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Books at Brown Vol BOOKS AT BROWN VOL. XIII, NO. 2 APRIL, 1951 FRIENDS of the LIBRARY OF BROWN UNIVERSITY: PROVIDENCE, R. I. To SMOKING CLERGYMEN Men, called of God to enforce his laws, With all your might, by tongue and pen, Call'd to his courts to plead the cause Of Virtue, with your fellow men, Hope ye to make that cause succeed The rather, by a poisonous weed? Baptized in the Redeemer's name, The holy and the undefiled, When ye administer the same Baptism to a new-born child, Findeth your inner man a use For baptism in tobacco juice? Are ye, when, with the adoring throng, The Almighty Spirit ye invoke Made, in the strength of God, more strong By memories of tobacco smoke ? Think ye the incense of your prayer The sweeter, that it taints the air? When parents stand, with weeping eyes, And ye kneel down beside the bed, Whereon a dying maiden lies, With thin, white hands and drooping head, Think ye ye make that bed of death More sweet by your tobacco breath? "Be the same mind in you" saith Paul, "That was in Christ." What, then, think ye? When drinking his full cup of gall, Lone, prostrate in Gethsemane Would he, "the bright and morning Star" Have shone more bright, with a cigar? Charlestown, N. H. 19 Oct. i860 JNO. PIERPONT 2 APRIL, 1951 HAT kind of man was the writer of "To Smoking Clergymen," the manuscript of which was acquired recently for the Harris WCollectio n of American Poetry and Plays? The poem itself— signed Jno. Pierpont and dated Charlestown, N. H., 19 Oct. i860, gives a partial answer. Twenty years earlier, in 1840, in the preface to his Airs of Palestine, and other poems, he had said, "Poetry is not my vocation. The pieces will be seen ... to be mostly occasional — the wares of a verse-wright, made 'to order' ". Charles Dickens would have concurred; he said that Pierpont was "a good sort of a pious and benevolent man in his way, but . little more could be said of him and the grain of his poetry was irretrievably commonplace." Yet in his day Pierpont was also called "One of the sweetest poets of the country." In Griswold's Poets of America there is an even more sweeping state­ ment: "The religious sublimity of the sentiments (of Airs of Palestine), the beauty of the language, and the finish of the versification placed it at once . before any poem at that time produced in America." The verdict of time has been with Dickens, but when we piece together an impression of Pierpont the man, there emerges a picture of an intransi- geant, a crusader who must have made bitter enemies as well as strongly partisan friends, and who would have been little disturbed by such apparently contradictory opinions. He was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1785, and died in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1866. He had been tutor, lawyer, merchant, clergy­ man, and poet. He came of a well-known New England family, his great-grandfather, John Pierpont, having been the second minister in New Haven and one of the founders of Yale. It was at Yale, in 1804, that our John Pierpont graduated. Thereafter for four years he was a tutor in the family of Colonel William Allston in South Carolina. There he began to study law and after his return north was admitted to the bar in Newburyport, Mass., in 1812. He moved to Boston very shortly after where, according to his friend, John Neal, "he found nothing to do and spent much of his time cutting his name on little ivory seals, and engraving ciphers." He was persuaded by his brother-in-law, Joseph L. Lord, to go into the jobbing and retail dry goods business. This venture ended disastrously in the general economic upheaval following the treaty of Ghent and in 1816, Mr. Pierpont entered the Harvard Divinity School. Three years later he was ordained minister of the Hollis Street Unitarian Church in Boston, and there he remained until 1845. These years were by no means peaceful ones, Pierpont being an enthusiastic reformer. He espoused many worthy causes — often unpopular ones. As secre­ tary of the Boston School committee he proposed the establishment of BOOKS AT BROWN 3 a high school for girls on the grounds of general expediency, and "as an object of ambition, and profitable employment of three years of life now inadequately occupied." The school was organized in 1825 and may have been the first of its kind ever established. Apparently that cause did not meet with opposition from members of his church, but Pierpont's sermons favoring the abolition of slavery, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt were not well received by some of the congre­ gation. The latter was frowned upon because of its political implications and the anti-slavery cause was considered too controversial to be in good taste or in the best ecclesiastical tradition. The temperance cause, however, was that on which the minister and the church almost parted company. Total abstinence was a subject on which John Pierpont felt strongly. He not only preached sermons to his own church on the subject, he delivered temperance addresses in Boston and wherever else he might. He wrote temperance songs or hymns, several of which were printed in the Cold water melodies and Washingtonian songster which had reached its fourth edition by 1842. One of these, "The Pure Stream of Eden" is fairly typical. It begins: In Eden's green retreats, A water brook, — that played Between soft, mossy seats, Beneath a plane-tree's shade, Whose rustling leaves Danced o'er its brink, — Was Adam's drink, And also Eve's. Would Eden thus have smiled, Had wine to Eden come? Would Horeb's parching wild Have been refreshed with rum? And had Eve's hair Been dressed in gin, Would she have been Reflected fair? Had Moses built a still, And dealt out to that host, To every man his gill, And pledged him in a toast, Would cooler brains, Or stronger hands, Have braved the sands Of those hot plains? 4 APRIL, 1951 If Eden's strength and bloom COLD WATER thus hath given, If, even beyond the tomb, It is the drink of heaven, Are not good wells And Crystal springs The very things For our HOTELS? Obviously such sentiments were not of a kind to endear a minister to a congregation in which more than half of the pew-owners were engaged in the sale of spirits. Much of the wealth of the parish had come from rum, and beneath the Hollis Street church there was a storage room for that commodity, a situation which provoked a wag into pinning on the door of the church the rhyme: There's a spirit above and a spirit below, A spirit of love and a spirit of woe; The spirit above is the spirit divine, The spirit below is the spirit of wine. When relations between minister and congregation were beginning to be a little strained Pierpont was given leave of absence for a year to go abroad. This was in 1835-36, but by 1840 relations were again bad, and a segment of the congregation tried to force Pierpont's resignation. He refused to resign, and a trial before a council of Boston ministers resulted. There were many charges brought against him, such as neglect of his parish because of his speaking engagements in other towns, dis­ honorable dealings in connection with patent rights in the American first reader and the National reader which he had compiled, but princi­ pally the charges were of offence given the congregation because of his anti-slavery and temperance activities. After a bitter controversy and a long-drawn out trial the verdict of the ecclesiastical council was largely a vindication of Mr. Pierpont with a reproof for both sides. Said the Council: "If there was sometimes a want of prudence, gentle­ ness, and discretion in the Pastor, there may have been, on the part of some of his hearers, unconsciously a susceptibility to offence, which led them to attach a stronger meaning and to make a more pointed application of his sermons . than was intended by him, or they could justly be made to have . and thus the difficulties have arisen from faults and failings in both parties." In 1845 Pierpont left the Hollis Street church to go to the First Unitarian Society at Troy, New York, but in 1849 he was back in New England as pastor of the Unitarian church in West Medford, Massachusetts, where he remained until 1858. Upon the outbreak of BOOKS AT BROWN 5 the Civil War and in his seventy-sixth year, Pierpont volunteered as chaplain of the 22nd Massachusetts Volunteers. He marched off to war with the regiment but was shortly withdrawn from active service. He then was given a clerkship in the Treasury department. In his American Procession, William A. Croffut gives an account of the organization of the Washington Lecture Association in the fall of 1861. Croffut had placed in the morning paper a notice requesting a meeting of "young men in Washington who desire to have a course of lectures during the winter similar to those of northern cities." While the meeting was going on a knock came at the door. "It was opened to admit a venerable man with long flowing white hair and beard like Raphael's Saint Jerome, a quick, nervous manner, a glowing pink face, and vivacious and merry blue eyes. He paused, leaned against the door, and said, 'Gentlemen, I saw an advertisement summoning young men to come here to consult to-night, and here I am!' " Thus entered John Pierpont and was immediately elected first president of the organi­ zation.
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