Crisis of the Standing Order
05/18/2009 18:13
Field’s thesis is that the Standing Order self-destructed in a war between proto-Unitarian “Brahmins” and orthodox Congregationalist leaders. The Brahmin ministers represented the interests of their supporters, the Boston merchant elite, and developed a high literary culture to meet their needs. The orthodox establishment, seeing their influence and authority slipping, attacked the Brahmins in an attempt to retain their role as intellectual rulers of Massachusetts.
Field notes early on that Puritan practice banned ministers from holding secular office, so their authority rested entirely on their leadership role in the intellectual life of their society. (1) He says the ministers of the “Standing Order gained cultural authority in direct proportion to society’s uncoerced adoption” of their ideas. (2) It’s ironic that the story of the orthodox fight to retain control in Mass is filled with their (futile) attempts to coerce. It’s not until they’ve completely hit bottom that Lyman Beecher convinces them to try revivalist persuasion. But then, they weren’t interested in reaching the middle class until the Brahmin ministers stole the upper class from them.
He cites an early 20th c. article on “The Revolt Against the Standing Order” I should probably read. And like Staloff, he builds on a foundation of Weber (Economy and Society), which I should probably read soon too.
Field proposes a “social history of intellectuals,” that treats the idealism of intellectual historians with a big dose of skepticism (if not cynicism), while retaining a focus on intellectuals as not only agents, but as a class (which he observes is missing from Marxist analysis. As a “new-class” theorist, Field argues with Weber that “ownership of the means of production is not the sole measure of the social division of labor.” (5) He seeks to undermine the “belief that intellectuals are heroically engaged in the disinterested pursuit of truth,” but it’s unclear to me whether he proves his case. Jedediah Morse is a really nasty guy in Fields’ story, but I’m not sure he’s insincere.
What is clear is that the increasingly public disagreements between the orthodox clergy and their urbane, polished, and increasingly rich adversaries made it clear to anyone paying attention in the early decades of the 19th c., that the ministry was filled with partisans. This devolution of the Puritan edifice into competing sects eliminated their claim to cultural dominance and divine inspiration. It’s incredible to me that Morse managed to survive the Illuminati hoax with any credibility at all – and that might be a topic for further study.
The fight over the Hollis Professorship of Divinity in 1805 begins (in a rare moment of physicality) with the completion of the West Boston Bridge, Nov. 23rd 1793. The orthodox leaders fight viciously, but lose control of Harvard. But did they have it before? Field mentions that David Tappan’s pupils are among the brightest lights of the new Brahmin ministry. Is he finding an abrupt change where there was really a slow evolution? Similarly, Field says no reasonable Federalist believed Morse’s Illuminati story. So what was going on? Who were the orthodox ministers talking to (besides themselves)? Were they carrying public opinion? At what point did the Brahmin elitist ministry lose touch with regular people? Or was it ever in touch with them? Certainly not through the Athenaeum or the Anthology. And what about western Mass? Revivalism began there in the 1790s, long before Beecher moved to Boston.
Field passes quickly over the first Great Awakening, saying it was a great threat to the Standing Order but not how. He places the ministers firmly on the side of the revolutionists (and says that until the Committees of Correspondence, they were nearly the only conduits of information, 26), which again illustrates a Boston-only focus. Most of the western ministers were Tories until they had no choice, and some remained Loyalists. Maybe highlighting Chauncy, Mayhew and Thacher gives Field an origin of orthodox ministers’ view of their role in politics. But in the Puritan colony, this would have been taken for granted. Its survival after the revolution is the issue.
Field mentions several items that don’t fit smoothly into his interpretation, like the fact that Joseph Hawley brought a bill to the General Court in 1777 to disestablish the church, but “he could not muster enough support even to bring it to the floor for a vote.” Field credits the clergy with defeating the 1778 Mass Constitution, but doesn’t provide any context (but he refers to this). William Gordon, chaplain of the Court, got himself fired for criticizing the constitution in the papers, and thirteen ministers attended the convention as delegates of their towns. Where were these towns, and what was the agenda of the ministers? Lots of western Mass towns instructed their representatives to block the constitution if possible; but not over religion. How did religious objections stack up to civil ones? Field doesn’t discuss.
According to Morison, there were “At least twenty-nine towns [that] distinctly stated their opposition to Article 3” establishing the church. Hawley said: “it is far from indisputable, and positively denied by many, viz, That it is the duty of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons to worship, &c….It is inconsistent with the unalienable rights of conscience, which rights are certainly unalienable, if mankind have, (as the first article avers they have) any such rights.” (38)
Field doesn’t really deal with the gradual shift of attitudes observed by some at the time, and he credits the revolution with imposing a “limited moratorium on theological controversy” (52). He does outline the family ties between the proto-Unitarians and the merchant elite, and makes a good case that theirs was “as much a social as a religious enterprise.” (80) In fact, this seems to be the chief complaint of the orthodox. John Thornton Kirkland married the daughter of George Cabot; William Ellery Channing married Ruth Gibbs; Harvard professors Andrews Norton and George Ticknor married the daughters of Samuel Elliot; and Edward Everett married the daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks, the first millionaire in Boston.
Field says the wealthy Bostonians left politics when the Federalists were defeated, and set about establishing high culture. But his chronology wanders back and forth from the 1790s to 1808 and beyond. This seems to undermine his claim that these groups were acting as self-aware, unified classes when they battled over the Illuminati in 1798 or David Tappan’s Hollis chair in 1803-5. Field says “Almost to a man, Brahmin ministers had begun to eschew the kind of active participation in politics entailed in…election-day sermons and fast days.” (91-2) But is that chicken or egg? Their patrons, the Boston merchants, were disaffected with politics after 1800. They weren’t looking for their ministers to rub their noses in their defeat. The Brahmin ministers might have faced a different set of expectations if Jefferson had been defeated.
“Theology,” said Joseph Stevens Buckminster, “is the subject upon which much of our genius and learning has always been employed, and not seldom wasted.” (97) It’s funny, in a sort-of “Emperor’s New Clothes” way. The merchants and their make-believe ministers made a show of religion to please the society they lived in and advance their own social standing. What a shock to the orthodox, who thought it was something else entirely. Fifty years from the “visible sainthood” of the New Lights to the Anthology’s editorial policy of “useful knowledge and harmless amusement, sound principles, good morals, and correct taste.” (97)
It is a sound point, though, that Boston was different from the rest of the state because its churches were NOT supported by taxes, they were all voluntary (a legacy of John Cotton?). As a result, those who contributed more expected to be treated accordingly, even if they were not “members” on the basis of a conversion experience. But Field doesn’t explain how the half-way covenant mitigated the requirements for membership, or what effect that had. And again, Field admits on p. 143 that John Adams wrote to Morse that the ideas he complained were recent and Unitarian had been around for 65 years.
Field remarks that there were two distinct responses among the (nearly 100%) Federalist ministers. The Brahmins retreated from politics; the orthodox went nuts. Of course, the orthodox couldn’t retreat, because the Brahmins had already claimed that hill. Who were their constituents? What was their market? But by 1820, even Morse’s own parish tired of his “engagements in, and encouragement of controversies [and] indiscriminate distribution of contradictory pamphlets and tracts.” (146) They replaced him, and he accused them of being “obviously Unitarians.”
In a letter to Oliver Wolcott Jr. (July 13 1798), Morse went so far as to declare it was “necessary to exterminate [their] dangerous enemies,” the Boston clergy who disagreed with them and refused to knuckle under to Morse’s self-appointed authority. (150) In his biography of Harrison Gray Otis, Samuel Eliot Morison says “neither Otis nor any other prominent Federalist subscribed to the [Illuminati] theory.” While they’d tried to support Morse’s attacks on the republican plot, Federalist papers like the Columbian Centinal and Chronicle were nervous about their own credibility. “Embarrassed by his recklessness, they shut Morse out.” (150) Maybe part of the problem ministers like Morse were having is they believed they were living in an earlier world; where the clergy was not only the only source of information about the outside world for most people, but the prestige of the clergy virtually guaranteed that whatever the pastor told his flock would be believed. Newspapers, pamphlets and broadsheets of the revolutionary era definitely widened the average person’s view of the world. But maybe the biggest damage was done by ministers like Morse, who showed themselves to be petty, partisan, and worst of all, miserably wrong.
The Yale connection to all of the orthodox leaders is too good to pass by. Timothy Dwight demands a closer look. I need to get Speaking Aristocracy, to give myself at least one chance to see a positive portrayal of Yale and its presidents. In addition, the careers of the presidents of Amherst, Dartmouth and Williams will probably have some surprises in them. Griffin, who Knowlton talked with a couple of times while living in Adams, seems to be up to his elbows in controversy in the 1800s and 1810s.
Morse’s Panoplist claimed to be the “antidote” (153) to the wickedness and infidelity spewed by the Anthology. Morse wasted little time in calling for ministerial examinations to insure creedal uniformity. Without rigid enforcement of correct doctrines, he said, “liberty, free enquiry [and] private judgment [were becoming] instruments of infidelity, and a fair mask, under which apostasy from Christianity and hatred of all goodness have disguised themselves.” (159) I wonder about this type of language. Who is he talking to? Hatred of all goodness? These are other Congregational clergymen he’s talking about, and the people who fill their churches every Sunday. Not some crowd of blood-drinking Satan-worshippers. Field doesn’t really explain who the audience for this type of rhetoric is, or how effective it was. Without that context, it just seems absurd.
The Andover Seminary’s creed, which all faculty had to swear and renew every five years, pledged “unswerving opposition , ‘not only to Atheists and Infidels, but to Jews, Papists, Mahomatans, Arians, Pelagians, Antimonians, Arminians, Socinians, Sabellians, Unitarians, and Universalists.” (168) So basically, they hated everybody. The Brahmins “deemed the doctrinal hairsplitting of the orthodox distasteful, uncharitable, and anachronistic.” (171) William Ellery Channing called the creed part of Andover’s “espionage of bigotry.” (167)
Field points out that the “growing class nature of Massachusetts society may not have been the efficient cause, but it was certainly a necessary cause of the crisis…” (183) He says the older (and increasingly female) communicants were less prosperous than their neighbors, implying that the time required to achieve their high level of religious devotion cut them off from worldly success. There’s a good chance these people may have “believed that the shrinking number of public confessions signaled a serious decline in religiosity” in Massachusetts, as Field says. He doesn’t show this, and it’s an area for possible research. (In general, Field ignores the audiences of the clerics he writes about, which is unfortunate) During the Dorchester conflict (when Codman refuses to exchange pulpits with Brahmins as his parishioners want), the orthodox minister’s enemies are described as being “exceedingly fond of amusements.” (197) Field points out this statement points to an underlying class conflict, but again he doesn’t describe how it was received. The ultimate secularization of the church occurs in this conflict, when wealthy parishioners demand a say in the church equal to their contribution. This is democracy! And exactly what the orthodox have been fighting all along.
Field points out the irony of ultra-conservative Boston elites fighting for liberal, democratic ideals in their churches. (204) But maybe he’s missing the point. Maybe the Brahmins’ position was like the Baptists’ during the revolution: they weren’t really against estabishment and authority, they were against someone else having it over them. But the irony resolves itself, when the 1821 Dedham decision rules that the assets of the church belong to the parish, not the saints. At that point, the orthodox seem to realize Morse and his crew have done them no good. Morse seems to disappear very rapidly from the picture, to be replaced with Lyman Beecher. Beecher tells them that establishment is against their interests, because they’re the outsiders. So, having nothing left to lose, the orthodox finally embrace their “age-old populist rhetoric concerning the ungodliness of the wealthy and the dangers of materialism,” (205) creating what Field calls “the American Religion.”
Abandoning establishment allowed the orthodox to go after the middle class people who’d been drifting toward Baptist and Methodist sentiments. The ministers swallowed their pride and embraced revivalism, holding 116 in Mass in 1831 (232). 81 “churches” (ministers and communicants) were “exiled” by parish revolts by 1833, according to a study made by the orthodox and presented to their General Association of Massachusetts Ministers. (229) Is this the meeting Mason Grosvenor attends, which prompts him to go after “infidelity and licentiousness” in Ashfield? The 1832 meeting of the General Association of Massachusetts Congregational Ministers was held in Northampton and dealt extensively with temperance. Where was the 1833?
The 11th amendment to the Mass constitution, disestablishing religion, went into effect January 1 1834. This fits perfectly with the issues in Ashfield, and may explain some of the undercurrents and tensions behind them.
