Unitarian Clergyman Research Articles

Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post- Revolutionary New England Clergy

A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-- Revolutionary New England Clergy. By Jonathan D. Sassi. (Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 298. Illustrations. $49.95.) In this fine monograph, Jonathan D. Sassi provides a missing link between the Congregationalist clergy who urged New Englanders to stand up to British tyranny and those who inspired them to call for an end to slavery. He argues that the pulpit power was not shattered by the rise of dissent after the Revolution, nor was it made irrelevant by the general shift in American religion toward a democratic individualism that was little concerned with public affairs. Instead the heirs of the Puritans made a transition that allowed them to remain respected spokesmen for private and public morality despite the political and ecclesiastical changes that took place in the half-century after 1783. Thus, A Republic of Righteousness attempts to correct a rather large body of scholarship, of which Harry S. Stout's respected The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (1986) is the latest example, that would relegate the New England clergy to what Sassi refers to as the dust bin of social irrelevance (5) in the new republic. At the same time, Sassi wants to demonstrate that public Christianity-the ways in which ministers tried to make religious beliefs and values speak to the problems of life in society (11 )-remained alive, despite the contrary implication of Nathan O. Hatch's enormously influential The Democratization of American Christianity (1993). Sassi's focus is on Massachusetts and Connecticut, where Congregationalism remained the established religion, although dissenters could designate their tax dollars for their own ministers. Not only did the established clergy enjoy a larger share of public funding, but they also maintained a close relationship with the economic and political power structure and continued to be recognized as the official interpreters of divine will. These clergymen saw the American Revolution as a work of Providence, although there was some question as to whether the United States had inherited the national covenant that once belonged to the Puritans or whether it was simply uniquely blessed. In any case, it was possible for the established clergy to see the hand of God in American affairs through the years of the Federalist ascendancy, although the French Revolution and its reverberations in America caused them concern. The election of Thomas Jefferson, however, was heavy rain on the Congregationalist parade. Not only did Republican success raise questions about the relationship between Divine Providence and American history, but it weakened the position of the established clergy and strengthened that of the dissenters, who were much more friendly to the new regime. By 1810, the Congregationalists were angry enough with the national government that they attacked the Constitution for its absence of religious provisions, and the War of 1812 completed their alienation. Meanwhile, at home in New England, the Baptists and the Republicans were making common cause, and when the Episcopalians in Connecticut joined that coalition, the result was a new constitution that ended that state's Congregationalist establishment in 1818. The demise of the Massachusetts state church was more a suicide than a murder, resulting from the split between Unitarians and orthodox Trinitarians that widened in the years after 1805 when the Unitarian Henry Ware became the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard. Although the establishment struggled on until 1833, the mortal wound came in 1821, when the state supreme court allowed the taxpayers of Dedham to choose a Unitarian clergyman despite the fact that the church members wanted an orthodox one. …

"But Maria, did you really write this?": Preface as Cover Story in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok

Hobomok was the first thing ever attempted to write for print. had for several years, until then, lived in the interior of Maine, almost entirely removed from literary influences. went to Watertown, Mass. where my brother, Dr. Francis, of Harvard University, was then settled as a Unitarian clergyman. Soon after arrived there, one Sunday noon, took up the N. American Review, and read Mr. Palfrey's review of Yamoyden, in which he eloquently describes the adaptation of early N. England history to the purposes of fiction. know not what impelled me; had never dreamed of such a thing as turning author; but siezed [sic] a pen, and before the bell rang for afternoon meeting had written the first chapter, exactly as it now stands. When showed it to my brother, my young ambition was flattered by the exclamation, Maria did you really write this? Do you mean what you say, that it is entirely your own? Lydia Maria Child (Collected Correspondence, letter 646) When Lydia Maria Child wrote this account in an 1846 letter to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, she was forty-four years of age and at the height of her career as a writer and reformer. Her correspondent was a well-known literary critic who was compiling an anthology, Prose Writers of America, which would include Child's work and would be published in the following year. In this story of the donnee of her first novel, Child betrays the sensitivity to the interdependencies of writers, critics, and editors that served her well throughout her writing career. Her muse, she diplomatically tells her current editor, was a literary critic, the Unitarian clergyman and historian John Gorham Palfrey, and her first reader was her brother, Convers Francis, also a Unitarian clergyman and a Harvard graduate. That Child chose to take her brother's doubts about the chapter's authorship as fuel for her ambition rather than as condescension toward her gender demonstrates the confidence and energy with which she approached writing, as wel l as other endeavors. I know not how it she wrote Convers in 1838, but my natural temperament is such that when wish to anything seem to have an instinctive faith that can it; whether it be cutting and making a garment, or writing a Greek novel. The sort of unconsciousness of danger arising from this is in itself a strength. Whence came it? did not acquire it. But the whence? how? whether? of our inward life must always be answered, From a mystery; in a mystery; to a mystery. (Collected Correspondence, letter 138) Child's account of the birth of Hobomok is the kind of story of creative initiative and authentication we love to hear. It serves the traditional conception of the writer as divinely inspired, as does her attribution in her letter to Convers of her will to do things. One might expect Child to have drawn on this experience in the preface to Hobomok as a way of exciting readers about her novel. But this was not the narrative that Child told in her preface in 1824. There is, indeed, a spirited young writer driven by the prospect of writing a new kind of work, a New England novel. But the writer is a young man. And the story runs differently. Before the man sets pen to paper, he lays his idea out before a prominent editor friend. The editor instantly provides the prospective writer with the historical documents necessary to carry out his project. Upon completion, the young man sets the manuscript on the desk of the editor, who reads it through once and then inscribes on it, Send it to the Printer. It is interesting that, besides appropriating a male mask in this fiction of Hobomok's beginning, Child foregrounds the routine, public aspects of writing--the project proposal, the enlistment of patronage, reviewing, and publication--when the romantic drama of the real story is so much more compelling. What purpose was this fiction intended to serve with the American reading public of the 1820s? …

British Unitarians against American Slavery, 1833-1865 (review)

182CIVIL WAR history While the letters include short comments on such current events as the 1863 draft riots in New York, they are slim pickings for subjects other than the Whitman family and engineering matters. Although it was edited with loving care, it is not a book for the general scholar of nineteenth-century life in the United States. IronicallyJeffWhitman, who is little remembered today, gained a national reputation before his more famous brotherbecame well known. As the editors point out, the publication of these letters will very likely provide the only biography ofa man who made substantial contributions to his profession and whose closeness to our greatest poet merits recognition. Larry Gara Wilmington College British Unitarians against American Sfovery, 1833-1865. By Douglas Charles Stange. (Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. Pp. 259. $29.50.) British Unitarians against American Sfovery, 1833-1865 is the first significant monograph concerning the reaction of a British religious denomination toward American slavery and the Civil War. Although British Unitarians trace their beginnings from c. 1660, they numbered probably no more than sixty thousand, some two hundred years later. Generally speaking, the British Unitarians were a well-educated, affluent, articulate, and influential group. They were, as were their coreligionists in America, associated with a variety of reform activities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Among those issues which elicited their support were women's rights, education, suffrage, temperance, antislavery, and others. Stange implies that a possible motive for their interest in reform was an effort to gain "status," a motive also ascribed by some to American reformers both before and after the Civil War. One reform activity which these affluent humanitarians shunned was seeking changes that would alleviate the poverty and despair, and would improve the quality oflife for the industrial working class in Britain. They devoted their attention and energies to a problem thirty-five hundred miles from their home (the abolition ofslavery in the United States) rather than to social and economic problems in Lancashire and other nearby places, because "slavery was the crime above all crimes" (147) in western society. The response of British Unitarians to American slavery was similar to that of the abolitionists in the United States; they were divided into moderate and radical or Garrisonian factions. The focus ofattention in this study is on the British disciples ofWilliam Lloyd Garrison. Their activities included writing antislavery tracts and books, publishing sermons and editorials which denounced slavery, circulating abolitionist petitions, and book reviews183 sending antislavery resolutions to their coreligionists and others in the United States. By 1855 the antislavery activities of British Unitarians were declining. One oftheir ablest spokesmen died that year; also by this time a number of British abolitionists had given up hope ofredeeming America from the sin ofslavery. With the new Fugitive Slave Act, violence in Kansas, the defeat of Freemont, and the Dred Scott decision—it seemed to many in Britain that the slave power was firmly in control in America and would probably continue for an indefinite time. The author claims that during the Civil War most Unitarians, as well as others in Britain, were neutral; however, he notes one Unitarian clergyman who advocated that the British government recognize the Confederacy . The Emancipation Proclamation elicited a mixed reaction, but the defeat ofthe Confederacy and the addition ofthe Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution stimulated British Unitarians to undertake activities designed to help the American freedmen. Although this study is sympathetic to the British Unitarians, it is not uncritical. It offers an encapsulated history of the Unitarian movement in Britain and of their leading spokesmen, together with an account of their interaction with American Unitarians in the antebellum years. It is a welcome contribution to an understanding ofBritish church history in the nineteenth century and to the transatlantic antislavery movement. It is hoped, and expected, that Stange's monograph will stimulate similar ones pertaining to other British churches. W. Harrison Daniel University ofRichmond Grourtng Up in the 1850s: TheJournal ofAgnes Lee . Edited by Mary Custis Lee DeButts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Pp. XX, 145. $11.95.) Eleanor Agnes Lee, the fifth child ofRobert Edward Lee and Mary Anne...

New England Unitarianism in Fictional Antiquity: The Romances of William Ware

N EW England Unitarianism of the 183o's may seem as far from romantic historical fiction as nineteenth-century Boston from ancient Palmyra or Rome. But one currently underrated American novelist brought them together with surprising success. William Ware in his once famous but now nearly forgotten novels-Zenobia, Aurelian, and Julian-effectively blended accurate historical description of the ancient world with vigorous expression of the new social and religious ideas of the Boston Unitarians. Antique romance became a potent vehicle for liberal opinion. When Ware's first novel appeared in 1837, such discussion of contemporary political and philosophical problems through the medium of fiction set in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, or Judaea was by no means new. From its beginnings in France in Fenelon's TMldmaque (1699) and Barthilemy's Anacharsis (1788), the romance of antiquity had had a tradition of contemporary relevance. Only a few years before Ware's work, for instance, John Gibson Lockhart had advanced modem religious and political ideas in Valerius (1821), Fanny Wright in A Few Days in Athens (1822), and Walter Savage Landor in Pericles and Aspasia (1836). In America, Thomas Gray had already published in Boston his highly didactic The Vestal (1830) set in ancient Pompeii, and Lydia Maria Child her philosophic romance Philothea (1836) set in ancient Greece. What places Ware apart from the general tradition, however, is the specificness and cogency with which he presents in antique clothes his obviously modern New England Unitarian doctrines and social opinions. Son of one Unitarian clergyman and controversialist, brother of another, uncle of a third, member of an extraordinarily able Massachusetts family, by no accident William Ware