Swept Into Puritanism: Emerson, Wendell Phillips

Swept into Puritanism: Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and the Roots of Radicalism Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 kenyon gradert

ENRY Adams mused in his Education that antislavery H politics “swe[pt] him back into puritanism with a violence as great as that of a religious war.” Four decades after the Civil War, Adams became the first of many to view the abolitionist movement with both sympathy and skepticism, admiring their moral vision while distrusting their absolutism. This imagination, in the words of Andrew Delbanco, “longed for the fire in which sin and sinner are consumed.”1 Adams defined abolitionism similarly and more specifically: “slavery drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism.”2 Adams rather literally described the process of genealogical re-imagination by which religious radicals like Ralph Waldo Emerson came to find common ground in militant abolition with activists like Wendell Phillips, the golden tongue of New England reformers whom Emerson had once mocked. Pres- sured by rising political tensions and hungry for a vigorous religiosity, both men turned to the radical side of their Puritan heritage and embraced their ancestors as Cromwellian spiritual warriors. This vision, martial and disruptive, is a striking depar- ture from what most scholars have characterized as New En- gland’s attempt to move beyond its history of Puritan violence

1Andrew Delbanco et al., The Abolitionist Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 22-23. 2Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams; an Autobiography (Boston: Mas- sachusetts Historical Society, 1918), 39-48.

103 104 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and intolerance.3 The Puritan penchant for drawing battle-lines and fighting devils became newly potent in the decades leading to the Civil War. As Emerson and Phillips embraced the revolutionary Puritan past repudiated by their peers, they are not only a productive comparison of two temperamental takes on a shared historical imagination—Emerson the withdrawn seer and Phillips the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 spitfire prophet—but also as representatives of the manner in which New England religious and political radicals found common ground in a shared lineage.4 (With only Phillips able to command higher speaking fees than Emerson by the 1850s, both men were also among antebellum America’s most famed counter-cultural figures.) While Emerson at first resisted and eventually embraced militant abolition because of his need to see it as a world-historical movement, Phillips, conversely, initially resisted transcendental infidelities but grew Emersonian in his historical vision; from opposite ends, both converged toward a radical culture of abolition through a vision of revolutionary Puritans. Uncovering such roots for New England radicalism, further, can meet recent calls to revisit and reimagine American literary and religious history. If the trans-Atlantic turn since the 1980s has drawn the field away from Puritan origins by challenging the “origins theses” of Perry Miller, Ann Douglas, and Sacvan Bercovitch with streams of influence beyond the Amer- ican nation-state, the more recent religious turn has involved a re-turn to and a revision of these foundational genealogies of religion, as noted in recent special issues of Early American

3See especially Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chap. 8. 4While recent studies have emphasized how New England religious and political radicalism overlapped in shared social networks, it also grew from a shared historical vision. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, eds., Emerson’s Antislavery Writings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, To Set This World Right (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); and Len Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990). For an analysis of how abolitionism often drew activists away from religious orthodoxy, see Stephen M. Cherry and Michael P. Young, “The Secularization of Confessional Protest,” Journal for the Scientiﬁc Study of Religion 44 (2005): 373-95. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 105 Literature and American Literary History.5 Scholars from Sarah Rivett to Joanna Brooks and Lawrence Buell have called for a reclamation of origins, rewritten without clean consensus rather than rejected outright.6 More disruptive origins can be found in the Puritan radicalism that one senator blamed for national dissolution and civil war; abolitionists’ agitation from “Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips ...andthelesserspawn Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 of Transcendentalism,” he lamented, grew from “the PURI- TANISM of New England.”7 What exactly was “radical” about this new vision of Puritan inheritance, particularly when American radicalism, as Bercov- itch argued, can reinforce as much as oppose hegemonies like liberalism and nationalism? Phillips and Emerson’s allies were seen as radicals in the basic sense, defending even armed resistance to federal law. But “radical” can also be taken in its humbler etymological sense as a matter of roots, which it ever was in history-hungry New England.8 Even for forward-looking ﬁgures like Emerson and Phillips, as romantics seizing upon

5See Sandra M. Gustafson and Gordon Hutner’s introduction to the special joint- issue on “Projecting Early American Studies” in Early American Literature and Amer- ican Literary History 45 (2010): 245-49. See also the special roundtable issue of EAL 47 (2012) on the re-release of Bercovitch’s Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), and Sarah Rivett’s “Religious Exceptionalism and American Literary History: the Puritan Origins of the American Self in 2012,” EAL 47 (2012): 391-410. 6Sarah Rivett, “Early American Religion in a Postsecular Age,” PMLA 128 (2013): 989–96; Lawrence Buell, “Religion on the American Mind,” ALH 19 (2007): 32-38; and Joanna Brooks, “From Edwards to Baldwin: Heterodoxy, Discontinuity, and New Narratives of American Religious-Literary History,” ALH 22 (2010): 439-53. 7Senator Samuel S. Cox, Puritanism in Politics: Speech of Honorable S.S. Cox, of Ohio, Before the Democratic Union Association, January 13, 1863 (New York: Van Evrie, Horton, & Co, 1863), 3; the speech was reprinted in the Richmond Daily Dispatch (March 14, 1863); and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, January 13, 1863, 2. Similarly, in his poignant political cartoon from 1863, Confederate sympathizer Adalbert Volck crowded prominent abolitionists around a devilish altar built of stones that read “Socialism,” “Free Love,” and “Atheism.” Crowning its top was “Negro Worship,” while its largest foundation stone boldly reads “PURITANISM”; see David Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 14-28. 8See Robert Milder, “A Radical Emerson?,” The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 49-75. On US abolitionism, see most recently Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 106 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY organic metaphors, to be radical required digging into the soil of history and sorting through roots, clearing those that were dried-up and tapping into what remained vital for breaking through the present’s encrusted complacencies in politics, religion, and art. Most often these efforts were only ﬁguratively militant. Rising pressure from a slave power changed that, fos- tering the sense that America was in the midst of not only Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 a second revolution, but what some called a “Second Refor- mation,” a spiritual watershed pushing the impulses of Luther and the Puritans to reform even the Reformation, in Milton’s words, and perhaps through bloodshed.9 Heeding calls for new origins requires acknowledging that “history may also work backward,” in the words of Robert Milder, “as its legacies of thought, vestigial or outmoded in new intellectual times, come to reassert themselves ﬁguratively as interpretive categories that respond to personal or commu- nal crises.”10 Disenchanted with a New England church and state that he deeply respected, Phillips spoke for Emerson and other New England radicals when he declared—in an address honoring the Puritans—that “to be as good as our fathers, we must be better,” transplanting roots into new temporal soils to preserve their vitality.11

“While I admired his eloquence,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of Wendell Phillips, “I had not the faintest wish to meet the man. He had only a platform.”12 Most accounts of

9Thomas T. Stone, “The Second Reformation,” The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria We- ston Chapman (Boston: Nation Anti-Slavery Bazaar, 1851), 120-25. Milton, “Are- opagitica.” http://www.dartmouth.edu/∼milton/reading room/areopagitica/text.html (accessed August 1, 2015). 10Robert Milder, “Emerson to Edwards,” The New England Quarterly 80 (2007): 96. 11Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, 2 vols. (Boston: Lee and Shep- ard, 1891), 1:231 (hereafter referred to as SLL). 12James Perrin Warren, Culture of Eloquence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 8. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 107 Emerson’s well-known distaste for reformers like Phillips point to “New England Reformers,” noting Emerson’s derisiveness as he joins abolitionists with cold-water therapists and other lesser movements into a silly “soldiery of dissent,” advocating instead a fuller inner transformation of the self. Robert Milder describes Emerson’s aim as one for “Reform” rather than “reform,” for the individual’s spiritual awakening rather than sociopolitical Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 tinkering, a difference similar to the Calvinist distinction between grace and works.13 Yet Emerson’s description of reformers as a “soldiery of dissent,” far from simple mockery, must be read alongside his lifelong admiration for the iconoclastic impulses of his Protestant pedigree, whose power to crack through convention was tied to his conception of spiritual transformation and historical progress. Though he found reformers’ goals near-sighted, he admired their dissent as signs of a fecund zeit- geist. Early on, Emerson crafted explicit genealogies that traced reformers to the same spiritual fount that birthed his transcendental peers: the Reformation and Puritanism. Declaring that “the fertile forms of antinomianism among the elder puritans, seemed to have their match” in reformers, Emerson spoke half admiringly of those that he imagined as spiritual kin.14 Despite our association of antinomianism with threats to Pu- ritan rule, Emerson and New England reformers more often combined Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and their Puri- tan opponents into what might be called an historical logic of Protestant dissent running from the Reformation through the English Civil War into the present: Hutchinson opposed the laws of John Cotton just as the latter’s brethren opposed the laws of Anglican kings, just as they had opposed the laws of the Pope. As resistance to despotism of church and state, antinomianism was not conﬁned to Hutchinson but was, as Emer- son called it, a “fertile form” that blossomed in the Reformation and continued to re-form itself in the nineteenth century. In

13Milder, “A Radical Emerson?,” 5. 14Emerson, “New England Reformers,” The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emer- son, ed. Robert Spiller et al., 12 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1971-2013), 3:251. 108 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY “The Transcendentalist,” a lecture delivered before his better- known “New England Reformers,” Emerson imagined a genealogy tied together by a common antinomian impulse that falling on superstitious times, made prophets and apostles; on popish times, made protestants and ascetic monks, preachers of Faith against

the preachers of Works; on prelatical times, made Puritans and Quak- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 ers; and falling on Unitarian and commercial times, makes the peculiar shades of Idealism which we know.15 Such history is more prophetic than whiggish, as insurgent revelations (apostolic, Puritan, Transcendental) clash with hardened zeitgeists (pagan, papal, Unitarian). In his response to F. O. Matthiessen’s language of an Ameri- can renaissance, Joe Fulton has noted that Emerson’s vision of artistic rebirth was equally tied to a desire for religious reformation (both of these ideals as much as historical descendants of their namesakes).16 But the Reformation was potent in Emer- son’s mind as much for its political as its religious effects; they were in fact two sides of the same spiritual transformation, wit- nessed in the genealogies of “The Transcendentalist” and “New England Reformers” that laud antinomian agitators as history’s prime movers. In his lecture “Boston,” Emerson praised his birthplace for “never want[ing] a good principle of rebellion ...always a heresiarch,” and again sketched a genealogy of what he called “new lights” from the city’s Puritan founders to its modern reformers, where there always arose “some noble protestant” to challenge spiritual hegemonies. Powering this antinomian lineage was what he called “the moving principle itself, the primum mobile, a living mind af- ﬂicting the mass and always agitating the conservative class with some odious novelty,” running from Anne Hutchinson and her Puritan opponents alike to religious radicals like the Shaker Ann Lee and political radicals like abolitionist Willliam Lloyd Garrison. In sum, if Emerson sought Reform over reform, he

15Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin Co, 1903-1904), 1:339 (hereafter referred to as Complete Works). 16Joe B. Fulton, “Reason for a Renaissance: The Rhetoric of Reformation and Rebirth in the Age of Transcendentalism,” NEQ 80 (2007): 383-407. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 109 also perceived a common antinomian militancy in both that he traced back to the Puritans and the spiritual impulses of the Reformation in a process akin to Raymond Williams’s sense of residual, dominant, and emergent cultural-political forces: always aiming for the fecundity of emergence in unsettling dominant modes of culture and power, Emerson found precedent in residual sources—Luther, English Puritans, New English Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Antinomians—once animated by revelation that could still be accessed.17 The patriarch of Emerson’s reformational genealogy was Martin Luther, with whom he had “a minor obsession” early in life, as Joel Porte describes. Not a Puritan proper, Luther was more powerful as their spiritual progenitor. One sees the revolutionary tack of Emerson’s vision of Protestantism in his dearth of interest in John Calvin, more systematic and staid than the German dissenter, as careful in his political guid- ance of Geneva as in his systematic theology. Crucially, though Emerson saw Luther as a model for Reform, he also admired the dissenter for a faith that provoked great reform movements. In an early lecture, Emerson admiringly sketched Luther as a warrior dissenter: “the movements of his heart took the form of visions,” Emerson declares, “and he gave way to an irresistible conviction that he was summoned by God to set up a standard of Reform, and to do battle with the infernal hosts.”18 Excited by girding Luther with militant metaphors, Emerson clariﬁed that his was “a spiritual revolution by spiritual arms alone” while nonetheless noting that Luther’s spiritual message held unpredictably antinomian implications.19 Revealingly, Emerson

17Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121-27; Emerson, Complete Works, 12:203-6. 18Joel Porte, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979), 300; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Early Lectures, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959-1972), 1:127, 136 (hereafter referred to as EL). 19Because of this tension, Emerson oscillated in his judgment of Oliver Cromwell. In an 1839 journal entry, he tells of Cromwell seeing the sun break through fog in the midst of battle, reading it as a sign that God was on his side, a faith not “speculative, but inward, transforming the mind to it its [sic] uniting to & participating of the Divine Nature.” Yet this faith sat uneasily alongside his use of physical force, 110 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY lamented Luther’s rejection of the proto-democratic Peasants War in part because it was inspired by Luther’s own impulses; likewise, Emerson lauded Luther’s calls for moderation from the princes “in language hitherto unheard, the rights of the people.”20 Luther’s Reformation was revolutionary. Emerson similarly admired John Milton for his militant mix of Reform and reform, where spiritual impulse propelled him Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 into his era’s proto-democratic conflict, the English Civil War. In an early essay, Emerson casts Milton’s faith as a masculine and worldly force much like Luther’s, again swept up in martial metaphors, declaring that Milton “opens the war and strikes the first blow”—only to again disclaim that “to this antique heroism, Milton added the genius of the Christian sanctity.” Though Emerson believed Milton superior to his nonconformist allies in Cromwell’s army, he recognized that the poet’s insight was kin to theirs and even thrived in “the stern, almost fanatic, society of the Puritans.”21 If Milton’s Puritans were the ancestors of New England reformers, Emerson could not yet grant the latter the historical importance of their forbears. Over two decades, he began to adjust his genealogy as history seemed to wax apocalyptic and abolitionists met rising violence with a courage that seemed divinely inspired. In 1837, the first of this violence seized Emerson’s attention and forced him to reconsider whether abolitionists were not only growing in importance on the historical stage to a role that might approach Cromwellian Puritans, but perhaps even capable of the same kind of militant spirituality as Milton. When

and ultimately, he could not compete with the Artist, “not taught or quickened by his appetites. The Cromwells & Caesars are a mob beside him.” But Emerson also admired Cromwell for conducting his armies along more spiritual goals. One could not condone the Peasant Rebellion while rejecting the New Model Army. Emerson, “Journal D,” Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Gilman (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press), 8:246-47. 20Emerson, EL, 1:127. 21Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Milton,” in Essays from the North American Review, ed. Allen Thorndike Rice et al. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1879), 112-15. Emerson’s mixed admiration for Puritan fanaticism recalls his comment from the same period in “Nature” that “without electricity the air would rot, and without this violence of direction, which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency.” SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 111 proslavery Missourians murdered Elijah Lovejoy for publishing abolitionist tracts, Americans seized upon the event as a refer- endum on the boundaries of free speech. Emerson was more inspired by the militancy that most feared in Lovejoy after he died defending himself with a rifle. Emerson praised Lovejoy’s resistance in “Heroism,” warning his audience that they “must not omit the arming of the man” nor “go dancing in the weeds Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 of peace.” As he had implied for Luther and Milton, Emerson more explicitly defined the heroic as “the military attitude of the soul” and “the state of the soul at war.” In the accompanying lecture “Holiness,” he tried the more difficult task of empow- ering the holy man with worldly force. To illustrate, Emerson again reached for Milton, quoting at length Samson Agonistes to illustrate the invincibility of an inspired soul, “whom unarmed / No strength of man or fiercest wildbeast could withstand”— fulfilling Emerson’s desire for a righteous militancy between the extremes of impotent piety and godless violence. Lovejoy similarly met Emerson’s criteria for spiritual militancy, marking the beginning of abolitionism’s shift from the league of water- therapists to the historical level of Cromwell’s army. Reform and reform drew near.22

Following Lovejoy’s death, Boston’s preeminent pastor William Ellery Channing wrangled uneasy permission from city ofﬁcials to convene a public meeting at Faneuil Hall to discuss the issue. Everyone left the meeting talking less about Lovejoy and more about the impromptu speech of a young Brahmin. Born into a venerable family, Wendell Phillips seemed destined for respectable greatness since his Harvard days where he duti- fully but half-heartedly took a law degree. When he married an abolitionist, Ann Greene, and encountered the infamous near- lynching of William Lloyd Garrison in Boston in 1835, Phillips converted to a life of dissent, ﬁrst publicly expressed that night

22Emerson, EL, 2:330-47. 112 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY at Faneuil Hall. Massachusetts Attorney General James Austin opened the meeting by paralleling Lovejoy’s murderers with the “orderly mob” of Boston’s revolutionary patriots and in- sulted the great Channing’s busybody interference in slavery as “marvelously out of place” as Lovejoy, an oxymoronic preacher with a gun. Burning at these insults to Boston history, Phillips shouldered his way to the stage for an unplanned rejoinder. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Phillips’s speech has been described as patriotic, but filial is more apt, filled as it is with the language of ancestral heritage that would continue to dominate his speeches. Phillips began first by contesting Austin’s genealogy that gave Tea Party roots to proslavery ruffians. Boston’s patriots were enlightened men aiming at self-rule; Lovejoy’s killers were a lawless mob fearing free speech. To sanctify his reading of their patriot forefathers, Phillips enlisted their Puritan grandfathers. When he declared to his audience—increasingly enthralled and unsettled by this Brahmin’s unexpected salvo—that this “soil consecrated by the prayersofPuritansandthebloodofpatriots...should have yawned and swallowed [Austin] up,” the crowd exploded. Man- aging to resume, Phillips used his Puritan ancestors to make clear that he was perfectly at home with righteous force. After the first of many threats from mobs, he began carrying a pistol. He blended New England Puritans with the English Civil War, like Emerson, as an argument against escapist religion. “Shades of Hugh Peters and John Cotton, save us from such pulpits!” Phillips cried, invoking the chaplain of Cromwell’s New Model Army, executed for regicide, alongside the venerated New En- gland Puritan minister, explicitly challenging Austin’s belief that preachers had no right to guns nor power in political matters.23 If Emerson aimed to be a Milton among Puritans, Phillips eagerly enlisted with the latter regiment to attack Austin’s paci- fication of their heritage. Phillips was relatively unknown before his impromptu speech, but soon rose to fame as America’s most pugnacious orator of reform, marked by a style that Emerson would grow to admire as a combination of Luther’s passion and Puritan plainspeak, “‘the steel hid under gauze and spangles;’

23Phillips, SLL, 1:3, 8. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 113 . . . not seen at his best until hostile dissent broke forth among his audience.”24 The antinomian tenor of the speech came not long after Emerson’s similar call for heroic intellectual independence in “The American Scholar” and just before the “Divinity School Address.” Both men were already closer in thought than either would have cared to admit, and would only grow closer as political tensions rose. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Phillips was similarly shaped by his sense of the Reforma- tion’s radical potential, especially in his passion for genealogy (a pastime rarely considered revolutionary). Shortly after grad- uation from Harvard, he began to research the Phillipses obses- sively, most interested in “establishing his roots in seventeenth century New England,” as Irving Bartlett notes. He usually took the trail leading to George Phillips, a Puritan minister whose passage to America was paid by John Winthrop himself, and a figure that would serve as a more personal model of radicalism than Emerson’s Milton, aiding Phillips emotionally in his “come-outerism.”25 This Garrisonian call for congregants to leave churches that did not speak out against slavery was a painful endeavor wrapped in family tensions as Phillips re- solved to leave the ancestral Old South which he would push to preserve later in life. Though critics viewed come-outers as infidels, Phillips’s stance grew from his deep faith, believing with most allies that “church and ministry are appointed of God” and towards which he “had been bred to an unmixed and unlimited respect.”26 When his elder brother George, named for the beloved first-generation Puritan minister, began attend- ing a church that had condemned Lovejoy, Wendell urged his mother to remind this brother that he bore “the honored name of George,” and was “bound to think if he can conscientiously

24Emerson, Complete Works, 7:429. 25Irving Bartlett, Wendell and Ann Phillips: The Community of Reform, 1840-1880 (New York: Norton, 1979), 13. Enthusiasm for genealogy was in part an expected interest for a blue-blooded Brahmin, but also reflected a burgeoning field, with New England then formalizing its longstanding interest in genealogy into antiquarian and historical societies. François Weil, “John Farmer and the Making of American Geneal- ogy,” NEQ 80 (2007): 414. 26The Liberator, July 30, 1841. 114 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY give such a man his support.”27 Phillips relied upon his literal Protestant genealogy not only as a model of separatism but as a source of emotional sustenance. In addition to his ancestor George, Phillips had his own particular vision of spiritual lineage that, just as Emerson pre- ferred Milton, began with the paradoxical Puritan Sir Henry Vane, governor of the Bay Colony, supporter of Roger Williams, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 ally of Cromwell, and regicide. Shortly after his Faneuil Hall speech, Phillips (like Emerson’s “Boston” and “The Transcen- dentalist”) crafted more explicit spiritual genealogies, rejoic- ing of British abolitionism that the movement “dwells still in the land of Vane and Milton, of Pym and Hamden”—key nonconformists in the English Civil War—and “of Sharp and Cowper and Wilberforce”—key British abolitionists.28 Emer- son admired Milton for joining spiritual insight with worldly power; Phillips similarly honored Vane for his mix of toler- ance and conviction, one who could lay down arms with Roger Williams, take them up with Cromwell, and sign the death war- rant of a king. As with Emerson, Phillips imagined this spiritual genealogy to be necessarily capacious and dynamic, a continu- ous reforming of the Reformation that transcended particular creeds to challenge ossified convention.29 In their reverence for Vane and Milton, both men reveal the tendency to bypass the later generations of Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather and instead revere the founding generation more closely allied with the Puritan leaders of the En- glish Civil War. Phillips lamented in jeremiad that since Vane’s generation, Harvard’s original motto had atrophied from the simple Veritas into Christo et Ecclesiae to reflect dogmatic squabbles that differed in spirit from the founders’ heroic separation from England. “It is a singular but forgotten fact that the first churches in New England,” Phillips noted ac- curately, “had no statement of doctrine in their creeds. They

27Bartlett, Wendell and Ann, 18. 28Phillips, “Letter to George Thompson,” SLL, 2:9, 333. He later deemed Vane to be Boston’s “noblest human being . . . Milton pales before him.” 29Milton, “Areopagitica.” SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 115 conﬁned themselves to a simple statement of purpose; for our fathers did not attempt to reﬁne—they felt.”30 Phillips’s emphasis on inner conviction and feeling above careful rationality again paralleled Emerson in historical vision if not in explicit theology. Early in his career, Phillips had utilized his literal Puritan genealogy for the more dynamic spiritual genealogies he saw Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 as its greater legacy. “The vindication of Puritanism is a New England bound to be better than Puritanism,” he would declare on the eve of the Civil War. Already by 1840 he had used his ancestors to sustain his painful exit from his ancestral church, indict New England’s apathetic, and inspire abolitionists with a fervency of cause.31

If Luther and Milton were the patriarchs of Emerson’s reformational genealogy as exemplars of a masculine faith, his greatest model herein was in fact a woman invested in family history. While Emerson initially admired Milton for tran- scending Puritan partisanship, his aunt Mary Moody Emerson captured his imagination with her vital vision of the Puritan past. Not long before Lovejoy’s death, Emerson reﬂected in his journal that the “inﬂuences of ancestral religion” through his aunt’s “hoarded family traditions” served as a far better education than anything he’d acquired in Cambridge, and one that goaded him towards militant abolition.32 Though Emerson’s self-reliant persona was antagonistic to history and environment, Phyllis Cole has revealed the extent to which he was shaped via Mary Moody by native and familial

30Phillips, SLL, 2:254. While the image of emotionless Puritans persists, Abram Van Engen has recently argued otherwise, a fact recognized by their antebellum descendants who seized upon Puritan zeal as an indictment of those who evaded the issue of slavery in the name of a cooler Unionism. See Sympathetic Puritans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1-25. 31Phillips, SLL, 2:298. 32Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3-15. 116 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY influence, just as Phillips reveals how Puritan influence was transmitted as much through family history and the lived experience of tradition as through ideas and texts. In Cole’s brilliant telling, the aunt with whom he sustained a formative lifelong relationship was a peculiar mix of category-defying radical and history-honoring conservative. She “was not a Calvinist, but wished everybody else to be one,” Emerson later observed. He Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 embraced her Puritan genealogy as a conduit to a Romantic- pietistic faith during her frequent reminders that the Emer- sons were one of Boston’s few families to side with fiery New Light revivalism during the Great Awakening.33 Through Mary Moody one can see Emerson quite literally related to “native religious tradition,” in Cole’s words, “a recasting of older and more spirit filled ways of faith.” Mary Moody was also a political model for her nephew. As with his vision of Luther and Milton, Mary Moody’s “spirit filled ways” entailed neither sentimentality nor ethereality but the combative “military attitude of the soul” that Emerson earlier lauded in “Heroism.” He admired the aunt who “repudiated the weakness of women in favor of masculine heroism” and thrilled to memories of the Revolutionary War in which her father died as a revolution-preaching chaplain.34 In his journals, Emerson delighted in Mary Moody’s aggressive style and her tales of Puritan ancestors with the same spiritual backbone. He recorded his aunt’s story of his great-grandfather Samuel Moody, who enraptured congregants with aggressive sermons and “collared them, & dragged them forth & sent them home” when they loafed at the pub.35 Alongside her own defiant spirit, Mary Moody’s reverence for hot-blooded ancestral faith convinced her nephew that native tradition could support as much as impede spiritual in- novation. Moody “held on with both hands to the faith of the

33Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of Cal- ifornia Press, 1995), 25. 34Cole, Mary Moody, 17, 79. 35Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, ed. by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 253. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 117 past generation,” Emerson reflected, “and poetised this beloved Calvinism.” In turn, he felt especially “bred to purify the old faith...andimportallitsfireintothenewage.”36 This poeticization of Puritan fire resembled Phillips’s own belief that his Puritan heritage was a living impulse that pushed beyond its doctrinal borders. Rather than Matthew Arnold’s substitution of culture for moribund religion, this poeticization was a fun- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 damentally religious endeavor that consummated rather than replaced the Protestant past. Just as he called Luther a “poet” and Milton a “prophet,” Emerson’s aesthetics were fundamen- tally religious. If he early admired Milton for Reform and, less so, the Puritans as reformers, Mary Moody’s “poeticization” of Puritan fire moved him to consider the legacy of the Puritans as a legitimate source of Reform in its own right. Emerson’s growing appreciation for Puritan heritage in turn prompted a reconsideration of his relation to the modern reformers he saw as their scions. Shortly after his reflections on Mary Moody, Emerson’s step-grandfather Dr. Ezra Ripley passed away. In his journal, Emerson again reflected at length on Puritanism’s militant legacy, honoring Ripley as “one of the rear-guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans.” If Mary Moody was the private and pietistic Puritan of Re- form, Ripley led the public and moralistic Puritans of reform. Emerson lauded Ripley as the “last banner ...of a mighty epoch” stretching from Luther’s Reformation to “the planting & the liberating of America.” He connected this genealogy to modern reformers whom he increasingly saw as America’s latter-day liberators: “what is this abolition & non-resistance & temperance, but the continuation of Puritanism?”37 Emer- son sided with Mary Moody over Dr. Ripley but increasingly saw a familial resemblance, an inextricable connection between Reform and reform. Milton’s introspection spilled outwards into political dissent, after all, while godly Puritan society required individual conversion, just as Garrisonians shared his emphasis on changing hearts above laws. Were they reformers

36Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, 253. 37Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, 260. 118 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY or Reformers? The question again mirrored Calvinist debate on grace versus works: works might be empty if void of a changed heart, but would not such a transformation manifest itself in societal reform? Mary Moody and Dr. Ripley were both devout abolitionists. Was abolitionism indeed a “Second Reformation?” Emerson began asking that question in his 1844 “Eman- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 cipation in the British West Indies,” well known as his first public—and very hesitant—endorsement of abolitionism. But the hesitancy is revealing. “What is most original about Emer- son’s antislavery writings,” Lawrence Buell writes, “is not their views of slavery or abolition as such but how they sift through as argument and as performance—the question of the proper relation of the work of the ‘scholar’ to the work of the activist or ‘reformer.’”38 Again, prophet, poet, or, especially, Reformer are useful synonyms for the Emersonian scholar, as Emer- son’s indecision in his early abolitionist writings often stems from attempting to discern whether the movement belonged to providential history as sketched in “The Transcendentalist” and “Boston,” propelled by militant prophets like Luther and Milton, and embodied in more literal militants like Cromwell. Emerson’s abolitionist writings evolve as he aims to discern the movement’s relation to providential history. If, in 1838,Emer- son could see the glimmerings of revelation in Elijah Love- joy’s militant martyrdom, his 1844 speech revisits the status of abolition’s historical and spiritual status. Typically, Emerson begins not with historical specifics but with a transcendental vision of history itself (as for Phillips) as “a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.” He acknowledges British emancipation as a seminal moment in this history, but quickly laments that in New England “the great-hearted Pu- ritans have left no posterity,” its descendants bearing a slave power with “sweetness and patience” that betrays their ancestors’ tough resistance to tyranny. Emerson admits America’s

38Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 269-70. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 119 debt to abolitionists as better heirs to the Puritans, but less for their attack on slavery and more for the unintended side effect of provoking deeper spiritual reﬂection; because of abolitionist agitation, people see “powers which, in their days of darkness, they had overlooked.”39 When the Mexican-American War erupted two years later, abolitionists protested it as a land grab for slave territory. As Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 their anger was met with rising aggression from the slave power, Emerson’s millennial expectations began to stir. At a Fourth of July celebration sponsored by the Massachusetts Antislav- ery Society, Emerson employed New England’s militant heritage to embrace abolitionism more actively. He still lamented that too many in New England were “private and sequestered ...snivelling nobodies” who though they “have good blood in their veins” degraded it by supporting war to safeguard cotton investments. Next to these worldly ﬁgures, abolitionists rose in his estimation as spiritual heroes. As he praised “the growth of the abolition party, the true successors of that austere Church, which made nature and history sacred to us all,” he now celebrated abolitionists as worthy scions. Though after Puritanism New England men had softened into a “Parisian manner of living,” abolition might toughen them into spiritual warriors as Pu- ritanism once did: “what can better supply that outward church they want, than this fervent, self-denying school.”40 Emerson even praised Phillips and Garrison with whom he shared the stage and the greater “phalanx of these brave men and brave women” for a faith that marched into battle like Milton’s. If he had deemed New England reformers a “soldiery of dissent” with not some derision four years prior, he now praised its leaders for increasingly exemplifying the “state of the soul at war.” Yet once more Emerson cautiously reincorporated their efforts into providence: “I am glad, not for what it has done, but that the party exists. Not what they do, but what they see, seems to me sublime.” Their true successes came not in policy

39Emerson, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 8, 24-28. 40Emerson, Antislavery Writings, 40-43. 120 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY but in revelations. Emerson almost believed in abolitionism as a spiritual movement.41 Emerson’s conversion was clinched on September 18, 1851 when Reform and abolitionist reform collapsed into one another amidst political crisis. With the Senate’s passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, northerners could no longer hold slavery at a distance and were bound to enforce the institution. Even the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 cool Emerson found his fire. “This filthy enactment was made in the 19th Century, by people who could read & write.”42 When Concordians asked him to speak on the issue, he delivered one of his most impassioned addresses. “The law is suicidal, and cannot be obeyed,” he bluntly began, while the crisis it provoked in northern culture “ended a great deal of nonsense we had been accustomed to hear on the 22nd December,” New England’s traditional date for Forefather’s Day, a celebration of the Pilgrims and Puritans.43 True Puritanism now required disobedience to the federal government. Repeating the speech in 1854 after the situation had worsened, Emerson added a lengthy reflection on the failures of northern institutions and reached for Cromwell to urge a spiritual militancy: “you must be citadels and warriors, yourselves the Declaration of Inde- pendence, the charter, the battle, and the victory. Cromwell said, ‘we can only resist the superior training of the king’s soldiers, by having godly men.’”44 Emerson had long been wary of Cromwell, admiring his spiritual goals while fearing his military means, but in his vitriol towards the Fugitive Slave Act, he invoked the Puritan general in an unabashed call for

41In “A Radical Emerson?” Milder shows how Emerson’s radicalism depended on the need to see a movement as spiritual, focusing on his anti-capitalism cooling in the later 1840s for these reasons. But this is the period when Emerson warms to abolitionism—a means for him to preserve his sense of politically potent spiritual transformation—not the decline of radicalism with old age and spiritual disillusionment but a changing of its political programs as history seemed to grow more apocalyptic over slavery rather than capitalism; socialism was historically premature, while abolition and the growing tensions it challenged seemed to wax providential. 42William H. Gilman et al., eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 11 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1960-1983), 11:412. 43Emerson, Antislavery Writings, 67, 78. 44Emerson, Antislavery Writings, 83. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 121 spiritual—perhaps even literal—war. Aunt Mary Moody de- spised the act as much as her nephew and wrote to him that winter, again invoking their ancestry: “I like a conscience war as did our kindred.”45 Revising his genealogy through the tense 1850s to admit abolitionists as his spiritual kin, Emerson now agreed. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021

In 1841, Phillips returned from a disappointing trip to Eu- rope, having made minimal progress at winning British support for abolition. One highlight was his continued genealogical quest. In England Phillips had hired genealogists to trace his roots beyond colonial New England and discovered in his own studies that Ann’s ﬁrst North American ancestor was an associate of Roger Williams. He also found that the family’s founder, Reverend George Phillips, had defended a colonist’s right to an Anabaptist book against none other than John Winthrop. Ann and Wendell had married well, dissenting descendants of dissenting dissenters. Propelled by a sense of connection to an ongoing tradition of dissent, Phillips’s abolitionism, like Emerson’s, would radicalize into militancy in the 1850s, drawing him onto shared stages, literal and ideologi- cal, with transcendentalists whom he increasingly resembled in language, belief, and historiography. Herein Phillips paralleled Salem transcendentalist Thomas Treadwell Stone’s vision of “The Second Reformation.” In an essay published in the antislavery anthology The Liberty Bell alongside a piece by Phillips, Stone imagined a future that rejected centralized political authority as much as Protestant churches had rejected the ecclesiastical authority of the Ro- man Catholic church. While the ﬁrst Reformation defeated the Roman church’s “assumption of divine authority,” Stone imagined a Second Reformation that “shall expose the falseness of the same claim in behalf of political institutions. Grant them

45Cole, Mary Moody, 281. 122 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of divine origin or ordinance; yet never, certainly, more divine than the individual man.”46 This vision is an apt description of Phillips’s radicalizing sense of history and activism, provoked by a growing frustration with New England’s complacency with slavery. The most immediate disappointment Phillips faced upon his return from England came again from his family, which per- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 sonalized his disgust with New England elites’ failure to live up to the ideals and history they preached. His brother-in- law George Blagdon assumed the pastorate of Boston’s Old South, historic home to Samuel Adams, Phillis Wheatley, and Benjamin Franklin, only to preach fervent attacks on Garrison, applauded by his wife (Wendell’s sister) Miriam. Wendell’s mother was disappointed that Europe had not cooled her son’s enthusiasms. Brothers George and Thomas remained profes- sionally apolitical. Beyond family, Phillips became sorely disappointed with a New England clergy that seemed increasingly opposed to calls for a church puriﬁed of slavery, and especially with the New England public. Reveling in memories of Lex- ington and Bunker Hill, Phillips long imagined the revolution as a groundswell of patriotism from the public and hoped that the same would happen for abolition. Instead, most New Eng- landers remained neutral if not vocally opposed to abolitionist zeal. In response, Phillips came to exchange a republican faith in an enlightened New England public for one in a prophetic minority who saw ahead and goaded it on, much like Emer- son’s poet-prophets if more inclined towards agitation than po- etry. Once more he returned to the particularities of his actual forefathers to imagine alternative spiritual genealogies. Revis- iting his ancestor George Phillips, he discovered that the man had not only argued with Governor Winthrop, but had challenged the very basis of his political power for the sake of colonial Catholics. In notes for an autobiography, Phillips re- counts how “Winthrop—a noted intermeddler, came with his friends, to Watertown to punish this heresy,” while his ancestor

46Stone, “Second Reformation,” 121-22. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 123 in turn “refused to receive them as magistrates & only accepted their advice as that of members of a neighboring congregation. This was one of the first protests here against a State-Church & an ecclesiastical tyranny.”47 With anti-Catholicism still potent in New England, for a Brahmin like Phillips to declare a defense of Catholics against a Puritan establishment a truer Puritanism—a rebellion against rebels grown tyrannical in their Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 own regime—was scandalous. George’s pariah status rang true to Phillips’s own experience among his New England family, churches, and public, helping to justify social exclusion and sanctify radical action. Under the guise of a Congregationalist professing allegiance to what he called the “old faith” of New England, Phillips hid an idealistic streak. Already by 1839, he had urged Garrisoni- ans to keep their enthusiasm afire, but warned them to avoid assuming a mobbish herd mentality in their activism. Instead he urged individual inspiration, “the old Greek definition—the Godwithinus.”48 In the tense 1850s, Phillips’s latent idealism was catalyzed especially by a string of fugitive slave cases in Boston and an apathetic response from the public. He took to the podium with increasingly militant lectures that were transcendental in their vision of history. By the Civil War, Phillips shared not only many stages with transcendentalists but also Stone’s belief in his era as a second Reformation. In his 1852 address “Public Opinion,” a neglected classic of nineteenth- century political theory, Phillips spoke to those who, like him, were frustrated that the nation largely remained unconverted to the cause. He reminded his audience that a minority voice could be a major power through incessant agitation, wielding organic metaphors while sketching a vision of history close to Emerson’s primum mobile in “Boston.” “The living sap of to- day outgrows the dead rind of yesterday,” Phillips declared, for “only by unintermitted [sic.] agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake.” “The church has to be regenerated, in each

47Bartlett, Wendell and Ann, 15. 48W. Carlos Martyn, Wendell Phillips: the Agitator (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1890), 124. 124 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY age,” he said, paralleling Emerson’s similar belief in reforming the Reformation, and like him found inspiration in the militant side of his religious heritage; Phillips called for listeners to imi- tate their Puritan forefathers “with their musket-lock on the one side and a drawn sword on the other,” ever ready for aggressive dissent. After drumming up holy war, Phillips even mimicked Emerson by quoting Paradise Lost to denounce Senator Daniel Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Webster, New England’s first son who found infamy with his crucial support of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. “No man, since the age of Luther, has ever held in his hand, so palpa- bly, the destinies and character of a mighty people,” Phillips thundered, yet now felt the “fall of another Lucifer ...intothat ‘lower deep of the lowest deep.’”49 The next year Phillips waxed more fiercely Miltonic in “The Philosophy of the Abolition Movement,” among the most comprehensive and impassioned manifestos of American antislavery. After a thorough historical review cataloging the movement’s supporters and detractors, separating the elect from the reprobate, Phillips crowned his list of the damned by fum- ing that Washington D.C. “always brings to my mind that other Capitol, which in Milton’s great epic ‘rose like an exha- lation. . . from the burning marl’”—likening particular United States senators to Milton’s demons. On the failure of America’s churches (an issue “momentous among descendants of the Pu- ritans”), Phillips declared that come-outers best honored their heritage as ecclesiastical separatists, where “some tried long, like Luther, to be Protestants, and yet not come out of Catholi- cism; but their eyes were soon opened.” A final testament to his radicalization, Phillips enlisted Cromwell’s army to attack the Constitution, much as Emerson would do the next year in his enraged response to the Fugitive Slave Act. While Senator Charles Sumner had stated his desire to see America restored to the peaceful republican “principles of 1789” that had cre- ated the Constitution, Phillips had come to believe that the document was proslavery since its inception. Sumner’s faith in

49Phillips, SLL, 2:49-54. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 125 1789, he retorted, was like England’s Restoration belief that “thememoryofthescaffold...wouldbeguarantyenough for [Charles II’s] good behavior,” in essence a call for Cromwellian soldiers to maintain their arms.50 Much like his ancestor George challenging Winthrop, Phillips rejected the very basis of Amer- ican political authority through his vision of the radical Refor- mation’s ongoing work. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Wielding Puritan soldiers against the United States Consti- tution, Phillips was at his most original when using history in these creative ways. In an 1855 Plymouth’s Forefathers Day speech, he most explicitly resurrected Puritans as models for radicalism in the present. As John Seelye has shown, by the mid-1850s, abolitionists had succeeded in re-politicizing these celebrations of Pilgrim and Puritan ancestry. At an 1855 dinner hosted by Plymouth’s venerable Pilgrim Society, a toast honored the Pilgrim gift of “prosperity and peace.”51 Phillips, who had managed to squeeze onto the dinner list, gave a rejoinder against this delusional sense of peace in the turbulence of the 1850s. Phillips ﬁrst instructed his audience that to honor their forebears rightly, they must regard them “in posse, not in esse—in the possibilities which were wrapped up in that day, 1620, not in what poor human bodies actually produced at the time.” This hermeneutic was essentially Emerson’s ideal- ist vision of history, valuable less for its own sake and more for creating new possibilities in the present. “Do you sup- pose that, if Elder Brewster could come up from his grave to- day, he would be contented with the Congregational Church?” Phillips posed—“no, Sir; he would add to his creed ...the thousand Sharpe’s Riﬂes, addressed ‘Kansas,’ and labelled [sic.] ‘Books.’” Like Emerson honoring Providential violence in nat- uralistic language, Phillips transformed Plymouth Rock into a quaking tectonic plate that “has cropped out a great many times” in America’s inspired individuals—including in Lovejoy’s

50Phillips, SLL, 2:121-46. 51John D. Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998), 270. 126 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY rifles.52 All of this energy, he summed up, was a legacy of the Puritan belief in creating institutions for individuals rather than the reverse. Here was the outcome of Phillips’s radicalized antinomianism: much like Stone’s anarchic vision of a Second Reformation that substituted the divinity of man for political authority and Emerson’s call for individuals to be “yourselves the Declaration of Independence, the charter, the battle,” Phillips Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 cast inspired individuals against institutions that ossified and tyrannized in their wake. The speech emphasizes the degree to which Phillips had embraced individualism and radicalism in his evolution towards a transcendental vision of history. Lest he sound too fawning towards Winthrops and Bradfords, he left his audience with a folk story garnered from his genealogical research. The Phillipses came from neither Plymouth nor Boston but Andover. There, his story goes, a man shot at an owl and the gun’s wad, land- ing in hay, set the barn ablaze. Residents gathered round the fire, lamenting the destruction until a quiet man appeared and asked, quite simply, “did he hit the owl?” What is recorded as “tumultuous applause” followed, and Phillips commanded his audience to always ask the same, no matter the material damage: “‘Did he hit that owl?’ Is liberty safe? Is man sacred? They say, Sir, I am a fanatic, and so I am. But, Sir, none of us have yet risen high enough. Afar off, I see Carver and Bradford, and I mean to get up to them.”53 Phillips’s desire to “rise high enough” was essentially transcendental, and it would soon sweep him and Emerson into support for counter-state militancy.

As war seemed imminent, fanatical visions of Puritan soldiers ignited Emerson and Phillips into sanctioning two insurgents who revealed the productive and destructive ends to which

52Phillips, SLL, 1:230-31. 53Phillips, SLL, 1:236. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 127 Puritan radicalism could lead. In his Forefather’s Day address, Phillips sketched a direct lineage from Puritans to a more palat- able radical when he imagined the Pilgrim William Brewster exchanging pulpits across a two-century divide with Theodore Parker, the infamous transcendentalist and abolitionist who was a friend to Emerson since their early days discussing religion and an ally of Phillips in aiding Boston’s fugitive slaves. When Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Emerson and Phillips shared the stage at the Music Hall to de- liver eulogies after Parker’s death in 1860, they found remark- able common ground. In their comments, Emerson praised Parker as a radical abolitionist and Phillips lauded him as a heretical transcendentalist, both against their early inclinations; Emerson and Phillips were now united around a common vision of the radical demands of their religious heritage. Both praised Parker as the best of New England stock, a Yankee yeoman, and a spiritual militant. “It was his merit, like Luther,” Emer- son reflected, “to speak tart truth” while Phillips chose another Reformation warrior: he imagined Parker “at Zwingle’s side, on the battlefield, pierced with a score of fantastic spears” alongside the Swiss reformer.54 While Parker’s antinomianism could be clearly illegal, it was of the sort both came to admire, as with his work as founder of the Boston Vigilance Committee in protecting runaway slaves. And although ministers were both- ered that Parker kept a loaded pistol in his desk—“to defend the (innocent) members of my church,” he retorted—he never used it.55 But while Phillips imagined Brewster exchanging pulpits with Parker, he also imagined the Pilgrim preacher as an arms dealer to antislavery militias in Kansas. Phillips and Emerson themselves had donated funds to one such guerrilla, John Brown, who dragged five proslavery settlers from their beds and or- dered his sons to execute them with broadswords in the Pot- tawatomie Massacre. When Brown reignited national tensions after his attempted slave insurrection at Harper’s Ferry in 1859,

54Emerson, Complete Works, 11:289; Phillips, SLL, 2:436. 55Vernon Louis Parrington, The Romantic Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 415. 128 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Phillips and Emerson again shared a platform as two of the few to defend Brown publicly, passionately, and puritanically. While Phillips lauded this “regular Cromwellian dug up from two centuries,” Emerson praised his “perfect Puritan faith,” even paralleling him with Christ when he infamously declared that Brown would “make the gallows glorious like the cross.”56 Brown revealed the extent to which Emerson and Phillips’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Puritan radicalism could carry them. In his early lectures on Milton, Luther, and heroism, Emerson distinguished between spiritual and literal war, but by the 1850s, he actively embraced armed resistance and celebrated the advent of holy war as an explicit culmination of a revolutionary genealogy that began in the Puritan past and culminated with the ﬂowering of reform and transcendentalism in the 1830sand40s: America was “in the midst of a great revolution, still enacting the sentiment of the Puritans, and the dreams of young people 30 years ago.”57 Phillips wasted less time celebrating holy war. In a speech to Parker’s congregation just one week after Fort Sumter, he seemed giddy for the outbreak of war as he celebrated Mas- sachusetts soldiers with a “hand on the neck of a rebellious aristocracy...mean[ing]to strangle it,” again worthy of their ancestors as they, like John Quincy Adams, “carried Plymouth Rock to Washington.” If the American Revolution was “a holy war, that for Independence,” he proclaimed the Civil War “a holier and the last,—that for liberty.” In a speech a few months later, he explicitly paralleled America’s civil war with Britain’s. “This is no epoch for nations to blush at. England might blush in 1620,” he said, “when James forbade them to think; but not in 1649, when an outraged people cut off his son’s head.”58 Perhaps Phillips even imagined Cromwell and Brown arising to decapitate Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Asking why Emerson’s transcendentalist allies could so un- equivocally support John Brown’s violence, David Reynolds points to gradual disillusionment with their mission to “supplant

56Phillips, SLL, 1:276; Emerson, Complete Works, 7:281. 57Emerson, Antislavery Writings, 146. 58Phillips, SLL, 1:396-409. SWEPT INTO PURITANISM 129 their culture’s materialism, conformity, and shady politics with spiritual-minded individualism.” The same can be said for Phillips.59 But this narrative of middle-aged men grown dis- illusioned with the present must be coupled with the new inspirations they took from a radical vision of the past, recon- necting them with the vital core of their religious inheritance— an activism that, if extreme in means, was progressive in ends. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/90/1/103/1792975/tneq_a_00586.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 The ﬁght against slavery increasingly became a test to sepa- rate America’s materialistic reprobates from its spiritual elect, and war promised the kind of spiritual heroism that both men craved as a conﬁrmation of their lineage. This antinomian vision of New England’s Puritan past creatively unsettled boundaries of race and religion as it built bridges to the plight of the American slave, empowered those who felt impotent within a materialistic culture, and revitalized liberal faith. But it also raised the very question that Lincoln’s Second Inaugural would pose in the midst of war: how does one ne- gotiate between antithetical visions, “deadly in earnest” and divinely inspired? Did the Puritan radicalism of the abolitionist imagination ultimately breed destruction or creation? Emerson and Phillips found themselves less ironically than Henry Adams swept back into a heritage that might cleanse America of its original sin—but only through a holy war that nearly undid the nation in the process.

59Reynolds, John Brown, 221.

Kenyon Gradert is a doctoral candidate in English at Wash- ington University in St. Louis. He is currently completing his dissertation, “Gospel Writ in Steel: Puritan Genealogies and the Abolitionist Imagination,” a study of the radical uses of Puritan origins in antislavery writings.