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Swept Into Puritanism: Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and the Roots of Radicalism

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Swept Into Puritanism: Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and the Roots of Radicalism Swept into Puritanism: Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and the Roots of Radicalism kenyon gradert ENRY Adams mused in his Education that antislavery H politics “swe[pt] him back into puritanism with a vio- lence 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, ad- miring 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. The New England Quarterly,vol.XC,no.1 (March 2017). C 2017 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ a 00586. 103 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00586 by guest on 01 October 2021 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they are not only a productive comparison of two temperamental takes on a shared histori- cal imagination—Emerson the withdrawn seer and Phillips the spitfire prophet—but also as representatives of the manner in which New England religious and political radicals found com- mon ground in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, ini- tially 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 revolu- tionary Puritans. Uncovering such roots for New England radicalism, further, can meet recent calls to revisit and reimagine American liter- ary and religious history. If the trans-Atlantic turn since the 1980s has drawn the field away from Puritan origins by chal- lenging 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00586 by guest on 01 October 2021 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 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 re- sistance 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). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00586 by guest on 01 October 2021 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, re- ligion, 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 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
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