A far solider mind, strongly realistic and broadly philosophical, acute

in analysis and with great powers of imagination, was the mind of the

distinguished leader of the New England Whigs. Not the equal of Story

as a lawyer, he was far superior as a political thinker. No man more

richly endowed in mind and person has played a part on the stage of

our public life, and in spite of gross shortcomings in character and

the betrayal of his own promise, Webster retains an aura of the heroic

about him. He was a great man, built on a great pattern, who never

quite achieved a great life.

In Emerson and Webster were completely embodied the diverse New

England tendencies that derived from the Puritan and the Yankee: the

idealistic and the practical; the ethical and the rationalistic; the

intellectual revolutionary, ready to turn the world upside down in

theory, planting at the base of the established order the dynamite of

ideas, and the soberly conservative, understanding the economic springs

of political action, inclined to pessimism, neither wishing for Utopian

change nor expecting it. The physical contrast was as striking as the

mental. The child of the Puritan was slender, nervous, with a lambent

energy that played freely in a rarefied atmosphere; the child of the

Yankee was massive, solid, somnolently heavy till an idea awakened his

faculties, a lover of the fleshpots, careless of conventional morals,

rankly physical, and yet with an assured stateliness of manner, a slow

imagination that expanded majestically and a rich eloquence that moved

forward by regular stages to a great objective. Emerson was the child

of a long line of ministers, and ministerial in his unworldliness;

Webster was a Yankee squire, the descendant of some fox-hunting master

of broad English acres, who by a freak of fortune had got born into the

family of a New Hampshire yeoman. No Englishman was ever more English

than he. He loved the substantial things of life: his Marshfield farm;

his cattle and horses and crops; his rides afield and the return to

good dinners and rich wines. Nothing is more characteristic or more

likable--more redolent of the natural Webster--than his concern for

agricultural improvements. His homely talk on _The Agriculture of

England_, filled with facts that had come under his observant eye,

reveals a side that is too little known. It is an English country

squire talking to his neighbors about the homely things they all care

for; and when after long years and disappointed ambition and utter

weariness, he returned to his Marshfield farm to die, it was his cattle

and his fields that offered a last solace to the broken man.

Webster’s intellectual development falls into distinct and rather

sharply defined periods. Before 1825 his mental processes were still

under the dominion of the solid, rationalist eighteenth century, with

its realistic politics and its _laissez faire_ economics. With the

emergence of the constitutional disputes at the end of the twenties,

when the lawyers and historians were busy at their commentaries, he

came increasingly to take a legalistic view of government. During the

acrimonious forties, with slavery dividing the country into hostile

camps, he was bitten deeply by presidential ambitions, and thenceforth

to the end of his life he was little more than a politician--a rôle for

which he was singularly ill-fitted, and which brought bitterness and

disillusion to his last days. Since his death both earlier and later

phases of his career have fallen into the background, and the middle

period of constitutional interpretation has stamped itself indelibly

upon his fame. Yet in many respects the solid reasoning of the

political philosopher is more valuable than the stately but somewhat

ill-grounded declamation of the defender of the Constitution; and his

just fame is increased rather than lessened by recalling his earlier

contribution to our institutional development.

Webster was a sound political scholar, if not an outstanding creative

thinker. He was of the distinguished line of political realists, from

Harrington through Locke and Burke, to Hamilton, Madison and John

Adams. He derived equally from seventeenth-century liberalism and

eighteenth-century Federalism. He was widely read in the political

classics, and his vigorous mind laid hold upon major principles

and examined them closely. His intellectual master was the acute

thinker of the English Commonwealth period, James Harrington, whom

he pronounces “one of the most ingenious of political writers,” and

to whose suggestive doctrine of economic determinism he returns

persistently. That Harrington was not the originator of the doctrine

he was well enough read to have discovered; but he pays him high

tribute as the thinker who gave the doctrine form and currency. It

is the substantial realism of the _Oceana_ that appealed to a mind

thoroughly indoctrinated with political realism, before the rise of

manhood suffrage and the spread of equalitarianism had brought a

change in American political theory. Both his major premises and his

mode of reasoning bear the impress of the classic English school. In

the year 1820, within a single week, he made two speeches, which as

expositions of his political philosophy are the most illuminating he

ever uttered, and which should stand side by side: the _Basis of the

Senate_, delivered before the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention,

and the Plymouth speech on _The First Settlement of New England_. They

supplement each other and together give an admirable elucidation of

the stake-in-society principle that embodied a conviction he never

abandoned. They are compact of Harrington, Montesquieu and John

Adams--the last authentic expression of the old Federalism, before the

democratic storms had driven it into new roadsteads and whipped its

flag from the halyards where it had long waved.

In his admirable argument Webster accepts as axiomatic the theory

of division of powers, with the attendant machinery of checks and

balances. He accepts equally the familiar view of eighteenth-century

liberalism, that the legislature as the self-conscious custodian of the

popular will is certain to prove the engrossing member of government

whose ambition is most to be feared. To expect a stable balance between

Senate and House when their characters are undifferentiated by diverse

modes of selection--a result that must follow from choosing both on the

numerical majority principle--seems to him the judgment of political

inexperience. The wiser method, he believed, was to seek counsel of the

philosophers and the clear teachings of history. The first, Webster

insisted, have rightly laid down the principle of a stake-in-society as

the true measure of political justice:

I take the _principle_ to be well established, by writers of the

greatest authority. In the first place, those who have treated of

natural law have maintained, as a principle of law, that, as far as

the object of society is the protection of something in which the

members possess unequal shares, it is just that the weight of each

person in the common councils should bear a relation and proportion

to his interest. Such is the sentiment of Grotius, and he refers,

in support of it, to several institutions among the lesser states.

(“The Basis of the Senate,” in _Works_, Vol. III, pp. 13-14.)

At the basis of the stake-in-society principle is the doctrine of

economic power as the controlling factor in determining the form

and scope of the political state. In support of this doctrine of

determinism Webster appeals to Harrington:

It is his leading object, in his _Oceana_, to prove, that power

_naturally_ and _necessarily_ follows property. He maintains that

a government founded on property is legitimately founded; and

that a government founded on the disregard of property is founded

in injustice, and can only be maintained by military force. “If

one man,” says he, “be sole landlord, like the Grand Seignior,

his empire is absolute. If a few possess the land, this makes the

Gothic or feudal constitution. If the _whole people_ be landlords,

then it is a commonwealth.” “It is strange,” says an ingenious

person in the last century, “that Harrington should be the first

man to find out so evident and demonstrable a truth as that

property being the true basis and _measure_ of power.” In truth,

he was not the first. The idea is as old as political science

itself. It may be found in Aristotle, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter

Raleigh, and other writers. Harrington seems, however, to be the

first writer who has illustrated and expanded the principle, and

given to it the effect and prominence which justly belong to it. To

this sentiment, Sir, I entirely agree. It seems to me to be plain,

that, in the absence of military force, political power naturally

and necessarily goes into the hands which hold the property. In my

judgment, therefore, a republican form of government rests, not

more on political constitutions, than on those laws which regulate

the descent and transmission of property....

The English Revolution of 1688 was a revolution in favor of

property, as well as of other rights. It was brought about by men

of property for their security; and our own immortal Revolution

was undertaken, not to shake or plunder property, but to protect

it. The acts which the country complained of were such as violated

the rights of property. An immense majority of all those who had

an interest in the soil were in favor of the Revolution; and they

carried it through, looking to its results for the security of

their possessions. (“The Basis of the Senate,” in _Works_, Vol.

III, pp. 14-16.)

Harrington’s principle that “if the _whole people_ be landlords, then

it is a commonwealth,” Webster justified by appeal to American history.

The spontaneous birth of republican institutions out of colonial

experience he attributed to the wide diffusion of property. The land

tenure of primitive New England was the creative source of her popular

government.

Their situation demanded a parcelling out and division of the

lands, and it may be fairly said, that this necessary act _fixed

the future frame and form of their government_. The character of

their political institutions was determined by the fundamental

laws respecting property.... The property was all freehold ...

alienation of the land was every way facilitated, even to the

subjecting of it to every species of debt. The establishment of

public registries, and the simplicity of our forms of conveyance,

have greatly facilitated the change of real estate from one

proprietor to another. The consequence of all these causes has

been, a great subdivision of the soil, and a great equality of

condition; the true basis, most certainly, of a popular government.

“If the people,” says Harrington, “hold three parts in four of the

territory, it is plain there can neither be any single person nor

nobility able to dispute the government with them; in this case,

therefore, _except force be interposed_, they govern themselves.”

(“The First Settlement of New England,” in _Works_, Vol. I, pp.

35-36.)

Wholly English then, after the soundest English liberal tradition,

was Webster’s political philosophy in the year 1820, compact of sober

eighteenth-century realism, quite unaffected by French romantic

equalitarianism. The great principle to which he adhered was the

principle that government to be stable must be founded in men’s

interests; thus founded no cause is given for revolutionary upheavals.

“The disastrous revolutions which the world has witnessed, those

political thunder-storms and earthquakes which have shaken the pillars

of society to their very deepest foundations, have been revolutions

against property.” Such were Webster’s convictions on the eve of

those two great upheavals, the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the

rejuvenation of the slave economy, that unseated the authority of the

old school of political realism, and turned him aside from the plain

path to lose himself in a tangle of constitutional legalism.

English also was his economic theory, to which, like Franklin before

him, he gave close thought. In the year 1820 he was a frank disciple

of Adam Smith and the _laissez faire_ school. Mercantilism he derided

as exploded;[434] and Physiocratic agrarianism seemed to him unduly

hostile to commerce. He never concerned himself, like Franklin, with

humanitarian ends. His sympathies went strongly for free trade,

individual initiative, and a competitive order--sympathies which to

the end of his life he never wholly outgrew. In those early days the

mercantile interests commanded his loyalty far more readily than

the manufacturing interests. Next to his Marshfield farm he loved

a full-rigged ship, and the thought of Yankee skippers plowing the

seven seas in well-freighted bottoms fired his imagination and kindled

his patriotism. But if in the background of his thought he remained

_laissez faire_, with the necessary implications of a diminished

political state and reliance upon the law of supply and demand above

tariffs, bounties, and political regulations, unfortunately in the

foreground of expediency were the loud demands of his constituents for

protective tariffs, internal improvements, and a policy of governmental

paternalism. His economics came into collision with politics, and

under the drive of necessity he went reluctantly along the path which

Hamilton had marked out a generation before.

The change came between the years 1824 and 1825. In the earlier year

he aroused himself to a strong defense of _laissez faire_ economics in

opposition to Clay’s clever campaign cry, the American System; in the

later year he endeavored half-heartedly to defend New England interests

in the game of subsidies. He was honestly ashamed of the whole mess; to

Webster any tariff was a “tariff of abominations”; but his mouth was

stopped by the clamor of the Lowell textile masters.[435] But having

chosen his side, thereafter he defended his course vigorously, and

joined forces with Clay in extolling the principle of protection. The

same dubious shift is revealed in his changing attitude towards public

finance. In 1815 he was an old-fashioned Federalist in his preference

for a metallic currency and his belief that the public credit must rest

on the public income; bank paper, stocks, bonds, and other agencies of

the new finance he distrusted as likely to encourage speculation.[436]

Twenty years later he was the outstanding champion of the Bank in its

mortal quarrel with Jackson. In defending his public career before his

constituents in Faneuil Hall in 1842, he said: “The subject of currency

has been the study of my life, in preference to all other public

topics”; and the result of those studies had made him a confirmed

bullionist. Nevertheless when “Old Bullion Benton” proposed to restore

a metallic currency, Webster derided the plan on the ground that bank

money was necessary; and when the subtreasury system was established he

denounced it bitterly.[437] He was a partisan to the cause of the Bank,

and as its attorney he defended its case before the American public, as

he defended its cases before the Supreme Court. He was no longer a free

man but was deep in the subsidies of financial interests; nevertheless

his old realism convinced him--as it had convinced Hamilton--of the

necessity of shaping the public policy to the desires of the bankers.

He justified it not only on the grounds of economic determinism, but by

professing to discover in business the strong friend of national unity.

The planters and farmers were local and sectional in outlook, but the

“mercantile classes, the great commercial masses of the country, whose

affairs connect them strongly with every State in the Union and with

all the nations of the earth, whose business and profession give a sort

of nationality to their character”--these men, he argued, gave solidity

and stability to government--they were the cohesive force that bound

the whole together.[438] In serving such clients he was but serving a

greater cause.

After 1824 the earlier Webster with his solid understanding, his

frank realism, his honest exposition of fundamental principles,

slowly gave way to the lawyer, the politician, the opportunist of

the unhappy later years. With the change the last authentic voice of

the eighteenth century was silenced; the break with the old English

tradition was complete. Immediate, domestic issues muddied his thought,

and Webster and America plunged into a bitter partisanship produced

by the new alignments of an equalitarian agrarianism, a capitalistic

industrialism, and a feudal slavocracy. Federalism was dead and in its

stead was the Whig party, patched together of odds and ends, devoid

of principles, seeking only expediency; and of this party Webster

became an outstanding spokesman. It was an ignoble time, and his great

abilities were not substantial enough to save him from the common

meanness. Whoever wishes to understand how great was his fall need

only compare the speech of 1820 on “The Basis of the Senate” with the

“Declaration of Whig Principles and Purposes” of 1840 (_Works_, Vol.

II, p. 41).

To his contemporaries, however, his position was secure. His reputation

was extraordinary, and he seemed as fixed and brilliant as the north

star. After the reply to Hayne, his fame as the defender of the

Constitution was in every mouth. That celebrated speech, perhaps the

most celebrated in our congressional history, was delivered on the

January 26, 1830, and awakened an amazing response. Men were moved to

tears by its eloquence, and its circulation in pamphlet form exceeded

that of any other pamphlet since the founding of the government. It is

not a great constitutional argument, but it better served the purpose

of inspiring in the public a grandiose conception of national unity

under the organic law, than any reasoned statement could have done.

For political purposes rhetoric was more effective than historical

argument, and its sonorous sentences, and in particular the stately

conclusion, vastly appealed to the taste of the generation. Three

years later Webster applied himself more closely to the subtleties of

the question. Calhoun’s masterly argument with its exposition of the

theory of concurrent majorities could not be answered by rhetoric, and

on February 16, 1833, Webster spoke on “The Constitution not a Compact

between Sovereign States” (_Works_, Vol. III, p. 449). His argument is

strictly legal and rests on four theses: that sovereignty inheres in

the people; that as individuals acting collectively in their sovereign

capacity, they ordained and established the Constitution; that the

Constitution thus established is the supreme law of the land, acting

immediately upon the individual citizen and recognizing no intermediary

sovereign state; and that as an “executed contract” it is irrevocable

and final, with the necessary functions to construe its powers and

execute its will.

Of these four theses, two may be regarded as Webster’s chief

contribution to the great debate: the doctrine of immediacy, and the

doctrine of an executed contract. The latter, quite obviously, is no

more than Burke’s theory of the British constitution as founded on a

compact entered into following the Revolution of 1688, and as such,

by analogy from the Common Law, inviolable without the consent of

both parties to the instrument. As developed by Burke the theory is

somewhat tenuous, but as applied by Webster to the interpretation of

a written document it is extraordinarily plausible to the legal mind.

The doctrine of immediacy, on the other hand, would seem to have been

derived from Judge Story. The argument of Webster in expounding the

principle of immediate contact between the individual citizen and the

Constitution follows the argument of Story’s _Commentaries_ too closely

to escape comment. Theodore Parker explicitly states that Webster got

his argument from Story, and circumstances bear out his assertion. The

two men had long been close friends. Webster’s speech was delivered a

month after the _Commentaries_ was finished. In his earlier speeches

such principle found no place, and it is reasonable to suppose that,

confronted by the Calhoun resolutions, Webster should have turned to

the materials gathered by his learned friend and frequent adviser. Here

was his reply ready to hand, a mass of legal fact and constitutional

exposition, together with a clear and simple theory. Nearly a month

elapsed before Webster rose to speak, and then he threw _Story on

the Constitution_ at Calhoun’s theory of compact. Whether such an

interpretation is reasonable or not, the speech added greatly to

Webster’s reputation as an expounder of the Constitution.

In 1833 he stood at the meridian of his renown; thereafter the

westering sun of his fame went slowly down. He had come to evil

times when opportunism and compromise--so imperative if the country

were to hold together at all--seemed immoral to men who insisted

that righteousness be legislated upon America, and weakness to men

who demanded their pound of flesh. The black shadow of slavery fell

across his path, and despite his wish to avoid all controversy on the

subject, he could not evade the issue. It drove him into a corner, and

the sword of the Constitution that he sought to defend himself with

was turned in the end against him. Webster’s antipathy to slavery was

of long standing and he gave frank expression to it in his speeches.

The position which he finally came to assume, in face of the growing

abolition sentiment in Massachusetts, was taken deliberately and was

worthy of a lawyer. He would oppose the extension of slave territory,

but he would not interfere with slavery in the old slave states. The

Constitution, he argued, recognized slavery as existing in certain

commonwealths by virtue of state laws, but those laws did not run

beyond the confines of the state. The territories were under Federal

law, and no injunction was laid upon Congress to extend the laws or

institutions of any state or group of states over the territorial

domain. In his speech on “Exclusion of Slavery from the Territories,”

on August 12, 1848, he stated his position thus:

It will not be contended that this sort of slavery exists by

general law. It exists only by local law. I do not mean to deny

the validity of that local law where it is established; but I say

it is, after all, local law. It is nothing more. And wherever that

local law does not extend, property in persons does not exist.

Well, Sir, what is now the demand on the part of our Southern

friends? They say, “We will carry our local laws with us wherever

we go. We insist that Congress does us injustice unless it

establishes in the territory in which we wish to go our own local

law.” This demand I for one resist, and shall resist. It goes upon

the idea that there is an inequality, unless persons under this

local law, and holding property by authority of that law, can go

into new territory and there establish that local law, to the

exclusion of the general law. (_Works_, Vol. V, p. 309.)

It was the unfortunate Seventh of March Speech that proved Webster’s

undoing--this and the Fugitive Slave Bill in which he was deeply

implicated. The situation was desperately critical, Webster was

pessimistic, and this was a last gesture of reconciliation with the

South. Presidential ambitions and runaway slaves were stewing in a

common political pot with Abolition societies and northern mercantile

interests. Webster was puzzled, hesitated, emptied another glass of

the wine of the Constitution, and went for the Fugitive Slave Bill. It

was a tragic political mistake. To be sure a tremendous address was

presented to him, signed by the most respectable persons in Boston and

Cambridge, but it was an empty honor. Webster’s influence was gone,

never to be regained. There is something pathetic in his futile attempt

to stifle the New England conscience by ramming the Constitution down

its throat:

Sir, the principle of the restitution of runaway slaves is not

objectionable, unless the Constitution is objectionable. If the

Constitution is right in that respect, the principle is right,

and the law providing for carrying it into effect is right. If

that be so, and if there is no abuse of the right under any law

of Congress, or any other law, then what is there to complain of?

(“Speech on the Compromise Measures,” in _Works_, Vol. V, p. 433.)

And there is something pathetic also in the hurt vanity of the old man

that his judgment should be questioned. His self-pride was offended

when the Abolitionists rejected his legal dogmatisms, and set up their

own dogmatisms. He regarded them as mischief-makers. “I am against

agitators, north and south,” he exclaimed petulantly. He recognized no

higher law than the Constitution and Blackstone, and he would suffer no

popular interference with Congress.

Then, Sir, there are the Abolition societies, of which I am

unwilling to speak, but in regard to which I have very clear

notions and opinions. I do not think them useful. I think their

operations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good

or valuable.... They have excited feelings.... I cannot but see

what mischiefs their interference with the South has produced ...

everything that these agitating people have done has been, not to

enlarge, but to restrain, not to set free, but to bind faster,

the slave population of the South. (“Seventh of March Speech,” in

_Works_, Vol. V, p. 357.)

I desire to call the attention of all sober-minded men at the

North, of all conscientious men, of all men who are not carried

away by some fanatical idea or some false impression, to their

constitutional obligations. I put it to all the sober and sound

minds at the North as a question of morals and a question of

conscience. What right have they, in their legislative capacity or

any other capacity, to endeavour to get around this Constitution,

or to embarrass the free exercise of the rights secured by the

Constitution to the persons whose slaves escape from them? None at

all; none at all. Neither in the forum of conscience, nor before

the face of the Constitution, are they, in my opinion, justified in

such attempt. (_Ibid._, p. 355.)

If the later Webster had no message for the conscience of New England,

neither had he any for the intelligence of New England. The realistic

Federalism that had listened to him in 1820 was gone, submerged by the

flood waters of the renaissance; and the current transcendentalism

seemed to him insubstantial and dangerous. The rising liberalism of

the forties left him wholly untouched; it could not leaven the heavy

materialism of his nature. He was quite unacquainted with the new

Massachusetts that was coming to expression; he had lived too long with

“the lawyers, the politicians, and rich merchants and manufacturers,”

to understand the greater world of Concord. While he had been living on

the subsidies of State Street, and contracting his mind to the compass

of a banker’s, the intellect of Massachusetts had become liberal. And

in becoming liberal it aroused him from indifference to hostility.

Writing to a friend in explanation of his refusal to visit Concord in

his later years, he said:

Many of those whom I so highly regarded in your beautiful and quiet

village have become a good deal estranged, to my great grief, by

abolitionism, free-soilism, transcendentalism, and other notions

which I cannot but regard as so many vagaries of the imagination.

(Quoted in Sanborn, _Life of Thoreau_.)

But if he was scarcely acquainted with the little group of thinkers

and liberals--Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, Parker, Garrison, Phillips,

Edmund Quincy, Whittier, Lowell, Higginson, Harriet Beecher Stowe,

Margaret Fuller--they were well acquainted with him and took his

measure exactly. The intellect of Massachusetts--so long ignored by

Webster--had its revenge. Its voice carried farther than his, and it

painted his portrait in no flattering strokes. The fierce storm that

suddenly beat upon him broke the old man’s spirit. He had fed too long

on adulation to endure censure. No doubt that censure was severe, but

it was far juster than the earlier adulation had been. Whittier’s

_Ichabod_ is familiar to every American schoolboy. Lowell, then in his

liberal mood, characterized him as “a statesman who had communicated no

impulse to any of the great ideas of the century, as a statesman whose

soul had been absorbed in tariff, banks, and the Constitution, instead

of devoting himself to the freedom of the future.” Emerson, who had

long studied him critically, gave an extraordinarily just analysis of

his character:

Mr. Webster is a man who lives by his memory, a man of the past,

not a man of faith or of hope. He obeys his powerful animal

nature;--and his finely developed understanding only works freely

and with all its force, when it stands for animal good; that is,

for property. He believes, in so many words, that government exists

for the protection of property. He looks to the Union as an estate,

a large farm, and is excellent in the completeness of his defence

of it so far. He adheres to the letter.... What he finds already

written, he will defend. Lucky that so much had got well written

when he came. For he has no faith in the power of self-government.

Not the smallest municipal provision, if it were new, would receive

his sanction. In Massachusetts, in 1776, he would, beyond all

question, have been a refugee. He praises Adams and Jefferson, but

it is a past Adams and Jefferson, that his mind can entertain.

A present Adams and Jefferson he would denounce. So with the

eulogies of liberty in his writings,--they are sentimentalism and

youthful rhetoric. He can celebrate it, but it means as much from

him as from Metternich or Talleyrand. This is all inevitable from

his constitution. All the drops of his blood have eyes that look

downward. (“The Fugitive Slave Law.”)

To the transcendental mind Webster’s economic realism was peculiarly

repugnant, and it was this which inspired Theodore Parker’s critical

analysis of Webster’s career--the most scathing and explicit of

all contemporary estimates. What Parker discovers most hateful in

Webster’s career was his adherence to the principles of Federalism,

from the “Basis of the Senate” speech in 1820, to the New York speech

on November 18, 1850. The persistence of his economic realism was an

affront to the liberals of the humanitarian school that had moved

far from the position of Fisher Ames. Webster might do lip service

to humanitarian ideals, Parker asserted, but always he came back in

the end to his polar conception--“The great object of government is

the protection of property at home, and respect and renown abroad”

(_Works: Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 220).

It was this same persistent realism that made Webster so useful to

the rising capitalism. His work in the Senate was supplemented by his

work in the court room. He was the greatest corporation lawyer of the

day, certain to be found defending vested interests, never on the side

of the leaner purse. Probably more than any other man except John

Marshall, he contributed to the work of bringing the Constitution under

the sovereignty of the judiciary. His most significant contribution,

certainly, was his argument in the celebrated Dartmouth College

case, delivered before the Supreme Court in 1818, which resulted in

one of the foundation decisions on which later has been erected the

solid structure of our corporation law.[439] By engrafting upon the

Constitution the principle that a contract lies beyond the reach of

legislative power to annul, the decision assured greater security for

private property than exists under any other judicial system in the

world. Alexander Hamilton could not have asked for more.

It was the singular ill fortune of Webster to have been born too late

to profit from the old mercantile Federalism to which his affections

were always attached, and too early to profit by the industrial

Federalism that came to greatness after the Civil War. If fate had

been kinder to him, and he had appeared on the political horizon a

generation earlier or a generation later, he would have reaped in far

greater abundance those high civic honors he so foolishly coveted. The

economic groups whom he served would have been in position to reward

a servant so conspicuously able and useful. As a contemporary of John

Adams he might have become a notable political philosopher--provided

always that he had not turned Tory as Emerson suggested. But unhappily

for his fame he was launched between tides on a stormy sea and his

stately bark foundered in the squall of Abolitionism.

Footnotes

[433] Quoted in Theodore Parker, _Daniel Webster: Additional Speeches_,

Vol. I, p. 195. Considerable information will be found in this

excellent study.

[434] See “The Tariff,” in _Works_, Vol. III, pp. 118-122.

[435] See his “Apology and Defense,” in _Works_, Vol. V, pp. 146, 240.

[436] See “The Bank of the United States,” _Works_, Vol. III, p. 35.

[437] See “Speech in Wall Street,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 55.

[438] See “The Landing at Plymouth,” in _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 204-205.

[439] Theodore Parker denied Webster credit for the argument, pointing

out that “the facts, the law, the precedents, the ideas, and the

conclusions of that argument, had almost all of them been presented by

Messrs. Mason and Smith in the previous trial of the case” (_Additional

Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 171). The statement is confirmed by Beveridge.

Part Two: The Rise of Liberalism

Chapter I • The Renaissance

To write a history of Massachusetts, I confess, is not inviting to

an expansive thinker.... From 1790 to 1820 there was not a book, a

speech, a conversation, or a thought in the State. About 1820, the

Channing, Webster, and Everett era begun, and we have been bookish

and poetical and cogitative since. (Emerson, _Journals_, Vol. VIII,

p. 339.)

In such summary fashion in the year 1852, Emerson recorded his

judgment on half a century of intellectual life in Massachusetts. It

was the comment of an exacting critic. In its characterization of

the extraordinary ferment of thought that marked the decades of the

thirties and forties, it is quite inadequate; but in its contemptuous

dismissal of the age of Fisher Ames and Robert Treat Paine it was

scarcely unjust. The utter sterility of those old times Emerson

understood only too well. It was the world of his own youth, whose

pale negations he had come to hate. The creative impulse was stifled,

the mind had grown stale from tedious iteration. But at last the old

barriers gave way, and into this narrow illiberal world, that had long

fed on the crusts of English rationalism and Edwardean dogmatism--dry

as remainder biscuit after voyage--broke the floods that had been

gathering in Europe for years, the waters of all the streams of

revolution that were running there bank-full. Before this inundation

the old provincialisms were swept away, and for the first time in its

history, and the last, the mind of New England gave itself over to a

great adventure in liberalism.

Quite evidently the renaissance resulted from the impact of the

romantic revolution upon the Puritan mind, and it issued in a form

native to New England experience. Animated by the common spirit

of Utopianism, its dreams were unlike those of Virginia or the

West, founded on a different economics and seeking different ends.

Massachusetts had discovered a particular road leading to Utopia by way

of the industrial revolution, and the textile mills on the Merrimac

began weaving a new pattern of life for New England. The old static

agricultural order was broken in upon, and with the social disruption

came naturally an intellectual disruption. The mind of that older New

England had been held in the close keeping of the church, and the

movement of intellectual emancipation became therefore at the outset a

movement leveled at theological conservatism; it was concerned first

to rid New England of the incubus of Calvinistic dogma. The Calvinists

were of tough fiber and tenacious of opinion, and to turn their flank

was no summer campaign. The result was a long battle of ideas, a fierce

struggle between the old deterministic theology and the new romantic

philosophy, with victory slowly inclining to the latter. This major

struggle gave to the renaissance its profoundly ethical spirit that

set it off sharply from the earlier renaissance of Virginia; and not

the least important of the results of the movement was the liberation

of the New England conscience from its long bondage to dogma, setting

it free to engage in a larger work in the world. What that conscience

accomplished in the brief period of its freedom; what causes it

espoused and what reforms it carried through--how it quickened a

humanitarian zeal in New England and imparted a militant spirit to its

culture--these are phases of the total movement not to be neglected by

the historian.

In the realm of ideas the renaissance was largely dominated by

old-world thought. From the abundant stores of European revolutionary

doctrine the New England liberals drew freely--more freely perhaps

from German idealism than from French Utopianism. Germany meant much

to the awakening mind of New England, by reason of its spiritual and

intellectual kinship. Plato was their common father, a transcendental

mysticism their common experience. Philosophical idealism with its

indwelling Godhood that exalted man to the divine and transformed

a mechanical universe into the dwelling place of divine love--this

was a dynamic faith, appealing to men long nurtured in faith, more

seductive to the children of Puritanism than any political or economic

romanticisms. It opened to them new heavens when the old were closed

and encouraged them to go forth on great ventures.

But the renaissance was very much more than a transplanting of German

idealism. France had a shaping hand in it, and England. Jean Jacques

came before Hegel, and Unitarianism before transcendentalism. It was

social and literary as well as philosophical. In so far as that which

was essentially one may be divided, the movement involved three major

strands: the social Utopianism that came from revolutionary France; the

idealistic metaphysics that emerged from revolutionary Germany; and the

new culture that spread with the development of literary romanticism.

To distinguish these three strands is one thing; to endeavor to

separate them is quite another. They interweave and blend in varying

patterns; they are but different, new-world phases of a comprehensive

European movement that runs far back into the preceding century--a

movement that in transferring economic and political mastery from the

aristocracy to the middle class, in destroying the worm-eaten feudal

order and clearing the way for the new capitalistic order, laid open

a broad path into the nineteenth century. The extraordinary appeal of

this vast movement to the liberal mind of America resulted from the

fact that an identical revolution was under way here. In New England,

perhaps more dramatically than elsewhere in America, the day of the

middle class was dawning, aristocratic ideals were disintegrating, and

the hopes of men were running high. To humanize this emerging society,

to awaken it to a nobler faith in human destiny, to further the cause

of social justice, to create a democracy of the spirit--this was

the deeper romantic purpose, however vaguely comprehended, that was

fermenting in the New England renaissance, and it was this that gave to

it a spirit so warmly ethical.

Now quite evidently a movement so extraordinarily complex would appeal

diversely to different minds, and in its development it drew to itself

a singularly various following. To the sons of respectable Federalism

it was the new romantic culture that appealed; to the militant

conscience of Puritanism it was the inspiration of social Utopianism;

to the emancipated intellectuals it was the metaphysical idealism. Its

many-sidedness was both confusing and stimulating. How shall we explain

a movement that embraced such different men as Everett and Channing

and Parker and Garrison and Whittier and Emerson and Longfellow and

Holmes; men often mutually repellent, sometimes sharply critical

of each other? No single mind sums up the whole--the theological,

humanitarian, mystical, critical, and cultural aspirations of the

awakening--as perhaps Goethe may be said to have done for Germany.

Emerson, Thoreau and Parker possibly embodied it most adequately; they

were transcendental individualists, intellectual revolutionaries,

contemptuous of all meanly material standards. But quite evidently

Everett would not travel far along the transcendental path they pointed

out, nor Holmes, nor Longfellow. These latter expected no romantic

Utopias, wanted no such Utopias. Cambridge and Boston satisfied their

hopes; they found the world not such a bad place for those who knew

how to meet it on its own terms. Yet they too were children of the

awakening, and in following their individual paths they contributed

in their own way to the disintegration of the old authoritarian order

that had long held the mind of New England in subjection. Each in

some measure and after his own fashion was a rebel, and their total

rebellions made up the sum of New England’s bequest to a more liberal

America. Yet in this eager and somewhat vague liberalism to which

the renaissance was dedicated in spirit, the note that runs through

the several programs is a note of reaction from the aspirations of

the middle class. It was an ethical protest against the harsh and

unjust realities of the industrial revolution that was so ruthlessly

transforming the old order of life in New England; and it took the form

of a return to a simpler life. To struggle free from the chains of the

eighteenth century, only to be bound in new chains, was an ignoble

ending to the emancipation that free men could not envisage with

satisfaction.

Chapter II • Liberalism and Calvinism

The first stirrings of new life were felt within the church, the

repository of such learning as Harvard College disseminated through

the Massachusetts villages. For two hundred years the dogmas of Calvin

had lain as a heavy weight on the mind of New England. Revolutions

had taken place in English and continental theology, but New England

Calvinism had kept closely within the narrow confines of its creed,

annually turning over the exhausted soil and reaping an ever scantier

harvest. Since the days of Edwards there had been abundant speculation

and much exercise in syllogisms, but no scrutiny of major premises.

Such an examination was long overdue, with the romantic revolution

under way in France, and new theories of human nature and the relation

of man to society and the state, spreading widely. But unfortunately

the odium which New England conservatism quickly fastened upon the

French school frightened the orthodox. The stigma of atheism was put

upon every harmless bantling of the numerous French brood, and in the

terror of reaction the pulpit, following the lead of the reactionary

pew, aroused itself to cleanse the church of every innovation. English

Arianism, even worse things, it was discovered, had stolen into

Congregational pulpits during the relaxed period of the Revolution;

a dangerous spirit of liberalism had spread silently through the

tidewater churches, capturing the strongholds of Boston orthodoxy.

By the year 1800 it was high time for the old Congregationalism of

Jonathan Edwards to take counsel with itself. “Let us guard against

the insidious encroachments of _innovation_--that evil and beguiling

spirit which is now stalking to and fro in the earth, seeking whom

it may devour,” exclaimed Jedidiah Morse, the arch reactionary, in

the days when French ideas were knocking at the doors of New England.

And by innovation the doughty Jedidiah meant any idea that had been

stumbled on, new since the days of the great Edwards. To go back to the

pure Edwardean doctrine, to purge the church of incipient Arminianism

and Arianism and Socinianism--together with such other innovations as

might show their faces anywhere--became thenceforth the chief business

of the devout New England of 1800. To timid souls the ideas of their

grandfathers seemed far safer than the ideas of their fathers; and so

theology followed politics in turning its back upon the freer, more

generous world that beckoned.

Nevertheless French liberalism slowly won its victories. It needs

high walls to keep out ideas. Excluded from the drawing-rooms and

counting-houses, ostracized in society and politics, romantic

philosophy slipped quietly into Boston by the door of theology, and

took lodgings in the homes of the first families. To those who enjoy

the little ironies of history, the easy subjugation of respectable

Boston by that very Jacobinical heresy against which Boston was so

bitter is too amusing to be overlooked. Changing its name and arraying

itself in garments cut after the best Yankee fashion, the gospel

of Jean Jacques presently walked the streets of Boston and spoke

from its most respectable pulpits, under the guise of Unitarianism.

The heretical doctrines of the excellence of human nature and the

perfectibility of man were preached to Federalist congregations so

persuasively that instead of repudiating them and asserting the total

depravity of their neighbors, simple-minded merchants approved the

doctrines and cheerfully paid their pew-rent. It was a respectable

and bloodless revolution. Under its discreet disguise Unitarianism

accomplished for New England what Jeffersonianism had accomplished

for the South and West--the wide dissemination of eighteenth-century

French liberalism. It opened the New England mind to fresh ideas. Out

of Unitarianism was to come the intellectual renaissance, with its

transcendental philosophies and social reforms, its enlarged conception

of democracy and its Utopian dreams, which made New England count so

effectively in the developments of the half century.

The twenty-five years between 1790 and 1815 were the nascent period of

Unitarianism, when it was reëxamining the old Calvinist dogmas in the

light of the new liberalism, weighing the doctrines of election and

reprobation in the scale with the doctrines of God’s beneficence and

man’s excellence, and coming definitely to reject them as blasphemy

against God and defamation of human nature. And it was during these

critical years that the upholders of the traditional orthodoxy were

most actively concerned to provide a defense for the sacred dogmas

of their grandfathers. The liberal advance produced a conservative

reaction, and the lines of battle were sharply drawn. The capture of

Harvard College by the Unitarians in 1805, and the founding of Andover

Theological Seminary by the Calvinists in 1808, were dramatic events in

a long intellectual and legal struggle that aroused much bitterness and

bequeathed to the churches a rich legacy of unchristian animosities.

Good men on both sides--to recall a contemporary witticism--were quite

too ready “to fight for the glory of God as if the very devil were in

them.”

The traditional Calvinism defended itself with spirit, asserting so

vehemently that it was still a living faith, that the corpse was not

yet an authentic corpse, that it succeeded at least in postponing

its own burial. It was deeply entrenched in the inertia of custom,

but intellectually it was in really desperate straits. It was slowly

disintegrating from dry-rot with which both minister and theology were

stricken. With its major premises tacitly denied by Yankee experience,

it was unfortunate in being defended by as humorless and ungainly a

breed of theologians as ever quarreled over the loving-kindness of God.

Clinging to the defenses which Jonathan Edwards had erected against

the incursion of old-world ideas, it declaimed its dogmas and damned

the human race with tedious iteration. Over-threshed straw makes poor

fodder, and after a two-hour battle with potential infidelities, many a

good minister descended from his pulpit lamenting that his exhortations

had been wasted on “a sermon-proof, gospel-glutted generation.” Yet

he went faithfully back to his study to consume the day in argument

with a suppositious Arminian, and in spinning cobweb systems between

the worm-eaten rafters, quite oblivious to the common-sense world

without his walls. The difficulties in which those old Calvinists

found themselves very likely seemed tragic to them; but to later

generations, endowed with some saving grace of humor, the situation

was not without its spice. The good men were undeniably caught in

a distressing dilemma. They were laboring prodigiously both to sit

tight in the old dogma of determinism and yet wriggle out; to maintain

election and reprobation and yet insert somehow the thin edge of

personal responsibility; to prove to the satisfaction of the pew that

man is both bound and free. It was a hard necessity to be under, to

damn man by predestination, and “yet worry out enough freedom for him

to be decently damned on,” as a late critic has remarked;[440] to

send him to hell by divine decree, yet prove that he went of his own

accord. Yet they must do that impossible thing if they were to justify

their theology to common-sense congregations that were drifting into

indifference.

The whole thing was monstrously unreal and it resulted in hatching such

a brood of tenuous subtleties as we have difficulty in comprehending

today. Theological fame in Massachusetts came to be measured by the

skill with which the logician made out to stand on both sides of the

fence at the same time. Had it not been for Jonathan Edwards New

England Congregationalism would have drifted comfortably with the tide

of liberalism; but his uncompromising spirit held it anchored. This

masterly spinner of theological systems bequeathed to his successors an

unfinished work; but he had clearly envisaged the problem and suggested

a line of attack. In his great inquiry into the nature of will he had

hoped to provide an infallible means of reconciling the irreconcilable

by arguing that the will is dependent on desire. The natural man,

according to the Edwardean logic, is free to serve God as the highest

good if he desires, but he lacks the desire unless God reveals himself

as that highest good, and such revelation rests with God’s pleasure.

“Moral responsibility lies in the choice, not in the cause of the

choice.”[441] With this distinction suggested between natural and moral

freedom, Calvinistic speculation went on hopefully till it attained

its culminating triumph in Nathaniel Walker’s ingenious doctrine of

certainty with power to the contrary. Walker was a pupil of Timothy

Dwight’s, and one of the foundation professors of the new Yale Divinity

School, established to combat Unitarian heresies. A tremendous rattling

of the bones of the Connecticut churches followed his pronouncement

that man’s acts are not necessitated by a rigid law of cause and

effect, but that his choices are so connected with antecedent

conditions of soul and environment, that to God’s perception it is

certain what they will be, although he possesses full power of contrary

choice.[442]

As we contemplate those old theological abstractions, dead now as

Lot’s wife, the universe of our fathers shrinks to a petty compass,

not much larger than the snug little state of Connecticut, curiously

egocentric, curiously anthropomorphic. Obviously such grotesqueries

could not endure indefinitely. Presently there must appear the

common-sense housewife with her broom, and the dusty cobwebs would

disappear. English Arianism, emerging out of English Presbyterianism,

and long under suspicion of the New England fathers, first opened the

windows and let a little fresh air into the New England churches. But

back of Arianism was the total body of eighteenth-century rationalism,

with its theology rooted in new political and social philosophies,

and its doctrines derived from conceptions of God and man hostile to

Calvinistic determinism. There could be no reconciling them. Calvinism

must extirpate English rationalism or be disintegrated by it.

But rationalism refused to be extirpated. Here and there in

Massachusetts pulpits appeared a new order of preachers, young men

who had broken with the old dogmas and were plainly bitten with the

English distemper. Of these the most notable was Jonathan Mayhew, from

1747 to 1766 pastor of the West Church, and the freest-spoken minister

in Boston. Mayhew was a thoroughgoing liberal, not to say radical,

an intimate friend of Otis and John Adams, and chief clerical leader

of the opposition to the English ministry. He had broken through the

narrow parochialism of Boston; he corresponded with the intellectual

leaders of English dissent, and while still a young man was on the

highroad to Arianism. He seems to have been a brilliant fellow, bold

and frank in speech, with great and popular powers as a preacher, and

his early death alone prevented him from anticipating some of the work

of Channing.[443] A like fate abruptly terminated the work of another

able young man, Lemuel Briant, pastor of the Braintree church from

1745 to his death in 1753. Briant was John Adams’s pastor and, like

Mayhew, an Arian, with a ready wit that his adversaries must have

found disconcerting. “I have always tho’t,” he remarked apropos of

the familiar dilemma, “that so far as any Man is pure (let it be in a

greater or lesser Degree) he is not filthy.”[444] But the coming on of

the Revolutionary disputes and the disturbance of war put a stop to the

normal development of the movement; and the general reaction following

the treaty of peace gave encouragement to the Calvinistic reaction

and temporarily strengthened the Edwardean school. Nevertheless the

liberal doctrines of Mayhew and Briant, falling in with the French

philosophy, prepared the way for the conscious Unitarian revolt at the

end of the century.

That revolt was fundamentally ethical rather than theological, and

the name Unitarian, which the liberal movement accepted somewhat

reluctantly from its opponents, very inadequately describes its special

genius. The term derives from the middle eighteenth century, before

religious thought had come under the influence of the new social

philosophy; and it suggests a primary theological bias in a movement

that was far more significantly ethical and social. The early liberals,

forerunners of Unitarianism, were theologians given to probing in

rationalistic spirit, the mystery of the Godhood. Now, denial of the

Trinity has been common to all Unitarians, although individually they

might profess an Arian or a Socinian interpretation of the nature

and rôle of Jesus; but what is more important, they have been from

the first close Scripturists, disliking exact theological systems

and setting biblical authority above human. By the time the name had

come to be generally accepted--about the year 1815--it had already

lost much of its earlier significance, for emphasis had shifted from

the mystery of the Godhood to the problem of the relations existing

between the children and the Father. On the one hand supernaturalism

tended to disappear in morality, and on the other religion tended to

seek an authoritative basis in idealistic philosophy and justify itself

by intuitionism. “The soul,” argued Channing, in his exposition of a

later Unitarian theology, “is the spring of our knowledge of God.”

“Here is our primitive teacher and light.” “The only God, whom our

thoughts can rest on, and our hearts can cling to, is the God whose

image dwells in our own Souls” (_Works_, Vol. VI, Introductory Remarks,

p. 21). Unitarianism, in other words, reversed the thought process of

Calvinism. Instead of debasing man to a mean creature, subject to a

God of wrath, it professed to discover a loving Father in the human

heart of love. Here was a revolution indeed, a revolution in which

were the seeds of transcendentalism, of social Utopias, of pretty much

the entire intellectual awakening of New England. The old Calvinism

had no weapons to meet such an attack; the new creed lay outside its

realm of thought. What that creed finally came to be, under Channing’s

influence, is thus stated by a recent historian:

Man is God’s child, made in His image and object of His love; his

reason and conscience are divine witnesses to truth and light, and

when governed by them he walks in the ways of God, safe in his

Father’s love and care. The God in whom their opponents believed--a

God of election and reprobation, capable of dooming an entire

race because its ancestors disobeyed a God of arbitrary will and

discriminating grace--seemed to them simply an immoral being and

they frankly said so. (Fenn, _Religious History of New England,

etc._, p. 125.)

In its noblest expression Unitarianism became essentially a humanistic

religion, rational, ethical, individual, yet with deep and warm

social sympathies. In Channing’s excellent phrase, it discovered the

apotheosis of religion in “the adoration of goodness.” It issued in

conduct because it developed character. The highest testimony to the

excellence of the faith is the noble company of men and women who

subscribed to its creed. And yet after all, Unitarianism was rather

an attitude of mind than a creed. It was the recovery of the original

principle of New England Separatism, lost during the long years of

orthodox conformity--the principle of the open mind and free inquiry.

Let each devout soul, each group of fellow believers, Unitarianism

announced, seek the truth where it may be found; let each give to it

such outward form as best reveals its divine nature; not seeking to

impose a particular interpretation upon others, but each taking upon

himself full responsibility for his spiritual welfare. Authority it

regarded as the prop of the weak; dogma, as the body of a faith that

is dead. As free souls, mature and self-reliant, the Unitarians would

be their own authority, would fashion their own creed. The Scriptures

lie open and the heedful eye will discover God’s revelation in their

pages. The deeper spirit of Unitarianism is not inadequately embodied

in the text, “Search the Scriptures, for they are they which testify

of me.” No abler or more devout Scripturists ever preached in America

than the Unitarian ministers, and if bolder souls like Theodore Parker

went further than others, if their free handling of old interpretations

gave offense to the timid, that fact provided no sanction to coerce or

stifle free inquiry. Toleration of differences, respect for devout free

thought--this return to the position of Roger Williams two centuries

before was the vital principle of Unitarianism. Like him, the Unitarian

was a seeker, open-minded and free. Others might be intolerant, others

might regard themselves as the sole custodians of truth, but not he.

But if the Unitarians who followed Channing were liberals in

religion, they were conservatives in well-nigh everything else.

Amongst the laity the adoration of goodness was sufficiently tempered

by Yankee thrift to keep it from interfering seriously with the

practical business of getting on in the world; and in consequence

the new faith gathered its supporters from amongst the prosperous

rather than the needy, from Federalists rather than Democrats. The

commercial dominated the intellectual and emotional in their prim

and somewhat cold congregations. “The Unitarians,” it was commonly

said, “were the cult of the arrived.” As successful men, these Boston

merchants and manufacturers did not believe that they were the sons

of Adam, children of iniquity. They thought better of themselves and

of God than Calvinism permitted them to think; “one who was born in

Boston,” the current jest put it, “had no need to be born again.”

Generous in all approved philanthropies these Unitarian laymen might

be, but emotionally religious they were temperamentally incapable of

being. Until the infusion of the rich sap of transcendentalism, that

gave it new life and brought it to bloom, Unitarianism was in grave

danger of dying at the root. But with the spread of the philosophy

of intuitionalism, the negative individualism of Unitarianism became

positive, broke with the respectable conservatism of commercial

congregations, and overflowed in a rich and generous faith. Authority,

dogma, creed, were swept away by this new faith in an indwelling

divinity, with its intuitive sanctions, and Unitarianism merged in the

larger movement of the renaissance.

II • William Ellery Channing

To the austerely spiritual Channing the guiding principle of

Unitarianism was identical with the spirit of primitive New England

separatism--the principle of freedom in religious matters, the

individual speaking his mind frankly, shepherd and flock feeding as

they would, without fear and without coercion. The soul is responsible

to itself and its own conscience; there are no orthodoxies and no

heterodoxies, but a duty is laid upon the individual to seek truth

with an open mind and be steadfast in its service. It was this spirit

of open-minded liberalism that led him along the path of unmilitant

individualism, seeking freedom only to the end of righteousness, and

counting righteousness the fine flower of freedom; desiring peace and

universal fellowship; loath to found a sect; yet driven by those who

denied freedom to themselves as well as others to become the champion

and leader of a great schism that sundered the traditional unity of

Congregationalism, and erected a new faith on the altars of the old.

Channing’s heritage was drawn from the deepest wells of New England

idealism; and filtered through his finely ethical mind it emerged pure

and limpid, the living waters of the new faith. His noble preëminence

was due to the simple spirituality of his nature. Intellectually,

he was neither great nor original. In scholarship he was distinctly

inferior to academic theologians like Andrews Norton and to omnivorous

students like Theodore Parker. Almost wholly introspective he was

influenced slowly by world-currents of thought, and such alien ideas

as found lodgment in his mind took on a native form and color from

his own convictions. Nevertheless though his meditations revolved

about the pole-star of his own experience, his theology cautiously

took shape under the pressure of two ideas that came to him from the

latter years of the eighteenth century--the ideas of God’s beneficence

and of man’s excellence. Once lodged in his mind, those ideas led to

quite revolutionary consequences, not only in their disintegrating

effect upon the Calvinistic dogmas in which he had been reared,

but in the generous romanticism which they bequeathed to Unitarian

theology. His intellectual development was late and halting, yet that

he liberated himself at all was remarkable considering the world that

bred him--Newport, frequented by wealthy planters and enriched by the

slave trade, Cambridge and Boston then in the stagnancy of Federalist

complacency. Of the same generation with Robert Treat Paine and Josiah

Quincy, only a few years older than Rufus Choate and Edward Everett,

as a boy sitting under the preaching of Samuel Hopkins--the rugged

expounder of the Hopkinsian doctrine of willing to be damned for the

glory of God, a doctrine so repugnant to the major tenets of Channing’s

theology--he belonged by temperament and training to the parochial

world that accounted Fisher Ames a great orator, and looked with

suspicion on the new century that was crowding in on its comfortable

preserves.

From the deep New England ruts Channing pulled himself with incredible

difficulty. His frequent reactions almost kept pace with his progress.

For years he oscillated between freedom and dogma, now dominated by

the Hopkinsian influence and thrown back upon a morbid Calvinism by

ill health; then resolutely casting off the evil spell; until the year

1815, when the conservative wing declaring war upon the liberals,

he was drawn into the controversy and took upon himself the burden

of defending the liberal cause. He was then thirty-five, but it was

not till four years later, in the celebrated Baltimore sermon at the

ordination of Jared Sparks, that he offered a definitive statement

of the new theology. The sermon brought him wide fame and fastened

upon him the leadership of the Unitarian movement. Comment upon the

new doctrines was widespread, and the circulation of the sermon in

pamphlet form, according to a late biographer, “was not exceeded by any

American publication until in 1830 Webster made his memorable reply

to Hayne” (John White Chadwick, _William Ellery Channing_, p. 147).

The creative influence of that sermon in clarifying certain doctrines

of Unitarianism and integrating the society should not blind us to

the fact that it embodies only a portion of Channing’s theology--the

idea of God’s beneficence. It is a reasoned attack upon Trinitarian

Calvinism, upon those dogmas which reveal--in Channing’s expressive

phrase--“how mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the Deity”; but

it takes no account of the idea which later he came to place first--the

idea of man’s excellence.

Finer than the Baltimore sermon in its restrained eloquence--an

eloquence that burns with an intensity rare in Channing--and in its

dramatic exposition of the doctrine of the atonement, is the sermon

entitled _Unitarian Christianity most Favourable to Piety_, delivered

in 1826 at the dedication of the second Unitarian church in New York

City. In this sermon Channing made use of a daring comparison which

startled his friends and gave mortal offense to orthodox Calvinists. It

is probably the most dramatic passage to be found in his writings, and

it so well exemplifies the temper of the controversy that it deserves

quotation. After discussing the Edwardean philosophy of infinite

punishment and the nature of atonement, he proceeded:

Let me, then, set it before you, in new terms, and by a new

illustration; and if in so doing, I may wound the feelings of some

who hear me, I beg them to believe, that I do it with pain, and

from no impulse but a desire to serve the cause of truth.--Suppose,

then, that a teacher should come among you, and should tell

you, that the Creator, in order to pardon his own children, had

erected a gallows in the centre of the universe, and had publicly

executed upon it, in room of the offenders, an Infinite Being, the

partaker of his own Supreme Divinity; suppose him to declare, that

this execution was appointed, as a most conspicuous and terrible

manifestation of God’s justice, and of the infinite woe denounced

by his law; and suppose him to add, that all beings in heaven and

earth are required to fix their eyes on this fearful sight, as the

most powerful enforcement of obedience and virtue. Would you not

tell him, that he calumniated his Maker? Would you not say to him,

that this central gallows threw gloom over the universe; that the

spirit of a government, whose very acts of pardon were written in

such blood, was terror, not paternal love; and that the obedience

which needed to be upheld by this horrid spectacle, was nothing

worth? Would you not say to him, that even you, in this infancy and

imperfection of your being, were capable of being wrought upon by

nobler motives, and of hating sin through more generous views; and

that much more the angels, those pure flames of love, need not the

gallows and an executed God to confirm their loyalty? You would all

so feel, at such teaching as I have supposed; and yet how does this

differ from the popular doctrine of atonement? (_Works_, Vol. III,

pp. 197-198.)

In seeking an explanation of Channing’s break with New England

orthodoxy--a breach that widened greatly with years, coming to embrace

politics and economics as well as theology, alienating many of his

own congregation and bringing acute grief to him--one can scarcely

over-emphasize the influence of his Virginia experience. During

the twenty-one months that he spent on the southern plantation,

painfully isolated and lonely, he grappled seriously with a body of

thought from which the environment of his youth had pretty much shut

him away. Virginia in 1798 was ardently Jeffersonian, and French

romantic philosophy was a commonplace in Virginia libraries. While

Channing never went over wholly to Jeffersonianism, but retained

certain Federalist prejudices after the old foundations had turned to

quicksand under his feet, he there began a long process of speculative

brooding that was to carry him far from the political principles of

Boston. French revolutionary thought provided his chief intellectual

stimulus during the critical Virginia period. Rousseau he read with

profound interest, together with Godwin’s _Political Justice_ and Mary

Wollstonecraft’s _Rights of Woman_. The Physiocratic economics that

sanctioned the agrarian bias of Jeffersonian democracy seems to have

made no appeal to a mind primarily ethical in outlook, yet he went so

far as to dabble in communistic theory, and for a time contemplated

joining a communistic community. From France, moreover, he derived

the idea of the excellence of human nature and the perfectibility

of man, ideas which became the mainspring of his later thinking,

creatively determining both his theology and his social philosophy, and

transforming his whole intellectual world.

In July, 1800, eight months before it took formal possession of the

White House, “French infidel philosophy” made its appearance in New

England in the person of a slight, health-broken youth, who returned

to his quiet theological studies, quite unmindful of the gunpowder he

had brought back in his intellectual luggage. It was long before a

spark was to strike home, but the powder was there and would do its

work eventually. In passing through Channing’s mind, the contributions

of French romanticism merged with the native heritage of New England

idealism, and supplemented by contributions from English Arian thought,

slowly assumed definite form that came to issue in three dominating

ideas, namely: God is love, man is potentially noble, religion is an

excellent life. Enveloping these master ideas, in which they were

carried as in a medium, was a pervasive ethical spirit that colored

all his thinking and eventually took form in that striking phrase into

which all of Channing is compressed, “the adoration of goodness--this

is religion.” This constituted his reply to the Edwardean theology that

debased man to the sole end of exalting a monstrous God--the doctrine

of “sweetness and light” was set over against the dogmas of reprobation

and election.

With his profound sense of justice, Channing could not follow “the

adoration of goodness” into an aloof and mystical pietism. The

temptation was strong, for his finely aristocratic and hesitant nature

prompted him to stand apart from all turmoil and partisan struggle.

He disliked controversy and distrusted all dogmatists. The world of

economics and politics was exceedingly distasteful to him; he would

gladly stop his ears against the clamor of organized groups and

strident parties. The Abolitionists, with whose purpose he deeply

sympathized, seemed to him intolerant and their tactics vulgar. There

is a measure of justice in Garrison’s comment after Channing’s death:

“His nerves were delicately strung. The sound of a ram’s horn was

painfully distressing to him. He was firmly persuaded that nothing but

a silver trumpet was needed to cause the walls of Jericho to fall; and

he did his best upon his own.”[445] And yet, however unwillingly, he

was drawn inevitably into an agitation that touched both his religion

and his humanity; and between 1835 and 1837 he issued three notable

contributions to the controversy: _Slavery_, a reply to the Southern

apologists; _The Abolitionists_, an open letter to James Birney, whose

Abolition press had been wrecked by an Ohio mob; and a noble appeal

to Henry Clay against the annexation of Texas. In the latter year he

spoke in Faneuil Hall at a turbulent meeting called to protest against

the murder of Lovejoy, the meeting at which Wendell Phillips made his

dramatic first appearance on the Abolition platform.

The point of view from which Channing approached the problem of

slavery is clearly set forth in his _Introductory Remarks_, written in

1841 for a collected edition of his works, and which constitutes his

_apologia pro vita sua_.[446] In this extraordinarily lucid and just

statement he reduces the master passions of his life to two--respect

for human nature, and reverence for human liberty--passions which were

inseparable in all his thinking. Of the first he says, “The following

writings will be found to be distinguished by nothing more than by

the high estimate which they express of human nature. A respect for

the human soul breathes through them.” This attitude he elaborates at

length:

An enlightened, disinterested human being, morally strong, and

exerting a wide influence by the power of virtue, is the clearest

reflection of the divine splendour on earth.... The glory of the

Maker lies in his work.... Those men glorify God most, who look

with keen eye and loving heart on his works, who catch in all some

glimpses of beauty and power, who have a spiritual sense for good

in its dimmest manifestations, and who can so interpret the world,

that it becomes a bright witness to the Divinity.

I have also felt and continually insisted, that a new reverence for

man was essential to the cause of social reform.... There can be no

spirit of brotherhood, no true peace, any farther than men come to

understand their affinity with and relation to God and the infinite

purpose for which he gave them life. As yet these ideas are treated

as a kind of spiritual romance.... The reception of this plainest

truth of Christianity would revolutionize society, and create

relations among men not dreamed of at the present day.... Men would

know the import of the word Brother, as yet nothing but a word to

multitudes. None of us can conceive the change of manners, the

new courtesy and sweetness, the mutual kindness, deference and

sympathy, the life and efforts for social melioration, which are

to spring up, in proportion as man shall penetrate beneath the body

to the spirit, and shall learn what the lowest human being is.

Out of this reverence for human nature flowed his “reverence for

Liberty, for human rights; a sentiment which has grown with my growth,

which is striking deeper root in my age, which seems to me a chief

element of true love for mankind, and which alone fits a man for

intercourse with his fellow-creatures.”

It is because I have learned the essential equality of men before

the common Father, that I cannot endure to see one man establishing

his arbitrary will over another by fraud, or force, or wealth,

or rank, or superstitious claims. It is because the human being

has moral powers, because he carries a law in his own breast

and was made to govern himself, that I cannot endure to see him

taken out of his own hands and fashioned into a tool by another’s

avarice or pride. It is because I see in him a great nature, the

divine image, and vast capacities, that I demand for him means of

self-development, spheres for free action--that I call society not

to fetter, but to aid his growth.

In such humanitarian idealism did French romantic philosophy come to

flower in the generous mind of this son of New England. He was no

longer narrowly Unitarian; he had become a social revolutionary with

Utopian dreams. The minister’s wealthy parishioners might worship the

common Father complacently under the shadow of slavery, black or white,

but the minister could not; he had caught a glimpse of the Promised

Land and would lead his flock towards it. Unhappily, the vast abyss

of negro slavery lay between, and Channing considered it with growing

concern. In his examination of the problem he was broadly philosophical

rather than narrowly partisan. He rested his case against slavery on an

ethical adaptation of the natural-rights theory.[447] Since man is both

rational and moral, he argued, he cannot be deprived by law or custom

of the essential prerogatives of personality. The inalienable rights

of man are in essence no other than the rights of personality--the

right to exercise his reason, to seek light of his conscience, to enjoy

the fruits of his labor, to enter into domestic relations, in short

to be free to live as a man in a state of civilization. To treat man

as property is the grossest denial and violation of that which by its

nature is inviolable and inalienable. Channing pushed his argument

further and asserted that the institution of slavery was not only

irrational and immoral, but a fundamental denial of democracy. It must

end in perverting the political state to its own evil. The southern

conception of a Greek democracy resting on black slavery he looked upon

as the final prostitution of the democratic ideal. “Those who tell us

that slavery is a necessary condition of a republic, do not justify the

former, but pronounce a sentence of reprobation on the latter.” For

those text-mongerers who professed to justify slavery by Scripture, he

had only scorn. By such methods polygamy might as readily be justified.

Inquiry into the nature and scope of individual rights brought Channing

face to face with the problem of the political state and the duties

of citizenship. Here his break with Boston Federalism was final and

complete. He judged men and institutions by ethical standards; State

Street judged them by economic standards. By his own path he went back

to the eighteenth century, and interpreting the functions and province

of government in the light of Godwin’s _Political Justice_, he arrived

at the conception of a constantly diminishing political state that

should eventually disappear. The dogma of political sovereignty he

denied: “The state is equally restrained with individuals by the Moral

Law” (“Slavery,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 37). The expediency of some

restraint upon individual action he accepted, but with the proviso

that it be exercised only to the end of the common well-being. “The

authority of the state to impose laws on its members I cheerfully

allow; but this has limits, which are found to be more and more narrow

in proportion to the progress of moral science” (_ibid._, p. 38). “That

government is most perfect, in which Policy is most entirely subjected

to Justice, or in which the supreme and constant aim is to secure the

rights of every human being” (_ibid._, p. 38). To such a government

loyalty will be given gladly; but in the event that expediency should

prevail over justice, and the state should prostitute its power by

exploiting one class for the benefit of another, then must loyalty be

transferred from the state to the higher law. “Justice is a greater

good than property, not greater in degree, but in kind.” “The good

of the individual is more important than the outward prosperity of

the State” (_ibid._, pp. 40, 44). In such doctrines Channing paid his

respects to the political philosophy of Webster.

The final outcome of his political thinking was a close approximation

to the position of Jefferson. His distrust of power grew more

apprehensive as he reflected on the common abuse of power, and the

cheap and paltry appeals by which the unthinking are swayed. Before

the organized power of the mass, the individual is helpless. In the

_Introductory Remarks_ he went further than he had done in earlier

writings in analysis of the state, and such a passage as this might

have been penned by John Taylor of Caroline County. It is pure

Jeffersonianism.

So fearful is the principle of which I have spoken, that I

have thought it right to recommend restrictions on power and

a simplicity in government beyond what most approve. Power, I

apprehend, should not be suffered to run into great masses. No more

of it should be confided to rulers than is absolutely necessary

to repress crime and preserve public order. A purer age may

warrant larger trusts; but the less of government now the better,

if society be kept in peace. There should exist, if possible, no

office to madden ambition.... One of the tremendous evils of the

world, is the monstrous accumulation of power in a few hands....

Is any man pure enough to be trusted with it? Ought such a prize

as this to be held out to ambition? Can we wonder at the shameless

profligacy, intrigue, and the base sacrifices of public interests

by which it is sought, and, when gained, held fast? Undoubtedly,

great social changes are required to heal this evil, to diminish

this accumulation of power. National spirit, which is virtual

hostility to all countries but our own, must yield to a growing

humanity, to a new knowledge of the spirit of Christ. Another

important step is, a better comprehension by communities that

government is at best a rude machinery, which can accomplish but

very limited good, and which, when strained to accomplish what

individuals should do for themselves, is sure to be perverted by

selfishness to narrow purposes, or to defeat through ignorance its

own ends. Man is too ignorant to govern much, to form vast plans

for states and empires. Human policy has almost always been in

conflict with the great laws of social well-being, and the less we

rely on it the better. The less of power given to man over man the

better. (_Works_, Vol. VI, pp. 26-27.)

Channing had evidently read his _Political Justice_ to good effect,

for the spirit of eighteenth-century liberalism had passed into his

thought and given shape to his political philosophy. In his hatred of

war, his pacifism, his humanitarian concern, his social-mindedness,

his repudiation of all coercive centralizing power, he proved himself

a child of Godwin. He would have no tyranny, whether by the organized

state or by the unorganized mass. He extended to all men the right

of free thought and free speech. In no other cause did he speak

more vehemently than in defense of this democratic right. When the

Abolitionists were mobbed and their presses broken he rejoiced in their

refusal to be silenced. “From my heart I thank them,” he wrote. “I am

myself their debtor. I am not sure, that I should this moment write in

safety, had they shrunk from the conflict, had they shut their lips,

imposed silence on their presses, and hid themselves before their

ferocious assailants.... I thank the Abolitionists, that in this evil

day, they were true to the rights which the multitude were ready to

betray.” Then follows a passage that is perennially true, considering

how hardly won and easily lost is the right of free speech:

Of all powers, the last to be entrusted to the multitude of men,

is that of determining what questions shall be discussed. The

greatest truths are often the most unpopular and exasperating; and

were they to be denied discussion, till the many should be ready to

accept them, they would never establish themselves in the general

mind. The progress of society depends on nothing more, than on the

exposure of time-honored abuses, which cannot be touched without

offending multitudes, than on the promulgation of principles,

which are in advance of public sentiment and practice, and which

are constantly at war with the habits, prejudices, and immediate

interests of large classes of the community. Of consequence, the

multitude, if once allowed to dictate or proscribe subjects of

discussion, would strike society with spiritual blindness, and

death. The world is to be carried forward by truth, which at first

offends, which wins its way by degrees, which the many hate and

would rejoice to crush. The right of free discussion is therefore

to be guarded by the friends of mankind, with peculiar jealousy.

It is at once the most sacred, and the most endangered of all our

rights. He who would rob his neighbor of it, should have a mark

set on him as the worst enemy of freedom. (“The Abolitionists,” in

_Works_, Vol. II, p. 161.)

High-minded and generous was this child of Puritan idealism who had

gone to school to French infidel philosophy--never untrue to the

principle of free inquiry which in demanding for himself he willingly

granted others. He calmly accepted the fact of disintegration which

is implicit in all liberalism--the denial of traditional authority

and ancient custom--partly because he believed the old ways were

bad, but in part also because he held strongly to his faith in human

nature. Despite failure and discouragement he clung to his cardinal

belief--“My one sublime idea, which has given me unity of mind, the

greatness, the divinity of the soul.” He broke the more willingly with

an ungenerous past because he envisaged a nobler future. An intuitive

individualist, he was a forerunner of transcendental individualism,

and he found himself in hearty accord with Emerson’s doctrines in

the Divinity School address. With the later rationalistic phase of

Unitarianism which began with Theodore Parker’s memorable South

Boston sermon _On the Transient and Permanent in Christianity_, in

May, 1841, he found himself only partly in intellectual sympathy.

He remained a supernaturalist after the younger generation had

rejected supernaturalism; but his sturdy adherence to the principle

of liberalism would not suffer him to join in the Unitarian hue and

cry raised against the young radical. Unitarianism turned orthodox,

and bent on erecting new dogmas, seemed to him treasonable to every

liberal hope. “As to Mr. Parker,” he wrote, “I wish him to preach what

he thoroughly believes and feels. I trust the account you received

of attempts to _put him down_ was in the main a fiction. Let the

full heart pour itself forth!” (John White Chadwick, _William Ellery

Channing_, p. 357.) Sixteen months after he penned those words Channing

was dead, but the spirit of his life was embodied in the great ferment

that was rising about him when he died. “Let the full heart pour itself

forth”--to many sober Bostonians it seemed that New England had taken

that injunction quite too literally and was pouring forth disturbant

and gusty heresies, but Channing would scarcely have disapproved.

Footnotes

[440] See Fenn, _Religious History of New England: King’s Chapel

Lectures_, p. 130.

[441] See Williston Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches

in the United States_, p. 283.

[442] _Ibid._, p. 356.

[443] _Ibid._, pp. 276-277.

[444] _Ibid._, p. 272.

[445] Compare a fuller estimate in Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_,

Vol. III, pp. 239-242.

[446] In the Glasgow edition of 1844 it prefaces the sixth volume.

[447] For a brief discussion, see Merriam, _American Political

Theories_, pp. 217-221.

Chapter III • Liberalism and the Social Conscience

I • The Social Mind

Unitarianism was generous in its bequests to New England, and amongst

its contributions to a nobler life not the least valuable was its warm

social sympathy. Channing’s tender social conscience sprang directly

from his humanitarian religion. Not from the hard old Calvinism did

he get this fine flower of a humane life, but from the new French

philosophy. Not from bounding his ethics by the Decalogue, or hating

sin more than he loved generosity, did he break the hard shell of

Puritan righteousness; but by metamorphosing the sinner into a child

of God and sharing with him the divine promise. Other-mindedness came

naturally to a religion established in a God of love. The social

conscience could not remain indifferent to injustice visited upon

the children of a common Father. Yet other-mindedness was a virtue

practiced too little in Calvinist New England. That old world had been

more concerned with hopes of individual salvation, with propitiating

an angry God, than with its present obligations to its neighbors.

Hard doctrine--which the old Puritan loved--was likely to make hard

characters, and an ascetic society was likely to breed close-fisted

natures. The conscience was tender in New England, but it was tender

chiefly as the guardian and monitor of the Ten Commandments; it gave

itself too little concern about the new commandment which Jesus

laid upon his disciples. It disciplined men and women in personal

righteousness, it created self-reliant characters, it scrutinized

narrowly the neighborhood conduct; but its social issues were likely

to be mean and petty. The righteousness of which it professed to be

guardian and monitor too often fell far short of generous manly stature.

From this hardness of the old religion came the hardness of the social

conscience. When the Yankee was driven by brutal fact to admit that

he was his brother’s keeper, he usually took care to get a few honest

pennies out of his brother’s board and lodging. The village poor

were provided for by farming out, as the taxes were farmed out. The

town meeting haggled narrowly over the terms, and substantial deacons

underbid each other. Though the price might be low, some profit might

still be got from the pauper’s keep. It was a cold, hard, unsympathetic

world for the social unfortunate, whether pauper, debtor, or idiot;

and it was harsh as well to the children of all but the wealthy.

The hours of toil were long, and the public schools about which the

historians have bragged rather too loudly, were poor affairs, starved

by the common niggardliness, ill taught and ill provided. The academies

and colleges that professed to keep the torch of learning aflame were

largely perquisites of the gentry. It is beside the point to assert

that public schools existed in New England long before Virginia had

any, and that poor boys stinted and starved their way through Harvard

and Yale. Well known as such facts are, they do not testify to a high

social sense in a people supposed to have been tender of conscience.

The Calvinist was taught to fear God rather than to love him. It was a

strong man’s business to save one’s soul and make a decent living; and

in the social code of New England the weakling must take his chance.

There was helpful neighborliness of course in old New England, and

much honest kindliness. Some of the hardest of dogmatic Calvinists

were the most considerate and gentlest of men. Old Samuel Hopkins of

slave-running Newport was a generous soul who preached the gospel of

love to one’s fellows, and practiced the virtues of apostleship to

the poor and outcast. He denounced the slave trade to parishioners

who knew all the inlets of the West African coast, and got himself

well disliked. His congregation preferred his hard theology to his

inconvenient humanitarianism, and kept him poor all his days. The

dogmatic Timothy Dwight scathingly attacked slavery in his _Greenfield

Hill_, denounced the injustice done the negro, and even protested

against the extension of capital punishment. Yet for all such protests

the common conscience was untouched. The Yankee was always standing

in the way of the Puritan’s righteousness. Respectability was founded

on property, and respectability was mightier in New England than even

John Calvin. It was the brutal debtor laws that brought on Shays’s

Rebellion, which Federalist church members put down and denied the

grievances. It was no tender conscience that extinguished slavery

in Massachusetts, for long after it became unprofitable there the

Yankee skipper was still in the slave trade. Dignified Tory Row on

what is now Brattle Street, Cambridge, was built by gentlemen who

drew their wealth from West Indian slave plantations.[448] William

Lloyd Garrison’s offense in Baltimore, for which he was thrown into

jail, lay in publishing the name of a Massachusetts shipmaster from

Newburyport--Garrison’s native town--who was engaged in the coastwise

slave traffic.[449] In the year 1830 there were somewhat more than a

hundred Abolition Societies in the United States, not one of which was

in New England; and in the first number of the _Liberator_ Garrison

wrote, probably without exaggeration, that he found “contempt more

bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless, prejudice

more stubborn, and apathy more frozen,” in New England, “than among

slave owners themselves.”[450] The old Puritan conscience might be

tender, but it refused pretty steadily to take on any larger job than

Sabbath-keeping and dogma-saving. It was inquisitorial rather than

humanitarian, and the sins which it hunted down were theological rather

than social.

The bridge between this older world and the later was thrown across by

Unitarianism. With its shift of emphasis from a God of wrath to a God

of love came the entering wedge that was to split away the egoism of

the old theology--its thralldom to the conception of personal sin--and

lay bare an inner core of altruism. It was another sort of conscience

that Unitarianism discovered, a conscience that welcomed the new social

thought of romantic Europe, and applying it to the facts of life in

America created the new humanitarianism which bit so deeply into the

New England of the forties. From this movement the intractable nature

of the Yankee held him back, but the Puritan speedily transformed the

hard theological conscience into a tender social conscience, that

bewildered the conventional morality with its sweeping program of

reform.

The awakening of the new spirit may perhaps be held to date from the

growing opposition to war that was an aftermath of the Napoleonic

period with its huge debts and vast social suffering. The inhumanity

of war profoundly impressed thoughtful minds that had come under the

influence of the sociological movement, and when Channing in 1812

preached his first anti-war sermon the new humanitarian spirit found

expression. In his espousal of pacifism Channing was following in the

footsteps of the social revolutionaries of the preceding century.

He fell short of Tom Paine in analysis of the economic and dynastic

sources of war, and in appreciation of its social consequences;

nevertheless his denunciation was significant of a changing social

attitude. From this early attack to the rise of the Garrisonian

Non-Resistance Society of the late thirties and early forties, the

spread of the pacifist movement was rapid. Transcendentalism was

eloquently anti-militaristic, and Emerson, Alcott and Parker were

outspoken in denunciation of the war spirit. To the war against war

soon was added the war against drink, and with the establishment in

Boston in 1826 of the _National Philanthropist_, under the patronage

of the “Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance”--a

paper of which Garrison was editor for a few months--began the long

agitation for the suppression of the liquor traffic. From such feeble

beginnings the ardor of reform grew and spread swiftly, enlarging its

program to embrace anti-slavery, woman’s rights,[451] prison reform,

repeal of the harsh debtor laws, vegetarianism, associationism, until

it caught the contagion of the perfectionist and transcendental

movements and issued in a comprehensive program of universal reform.

The golden age of New England was quite as much the golden age of the

New England conscience as of the New England mind.

II

The fame of transcendentalism has too much obscured the contemporary

movement of perfectionism, a movement which marked the extreme

expression of the new conscience, the most revolutionary of its

aspirations, the apotheosis of ethical radicalism. Its want of literary

skill narrowed its appeal and the archaic quality of its enthusiasm

lessened its following; yet in spirit it was native to Puritan

idealism, and it enlisted the active sympathy of many of the finer

souls of New England. How greatly reform was furthered by the movement

of perfectionism is not easily determined, but it is clear that its

influence permeated much of the revolutionary activity of the times.

Scratch an ardent Abolitionist and you were likely to find a potential

perfectionist.

The doctrine was first elaborated by John Humphrey Noyes, a young

Vermont mystic, who, under the influence of the revivalist excitement

of the early thirties, elaborated a social creed that reëmbodied much

of the teaching of the extreme left wing of English Commonwealth

thought. Noyes was a primitive religious nature, with the tenderest

of consciences, vastly troubled over current materialisms; and his

speculations reveal a curious throw-back to early English Puritanism.

He was a Yankee Fifth Monarchy man. Two hundred years of Yankee

experience slipped from his mind, and he walked and talked with the old

millennial spirits, the Diggers and Levelers of Commonwealth times. A

devout Scripturist, he took literally the injunction of Matthew, “Be ye

therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.”

A primitive Christian, he proposed to re-order society with the naïve

simplicity of the apostle Eliot. In his mystical speculations, social,

political, and religious radicalisms were stirred in a common pot and

simmered down to what may be called spiritual anarchism. Noyes was a

Yankee “root and branch” man, a single-minded apostle of “thorough.”

He would not strain at gnats and swallow camels, but he rejected the

camels first and then proposed to get rid of the gnats. In 1834 he

established a small monthly paper called the _Perfectionist_, which was

very probably as revolutionary a sheet as was ever printed in America.

He made converts, including Garrison, Edmund Quincy, son of Josiah

Quincy, the Grimké sisters, Henry C. Wright and other Abolitionists,

and made an increasing stir in the world, to the great concern of

respectable folk who swallowed their camels without a grimace.

Some notion of the main doctrines of this seventeenth-century creed may

be gained from a letter of Noyes to Garrison, written in 1837, from

which the following is taken:

I have subscribed my name to an instrument similar to the

Declaration of ’76, renouncing all allegiance to the government

of the United States, and asserting the title of Jesus Christ to

the throne of the World.... When I wish to form a conception of

the government of the United States ... I picture to myself a

bloated, swaggering libertine, trampling on the Bible--its own

Constitution--its treaties with the Indians--the petitions of

its citizens.... I have renounced active co-operation with the

oppressor on whose territories I live; now I would find a way to

put an end to his oppression. But he is manifestly a reprobate:

reproof and instruction only aggravate his sins. I cannot attempt

to reform him, because I am forbidden to “cast pearls before

swine.” I must therefore either consent to remain a slave till

God removes the tyrant, or I must commence war upon him, by a

declaration of independence and other weapons suitable to the

character of a son of God.

He then lays down seven reasons for choosing to make war upon the

state, amongst which are the following:

1. As a believer in the Bible I know that the territory of the

United States belongs to God, and is promised ... to Jesus Christ

and his followers....

6. The Son of God has manifestly, to me, chosen this country

for the theatre of such an assault--a country which, by its

boasting hypocrisy, has become the laughing-stock of the world,

and by its lawlessness has fully proved the incapacity of man

for self-government. _My hope of the millennium begins where Dr.

Beecher’s expires_--viz., +AT THE OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION+.

I have stated to you only ... the principal things which God has

urged upon me by his Spirit, and by which he has moved me to

nominate Jesus Christ for the Presidency, not only of the United

States, but of the world. Is it not high time for abolitionists to

abandon a government whose President has declared war upon them? I

cannot but think that many of them hear the same great voice out

of heaven which has waked me, saying, “Come out of her, my people,

that ye be not partakers of her sins and of her plagues.”... Allow

me to suggest that you will set Anti-slavery in the sunshine only

by making it tributary to Holiness; and you will most assuredly

throw it into the shade ... if you suffer it to occupy the ground,

in your mind or in others, which ought to be occupied by +UNIVERSAL

EMANCIPATION FROM SIN+. All the abhorrence which now falls upon

slavery, intemperance, lewdness, and every other specific vice,

will in due time be gathered into one volume of victorious wrath

against _unbelief_. I wait for that time as for the day of

battle ... I counsel you, and the people that are with you, if

you love the post of honour--the forefront of the hottest battle

of righteousness--to set your face towards _perfect_ holiness.

(Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, pp. 145-148.)

This curious appeal brought forth its fruit in a Peace Convention,

held in 1838, which published a Declaration of Sentiments[452] that

was quite as extraordinary a pronouncement--one that serves to explain

the utter bewilderment of prosaic souls at the strange progeny of

the times. It was only one of many strange conventions, marked by an

ebullient faith of which Emerson remarked, “The core of the comet

did not seem to be much, but the whole air was full of splendors”

(_Journals_, Vol. VII, p. 5), and on which Josiah Quincy commented,

“Such a mass of free mind as was brought together I have never seen

before in any one assembly.... There was much talent and a great deal

of _soul_.” Men who take their Biblical teachings literally are likely

to be curious fellows. Righteousness may prove a potent drink for

them that love it, begetting its own particular intemperance; and a

conscience that has slipped its leash of the practical will run many a

mad chase. If it followed its logic this perfectionism must make short

shrift of political parties, of loyalty to government, of the political

state itself, and set up instead a social order in which familiar

things would be topsy-turvy, with the just sitting in high places

and the rich and great of earth brought low; and this is precisely

what Noyes did in the Oneida Community--the most successful of the

contemporary ventures in communism--of which he was the founder. In

spite of his taste for the wine of new vintages Emerson was somewhat

taken aback at certain of its ebullitions, and when the sabbatarian

Chardon Street Convention in 1840 gathered together the choicest

repositories of New England holiness, he shook his head dubiously. His

humorous catalogue of the miscellaneous enthusiasts suggests more than

a spice of criticism.

Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians,

Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists, Quakers,

Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers,--all came

successively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their

hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach, or protest. (“The

Chardon Street Convention,” in _Works_, Vol. X, p. 374.)

And even the catholic-minded Edmund Quincy, who was one of the callers

of the Convention, confessed that “It was the most singular collection

of strange specimens of humanity that was ever assembled.” The wine of

perfectionism was in high ferment in New England in 1840.

It was a curious anachronism in the midst of the industrial

revolution--this revival of the religious Utopianism of 1650, this

April renaissance of the faith of a dead _saeculum theologicum_. It

was in no sense a by-product of transcendentalism--no lunacy fringe

of metaphysical speculation. It owed nothing to French romanticism or

German idealism, not in origin at least. It was far more primitive and

native, and its affinities run back to Roger Williams and the Fifth

Monarchy millennialism, rather than to Rousseau and Kant and Jacobi. It

was a breaking through of the submerged New England spirituality, a

volcanic release from sterile conformity; and it summoned the awakening

soul to go forth and conquer the world for righteousness. Millennialism

is the prophetic hope of a primitive faith. To its disciples it is

certain of fulfillment because God’s promises are certain; but to

practical minds, unconvinced that Biblical phrases are authentic divine

contracts, any expectation of the speedy coming of the Kingdom of God

seems grotesque. The millennial enthusiast is a fair butt of ridicule,

and the perfectionists came in for a large share. It was Lowell who

leveled at the militant godliness of the new sects the wittiest attack.

Forgetting his English history he found himself puzzled, and being

puzzled he allowed himself to become ill-natured. His clever sentences

explode smartly about his subject, but there is no light in them.[453]

III

Upon another venture in Utopianism, and one far better known, the years

have laid a pleasant, idyllic haze, softening the prosaic outlines and

clothing them with romance. Brook Farm has been singularly fortunate

in the posthumous fame that has dealt with it so tenderly as to

transmute it into poetry. By virtue of the light reflected upon it by

the transcendental illumination and the literary skill it commanded,

the little communal settlement at West Roxbury has come to be regarded

as a homely Yankee pastoral, a sort of May Day adventure in brown

holland tunics, an inspiring quest of the ideal amongst furrows and

manures. It is a social poem fashioned out of Yankee homespun. No

hint of rude social leveling is associated with its aims; even its

communism suggests no stigma. Of the dozens of communistic experiments

which marked the first half of the nineteenth century in America,

few were native in origin or ventured upon in New England. They were

mostly undertaken by old-world groups, chiefly German, who sought cheap

land and a free environment for primitive religious experiments. But

Brook Farm was true Yankee, using the familiar dialect to clothe its

unfamiliar thoughts, and escaping the prejudice that confronts the

uncouth and alien; and in consequence the vagaries that all New England

once laughed at have become enshrined as a cherished New England

possession.

Perfectionism and Brook Farm embodied diverse phases of the

renaissance and made appeal to different temperaments. Fellow-ship

founded on common ownership and communal labor was an ideal that

left the religious mystic cold, whereas the anarchistic holiness of

perfectionism seemed to the Brook Farmers grotesque. Present economic

maladjustment appeared to the latter the fundamental problem of the

times. They were deeply concerned for the future that must emerge

from the chaotic individualism of the present. Unless society were

brought back to a wiser understanding of values, they foresaw only

chaos; and so in a small way they set about a great experiment.

Brook Farm grew out of the impact of the industrial revolution upon

the social conscience of New England. Industrialism and social

speculation were contemporary developments. The first cotton mill in

New England was established at Lawrence in 1822, and the following

year the Merrimac Mills were established in the newly founded city of

Lowell. By absorbing the vast Irish immigration the factory system

brought increasing wealth to Beacon Street homes, but it brought other

consequences in its train which Beacon Street carelessly overlooked.

How those consequences affected more sensitive and intelligent

minds--men like William Henry Channing, Theodore Parker and George

Ripley--is suggested by their eager talk of mutualism, association,

coöperation, as potential cures for the growing evils of competition,

discussions never before heard in New England. Describing the state

of mind of the Boston group of social thinkers, John Weiss offers the

following explanation:

A mutualism to secure culture and material welfare was consistently

desired by those who believed in a community of the sources of

moral and spiritual welfare. The social evils which result from

the struggles of competitive labour seemed to outweigh all its

benefits. Modern civilization was thought to be the culmination

of isolated selfishness, madly struggling from bread to luxury

and refined delights, which the strongest and least scrupulous

only could acquire. Prisons and punishments were the defences of

this artificial system, to repress instincts that were moral till

they become illegal. Hospitals and benevolent institutions were

also mere defences to absorb as much misery as possible ere it

became malicious, to get the social gangrene reduced to limits.

The providential impulses of the human being were forced to act in

subversive ways and directions, when they might all be harmonized

by their own inherent laws, and the blessing of mutualism succeed

to the bane of antagonism. Each man ought to be the guarantee

to all men against disorder; the carefully adjusted elements of

a selfishness which threatens continually to blow the social

fabric to atoms, would become not only innoxious but salutary in

its proper combination; and a new civilization might arise in

fair proportion from the serial development and movement of all

possible human tendencies. Then all men and women might labor and

be happy; all might earn with a minimum of toil a competence of

culture. Property would be the ally of the whole instead of the

oppressor of the many; and crime would disappear, because the

instincts would no longer have motives to be criminal. (_Life and

Correspondence of Theodore Parker_, Vol. I, pp. 106-107.)

The transcendental basis of such social speculation is evident enough.

The new social thought was transcendental thought. A common belief

in the excellence of human instincts drew these idealists together;

but when it came to the vexing problem of reconciling individualism

and mutualism, creating an economic fellowship out of electric

personalities, the more ardent transcendentalists took fright and

prudently kept without the gates of Brook Farm. Organization seemed

to them the fatal poison in the bottom of the cup. When a community

was planned in Massachusetts in 1841, by liberal Christians of the

Universalist sect, a writer in the _Dial_ subjected the proposal to

sharp criticism:

A true community can be founded on nothing short of faith in the

universal man, as he comes from the hands of the Creator, with

no law over his liberty but the eternal ideas that lie at the

foundation of his being.... The final cause of human society is the

unfolding of the individual man, into every form of perfection,

without let or hindrance, according to the inward nature of each.

(Quoted by Frothingham in _Transcendentalism, etc._, p. 157.)

Such a view is anarchistic rather than collectivistic, and as embodied

in Alcott’s Fruitlands, it may be regarded as the transcendental type

of Utopia. Towards all systems of socialism the transcendentalists

were instinctively hostile, as implying an industrial regimentation;

and in planning Brook Farm, Ripley rejected industrialism and reduced

regimentation to a minimum. With the agrarian background of Brook Farm

the transcendentalists were in hearty sympathy, quite oblivious of the

fact that agrarianism could offer no solution for industrialism; but

they balked at the principle of task allotment as a hindrance to the

unfolding of individual differences. Upon the later introduction of

the Fourier Phalanx their doubts grew into certainty, and they lost

their faith in the experiment. Of all the transcendentalists William

Henry Channing was clearly the most confirmed associationist, except

perhaps Ripley; to the end of his life he remained a socialist, active

in collectivistic movements and clinging fondly to his memory of Brook

Farm as a “great college of social students.” But few of his fellow

transcendentalists shared his faith.

This growing skepticism of organization is clearly shown in the

comments of Emerson’s _Journals_. In October, 1840, he set down his

first reaction to the plan as follows:

Yesterday George and Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller and Alcott

discussed here the Social Plans. I wish to be convinced, to be

thawed, to be made nobly mad by the kindlings before my eye of

a new dawn of human piety. But this scheme was arithmetic and

comfort; this was a hint borrowed from the Tremont House and United

States Hotel; a rage in our poverty and politics to live rich and

gentlemanlike, an anchor to leeward against a change of weather; a

prudent forecast on the probable issue of the great questions of

Pauperism and Poverty. And not once could I be inflamed, but sat

aloof and thoughtless; my voice faltered and fell. It was not the

cave of persecution which is the palace of spiritual power, but

only a room in the Astor House hired for the Transcendentalists. I

do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little

larger. I wish to break all prisons. I have not yet conquered

my own house. It irks and repents me. Shall I raise the siege

of this hencoop, and march baffled away to a pretended siege of

Babylon? It seems to me that so to do were to dodge the problem I

am set to solve, and to hide my impotency in the thick of a crowd.

(_Journals_, Vol. V, pp. 473-474.)

In January, 1844, noting the spontaneity of life at Brook Farm, he drew

the conclusion “that in the arrangements at Brook Farm, as out of them,

it is the person, not the communist, that avails” (_ibid._, Vol. VI,

p. 492). With the introduction of Fourierist organization he became

sharply critical. Neither in Fourier nor in Owen did he see any hope.

Fourier learned from him [Owen] all the truth he had, and the rest

of his system was imagination, and the imagination of a banker. The

Owen and Fourier plans bring no _a priori_ convictions. They are

come at merely by counting and arithmetic. All the fine _aperçus_

are for individualism. The Spartan broth, the hermit’s cell,

the lonely farmer’s life are poetic; but the Phalanstery, the

“Self-supporting Village,” are culinary and mean. (_Ibid._, Vol.

VIII, pp. 134, 135.)

And a few days later he gave his final judgment, “Dear heart, take

it sadly home to thee, that there will and can be no coöperation”--a

judgment that explains the clever phrase with which he demolished Brook

Farm, “It is the Age of Reason in a patty-pan.”

The transcendentalist with his Puritan conscience could understand and

sympathize with the perfectionist zeal for universal righteousness;

but collectivistic systems of economy seemed alien and a community of

goods uncongenial to his Yankee individualism. Albert Brisbane, the

American apostle of Fourierism, might bring George Ripley, the least

individualistic and most prosaic of the transcendental group, to his

views of organization; but he got on badly with the others who were

quite too fluid to take a mechanical set. In consequence it was not at

Brook Farm but at the North American Phalanx that the French system

found its fairest experiment and met with its solidest success.

IV

With the awakening interest in social problems the conscience of New

England could not longer remain indifferent to slavery. The incoming

of French humanitarianism, the spread of idealistic sociology under

the teachings of Unitarianism, above all the stimulus of English

Abolitionism that provided argument and example in the freeing of

slaves in the British West Indies, wore away the indifferentism

that had calloused the mind of New England; and with the decay of

her provincial particularism the conscience of New England slowly

roused itself. The arrogance of the slave party nowhere else stirred

such deep resentment. Southern steel, striking the flinty Yankee

character, threw off sparks that would fire whatever combustible stuff

lay near; and such combustible stuff was provided in plenty by the

Utopian enthusiasts who gathered in conventions, each with a plan

of universal reform in his waistcoat pocket. Little conflagrations

were started in many an obscure Yankee soul, and the noise of the

crackling spread over New England, to the anger of the South and the

vast concern of respectable Boston merchants. Sooner or later Abolition

sentiment was bound to make a tremendous stir amongst the children of

Puritanism; and when that time came it was bound to arouse tremendous

antagonism amongst the sons of Yankees. The dominant commercial

group would not tolerate a movement that was certain to alienate its

southern customers. A mighty collision between the conscience and the

self-interest of New England was inevitable; and in that collision of

flinty characters, arguments were likely to be countered with blows.

The New England Abolitionists, men and women, were an extraordinarily

interesting group. They were good fighters, outspoken and tenacious of

opinion, unsparing in attack, refusing to be browbeaten, resilient

and tough as seasoned hickory. In them the Yankee Tory met his match;

against them coercion and intimidation, all the usual Tory weapons,

failed as earlier they had failed with the primitive Quakers. They

were daily charged with being social incendiaries. The commercial

newspapers thundered against them as atheists, Sabbath-breakers,

socialists, anarchists; the absurdest myths were given circulation;

the public mind was skillfully poisoned against them. Yet as a matter

of sober historical fact, they were the kindliest of men, with

generous sympathies and disinterested motives. No blackguard was ever

an Abolitionist--no ward-heeler, or mob-inciter, or purse-patriot;

all such convenient tools of power were found amongst the baiters

and mobsters in the commercial opposition. John Brown was the only

direct-action Abolitionist and what befell him is well known among men.

There was no money to be made, no place of honor or power to be got by

espousing Abolitionism, but only self-sacrifice and social ostracism.

Ambitious men, self-seekers, went with the dispensers of social

favors. It was the remnant in Israel that gathered to the cause, few

in numbers but the best New England had. And what an excellent company

they were: Garrison, Samuel J. May, Edmund Quincy, Jonathan Sewall,

Theodore Parker, Lydia Maria Child, Mrs. Chapman, Wendell Phillips,

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Whittier, Henry Ward Beecher, Sumner,

Maria White and the young Lowell--such a fighting phalanx as the New

England conscience had never before mustered, nor has since. To them

were gathered heroic souls from other states: Arthur and Lewis Tappan

and Gerrit Smith from New York, James Birney from Kentucky, Lucretia

Mott from Philadelphia, the Grimké sisters from South Carolina. Harriet

Martineau, who knew the group intimately, has left on record her

judgment of them: “A just survey of the whole world can leave little

doubt,” she wrote in 1838, “that the abolitionists of the United States

are the greatest people now living and moving in it” (Carpenter, _John

Greenleaf Whittier_, p. 107). They gave New England and the country no

peace. From their persistent agitation came the Emigrant Aid Society,

Sharp’s rifles, and the bloody struggle in Kansas; and from it came the

temporary overwhelming of the Tory minority in Massachusetts. For a few

brief years New England threw off the stifling grip of the commercial

mind and was the home of American humanitarianism.

Footnotes

[448] See T. W. Higginson, _Old Cambridge_, p. 149.

[449] See Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. I, Chapter VI. The

court held that it was libelous to seek to bring into disrepute an

action that was legal.

[450] Quoted by S. E. Morison in _Harrison Grey Otis_, Vol. II, p. 263.

[451] This was an outgrowth of the anti-slavery movement and emerged

from the conservative opposition to women’s appearing on the abolition

platform. The reply of the Quakeress, Angelina Grimké, to Elizabeth

Beecher’s _Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with reference to the

Duty of American Females_, in 1837, marks the definite beginning of the

movement. See Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, pp. 133-134.

[452] Written by Garrison; see _ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 230-234.

[453] See the essay on Thoreau.

Chapter IV • Certain Militants

I • William Lloyd Garrison

The flintiest character amongst the New England militants, curiously

enough, was the son of an immigrant family, brought to Newburyport

and abandoned by a shiftless father. William Lloyd Garrison was not

an offspring of generations of New England Puritanism, but a waif

thrown by chance on the bleak shores of Massachusetts, and left to

shift pretty much for himself. Born in Newburyport, half English and

half Irish, with a heritage that promised ill, he was disciplined in

the sternest of schools. His capable Irish mother had a bitter time

providing for her three fatherless children, and the son suffered

the privation and found the help that were the mixed portion of the

destitute of old New England. Like Horace Greeley he ate the bread of

poverty and grew strong on it. There was iron in his nature, and the

narrow means that drove his father to drink and desertion, that sent

his brother adrift, that broke his mother and killed his sister, only

strengthened his will and toughened his fiber. As a lad he was put to

the cobbler’s bench to learn the trade that Whittier was learning at

Haverhill; later he was apprenticed to a carpenter and cabinetmaker. In

both trades he was unhappy, and it was not till a freak of fate turned

him over to a friendly printer that he found himself. For seven years

he stuck to his case, and at the end of the apprenticeship he was not

only a first-rate practical printer, but with some little knowledge of

books and master of a vigorous and serviceable prose style. With the

amazing capacity for self-training so characteristic of the Yankee, he

had picked up a sort of education and was ready to do whatever work in

the world should come to hand.

Chance threw in his way the job of village editor, and inclination

plunged him into politics. His political opinions, which he embraced

more ardently than intelligently, were faithful reflections of current

Massachusetts partisanship. He was quite ignorant of political

principles and the economics that determined political parties, and

with unconscious naïveté he espoused the cause of Boston commercialism.

He was a dogmatic, unquestioning Whig. Clay was his idol, General

Jackson his abomination; and his first political speech was in support

of Harrison Gray Otis, the discredited boss of the old Federalist

machine. But this was only a vagary of youthful hero worship.

Enthusiasm for reform was already setting up a ferment in his ardent

soul and preparing him for quite other alliances. The unhappy fate of

his father was a lesson that he took home, and he interested himself

in the temperance movement then just getting under way, serving for

a time as editor of a small temperance paper. Shortly thereafter he

stumbled upon his life work. Benjamin Lundy, a homespun hero of the

Society of Friends, had long been publishing intermittently his _Genius

of Universal Emancipation_, and in the itinerant work of begging

support he fell in with Garrison. The two discovered kindred interests

and they entered into a compact to go forth together to fight the

dragon of slavery. They sought out the den of the beast in Baltimore

and delivered their blows lustily; with the result that Garrison was

indicted by the grand jury for printing the name of a Newburyport

merchant who was picking up some honest dollars in the coastwise slave

traffic, and spent seven weeks in jail. On his release he returned

to Boston to replenish a lean purse, and January 1, 1831, he issued

the first number of _The Liberator_, a little paper that was to make

a mighty stir in the world during a long period of hand-to-mouth

existence.

Never was there a more foolhardy venture, judged by the wisdom of this

world. With no following, no weapon but a borrowed font of type in

a mean little print-shop, no money or credit, he flung his defiance

at the entrenched enemy with the courage of uncalculating youth. A

prospectus issued in the fall of 1830 thus set forth the purpose of the

venture:

I shall assume, as self-evident truths, that the liberty of a

people is a gift of God and nature:--That liberty consists in an

independency upon the will of another:--That by the name of slave

we understand a man who can neither dispose of his person or goods,

but enjoys all at the will of his master:--That no man can have a

right over others, unless it be by them granted to him.... That

that which is not just is not law; and that which is not law,

ought not to be in force:--That he who oppugns the public liberty,

overthrows his own.... That there is no safety where there is no

strength, no strength without union, no union without justice, no

justice where faith and truth are wanting:--That the right to be

free is a truth planted in the hearts of men, and acknowledged so

to be by all that have hearkened to the voice of nature.... _Vide

Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government--the Declaration of

American Independence--the Constitutions and Bills of Rights of the

several States, etc., etc._ (_Life of William Lloyd Garrison, by

his Children._ Vol. I, p. 200.)

This pronouncement was amplified in the salutatory address in the first

number, as follows:

Assenting to the “self-evident truth” maintained in the American

Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and

endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights--among

which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” I shall

strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave

population.... I am aware that many object to the severity of my

language; but is there not cause for severity? I _will_ be as

harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject,

I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation ...

urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am

in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not

retreat a single inch--+AND I WILL BE HEARD+. (_Ibid._, Vol. I, pp.

224-225.)