Who were the evangelicals?: conservative and liberal identity in the Unitarian Controversy in Boston, 1804-1833

45. See William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress, 32; and Peter R. Knights, Yankee Destinies: The Lives of Ordinary Nineteenth-Century Bostonians (Chapel Hill, 1991), 15-31.

46. Knights, Yankee Destinies, 15-31.

47. Lemuel Shattuck, Report to the Committee of the City Council Appointed to Obtain the Census of Boston for the Year 1845 (Boston, 1846), 37, breaks down residents of Boston in 1845 captured by the census according to place of birth. Although his data come from a period somewhat later in time than that of the religious controversy, the numbers nevertheless suggest the magnitude of the migration to Boston from rural areas of New England.

                       Under 20         Over 20          All Ages

Born in Boston,     19,814 (17.3%)   11,077 (9.7%)    30,891 (27.0%)
American Parents

Born in Boston,     10,105 (8.8%)    80 (0.1%)        10,185 (8.9%)
Foreign Parents

Born in U.S., Not   10,207 (8.9%)    35,979 (31.5%)   46,186 (40.4%)
in Boston

Not Born in U.S.     6,265 (5.5%)    20,839 (18.2%)   27,104 (23.7%)

48. See Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1830 (Chapel Hill, 1994), 301-309; and Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 60, 64.

49. On the frontier missionary efforts of Congregationalists, see James R. Rohrer, Keepers of the Covenant: Frontier Missions and the Decline of Congregationalism, 1774-1818 (New York, 1995).

50. They represent, of course, not every conservative Congregational church of the time - but they go a fair way toward telling us something about what some evangelicals were like during this period of disputation.

51. The records drawn upon are not exactly comparable in the information they yield, because the kinds of information retained by each type of congregation differed according to the conception of what constituted important congregational knowledge. We must therefore be cautious in interpreting what they tell us. For example, the total number of names we can trace through the records is much greater for Salem Street than for Second Church, despite the fact that the Second Church records cover a much longer period of time. This fact might mean that the membership, both formal and loosely affiliated, of Salem Street was larger, but it might also mean that because the Congregationalists placed such emphasis on regular and disciplined church membership, they were much more careful than their Unitarian counterparts to retain evidences of conversions and admissions. Moreover, to all appearances, women constituted a much higher percentage of the Salem Street congregation than they did of Second Church. However, when we keep in mind that Salem Street conscientiously kept conversion narrative records in order to substantiate church admission, and that the majority of these members were women, while Second Church did not keep such records as systematically, we may be looking at a situation where women's presence in Second Church was underrepresented. On the basis of the records we have, it is simply impossible to tell.