The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780-1833

Abstract

The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780-1833. By Peter S. Field. Amherst, Massachusetts, 1998 (University of Massachusetts Press, P. O. Box 429, Amherst, MA 01004). $34.95. Peter S. Field describes himself as "a social historian of intellectuals" (p. 4) setting out to describe the early nineteenth century collapse of the "Standing Order" (the old Puritan Congregational establishment), the emergence of an alliance between clerical intellectuals and prospering merchants - the Brahmins, and the creation of a secular, high culture which helped legitimate the claims to social dominance of this elite class. Like Renaissance merchant princes, wealthy Bostonians such as Samuel Dexter, John Lowell, Harrison Gray Otis, and Samuel Eliot used their financial influence to attract bright, articulate, cultured ministers such as John Thornton Kirkland, Jeremy Belknap, and Joseph Stevens Buckminster to important Boston pulpits. Unlike the rest of the Massachusetts religious establishment, the Boston churches had always survived or perished in a competitive, voluntaristic environment. Most of these churches were controlled by wealthy pew holders who wanted their clergy to be eloquent, cultivated men with a refined literary sensibility. Gentility mattered far more than theological orthodoxy. The political influence of this Brahmin oligarchy, Federalists all, was on the wane and so they sought to buttress their status through cultural dominance. In 1805 the Brahmins installed one of their own as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard College and soon came to dominate the Harvard Corporation; the old school of the prophets became an intellectual and cultural Brahmin bastion. The cultural conquest of Boston was completed with the establishment of the Anthology Society and its literary organ, the Monthly Anthology, the creation of the Boston Athenaeum, and other philanthropies such as the Massachusetts Historical Society. As Field puts it so well, "the Brahmin clergy of Boston had transformed God's covenant with the Puritan nation into a class compact with a privileged elite." ( n. 10) The Brahmin-clerical cultural alliance, which Field so clearly delineates, was vigorously resisted, and the author's account of that resistance is the most absorbing part of this book. The orthodox clergy, led principally by the indefatigable Jedidiah Morse and allies such as Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, wanted to retain the traditional political and moral authority of the old Standing Order and saw that authority being seriously undermined, less by Baptists and other dissenters and more by wealthy, influential, religiously suspect "pew parishioners" and their hireling clergy. Morse, who not incidentally was an accomplished scholar in his own right, championed the orthodox communicants in their struggle for control of their churches with increasingly powerful, wealthy parishioners. At times sounding like Cotton Mather and at others like Senator Joseph McCarthy (an anachronistic parallel irresistible even to Field), Jedidiah Morse championed the cause of "pure and undefiled religion" in church councils and in the courts. The orthodox party fought fire with fire, trying to enforce doctrinal uniformity through clerical associations but also by establishing their own, anti-Brahmin institutions such as Andover Theological Seminary and Park Street Church. The defining moment in this struggle was probably the "Dedham controversy" (1818-1821), a parish vs. communicant struggle over church property, leading to a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in favor of the rights of the parish. That decision, as Field says, "in effect, put schismatic orthodox churches in an identical position vis-a-vis state taxation for the support of `Christian teachers' as that of the Baptists, Methodists, Universalists, and other dissenting sects. …