Lorenzo Dow, Prophet of Democracy

Lorenzo Dow

In the antebellum United States, more children were named after Lorenzo Dow than any other person. It is likely that more people heard Dow speak in person than any one else. His writings were so widely read and reprinted that Dow made a small fortune. In an age known for religious eccentricity, Dow could give any eccentric a run for his money. But despite his eccentricities, or because of them, Dow was a representative of American religion after the Revolution—a prophet of democracy. ¹

Dow was a child of the Revolution, born in Connecticut in 1777. He was converted in his early teens and began itinerant preaching when he was nineteen. Dow was frequently at odds with the Methodist conferences and bishops that were the authorities within the denomination. At first his age, and soon his idiosyncratic preaching and prophet-like personality made other Methodist ministers reluctant to support Dow. They licensed Dow to preach, but he was never ordained. In the 1790s and especially in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Dow preached at camp meetings throughout the United States, including some of the western territories. He also made three trips to Great Britain, in 1798–1801, in 1805–1807, and in 1818–1820. Dow cultivated his reputation as an American John the Baptist. He wore disheveled clothes, long hair, and a beard. In his preaching, he used the types of antics that are normally associated with later evangelists like Billy Sunday.²

If Dow was a preacher of the gospel, he was also a preacher of American democracy. Democracy was the root of Dow’s beliefs about how people obtain salvation. Dow rejected the Calvinism of his upbringing. Salvation, he preached, was not a matter of God’s election but of man’s choice to choose or reject Christ. Nor could salvation be judged by church authorities, but only by the immediate apprehension of the believer. Dow was not unique in these doctrines, for many Christians contemporary with him were moving away from Calvinism towards the revivalism epitomized by Charles Grandison Finney a few decades later. What made Dow important was that he explicitly connected this change in preaching salvation to the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy: “If all men are ‘BORN EQUAL,’ and endowed with unalienable RIGHTS by their CREATOR, in the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—then there can be no just reason, as a cause, why he may or should not think, and judge, and act for himself in matters of religion, opinion, and private judgment.” Dow was clear that politics were driving his theology. ³

The second way in which Dow mixed democracy and religion was by his constant resistance against ecclesiastical authority. Some of this resistance must be attributed to Dow’s naturally contrary personality. But much of it was principled, as can be seen in his tract on “Strictures on Church Government.” In that tract, Dow rejected the notion that episcopal succession was the source of Methodist authority. That argument justified Anglicans, or even the tyrannical Catholics, better than it justified Methodists. Rather, Dow argued, the only legitimate authority for the church was the sovereignty of the people. And Dow was willing to take the principle of democratic egalitarianism much farther than most contemporaries, even to include other races. The main example that Dow used to justify his ideas of church government was the case of Richard Allen, a black laymen who had founded his own Methodist church, of which he eventually became a bishop. Even Dow’s editor, though reluctantly admitting that Dow was too sharp in his opinions on church government, thought that tract and others “evince a mind deeply imbued with the spirit of Democracy.”⁴

The key to Dow’s experience were the visions and dreams that he saw throughout his life. These visions guided Dow’s decisions and informed his theology. For example, Dow had two visions of John Wesley that led to his conversion and his call to preach. Perhaps visions are key to more than just Dow’s experience. Historians have noted that democratized religion in the United States was at once extraordinarily open and extraordinarily authoritarian. People were free to pick the denomination, sect, or clergyman of their choice, and they exercised that freedom frequently. Yet people tended to pick leaders who were authoritarian. Christian democracy was not so much inside any particular church as it was among the churches. Perhaps visions and dreams are part of the explanation for this paradox. ⁵

The Protestant teaching that every person could read the Bible for himself can lead to egalitarianism in religion. If people are permitted to understand God’s word for themselves, and to correct their ministers from the Bible, then the Bible has a leveling effect. Reading the Bible can also lead to religious mobility, as laymen look for a church that matches their interpretation, or else found their own. An example contemporary with Dow are the Christians and Disciples of Christ of Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone, who founded new denominations to return to the primitive Christianity of the Bible. Visions and dreams, though, can have a more complex effect. In Dow’s case, visions convinced him to disregard the authority of the Methodist bishops and conferences, and thus to influence Methodism towards increased openness. But visions also gave Dow the authority to preach in a way that was right in Dow’s own eyes. Those visions were necessarily anti-democratic, because they were accessible only to Dow and not to his followers, and because visions are so intensely personal that they are nonnegotiable. It is not much of a leap from Dow’s visions to those of other innovative but authoritarian religious leaders of the same period. For example, both Joseph Smith and Robert Matthews (later Matthias) claimed visions as their basis for establishing very authoritarian sects. ⁶

Though Dow was the prophet of American democracy, Dow also typifies the international characteristic of evangelicalism in early America. Dow had visions of John Wesley at both his conversion and his call to preach. He traveled to Ireland and England first for his health and then to preach, where he made connections with British Methodists and also Quakers. Like many revivalists, from George Whitefield to D. L. Moody to Billy Graham, Dow made his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Dow was not necessarily well-received in Britain, for the American camp meeting style was far less appealing to British Christians than, say, Moody’s Victorian morality and sentimentality would be a half-century later, but Dow spent nearly as much time preaching in Britain as he did America. Perhaps the most important clue to Dow’s transatlantic identity is the curious term that Dow chose for himself, “Cosmopolite.” This term often stands in for Dow’s name, as in the title of Dow’s published journal, The History of Cosmopolite; Or, Lorenzo’s Journal. Dow titled one particularly bizarre segment of his journal “A Short Account of ‘Eccentric Cosmopolite.’” These sections are clearly autobiographical, but Dow writes about himself in the third person without using his name. The meaning of the term cosmopolite—“citizen of the world”—is plain enough, but precisely what Dow meant by it is more difficult to know. Perhaps Dow meant that though he was a citizen of the United States and an advocate for its democracy, yet he was not bound by the confines of one nation. Neither Methodism nor the United States could hold Dow, though he typified them both. ⁷

1. The assertion about children being named after Dow is taken from Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 281, n.27. There is no recent biography of Lorenzo Dow. The best secondary sources on his life are American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo”; Charles Coleman Sellers, Lorenzo Dow, the Bearer of the Word (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1928); Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. Dow also appears in Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 610. This paper is drawn from those sources, and from a collection of Dow’s works, Lorenzo Dow, History of Cosmopolite; or The Four Volumes of Lorenzo’s Journal, Concentrated in One: Containing His Experience and Travels, from Childhood to 1815, Being Upwards of Thirty-Seven Years. Also, His Polemical Writings . . ., 6th ed. (Wheeling, Virginia, 1849). [↩]
2. American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo”; Dow, History of Cosmopolite. [↩]
3. Quoted in American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo.” [↩]
4. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, v, 543-58. [↩]
5. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, 10, 27-28. [↩]
6. An account of Campbell, Stone, and Smith can be found in Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). For Matthews, see Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). [↩]
7. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, 10, 27-28, 78-94, 253-303. The OED reports that the term cosmopolite was revived in the nineteenth century “and often contrasted with patriot, and so either reproachful or complimentary”; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “cosmopolite.” Two works which stress the international aspects of evangelicalism in this period are Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys, A History of Evangelicalism: People, Movements, and Ideas in the English-speaking World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003); John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers, and Finney, A History of Evangelicalism: People, Movements, and Ideas in the English-speaking World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007). [↩]