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5 Ellery Channing: Saturday Afternoon Professor; Or, Concord's Mad Poet

David Dowling

in Emerson's Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism's Future

This chapter focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson's mentorship of Ellery Channing the younger, who entered the former's life as a poet apprentice after Henry David Thoreau. It begins by assessing ... More

This chapter focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson's mentorship of Ellery Channing the younger, who entered the former's life as a poet apprentice after Henry David Thoreau. It begins by assessing Channing's efforts to make a favorable first impression on Emerson and his eventual immersion in transcendentalism as a romantic poet. It then examines the change in Emerson's theory of poetry, particularly after he undertook the poetic apprenticeship of Channing, and why Channing's poetic composition process appealed to Emerson. The chapter concludes by describing Channing's relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne.Less

“Arguments for the Possibility Are Good”

David F. Holland

in Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America

This chapter traces the intellectual history of the canon among liberal Christians of the nineteenth century. Beginning with Hicksite Quakers, it moves through William Ellery Channing's Unitarianism, ... More

This chapter traces the intellectual history of the canon among liberal Christians of the nineteenth century. Beginning with Hicksite Quakers, it moves through William Ellery Channing's Unitarianism, the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, the transition from Transcendentalism to Catholicism of Orestes Brownson, and finally the liberal congregationalism of Horace Bushnell. It demonstrates how the convergence of various intellectual trends in the nineteenth century—such as skepticism, sentimentalism, and biblical criticism—combined to push prominent American thinkers toward a concept of an open canon.Less

Antislavery Moderation

Molly Oshatz

in Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism

This chapter introduces the antebellum antislavery moderates, including William Ellery Channing, Moses Stuart, and Francis Wayland. It explores the moderates’ theological roots in New England ... More

This chapter introduces the antebellum antislavery moderates, including William Ellery Channing, Moses Stuart, and Francis Wayland. It explores the moderates’ theological roots in New England Calvinism and their predominantly Congregationalist, New School Presbyterian, and Baptist denominational identities. The chapter concludes by attending to historians’ harsh judgments of the moderates and arguing for a more nuanced portrayal of their contribution to antislavery.Less

Toward a Genealogy of Spirituality

in Secularism in Antebellum America

This chapter chronicles the emergence of spirituality as a marker of liberal Protestant piety in the U.S. It describes the shift the ontological status of spirituality from one signifying a quality ... More

This chapter chronicles the emergence of spirituality as a marker of liberal Protestant piety in the U.S. It describes the shift the ontological status of spirituality from one signifying a quality of God to a practice of human immunization. This chapter analyzes the theological abstractions of William Ellery Channing and Boston Unitarianism and discusses the conceptual life of spirituality within a burgeoning spiritualist subculture.Less

Henry David Thoreau: A Poet's Apprenticeship

David Dowling

in Emerson's Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism's Future

This chapter focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson's mentorship of Henry David Thoreau, with particular reference to the perils of the latter's experience as poet in training. It begins by analyzing “Sic ... More

This chapter focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson's mentorship of Henry David Thoreau, with particular reference to the perils of the latter's experience as poet in training. It begins by analyzing “Sic Vita,” a love poem written for Emerson's sister-in-law Lucy Jackson Brown, but also intended to court Emerson with the hope of initiating a poetic apprenticeship. It then explores the steps taken by Thoreau to professionalize the poetic craft in his career. Finally, it examines Ellery Channing's usurpation of Emerson's mentorship that resulted in Thoreau's liberation from the pursuit of Emersonian poetry.Less

Suspending Unbelief: The Secular Threats of Catharine Sedgwick’s Redwood

Gretchen Murphy

in New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State

This chapter interprets Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s novel Redwood as her response to a challenge posed by William Ellery Channing: to add an accession of feeling to overly-cool Unitarianism. Redwood ... More

This chapter interprets Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s novel Redwood as her response to a challenge posed by William Ellery Channing: to add an accession of feeling to overly-cool Unitarianism. Redwood responds to Channing’s challenge and to the period’s larger orthodox backlash against Unitarianism by reconciling liberalism with the conviction of belief, a balance that Sedgwick presents as essential for national cohesion in a post-revolutionary context. The novel portrays this post-revolutionary context as threatened by various forms of radicalism (slave revolts, class resentment, Shaker enthusiasm) that the novel links to memories of the French Revolution. It offers sentimental Protestant Christianity, characterized by a balance of zealous belief and broadminded tolerance, as the solution, albeit one that is expressly intolerant to non-Christians and unbelievers. The chapter draws on correspondence, sermons, and religious print culture to explain these theological and political problems and imagined solutions in Sedgwick’s novel.Less

Conclusion: The Concept of Membership in the Age of Reform

Kevin Butterfield

in The Making of Tocqueville'S America: Law and Association in the Early United States

The first generations of American citizens learned a great deal about how to join together in ways voluntary, effective, and safe for both the republic and the individual citizen. Something new did ... More

The first generations of American citizens learned a great deal about how to join together in ways voluntary, effective, and safe for both the republic and the individual citizen. Something new did appear in the 1830s, however, when temperance and antislavery societies that were organized around a pledge—a public confession of faith in the cause and an internalized commitment to both personal and societal transformation—brought a novel and powerful kind of voluntary membership to the United States. And thus the post-Revolutionary emphasis on procedure and law-minded practices in American civil society sowed the seeds of its own historical obscurity, for the associational diversity that it nurtured had produced new ways of thinking about the meanings of voluntary membership, new ways of joining together. The pluralism of antebellum American civil society had opened the door to something new and radically transformative.Less

The Slavery Question

Paul C. Gutjahr

in Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy

Chapter twenty-seven examines Hodge’s first article on the issue of slavery. Hodge remained largely consistent on his views of slavery throughout his life, and they are most clearly sent down in his ... More

Chapter twenty-seven examines Hodge’s first article on the issue of slavery. Hodge remained largely consistent on his views of slavery throughout his life, and they are most clearly sent down in his 1836 Repertory article entitled “Slavery.” Hodge believed that if the Bible nowhere condemned slavery, then neither could the Presbyterian Church. For a time, he and others at Princeton were ardent supports of the American Colonization Society. Their more proslavery stances put them in conflict with the more progressive antislavery views of the New School.Less

Unitarians, Shakers, and Quakers in North America

Stephen P. Shoemaker

in The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century

This chapter considers an unlikely trio of groups who opposed the Evangelical Protestant mainstream in nineteenth-century America: the Unitarians, the Quakers, and the Shakers. Each had to navigate ... More

This chapter considers an unlikely trio of groups who opposed the Evangelical Protestant mainstream in nineteenth-century America: the Unitarians, the Quakers, and the Shakers. Each had to navigate two different forms of dissent: the external and the internal. When deciding how best to revise or contradict the hegemonic forms of Protestantism, these groups had certain goals and methods for interacting with those outside their fellowship. In time, they each also had to face a more pernicious adversary, the second generation of dissenters that grew within their own ranks. While these disparate traditions may appear to have little in common, each body faced many of the same questions as they asserted their distinct form of external cultural and religious correction. When articulating a theological vision that went against the mainstream, they had to determine how to serve that particular vision in a culture that did not share their theological views. Some withdrew from contact with outsiders and used their enclaves as a way to practise and preserve their vision of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. On the other hand, there were groups that deliberately sought to model correct religion for others, and thereby hoped to transform other religious groups by disseminating their theological vision beyond the confines of any type of self-imposed seclusion. As the decades passed, though, both sorts of groups were surprised by the inevitable challenges to their founding orthodoxy from within their own membership. This dissent among dissenters was, of course, an outgrowth of the very impulse that stood behind the earlier establishment of the group. Subsequent generations of membership often failed to realize that belonging to a group of dissenters might require adherence to a detailed theological vision. This tension between founding theology and ongoing interpretation could leave a Dissenting group hierarchy in the awkward position of having to restrict innovation, an irony not lost on subsequent generations of members. This chapter asks how Unitarians, Shakers, and Quakers in nineteenth-century America addressed these two aspects of Dissent: external and internal. How did each group perceive their relationship to American culture and other more mainstream religious groups? How did they encounter and negotiate dissent from within their ranks? In each group there was an evolution over the course of the nineteenth century that complicates any interpretation of these multifaceted embodiments of Protestant Dissenting traditions in the United States.Less