extended to many U.S. states. On this side of the Atlantic, hundreds of banks folded, often leaving their customers with worthless paper money. Land speculators, farmers, merchants, manufacturers, and business owners suffered financial ruin. Common folk lost their jobs. In cities and towns, mobs set upon debt collectors and law enforcement officials. I’ve just started researching an upcoming Gideon Stoltz Mystery that will unfold during these “Hard Times,” as the era was known.

(These two books present a wealth of information about America in the early 1800s: What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe; and Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, by David S. Reynolds.)