Toward the End of Their Lives, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams Found Themselves Profoundly Disillusioned Over the State of the Republic

A TURN TO THE PAST: REPUBLICANISM AND BROOK FARM

MARILYN MICHAUD

Toward the end of their lives, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams found themselves profoundly disillusioned over the state of the republic. Those revolutionary leaders who survived into the first decades of the nineteenth century could only, in Benjamin Rush’s words, “look back with regret”. The democratic society they saw unfolding before them was not what they had envisioned in the original contest for liberty and equality; rather than enshrining the ideals of classical agrarian virtue, a miasma of self-interest, materialism and anti-intellectualism had descended on the nation. The burgeoning middle classes were not only abusing their freedom, but virtue, that bulwark of republicanism, was being threatened by the slow corrosion of luxury and self-interest. “All, all dead”, Jefferson wrote in 1825, “and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who knows not us”.1 This was not entirely true. There were many who shared the pessimism of the previous generation, and many who feared the swell of commercial self-interest that democracy seemingly had wrought. In the 1820s, a young Ralph Waldo Emerson detected a society “choked with evils … a community composed of a thousand different interests, a thousand various societies filled with competitions in the arts, in trade, in politics, in private life”.2 By mid-century, the view had not radically altered. “The tendency of modern civilization”, The Harbinger announced in 1845, “is to produce a state of unmitigated poverty, of physical and moral wretchedness, of intellectual degradation, and of revolting crime”. With the increase of material

1 Quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, New York, 1991, 368. 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, eds William H. Gilman and Alfred R. Ferguson, Cambridge: MA, 1964, I, 103-104. 68 Marilyn Michaud wealth societies “cherish within their bosom, a subtle poison, which is fatal to the growth of humanity”.3 In response to the portentous gloom that hovered over the nation, a number of individuals and groups professed “a deep reverence for the past”, hoping to use its “transmitted treasures” for the good of society. One of these groups was the Brook Farm Institute for Agriculture and Education. Founded in 1841 by George and Sophie Ripley, Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was a communal living space devoted to equality through education, labour, and free intellectual exchange. Born out of Ripley’s discontent with mainstream Unitarian doctrine, the activities of the Brook Farm association were predicated on the values of harmony between mind and body, spirit and flesh. Spiritually, the Brook Farm endeavour addressed itself to those “who cherish a living faith in the advancement of humanity … who are hungering and thirsting for positive truth; and who … look forward to an order of society founded on the divine principles of justice and love”.4 On a more practical level, the community sought to achieve these ends through labour and education. In a letter to Emerson, Ripley laid out his philosophy which would eventually form the basis for the Original Constitution of Brook Farm:

Our objects, as you know, are to ensure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to 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 with 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 now be led amidst the pressures of our competitive institutions.5

3 Anonymous, “Tendencies of Modern Civilization”, The Harbinger, I/ 3 (1845), 32; Source: British Library Microfilm: mic.A.4041. 4 Anonymous, “Introductory Notice”, The Harbinger, I/1 (1845), 8. 5 Jessica Gordon, “Transcendental Ideas: Social Reform, History of Brook Farm”, American Transcendental Web, Virginia Commonwealth University: http://www.vcu. edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ideas/brhistory.html (last accessed, 24 June 2008).