The Story of Locomotion By W. J. Wiltshire

The Story of Locomotion By W. J. Wiltshire: ""

The Story of Locomotion By W. J. Wiltshire

The Story of Locomotion By W. J. Wiltshire: ""

The Story of Locomotion By W. J. Wiltshire

The Story of Locomotion By W. J. Wiltshire: ""

One of the things that interests me about the people I’m studying in the early 19th century, is their generally high level of literacy and understanding of what’s going on in the world, in spite of the remoteness of places like Ashfield.

When the religious bigots in his Berkshire hill-town of 1800 people tried to ruin his business, Dr. Charles Knowlton called the town to a meeting and made a long speech about belief, morality and politics. The year was 1833: Knowlton had published his Fruits of Philosophy the year before, and was using it with his patients in Franklin county.

“He that will not reason is a bigot, he that cannot reason is a fool, and he that dares not reason is a slave!” Knowlton announced to his neighbors.
“I proceed—
“There are no changes, no events, in a word, no effects without causes, and one effect as necessarily follows its cause as another, whether it occur within a man’s head or without. Every feeling of man, every thought of his brain, as necessarily has its cause as the movement of a water-wheel; and we all as necessarily think as we do think, as rocks unsupported fall to the ground. To admit that a man may think as he has a mind to, is not to admit one whit against what I have now advanced. To have a mind to think so and so, is but to have thoughts and ideas that you will think so and so,—every one of which thoughts or ideas must and does have its cause; which cause, whatever it may be, is but the effect of a prior cause, and this, again, the effect of a still prior cause, and so on throughout the eternal chain of events.”
“All those changes within a man’s head, called intellectual operations, such as remembering, judging, belief, &c. consist entirely of sensorial actions, called thoughts or ideas, which follow one after another, and every one of which has its cause.” (text of the speech as reported by Knowlton here)

The philosophy behind Knowlton’s ideas is remarkably like the 20th-century psychology of behaviorism. Knowlton had published a nearly 450-page book about his theories, called Modern Materialism, in 1829.

The crux of Knowlton’s argument to his neighbors is that freedom of opinion is the basis of American society. Knowlton’s grandfather and father had fought in the Revolution; it was still a recent event. Knowlton asked the townspeople to judge him by his behavior, not his beliefs. He subtly but unmistakably suggests that those who want to judge people by their beliefs rather than their actions (the minister and his friends) choose this because they know their actions will not stand close scrutiny. His charge against the church was dramatically proven when the congregation excommunicated a long-time member who stood up to the minister and supported his friend and doctor, Knowlton. The church was divided over the issue, and the minister was ultimately forced to resign.

The things that really strike me about Knowlton’s speech are the modernity of the argument, and the generally high level of its language and ideas. Knowlton was clearly an odd man, but he had some experience in public speaking. He was probably pitching his argument appropriately for his audience, which suggests they were an intelligent and well-read crowd. This is especially interesting, as most of them were back-country farmers and sheep-herders. An intellectual history of regular people might help me get a better idea of what these people were reading, thinking, talking about in the taverns. I wonder if there is one, or if I should try to do one?

The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the Virtuous Farmer by Douglass G. Adair (New York: Lexington Books, 2000), 1943 Yale dissertation.

Adair was apparently a legendary professor, who mentored a generation of historians. I first ran into him in the introduction to Daniel Sisson’s published dissertation. Sisson pretty much lifted his thesis, it turns out, from Adair’s introduction. But Adair was much more careful in his statement than Sisson turned out to be in his extrapolation of it.

This dissertation was unpublished forever, but the list of borrowers of the original document at Yale is supposedly a who’s who of history, at least in the minds of the borrowers. Many of Adair’s grad students seem to have found hints and ideas in it that they were able to pursue in their own studies.
Adair begins by situating his study as a post-Beard analysis of Jefferson and Madison’s political ideas. He asks whether something more should be added to Beard’s economic analysis, to explain why, although Hamilton and Madison’s economic ideas were “practically identical,” Madison, “the great antiparty philosopher of the Constitutional Convention, went into opposition and helped organize a highly effective party with Jefferson—supposedly Hamilton’s direct antithesis in economic doctrine”? (9-10)

The answer, Adair says, is that Jefferson and Madison shared a political outlook informed by the classical traditions going all the way back to Aristotle. Hamilton was also a student of the classics, Adair says; but his scholarship was shallower, and he failed to adapt what he learned in the ancient texts to the conditions in early America. He was too much of an idealist.
This is an interesting argument, and intuitively it’s very satisfying. Elite education in the eighteenth century was classical, and all three men (and John Adams, and the rest of the members of the Constitutional Convention) had a shared language. Adair makes his case that the founders didn’t just come up with their political philosophy by watching their neighbors in the Virginia piedmont, as some Turner-influenced historians apparently claimed. But the question of specifically how each man was able to adapt this shared classical heritage into their various plans for the American republic is left largely unanswered.

Adair leans heavily on the Scottish philosophers, especially David Hume, as progenitors of the founding fathers’ world view. He lists the books Madison studied under (Scottish) John Witherspoon at Princeton. In addition to Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes, Madison read Shaftesbury, Locke, Hume, Hutcheson, Mandeville, and Adam Smith. (26) The inclusion of Smith suggests the Republicans were not the economic illiterates that supporters of Hamilton make them out to be. Fisher Ames described Madison as “a thorough master of almost every public question that can arise, or he will spare no pains to become so.” (28) In a note, Adair mentions that by the 1850s, the prominence of continental political classics in school curricula was decreasing, resulting in an observed decrease in references to the ancients in political speeches. (31) But all evidence suggests Madison and Jefferson (and their serious contemporaries) arrived on the scene at the peak of classical scholarship.

Adair says Jefferson’s most powerful influence was Aristotle, and that the hope that a class of virtuous yeomen could stabilize a republic was lifted directly from the Politics. He describes Shay’s rebellion as a debtors’ revolt, echoing an interpretation based on politically motivated contemporary sources (like Knox’s letters to Washington). Leonard Richards’ recent study of the members of the rebellion contradicts the traditional story. Adair says the “ominous event” (quoting Madison, 61) sent the founders rushing back to their shelves for answers in “Thucydides, Xenophon, and Aristotle.” Maybe this was part of the solution…but maybe it also limited the effectiveness of the final solution. The two missing pieces of Adair’s puzzle seem to repeatedly be: how did regular people react to all this classically-inspired politics, and how accurately did the founders really understand their situation, before they fit it to the models written by the masters two millennia earlier?

Adair hints at the possibility of over-applying classical analogies, but only among Jefferson and Madison’s adversaries. Hamilton is described as brilliant, but with a shallow understanding of the classics (76). Adams’ use of Thucydides account of the sedition at Corcyra in his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States is shown to be not only “the most tenuous” of analogies (65), but also to miss the point that Shays and his rebels were behaving symbolically rather than trying to take over the State of Massachusetts. Adair argues that because the principals of the debates believed these analogies significant, we should consider their relationship to the events. This is probably true with respect to Adams’ paranoia, and may be an approach to assessing not only the strengths (as Adair suggests), but the weaknesses of the founders’ vision.

Gouverneur Morris’ posthumous opinion of Hamilton is quoted at length, and probably contains the seeds of a book or two:

Our poor friend Hamilton bestrode his hobby to the great annoyance of his friends, and not without injury to himself. More a theoretic than a practical man, he was not sufficiently convinced that a system may be good in itself, and bad in relation to particular circumstances. He knew well that his favorite form [monarchy] was inadmissible, unless as the result of a civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he called an approaching crisis arose from a conviction, that the kind of government most suitable, in his opinion, to this extensive country could be established in no other way. (77) (from)

“For nearly a generation American political thinkers had shared Locke’s exclusive concern,” Adair says, “with curbing the powers of kings. But now in the summer of 1787, the Convention delegates were almost unanimously agreed that the people themselves presented an additional problem.” (109) And perhaps the delegates’ nearly unanimous opinion highlights yet another problem. Ironically, after arguing that Beard ignored politics and ideas, Adair blames Hamilton for economic policies that “divided the American people into sharper cleavage than had existed since 1776.” (114) The reduction of the Confederacy’s problems to Hamilton’s national financial schemes, and the reduction of Hamilton to “a victim of his Plutarch and his Tacitus,” is the book’s greatest weakness. (Adair even quotes Woodrow Wilson: Hamilton was “a very great man, but not a great American,” to which a previous reader wrote in the margin, “TOSH!”)

Adair says Hamilton’s reductive mistake was his assumption of class struggle, that ultimately “faction [would] pivot entirely upon the conflict of haves and have-nots.” (120) Madison saw past this Hobbesian error after long review of his classics, Adair says, and “challenged the basic postulate upon which the ancient mixed government depended for its justification; and in so doing he exploded the justification for a permanent will in the community to keep the immutable strife of the few and the many within bounds.” But he never really says what those other elements of factionalism were, or how Madison proposed to keep them in check or play one against the other to stabilize his system. This is where a look back at Turner, who Adair threw out in the preface, might be helpful. Both Jefferson and Madison had experienced the frontier, and when the Louisiana Purchase was completed Madison breathed a sigh of relief and added a generation onto his expectation for America’s survival. (160) But Madison did the math, and decided that by 1930, Americans would “necessarily [be] reduced by a competition for employment to wages which afford them the bare necessities of life. The proportion being without property…cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its right to be safe depositories of power over them.” (161) “It would be impossible to base a republican government on a minority, without creating ‘a standing military force, dangerous to all parties and to liberty itself.’” Madison’s classics apparently held no answer; he simply hoped when the time came “the wisdom of the wisest patriots” in a future generation would pull them through (from “Notes on Suffrage” written during the Virginia Convention of 1829-30).

(Jedidiah Morse -- yeah, he was that scary!)

The Crisis of the Standing Order Peter S. Field (Amherst: Univ. of Mass Press, 1998)

Field’s thesis is that the Standing Order self-destructed in a war between proto-Unitarian “Brahmins” and orthodox Congregationalist leaders. The Brahmin ministers represented the interests of their supporters, the Boston merchant elite, and developed a high literary culture to meet their needs. The orthodox establishment, seeing their influence and authority slipping, attacked the Brahmins in an attempt to retain their role as intellectual rulers of Massachusetts.

Field notes early on that Puritan practice banned ministers from holding secular office, so their authority rested entirely on their leadership role in the intellectual life of their society. (1) He says the ministers of the “Standing Order gained cultural authority in direct proportion to society’s uncoerced adoption” of their ideas. (2) It’s ironic that the story of the orthodox fight to retain control in Mass is filled with their (futile) attempts to coerce. It’s not until they’ve completely hit bottom that Lyman Beecher convinces them to try revivalist persuasion. But then, they weren’t interested in reaching the middle class until the Brahmin ministers stole the upper class from them.

He cites an early 20th c. article on “The Revolt Against the Standing Order” I should probably read. And like Staloff, he builds on a foundation of Weber (Economy and Society), which I should probably read soon too.

Field proposes a “social history of intellectuals,” that treats the idealism of intellectual historians with a big dose of skepticism (if not cynicism), while retaining a focus on intellectuals as not only agents, but as a class (which he observes is missing from Marxist analysis. As a “new-class” theorist, Field argues with Weber that “ownership of the means of production is not the sole measure of the social division of labor.” (5) He seeks to undermine the “belief that intellectuals are heroically engaged in the disinterested pursuit of truth,” but it’s unclear to me whether he proves his case. Jedediah Morse is a really nasty guy in Fields’ story, but I’m not sure he’s insincere.

What is clear is that the increasingly public disagreements between the orthodox clergy and their urbane, polished, and increasingly rich adversaries made it clear to anyone paying attention in the early decades of the 19th c., that the ministry was filled with partisans. This devolution of the Puritan edifice into competing sects eliminated their claim to cultural dominance and divine inspiration. It’s incredible to me that Morse managed to survive the Illuminati hoax with any credibility at all – and that might be a topic for further study.

The fight over the Hollis Professorship of Divinity in 1805 begins (in a rare moment of physicality) with the completion of the West Boston Bridge, Nov. 23rd 1793. The orthodox leaders fight viciously, but lose control of Harvard. But did they have it before? Field mentions that David Tappan’s pupils are among the brightest lights of the new Brahmin ministry. Is he finding an abrupt change where there was really a slow evolution? Similarly, Field says no reasonable Federalist believed Morse’s Illuminati story. So what was going on? Who were the orthodox ministers talking to (besides themselves)? Were they carrying public opinion? At what point did the Brahmin elitist ministry lose touch with regular people? Or was it ever in touch with them? Certainly not through the Athenaeum or the Anthology. And what about western Mass? Revivalism began there in the 1790s, long before Beecher moved to Boston.

Field passes quickly over the first Great Awakening, saying it was a great threat to the Standing Order but not how. He places the ministers firmly on the side of the revolutionists (and says that until the Committees of Correspondence, they were nearly the only conduits of information, 26), which again illustrates a Boston-only focus. Most of the western ministers were Tories until they had no choice, and some remained Loyalists. Maybe highlighting Chauncy, Mayhew and Thacher gives Field an origin of orthodox ministers’ view of their role in politics. But in the Puritan colony, this would have been taken for granted. Its survival after the revolution is the issue.

Field mentions several items that don’t fit smoothly into his interpretation, like the fact that Joseph Hawley brought a bill to the General Court in 1777 to disestablish the church, but “he could not muster enough support even to bring it to the floor for a vote.” Field credits the clergy with defeating the 1778 Mass Constitution, but doesn’t provide any context (but he refers to this). William Gordon, chaplain of the Court, got himself fired for criticizing the constitution in the papers, and thirteen ministers attended the convention as delegates of their towns. Where were these towns, and what was the agenda of the ministers? Lots of western Mass towns instructed their representatives to block the constitution if possible; but not over religion. How did religious objections stack up to civil ones? Field doesn’t discuss.

According to Morison, there were “At least twenty-nine towns [that] distinctly stated their opposition to Article 3” establishing the church. Hawley said: “it is far from indisputable, and positively denied by many, viz, That it is the duty of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons to worship, &c….It is inconsistent with the unalienable rights of conscience, which rights are certainly unalienable, if mankind have, (as the first article avers they have) any such rights.” (38)

Field doesn’t really deal with the gradual shift of attitudes observed by some at the time, and he credits the revolution with imposing a “limited moratorium on theological controversy” (52). He does outline the family ties between the proto-Unitarians and the merchant elite, and makes a good case that theirs was “as much a social as a religious enterprise.” (80) In fact, this seems to be the chief complaint of the orthodox. John Thornton Kirkland married the daughter of George Cabot; William Ellery Channing married Ruth Gibbs; Harvard professors Andrews Norton and George Ticknor married the daughters of Samuel Elliot; and Edward Everett married the daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks, the first millionaire in Boston.

Field says the wealthy Bostonians left politics when the Federalists were defeated, and set about establishing high culture. But his chronology wanders back and forth from the 1790s to 1808 and beyond. This seems to undermine his claim that these groups were acting as self-aware, unified classes when they battled over the Illuminati in 1798 or David Tappan’s Hollis chair in 1803-5. Field says “Almost to a man, Brahmin ministers had begun to eschew the kind of active participation in politics entailed in…election-day sermons and fast days.” (91-2) But is that chicken or egg? Their patrons, the Boston merchants, were disaffected with politics after 1800. They weren’t looking for their ministers to rub their noses in their defeat. The Brahmin ministers might have faced a different set of expectations if Jefferson had been defeated.

“Theology,” said Joseph Stevens Buckminster, “is the subject upon which much of our genius and learning has always been employed, and not seldom wasted.” (97) It’s funny, in a sort-of “Emperor’s New Clothes” way. The merchants and their make-believe ministers made a show of religion to please the society they lived in and advance their own social standing. What a shock to the orthodox, who thought it was something else entirely. Fifty years from the “visible sainthood” of the New Lights to the Anthology’s editorial policy of “useful knowledge and harmless amusement, sound principles, good morals, and correct taste.” (97)

It is a sound point, though, that Boston was different from the rest of the state because its churches were NOT supported by taxes, they were all voluntary (a legacy of John Cotton?). As a result, those who contributed more expected to be treated accordingly, even if they were not “members” on the basis of a conversion experience. But Field doesn’t explain how the half-way covenant mitigated the requirements for membership, or what effect that had. And again, Field admits on p. 143 that John Adams wrote to Morse that the ideas he complained were recent and Unitarian had been around for 65 years.

Field remarks that there were two distinct responses among the (nearly 100%) Federalist ministers. The Brahmins retreated from politics; the orthodox went nuts. Of course, the orthodox couldn’t retreat, because the Brahmins had already claimed that hill. Who were their constituents? What was their market? But by 1820, even Morse’s own parish tired of his “engagements in, and encouragement of controversies [and] indiscriminate distribution of contradictory pamphlets and tracts.” (146) They replaced him, and he accused them of being “obviously Unitarians.”

In a letter to Oliver Wolcott Jr. (July 13 1798), Morse went so far as to declare it was “necessary to exterminate [their] dangerous enemies,” the Boston clergy who disagreed with them and refused to knuckle under to Morse’s self-appointed authority. (150) In his biography of Harrison Gray Otis, Samuel Eliot Morison says “neither Otis nor any other prominent Federalist subscribed to the [Illuminati] theory.” While they’d tried to support Morse’s attacks on the republican plot, Federalist papers like the Columbian Centinal and Chronicle were nervous about their own credibility. “Embarrassed by his recklessness, they shut Morse out.” (150) Maybe part of the problem ministers like Morse were having is they believed they were living in an earlier world; where the clergy was not only the only source of information about the outside world for most people, but the prestige of the clergy virtually guaranteed that whatever the pastor told his flock would be believed. Newspapers, pamphlets and broadsheets of the revolutionary era definitely widened the average person’s view of the world. But maybe the biggest damage was done by ministers like Morse, who showed themselves to be petty, partisan, and worst of all, miserably wrong.

The Yale connection to all of the orthodox leaders is too good to pass by. Timothy Dwight demands a closer look. I need to get Speaking Aristocracy, to give myself at least one chance to see a positive portrayal of Yale and its presidents. In addition, the careers of the presidents of Amherst, Dartmouth and Williams will probably have some surprises in them. Griffin, who Knowlton talked with a couple of times while living in Adams, seems to be up to his elbows in controversy in the 1800s and 1810s.

Morse’s Panoplist claimed to be the “antidote” (153) to the wickedness and infidelity spewed by the Anthology. Morse wasted little time in calling for ministerial examinations to insure creedal uniformity. Without rigid enforcement of correct doctrines, he said, “liberty, free enquiry [and] private judgment [were becoming] instruments of infidelity, and a fair mask, under which apostasy from Christianity and hatred of all goodness have disguised themselves.” (159) I wonder about this type of language. Who is he talking to? Hatred of all goodness? These are other Congregational clergymen he’s talking about, and the people who fill their churches every Sunday. Not some crowd of blood-drinking Satan-worshippers. Field doesn’t really explain who the audience for this type of rhetoric is, or how effective it was. Without that context, it just seems absurd.

The Andover Seminary’s creed, which all faculty had to swear and renew every five years, pledged “unswerving opposition , ‘not only to Atheists and Infidels, but to Jews, Papists, Mahomatans, Arians, Pelagians, Antimonians, Arminians, Socinians, Sabellians, Unitarians, and Universalists.” (168) So basically, they hated everybody. The Brahmins “deemed the doctrinal hairsplitting of the orthodox distasteful, uncharitable, and anachronistic.” (171) William Ellery Channing called the creed part of Andover’s “espionage of bigotry.” (167)

Field points out that the “growing class nature of Massachusetts society may not have been the efficient cause, but it was certainly a necessary cause of the crisis…” (183) He says the older (and increasingly female) communicants were less prosperous than their neighbors, implying that the time required to achieve their high level of religious devotion cut them off from worldly success. There’s a good chance these people may have “believed that the shrinking number of public confessions signaled a serious decline in religiosity” in Massachusetts, as Field says. He doesn’t show this, and it’s an area for possible research. (In general, Field ignores the audiences of the clerics he writes about, which is unfortunate) During the Dorchester conflict (when Codman refuses to exchange pulpits with Brahmins as his parishioners want), the orthodox minister’s enemies are described as being “exceedingly fond of amusements.” (197) Field points out this statement points to an underlying class conflict, but again he doesn’t describe how it was received. The ultimate secularization of the church occurs in this conflict, when wealthy parishioners demand a say in the church equal to their contribution. This is democracy! And exactly what the orthodox have been fighting all along.

Field points out the irony of ultra-conservative Boston elites fighting for liberal, democratic ideals in their churches. (204) But maybe he’s missing the point. Maybe the Brahmins’ position was like the Baptists’ during the revolution: they weren’t really against estabishment and authority, they were against someone else having it over them. But the irony resolves itself, when the 1821 Dedham decision rules that the assets of the church belong to the parish, not the saints. At that point, the orthodox seem to realize Morse and his crew have done them no good. Morse seems to disappear very rapidly from the picture, to be replaced with Lyman Beecher. Beecher tells them that establishment is against their interests, because they’re the outsiders. So, having nothing left to lose, the orthodox finally embrace their “age-old populist rhetoric concerning the ungodliness of the wealthy and the dangers of materialism,” (205) creating what Field calls “the American Religion.”

Abandoning establishment allowed the orthodox to go after the middle class people who’d been drifting toward Baptist and Methodist sentiments. The ministers swallowed their pride and embraced revivalism, holding 116 in Mass in 1831 (232). 81 “churches” (ministers and communicants) were “exiled” by parish revolts by 1833, according to a study made by the orthodox and presented to their General Association of Massachusetts Ministers. (229) Is this the meeting Mason Grosvenor attends, which prompts him to go after “infidelity and licentiousness” in Ashfield? The 1832 meeting of the General Association of Massachusetts Congregational Ministers was held in Northampton and dealt extensively with temperance. Where was the 1833?

The 11th amendment to the Mass constitution, disestablishing religion, went into effect January 1 1834. This fits perfectly with the issues in Ashfield, and may explain some of the undercurrents and tensions behind them.

The Making of an American Thinking Class by Darren Staloff (1998)

This was a challenging text, which assumed a prior knowledge of the events of the Puritan period, and applied the formulas of what Staloff calls a post-revisionist approach that was heavily influenced by Marx and Weber.

Texts he refers to a lot: Perry Miller, Alvin Goldner (The Dark Side of the Dialectic), George Conrad and Ivan Szelenyi (Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power), Larzer Ziff,

“Marxist outlaws have not surrendered the dialectic, but continue to probe and wander its dark side. Only those who can move without joining packaged tours of the world can afford such a journey.” (quoting Alvin Gouldner, 2) This is a great image. Of course, Marxists aren’t the only types of outlaws running off the beaten paths…

Staloff’s thesis is that Puritan Massachusetts was run by an alliance of intellectuals (ministers, the producers of culture) and intelligentsia (magistrates, who administered culture through politics). The basis of their shared power he names cultural dominance, which he says is built on four principles:
1. public recognition or ritual acceptance of leaders
2. leaders always agree publicly (avoid schisms)
3. public expressions of the dominant culture are “socially privileged” and single source
4. dissent is suppressed, as are unauthorized expressions of culture

Staloff’s history of the Bay Puritans is a series of challenges to, defenses of, and ultimately violations of these principles, resulting in the gradual undermining of the ruling party’s cultural dominance. Staloff doesn’t disparage the notion that the Puritan rulers, dissidents, and the laity had sincere theological differences; but he’s clearly not interested in them. He suggests at several points that he’s examining the true underlying causes of individual and group actions, even when the people involved were unaware of them.

The way the Bay Colony was established certainly lends itself to the type of self-conscious, premeditated construction of the state Staloff claims. The colony was, as he says, “Designed and staffed by a class-conscious and dissident educated elite.” (12) Staloff mentions events in England only briefly (although his historiographical appendix is mostly about English Puritanism), but reminds the reader that the Bay Puritans are (or at least may consider themselves) the radicals in an intercontinental movement (actually, Staloff lets his theory get away from him for a moment and calls them the “vanguard of the militant Protestant internationale”).

Staloff argues that the colony’s toleration of high-ranking dissenters like Roger Williams (who was treated with kid gloves at a time when lesser men were being “whipped, have his ears cutt of, Fyned £40, and banished…for uttering mallitious and scandalous speeches against the government and the church of Salem.” 21) was due to his status as a member of the intellectual ruling elite. Every attempt was made to reconcile Williams’ differences with the ruling consensus, to avoid the appearance that the fundamental truths on which Puritan society was based were open to a variety of interpretations. Anne Hutchinson was more easily dealt with, because she was a woman; the magistrates took much greater care bringing John Cotton (her mentor and the teacher of the Boston church) back into the fold.

John Cotton presented his fellow leaders with an ongoing dilemma. He argued for a more charismatic faith, where evidence of grace was somewhat disassociated from works (not as much as Anne Hutchinson believed, as it turned out). In a sense, Cotton was “seeing” the Puritans’ miraculous-biblical social basis, and “raising” them with claims of contemporary miracles (experiences of saving grace as a qualification for “saint” status). How could they deny him, and sustain their own claims? This would later prove their undoing, when Increase Mather took it too far and prophesied against the British authorities.

It’s interesting that these Puritan issues foreshadow later Massachusetts religious issues. The Edwards controversy in Northampton revolved around a charismatic minister, a revivalist message, and election by a claimed experience that was beyond the control of the regular hierarchy. The communion of saints was at the same time more exclusive and more democratic (or at least anarchistic, because it wasn’t based on the accepted tests of worth). In addition, Roger Williams’ call for disestablishment challenged the legitimacy of the state’s role in allying with a particular group of religious leaders. This issue reappears in the Ashfield Baptists’ fight to relieve themselves from taxes to support the Congregational church. And Cotton’s preference for at will offerings (in the richest parish in New England) over forced tithes reappears in Chileab Smith’s schism with his son Ebenezer over ministerial salary at the end of the 18th century.

The Antinomian dissent was apparently supported by many of the Boston merchants, but Staloff doesn’t make it clear how or why the “urban bourgeoisie” transformed their dissatisfaction with the “arcane economic policy” (40) of the inner party into Anne Hutchinson’s theological break with Puritan orthodoxy. Staloff seems unclear about who’s using whom in this passage. On the one hand, he agrees with Ziff that “so long as the doctrine itself was under attack, he stood by them, but when it became clear to him…that they aimed at a social revolution and were willing even to pervert doctrine to achieve it, he abandoned them.” But in the next paragraph, “Cotton attempted to use the Antinomians in the same fashion that Mao Tse-tung used the Red Guards in his struggle for absolute preeminence against the other members of the inner party elite.” (42) So which is it? Was Cotton a theological idealist, or a cynical political infighter?

By 1637, the Quakers had identified another danger to the Puritan regime. If the orthodox leaders allowed the existence of an “inner light,” then anyone could claim a personal revelation that was superior (or at least equivalent) to the Word as preached by the ministers. The Synod of 1637 identified and condemned it as Error #53: “No Minister can teach one that is anointed by the Spirit of Christ, more than hee knows already unlesse it be in some circumstances.” (45) This is obviously true as well of Cotton’s saints, but they weren’t pressing the point and Cotton was still one of the foremost ministers in the colony. Going after him and his flock would violate the second rule. And Cotton avoided violating “the ritual code of deference that surrounded the clergy and supported their system of cultural domination.” (first rule)(50)

Eighteenth century clerics might have justified their intrusions into politics based on Puritan traditions. “At the beginning of each annual Court of Elections, a duly appointed member of the ministry would preach a decidedly political and often factionally partisan election sermon to the assembled freemen.” (74) But as the civil and religious organizations began to drift apart, crossovers of magistrates (like Winthrop) into religious theorizing began to be resisted by the ministers. It seems to have taken much longer for the ministers to be judged as incompetent to hold political opinions (if it ever happened at all).

“Harvard College (named after Rev. John Harvard of Charlestown, who died Sept. 14 1638 leaving £1600 and a library of 400 books) played an indispensable role in supplying cultural cohesion and hierarchical control. The college collected a common cultural core which, through the ministers, would be exported to every settlement in the land. By 1660, there were 135 college-trained leaders among the second generation, of whom 116 were Harvard graduates.” (q Harry Stout, 94-5) (cf New England’s First Fruits) In addition, the college graduated magistrates for the General Court and teachers for the Latin schools, to prepare the next generation of Harvard men. The college’s 2nd president, Henry Dunster, was sacked for becoming a Baptist, but he was neither banished nor excommunicated, even though standard treatment of Baptists included floggings and heavy fines. Staloff attributes this to the fact that Dunster humbly complied with his admonitors. “Here lay the key to Puritan toleration and repression: orthodox unanimity was sought not as an end in itself but as a means to cultural domination,” Staloff concludes. (100)

In 1638, the church took its first steps toward establishment. The court ordered that “every inhabitant in any towne is lyable to contribute to all charges, both in church and commonwealth, whereof hee doth or may receive benefit.” (106) This is an interesting construction, clearly showing the author’s belief that church and commonwealth are two elements of a single society that everyone is responsible to keep up. The difficulty is that the strict covenant (and Cotton’s even stricter requirement for signs of “saving grace”) disqualified most of the population from church membership. The colony’s original inclusive churches had evolved into very exclusive communities of saints. So the involuntary assessment for their support amounted to taxation without participation. This foreshadows the next century’s difficulties with establishment, and helps explain the tradition that formed the clergy’s expectation of support from their flocks.

Samuel Gorton was thrown out of Boston, and then out of Portsmouth (RI) for his heretical ideas. He went to Providence, but annoyed even the liberals there; so he went to Pawtuxit (Pawtucket). Massachusetts annexed Pawtuxit in 1642 to drive him out and secure the hinterlands from heresy, and Gorton bought land in Shawomet. “Gorton and his followers had purchased their land from Miantonomo, the sachem of the Narragansetts. Unfortunately, two of his subsachems who resided in the locality, Punham and Sacononoco, objected to the sale. In the spring of 1643, the two traveled to Boston to place themselves and their followers under the Massachusetts jurisdiction and thus regain control of the land…” (109-110) This is an interesting example, 32 years before King Philip’s War, of the natives interacting with colonial government as if they consider it legitimate.

After the Cambridge Platform, the “one-party regime” reached its peak. “The word was widely preached to forced attendance, the number of orthodox gathered churches grew, three intercolonial synods were held, remonstrants were imprisoned and heavily fined, Baptists were banished, and Quakers were flogged and executed. How much more Puritan could the Bay Colony be?” Staloff asks. The ministers were growing more distant from their people, evidenced by their correspondence. “Shall I tell you what I think to be the ground of all this insolence, which discovers itself in the speech of men?” Peter Bulkeley asked John Cotton. “Truly I cannot ascribe it to any outward thing, as to the putting of too much liberty into the hands of the multitude, which they are too weak to manage…” (115) Staloff says the laity’s loss of power in the church was partly balanced by a gain of some control over politics, as the deputies began disagreeing more frequently with the magistrates. The Halfway Covenant was the ministers’ attempt to regain control over the population, by bringing them back into the church that “saving grace” had disqualified them from.

The “saints” in the congregations resisted this change, because it devalued the position of the laity overall. A larger and generally less educated congregation increased the power of the minister, by widening the distance between him and his flock in terms of biblical knowledge and theological authority. But the distance between the people and their leaders continued to grow. The synod of 1646 authorized the General Court to pass laws regulating religious behavior. In addition to a number of finable offences, they decided “the death penalty was prescribed for blasphemy and, more pointedly, for any person who dared ‘reproach the holy religion of God, as if it were but a polliticke devise to keep ignorant men in awe.’…Failure to attend the ministers’ public exercises—‘the ordinary meanes to subdue the harts of hearers not onely to the faith, & obedience to the Lord Jesus, but also to civill obedience, and allegiance unto magistracy;--would draw a fine of 5 shillings for each such occurrence.” (125) Clearly, these measures were not adopted for no reason.

In 1657 the Quakers came and threw themselves into martyrdom, apparently interesting a lot of common people in the process. Staloff claims “the ultimate significance of the Quaker movement for the orthodox Bay regime was that it thus forced the magistrates and ministers to neutralize the danger of an unchurched majority that might easily be induced to support heterodox dissent.” The solution was to bring the people back into the church using the halfway qualifications. “Discipline was our great Interest,” claimed Increase Mather. (136) “The most important way in which the half-way covenant centralized church power was by devaluing lay consent,” (137) as well as the learning and emotional commitment required to qualify for membership. Of course, only full members could vote.

By the mid 1670s, the magistrates were using friendly clergy regularly to support their political agendas. The 1676 pre-election speaker, Harvard graduate William Hubbard, told his audience that those who called for “a parity in any Society, will in the issue reduce things into a heap of confusion.” (174) In other words, shut up and do what we tell you. The problem the people faced was, the messages from the pulpit were becoming more fragmented, as the clergy’s unanimity started to fray. Sometimes, the message was downright incredible, even for Puritans.

“Do not say that the Ministers of God cannot tell you why this Judgment has come,” Increase Mather told his listeners. Mather tried to reclaim the clergy’s authority over day-to-day secular events, by claiming to have prophesied King Philip’s War. He predicted further troubles for the colony, unless the people obeyed his directions for making peace with an angry God. A reforming synod was called in 1679, that adopted most of Mather’s proposals. Interestingly, it was Solomon Stoddard who turned the synod from requiring testimony of saving grace, to “a personal and publicke profession of their Faith and Repentance,” (181) which paved the way for the half-way covenant. Staloff’s chronology seems confused here (or more likely his narrative is just too convoluted), but I should look into the debates between Stoddard and the Mathers (Cotton and Increase), and follow the thread down to Stoddard’s grandson, Jonathan Edwards. (cf Mather, A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostacy, 1677)

Mather’s perpetual insistence on an immanent crisis wore his supporters out. By 1682, Mather was complaining that Satan attacked the people in his church, and “he causeth them to sleep at Sermons.” (182) Mather warned his listeners that “God himself is speaking to you…though by mortal men like unto your selves,” (183) and that not only the minister but the almighty was offended when they dozed off. But his sermons had strayed so far from any relevance with their lives that they were unable to stay awake for them.

The colony’s relationship with the British Crown also suffered from Increase Mather’s stubborn insistence on his own infallibility. When it became clear that the king wanted changes in the Bay charter, reflecting increased religious liberty and toleration of other sects, Mather declared that there could be no compromise. At the 1684 elections, Mather purged the “accommodationist” members of the Court, and prayed for deliverance. On Feb. 6 1685 after fasting and meditation, Mather claimed that “God will deliver New England!” Coincidentally (when did Mather claim his vision?), King Charles II died the same day.

Unfortunately for Massachusetts Bay, James II suspended the colony’s charter and disbanded their government. The Dominion of Edmund Andros ended with the Glorious Revolution, but unlike Rhode Island and Connecticut, Massachusetts was not allowed to reinstate its previous government. Increase Mather negotiated a new charter, which was far less generous than the deal the other colonies got. Staloff concludes his account by observing that the “calumnies heaped on Mather perfectly symbolized the breakdown of cultural domination for which he had been largely responsible.” (188)

The American Revolution of 1800 by Daniel Sisson

This was originally a PhD dissertation, apparently for Douglass Adair, who Sisson says inspired his research. It begins well, and I was impressed enough after 30 pages to want a copy of this for my library (which is saying something, as I’ve pared that down to about 30 books). The reviewers almost unanimously hated it, and the book does bog down pretty quickly, while at the same time not going deep enough into unpublished primary material. Most of Sisson’s primary quotes seem to be lifted from secondary sources or published selections of his subjects’ papers.

Even so, Sisson’s thesis is provocative. He challenges historians with finding the modern two party system too soon in post-Revolutionary America, insisting that this was emphatically NOT the goal of anyone in the 1790s. Instead, he builds a definition of revolution based on Jefferson’s understanding of the classics. Following the Gracchi brothers, Sisson says, Jefferson and his Republican associates built a “second city” revolutionary movement to take power away from the Federalists they believed were betraying the spirit of ’76 and moving toward monarchy.

Sisson quotes Jefferson’s claim that “The Revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” One of his reviewers points out that this quote comes from a private letter, and is taken out of context. Regardless, it may highlight Jefferson’s understanding of what he was doing in the 1790s. Sisson opens an interesting train of thought here. Why did the ’76 revolution fail to produce the changes Jefferson wanted, requiring a second “revolution” in 1800? What did the 1790s teach Americans about the operation of democracy, in a world where there wasn’t the unanimity they may have expected? Did the Republicans think they were wiping out the monarchists and finishing the revolution, while at the same time they were showing Americans how to operate their democracy? Did Henry Adams undermine Jefferson’s own interpretation of his campaign and presidency?

Sisson claims “During the period of High Federalist ascendancy Jefferson noted again and again the Federalists’ lack of faith in the meaning of the first American Revolution.” (11) There’s a lot of space to examine the real intentions of the diverse group that united to produce the revolution, and no reason to suppose that Jefferson’s interpretation of its “meaning” is the true or legitimate one. It succeeded because he rallied the people to it in 1800, but was he following or shaping public opinion? Sisson also observes that Jefferson “adopted a posture of philosophical vagueness that allowed his opponents to read into his intentions a positive view of the future.” Jefferson’s ability to clothe (disguise?) his program to create a mass movement for it is interesting, but it’s precisely the idea of partisanship that Sisson is arguing against.

Sisson mentions Bernard Bailyn and Douglass Adair repeatedly; the best things I get out of this book may be echoes of them, and the references to their work—that I’ll now go and find.

Sisson portrays Adams’ firing of Pickering from his cabinet as his moment of clarity, when he realizes the High Federalists have betrayed the revolution and “plung[es] a sword” into his own administration. (21) It’s interesting that he refuses to throw Adams under the bus; but he needs to sustain that argument that the original revolution lived on in the minds of the founders, so how could Adams betray it? Even though his argument is weak, I come away from it with new interest in both Jefferson and Adams.

Jefferson’s remark that “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time,” (50) pretty much damns Sisson’s argument that the politicians of 1790 were unaware of partisanship. His point that they abhorred the idea of parties and factions in their writing begs questions about the purposes of the writings he quotes. Could Jefferson and his contemporaries have desired a one-party state in the same way current politicians desire “bipartisanship”? As a code for “us getting our way and the other guys seeing the errors of their ways?

Were the Republicans and Federalists REALLY scared it was going to come down to war again? Or were they using popular reaction to the French Revolution for political purposes? No doubt they were sincere; but maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we don’t like to see the “founding fathers” using all these tawrdy political devices to achieve what we consider our historic destiny?

To the extent that the standard histories see the 1790s as the beginning of a completely modern 2 party system, I think Sisson makes a compelling counter-argument. Ironically, it reminds me a lot of the 2008 campaign. Two parties each trying to completely wipe out the other, a candidate with a revolutionary goal which he dissembles in order to build a mass movement and avoid alarming his opponents, charges by ideological purists that “he’s not going far enough.”

Sisson opens some space around (what he claims is) the standard interpretation and stirs things up, as does Jefferson’s observation that the same parties have always existed. If this is the case, then what did the founders EXPECT to happen after they won? And, if the binary, 2-party choice continually reproduces these poles, is this really the way to go? If the only choices are black and white, then people will choose the pole they think is closest to their real color, even though it’s a poor match. Maybe the mistake is in mobilizing campaigns around these poles (or believing that’s what the founders were about), rather than changing the game so that everyone gets more of what they want. If Sisson’s point is that the founders thought they were doing that, then it was an interesting one.

The Unknown American Revolution by Gary B Nash
2005 popular history, by UCLA professor who specializes in women, Native and African Americans in history. The book reflects this focus, and yet still seems to dwell excessively on the names you’ll find in any old-fashioned political history. I grabbed a bunch of things that pertain to my interests, and added a bunch more books he refers to, to my queue of titles.

Nash mentions that George Lippard was called out for embellishing his histories with legend or things he just made up. He defended his attempt to personalize the story, saying that official history or the “thing that generally passes for History is the most insolent, swaggering bully, the most graceless braggart, the most reckless equivocator that ever staggered forth on the great stage of the world.” (xxvi) You can’t really argue with that…

The Great Awakening, in this treatment, is “a search for new sources of authority, new principles of action, new foundations of hope.” (quoting William G. McLoughlin, 8) “The Awakeners preached that the old sources of authority were too effete to solve the problems of the day, too encrusted with tradition, self-indulgence, hypocrisy, and intellectualism to bring a sense of hope and faith to a generation that was witnessing the transformation of the world…” (8) In what way was their world transformed? All the listed problems would have been equally recognizable to infidels – is it really a reaction of people who want to remain religious, to outside critiques?

George Whitefield’s message was that “God did not work through the elite corps of learned clergy and their aristocratic allies. Rather…through the inner light…The message was one of social leveling, for it put all people on one footing insofar as the conversion experience was concerned.” (8-9) This argument was also played out (the levelers lost) in the English Civil War, and countless other times in Christian history. It explains how Jonathan Edwards could be socially democratic and theologically ultra-conservative, because the evidence of grace had to be based on some measure, if not on material success.

“Virginia’s ruling class had another reason to fear and oppose religious enthusiasm: It held great appeal for the enslaved.” (10)

Ethan Allen: New York attorney general John Tabor Kempe won a court victory over the Hampshire Grants. “Allen later wrote that Attorney General Kempe took him aside in a tavern the night of the court decision and tried to get him to convince his farmer friends to leave the area or recognize that they had new landlords. Said Kempe—at least in Allen’s recollection—“We have might on our side, and you know that might often prevails against right.” Allen claims he replied, “The gods of the hills are not the gods of the valley,” indicating that the New England farmers would not give up their lands without a fight.” (110)

“The New York Riot Act, which Allen promptly called the ‘Bloody Act,’ specified that an assembly of three or more persons with ‘unlawful intent’ would be subjected to the provisions of the law, which included capital punishment for infractions such as destroying fences and outhouses and burning haystacks. With the Continental Congress about to assemble in Philadelphia, Allen defiantly wrote to [Governor] Tryon that ‘We shall more than three, nay more than three times three hundred, assemble together if need be to maintain our common cause” and promised that “Printed sentences of death will not kill us…We will kill and destroy any persons, whomsoever, that shall presume to be accessory, aiding or assisting, in taking any of us.’” (111)

cf Thomas Young Reflections on the Disputes Between New York, New Hampshire, and Col. John Henry Lydius, 1746

“The Baptist religious revolution of the 1760s was far more subversive than the Presbyterian revivalism of the 1740s and 1750s because it challenged gentry values and their social order more sharply and reached even lower into the social order for its recruits. It was all the more subversive because almost all Baptist preachers were unschooled farmers or artisans—men drawn from ‘Christ’s poor.’” (147-8) cf Israel Williams’ tirade against Chileab and Ebenezer Smith of Ashfield and their church.

“Vermont’s constitution went farther than Pennsylvania’s in several respects: it provided unrestricted manhood suffrage without even a taxpayer qualification; made all judges elective; gave special protection to debtors; and declared all slaves free, without compensation to their owners…The abolitionist principal received real application when Yale-trained David Avery arrived in Bennington to assume the pulpit of the Congregational church in 1779. There he found that his congregation refused to commune with him because he owned a female slave. Encouraged by Ethan Allen, the woman sued for her freedom.” (282)

“New York’s legislature went so far as to threaten to withdraw from the war against England unless Congress took ‘speedy and vigorous measures for reducing them [the Vermonters] to an obedience.’” (282)

“In many respects, the New York constitution was the most conservative passed by the states…it lacked a bill of rights… Ira Allen, Ethan’s youngest brother, carried the constitutions of New York and Vermont from town to town in the Green Mountains region in 1777, inviting the citizens to compare them carefully…Forty towns in the region endorsed Vermont’s constitution while rejecting New York’s as perversely undemocratic.” (282-3)

“In no other state did ideas about the people as the foundation of all political authority ebb away so quickly in the face of a resurgent conservative view that favored strict limits on popular power.” (291)

Theophilus Parsons’ Essex Result was a criticism of the [already ultra-conservative] draft for the Mass constitution, claiming it didn’t do enough to protect the wealthy against democracy. (298-9)

“Reconvening to count the votes in early June 1780, the convention declared that the requisite two-thirds of the voters had given their approval…they had a constitution. But it was not a constitution that they had actually approved. Of 290 towns returning votes…only 42 accepted it without amendment…nearly half of them rejected the constitution because it strangled the voice of the people at large in favor of a government controlled by the elite…The constitution, wrote [Joseph] Hawley violated ‘the natural, essential and inalienable right’ of every freeman to vote and hold office.” (302-3)

John Hancock was elected governor. One of his first acts was to receive the resignations of two militia captains, Samuel Talbot and Lemuel Gay, who had been disenfranchised by the new Mass constitution’s property requirements in the course of fighting in the Revolution. Their small farms had dwindled while they were away fighting. They said “We can no longer with truth encourage our fellow soldiers, who are so poor as to be thus deprived of their fundamental rights, that they are fighting for their own freedom; and how can an officer possessed of the generous feelings of humanity detach any of them into a service in which they are not interested.” They refused to lead men to fight for “a form of government…that appears repugnant to the principals of freedom.” (304-5)

How do historians possibly excuse Robert Morris?

For a version of this with live links, try http://www.danallosso.com/Reading/Reading.html