Chapter One
A Yankee Religious Outsider,
1803-1829
Orestes Augustus Brownson claimed to be a descendant of the
John Brownson clan. John Brownson emigrated from England to
Hartford Colony apparently in 1635 or 1636 and fought in the Pequot
War of 1637, his one claim to historical fame. In 1860, Orestes wrote
that he knew very little about the Brownson family and even less
about his own branch of the clan. His paternal grandparents had lived
in the vicinity of New Britain, Connecticut, and were apparently farmers.
His grandfather, Nodiah (1740-1803), a resident of New Britain,
died the year Orestes was born, and his grandmother, Sybble
Horsington Brownson, of whom very little is known, was apparently
still living as late as 1840, as Brownson intimates in one of his writings,
but he never met her. Orestes had no personal memories or oral traditions
about the Brownson family probably because he was two years
old when his father died, severing connections with the Brownsons.
Sometime in the late eighteenth century, perhaps after Vermont
had been admitted as a state in 1791, Sylvester Augustus Brownson
(1772-1805), Orestes' father, like many young men of the time in search
of land and a living, moved up the Connecticut River Valley and settled
at Stockbridge, in Windsor County, Vermont. Stockbridge,
founded in 1783, had a population in 1803 of about one hundred inhabitants;
it was located on the White River, a little more than thirty
miles west of the Connecticut River, on the edge of what is now the
Green Mountain National Forest. The luscious countryside, the mountains,
the river, and the forest were scenes that Brownson cherished for
the remainder of his life, and though he had a reputation in later life as
a hard-headed philosopher, he was romantically sensitive to the beauties
of nature. In his mature years, he took pride in being a native Vermonter;
Vermont was in his bones and he inherited from its topography
a love of freedom and independence. Nature, moreover, spoke
loudly to Brownson of divine order as well as divine liberty.
We know very little about Sylvester. In all of his voluminous
writings, Orestes almost never mentions his father. From certain allusions
in his writings it appears that his father was a sheep herder in
Stockbridge, or worked as a hired hand. Orestes, though, did not really
know his father. According to family tradition, Sylvester died after
a severe cold, leading perhaps to pneumonia. What is known is that
the Sylvester Brownson family barely eked out a living while he was
alive. The Stockbridge landscape was beautiful, but the soil was stingy.
Many Vermonters who tried to make the land yield fruit were frustrated
in the early nineteenth century and eventually moved west for
more fertile acreage. The Brownsons lived in relative destitution and
poverty, but such a living was not an uncommon experience for those
who sojourned in Vermont in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Involuntary poverty, Brownson repeatedly recalled, was a
constant companion of his life.
Orestes' father, as family tradition had it, was a Presbyterian, but
there is no record of his identification with any church in Vermont.
More than likely he had few if any opportunities for worship in
Stockbridge. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Vermont
was geographically removed from the centers of Puritan culture
and Stockbridge was isolated from the major centers of social life in
Vermont. It is not even evident that there were any religious establishments
or itinerant missionaries available to Stockbridge residents in
the early 1800s. Religion, if there was any, would have been a family
affair. The Brownsons were on the fringes of any long-established religious
traditions, and it is not clear that there was any religious practice
in the Brownson home.
Vermont was part of a religious frontier culture that had not experienced
the stability of a religious establishment. Deism, other forms
of Enlightenment religious skepticism, "no-churchism," and Universalism
were mixed in with pockets of Presbyterianism, Congregationalism,
and Methodism. To the Orthodox Puritans of Connecticut, Vermont
seemed like missionary territory in the late eighteenth century.
Ethan Allen's deist Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1785) had been published
in Vermont, Thomas Paine's Age of Reason (1791, 1792) had been
greedily received, and Universalism had a stronghold in the state.
Down the Connecticut River, Timothy Dwight, the Calvinist president
of Yale, looked upon Vermont as a hotbed of infidelity. To him the Vermonters
were "men of loose principles and loose morals. They were either
professed infidels, Universalists, or people who exhibited the
morals of these two classes of mankind." After the Revolutionary War,
Connecticut clergymen had visited the state and reported back to Connecticut
that Vermont needed a major missionary effort to claim the
souls of those without the ministrations of the gospel. In 1798 Connecticut
organized a missionary society and began to send evangelists to
Vermont to win souls to Christ and the church. Thereafter others, particularly
the Methodists and "Christians," sent revivalists into the
state to evangelize.
Orestes' mother, Relief Metcalf (1776-1864), was a native of
southern New Hampshire. The Metcalf family apparently had been a
part of the migration from Connecticut to the upper Connecticut River
Valley, where her father Jotham Metcalf and his wife settled in Keene,
Cheshire County, New Hampshire, about twenty miles east of the
Connecticut River. Relief's parents were apparently Universalists, and,
as Brownson mentions in one of his letters of 1834, his mother and her
sister were Restorationist Universalists. That religious tradition, however,
apparently had no influence on Brownson himself until he was
about fifteen years of age.
Sometime in 1795 or 1796, Sylvester and Relief married, perhaps
at Keene, New Hampshire. We know they were living in Stockbridge
in 1803, but where they lived prior to that is unknown. Between the
late 1790s and 1803 they gave birth to three children: Oran, Daniel, and
Thorina. On 16 September 1803, twins, Orestes Augustus and Daphne
Augusta, were born. The names chosen for the twins came from Greek
mythology and were not the typical names chosen by Puritan parents
for their children. The names reflected much more the influence of
classicism or the Enlightenment than that of Puritanism. Relief and
Daniel were more typical names in the Puritan heritage.
Two years after the twins were born disaster struck the family
when Sylvester died, leaving the young family without any means of
support. The other children were probably four, six, and eight years of
age. A mother of twenty-nine years of age with five children under the
age of eight, with no source of support other than extended family and
friends, was going to have a difficult time feeding and rearing her children.
Relief tried to raise the children for four more years after
Sylvester died, but she could not manage. She had to send Thorina and
the twins to three different families to be cared for. Orestes was about
six years old when his mother sent him to Royalton, about seventeen
miles north and east of Stockbridge on the White River, to live with
and be raised by James Huntington (or Hunting) and his wife,
middle-aged people (sixty and fifty respectively) whom he never
names in his autobiography, but for whom he obviously had deep affection.
Orestes was separated from the family for more than seven
years before he was reunited with his mother and siblings in 1817
when they all emigrated to Ballston Spa, New York, joining the great
Vermont migration west after a devastating famine of 1816. These
youthful experiences of separation created in him a strong sense of
personal independence, initiative, and self-reliance, but they also put
him in a constant search for the communion, continuity, order, and stability
that he did not enjoy.
Vermont was a cradle for a number of persons who later became
important figures in American religious history. The Vermonters
demonstrated the religious initiative, creativity, and imagination that
flowed from a country where such virtues were highly prized and
where tradition itself, political or religious, was identified with a dead
and overturned past. In addition to Orestes Brownson, Vermont gave
birth to the founder of the Mormons, Joseph Smith (1805-44), who
was born in Sharon and whose family had lived in Royalton during a
period in which Brownson was living there. Brownson indicates in
the Spirit-Rapper (1854) that he knew Smith as a young man. Brigham
Young (1801-77), Smith's trusted advisor and president of the Mormons
from 1847 until his death, was from Whitingham. William
Miller (1782-1849), founder of the Adventist movement, was born and
raised in Pittsfield. John Humphrey Noyes (1811-86), a religious perfectionist
and founder of socialist and free-love religious communes,
was born in Brattleboro. These Vermont contemporaries of Brownson,
probably unknown to one another while in Vermont, were products
of a rural, mobile, and unsettled culture. All of them, moreover,
moved several times during their youth and eventually joined the
westward journey to upstate New York where they all began their careers
as leaders of religious ferment, but none of them were from the
same mold. They were products of the diverse and freedom-loving religious
culture in which they lived, but they were also shapers and
creators within a culture that they resisted and in some instances rejected
for religious alternatives they themselves helped to direct. All
of them would have been considered heterodox or unorthodox by the
mainline churchgoers in the society: the Congregationalists, Presbyterians,
Baptists, Methodists, and other early nineteenth-century Protestant
evangelicals.
These Vermonters found the religious differences in the society to
be troubling; they were in search of something that could transcend
the very multiplicity that they themselves would ironically increase.
They wanted to escape the infallibilities of differing dogmas, the intrigues
of priestcraft, and the wars of the sects. They did so in ways
that rejected the tradition of Puritan and evangelical culture. But they
could not escape that culture entirely no matter how hard they tried.
They were a part of its long-standing reforming zeal. They also shared
another characteristic: they were not instructed well in what they came
to reject. They all experienced the benefits and suffered the consequences
of being self-educated, being intellectually and religiously
flexible and simultaneously subject to their latest individual insights
untested by tradition and common experience.
Brownson's own religious and intellectual formation was neither
very systematic nor consistent. He picked up in bits and pieces what
he could of religion and knowledge from those around him and from
the limited number of books that were available to him. His religious
development, especially in his earliest years, was a process of osmosis,
absorbing what he could from his immediate religious surroundings.
In various autobiographical accounts of his religious life and development
he never mentions the influence of his mother on his religious
formation. Nor do we learn who taught him how to read, but we do
learn that he knew how to read at a very early age. His earliest religious
and intellectual formation appears to come from the period
when the Huntingtons were primarily responsible for nurturing him.
The Huntingtons, with whom Brownson lived from the ages of
six to fifteen, were Congregationalists, although not churchgoing ones.
They taught him various prayers, the Apostles' Creed, and the Shorter
Catechism. These he had committed to memory early on. Once he
learned to read, moreover, he was drawn to the Scriptures, which he
read repeatedly, committing much of it to memory, as is clearly evident
in his later writings. In The Convert, his 1857 autobiographical account
of his conversion to Catholicism, Brownson admits that he was always
interested in things religious and had contemplated becoming a minister
in his early adolescent years. Periodically he attended Methodist
and "Christian" worship services because he considered them the
"wisest" of all the denominations (Congregationalist, Baptist, Universalist)
available in Royalton.
When he was thirteen, Brownson attended a "Christian" revival
in the town of Royalton and had an experience that can only be characterized
as something of a religious conversion, although it never made
him join the Christian Church or Christian Connection, a Vermont denomination
established in 1801 by revivalists and Christian
Restorationists Abner Jones (1772-1841) and Elias Smith. The Royalton
event was part of a major religious awakening that occurred in Vermont
in 1816 and one of several revivals that had taken place in the
state during the Second Great Awakening. Although he did not record
the experience in The Convert, he did retell it two or three times during
his late twenties and early thirties. In one semi-fictional account in
1831, he told how he had been convicted of sin as an early adolescent
in one of the revivals, how he sought relief from the terror of his condition,
and how one dark night in the quiet of his room he experienced a
joyful release and a feeling of redemption.
The time had come, when nature must sink or triumph. The darkness
disappeared; the storm subsided; the thunder hushed his
voice; all was silent, calm and bright. I lay entranced. A soft, an inexpressibly
sweet sensation pervaded my whole frame. There was
a light around to which the day would have seemed as night; yet it
was midnight. I could see every part of my room clearly and distinctly,
yet I was not startled. All my guilt, all my grief, all my anguish,
were gone and I felt as if ushered into a new world, where
all was bright and lovely, where the air was perfumed with sweet
spices, where soft and thrilling music breathed from every dwelling
and warbled from every grove. I could bear no more. The contrast
of feeling may be imagined. I broke out so loud that I was
heard all over the house: 'I have tasted heaven today, what more
can I contain?' Thus was I born again.
This teenage experience was not unusual during revivals, and
Brownson had developed a way of reporting it that reflected classical
conversion stories. He did not join a church, though, as a result of that
experience. This conversion and a similar one in his late teens when he
did join the Presbyterian Church, however, provided him with a sense
of traditional Christian values that acted like a subterranean foundation
for his later defense of historical Christianity when he saw it
threatened by the criticisms of some Transcendentalists.
Continues.
