In the reactionary aftermath of the great liberal revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848–49, liberal heroes, or heroes who were at least perceived to be liberal by the Anglo-American press, made their way to British and then United States cities. The Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth wanted to enlist British and American hearts and minds in the service of oppressed Hungarians. Kossuth made his intention to barnstorm American cities clear, prompting various reactions from Protestant ministers in the United States. Intervention and immigration were both litigated in the press and in pulpits as “foreign entanglements” the Founding Fathers, particularly George Washington, had warned against. William Aikman, minister of the Sixth Presbyterian Church in Newark, New Jersey, issued a caution regarding foreign entanglement that was representative of the largely conservative opinion that defined Presbyterian clergy at the time. Aikman posited that (1) gratitude, (2) constitutional continuity, and (3) a commitment to perfecting a society devoted to self-government made foreign entanglement fundamentally problematic for the American republic. Aikman was not insensitive to the plight of Europeans oppressed by autocrats, nor indifferent to the fall of autocrats, but he warned that America could serve the march of liberty by its moral example rather than through en masse intervention or en masse immigration.
Gratitude motivated Aikman to urge the republic’s leaders to steer clear of foreign entanglement. After listing spiritual blessings like salvation and the Christian ministry, he turned to political blessings. “We praise God especially today as citizens of a common country.” Americans were rightly “filled with thankfulness that peace has smiled upon us, that no sound of booming cannon nor echoing trumpets have startled and made us tremble; that plenty has blessed our land; that no famine has stalked in ghastly horror abroad; that the pestilence has been kept away, and we have not mourned its widespread desolations.” Americans could be glad that “the framework of our State exists in all its integrity, that mad faction has been rebuked, and the bands of brotherhood have been strengthened.” Americans should praise God “that we are, in one word, a free and happy people. All these things we acknowledge as gifts of His hand, and for them all we have praised Him, and we praise Him still.”
For conservative Protestants like Aikman, the chief way in which the United States achieved substantive political and social unity was by being separate from the Old World. Aikman recognized that “the feeling with which the Old World regards this nation is another cause calculated to lead us to forsake our great principle of non-intervention. The eyes of all men are directed toward us. The advocates and supporters of despotism regard us with ill-concealed hatred; this provokes a corresponding emotion in us.” Oppressed and struggling peoples looked to the United States “for sympathy, while they long after the liberty we enjoy.” Aikman challenged the notion that all peoples had an innate desire for republican liberty and maintained that the European desire for liberal republican liberty was prompted not by a universal human sense, but by the example of the American republic. “When we remember that these very upheavings have been produced in a great measure by the force of principles going out from this land, that our example has made the oppressed restive in their bondage; when we see them stretching out their hands to us, it seems an ill return from us to remain calmly at home doing nothing for their help.” Aikman feared this potential sense of national empathy because he believed Lajos Kossuth would fuel it and then turn the hearts of Americans toward a moral crusade for liberalism in Europe.
Crusades against autocracy understandably elicited sympathy from Americans. Yet Aikman warned against the nation taking up those causes as a national telos. “The policy of this nation hitherto, in respect to other states, may be stated in a word as that of SEPARATION.” Aikman maintained that separation was necessary because the Founding Fathers knew they had the great problem of self-government to work out and chose to solve it alone, away from the helps or the hindrances of other powers. “The providence of God and the dictates of human wisdom,” Aikman declared, directed Americans to follow that same course of relative political—but not commercial—separation. “The words of far-reaching wisdom which, in the infancy of our state, said to us, ‘It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,’ I believe to be eminently appropriate still.”
The United States’ enduring separation from Europe was as appropriate in 1851 as it had been in 1789 because its “insulation had a purpose…to enable this people to work out the great problem of self-government. To do this well they were to be alone.” Americans who believed that the country’s doors should be thrown open to peoples untrained in American-style liberty, sneered Aikman, were foolhardy, not because American liberty was just for Anglos, but because the problem of self-government among white Americans “is not solved yet.” Too many Americans, Aikman worried, “seem to suppose that it is all determined, that the experiment has been fully tested. But it is not so; no greater or more dangerous mistake can be made. Seventy or eighty years are as nothing in the life of a state; they are years of infancy.” Aikman emphasized that the experiment in self-government was “being carried forward now; we are not certain how it shall result. It has been wonderfully successful thus far; it gives most glorious promise; but it is not finished yet.”
The state alone, Aikman insisted, could not complete America’s mission to create a self-governing people. Government needed the church’s moral affect and influence. Aikman saw the Protestant churches of 1851 as an analog for ancient Israel’s influence in the classical world. “The Jewish state was for the world, not for itself, and the nation was secluded so that it could best affect the world. There, in its retirement, it was to complete the grand, the glorious edifice, the model building for the race; the race was to gaze at its proportions and build like temples for God.” By being a people of God, faithful to His dictates, ancient Israel influenced its neighbors, for good or ill depending on the Israelites’ faithfulness. “In this way it was best to influence the whole race. Had it preserved its seclusion, it would not have defeated the wise designs of Jehovah.”
America, Aikman declared, in some ways functioned like a new Israel. The analog was not direct; the American churches did not inherit the Jewish theocracy’s constitution or the theocratic union of church and state. But churches did inherit Israel’s moral power. “Our country,” Aikman said, “is for the world. How then shall it best affect the world and hasten the day of universal freedom?” How could American Protestant churches influence the world without the help of the state, and without the establishmentarian structures Aikman loathed? “I answer—by the moral spectacle of its life. Moral effects are ever similar. How shall a man, in the surest way, propagate his principles but by his life?” The Christian life was the “greatest element of influence, for it shows what his religion does. The strong Christian is one whose life is strong. The life of the church is its power.” So too, according to Aikman, “the life of a nation is its power. It is not theories, nor words, nor half-tried experiments which convince men and actuate their conduct, but developed facts and working models.” In order for Americans to “extend the principles of human freedom, we must have something to show the world as an example of what they have done. We must be able to exhibit the embodiment of these principles in a well-ordered and prosperous and happy state.” To bring liberty to the world, “the state must be living,” but not living in an expansive or interventionist sense. The state must be living so its moral influence would change the world. Nothing else, warned Aikman, would. Likewise, the church affects the world “because her life is in contrast with it, and this life is the visible form of her doctrines. When then she would increase her efficiency and extend the principles of the religion she possesses, she intensifies her life; she kindles up within herself the elements of holiness and devotion to God.” These elements glowed within the church and shone outward, “so her life becomes radiant, quickening like the solar influence.”
The church was not, in Aikman’s political economy, meant to be the state, nor was the state to subsume the church. They had different missions and different charges, but both had the power of moral influence. As that power was with the church, so it was “with a nation.” America’s moral power politically “affects the world by being the manifestation of its own principles; if it would increase its power and extend its influence, these principles must assume a new vitality; they must give a new sharpness of feature, and a greater vividness of outline, to the life which embodies them.” The power of the American people “is a moral power. These are times when moral forces shake the world, and our country was born for such a time as this. The enslaved nations are to be made free by becoming incapable of being slaves.” Americans must “never forget that we are to extend liberty to the oppressed,” but they had to “remember that that end is secured only by those means which best develop, elevate, and ennoble the human mind and character.” In vain, Aikman lamented, “while the soul is abject, may a strong arm break the shackles off the limbs. These last years have taught this to the world.”