Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
The decline of Calvinist orthodoxy worked an intellectual revolution in the minds of several million Americans during the period between the eighteen twenties and the eighteen forties. The social ferment of that generation produced a variety of effects including social perfectionism, theological liberalism, millennial sects, and new waves of revivalism. To multitudes of men and women a new earth seemed as close as a new heaven. Working hand in hand with the theological rebellion which insisted on the possibility of universal salvation and the actuality of great freedom for the will, social circumstance provided an environment rich in economic abundance and freedom for social experiment. America seemed so close to social perfection, religious salvation so near for so many, the inner and outer human worlds so plastic and pregnant with possibility, that the pursuit of either piety or social reformation promised spectacular results. The Mormons and other new sects with evangelical and millennial overtones absorbed many advocates of “the newness,” but an important minority regarded the old and the new sects as almost equally intolerable. It was not easy for these unchurched rebels to find a niche in American society; they inherited religious sensibilities which made them feel uncomfortable with both militantly secular social reformers and the scattered theological rebels who clung to the label of “Deist” or “Agnostic.”
1. Calls for a new church came most frequently from Fourierist newspapers (listed in notes 5 and 10); sympathetic journals such as Greeley's New York Tribune and the Boston Chronotype; and periodicals and journals without Fourierist connections such as the Western Messenger (Cincinnati), The Boston Quarterly Review, The Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia), The Univercoleum and Spiritual Philosopher (New York), and The Harmonial Advocate (Philadelphia).
2. Fernald edited The Univercoleum and Spiritual Philosopher. On Cooke see Crowe, Charles; “Utopian Socialism in Rhode Island,” Rhode Island History, XVIII (1959), 20–26Google Scholar; on the Philadelphia socialists see the letters of James Kay in the Massachusetts Historical Society Library (hereafter cited as MHSL); on the Louisiana planter seeThe Harbinger (Brook Farm and New York, IV (1847), 142.Google Scholar
3. Among the better accounts of the Phalanxes are Noyes, J. H., History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia, 1870)Google Scholar; Charles Nordhoff, Communistic Societies of the U. S.; and the A. J. MacDonald ms. history in the Yale University Library. Information on the Fourierist unions can be found in journals such as the Harbinger. For an example of the religious bias of American Fourierism see Dwight, J. S., “The Church of Humanity,” The Harbinger, III (1846), 410–411.Google Scholar
4. Dwight, who found the Unitarian ministry unsatisfactory was the second in command at Brook Farm and one of the last Fourierist leaders to give up the ghost. In later years he became a celebrated Boston music publicist. On religion at Brook Farm seeThe Harbinger; Marianne Dwight, Letters from Brook Farm 1844–1847, ed. Amy Reed (Poughkeepsie, N. Y., 1928)Google Scholar; and the letters of George and Sophia Ripley, W. H. Channing, and J. S. Dwight in the MHSL and the Boston Public Library (hereafter cited as BPL).
5. On the conversion to Fourierism see The Present (New York), January 15, 1844Google Scholar; The Phalanx (New York), February 5, 1844Google Scholar; and the early issues of The Harbinger.
6. Allen to Marianne Dwight, March 9, 1846, Abernethy Library, Middlebury College. Allen, once a Vermont farmer, was a Brook Farm leader and perhaps the most energetic of the Fourierist lecturers.
7. Marianne Dwight to Anna Parsons, Brook Farm, Aug. 11,1845, BPL.
8. Marianne Dwight, Letters from Brook Farm, 112.
9. The Phalanx, I (1845), 336–337.Google Scholar
10. Channing, a nephew of the great William Ellery Channing, spent a large portion of his life attempting to establish worker's congregations and “nonsectarian” reform churches. His influence at Brook Farm was extensive, and he edited The Present and The Spirit of the Age (New York). On the socialist church at Brook Farm see Dwight, , Letters from Brook Farm, 114–116; 122–126Google Scholar; Albert Brisbane to George Ripley, New York, December 9, 1845, BPLGoogle Scholar; and Ripley, George, “Fire at Brook Farm,” The Harbinger II (1846), 200–222.Google Scholar
11. For accounts of the discussions of 1846 see the letters of Ripley, Channing, and Dwight in the Houghton Library, BPL, and MHSL. On the organization of the church, see the Records of the Religious Union of Associationists (hereafter cited as Religious Union Records). Since the Records are not paginated, references will be given by dates.
12. Religious Union Records, Jan. 3, 1847.
13. Fisher, a Boston Reformer, was church secretary and after Channing the most powerful person in the religious union.
14. Dwight, , Letters from Brook Farm, 143–145Google Scholar. Many of Channing's sermons were published in the Harbinger or The Spirit of the Age and there are brief accounts of all of them in the Religious Union Records.
15. For representative discussions see Ibid., Nov. 19, Dec. 3, 1848.
16. Ibid., Nov. 11, 1848.
17. Ibid., Jan. 2, Nov. 7, Nov. 21, 1848.
18. Several of Dwight's programs are attached to the Religious Union Records.
19. For a religious census, see Ibid., Dec. 5, 1847.
20. The church secretaries were reticent and included only general sketches, but in many cases these accounts can be supplemented: Cooke's, Joseph J. entire “confession” was published in The Harbinger VI (1848), 83–84Google Scholar; Dr. Marx Lazarus, the major American “scientific” theorist of the movement, discussed his past in a number of books including The Solar Ray (1851)and Passonial Hygiene and Natural Medicine Embracing the Harmonious Man with His Planet (New York, 1852)Google Scholar; and Ripley committed his religious history to private letters, now in the MHSL.
21. Religious Union Records, Jan. 2, 1848.
22. Several letters from Allen on the Cincinnati church from Allen on the Cincinnati church are attached to the Religious Union Records which also contains scattered references to similar religious enterprises.
23. Unfortunately the idea of a mass movement was largely a theoretical one.There were never more than a hundred persons on the church rolls and usually not more than forty or fifty persons present at a single meeting.
24. Several membership lists are attached to the Religious Union Records.
25. James Kay, William Harrison, Charles Sears, Osbourna MacDaniel, E. P.Grant, William Chace, Peleg Clarke, and William Tweedy— all officers of the national organization as well as leaders of local unions and Phalanxes— were also members or frequent visitors to the Boston church.
