Moral Geography traces the development of a moral basis for American expansionism, as Protestant missionaries, using biblical language and metaphors, imaginatively conjoined the cultivation of souls with the cultivation of land and made space sacred. While the political implications of the mapping of American expansion have been much studied, this is the first major study of the close and complex relationship between mapping and missionizing on the American frontier. Moral Geography provides a fresh approach to understanding nineteenth-century Protestant home missions in Ohio's Western Reserve. Through the use of maps, letters, religious tracts, travel narratives, and geographical texts, Amy DeRogatis recovers the struggles of settlers, land surveyors, missionaries, and geographers as they sought to reconcile their hopes and expectations for a Promised Land with the realities of life on the early American frontier.
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acnowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. The Benevolent Design: Mapping the Landscape
- Mappers and Missionaries
- The Connecticut Land Company: Mapping
- In regard to the Heathen on our borders”: Erasing the Natives
- “The most benevolent designs”: Missionary Publications
- 2. Models of Piety: Protestant Missionaries on the Frontier
- “I find I can preach, if I can ride”: Missionary Letters
- Difficulties inseparable to a family”: Age, Marital Status, and Missions
- “I have no prospect of being popular”: Social Status and Missionary Labor
- “Book knowledge is not all”: The Heart, Not the Head
- “Born and raised in the woods”: Homegrown Missionaries
- 3. The Moral Garden of the Western World: Bodies, Towns, and Families
- “Nurseries of piety”: Body, Town, and Family
- “A considerable phalanx of infidelity”: Religious Rivalry and the Body
- “Scattered promiscuously over the face of the country”: Town Planning and Moral Order
- “One great step towards a state of barbarism”: Family and Home Order
- 4. Geography Made Easy: Geographies and Travel Literature
- Geography Made Easy: Mapping and Moralizing
- Domestic Travel Narratives
- Fairy-Tale Reports: Western Reserve Travel Literature
- A Correct View: New Connecticut as the Promised Land
- 5. A Beacon in the WIlderness: Moral Inscriptions on the Landscape
- The Oberlin Colony and Institute
- Building Up Society: Missionary Institutions
- Ecclesiastical Outlaws
- Moral and Spatial Order
- Conclusion: Moral Geography
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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