Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert

Author:Kenyon Gradert [Gradert, Kenyon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Beecher’s Pilgrim Spirit

In 1826 the Reverend Lyman Beecher resolved to reclaim Boston from the Unitarians and restore its status as the capital of Puritan America. The first belle puritain in the Beecher line, he planned to use captivating style, modern communication technologies, softened doctrine, and vigorous benevolence societies to create a distinctly modern Puritan church suited to a democratic nation. Where he had once opposed efforts to disestablish the Congregationalist Church in Connecticut, he famously changed his mind after disestablishment passed in 1818, deciding that a loss of state support would energize America’s ministers for a national campaign of revival and reform. He especially planned to dethrone the Unitarians with a regiment of benevolent societies that would squelch national sins like dueling, drunkenness, and slavery. Each of these reform efforts were assumed to be projects emanating from the church itself, but the delicate question of slavery quickly became the stickiest part of this mission, and one that Beecher ultimately failed to resolve on two fronts. First, he never convinced the young William Lloyd Garrison that his mission might best be accomplished if it was accommodated to the church’s existing efforts. More disastrously, he fueled Garrisonians’ anticlericism by failing to unite the churches themselves around a forthright response to slavery. This would prove to be a recurring struggle for early orthodox reformers and their Tappanite successors in the decades to come. While Garrison claimed the Puritan mantle for a bold and focused immediatist platform, Beecher and his orthodox allies wavered as they failed to agree upon what exactly their forefathers would have them do about slavery.

The Spirit of the Pilgrims especially reveals this quandary. Two years after Reverend Storrs’s sermon of the same name, Beecher and other colleagues became convinced that their mission, like most in the early republic, required a paper. The Spirit ran monthly from 1828 to 1833, for a time edited by Beecher himself. The fact that dignified clerics were now participating in a medium traditionally considered below their station was itself a small admission that the pulpit had declined in cultural authority: “The mass of mind which is now awake to investigate and feel,” Beecher wrote, “renders the pulpit unequal, and a new means of enlightening and forming public sentiment indispensable.” A primary motivation for the paper was to convince Bostonians that orthodoxy could be an enlightened affair. Here too like Storrs “they did not hold themselves responsible to the letter for those doctrines as stated in the creeds of the Reformation” but esteemed “the expectation of ‘farther light’ as the glorious privilege of the New England churches.” Yet such a venture was precarious from the start in its effort to remain open to Storrs’s “spirit of free inquiry” but not so open as to fall from a sacred inheritance nor damage the Puritans’ institutional legacies. “The time has come,” Beecher concluded, for “a united and simultaneous effort to rescue from perversion the doctrines and institutions of our fathers, the fairest inheritance ever bestowed by Heaven upon men.

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