Out of the Flames

by Lawrence Goldstone

  In Birmingham in 1791, those few still supporting the French cause decided to throw a dinner to commemorate Bastille Day, “the auspicious day which witnessed the Emancipation of Twenty-six Millions of People from the Yoke of Despotism, and restored the blessings of equal Government to a truly great and enlightened Nation,” the public advertisement, which ran three days before, rather recklessly announced. Any “Friend to Freedom” had to pay only five shillings for a ticket, which included a bottle of wine. There were sufficient rumblings in the town to make the sponsors question the wisdom of the gesture, but the manager of the hotel where the dinner was scheduled to take place (and who presumably had already disbursed funds in anticipation of the profit) assured them that it was perfectly safe. Accordingly, July 14 arrived, and the dinner was held.

  The manager was right: the dinner itself was safe. Although a mob gathered, it confined itself to jeering and hooting until around eight o'clock, just after the “Friends to Freedom” had eaten and gone home. Then those in the mob, having drunk no small amount themselves, made up for lost time. They smashed the windows of the hotel before going on to set fire first to the New Meeting House, where the Dissenters prayed, and then to the Old Meeting House, just because it was there. Finding themselves out of public buildings to attack, they decided to move on to private property. The natural choice was the home of the most public Dissenter in England, Joseph Priestley.

  Priestley, who hadn't even attended the dinner, was playing backgammon when a friend arrived with a chaise. It was only with great difficulty that he was made to believe that his family was in danger. They got away “with nothing more than the clothes we happened to have on,” Priestley later wrote. Because the mob was on foot, the Priestleys at first drove only about a half mile out of town and waited, assuming that that was enough for security.

  It was remarkably calm [he wrote], and clear moonlight, we could see a considerable distance, and being upon a rising ground, we distinctly heard all that passed at the house, every shout of the mob, and almost every stroke of the instruments they had provided for breaking the doors and the furniture… one of them was heard to offer two guineas for a lighted candle, my son… having taken the precaution to put out all the fires in the house… I afterward heard that much pains was taken [sic], but without effect, to get fire from my large electrical machine, which stood in the library.

  Priestley lost everything that night—home, library, and worst of all, the notebooks containing the results of unpublished scientific research. Priestley himself spent the better part of the next three days exhausted and on horseback, hunted by a mob that traced his path to a neighboring town and beyond. Eventually, he and his family fled to London in hopes of redress. Birmingham disbursed token compensation for his losses, but it was clear that there was no hope of returning. Priestley wrote a letter to “My Late Townsmen and Neighbours”:

  You have destroyed the most truly valuable and useful apparatus of philosophical instruments that perhaps any individual, in this or any other country, was ever possessed of, in my use of which I annually spent large sums with no pecuniary view whatever, but only for the advancement of Science, for the benefit of my country and mankind. You have destroyed the Library corresponding to that apparatus, which no money can repurchase except in the course of time. But what I feel far more, you have destroyed manuscripts which I shall never be able to recompose; and this has been done to one who never did, or imagined, you any harm.

  In London, outraged by the French Reign of Terror, the Royal Society ostracized Priestley, and he was forced to resign. He was going to have to leave England. France, which had made him an honorary citizen in 1792, offered him a house and a seat on the National Assembly, but he refused. Instead, in 1794, he and his family crossed the Atlantic and came to America.

  THE CHOICE “WAS NOT arbitrary. At the end of the eighteenth century, Unitarianism was just gaining a foothold as a religious movement in the United States. Radical antitrinitarian ministers had begun to gain favor, particularly in Massachusetts. In addition to their denial of the Trinity, almost all of them had one other thing in common. They had either corresponded with Joseph Priestley or become followers of his theological works.

  Until Priestley's arrival, however, Unitarianism in America had no celebrity. No other Unitarian minister had ever preached to a packed audience that included the vice president (John Adams), or been invited to visit President Washington at his home in Mount Vernon, or claimed the personal friendship of Thomas Jefferson. “As to Unitarian-ism,” Priestley wrote from Pennsylvania, in a letter to a friend, “it is, I perceive, greatly promoted by my coming hither, and the circulation of my publications.”

  Priestley founded a Unitarian Society in Philadelphia, and his sermons were printed and distributed throughout the country. He was offered a professorship of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and the presidency of the American Philosophical Society. There is no telling just how much influence Priestley might have exerted in both science and religion had he remained in what was then the nation's capital. Instead, inexplicably—based, it seems, solely on his wife's distaste for Philadelphia—Priestley relocated to Northumberland, 130 miles outside the city, a town so remote that when a shipment of his books was delivered to a neighboring village in error it took two years to correct the mistake. Mrs. Priestley died the following year.

  By 1798, American relations with France had deteriorated greatly— the French were seizing American ships, and Talleyrand, then the French foreign minister, tried to bribe an American diplomatic mission led by John Marshall. Priestley's perceived association with the radicals in France got him in trouble once more. Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, and Priestley, now in his sixties, faced the possibility of deportation under President Adams.

  But Joseph Priestley was not deported because the following year Thomas Jefferson was elected president.

  JEFFERSON HAD MET Priestley in Philadelphia in 1797. In addition to a broad love of scholarship and science, they had the Lunar Society in common. Jefferson's favorite professor at William and Mary, William Small, had retired to England, settled in Birmingham, and been invited to join the group. Although Small had died before Priestley arrived, Jefferson, who corresponded with his old mentor until the end, was well aware of the intellectual fervor that was the society's signature.

  Small's influence on Jefferson's character cannot be overestimated. Years later, Jefferson would write to his grandson:

  I had the good fortune to become acquainted very early with some characters of very high standing, and to feel the incessant wish that I could ever become what they were. Under temptations and difficulties, I would ask myself what would Dr. Small Mr. Wythe [brilliant legal scholar and signer of the Declaration of Independence], Peyton Randolph [first president of the Continental Congress] do in this situation? What course in it will insure me their approbation?

  From Small Jefferson had acquired a deep reverence for the Enlightenment and the work of philosophes such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, which led directly to the formation of his views on religious freedom. The colonies had inherited England's prejudice in favor of the Church of England—only Anglican ministers received a stipend, paid from public taxes. Dissenters, whom Jefferson estimated comprised two-thirds of the population of Virginia, were not given equal rights under the law. This, to Jefferson, was unacceptable, and so he penned the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1779.

  That statute, although not passed by the Virginian general assembly until 1784, bears great similarity to the proclamation of young King John II of Transylvania over two hundred years before:

  We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall suffer otherwise on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, thei
r opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

  When Thomas Jefferson later wrote the epitaph that he wished inscribed on his tombstone, he chose three achievements stating that “by these as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered.” Two of them were of little surprise—“Author of the Declaration of American Independence” and “Father of the University of Virginia.” For the third, however, Jefferson chose neither his presidency nor his role in the drafting of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. To Jefferson, the third most important accomplishment of his life was “Author of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom.”

  Jefferson's own views of religion were complex and evolved over time. Always an antitrinitarian, in his youth he was a deist, one of those who applied reason and science to religion and whose conception of God was simply that of a Supreme Being who created the world as one would an intricate clock, then left it to tick. As Jefferson grew older, he continually reexamined the basis and precepts of his own personal faith.

  Even from Northumberland, Priestley had become something of a mentor to Jefferson. They corresponded frequently, and Jefferson asked for his advice in organizing the curriculum of the University of Virginia. Priestley's religious views also affected Jefferson's own. In 1803, in one of his most thoughtful and impassioned analyses of his religious beliefs, Jefferson wrote:

  I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he [Christ] wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other… In the moment of my late departure from Monticello, I received from Dr. Priestley, his little treatise of “Socrates and Jesus Compared.” This being a section of the general view I had taken of the field, it became a subject of reflection while on the road… The result was, to arrange in my mind a syllabus, or outline of such an estimate of the comparative merits of Christianity… I am averse to the communication of my religious tenets to the public; because it would countenance the presumption of those who have endeavored to draw them before that tribunal, and to seduce public opinion to erect itself into that inquisition over the rights of conscience, which the laws have so justly proscribed. It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others… It behooves him, too, in his own case, to give no example of concession, betraying the common right of independent opinion, by answering questions of faith, which the laws have let between God and himself.

  But regardless of his own faith, Jefferson, like Voltaire, always opposed the accumulation of power under the veil of godliness. And again like Voltaire, Jefferson viewed John Calvin as one of history's worst offenders, a tyrant who bred other tyrants in his name. The event that exposed Calvin for what he was, that most epitomized his hypocrisy, was the trial and execution of Michael Servetus.

  “The Presbyterian clergy are the loudest, the most intolerant of all sects,” he wrote in 1820 to William Short, an American diplomat and former protégé who had served as his private secretary in Paris, “the most tyrannical and ambitious, ready at the word of the law-giver, if such a word could now be obtained, to put their torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flame in which their oracle, Calvin, consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not subscribe to the proposition of Calvin, that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to the Calvinistic creed! They pant to re-establish by law that holy inquisition which they can now only infuse into public opinion.”

  Joseph Priestley died quietly and peacefully on February 6, 1806, sitting in a chair in his bedroom in Northumberland. Up until one hour before, he had been dictating changes to a new pamphlet and chastising his secretary for attempting to alter his language. Then he stopped and put his hand in front of his face so that his family, who were present, would not see him die. When his hand dropped, he was gone.

  Priestley left a legacy of scientific inquiry and freedom of conscience, but he died unaware that the religious movement that he had all but founded in America was about to explode. But then, he had never been to Massachusetts.

  MASSACHUSETTS HAS ALWAYS held a special niche on the continuum of American radicalism. It was Massachusetts that, by its example, polarized the colonies against the British; Massachusetts where the first shots rang out in the War for Independence; Massachusetts that set the tone for a specific kind of American rebel—independent, plainspoken, and in the forefront of the battle of free thought against the tyranny of inherited ideas.

  The need to question, to rebel against authority, to replace ceremony with common sense, had become ingrained in the citizenry and found itself without an outlet in the years following the war. Casting about for a new opponent, the rebels of Massachusetts suddenly woke up and discovered a strong dissatisfaction with some of the fundamental tenets of their religion. Having just thrown off the divine right of kings, some young ministers and their followers now turned the fight to the divine right of Calvin.

  Calvinism, they concluded, was a cold, repressive doctrine with a view of man that could not be further from the ideals of personal freedom that had been vindicated by seven years of revolutionary struggle.

  Man was not a corrupt, damned creature, helpless against his imperfections, nor did he need any intermediary between himself and God. Sermons questioning predestination and the Trinity began to be heard both in the small parishes in the countryside and the large, established churches in Boston. And because the church structure in Massachusetts was decentralized, with no formal mechanism for anyone outside a congregation to remove its minister, every time a liberal was appointed, the movement as a whole gained momentum.

  Pivotal in the new thinking was an idea that Servetus had propounded in 1530, that Christ was a man made divine by God's word, rather than a manifestation of God himself. A conservative minister, Jedediah Morse, attempted to force the liberals to admit that they were Unitarians, which at the time meant not only rejecting the Trinity but also the divinity of Christ. Such an admission would allow conservatives to force the liberals out of the Church. The liberal ministers refused to take the bait. They denied being Unitarians, insisting that a rejection of the Trinity was supported by Scripture and a separate issue from Christ's divinity.

  The stalemate continued until 1803, when David Tappan, the Hol-lis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, died and the six members of the corporate board of the college were charged with naming a successor. The position was of immense importance, effectively determining the course of education for future ministers of Massachusetts churches. The board was split 3–3 between Henry Ware, a liberal, and Jesse Ap-pleton, a conservative. Ware was an avowed antitrinitarian but, like his colleagues, denied being a Unitarian. After a year of deadlock, the board finally voted for Ware, and the Harvard Board of Overseers, the highest authority at the college, ratified the choice. As soon as Ware assumed his post, every conservative member of the Board of Overseers resigned. The following year, a liberal, Samuel Webber, was chosen as Harvard's president.

  Shut out of Harvard, Morse and his allies established the Andover Theological Seminary, which would adhere to strict Calvinist principles. Morse also founded his own church in Boston and pressed his attacks on the liberals through pamphlets.

  Cheap and short, pamphlets were the talk shows of their day. The public gobbled them up. Anyone who wanted to get out a point of view or dose of propaganda could do so almost instantly through a pamphlet. Records of congressional proceedings were produced in pamphlets, as were accounts of criminal or civil trials. It was regular practice for the sermons of an important minister to be reprinted as pamphlets and sold on street corners.

  In 1815, Jedediah Morse issued a pamphlet in which he reprinted a section from an English biography that claimed that the Unitarians in England considered the liberals in Massachusetts as part of their movement. Morse then went on to charge that the liberal m
inisters refused to acknowledge their true beliefs because they were engaged in a conspiracy to spread their doctrine in secret and undermine the Protestant religion.

  Morse's pamphlet sold all over Massachusetts and demanded a reply. The liberals chose the acknowledged leader of their movement, William Ellery Channing, a Boston minister and Fellow at Harvard. No longer able to convincingly deny his Unitarianism, Channing instead claimed that there was no conflict between Unitarianism and mainstream Christianity. Morse responded, Channing answered, and the pamphlet wars continued for another four years.

  Finally, in 1819, Channing decided the time had come to accept the inevitable and define the movement. He used as his platform a speech delivered at the ordination of a new minister in Baltimore. A large group of liberal Bostonians made the four-hundred-mile journey to hear Channing's sermon, entitled “Unitarian Christianity,” in which he argued for the use of logic and common sense when reading the Scriptures. Anyone who did so, Channing insisted, would see that Christianity was Unitarian. Although it was later reported that almost no one in the packed church could hear the speech, the pamphlet version, which went through eight editions in four months, became one of the most widely read sermons in the United States. By i&i% all but one of Boston's churches were Unitarian, and the movement was acquiring followers as far away as Charleston, South Carolina, prompting Thomas Jefferson to write, “I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States.”