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A Paper Puritan of Puritans: The Liberator’s Protestant Spirit the Antebellum Public Sphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2018

KENYON GRADERT
KENYON GRADERT*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Washington University. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This essay argues that the anti-slavery periodical The Liberator cast itself as heir to a revolutionary tradition of Puritan print to sanction its critiques of the American church and state. This reimagination of Puritanism spoke to readers by tapping into desires for spiritual revival within a secularizing public sphere and a print culture shifting from Protestant scarcity to Victorian abundance. By tracking how The Liberator both utilized these new print technologies and imagined their reclamation of Puritanism, this essay ultimately reveals a more ambiguous negotiation between the sacred and the secular in the emergent public sphere than is often supposed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 589 - 612
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018

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References

1 For comparison, it takes nearly a thousand non-abolitionist newspapers to reach the same frequency. These data come from the Viral Texts project of the NUlab at Northeastern headed by Ryan Cordell and David Smith, whose prototype database draws text from the Chronicling America digital archive of US periodicals to “cluster” reprints of articles. A search for “puritan/-s/-ism/-anical” turns up 1,328 total references from 536 clusters of original references in 991 non-abolitionist papers in 1837–65 from Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Indiana, Virginia, Kentucky, and New York. My subsequent digital analyses of The Liberator have been enabled by Slavery Anti-slavery: A Transnational Archive by Gale Digital Collections, who were kind enough to share their data. As the word count remains constant, references rise with the murder of abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy in 1838 and especially with the outbreak of the Mexican War, spiking in 1848 amidst The Liberator’s coverage of the European revolutions. Another steady rise happens through the volatile 1850s. A final jump occurs in 1859 with Harper's Ferry and once more with the outbreak of the war. Most, but not all, of these references claim a revolutionary vision of Puritanism: occasionally the reference was to the New England Puritan, a journal of conservative Congregationalism with which The Liberator had a standing feud, or to the history of Puritan persecution of Quakers and Native Americans to deflate New England chauvinists who celebrated a legacy of liberty yet maintained neutrality on slavery. Here and in the rest of my digital analysis, I report raw rather than relative frequencies. This suffices for two reasons: (1) individual issues of The Liberator are nearly identical in length; (2) such analysis is not the essay's core but rather supplementary evidence for a simple point: The Liberator spoke of the Puritans often. In this decision, I am aware of the factors surrounding corpus size as delineated in Stefan Gries's work on hypothesis testing in Quantitative Corpus Linguistics (New York and London: Routledge, 2009).

2 “It is said, Lovejoy had no right to propagate his opinions by the sword,” Phillips wrote in a special issue on the event, but “he did not attempt it, any more than the Puritans of Cromwell's day, or the Covenanters of Scotland did, when they rushed to battle, to uphold laws which protected them in their faith.” The Liberator, 5 Jan. 1838, 1.

3 The Liberator, 10 Nov. 1848, 4. Henry Vane and Algernon Sydney were prominent Puritans in the English Civil War with connections to New England, and the Battle of Naseby was a decisive turning point in the struggle after Cromwell and Fairfax all but destroyed Royalist forces. Expectedly, Lowell's depiction of Marvell as a virtuous republican is one-sided; Marvell nimbly navigated shifts of power between Parliament and Monarchy.

4 Eden B. Fost, “Sermon,” The Liberator, 17 Oct. 1856; “The Object of the Rebel War,” The Liberator, issue 51, 16 Dec. 1864, 1. Reprinted extract from Reverend Amory Dwight Mayo's “The Progress of Liberty in the United States,” Continental Monthly, Nov. 1864, 1.

5 The Liberator, 23 Jan. 1846, 1.

6 Loughran, Trish, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar, qualifies the common emphasis on the late eighteenth century as the locus classicus for the emergence of a national consciousness via print; instead, she argues that the material infrastructure and technology necessary for a truly national print culture did not emerge until the 1830s.

7 Hall, David D., Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book, 1st edn (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 76Google Scholar. For an excellent study of this “print explosion,” see especially Cohen, Lara Langer, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 5Google Scholar.

8 Since The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989)Google Scholar, Jürgen Habermas's career has especially been marked by his reconsideration of the place of religion in the public sphere. Taylor builds on his work to conclude that the modern public sphere is especially defined by “its radical secularity” (not in denying religious experience but in restricting its public role to a non-transcendent “immanent frame”); see Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, chapter 4, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” 186–98. Warner, Michael, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, too, follows this vein. Among more recent work on antebellum American print, I have found the following studies to be the most useful, though the place of religion and secularization remains a minor theme in each: Cohen, Lara Langer and Stein, Jordan Alexander, Early African American Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, McGill, Meredith L., American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)Google Scholar, Hruschka, John, How Books Came to America: The Rise of the American Book Trade, first edn (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013)Google Scholar, and Smith, Steven Carl, An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017)Google Scholar. Charvat, William, Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993)Google Scholar still remains a classic in its study of how the evolving publishing industry affected American authors.l.

9 Nord, David Paul, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 I have drawn the ubiquitous Luther quote from Black, M. H., “The Printed Bible,” in Greenslade, S. L., ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, Volume III, The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 432Google Scholar, quoted in Nord, 14. Recent studies in American print culture and the history of the book have reaffirmed Nord's emphasis on an especially strong print culture descended from New England Puritanism, tethering Perry Miller's intellectual history of the “New England mind” to a remarkable circulation of texts and economies of publication which clarify the overlap between Puritan spirituality and print materiality. See Hall, David D., Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989)Google Scholar; and Hall, Cultures of Print; Green, Ian, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, first edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Casper, Scott E., ed., Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary (Amherst, Worcester, MA, and Washington, DC: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Brown, Matthew Pentland, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Monaghan, E. Jennifer, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Cohen, Matt, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)Google Scholar, available at http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=496589. Cohen remarks that “the region of New England has been fertile ground for the study of what has been called ‘print culture’” for this reason. Most of these studies, like scholarship on antebellum print, tend to examine the cultural aspect of print culture synchronically, focussing on its defining features at a particular time (for a representative spectrum of recent approaches to print culture in early America, see Gross, Robert A. and Kelley, Mary, eds., A History of the Book in America, Volume II, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, reprint edn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)Google Scholar, which employs a focus on ideologies, institutions, education, gender, genre, and publics). My approach is more diachronic in examining how later print cultures can self-consciously reclaim and revise early print cultures.

11 Karcher, Carolyn L., The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 599CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Mayer, Henry, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 70Google Scholar.

13 Journal of the Times (Bennington, VT), 27 March 1829, quoted in Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Garrison, Francis Jackson, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1885), 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 The Liberator, 1 Jan. 1831, 1.

15 The Liberator, 26 July 1834, 2.

16 The article first appeared in The Liberator on 7 Nov. 1835, again on 12, 19, 26 Dec., and once more on 9 Jan. 1836; it appeared again much later in the 26 Oct. 1860 issue.

17 Mayer, 213–14.

18 van Anglen, Kevin P., The New England Milton: Literary Reception and Cultural Authority in the Early Republic (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993), 97Google Scholar.

19 “Severity of the Abolitionists,” The Liberator, 9 Jan 1836, 1.

20 Quoted in Mayer, 226, 229, original emphasis; The Liberator, 23 July, 6 Aug. 1836.

21 Phillips, The Liberator, 14 April 1837, 2–3; Russell, The Liberator, 4 Aug. 1837, 1. Russell would later become a founding member of the Boston Vigilance Committee.

22 Quoted in Mayer, 238.

23 The Liberator, 12 Jan. 1838, 1.

24 For the sake of concision, I omit an exhaustive examination of further examples of explicit connections between Puritan heritage and a free press, but they can be found in the following issues of The Liberator: 18 May 1838, 28 Dec. 1838; 5 Aug. 1842, 23 Jan. 1846, 6 March 1846, 13 Aug. 1847, 6 April 1849, 14 June 1850, 2 Aug. 1850, 17 Jan. 1851, 26 May 1854, 12 July 1861.

25 The Liberator, 19 Jan. 1844, 15 April 1859, 22 April 1859, 29 April 1859; reprinted as “No Compromise with Slavery,” in William Lloyd Garrison, Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison. With an Appendix (Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1852), 139.

26 Child, Lydia Maria and Karcher, Carolyn L, A Lydia Maria Child Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 289Google Scholar.

27 Channing, William Ellery, Slavery (Boston: J. Munroe, 1835)Google Scholar, available at http://books.google.com/books?id=FtJNAAAAMAAJ, 134.

28 Ibid., 136–37.

29 Ibid., 146, 134.

30 The Liberator, 9 Jan. 1836, 1, original emphasis.

31 Many of the traits by which one scholar distinguishes The Communist Manifesto can likewise be applied to the Garrisonian oeuvre: “vigorous, varied, and highly concrete, alive with imagery and flashing with figures of speech. In the freshness of its diction and the boldness of its tropes, it may be said to be romantic.” Siegel, Paul N., “The Style of the Communist Manifesto,” Science & Society, 46, 2 (1982), 222–29Google Scholar, available at www.jstor.org/stable/40402395, 223. This is especially true of Garrisonians’ frequent recurrence to the language of heat and eruption. “I use strong language, and will make no apology for it,” Garrison seethed, defending “the language of hot displeasure, and caustic irony, and righteous denunciation. Every word will burn like molten lead, and every sentence glow like flaming fire.” Garrison, William Lloyd, An Address Delivered in Marlboro’ Chapel, Boston (Boston, MA: Isaac Knapp, 1838), 5Google Scholar.

32 Mailloux, Steven, “Enactment History, Jesuit Practices, and Rhetorical Hermeneutics,” in Ballif, Michelle, ed., Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 2013), 34Google Scholar.

33 Phillips, Wendell and Pease, Theodore C., Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, Volume II (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1892), 38–40Google Scholar.

34 The Liberator, 25 April 1835, 4.

35 Wendell Phillips, “Public Opinion,” in Phillips and Pease, Volume I, 43.

36 This sampling come from the following issues of The Liberator: “gospel,” 19 May 1837; “calculating politicians,” 26 May 1837; “Constitution,” 19 May 1837.

37 Digital copies of these texts come from the Gale Slavery and Anti-slavery Transnational Archive and Chronicling America; in the latter, digital txts and xmls need cleaning, and all results are thus preliminary and subject to further refinement (because of this, I would in fact hypothesize more references to “spirit” and “puritan” than I have thus far counted). The data follow: I compiled word counts of “spirit” over total word counts for full digital runs of six southern newspapers included in the Gale Slavery and Anti-slavery Archive and compared them to the same length of run from The Liberator. The data follows as Liberator 11,397/57,081,176 = .0200% versus southern papers 3,046/90,598,684 = 0.0034%, or 5.9 times as frequently. Tracking the word “spirit” from 1856 to 1859 for The Congregationalist and 1849 to 1850 for the Emancipator & Republican (the years in which full runs of digital issues exist, both from Chronicling America) results in the following word counts over total word count: Congregationalist 2,064/9,282,000 = 0.02% versus The Liberator 1,955/6,825,000 = 0.03%, or 1.5 times as often; Emancipator & Republican 583/4,680,000 = 0.01% versus The Liberator 1,128/3432000 = 0.03%, or 2.7 times as often.

38 A comprehensive count of all “spirit of …” phrases in The Liberator runs as follows: slavery 427, liberty 325, the age/times 265, Christ 260, Christian/-ity 236, freedom 228, the Gospel 215, God 170, the national government 165, love 133, the Constitution 112, the Lord 98, truth 92, abolition/-ism 88, war 79, Jesus 78, peace 74, revenge 59, humanity 58, compromise 56, violence 52, reform 52, kindness 47, America 45, the people 42, the Pilgrims/Luther/the Puritans/Protestantism/Reformation/the Mayflower 41, 1776/76/the Revolution/the Patriots/bunker 39, justice 39, sectarian 36, the clergy 35, our institutions 32, persecution 32, the law 30 (“letter of the law” 37), hatred 30, mobocracy 28, philanthropy 27, hostility 26, resistance 24, prophecy 23, party 23, the Scripture/Bible 22, our fathers 21, fanaticism 21, democracy 7, the church 5.

39 Benjamin Rush to John Adams, 27 Oct. 1778, National Archives, Founders Online, at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-07-02-0110, emphasis original.

40 Chapman, Maria Weston, Right and Wrong in Massachusetts [An Anti-slavery Tract.] (Boston: Dow & Jackson, 1839), 164Google Scholar.

41 Gouldner, Alvin Ward, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar, and Future of Ideology (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasis original.

42 Garrison, Selections from the Writings and Speeches, 122.

43 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 365–66Google Scholar.

44 The Liberator, 27 Nov. 1840, 2.

45 For an example of a Garrisonian who accepted the charge of Jacobinism see ibid., 9.

46 Carlyle, Thomas, Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1841)Google Scholar; James, 349.

47 Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry, 12, 4 (1986), 631–53, at www.jstor.org/stable/1343431, 635.

48 On these two meanings of “ideology,” see Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 107–11Google Scholar; Michael Walzer's looser definition of ideologies as radical movements motivated by “introspective discipline and self-control,” for instance, highlighted the radical elements in “Calvinism as an ideology” and the parallels between Cromwellian, Jacobin, and Bolshevik revolution. Walzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 1–25Google Scholar.

49 Further, this culture also influenced major writers towards countercultural dissent, as with Emerson's path towards Wendell Phillips and his eventual praise of John Brown as a new Christ. And as evidenced by the lives of Garrison and Lovejoy, anti-slavery editors and journalists took real risks in their desire to challenge the nation and honor the dissenting legacies of Puritan forebears.

50 Cox, Samuel Sullivan, Puritanism in Politics. Speech of Hon. S. S. Cox, of Ohio, Before the Democratic Union Association, January 13, 1863 (New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., 1863)Google Scholar, available at http://archive.org/details/puritanisminpoli00coxs, 5.

51 John Milton, Paradise Lost, IV.99.

52 Medico, A Review of Garrisonian Fanaticism and Its Influence (Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1852)Google Scholar, availabl at https://catalog-hathitrust-org.libproxy.wustl.edu/Record/009577870, 22–23.

53 Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (self-published, Washington, DC, 1907)Google Scholar, available at https://archive.org/stream/educationofhenry00adamrich#page, 4–5.

54 Medico, 11–12, emphasis original.

55 Ibid., 22.

56 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 360.

57 Garrison, Selections from the Writings and Speeches, 251–52, 254.

58 Ibid., 259–60.

59 Chapman, Right and Wrong in Massachusetts, 159–61.

60 Maria Weston Chapman to James Russell Lowell, James Russell Lowell Papers, MS Am 765, Containers 219–21, Houghton Library, original emphasis.