American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  The orthodox clergymen’s letter appeared in the May 28 issue of the paper; and from what they heard, Fairchild, Driver, and Dunham argued that Parker did indeed deserve opprobrium for his ideas. He had advanced sentiments so contrary to commonly accepted ideas of Christianity, they wrote, that they felt themselves “constrained by a solemn sense of duty” to inquire whether the Unitarian clergy of Boston and its vicinity sympathized with Parker.46 Not satisfied with the accuracy of their redaction, Parker decided to publish his address, with emendations to clarify certain points to which they objected.

  His enemies then jumped on the fact that his revision did not represent the sermon as he had given it. This occasioned a war of words in the Boston papers similar to that which had followed Emerson’s sermon at the Divinity School in 1838. Parker thereupon issued a second edition of the Transient and Permanent, with an appendix that contained the “various readings” collected from a collation of the initial printed discourse with his manuscript as he delivered it in South Boston. His frustration over the controversy was evident in a letter of July 12 to Charles Miller, in which he claimed that never in his life had he written a sermon “with a deeper conviction of truth, or the good it would do in the world.” Further, because the opinions in his discourse were nothing new to him, not the “thoughts of a young man but the sober deliberate convictions” of his maturity, he believed that “the end will be good.”47 This, however, did not prove to be the case.

  Controversy continued through the year. In the late summer the printers Saxton and Pierce, noting the public’s continuing interest in the matter, republished generous excerpts from the chief documents in the controversy as The South-Boston Unitarian Ordination.48 Parker did not respond to this pamphlet, but the negative publicity had a practical effect. Many conservative Unitarian clergy were so upset with his sermon that they worried about exchanging pulpits with him, long a common courtesy in Unitarian ranks. The denomination was beginning to split at its seams.

  Parker’s supporters implored him to explain himself at more length, an idea he at first resisted. In late June, however, he accepted an invitation from several prominent Boston Unitarians to deliver a course of public lectures in the city, and he decided to formulate and publicize his beliefs in more extended fashion. His patrons rented Boston’s old Masonic Temple on Tremont Street, the city’s premier lecture hall, whose 750 seats were filled for Parker’s series, subsequently published as A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842).

  He had been steeling himself for such an airing of his theology. As early as 1840, he had noted in his journal that “for my own part, I intend, in the coming year, to let out all the force of Transcendentalism that is in me.”49 In the Masonic Temple he did just that, delivering five two-hour lectures in which he sought nothing less than “to recall men from the transient Form to the eternal Substance” and show them that God was alive to and in every person.50 This was a heady suggestion, and it was no wonder that both Trinitarians and conservative Unitarians were distraught at where Parker’s scholarship had led. The Reverend Samuel Osgood, for example, who sympathized with many of the Transcendentalists’ views, realized into what a difficult position Parker had placed his peers. “As the Strauss of our American theology,” he said in the Monthly Miscellany, an allusion to the German theologian whose Life of Jesus had caused such a stir, Parker stood “almost alone” among Unitarians. Indeed, to date, Osgood noted, no one had come to Parker’s defense, so that “he is not now in any way identified with the Unitarian body.”51

  Osgood’s assessment was prescient, for from this point Parker’s days as a Unitarian were numbered. Loyal members of that faith still insisted that Christianity was based in a special dispensation more significant than that vouchsafed any other religion. After meeting with Parker to discuss his views, members of the Boston Association of Ministers voted to end their fellowship with him, lest their congregations think they approved of or shared his views. Parker was reduced to tears.

  At this point a group of prominent religious liberals, influenced by Bostonians who supported Parker’s right to preach, whatever his ideas, formed a new, independent church and convinced him to accept their call to become its minister. By 1845 he was preaching to the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society in Boston’s large music auditorium, the Melodeon, which held a thousand people and on many Sundays was filled to capacity. His became one of Boston’s largest churches, seven years later moving to an even more impressive edifice, the Music Hall, and provided a prominent venue from which he could speak his mind. From then on, like his friends Brownson and Ripley, Parker more and more turned his attention to pressing social issues, even as others among his cohort, notably Emerson, Alcott, and Fuller, continued to press an agenda of individual self-culture.

  Writing to Frederic Henry Hedge early in 1843, Parker’s friend Convers Francis summed up the complex situation among the Unitarians and provided a useful typology of its factions. “The condition of things with us in the religious world,” he opined, “is anything but pleasant.”

  The cauldron is kept boiling, & all sorts of materials are thrown into it. Parker lectures with great éclat to audiences of 2000 or more in Boston & Salem,—& to very large houses in other places. Among the Unitarians proper there is an old regular body, represented by some of the Boston ministers, & the Evangelical or Puritan body headed by [James Freeman] Clarke & perhaps Brownson, who aim to intensify Unitarianism by giving it more zeal & more primitive godliness. Then the Transcendentalists have another vocation.52

  Francis’s description of the factions was accurate. The next decade’s challenge was whether the “Evangelical” party still had enough in common with the “Transcendentalist” wing for them to continue to work together to reform Unitarianism and, implicitly, the nation as a whole.

  6

  HEAVEN ON EARTH

  On August 10, 1840, the “Friends of Christian Union” met in Groton, Massachusetts, a small town thirty miles northwest of Boston. In attendance were George Ripley, nearing his decision to resign his Purchase Street ministry, Bronson Alcott, and Christopher Cranch, a young Unitarian minister recently returned from the Ohio Valley. Although it was principally disciples of the millennialist William Miller who had organized the meeting, representatives of many other reformist groups attended. Ripley recalled that attendees represented “every sect, every Christian connexion [sic], with every variety of faith, opinion, and character,” all having “a deep dissatisfaction with the religion of the age.” Among the most distinctive participants were a few score “Come-outers” from Cape Cod, laypeople who had left their churches to attend to the spirit within and practice a more pure Christianity. Their rejection of doctrinal creeds and of the authority of the ordained clergy resonated with the Boston visitors so much that subsequently they adjourned with several of the Cape Codders to a nearby tavern where, as Parker put it, “we had a little convention of our own.”1

  Many of the attendees at Groton, including Parker, Ripley, and Alcott, were thrown together again in September at the second annual meeting of the New-England Non-Resistance Society at Joshua Himes’s Chardon Street Chapel in Boston, a meeting called by Christian pacifists with connections to the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. This meeting, too, was a success, so much so that after it ended, the trio met with its organizers to plan a gathering of the Friends of Universal Reform at Chardon Street that November.2

  Persuaded to attend, Emerson, in an article he later contributed to The Dial, left the best record of its proceedings.

  If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. 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.3

  “If there was not parliamentary order,” he concluded, “there was life, and the assurance of
that constitutional love for religion and religious liberty” that always had characterized the United States.4

  Reported and debated in Boston’s press, the “Chardon Street Convention” gathered a cross section of New England’s most committed reformers and proved a signal moment in the development of New England’s intellectual life. Although the assembly took no formal action on the questions they discussed, it brought together “many remarkable persons, face to face, and gave occasion to memorable interviews and conversations, in the hall, in the lobbies, or around the doors.”

  Of the memorable interviews that these conventions expedited, none was more significant than that between George Ripley and Adin Ballou. Leader of a group of “Practical Christians,” Ballou was contemplating the creation of a model community, plans that by 1841 eventuated in his Hopedale experiment.5 By now also committed to the idea of working for reform in a communal setting rather than through the church, Ripley was fascinated by Ballou’s project and eager to hear more.6 He concluded that Ballou’s community was too restrictive, its members required to assent to a credo based exclusively in Christianity. But the discussion fired Ripley’s enthusiasm, and he immediately went forward with plans to start his own community, open to individuals of different theological views and based in egalitarian principles.

  Ripley spent the late fall and winter months of 1840–41 trying to drum up support among his friends. In particular, he sought the commitment of those closely associated with The Dial—Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott—in hopes that their endorsement would generate widespread interest in his plan. These individuals, however, proved recalcitrant. Alcott had his own ideas for such an experimental community, “a simpler New Eden,” he termed it, where, after its members had surrendered their desires for selfish gratification, they would live in harmony with the universal spirit. He doubted that any reform could occur by merely changing social arrangements.7 Fuller, too, resisted Ripley’s entreaties. She supported his plans but, like Alcott, wondered if they would bear lasting fruit. “I do not know what their scheme will ripen to,” she wrote a friend, for “it is only a little better way than others.” “I doubt,” she concluded, “they will get free from all they deprecate in society.”8

  Ripley’s siege of Emerson, who was now more widely known because of his career as a lecturer, went on for more than a month. Failing to convince him in person, on November 9 Ripley sent his cousin a long letter in which for the first time he detailed his goals for the community. He sought “to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists.” Toward that end, at his new community he would

  Combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor, adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away the necessity of menial services, by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions.9

  He had a site in mind, in West Roxbury, where a large dairy farm would form the basis of their labor and where they also would operate a school for the children of members, and of others by tuition. Such a community would require about a $30,000 investment, raised primarily by selling shares in a joint-stock enterprise.

  How did Ripley come to this particular formulation of the community’s goals? One model lay in the various religious communities that dotted the country’s landscape, particularly those of the Shakers, whose village at Harvard, Massachusetts, was only twenty-five miles from Boston. But with its complex theology, segregation of the sexes, and enforced celibacy, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing did not offer much to a lapsed Unitarian, save a glimpse of the harmony possible in a community removed from entanglement in a corrupt world. More immediately influential may have been the German community of Separatists at Zoar in Ohio, which Ripley and his wife had visited in 1838 when he was on a preaching tour through the Ohio River Valley. Sophia was struck by the group’s social harmony and their enjoyment of various kinds of labor, which never seemed tedious. She was enough impressed by what she saw to pen an article on Zoar for The Dial.10

  One other influence on Ripley’s thought arose from New Englanders’ continuing interest in and engagement with European social thought. Late in 1839 James Freeman Clarke’s mother, traveling in the Ohio Valley, met a young reformer named Albert Brisbane, recently returned from France, flush with ideas implanted by socialists whom he had met, particularly François Marie Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and now popularizing them in the West. On her return to Boston she shared her acquaintance’s ideas about “association” with her son’s friend Ripley.11 Brisbane soon became better known. In the summer of 1840, shortly after Ripley’s initial talk with Ballou in Groton, Ripley’s friend Theodore Parker read Brisbane’s Social Destiny of Man; or, Association and Reorganization of Industry, recording in his journal that he approved of the “many excellent things” in the book.12 It is hard to imagine Parker not discussing Brisbane’s ideas or sharing the volume with Ripley, who was living that summer at Charles Ellis’s dairy farm in West Roxbury, just a few miles from Parker’s home.

  The son of a wealthy landowner in upstate New York, Brisbane emerged as the foremost American exponent of Fourier, who, beginning early in the nineteenth century, had published an eccentric yet powerful critique of Western civilization and a detailed cosmogony of what he termed “universal harmony.”13 While abroad, Brisbane had sought out the social thinker, eventually paying him for personal tutorials: he received two hour-long sessions each week, at five francs per hour, for a month and a half. His Social Destiny of Man was the first of several signal publications in English spawned from the master’s works.

  Analyzing what he regarded as man’s flawed economic and social system, Fourier detailed a utopian alternative centered on model communities that he termed “phalansteries.” Emphasizing development of the “harmonian man” whose desires are gratified rather than repressed, and of “attractive industry,” work that satisfies one’s deepest urges, Fourier promised to free Western society from wage labor and the personal alienation attendant on it. Brisbane appended his own commentaries to his translations of sections of Fourier’s voluminous works, domesticating the system for American consumption by downplaying Fourier’s radical critique of monogamous marriage and his wildly speculative anti-Christian metaphysics. Brisbane also lectured widely on his mentor’s ideas.

  With such ideas spinning through his mind, Ripley anxiously awaited Emerson’s reply to his overture. Finally, on December 15, a month after Emerson had received Ripley’s long missive, he wrote his friend that he could not join in the admittedly “noble & humane” enterprise. The ground of his decision, he told Ripley, was “almost purely personal.” He was content with his home, the neighborhood, and the institutions in Concord around which he had built his career. More tellingly, he explained that it seemed to him “a circuitous & operose [that is, arduous] way of relieving myself of any irksome circumstances, to put on your community the task of my emancipation which I ought to take on myself.”14 Personal reform, he implied, was best accomplished in the privacy of one’s closet.

  Emerson had spared Ripley what he thought and said privately of his friend’s plans. Earlier in the negotiation, he had admitted that he “wished to be thawed, to be made nobly mad by the kindlings [sic] before my eyes for a new dawn of human piety,” but he simply was not “inflamed” by Ripley’s plan. It was too much “arithmetic & comfort.” Nor did he wish to have what amounted to, given the fairly comfortable financial circumstances of those whom Ripley had already interested in the project, “a room in the Astor House hired for the transcendentalists,” a reference to one of New York City’s most fashionable residences. Emerson offered his own conception of the
plight of labor and his complicity in it, a passage that reveals a certain moral obliquity. “The principal particulars in which I wish to mend my domestic life,” he wrote, “are in acquiring habits of regular manual labor, and in ameliorating or abolishing in my house the condition of hired menial service.”15 Evidently, Emerson neither knew much about the social problems in the neighborhood around Ripley’s Boston church nor had talked with those to whom Brownson regularly ministered. To chop wood and to allow household domestics to dine with the family, as Emerson now did, would not cure Boston’s social ills.

  Even though no prominent Transcendentalist signed on with Ripley, by the spring of 1841 the community was a reality. Ripley had decided on the Ellis farm in West Roxbury, with which he was familiar and which was currently for sale. It comprised 170 acres, one mile northwest of West Roxbury and eight miles west of Boston.16 The Charles River bordered it on the west, and at its northern perimeter was Pulpit Rock, a large boulder on which, in the seventeenth century, John Eliot, the “Apostle to the Indians,” had preached to the native tribes. The property consisted of pasture and meadowland, some hardwood lots, and, near Eliot’s Pulpit, a pine forest. The land had been used primarily for dairy farming, its surplus hay sold locally and to the Boston market. Access was from the Dedham Road, and to the left ran Palmer Brook, after which the farm later was named—Brook Farm, America’s first secular utopian community. To the right of the entry was a two-and-a-half-story white clapboard building with a long ell attached to its rear, a sizable structure subsequently called the Hive. Shaded by an ancient elm tree, for years it remained the center of the community’s activities. The property also included a large barn with stalls for twoscore cattle or horses. By all accounts in an idyllic setting, the farm was a place of great natural beauty, combining proximity to the city with the beauty and quiet of the countryside. 17