Versions of Anarchism in the Antislavery Movement
Author(s): Lewis Perry
Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1968), pp. 768-782
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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LEWIS
PERRY
State University of New York at Buffalo
Versions of Anarchism
in the Antislavery Movement
1880s THE FAMOUS RUSSIAN NOVELIST AND CHRISTIAN ANARchist, Leo Tolstoy, tried to recover the history of American anarchism
before the Civil War.1 Tolstoy's own efforts to live according to the Bible
had led to the repudiation of government, and after the publication of
My Religion in 1884 one of the sons of William Lloyd Garrison wrote
to him about the striking similarity between the views expressed in that
book and those once espoused by the great abolitionist. But in response
to Tolstoy's request for further information the younger Garrison had
to confess that he knew of no reformer who had sustained an interest in
the old doctrine called nonresistance. Five years later, Tolstoy had a
chance to correspond with Adin Ballou, a faithful Christian nonresistant
whom the Garrisonians had forgotten. But Ballou was bitter and argumentative; not much could be learned from him. Judging from the
obscurity into which nonresistance had fallen in America as elsewhere,
the Russian wondered whether the world was determined to ignore the
message of the New Testament. For Tolstoy was interested in the beliefs
of Garrison and Ballou not as the odd inventions of a few Americans but
as possible expressions of a universal Christianity.2
Tolstoy did not gain much information about the anarchism of the
abolitionists. He guessed that abolitionists had discarded the doctrines
of anarchism in the belief that they embarrassed the cause of the slave.
Because the country had evaded those doctrines, it went through a fratricidal war which put a superficial end to slavery but left a hideous
IN THE LATE
1 An earlier version of this paper was presented
to the New York American Studies
Association in Rochester, N. Y., May 6, 1967.
2 Lyof N. Tolstoi,
The Kingdom of God is Within You (New York, 1899), pp. 4,
11, 19; Count Leo Tolstoy and Rev. Adin Ballou, "The Christian Doctrine of Nonby Rev. Lewis G. Wilson,"
Compiled
Correspondence
Resistance . . . Unpublished
Arena, III (Dec. 1890), 1-12.
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Anarchism
in the Antislavery
769
Movement
pattern of interracial violence. One thing Tolstoy understood perfectly
from his own anarchist perspective: Garrison's followers had been anarchistic not in addition to being against slavery but because they were
against slavery. He put the matter succinctly:
Garrison, a man enlightened by the Christian teaching, having begun
with the practical aim of striving against slavery, soon understood that
the cause of slavery was not the casual temporary seizure by the Southerners of a few millions of negroes, but the ancient and universal recognition, contrary to Christian teaching, of the right of coercion by some
men in regard to others.
. .
. Garrison understood
.
.
. that the only
irrefutable argument against slavery is a denial of any man's right over
the liberty of another under any conditions whatsoever.3
Since Tolstoy's time the anarchism of the abolitionists has perhaps
been rescued from obscurity; at least the term "anarchism" appears
regularly in the literature on Garrison. Acknowledgment of the fact that
Garrison opposed government, however, has not necessarily meant that
the reasons for his opposition to government are understood. Lacking
Tolstoy's perspective, historians have not known quite what to make of
Garrison's anarchism and have been unable to state its relationship to
his antislavery. Those interpretations kindest to Garrison suggest that
he became an anarchist solely out of impatience with a particular government which paid no heed to his demands. But the more important point
is that Garrison knew, or thought he knew, that no human government
could respond to the demands of a Christian. Unkind interpretations
choose to suggest that Garrison was mentally unbalanced. A typical
attitude is that antislavery sentiment can be explained by the presence
of the social evil of slavery but that anarchist ideas must be explained
by the personal psychology of the reformer. Kind and unkind interpretations alike assume that anarchism represented a deviation from antislavery.
I propose to suspend this assumption for a while. I would like to
speculate on the possibility that anarchism was, as Tolstoy understood,
doctrinally related to antislavery; it would then be no surprise that
anarchism emerged in many versions throughout ante-bellum reform.
Anarchism, it will appear, was not merely the quirk of a handful of
eccentric Bostonians, but was, instead, one logical outcome of the Protestant traditions expressed in antislavery. To advance these speculations,
I will first consider the views of Garrison and those closest to him, and
then inspect some other varieties of anarchism in the 1840s.
3 Leo Tolstoy,
"Introduction
trans. Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy
Lloyd Garrison,"
of William
to a Short Biography
Centenary Edition (London, 1935), XX, 577-78.
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Although Garrison's views are often catalogued as Christian anarchism,
the theology behind them has not often been discovered. Partly the blame
belongs with the abolitionists themselves: the Garrisonians called their
most anarchistic organization the New England Non-Resistance Society,
and instead of anarchism, a term which they lacked in any favorable
sense, they advocated nonresistance. Consequently they focused attention
on their commitment to what we call nonviolence rather than on the
doctrines underlying that commitment. Nonviolence was not the basic
issue: opponents of Garrisonian anarchism-religious abolitionists such
as Orange Scott, Theodore Dwight Weld and William Goodell-also
preached nonresistance among men. This was "old-fashioned" nonresistance, turning the other cheek. But they abhorred what they named
"no-governmentism," the idea that government violated the Biblical
injunctions against violence.4 At this point it should be clear that nonviolence was less important than the theology in which it was couched.
For their part, the Garrisonian nonresistants resented and repudiated
the name of no-governmentism. Here we must attend to them carefully.
They insisted that they were striving for, and placing themselves under,
the only true and effective government: the government of God. They
insisted that they opposed not government, but human pretensions to
govern. I find, sometimes to my regret, little sense of humor among them,
and there was seldom much deliberate irony in this insistence. Henry
C. Wright, the most dogged nonresistant, was deadly serious when he
complained of his audiences that they "seemed to think . . . that all
who refuse 'to acknowledge allegiance to human governments,' but feel
it a duty 'to obey God rather than man,' are 'no-government men' and
'jacobins':-to be under the government of Christ-of moral principlewas, as has been taught by the religious and political newspapers of the
land, and by the American Peace Society, to be under 'no-government'to be in a state of anarchy." 5 As far as Wright was concerned, simply to
state this view was to refute it. Adin Ballou, the best philosopher among
the nonresistants, developed this line of reasoning more fully: "there is,"
he wrote, "strictly speaking, no such thing as human government." The
goal of the nonresistance movement was "true moral order," forcing
the physical world into a right and orderly condition. "Therefore, all
depends on a supreme moral authority, or government. This must be
inherently divine. . . . It is not original in any created being." Was it
not plain, then, that the direction of nonresistance was not away from
4 Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality,
1780-1845 (Princeton, 1965), p. 161; Benjamin P. Thomas, Theodore Weld: Crusader
for Freedom (New Brunswick, N. J., 1950), p. 146; Liberator, June 12, 1840, p. 2; June
26, 1840, p. 4.
5 Non-Resistant, Mar. 2, 1839, p. 2.
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Anarchism in the Antislavery Movement
government but toward a government of the highest authority? Ballou
wanted to turn the tables on the assailants of nonresistance. He claimed
that only "atheists and would-be Deicides-
. . . the genuine no govern-
mentists"-believed in any human right to govern; man must be the
subject of God.6
It has been necessary to quote these turgid writers at length because
the temptation to equate their views with those of modern spokesmen for
nonviolence has obscured their beliefs. They were not being ironical
when they identified themselves with true government and their opponents with no government. On the contrary, they were speaking earnestly
from a theological viewpoint that may best be described as antinomian.
They were Christians who were concerned for the coming of the millennium and who understood that the millennium was the government of
God. How did God govern? Directly, through the human heart. And any
intermediary authorities between the individual and God were rivals to
God's sovereignty and impediments to the coming of the millennium.
The term antinomian is in some ways more useful than the term
anarchist. As the quotations from Wright and Ballou indicate, the Garrisonian nonresistants opposed anarchy and yearned for government. If
there is a paradox here, it is a paradox at the heart of their faith. They
were anarchists-or, more properly, we would call them anarchistsbecause they detested anarchy. In their categories, human government,
so called, was synonymous with anarchy and antithetical to "true moral
order." Once we understand this, we will have no difficulty with the
relationship between their kind of anarchism and antislavery.
Bronson Alcott, whose enthusiasm for the reforms is less well known
than his oracular presence among the Transcendentalists, caught the
spirit of nonresistance more simply and clearly than anyone else, and
his speeches stood out at nonresistance conventions. "What guide have
I but my conscience?" he asked in 1839.
Church and State are responsible to me; not I to them. They cease to deserve our veneration from the moment that they violate our consciences.
We then protest against them. We withdraw ourselves from them.
I believe that this is what is now going on.... I look upon the Non-Resistance Society as an assertion of the right to self-government. Why
should I employ a church to write my creed or a state to govern me? Why
not write my own creed? Why not govern myself?7
Antinomianism consistently led to this point: the uncontested sovereignty
of God meant that the individual must follow his own best light. The
6 Christian
In All Its Important
Non-Resistance,
1846), pp. 84-85, 214.
(Philadelphia,
7 Non-Resistant,
Oct. 19, 1839, p. 4.
Bearings,
Illustrated
and Defended
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only government which does not violate God's sovereignty is the individual's sovereignty over himself. Thus Alcott urged other delegates to
ignore government, rather than combat it, and to fix their attention on
the great lawgiver in the human soul.
Similar assumptions may be found in the Declaration of Sentiments
that Garrison composed for nonresistants. Most simply he presented the
syllogism: the New Testament forbids the use of force; government is
upheld by force; therefore a Christian must abstain from government.
But more was at stake here than literal obedience to Scripture. Here was
a millennial appeal away from human government and toward the "one
KING and LAWGIVER, one JUDGE and RULER of mankind." The
declaration went on to stress the design of nonresistants to "hasten the
time" when Christ shall rule directly. To this end, they accepted in
their individual lives the belief that "whatever the gospel is designed
to destroy at any period of the world, being contrary to it, ought now
to be abandoned." 8
In short, the goal of the Garrisonians was not to eliminate specific
earthly evils. Their goal was to renounce all authoritarian relationships
among men; it was the very principle of authority that was sinful. That
is why abolitionists would not compromise nonresistance to speed the
course of antislavery; such a compromise represented a digression from
their quest. Unless we understand this, much of the behavior of the nonresistants must appear quixotic. For example, when the Massachusetts
legislature revoked some death penalties, ended some militia allowances
and passed resolutions against slavery, nonresistants were not gratified.
On the contrary, Edmund Quincy spent an editorial worrying over the
soul of the abolitionist legislator, George Bradburn. "We believe he could
as well hold a slave innocently, as to exercise the power of making laws
enforced by penalties, without detriment to his soul; for both relations
spring from the same false principle-the assumed right of man to have
dominion over man." 9
Like statements appear repeatedly. Slavery, government and violence
were considered identical in principle: all were sinful invasions of God's
prerogatives; all tried to set one man between another man and his rightful ruler. In a sense we might even say that these men opposed slavery
more as a symbol than as an institution. Slavery served as a paradigm of
all human authority, the condition in which one man takes possession
of another and removes him from God's sovereignty. Nor was this all a
question of abstract theology. The Garrisonians were intent on the prob8 Non-Resistant,
Jan. 1839, p. 1. The portion of the Declaration
Era of Reform, 1830-1860, ed., Henry Steele Commager (Princeton,
misleadingly omits some of this argument.
Apr. 20, 1839, p. 3.
9 Non-Resistant,
reprinted in The
1960), pp. 172-74,
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Anarchism in the Antislavery Movement
773
lem of order and security, as their obsession with the most violent and
immoral aspects of slavery ought to suggest. In their view, the fact that
men tried to rule one another explained the prevalence of violence and
bloodshed on this earth. Their logic unfolded categorically: to end
slavery was to end all coercion; to end all coercion was to release the
millennial power of God; to end coercion, again, was to secure peace
and order on earth; and to secure peace was, of course, to realize the
millennium. Schematically, slavery, government or coercion was the
intermediate stage between self-government and divine government. Selfgovernment and divine government reinforced one another, but the intermediate stage was "anarchy" (in the bad sense of pandemonium) in
which men were not under moral law. All that was needed to usher in
peace was to expel the intermediaries who pretended to keep the peace.
These thoughts struck the Garrisonians with mathematical clarity. Anarchism, in the good sense of self-government, was not a dilution of antislavery, but synonymous with it. Ending slavery by civil law, or any
other coercion, was a ludicrous contradiction in terms.
It must be admitted, however, that most of the Garrisonians in time
lost sight of the simplicity of these definitions. They had always seemed
a trifle uneasy when pressed to demonstrate that their commitment to
nonresistance did not neglect the plight of the Negro slave. By the mid1840s many had joined in what was called disunionism, a movement
concentrating its attack on the proslavery Constitution and federal government. This movement, though historians have frequently confused
it with nonresistance, actually started from quite different assumptions.
Since disunionism was scarcely a version of anarchism, it may be passed
over quickly in this article. But certain contrasts may help to clarify nonresistant anarchism.
While nonresistance repudiated all human governments as sinful
invasions of God's authority, disunionism assumed a divine obligation
for men to institute moral governments. Its specific demand was for the
North to withdraw from the union in order to establish a new federation
not dirtied by the sin of slavery. Here was not antinomianism but the
old intolerance of Massachusetts. The government was tolerating slavery,
and it was as true now as it had been in the 17th century that "to authorize an untruth, by a Toleration of State, is to build a Sconce against the
walls of Heaven, to batter God out of his Chaire." 10 In the 1840s the
implications of this sentiment were separatist; by the 1860s they might
well prove authoritarian. Let me repeat, to underscore my present purposes, that, although disunionism was bent on purity and the sovereignty
10 Nathaniel
Ward, as quoted in The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings,
cds. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson (paperback, New York, 1963), L, 229.
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of God, it was not anarchistic and it was almost antithetical to nonresistance.
In fact, it was only in the minds of political abolitionists that disunionism seemed synonymous with nonresistance. Wendell Phillips, the
chief spokesman for disunionism and never a nonresistant, ridiculed the
logic by which dislike of the present federal government was equated
with dislike of all government. It was "arrogance" to assume the Constitution so perfect "that one who dislikes it could never be satisfied with
any form of government whatsoever." 11 Moreover, there were a number
of nonresistants who stayed wary of the new movement. For example, an
Ohioan wrote Garrison that he too would be pleased to see "the masses"
in the North pull out of their compact with the South "even for the comparatively unworthy object of establishing andther arbitrary government
in its stead," but this was nothing that a nonresistant should work for.
It was time people learned that, slavery or no slavery, voting is wrong
and "genuine government does not come from ballot-boxes." 12 But few
abolitionist leaders could keep this distinction in mind: the leading
Garrisonians gave to disunionism the energy formerly given to nonresistance, although they did not consider these causes identical. Disunionism was a temporary antislavery tactic; nonresistance promised
the millennial end of all human bondage to sin.
The only prominent nonresistant to denounce disunionism (a good
many obscure men did so) was Nathaniel P. Rogers. Reasoning and
moral influence could not take effect, he thought, behind a barrage of
threats. In any case, he did not care about the political union; what sustained slavery was "the moral union," the "agreement in the hearts of
the whole people that the colored man shall not have liberty among us."
The Constitution was irrelevant to antislavery. Disunion, furthermore,
would mean war and unfavorable circumstances for ending any moral
evil. (Rogers still looked forward to a day when the union would disintegrate because people no longer believed in government-a vision
once emphasized by almost all Garrisonians.) Rogers found the disunionists now to be "political" in three ways: they voted on slogans to
characterize themselves; they could not keep their minds off the Constitution; and their remedy for slavery was a disunity beginning with ballots
and bound to conclude with bullets.13
Rogers was no ordinary nonresistant. He moved through antislavery
and nonresistance to become the most respected prophet of what was
widely known as come-outerism. And the term come-outerism, as Thomas
11 Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office Under the United States Constitution?
(New York, 1845), pp. 3-4.
12 Liberator, Nov. 2, 1855, p. 4.
13 Herald of Freedom, June 14, 1844, p. 2; July 12, 1844, p. 2; June 6, 1845, p. 3.
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775
Wentworth Higginson reminded readers at the end of the century, was
as familiar before the war "as is that of the Salvation Army today." 14 Yet
historians have given the movement little careful attention, perhaps
because come-outerism manifested itself in many different ways. If we
are interested in the versions of anarchism in ante-bellum reform, however, we should at least enumerate these different manifestations.
The term "come-outer" was familiar from the revivals, where it signified a "new light," one who stepped forward to a public profession of
faith. Other significant sources of the term were favorite apocalyptic
texts from Scripture, such as the angel's prophecy of Babylon's fall.
"Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and
that ye receive not of her plagues" (Rev. 18:4). The first manifestation
of come-outerism, then, was a revivalistic, millennial tendency in rural
New England, concerning which we have little first-hand information
but which for a while dominated the imaginations of abolitionists. Rural
come-outers were reported to strut on fences, to renounce money and
property, and even to go naked in the summer. Certainly it was their
intention to escape from church, state and every form of "social bondage,"
and to enter into the condition where the saints were free to recognize
one another.15
Secondly, the name was appropriated by famed abolitionists, even
though they substituted the convention hall for the religious ecstasy of
the rural come-outers. Frederick Douglass played skillfully on the religious metaphors of bondage-he was a fugitive "in slavery"-and his
audiences saw in his escape to northern freedom the model of their religious purposes of self-discovery.16Garrison's example may have been less
dramatic, but he too called himself a come-outer from creeds and ceremonies.17 The term extended, thirdly, to "Jerusalem wildcat" churches
arising in imitation of Theodore Parker's society in Boston, free congregations centered around nonaligned ministers. In the mind of Thomas
Wentworth Higginson at least, this movement sprang not only from the
needs of ante-bellum reform but also from the ancient Puritan concern
for the voluntary laying-on of hands.18In a fourth version, come-outerism
14 Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston and New York, 1898), pp. 115-17.
15 Henry C. Kittredge,
Cape Cod: Its People and Their History
(Boston and New
York, 1930), pp. 257-60, 288-91; Thomas Low Nichols, Forty Years of American Life
(London, 1864), II, 45-46; P. Douglass Gorrie, The Churches and Sects of the United
States (New York, 1850), pp. 224 ff.; John Hayward. The Book of Religions; Comprising
the Views, Creeds, Sentiments, or Opinions, of All the Principal Religious Sects in the
World . . . (Concord, N.H., 1845), pp. 177-81.
16Herald of Freedom, Feb. 16, 1844, p. 2; Parker Pillsbury, Acts of the Anti-Slavery
Apostles (Boston, 1884), pp. 161-62.
17 Liberator, Jan. 12, 1844, p. 4.
18 Cheerful Yesterdays, pp. 113-14, 130.
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referred to antislavery people who seceded from supposedly proslavery
denominations and, in effect, built new ones. There may have been a
dozen such ventures, mostly ignored by historians and yet providing interesting connections between the moral problem of slavery and theories
of ecclesiastical reform.19 Confused with these secessions was the idea
promoted by New York abolitionists, particularly Gerrit Smith, that
there could rightfully be only one church in any locality and that higher
bodies might represent geographical areas, but never doctrinal or "sectarian" disagreements.20 This was known as the "Christian" or "Union"
movement, and it reminds us that the general purpose of come-outerism
was not the introduction of new sects into the denominational competition but the removal of earthly institutions between religious people
and God.
All of these different come-outer tendencies came together in August
1840 at the Groton Convention on Christian Union, with Edmund
Quincy one officer, Bronson Alcott one of the most vigorous participants,
Theodore Parker an observer, and a motley assembly of about 275 New
Yorkers and New Englanders. According to a neutral report: "The house
seemed to divide into two general parties-the one maintaining that local
Churches were a sort of divine organization, with peculiar authority and
prerogatives-and the other that they were a purely human organization,
or voluntary association, which could not in the nature of things assume
any authority or prerogatives not possessed by the individuals of which
they were composed." 21 Both parties rejected notions of outside authority,
but within anarchistic doctrines there was plenty of leeway for antagonism. Progress from the revival to the millennium would have to be
dialectical.
Compared to come-outerism, nonresistance was safely abstract: it expressed itself mainly in repudiation of the idea of government. Comeouterism focused attention on the role of individuals and organization
in society renewed: consequently it was a tougher test of anarchistic
tendencies and it ended in the most unmodified anarchist and antinomian statements to be found in ante-bellum reform. The best of these
statements were provided by Nathaniel P. Rogers. And Rogers did more
than merely separate antislavery from political action or institutionalized religion. He ultimately decided that even the voluntary reform
19 The best treatment of this subject remains that in William Goodell, Slavery and
. . . (New York,
A History of the Great Struggle in Both Hemispheres
Anti-Slavery;
1852), pp. 487-516.
20 See Smith's Abstract of the Argument,
in the Public Discussion of the Question:
"Are the Christians of a Given Community the Church of Such Community" (Albany,
1847).
21 Practical Christian, Sept. 1, 1840, p. 2.
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societies involved too much direction and authority to be free of the
taint of slavery.
There were two stages in Rogers' approach to this conclusion. First
came the standard antinomian scheme with which we already are familiar: to serve God, men, even when acting together, must be thrown back
on their own self-government. Soon, however, Rogers came to suspect
even the authority of God. The magic that made free meetings possible
had its source in human faculties, and even the demands of God had to
meet the test of private judgments. For example, it was a contradiction
in terms, according to Rogers, to call for the freedom of the slave on
grounds of Scriptural authority.22 Thus Rogers arrived at the most unmitigated anarchism of all the abolitionists, an anarchism brooking no
leadership from any quarter of heaven or earth. Before he died, he fell
into bitter antagonism with the Boston Garrisonians.
Rogers drew on support in two places: in New Hampshire where he
himself led the antislavery society, and in Lynn, which seems to have
been the center of the most radical reform. The come-outers of Lynn, in
fact, were known as no-organizationists, and they too suspected any form
of association that was not thoroughly spontaneous. It was one of their
editorial voices who gave the clearest definition of the paradox of antinomianism. "I know of no more strenuous advocates of 'law and order'
than that class of persons called 'no-organizationists,'" wrote Henry
Clapp Jr.
It is because they love law and hate anarchy, that they resist the unreasonable edicts of self-constituted authority, and deny infallibility to
that God of organization, the popular voice. They see nothing of the
beauty of order in a gathering of men and women, each of whom is
bitted, and bridled, and kept in check, by an officious chairman. But
they do see the beauty of order, in its highest development, where the
same people, attracted together by a common thought, exhibit that true
'peace,' whose only 'bond' is 'unity of spirit.' 23
But Lynn and New Hampshire together were no match for Boston:
Rogers died in bitterness and defeat.
Rogers had taken antinomianism beyond an attack on the federal
government. Therefore he had raised questions ducked by most of Garrisonian nonresistance. Specifically, he had questioned the authority of
local and voluntary institutions, and thus had pointed out an issue of
tremendous significance to all abolitionists. Abolitionists had claimed
22 A Collection of the Miscellaneous
Peabody Rogers
Writings of Nathaniel
chester, N. H. and Boston, 1849), pp. 280-84, 311-13.
23 The Pioneer: Or Leaves from an Editor's Portfolio (Lynn, 1846), p. 152.
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that the end of slavery must be spelled out in the peaceful conversion of
the slaveholders as part of the culmination of the history of God's work
of redemption. They had claimed, moreover, that the perpetuation of
the institution of slavery was due to the existence of sinful dispositions
in the North as well as the South. All of this underlay the original declaration of sentiments of antislavery, and it is not hard to see how it was
converted into nonresistance, into a disavowal of governmental sanctions.
Force cannot work conversion. But these beliefs could also have fostered
a kind of defeatism: after all, Southerners defended slavery on the
grounds that in the state of man since Adam's fall it was essential to
social order that some men control others. Abolitionists could name
slavery sin and thereby vilify it, but could they show any present escape
from it? Could they clear their own institutions of complicity in sinenough so as to be able to indicate a way out of slavery? Nonresistance
had barely reached this question (it had only issued attacks on the formal
sinfulness of coercion), and disunionism, on the other hand, too completely freed the North of intrinsic guilt, guilt not coming from connection with the South. For the come-outers it was presumably only the
elect who could be trusted outside of social coercions, while Rogers and
the no-organizationists seem to have imputed a sentimental reliability
to all men, a conception that finally ceased to be Christian. The central
problem-if we regard the movement in terms of Christian anarchismwas, however, to show a way out of sin and slavery that did not ignore or
smugly exonerate the institutions of the North, that did not predestine
half the world to slavery, and still did not negate the sovereignty of God.
Two solutions were given for this problem: one of which had to do with
the Hopedale Community and the other with the Liberty Party.
Both of these solutions were millennial, as they had to be, starting as
they did from concern with the enslavement of man in sin and human
government since Adam's fall. Adin Ballou's solution was community.
Unlike the Garrisonians, he did not denounce present-day governments.
Rather, he agreed with Southerners that such institutions were necessary
evils. It is, he told the nonresistance society, "among the irrevocable
ordinations of God, that all who will not be governed by Him shall be
governed by one another-shall be tyrannized over by one another; that
so long as men will indulge the lust of dominion, they shall be filled with
the fruits of slavery.
. .
. So if men will not be governed by God, it is
their doom to be enslaved by one another." 24 This did not mean that
those who gave their allegiance to God must patiently await the Second
Coming. Like all abolitionists, Ballou believed men could desist from
24 Non-Resistance
in Relation to Human Governments
(Boston, 1839); also available
in Liberator, Dec. 6, 1839, p. 4; and Non-Resistant,
Nov. 16, 1839, pp. 1-2.
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Anarchism in the Antislavery Movement
779
doing wrong, opt for a superior plane of moral law than prevailed on
earth, or, as he put it, find in their hearts "the germ of the millennium."
At the point when they made that discovery they needed some place to
go and new institutions to enclose them. The millennium, after all, was
not solely related to extra-historical forces; it would come through selfexploration, conversion and individual secession. Ballou assigned to the
Hopedale Community the function of giving converts a means of signifying their secession from earthly government and slavery.25
This viewpoint turned out to mix strengths and liabilities about
equally. On the one hand, as Ballou gladly pointed out in later years,
his community lasted much longer than such others as Skaneateles and
Brook Farm, which had scoffed at his restricted theological and reformist
purposes as sectarian.26 And, having taken the long view, he would
remain loyal to nonresistance when Garrison and others forsook it.27 But
on the other hand, Ballou's willingness to have the Negro wait in slavery
must have seemed a drawback to other abolitionists, even though he
anticipated that any other attitude would probably eventuate in civil
war and racial bitterness.28Furthermore, the long view could lead toward
a rather feeble resignation to the failure of the communitarian scheme
itself, once it seemed possible that its moment in history had not arrived.29
More satisfactory perhaps-that is, truer to the needs of Christian anarchy in antislavery-was the Liberty Party. This movement has usually
been taken as the opposite of anarchism and nonresistance, but, at least
in the minds of such of its founders as Beriah Green, William Goodell
and Gerrit Smith, it was a solution to the same problem of slavery and
sin which beleaguered the New England abolitionists. It was a sort of
political come-outerism. In the first place, we should notice that the goal
of the party was considered to be neither victory at the polls nor attainment of any balance of power but "disconnection from evil." It provided
a way of not voting for the parties which sinfully governed. Voting was
regarded not as an instrument of majority rule but as a record of individual character. In the second place, it was felt that voting for parties
which used politics as a way of simply adjusting moral differences was
giving a personal guarantee that the millennial government would never
come. For the Liberty Party was designed as a vanguard of the millenof the Hopedale Community, ed. William S. Heywood (Lowell, 1897).
Christian, Jan. 22, 1842, p. 2; Nov. 27, 1841, p. 2; May 17, 1845, p. 3;
Ballou, History of the Hopedale Community, pp. 24-26.
27 See the exchange
between Ballou and Garrison in 1861, as reported in Ballou,
of Adin Ballou, ed. William S. Heywood (Lowell, 1896), pp. 444-49.
Autobiography
Practical Christian, Dec.
28 See, for example,
his editorial, "Pro-War Anti-Slavery,"
21, 1850, p. 2.
Noyes scoffed at Ballou's account of his own
29 Among
others, John Humphrey
1870), p. 131.
failure. See his History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia,
25 History
26 Practical
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780
American Quarterly
nium rather than as a tactical machine of abolition. In the third place,
in pointing toward the millennium, Liberty Party men paid tribute to
the same dialectic of divine government and self-government that captivated Garrisonian nonresistants. That is why they wanted a record of
individual character instead of an index to majority sentiment; like
Ballou, they believed in an obligation for those choosing the government
of God to make special arrangements for themselves so as not to dilute
their moral influence in hastening the rule of God on earth. Ultimately
it was God, not man, who would supervise consequences.30
If there is any element of conservatism that distinguished these men
from their New England counterparts, it is that they believed in the
availability of natural leaders, provided by God, whose authority would
be respected only when the obstructions of human government had been
cleared away. Such leadership could only come into view voluntarily,
naturally. We are still dealing with a version of anarchism. But we are
dealing with a version more concerned with the ranks and tiers of voluntary local authority than with the release of individuals into harmonious
equality.
A recent sociological study observes that some ventures into reform
politics are more concerned with the symbolic identification of the virtue
of reformers than with the alleviation of specific social evils. This may
be explained by the existence of threats to the social status of the reference groups from which the reformers are drawn.31 In the case of the
Liberty Party, however, an alternative explanation is available. That
party was openly established to enable the virtuous to symbolize their
allegiance to God. It may be accounted for as a practical response to the
theological necessities of antislavery.
The main conclusion to be drawn from this survey, I believe, is that
anarchism was nearly at the heart of antislavery in the 1840s. We may
feel uncomfortable with Tolstoy's view that the problem of slavery was
eternally bound up in the larger problem of man's tendency to take
authority upon himself and thereby stifle the kingdom of God within
each man; we may prefer not to conclude that abolitionists were inclined
toward anarchism simply to the extent that they were clear-sighted Christians. Another explanation, more limited to time and history, may then
30 Illustrations
of these points may be found in William Goodell's marvelous history,
Beriah Green, Belief without Confession (Utica, 1844) and
Slavery and Anti-Slavery,
recurrently in the Model Worker (most strikingly in Beriah Green's address, July 28,
anarchist was
and a forthright
Liberty Party theoretician
1848, p. 1). A prominent
he was a deist. See chap. vii of Lewis Curtis Perry,
Lysander Spooner. Theologically
before the Civil
and Anarchy: A Study of the Ideas of Abolitionism
"Antislavery
War" (Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1967).
Temper31 Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American
ance Movement (paperback, Urbana, Ill., 1966).
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Anarchism in the Antislavery Movement
781
be adopted. As has often been recognized, antislavery was an outgrowth
of revivalism.32 Within the revival lay a model in which the most Godforsaken communities might approach a millennial escape from sin, not
through institutional coercions but through the spontaneous movements
of individual hearts. Inrthe 1830s, then, antislavery made a preliminary
application of the techniques of universal escape from sin to the social
problem of slavery. This extension of concern is understandable enough,
once we are reminded that slavery had long been a powerful metaphor
for sin in Christian thought.33 Division came in the 1840s, a division
which the political abolitionist William Goodell recognized as nearly
inevitable. "When a large body of the people were convinced of the
truths abolitionists had taught them, the question arose, How shall they
best be led to put their principles in practice?" No one kept to the first
applications: now they needed not only to think in terms of broadcasting
principles; they had to express those principles in action. And in matters
of such unearthly significance demands of conformity would have been
vain and sinful.34 Therefore antislavery in the 1840s spawned a variety
of submovements, all retaining the revivalistic hope of securing the kingdom of God by individual conversions, but differing considerably over
the methods by which this anarchistic hope might innocently be expressed within social institutions.
In this explanation, furthermore, we may see one reason why antislavery stood preeminent among the reforms. It was most openly involved
in the Christian problem at the heart of other reforms. Connections with
strivings for peace, communitarianism and church reform have already
been pointed out. It would be easy to add campaigns against the imprisonment of urban derelicts and against capital punishment in general. A
brief list of other movements showing some concern to substitute innocent
conversion for sinful coercion in social conduct beneath the sovereignty
of God would include: the women's rights movement, particularly when
it emphasized the coercions of marriage rather than the liberties of
voting; phrenology, when it sought to substitute natural unions for legal
marriages; the individualist anarchists led by Stephen Pearl Andrews,
who found in anarchism the most progressive applications of Protestantism; a number of educational experiments; and most especially the
temperance movement, which found a less ambiguous image in the
reformed drunkard than antislavery did in the fugitive slave.
in American
32 Anne C. Loveland,
Emancipation'
and 'Immediate
"Evangelicalism
Antislavery Thought," Journal of Southern History, XXXIII (1966), 172-88.
in The AntiBackground,"
33 David Brion Davis, "Slavery and Sin: The Cultural
ed. Martin Duberman (Princeton,
slavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists,
1965), pp. 3-31.
pp. 450-51, 454.
34 Slavery and Anti-Slavery,
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American Quarterly
782
The course of anarchistic ideas in each of these other reforms deserves
separate investigation, but it is possible to give an illustration revealing
connections among the temperance, anti-imprisonment and urban reforms. The illustration is drawn from Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York
Illustrated, a novel about crime and drunkenness which the agrarian
reformer, Solon Robinson, serialized in Horace Greeley's Tribune.
Throughout this very popular novel, Robinson singles out alcoholism
as a kind of symbol of the moral blindness and lack of character that lead
to vice and poverty in the city. Evils such as these cannot be remedied
by prisons or institutional controls; rather, they wait to be combated by
powerful sentiments of morality and charity. At one point an exemplary
young man explains why he did not kill a man who tried to seduce
his sister:
"Why did you not strike the villain dead at your feet?"
"That is savage nature."
"Why not arrest and punish him then, for his attempt at rape?"
"That is civilized nature."
"What then did you do?"
"I forgave him, and bade him repent, and ask God to forgive him as I
did."
"Lovetree, give me your hand, I give you my heart; I stand rebuked. 1
understand you now, that was Christian nature. Let us go." 3
An anarchistic repudiation of the controls of civilization and a celebration of the spontaneous impulses of the heart were easily generated out
of evangelical and millennial traditions in a problem-ridden America.
The anarchism derived from the revival supplied a quite different
purpose for reform than that of traditional theocratic agencies of social
control. Release took the place of containment and harmony took the
place of restraint. Therefore attention to versions of anarchism helps us
to understand alterations in American social reform in the 1840s. I think
we can also agree that these versions are more interesting and intricate
than what we are offered in discussions of abolitionism that simply take
political action as a norm and anti-politics as an abnormality.
35 Robinson,
Hot
Corn (New York, 1854), pp. 266-67.
Italics
added.
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