Unitarian Minister Research Articles

A New England Prison Diary: Slander, Religion, and Markets in Early America by Martin J. Hershock (review)

A New England Prison Diary: Slander, Religion, and Markets in Early America By Martin J. Hershock. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Pp. 256. Cloth, $75.00; Paper, $35.00.)In spring of 1812, Unitarian minister William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, belittled a scandal that had lately rocked his state. A drunken shopkeeper, posing as a British soldier, had committed slander by accusing a Federalist gubernatorial candidate of organizing a plot to deliver America to Britain. Bentley called this episode the trifling affair of a boy, intimating that it was a distraction from real problems that party faced in 1812.In his incisive study of diary-writing, economics, politics, and religion in early America, Martin J. Hershock demonstrates that this allegation of high treason was, in fact, no small matter. It was, instead, uncommon action of a common man, a product of dramatic changes that commercialism and partisanship had wrought in New England and United States as a whole. Ultimately, trader's defamation and his subsequent incarceration revealed tumultuousness of both revolution and republican government.Hershock terms diary that Timothy M. Joy kept while imprisoned for libel a microcosm of an 'extraordinary' moment in nation's (9). The author traces Joy's angst, which stemmed from his accusation that statesman Timothy Pickering had committed treason. After issuing a comprehensive genealogy of Joy family in Strafford County, New Hampshire, and offering a brief, but strong, political history of that area, Hershock tracks Joy's transition from a world of farming to one of commerce.He details risk that young man incurred in abandoning respectability and security his family had acquired in town of Durham. In late 1811, Joy opened a small store in nearby Middleton and for a few short months adopted a middle ground in nascent market economy (43). By mid-March 1812, a combination of bad weather and market forces left Joy (a man just building a reputation in a fragile trade) in a dire situation; he faced pressures from creditors amid mounting diplomatic tension and a consequent reduction in Anglo-American trade. Soon after, creditors ransacked Joy's shop and threatened to have him arrested for outstanding debts. The twenty-two-year-old fled town, leaving behind a family of three. Examining broadsides, newspapers, court records, land grants, and journal itself, Hershock reconstructs Joy's flight and his 1812 jailing in Essex County, Massachusetts.Hershock builds on scholarship about honor and masculinity from historians such as Toby Ditz, Joanne Freeman, and Bruce Mann. He scrutinizes Joy's debt, defamation, and imprisonment in order to probe humiliation of a shopkeeper-on-the-run in light of market volatility during Napoleonic Wars. …

Contours of Pacificism: Ramsden Balmforth’s Advocacy of Peace in the Union of South Africa and Beyond

Among the many dimensions of Christian pacifism in South Africa which remain underexplored is the ministry of the Unitarian minister Ramsden Balmforth (1861-1941). For approximately four decades beginning shortly after his arrival in Cape Town in 1897, this Christian socialist devoted part of his time to efforts to promote peace both in southern Africa and on a broader, almost global, scale. It is argued that Balmforth was not at any time an absolute pacifist, and that the distinction between “pacifism” and “pacificism” which was advanced by inter alia the British historians A.J.P. Taylor and Martin Ceadel is particularly useful for interpreting Balmforth and placing him on the spectrum of positions with regard to the ethical defensibility of taking up arms.

The Politics of Theatrical Reform in Victorian America

Beginning in the late 1840s there was a concerted effort by a group of editors and opinion-formers to encourage the development of a more respectable and “moral” theater. The American Dramatic Fund Association, based in New York City but consciously part of a transatlantic movement, was founded in 1848 as the organizational embodiment of this cause and the Unitarian minister Henry W. Bellows was one of its foremost spokesmen. This article explores why theater reform was seen as important, who supported it, and who opposed it. It suggests that we should understand theatrical reform, in the form it took in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as a quintessential example of a transatlantic liberal reform aimed at combating the destabilizing and morally degenerate consequences of urbanization and industrialization. The article also locates theatrical reform within antebellum party formations, arguing that it exposed a basic fracture within the Whig-Republican coalition between evangelical reformers and cosmopolitan liberal reformers over the nature of cultural authority in an urbanizing, fragmented society.

The Religious Counterculture

The claims of liberal theology, if taken seriously, generate radical obligations. What would the world look like if religious liberals became religiously observant?

"Poor Isabel, who had never been able to understand Unitarianism!": Denominational Identity and Moral Character in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady 's chapter 42 vigil scene features Isabel Archer remembering Gilbert Osmond objecting to her moral sensibility by comparing her to a Unitarian minister. This article examines James's treatment of pre- and post-Civil War Unitarianism in book reviews and novels such as The American, The Bostonians , and The Europeans to evaluate James's reference and discovers that, far from being a minor part of James's characterization technique, his references to Unitarianism shed light onto the fundamental qualities that define Isabel Archer and thus shape the novel that centers so fully on her status as a moral being.

The Forgotten Nationalist: John Mitchel, Race, and Irish American Identity

The Forgotten Nationalist:John Mitchel, Race, and Irish American Identity David T. Gleeson (bio) Bryan P. McGovern . John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. xviii + 293 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $36.00. Bryan McGovern has provided a long-overdue modern biography of the Irish nationalist John Mitchel. Mitchel, the son of a Unitarian minister from County Derry, became the premier propagandist of Irish nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century. His life and his polemic influenced both the Irish in Ireland and in the United States. In the U.S., he, in a sense, set the tone of Irish American nationalism for generations. Long after his death, Mitchel was feted in Irish nationalist circles for his virulent anti-British propaganda. Admirers wrote a number of biographies and kept his books in print on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, Mitchel the man, if not his rhetoric, fell into disfavor. One can put this disconnect between Mitchel and his work down to his strong support for the Confederate States of America during the Civil War and for its "cornerstone," slavery. He thus became something of an embarrassment to more progressive revolutionary nationalists of the later twentieth century even as they continued to use his propaganda in their anti-British campaigns during the latter-day "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. McGovern's scholarly effort here is to be welcomed—especially as there is no major collection of John Mitchel papers, only some scattered letters. As his subtitle suggests, McGovern pays a lot of attention to the most neglected aspect of Mitchel's life, the time he spent in America, particularly in the South. He begins, however, with good coverage of Mitchel's early life in Ireland and his rise to prominence there. The first issue dealt with ably is how the Protestant Mitchel could have such interest in and appeal to Irish Catholics when sectarianism in Ireland was on the rise. Mitchel's father, fitting his embrace of Unitarianism within the Ulster Presbyterian tradition, had a very liberal attitude toward Catholics. The young Mitchel was imbued with this tolerance and would retain it throughout his life, even to the point of accepting the [End Page 658] conversion of his daughters to the Roman Catholic faith and of one of them entering the Catholic sisterhood. McGovern believes that Mitchel always held an ecumenical dream that Irish people would bury their denominational differences and focus more on national unity. The other big influence on Mitchel's early life was Thomas Davis, a fellow Protestant and the spiritual father of Irish cultural nationalism in the 1840s. Mitchel supported Davis' view that a "Young Ireland" could resurrect a dormant Celtic and Irish national identity. After Davis' death in 1845, Mitchel became more radical in his nationalism. Part of his radicalism, somewhat ironically, came from his admiration for the Scottish conservative writer and scourge of the liberal industrial age, Thomas Carlyle. Mitchel overcame Carlyle's anti-Irish writings to endorse his critique of the modern era (Carlyle came to admire Mitchel, too, despite the younger man's strong Irish nationalism). McGovern pays good attention to this relationship but also recognizes that Mitchel moved beyond Carlyle's mere reactionism. Mitchel came to recognize that the whole system of landholding in Ireland (where a tiny Anglican elite owned the vast majority of land) needed to be overthrown and that violent rebellion against British rule in Ireland was the only way to achieve this. The massive death and dislocation of the Great Famine, which began in 1845, pushed Mitchel in this direction. He began to see even his former colleagues in Young Ireland, who did not disavow violence but did not advocate it either, as hopelessly misguided moderates. He split from them in early 1848 and founded his own weekly newspaper, The United Irishman, named for the purveyors of the last major rebellion against British rule back in 1798 (The Society of United Irishmen). Inspired by the February revolution in Paris, Mitchel called publically for armed rebellion. The authorities moved quickly and preemptively arrested him, charged him with treason, and sentenced him to death. This...

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution R. Darrell Meadows (bio) Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution. By Matthew J. Clavin. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. viii, 238. $39.95 cloth) In recent years, scholars have shown with increasing subtlety the breadth and depth of the long shadow that the Haitian Revolution cast over the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Matthew Clavin's new book contributes to this literature by exploring manifestations of historical memory of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in late antebellum and Civil War America. Following a similar binary thread that Edward Bartlett Rugemer traced in The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (2009), Clavin likewise situates the origins of this historical memory in contemporary accounts of the Haitian Revolution produced in the 1790s and early 1800s, especially those based on first-person narratives of the white "victims" of the revolution. These early works established an indelible narrative about the revolution, the abolition of slavery, and race war that, in the U.S., shaped subsequent arguments of both slaveholders and abolitionists. Clavin does an excellent job of showing that conservatives and reformers frequently invoked the memory of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. In the 1820s and 1830s, abolitionists sought to counter the proslavery narrative (that their efforts would provoke slave rebellion) by praising Toussaint Louverture's "compassion, probity, and integrity at the expense of his militancy and defiance." By the eve of the Civil War, according to Clavin, radical abolitionists had "transformed Louverture into a symbol of black masculinity and violence that they deployed to bring about the destruction of slavery" (p. 35). Chapter three continues this line of argument for the period between John Brown's raid and the outbreak of war. [End Page 308] Here and at other points, Clavin is less successful in his analysis of the proslavery camp, missing clues in his own evidence that suggest it was not only memory of the Haitian Revolution that informed southern perspectives. Discussing the 1860 proslavery writing of Professor Albert Taylor Bledsoe of the University of Virginia, for example, Clavin's evidence makes clear how steeped the proslavery camp was in the history of the French Revolution—especially French Jacobinism, and the slaughter of innocents and violent destruction they associated with it. In part two, Clavin focuses entirely on the Civil War years after 1862 when the arming of slaves and emancipation became fundamental components of Union war policy. Again, the Haitian example often took center stage in these debates. Unitarian minister John Weiss's Atlantic Monthly articles, published in 1862-63, in fact, anticipated Clavin's work. Weiss noted, for example, how for decades Northerners and Southerners had similarly, though for different ends, invoked the history of "St. Domingo." And now partisans on all sides invoked memory of the Haitian Revolution to weigh in on the question of African American recruitment. For John Weiss, the "history of the Haytian Revolution" was "positive proof that negroes have made good soldiers" (p. 83). William Wells Brown, Wendell Phillips, and others made the same point. In various ways, Clavin shows how antislavery politicians like George Boutwell and Charles Sumner, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, James Redpath, and Lydia Maria Childs regularly drew on the Haitian example. But in invoking Toussaint, many writers avoided his use of military violence and the essential participation of slave-soldiers in ultimate overthrow of the French regime. Rather, they depicted the freedmen of Saint-Domingue as docile and contented with Toussaint's new labor regime, arguing by analogy that freed American slaves would be the docile children that Southerners claimed them to be. Perhaps the clearest example of how memory of the first French emancipation could affect decision making was William Whiting's The War Powers of the President, and the Legislative Powers of Congress in Relation [End Page 309] to Rebellion, Treason, and Slavery (1862), which impressed Lincoln enough that he appointed Whiting solicitor of the War Department. In this work, Whiting had expressly drawn upon the actions of the French civil commissioner...

Religion, Pragmatism, and Dissent: Theodore Parker's Experience as a Minister

Religion, Pragmatism, and Dissent:Theodore Parker's Experience as a Minister John Kaag I. Introduction: American History and American Philosophy On October 16, 1859, John Brown led an unsuccessful raid on the Harpers Ferry Armory. He planned to seize the cache of weapons in order to arm local slaves, to march south, and to deplete Virginia of the slaves who supported its economy. While it failed to realize this objective, the raid succeeded in driving a wedge between the Union and the Confederate States. The rift that Brown helped create grew into the gaping wound of the Civil War. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln surveyed the site of the most gruesome aspect of that wound: Soldier's Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His Gettysburg Address signaled a turn in the war and a turn in the Union's favor. It is remembered as a significant step in the project that had been initiated at Harper's Ferry. Today we regard these events as pivotal moments in American history. We tend to forget the fact that they were pivotal moments in, and embodied moments of, the American philosophical tradition. Behind each of these moments was the thinking and action of Theodore Parker (1810-1860), a Unitarian minister, transcendentalist, and social reformer who served as a forbearer to the American pragmatists. Parker was a member of the "Secret Six," a group of wealthy abolitionists who provided financial and political support to Brown in his activities in Kansas and West Virginia. Parker provided material support, but also a solid ideological underpinning for the abolitionist movement. This ideology was developed while serving as a Unitarian minister in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston in the early 1840s. Parker was in the audience of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Divinity School Address in 1838 and took Emerson's [End Page 1] words to heart: "newborn bard(s) of the Holy Ghost,—cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity" (Emerson, Essays 40). For Parker, casting off conformity involved being a vocal and reliable opponent of slavery, ecclesiastical sectarianism, and gender discrimination. It is with these concerns in mind that he addressed an audience at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in 1850. In his talk, entitled "The Effects of Slavery on Men in America," Parker stated that, "Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people" (Collected Works 5: 106). Lincoln adopted this phrase in his 1864 address at Gettysburg, and it has achieved iconic status over the years, capturing the meaning and hope of a nation's founding. Parker's life has gained notoriety in recent years, largely due to Dean Grodzin's American Heretic: Theodore Parker and the Transcendentalists. The following article, however, attempts to approach this phrase not as the icon that Grodzin presents, but as a moment in the broader intellectual life of a Unitarian minister who championed a form of American philosophy in New England in the antebellum years. Most scholars of American intellectual history such as Cornell West, Louis Menand, and John Stuhr argue that American pragmatism stems from the work of Transcendentalist thinkers, most notably that of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (West 9-41; Stuhr 1-7; Menand 9). Parker's work is routinely marginalized in this genealogy; rarely have scholars underscored the way in which Parker's thinking and social activism serves as a harbinger for the classical pragmatic tradition. Menand does treat Parker as an important figure in American intellectual history, but does not afford him the attention that might be necessary to explain the deep similarities between his work and the American pragmatic tradition. Remedying this oversight is important since Parker's work proves more practically oriented than the poetry and prose of his Concord colleagues. As Brent notes, Parker was a frequent visitor to Benjamin Peirce's Mason Street home in the 1840s, and his thinking permeated the walls and dwellings of other minds of the period (45). Many of his writings anticipate the positions that C. S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey would later develop in regard to inquiry, religion, and metaphysics, and Parker's social...

« God's alphabet » : le transcendantalisme musical de John Sullivan Dwight

This article explores the roots of the American art music tradition in the aesthetics of John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893), the most influential writer on music in 19th century America. As a Brook Farmer and a former Unitarian minister, Dwight articulated a conception of music simultaneously endowed with deep spiritual content and social import. Steeped in the literary and musical traditions of German Romanticism, especially the works of Schiller and Beethoven, Dwight’s musical Transcendentalism echoed many of Emerson’s themes and contributed to fashioning the key notions that nurtured the aesthetic tradition in which Charles Ives was raised. His utopian musical anthropology turned music into a form of spiritual experience reorienting our relation to the world and thus foreshadowing the refounding of society.

Original and Ongoing Theological Issues through One Hundred Years of the Harvard Theological Review

The first words of the inaugural issue of the Harvard Theological Review in January 1908 were those of Francis Greenwood Peabody, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and sometime Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, from 1901–1906. An ordained Unitarian minister, Peabo, as he was affectionately called by the undergraduates, was known most prominently around College haunts for having convinced the Corporation (the President and Fellows of Harvard College) to make Chapel attendance optional while he was Preacher to the University. More importantly, however, he was the main proponent of Social Ethics in both the College and the Divinity School and Harvard's own expositor of the Social Gospel some years before Walter Rauschenbusch made that term popular. Peabody was also a key professor of German thought and theology in the Divinity School.

"Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry": The Companionate Marriage Controversy

Only a few family members heard the Unitarian minister proclaim them husband and wife in Girard, Kansas, on November 22, 1927. But by the following evening, newspapers from New York to Los Angeles reported that Josephine Haldeman-Julius, aged eighteen, had wed Aubrey Clay Roselle, aged twenty, a student at the University of Kansas, in a secret ceremony at her parents' home, held a few days ahead of schedule in a futile bid for privacy. Readers learned that neither God's name nor even a reference to God's authority had passed the lips of the minister who officiated at the ceremony. Josephine and Aubrey had not exchanged the traditional Christian wedding vows, nor had the minister asked Aubrey to endow the woman with his worldly goods.1 Instead, Josephine and Aubrey swore their commitment to one another as partners in a As they described it, companionate marriage enabled them to marry (and thus have a social ly sanctioned sexual relationship) while still too young to support themselves financially. In principle, if not yet by law, Josephine and Aubrey's companionate marriage permitted divorce without alimony at the two-year mark, assuming no children had been born in the interim. Josephine planned to continue living with her parents in Girard until she finished high school, after which she hoped to become a professional dancer. Aubrey would return to Lawrence, Kansas, to complete his degree. Though hardly mentioned in the press, the use of contraceptives enabled both husband and wife to pursue their educations and careers while still conforming to moral precepts and social conventions that limited sexual intercourse to marriage. It seems almost too beautiful to be true to me, Josephine told the reporters who had descended on her parents' home.2 Their com panionate union epitomized what historians have described as marriage's early twenti eth-century transformation from a patriarchal, procreative institution into a relationship premised on equal sexual desires and mutual emotional fulfillment. But if it reflected the

A Provincial Minister in Politics: Henry W. Crosskey*

Henry W. Crosskey (1826–93), a late Victorian unitarian minister who served in Derby, Glasgow and Birmingham, is now best remembered for his involvement in Liberal politics and policy, especially education, as both an advocate and as a member of the Birmingham School Board. An eloquent preacher, he was also an important geologist, recognized both for his original research and for popularising the science and its impact on theology, and a revealing figure in the evolution of English unitarian thought. From his student days at Manchester College, Crosskey was a follower of his teacher, James Martineau, but, unlike Martineau, he advocated an active role for government, particularly local government, in promoting social well‐being. In the political crises of 1885–6, though differing from Gladstone on religious education, disestablishment, and home rule for Ireland, he was unable to follow Joseph Chamberlain, a member of his congregation, into alliance with the Conservative Party. His scientific convictions led to his emergence in later life as an admirer of the broad piety of the early unitarian theologian and scientist, Joseph Priestley, whose followers had warred with Martineau's disciples in the bitter mid century struggle between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ unitarianism, thus serving as a bridge between the two schools of interpretation. He is also an important reminder of the expanding demands, internal and external, of an urban pastorate in the later 19th century.

"Proper Subjects for Public Inquiry": The First Unitarian Controversy and the Transformation of Federalist Print Culture

"Proper Subjects for Public Inquiry":The First Unitarian Controversy and the Transformation of Federalist Print Culture Neil Brody Miller (bio) In November 1804, a pseudonymous group of writers addressed the readers of the Columbian Centinel and Massachusetts Federalist regarding the solicitation of public funds for a proposed chair in natural philosophy at Harvard College. While "Several Subscribers" lauded the plan as a "useful design," they also charged the solicitors with failing to provide readers with all the information needed to form a sound opinion of the project. "Without a clear public understanding of this business in all its parts," warned the authors, an otherwise sound proposal "will be in danger of being defeated." The novelty of publicly criticizing Harvard College, a quasi-private institution, was not lost on these writers. While the political unrest of the 1790s and early 1800s significantly broadened New England's print culture, Boston's High Federalists remained wedded to what John L. Brooke describes as a deferential, "classical public sphere" in which controversy was abhorred and consensus presupposed ("Ancient Lodges" 277–78, 283, 296–97). The press in general was held in low esteem as a forum unfit for high-minded civil discourse.1 Accordingly, "Several Subscribers" self-consciously addressed the Harvard solicitors in the conservative High Federalist idiom of deferential public speech. "[T]he original and important design of a Newspaper," "Several Subscribers" asserted, "is best answered by discussing important things, and general concerns, with decency and candor." "Happy is that people, who dwell in a country like ours," they continued, "where, in the bosom of liberty, the Citizen or Subject can safely discuss in a public and impartial paper, any topic interesting to his country, whether it be its commerce, its government, its science, or even its religion, provided the discussion be conducted with strict decorum, perfect fairness, and undeviating rectitude." Published in the next issue of the Centinel, the solicitors' response left [End Page 101] little doubt that they dismissed outright any questioning of their cultural authority. An outline of the proposal had been printed, and as the Harvard committee soliciting subscriptions was not "conscious of any concealment or misrepresentation," the anonymous writer rejected "the necessity . . . of bringing the subject, at present, before the Public" (Anon., 24 November 1804). This brief, seemingly unremarkable exchange marks a critical moment in the transformation of New England's print culture and of the public Christianity of New England's Congregational clergy. Deference aside, the "Several Subscribers" charge to the Harvard solicitors to "lay the whole of their design before the public," sounded a novel, discordant note within New England Federalism. Nor were "Several Subscribers" alone in voicing their discontent. As the writers undoubtedly were aware, citizens of Massachusetts had been engaged for the past two months in another controversy involving Harvard College. Since September 1804, writers in the Columbian Centinel had grown increasingly critical of the Harvard Corporation for having failed to elect a new Hollis Professor of Divinity following the death in August 1803 of the Rev. Dr. David Tappan. Uncertain whether the year-long delay in naming Tappan's successor fully justified publicizing their concerns, these pseudonymous authors self-consciously articulated a critical, interrogatory role for the press while remaining formally within the normative bounds of High Federalist public discourse. Overshadowed by the later stages of what has become known as the first Unitarian Controversy, the Centinel letters of 1804 offer tantalizing clues to the existence of a contest within Federalist print culture to define and to determine the course of New England's post-Revolutionary public sphere. In the resulting controversy Boston's Liberal or Unitarian ministers and evangelical, moderate Calvinists sought to advance radically dissimilar "cultural projects."2 Alarmed over Jeffersonian successes and fearful of the growing movement for religious disestablishment, High Federalists and the Liberal ministers with whom they were allied constructed a network of exclusive private societies and cultural institutions to offset their declining social and political authority. Through such means, High Federalists sought to retain the privileged access to the public sphere they had traditionally enjoyed as New England's "speaking aristocracy." From their early success in maintaining control of Harvard College, through the founding of the Boston...

The Political Economy of Sentiment: Paper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston, 1780–1820 (review)

The Political Economy of Sentiment: Paper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston., 1780-1820. By Jose R. Torre. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006. Pp. 251. Cloth, £66/ $99.00.)Reviewed by Cathy MaisonThe Political Economy of traces the transformation in thinking about that began in late seventeenth-century England and reached maturity before America's market revolution. Jose Torre argues that profound changes in the meanings of value spurred innovations in the paper credit and banking systems of the early national political economy, but he also invites the reader to consider parallel intellectual transformations among New England's Unitarian ministers, sentimental novelists, and decorative artists who articulated new views about value through the concept of sentiment.In Torre's background stand the traditional defenders of the intrinsic value of money (silver and gold), a beggar thy neighbor mercantilist model of commerce, and the regulation of personal behavior in the marketplace. Among them, John Locke is cast not as the herald of liberal individualism, but as an advocate of unchangeable intrinsic value in money. Slowly, under the influence of Scottish Moral Sense writersmost notably David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith-value became changeable, contestable, and conceptually fictitious. Revolutionary Americans more readily accepted currency as a promise to facilitate exchange, an instrument of public trust, and confidence without real value. The true measure of wealth was not the store of money on hand, but the ability of mere paper to satisfy collective individual desires to develop America and consume more.This new view of value proved to be liberating in an infant republic whose citizens were deeply in debt, but also convinced of their tremendous potential for economic and cultural development. Powerful spokesmen pushed the new view of value further and celebrated speculative investments, expansive individual consumption, and an infinite system of paper credit, all of which, they insisted, would knit together large networks of investors and consumers in mountains of confidence and trust.Yet because paper credit was fictitious, and Americans had lost the security of attachment to the British commercial empire and fixed traditional political authority, some kind of glue was necessary to hold together otherwise discretely associated individuals in this new world of value. Sentiment would be the glue to ease disquietude about the unbridled self-interest, and it would provide New Englanders with an epistemology based on feelings (56). In the form of sympathy or benevolence, Adam Smith's impartial spectator knew what was morally right by imagining himself in the place of the other whom he was judging; an internal moral sentiment would bind individuals in a system of natural liberty that had little place for the constraints of mercantilism and much potential for the satisfaction of wants and needs.Torre is less effective in addressing a central conundrum in early national political economy: the failure of lofty ideals-in this case, sentiment-to play out in the reality of contentious interests. Surely, regulation, restraint, and paternalism persisted in disputes over cultural authority, but Torre provides only a few glimpses of discussions about commercial protection and internal improvements. He demonstrates that many key economic thinkers, among them Jonathan Witherspoon, Ben Franklin, William Barton, James Sullivan, and Mathew Carey (whose name is consistently misspelled), were excited about facilitating the new nation's liquid credit and enlarging public confidence in banks, and hence the nation's sympathetic social bonds. …

Heirs of Richard Baxter? The Society of Free Catholics, 1914–1928

The Society of Free Catholics was founded in 1914 by a small group of Unitarian ministers, who, inspired by Richard Baxter, James Martineau, F. D. Maurice and the Catholic Modernists, sought to combine historic Catholic sacramental and devotional practice with theological freedom, and to unite all Christians in a Free Christian Church. The members included Anglicans, Nonconformists and a few Roman Catholics. The two main leaders of the society were J. M. Lloyd Thomas of the old Meeting, Birmingham, and W. E. Orchard of the King's Weigh House, London. Their chief legacy was a series of prayer books for public worship.

Ricardo and the Utilitarians

The paper discusses Ricardo's relationship to Mill and Bentham. It discusses first the origins of the myth of Ricardo's dependence from Bentham through Mill, and Halévy's contribution to the freezing of such a myth. The paper reconstructs what were their shared political commitments and activities and the kind of specific political views and agenda that may be ascribed to Ricardo himself. The paper then discusses the question of Ricardo's adhesion to Benthamite ethics. It examines fragments in Ricardo's correspondence with Maria Edgeworth and Francis Place, and adds fresh light on the issue by highlighting the partial overlapping between Bentham's ethics and the kind of intuitionism with theological consequentialism that Ricardo had learned from the Unitarian minister, Thomas Belsham.

Martha May Eliot: “Spinster in Steel Specs, Adviser on Maternity”

PEDIATRICIAN MARTHA MAY ELIOT was associated with the Children’s Bureau for over 20 years. When criticizing her role and the influence of the Children’s Bureau, and even when noting Eliot’s remarkable achievements, commentators frequently questioned her authority as an “unmarried expert” on child health. Despite the rather hostile environment in which she worked, Eliot went on to receive many well-deserved honors. The American Pediatric Society gave her its highest award, the John Howland Medal, in 1967. Martha May Eliot was born in Dorchester, Mass, in 1891, to Christopher Rhodes Eliot, a Unitarian minister, and Mary Jackson May. She was a first cousin of the poet T. S. Eliot. Her grandfather, William G. Eliot, was the first chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. Eliot majored in classical literature at Radcliffe College and also completed premedical training. During a year’s study at Bryn Mawr College she met Ethel Collins Dunham, who was to become her life partner.1 After completing their undergraduate education, the two enrolled at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1914. Eliot and Dunham planned to take medical internships together, but only Dunham was accepted at Hopkins, making her the first female intern in the Pediatrics Department. The department chair, John Howland, refused to admit more than one woman. Eliot instead went to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Boston, and then completed a residency in pediatrics at St. Louis Children’s Hospital from 1919 to 1920.2 Figure 1 In 1921, Eliot was invited to become the first chief resident in Edwards A. Park’s new Department of Pediatrics at Yale Medical School, working at New Haven Hospital. In 1924, she was named director of the Children’s Bureau’s Division of Child and Maternal Health. Park encouraged her to commute to Washington for one week a month while continuing her duties at New Haven. Eliot and Park also began a 3-year study of the prevention of rickets and presented their preliminary results, excerpted in this selection, to the American Medical Association in 1925. As a result of this study, they recommended cod-liver oil and sunlight as effective measures to prevent this deforming disease of childhood. As a consequence, rickets, once prevalent, became much less common in America. When Eliot was appointed assistant chief of the Children’s Bureau in 1934, she moved to Washington full-time, and a year later left her position as associate professor at Yale Medical School. Dunham also joined the bureau in 1935, as director of child development.2(p 174) During World War II, Eliot traveled to England to study the impact of wartime evacuation on young children. She published her report Civil Defense Measures for the Protection of Children in 1942. She was also a leading figure in war work at home and ran the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care Program, providing medical assistance to the families of 1.5 million American soldiers. Eliot received the Lasker Award for this work in 1948. After World War II, Eliot served on the US delegation to the first-ever World Health Assembly, and she was the only woman to sign the founding document of the World Health Organization (WHO). In 1949, she moved to Geneva to serve as assistant director general of the WHO. As one of few women ever to hold such high office in a public health agency, she faced intense scrutiny of her professional qualifications as well as her personal circumstances; a newspaper headline announcing the appointment described her as a “spinster in steel specs, adviser on maternity.”3(p 25) Two years later, she returned to the Children’s Bureau as its chief. Eliot left the Children’s Bureau in 1956, and in 1957 she became chair of the Department of Child and Maternal Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. After retiring in 1960, she continued her work for the WHO and UNICEF, reporting on medical education in Asia and Africa. In 1947, she was the first woman to be elected president of the American Public Health Association (APHA). In 1964, the APHA established the Martha May Eliot Award to recognize outstanding achievements in the field of maternal and child health care. Eliot died in Cambridge, Mass, on February 14, 1978, nine years after the death of her partner.

Breaking and Entering

Breaking and Entering Eileen Pollack (bio) When her lover is in town, Louise tries not to let herself drive by his house. Why be reminded that when they are not together he exists somewhere else, sitting down to morning coffee with a woman who isn't her, a ratty flannel robe tied loose around his waist (Louise knows he sleeps naked and this drives her to despair). She is achingly obsessed but can control those impulses that might make him stop seeing her. His wife might be home. When Natalie isn't repairing computers in their attic she spends most of her time preparing kosher food, even kosher cosmetics, since she doesn't trust the few supposedly kosher products sold at Kroger's. Louise drives a red Voyager, as conspicuous in its color as the wig Natalie wears, a wig Louise would hate to see floating past the window as she drives by their house. Her lover - his name is Ames - is a Unitarian minister. He could be home working on a sermon or walking his dog at any time. If he notices Louise's van circling his block he won't believe her promise that she can keep their affair in its place. Capable of driving by his house, she might also be capable of parking in his driveway and ringing the bell or standing up at services and announcing to his parishioners: Your minister and I make love to one another every other week at the Potawatomie Inn. But Ames and his family have been away in New York. Natalie and the girls are seeing the museums while Ames takes part in a symposium on Christian-Jewish-Islamic relations, and Louise feels drawn to all reminders that he eventually will come back. The first few days he was gone she kept finding excuses to drive into town - Louise and her family live seven miles beyond the limits of Potawatomie, which itself is a city with little to distinguish it but the Michigan State Prison and factories that produce canned onion rings and twine - so she could detour past Ames's house. She managed to stay away for the remainder of the week, but [End Page 95] Ames is coming home today, and Louise is so excited that she has already driven into Potawatomie twice. "I'm going in to buy fish for dinner," she told her husband, at which he made a face that expressed some concern or fear he couldn't bear to put in words. It is only four o'clock, and Ames can't possibly get back from the airport until five. If she drives past his house much earlier than that he won't have arrived yet and she will need to try again. Instead, she takes a tour of the landmarks of their affair. The first is Ames's church, a small brown stucco structure with a billboard quoting Emerson to the effect that "Life consists of what a man is thinking of all day," a message Louise interprets as a love note left by Ames. She has spent hours at this church, helpingAmes and his committee fight the city's fundamentalists. She never loves Ames more than when he is guiding this committee to the resolutions they will draft, or, at meeting's end, when he exchanges a soul shake with Matt LeGrand - the blind, rotund minister of the A.M.E. Church - or heartfelt hugs and back pats with Loretta Paterson and Mary Walz, who represent the Quakers, or Jack Lovecraft, the gay rights activist who heads the AIDS coalition, for which Ames and Louise also volunteer. Afterwards, she and Ames retire to the shed behind the church where clothes and food are stored until they can be delivered to the poor. Overtaken with her memories of the hours that she and Ames have spent amid those bags and boxes, Louise gives herself over completely to her dream - hallucination is more accurate, that's how three-dimensional it is. She closes her eyes and leans back, moving her mouth and hands, wondering if she might be the only woman who gets off on imagining herself going down on a man the...

Caroline Bartlett Crane and Municipalsanitation: Applied Sociology in the Progressive Era

Applied Sociology occupies contested territory between academic sociology and social activism. An examination of applied sociology at the turn of the 20th century, as practiced by Caroline Bartlett Crane, Unitarian minister and Progressive Era social reformer, provides an excellent case study of these disciplinary debates. This article examines Crane's efforts to utilize the new discipline of sociology to improve society through municipal sanitation. Sociology and community social reform were often closely linked in the Progressive Era. Early reformers and applied sociologists involved in sociology at the turn of the 20th century would likely be puzzled by the academic focus of the field today and dismayed by the privileged position of scholarship over social reform in contemporary sociology. One can only question how sociology's mission and message might differ today if the legacy of early, community-based sociology was more widely known within the discipline.

Necessary Evils: Unitarian Theodicy in "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere"

What we have most to dread, is the almost irrecoverable debasement of our minds by looking off from God, living without him, without a due regard to his presence and providence, and idolizing ourselves and the world, considering other things as proper agents and causes; whereas, strictly speaking, there is but one cause, but one sole agent in universal nature. --Joseph Priestley, Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity NO QUESTION IN COLERIDGE STUDIES HAS RESISTED RESOLUTION MORE effectively than the question of the Christianity of The of the Ancyent Marinere. Contemporary readers often feel that no theological paradigm survives the nightmarish ironies of Coleridge's tale, of course, but that very feeling requires some assumption about the text's theological investments, so the issue of the poem's religious outlook remains a pertinent one. It is an issue that I will reconsider here by invoking Coleridge's Unitarianism. Critics tend to hurry the poet past his Unitarian period, convinced that the glib optimism of Joseph Priestley could accommodate neither Coleridge's visionary interests nor his responsiveness to injustice and suffering. I What troubles me about that conviction is that it seems so thoroughly at odds with the historical record. For in 1797-1798 Coleridge was still zealously engaged in the Unitarian cause: preaching to Unitarian congregations, corresponding with Unitarian ministers on theological questions, and revising his doctrinaire Religious Musings. He renounced his candidacy for the vacant ministry at Shrewsbury not on doctrinal grounds but simply because the Wedgwood legacy allowed him to act on his aversion to ministerial routine. (2) In turning from Coleridge to The moreover, we turn from a devout Unitarian to a conversion narrative organized around Christian motifs from the moment Coleridge introduces Crucifixion imagery into it. Is there no connection between the poet's religious beliefs and the poem's religious speculations? There is indeed, critics reply, but they defend the connection by denying or misrepresenting Coleridge's Unitarianism. For Robert Penn Warren, Coleridge's mythmaking reformulates the orthodox Fall occasioned by Original Sin, in the process ignoring Unitarian and Necessitarian doctrine. (3) For James Boulger, conversely, The Rime depends crucially on Necessity, but on a version of Necessity more reminiscent of Hume than Priestley. (4) Jerome McGann advocates reclaiming The Rime for historical understanding by looking not to Coleridge's Unitarianism but his interest in Higher Critical hermeneutics. (5) With William Empson, we at last encounter outright insistence on the Unitarianism of The thankfully. Yet we also encounter a reconstruction of Coleridge's Unitarian faith so tendentious as to create more problems than it resolves. My effort to negotiate these contending positions will appeal to the Unitarian convictions expressed in Coleridge's own letters and prose writings and Priestley's theological treatises. My essay will concede Warren's claim that The Rime celebrates the One Life, but then argue that the poem displays a typically Unitarian disinterest in Original Sin and the loss of Eden. I will agree with Boulger, against Warren, that the idea of Necessity shapes Coleridge's narrative profoundly, but I will also argue that Coleridge's conception of Necessity is providential rather than skeptical. While accepting McGann's case for a historicist Rime, with the Mariner as a figure of superstition, I will ignore the marginal glosses tie privileges arid concentrate instead on the 1798 text. My concern with The Rime as a Unitarian theodicy, finally, marks the divergence of my argument from Empson's reading. By looking narrowly at the poet's distaste for notions of a hereditary guilt demanding expiation, Empson concludes that Coleridge's Unitarianism disallowed the redemptive rationale of pain and evil--and there I cannot agree. …