Conservative Voices in the Western Messenger: William Greenleaf Eliot and Harm Jan Huidekoper

Abstract

The Western Messenger (1835–41) has often been given honorable mention in American literary history and has some reputation as one of the best-written magazines to appear in the early American West. Many scholars who are at all familiar with the Messenger associate it primarily with American Transcendentalism and often mention it as a precursor of the Dial. Indeed, it did defend the right of Ralph Waldo Emerson and several others to express the “New Views,” and a few articles which did so were excerpted by Perry Miller for his authoritative anthology The Transcendentalists. However, the material appearing in its five full years of monthly publication cannot so easily be reduced to a single theme. The magazine's original intention was to serve as an organ of Unitarian missionizing, and several of its most supportive writers, wary of the claims of Transcendentalism, continued to contribute articles that emphasized the scriptural basis for a Unitarian interpretation of Christianity. This persistent identification with traditional Unitarianism, alongside support for an open-minded examination of the ideas being put forward by Emerson, William Henry Furness, George Ripley, and Bronson Alcott, illustrates how Transcendentalist thought could be incorporated into a Unitarian forum without the recrimination associated with Andrews Norton's attack on Emerson's Divinity School Address. The denomination, even in its fledgling Western development, was far more diverse and dynamic than has usually been appreciated.