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Tares in the Wheat: Puritan Violence and Puritan Families in the Nineteenth-Century Liberal Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Daniel P. Buchanan
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Extract

The New England tradition of violence is a curiously dual one. For more than a Century after their arrival in Boston, the Puritans of New England participated in the wave of genocidal violence that helped decimate Native communities throughout the Americas. To a lesser degree, they also turned their violent energies against members of their own Community by banishing, torturing, and killing those Puritans who embraced the Quaker doctrine of the inner light or who were accused by their neighbors of witchcraft. Yet, rarely has a community been so self-conscious about its own violence, so determined to find ultimate meaning in the midst of atrocity. What could it mean, New Englanders persistently asked, that their “city on a hill” was enmeshed in violence? For at least two of the theological traditions that took strongest hold in New England—Puritanism and liberalism—this question was an inescapable preoccupation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Summer 1998 , pp. 205 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1998

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References

Notes

1. Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England (1702; repr., Hartford, Conn.: Silus Andrus, 1820).Google Scholar The quotation is from the table of contents.

2. See Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. McNeill, John T., trans. Battles, Ford Lewis (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster Press, 1960), 1:310-11.Google Scholar

3. The principal texts considered in this essay are Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, A New-England Tale; or, Sketches of New-England Characters and Manners, ed. Clements, Victoria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts, ed. Kelley, Mary (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Child, Lydia Maria, Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians, ed. Karcher, Carolyn L. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Child, Lydia Maria, The First Settlers of New England; or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansetts and Pokanokets. As Related by a Mother to Her Children. By a Lady of Massachusetts (Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1829)Google Scholar; Sigourney, Lydia, Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since (Hartford, Conn.: Oliver D. Cooke and Sons, 1824)Google Scholar; Lee, Eliza Buckminster, Delusion; or the Witch of New England (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1840)Google Scholar; and Lee, Eliza Buckminster, Naomi; or, Boston, Two Hundred Years Ago (Boston: William Crosby and H. P Nichols, 1848).Google Scholar A few other texts by these and closely related authors will be cited to illustrate aspects of liberal theology. The well-known New England romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe are not considered here because they depart in some important respects from the liberal perspective that I am examining. Valuable overviews of this literature include Gould, Philip, Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bell, Michael Davitt, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Buell, Lawrence, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Baym, Nina, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995).Google Scholar A study that emphasizes the theological dimension of liberal literature, albeit from a perspective vastly different from that developed here, is Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977).Google Scholar

4. Although there were tensions between liberal and orthodox Congregationalists at least from the early eighteenth Century, the conflict came to a head between 1805 (when liberal Henry Ware, Sr., was appointed as Hollis Professor at Harvard College) and 1825 (when the American Unitarian Association was organized as a distinct denomination). I refer to the two parties as “liberal” and “orthodox” (rather than “Unitarian” and “Calvinist”) because these terms, which were in wide use at the time, most accurately convey the spirit of the two groups. “Unitarian” refers to just one, and not the most important, of the doctrines espoused by the liberals and to just one of several institutional expressions of liberalism (Connecticut liberals, for example, be- came Episcopalian rather than Unitarian), while “Calvinist” refers to just one, albeit the most influential, of many theological progenitors of the Reformed tradition.

5. I am thus suggesting that an anthology such as Ahlstrom, Sydney E. and Carey, Jonathan S., eds., An American Reformation: A Documentary History of Unitarian Christianity (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, is incomplete given its exclusion of fictional texts. Of course, in one sense, scholars have always recognized a Special connection between theological liberalism and early American literature; indeed, Lawrence Buell has complained that his colleagues in English departments tend to overstate the literary preoccupations of Unitarianism at the expense of issues of doctrine or polity Buell's concern is that such scholars have generally not been interested in Unitarian theology at all; they have deployed Unitarianism merely as “an anti-doctrinal solvent to release the New England imagination from its parochial confines.” My point, by contrast, is to show that Unitarians did not so much turn from theology to literature as develop a new kind of theology in literature. In so doing, I am also responding to Buell's call for a less “high canonical” approach to liberal literature. See Buell, Lawrence, “The Literary Significance of the Unitarian Movement,” in American Unitarianism, 1805-1865, ed. Wright, Conrad Edick (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society and Northeastern University Press, 1989), 165-70.Google Scholar

6. Cited in Kelley, Mary, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 290.Google Scholar It has remained a Unitarian tradition to take more pride in the general dissemination of liberalism than in institutional expansion. Thus, George Willis Cooke included many non-Unitarians in his 1902 history of Unitarianism on the grounds that the movement “is not represented merely by a body of churches, but… is an individual way of looking at the facts of life and its problems.” Cooke, George Willis, Unitarianism in America: A History of Its Origin and Development (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902), v.Google Scholar

7. Recent scholarship has clearly established that early liberalism was not as “corpse-cold” as Emerson pretended and that Transcendentalism was as much an extension as a repudiation of the Christian liberal movement. This scholarship has rightly focused on William Ellery Channing—a prominent Unitarian preacher who remained a hero to most Transcendentalists—as the key to this transition. My Suggestion here is that careful attention to the ways in which fiction writers fleshed out Channing's theology will clarify the ways in which Transcendentalism both continued and departed from the liberal tradition. See Wright, Conrad, “The Rediscovery of Channing,” in Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History, by Wright, Conrad (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 39.Google Scholar

8. Andrew Delbanco has argued that, by abandoning the classic Augustinian theory of evil as deeply rooted in every human individual, American liberals have usually ended either denying the existence of evil altogether or else treating it as a purely external, demonic power. I hope to show that, at their best, liberals have managed to avoid both of these unappealing alternatives. It is interesting, in this regard, that Channing is one of the very few liberals Delbanco is willing to exempt from his critique. Delbanco, Andrew, William Ellery Channing: An Essay on the Liberal Spirit in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 129, 150CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Delbanco, Andrew, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 234-35.Google Scholar

9. See Fliegelman, Jay, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

10. Baym, , American Women Writers, 2.Google Scholar Baym is paraphrasing a thesis developed in Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Unviersity Press, 1985)Google Scholar, and her own Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820-1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). “Public policy” here does not mean exclusively, or even primarily, State policy: liberals assumed that social life would be shaped by a range of voluntary as well as State institutions.

11. By highlighting the liberal novelists’ preoccupation with the family, I hope to qualify, though not supplant, Conrad Wright's argument that the years of the Unitarian controversy were “not a time of theological innovation or fresh religious insights.” Though in one sense my writers simply elaborated theological arguments that were nearly a Century old, their discovery that these ideas could better be expressed in familial fiction than in traditional theological genres surely qualifies as “theological innovation.” See Wright, Conrad, “Institutional Reconstruction in the Unitarian Controversy,” in American Unitarianism, ed. Wright, , 4.Google Scholar

12. From its beginning, New England Arminianism was closely linked to a concern for the family. The eighteenth-century Arminians, for example, supported the Half-Way Covenant because it allowed church communities to include family members who had not experienced an orthodox conversion. Indeed, they doubted that a momentary conversion could contribute much to Christian virtue, believing instead that righteousness was the product of ongoing moral education directed by parents. Early liberals such as Charles Chauncy, moreover, were particularly troubled by the fact that orthodox theology seemed to imply that children who died in infancy would suffer damnation (a position that was not actually taught by either John Calvin or Jonathan Edwards). See Wright, Conrad, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 12–13, 86-87, 132.Google Scholar

13. See Ware, Henry Sr., “Philosophical Difficulties in the ‘Unitarian Controversy,’ ” in American Reformation, ed. Ahlstrom, and Carey, , 359-60Google Scholar; and Channing, William Ellery, “The Moral Argument against Carvinism,” in William Ellery Channing: Selected Writings, ed. Robinson, David (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 107, 109.Google Scholar

14. See Wright, , Beginnings of Unitarianism in America, 3, 184.Google Scholar

15. See Channing, William Ellery, “Unitarian Christianity,” in American Reformation, ed. Ahlstrom, and Carey, , 105 Google Scholar; Ahlstrom, and Carey, , “Introduction,” in American Reformation, 37 Google Scholar; and Hutchison, William R., The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), 4.Google Scholar

16. Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” 106; Channing, William Ellery, “Likeness to God,” in American Reformation, ed. Ahlstrom, and Carey, , 125 Google Scholar; and Channing, William Ellery, “Spiritual Freedom,” in Channing: Selected Writings, ed. Robinson, , 204.Google Scholar See also Wright, , Beginnings of Unitarianism in America, 165 Google Scholar; Wright, “The Rediscovery of Channing,” 38; and Cooke, , Unitarianism in America, 38.Google Scholar It is important to remember that, while Channing was quite explicit about the political ideals that led him to prefer the image of God as father to that of God as king, he was apparently unconscious of the gender bias that prevented him from thinking of God as mother. Liberal images of the divine were not, in any event, exclusively masculine: Henry Ware, Sr., invoked both maternal and paternal imagery in his essay on “The Personality of Deity,” in American Reformation, ed. Ahlstrom and Carey, 433.

17. Like Sedgwick, both Lee and Child had close ties to the clerical leadership of Unitarianism, as each had a brother who was a prominent Unitarian minister. Ware and Judd were themselves Unitarian ministers.

18. Though it may seem strange to characterize Unitarians as evangelical, such characterization has many precedents: in 1902, for example, Unitarian historian George Willis Cooke described Channing as “distinctly evangelical,” and, more recently, Conrad Wright has done much to bring early Unitarian evangelicalism to light. What is at stake in the dispute over labels is nothing less than the essence of the gospel: those who identify “evangelicalism” with either Reformed orthodoxy or with revivalism implicitly place these movements at the heart of the gospel message, just as the Christian liberals contended that Jesus’ fundamental message was one of benevolence. See Cooke, , Unitarianism in America, 94.Google Scholar

19. See Wright, , Beginnings of Unitarianism in America, 161, 171.Google Scholar

20. Ware, Henry Jr., The Recollections of Jotham Anderson, Minister of the Gospel (Boston: Christian Register Office, 1824), 5 Google Scholar; Sigourney, , Sketch of Connecticut, 8 Google Scholar; Child, , First Settlers of New England, 38 Google Scholar; Sedgwick, , “Huguenot Family,” in Tales and Sketches: Second Series (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1844), 277.Google Scholar

21. Savage, Sarah, The Factory Girl: By a Lady (Boston: Munroe, Francis, and Parker, 1814), 80.Google Scholar

22. See Wright, “The Rediscovery of Channing,” 28; Robinson, David, “Introduction,” Channing: Selected Writings, 11 Google Scholar; and Conforti, Joseph, “Edwardsians, Unitarians, and the Great Awakening,” in American Unitarianism, ed. Wright, , 41–42.Google Scholar Channing anticipated a much more extensive liberal reading of Hopkinsian benevolence, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel The Minister's Wooing.

23. Follen, Eliza Lee Cabot, The Skeptic (Boston: James Munroe, 1835), 22 Google Scholar; Sedgwick, , New-England Tale, 27.Google Scholar

24. Channing, “Likeness to God,” 128; Sedgwick, , New-England Tale, 11 Google Scholar; Child, , First Settlers of New England, 183.Google Scholar

25. Gay, Ebenezer, “Natural Religion as Distinguished from Revealed,” in American Reformation, ed. Ahlstrom, and Carey, , 45–59 Google Scholar; on Jefferson, see May, Henry F., The Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 296 Google Scholar; and, for Channing's recollection, see Channing, William Henry, Memoir of William Ellery Channing, 3 vols. (Boston: W. Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 1848), 1:64 Google Scholar, cited in Delbanco, , William Ellery Channing, 23 Google Scholar. Helpful accounts of the “moral sense” theory include Howe, Daniel Walker, “The Cambridge Platonists of Old and New England,” in American Unitarianism, ed. Wright, , 95 Google Scholar; Martin, Terence, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Commonsense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 11 Google Scholar; May, The Enlightenment in America, 293; and Turner, James, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 62.Google Scholar

26. Ware, , Jotham Anderson, 7 Google Scholar; Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1830), 1:209.Google Scholar

27. Channing, “A Letter to the Rev. Samuel C. Thacher,” in American Reformation, ed. Ahlstrom and Carey, 82; Lee, , Naomi, 367 Google Scholar; Child, , First Settlers of New England, 37.Google Scholar

28. Channing, “Likeness to God,” 133 (see also Wright, “The Rediscovery of Channing,” 30); Ware, Henry Sr., “The Nature of Man,” in American Reformation, ed. Ahlstrom, and Carey, , 201 Google Scholar; Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, Home (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1837), 99.Google Scholar

29. Sedgwick, , Home, 54 Google Scholar; Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, The Linwoods; or “Sixty Years Since” in America, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), 1:96–97 Google Scholar; Lee, , Delusion, 92.Google Scholar

30. Sedgwick, , New-England Tale, 19, 149.Google Scholar

31. Ware, Henry Jr., David Ellington: With Other Extracts from His Writings (Boston: William Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 1846), 17 Google Scholar; Channing, “Moral Argument against Calvinism,” 105.

32. This contradiction is highlighted in most scholarly treatments of the New England historical romance. See especially Bell, , Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England, 10–17 Google Scholar; and Baym, , American Women Writers, 56–57, 155-68.Google Scholar

33. Child, , Hobomok, 5–6.Google Scholar

34. Ibid., 6. A similar passage appears in Lee, , Delusion, 1–2.Google Scholar

35. Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, “Mary Dyre,” in Tales and Sketches (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1835), 153 Google Scholar; Lee, , Naomi, 102-3.Google Scholar

36. Sedgwick, , New-England Tale, 114-15Google Scholar; Sedgwick, , Hope Leslie, 54 Google Scholar; Child, Lydia Maria, “Appeal for the Indians,” in Hobomok, 221.Google Scholar

37. Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” 107. Channing elaborated his argument in his 1820 essay, “Moral Argument against Calvinism,” which in turn influenced Jared Sparks's essay, “The Comparative Moral Tendency of the Leading Doctrines of Calvinism and the Sentiments of Unitarians,” in American Reformation, ed. Ahlstrom and Carey, 332-39.

38. Child, , First Settlers of New England, 31, 58.Google Scholar

39. Lee, , Delusion, 74, 140.Google Scholar

40. Channing, “Moral Argument against Calvinism,” 109; Channing, “Likeness to God,” 133. In some respects, Channing and Lee anticipated Valerie Saiving's now famous argument that the exclusive association of sin with pride and self-assertion reflects the experiences of men more than those of women. See Saiving, Valerie, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion 40 (April 1960):100–112.Google Scholar

41. Sedgwick, , Hope Leslie, 9.Google Scholar

42. Sedgwick, , Linwoods, 1:102 Google Scholar; Hope Leslie, 7-8; Lee, , Naomi, 24–25 Google Scholar; Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, Redwood; A Tale, 2 vols. (New York: Bliss and White, 1824), 1:108.Google Scholar

43. Lee, Eliza Buckminster, Florence, the Parish Orphan; and A Sketch of the Village in the Last Century (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), 1.Google Scholar

44. Lee, , Naomi, 147-49.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., 24.

46. Sedgwick, , Hope Leslie, 22.Google Scholar

47. See Lee, , Delusion, 26 Google Scholar, 77; Lee, , Florence, the Parish Orphan, 8 Google Scholar; and Sedgwick, “Huguenot Family,” 288. This device is not limited to fiction related to the Puritans. In Sedgwick's “Huguenot Family,” Father Clement is an interloper within a Catholic persecuting Community, while, in First Settlers of New England, Child implausibly describes Queen Isabella as a classic interloper.

48. Lee, Delusion, 26 (see also Lee, Naomi, 92-93); Sedgwick, , Hope Leslie, 294 Google Scholar; Lee, , Naomi, 178.Google Scholar

49. Lee, , Naomi, 391, 138, 7, 172.Google Scholar

50. Sedgwick, , Hope Leslie, 15–16.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., 123.

52. Lee, , Naomi, 52, 104.Google Scholar

53. Ibid., 444-45.

54. By using the term “Ruthian genealogy,” I do not mean to suggest that any of the liberal novelists were consciously mimicking the book of Ruth. Even Lee, who borrowed her characters' names from that book, does not seem to have been making any particular point: in her novel, Naomi's sister Ruth is a petty and vain girl who offers to free Naomi from jail only if she will renounce Herbert. I do, however, mean to sound a cautionary note against the tendency of some liberals to trace all the appealing aspects of their own faith to the New Testament and all the sins of the orthodox to the Jewish Scriptures.

55. This reading of Abrahamic genealogy is shaped by the work of feminist sociologist of religion Nancy Jay, who argues that sacrifice is an integral part of any patrilineal genealogy Sacrifice, according to Jay, is a “remedy for having been born of woman”: it mocks and replaces the physical event of childbirth, allowing the divinely sanctioned relationship between father and son to supersede the original maternal bond. See Jay, Nancy, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40.Google Scholar

56. Bell, , Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England, 149-50Google Scholar, also notes the prevalence of marriage comedies in New England historical fiction.

57. Sedgwick, , Hope Leslie, 154.Google Scholar

58. Bell, , Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England, 19–20 Google Scholar, has argued that liberal novelists mapped their ambivalences about the Puritan legacy onto a sharp distinction between good Puritans like Winthrop and bad Puritans like Thomas Dudley The liberals did this, to be sure, but it was a superficial gesture that resolved nothing. Their real ambivalences came out in their complex characterizations of the “good” Puritans.

59. Sedgwick, , Hope Leslie, 156.Google Scholar Sedgwick's “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude toward Winthrop reflects Channing's insistence that the orthodox were Christians as well as Calvinists and that, consequently, “some of the brightest examples of Christian virtue” were included in their camp. Channing, “Moral Argument against Calvinism,” 105.

60. Sedgwick, , Hope Leslie, 175, 180.Google Scholar

61. Sigourney, , Sketch of Connecticut, 264-65, 267, 271.Google Scholar

62. Ibid., 277.

63. In his preface to Frederick Douglass's Narrative, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison testified that his first encounter with Douglass solidified his awareness of “the enormous outrage” inflicted by slavery “on the godlike nature of its victims.” Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 3-4.