Anarchism and Nineteenth-Century American Political Thought

CHAPTER 16 Anarchism and Nineteenth-Century American Political Thought Crispin Sartwell Introduction Although it is unlikely that any Americans referred to themselves as “anarchists” before the late 1870s or early 1880s, anti-authoritarian and explicitly anti-statist thought derived from radical Protestant and democratic traditions was common among American radicals from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Many of these same radicals were critics of capitalism as it emerged, and some attempted to develop systematic or practical alternatives to it. Prior to the surge of industrialization and immigration that erupted after the Civil War—which brought with it a brand of European “collectivist” politics associ- ated with the likes of Marx and Kropotkin—the character of American radi- calism was decidedly individualistic. For this reason among others, the views of such figures as Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, Josiah Warren, Henry David Thoreau, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker have typically been overlooked in histories of anarchism that emphasize its European communist and collectivist strands. The same is not true, interestingly, of Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre and other important social anarchists of the period, all of whom recognized and even aligned themselves with the tradition of American individualist anarchism. Precursors In 1637, Anne Hutchinson claimed the right to withdraw from the Puritan the- ocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the sole authority of “the voice of [God’s] own spirit to my soul.”1 Roger Williams founded Rhode Island on similar grounds the previous year. Expanding upon and intensifying Luther’s 1 “The Trial and Interrogation of Anne Hutchinson” [1637], http://www.swarthmore.edu/ SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/30-hut.html. See also E. LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans (New York: HarperOne, 2005), especially chapter 10. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��8 | doi ��.��63/9789004356894_0�8 Anarchism And Nineteenth-century American Political Thought 455 doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers,” the Quakers taught that the inner light of God in each individual was the only authority to which each believer was obliged to answer, a vision that was extended—in the journals of John Woolman in the late eighteenth century, for example—to all persons regard- less of race and gender, and which was the basis of the opposition of Woolman and others to slavery. Such figures were often accused of “antinomianism,” the heresy of denying the law or of declaring that each person is a law unto herself. In the context of secular politics on the cusp of the nineteenth century, we might also mention radically democratic tendencies that were expressed by some opponents of the ratification of the Constitution (the so-called “Anti- Federalists”). Broadly anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical commitments helped inform such events as Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion immediately following the American Revolution. The former, for example, fo- cused to some extent on the cancellation of debts and mortgages, which were burned when the rebels took over courthouses in Western Massachusetts.2 Radical democrats such as Thomas Paine and John Taylor of Caroline often edged toward anti-statism as well. Radical Protestantism and Anti-Slavery By the late eighteenth century, the pacifism and individualism of the Quakers and other radical Protestant denominations gave rise to a wide array of vision- ary political, social, and economic positions including anti-slavery, anti- statism, pacifism, and gender egalitarianism. The period extending roughly from 1820 to 1850 witnessed the emergence of an astonishing group of American radicals including William Lloyd Garrison, Josiah Warren, Adin Ballou, Lucretia Mott, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Maria Weston Chapman, Theodore Dwight Weld, Samuel J. May, and many others, all whom are noteworthy for their purity and profundity as well as extremism and ec- centricity. The labels attached to some of their positions—“ultraism,” “come- outerism,” “perfectionism,” “immediatism,” “no-governmentism,” and, going beyond even that, “no-organizationism”— give a sense of how they were per- ceived by their contemporaries. One thing these figures had in common—and which bound their reform movements together as well as to the Transcendentalists, with whom they were intertwined—was a pervasive anti-authoritarianism. Their marked hos- tility toward the power of the state as well as of the church, the white race, 2 See L.L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003)..

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