Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
more stubborn, and apathy more frozen,” in New England, “than among
slave owners themselves.”[450] The old Puritan conscience might be
tender, but it refused pretty steadily to take on any larger job than
Sabbath-keeping and dogma-saving. It was inquisitorial rather than
humanitarian, and the sins which it hunted down were theological rather
than social.
The bridge between this older world and the later was thrown across by
Unitarianism. With its shift of emphasis from a God of wrath to a God
of love came the entering wedge that was to split away the egoism of
the old theology--its thralldom to the conception of personal sin--and
lay bare an inner core of altruism. It was another sort of conscience
that Unitarianism discovered, a conscience that welcomed the new social
thought of romantic Europe, and applying it to the facts of life in
America created the new humanitarianism which bit so deeply into the
New England of the forties. From this movement the intractable nature
of the Yankee held him back, but the Puritan speedily transformed the
hard theological conscience into a tender social conscience, that
bewildered the conventional morality with its sweeping program of
reform.
The awakening of the new spirit may perhaps be held to date from the
growing opposition to war that was an aftermath of the Napoleonic
period with its huge debts and vast social suffering. The inhumanity
of war profoundly impressed thoughtful minds that had come under the
influence of the sociological movement, and when Channing in 1812
preached his first anti-war sermon the new humanitarian spirit found
expression. In his espousal of pacifism Channing was following in the
footsteps of the social revolutionaries of the preceding century.
He fell short of Tom Paine in analysis of the economic and dynastic
sources of war, and in appreciation of its social consequences;
nevertheless his denunciation was significant of a changing social
attitude. From this early attack to the rise of the Garrisonian
Non-Resistance Society of the late thirties and early forties, the
spread of the pacifist movement was rapid. Transcendentalism was
eloquently anti-militaristic, and Emerson, Alcott and Parker were
outspoken in denunciation of the war spirit. To the war against war
soon was added the war against drink, and with the establishment in
Boston in 1826 of the _National Philanthropist_, under the patronage
of the “Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance”--a
paper of which Garrison was editor for a few months--began the long
agitation for the suppression of the liquor traffic. From such feeble
beginnings the ardor of reform grew and spread swiftly, enlarging its
program to embrace anti-slavery, woman’s rights,[451] prison reform,
repeal of the harsh debtor laws, vegetarianism, associationism, until
it caught the contagion of the perfectionist and transcendental
movements and issued in a comprehensive program of universal reform.
The golden age of New England was quite as much the golden age of the
New England conscience as of the New England mind.
II
The fame of transcendentalism has too much obscured the contemporary
movement of perfectionism, a movement which marked the extreme
expression of the new conscience, the most revolutionary of its
aspirations, the apotheosis of ethical radicalism. Its want of literary
skill narrowed its appeal and the archaic quality of its enthusiasm
lessened its following; yet in spirit it was native to Puritan
idealism, and it enlisted the active sympathy of many of the finer
souls of New England. How greatly reform was furthered by the movement
of perfectionism is not easily determined, but it is clear that its
influence permeated much of the revolutionary activity of the times.
Scratch an ardent Abolitionist and you were likely to find a potential
perfectionist.
The doctrine was first elaborated by John Humphrey Noyes, a young
Vermont mystic, who, under the influence of the revivalist excitement
of the early thirties, elaborated a social creed that reëmbodied much
of the teaching of the extreme left wing of English Commonwealth
thought. Noyes was a primitive religious nature, with the tenderest
of consciences, vastly troubled over current materialisms; and his
speculations reveal a curious throw-back to early English Puritanism.
He was a Yankee Fifth Monarchy man. Two hundred years of Yankee
experience slipped from his mind, and he walked and talked with the old
millennial spirits, the Diggers and Levelers of Commonwealth times. A
devout Scripturist, he took literally the injunction of Matthew, “Be ye
therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.”
A primitive Christian, he proposed to re-order society with the naïve
simplicity of the apostle Eliot. In his mystical speculations, social,
political, and religious radicalisms were stirred in a common pot and
simmered down to what may be called spiritual anarchism. Noyes was a
Yankee “root and branch” man, a single-minded apostle of “thorough.”
He would not strain at gnats and swallow camels, but he rejected the
camels first and then proposed to get rid of the gnats. In 1834 he
established a small monthly paper called the _Perfectionist_, which was
very probably as revolutionary a sheet as was ever printed in America.
He made converts, including Garrison, Edmund Quincy, son of Josiah
Quincy, the Grimké sisters, Henry C. Wright and other Abolitionists,
and made an increasing stir in the world, to the great concern of
respectable folk who swallowed their camels without a grimace.
Some notion of the main doctrines of this seventeenth-century creed may
be gained from a letter of Noyes to Garrison, written in 1837, from
which the following is taken:
I have subscribed my name to an instrument similar to the
Declaration of ’76, renouncing all allegiance to the government
of the United States, and asserting the title of Jesus Christ to
the throne of the World.... When I wish to form a conception of
the government of the United States ... I picture to myself a
bloated, swaggering libertine, trampling on the Bible--its own
Constitution--its treaties with the Indians--the petitions of
its citizens.... I have renounced active co-operation with the
oppressor on whose territories I live; now I would find a way to
put an end to his oppression. But he is manifestly a reprobate:
reproof and instruction only aggravate his sins. I cannot attempt
to reform him, because I am forbidden to “cast pearls before
swine.” I must therefore either consent to remain a slave till
God removes the tyrant, or I must commence war upon him, by a
declaration of independence and other weapons suitable to the
character of a son of God.
He then lays down seven reasons for choosing to make war upon the
state, amongst which are the following:
1. As a believer in the Bible I know that the territory of the
United States belongs to God, and is promised ... to Jesus Christ
and his followers....
6. The Son of God has manifestly, to me, chosen this country
for the theatre of such an assault--a country which, by its
boasting hypocrisy, has become the laughing-stock of the world,
and by its lawlessness has fully proved the incapacity of man
for self-government. _My hope of the millennium begins where Dr.
Beecher’s expires_--viz., +AT THE OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION+.
I have stated to you only ... the principal things which God has
urged upon me by his Spirit, and by which he has moved me to
nominate Jesus Christ for the Presidency, not only of the United
States, but of the world. Is it not high time for abolitionists to
abandon a government whose President has declared war upon them? I
cannot but think that many of them hear the same great voice out
of heaven which has waked me, saying, “Come out of her, my people,
that ye be not partakers of her sins and of her plagues.”... Allow
me to suggest that you will set Anti-slavery in the sunshine only
by making it tributary to Holiness; and you will most assuredly
throw it into the shade ... if you suffer it to occupy the ground,
in your mind or in others, which ought to be occupied by +UNIVERSAL
EMANCIPATION FROM SIN+. All the abhorrence which now falls upon
slavery, intemperance, lewdness, and every other specific vice,
will in due time be gathered into one volume of victorious wrath
against _unbelief_. I wait for that time as for the day of
battle ... I counsel you, and the people that are with you, if
you love the post of honour--the forefront of the hottest battle
of righteousness--to set your face towards _perfect_ holiness.
(Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, pp. 145-148.)
This curious appeal brought forth its fruit in a Peace Convention,
held in 1838, which published a Declaration of Sentiments[452] that
was quite as extraordinary a pronouncement--one that serves to explain
the utter bewilderment of prosaic souls at the strange progeny of
the times. It was only one of many strange conventions, marked by an
ebullient faith of which Emerson remarked, “The core of the comet
did not seem to be much, but the whole air was full of splendors”
(_Journals_, Vol. VII, p. 5), and on which Josiah Quincy commented,
“Such a mass of free mind as was brought together I have never seen
before in any one assembly.... There was much talent and a great deal
of _soul_.” Men who take their Biblical teachings literally are likely
to be curious fellows. Righteousness may prove a potent drink for
them that love it, begetting its own particular intemperance; and a
conscience that has slipped its leash of the practical will run many a
mad chase. If it followed its logic this perfectionism must make short
shrift of political parties, of loyalty to government, of the political
state itself, and set up instead a social order in which familiar
things would be topsy-turvy, with the just sitting in high places
and the rich and great of earth brought low; and this is precisely
what Noyes did in the Oneida Community--the most successful of the
contemporary ventures in communism--of which he was the founder. In
spite of his taste for the wine of new vintages Emerson was somewhat
taken aback at certain of its ebullitions, and when the sabbatarian
Chardon Street Convention in 1840 gathered together the choicest
repositories of New England holiness, he shook his head dubiously. His
humorous catalogue of the miscellaneous enthusiasts suggests more than
a spice of criticism.
Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians,
Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists, Quakers,
Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers,--all came
successively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their
hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach, or protest. (“The
Chardon Street Convention,” in _Works_, Vol. X, p. 374.)
And even the catholic-minded Edmund Quincy, who was one of the callers
of the Convention, confessed that “It was the most singular collection
of strange specimens of humanity that was ever assembled.” The wine of
perfectionism was in high ferment in New England in 1840.
It was a curious anachronism in the midst of the industrial
revolution--this revival of the religious Utopianism of 1650, this
April renaissance of the faith of a dead _saeculum theologicum_. It
was in no sense a by-product of transcendentalism--no lunacy fringe
of metaphysical speculation. It owed nothing to French romanticism or
German idealism, not in origin at least. It was far more primitive and
native, and its affinities run back to Roger Williams and the Fifth
Monarchy millennialism, rather than to Rousseau and Kant and Jacobi. It
was a breaking through of the submerged New England spirituality, a