Three things must be noted as characteristic of America in the period which witnessed the beginnings of the Disciples of Christ. First, this was a very young nation. Its population was small. Its frontier, which began even east of the Allegheny Mountains, was sparsely settled, but settlers were pouring into it rapidly. The Disciples began on the frontier and moved westward with it. Second, the country’s religious forces were divided into five or six large sects of approximately equal size and many more small ones. The members of all these together constituted only a small fraction, perhaps 10 per cent, of the total population. In no other country was so large a proportion of the people religiously unattached. Third, America had a kind and a degree of religious liberty which had never before existed anywhere in Christendom. Church and state were separated; the support of the churches was purely voluntary; no church had legal advantage or social pre-eminence over others; and every man had complete liberty to adopt any form of worship and belief he thought right (or none), to propagate his faith without hindrance, or to start a new religious organization if he so desired. This combination of circumstances had never before existed. These factors in the environment are immensely important for our study. Since the movements which produced the Disciples of Christ began so near the beginning of the nineteenth century, we may take the year 1800 as a suitable point at which to make a cross section of the United States and observe, in a very general way, the state of the nation. America in 1800 George Washington had died the year before. John Adams was president. The country consisted of sixteen states, only Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee having been added to the original thirteen. It had a population of 5,308,483, less than 10 per cent of whom lived west of the Alleghenies. (Twenty years later, in spite of the great westward movement, 73 per cent of the people were still on the Atlantic slope.) The population, wealth, industries, and cultural institutions were very largely concentrated not only east of the mountains but in the eastern part of the area east of the mountains. The Atlantic tidewater belt, from Boston to Charleston, contained the great preponderance of everything that made this a nation—except its land, its undeveloped resources, and its pioneering spirit. But the eastern cities that loom so large in history were still small: Philadelphia, 28,522; Boston, 24,037; New York, with 60,515 within the boundaries of present-day Manhattan, had already taken first place. In the summer of 1800 the seat of the national government was moved from Philadelphia to the unfinished buildings in the almost uninhabited area that was to become the city of Washington.