“Versions of Anarchism in the Antislavery Movement.” Lewis Perry, American Quarterly 20.4

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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
IN THE LATE 1880s THE FAMOUS RUSSIAN NOVELIST AND CHRISTIAN ANAR-
chist, 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 argu-
mentative; 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 fra-
tricidal war which put a superficial end to slavery but left a hideous
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 Non-
Resistance . . . Unpublished Correspondence Compiled by Rev. Lewis G. Wilson,"
Arena, III (Dec. 1890), 1-12.
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Anarchism in the Antislavery Movement 769
pattern of interracial violence. One thing Tolstoy understood perfectly
from his own anarchist perspective: Garrison's followers had been anar-
chistic 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 Southern-
ers of a few millions of negroes, but the ancient and universal recogni-
tion, 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 govern-
ment 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 interpre-
tations alike assume that anarchism represented a deviation from anti-
slavery.
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 Protes-
tant 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 to a Short Biography of William Lloyd Garrison,"
trans. Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy Centenary Edition (London, 1935), XX, 577-78.
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770 A merican Quarterly
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" non-
resistance, 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 non-
violence 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 principle-
was, 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 771
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 oppo-
nents 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 millen-
nium 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 Garri-
sonian 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 anarchists-
because 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 de-
serve 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-Re-
sistance 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 Non-Resistance, In All Its Important Bearings, Illustrated and Defended
(Philadelphia, 1846), pp. 84-85, 214.
7 Non-Resistant, Oct. 19, 1839, p. 4.
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772 American Quarterly
only government which does not violate God's sovereignty is the indi-
vidual'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 non-
resistants 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 right-
ful 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 prob-
8 Non-Resistant, Jan. 1839, p. 1. The portion of the Declaration reprinted in The
Era of Reform, 1830-1860, ed., Henry Steele Commager (Princeton, 1960), pp. 172-74,
misleadingly omits some of this argument.
9 Non-Resistant, Apr. 20, 1839, p. 3.
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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. Self-
government and divine government reinforced one another, but the inter-
mediate 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. Anar-
chism, in the good sense of self-government, was not a dilution of anti-
slavery, 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 mid-
1840s many had joined in what was called disunionism, a movement
concentrating its attack on the proslavery Constitution and federal gov-
ernment. 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 non-
resistant 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 author-
ize 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 pur-
poses, 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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774 A merican Quarterly
of God, it was not anarchistic and it was almost antithetical to non-
resistance.
In fact, it was only in the minds of political abolitionists that dis-
unionism 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 Con-
stitution 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 com-
paratively 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 non-
resistance, although they did not consider these causes identical. Dis-
unionism 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 sus-
tained 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 dis-
integrate because people no longer believed in government-a vision
once emphasized by almost all Garrisonians.) Rogers found the dis-
unionists now to be "political" in three ways: they voted on slogans to
characterize themselves; they could not keep their minds off the Constitu-
tion; 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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Anarchism in the Antislavery Movement 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, how-
ever, we should at least enumerate these different manifestations.
The term "come-outer" was familiar from the revivals, where it sig-
nified 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 reli-
gious metaphors of bondage-he was a fugitive "in slavery"- and his
audiences saw in his escape to northern freedom the model of their reli-
gious purposes of self-discovery1. 6Garrison's example may have been less
dramatic, but he too called himself a come-outer from creeds and cere-
monies.17 The term extended, thirdly, to "Jerusalem wildcat" churches
arising in imitation of Theodore Parker's society in Boston, free congre-
gations 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.18 In 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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776 A merican Quarterly
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 in-
teresting 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 "sec-
tarian" 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 compe-
tition 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 antago-
nism. Progress from the revival to the millennium would have to be
dialectical.
Compared to come-outerism, nonresistance was safely abstract: it ex-
pressed itself mainly in repudiation of the idea of government. Come-
outerism 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 antino-
mian 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 institution-
alized religion. He ultimately decided that even the voluntary reform
19 The best treatment of this subject remains that in William Goodell, Slavery and
Anti-Slavery; A History of the Great Struggle in Both Hemispheres . . . (New York,
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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