James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol. 1/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

he began, and employed all the resources of type to make his protest heard:—

“And though all other deeds of thine, dear Fatherland, should be
Washed out, like writing upon sand, by Time’s encroaching sea,
That single word shall stand sublime, nor perish with the rest,
‘Though the whole world sanction slavery, in God’s name WE protest!’”

The final stanza was a burst of state independence:

“No, if the old Bay State were sunk, and, as in days of yore,
One single ship within her sides the hope of Freedom bore,
Run up again the pine tree flag, and on the chainless sea
That flag should mark, where’er it waved, the island of the free!”

In these verses, as in others of a similar nature, Lowell seems almost to have followed the lead of Whittier, who employed the same stanza in several of his anti-slavery poems written before this time.

In his eager, impulsive desire to right wrongs, and his impatience at compromise, he chafed under the restraints laid upon him. The rebuff he received when he undertook to scarify the conscience of Congress in the pages of The Broadway Journal irritated him. He had hoped that the Journal would be a “powerful weapon in the hands of reform,” and was disheartened. “The reason I have written no prose for him (Briggs),” he wrote his friend Carter, “has been because I knew not what to write about. The Journal shut its doors in the face of every subject in which I was mainly interested, and I could not bring myself (in writing for a friend especially) to undertake subjects in which, feeling no interest, I could not possibly write well.” He had engaged to write regularly for the Pennsylvania Freeman, but even here he did not, in his own mind, have a clear field. “I do not feel entirely free,” he says in a letter to Carter, “in what I write for the paper, as its conductors are rather timid.” That is the complaint of most young reformers, and yet the constraint which appears in his articles is due rather to the caution with which he feels his way along a path where he is likely to be misjudged than to any outside repressive influence. At least this may be inferred from a reading of two articles which he contributed to the Freeman and which were no doubt looked upon as very radical utterances. They had for their heading “The Church and Clergy,” and were deliberate inquiries into the nature of the religious bodies in America as tested by the attitude which they took, organically, toward the great question of political reform, especially as regarded the subject of slavery. In a letter to Longfellow written a few weeks after this date, Lowell puts his belief into two or three pregnant sentences. “Christ,” he says, “has declared war against the Christianity of the world, and it must down. There is no help for it. The Church, that great bulwark of our practical Paganism, must be reformed from foundation to weathercock. Shall we not wield a trowel, nay, even carry the heavy bricks and mortar for such an enterprise? But I will not ride over you with my hard-mouthed hobby.”

In the two editorial articles referred to, Lowell takes the ground that when there is dereliction to pure ideals on the part of the more refined and intellectual members of the church, especially of those in the priestly order, there will be the greater zeal of the more brutal and unintelligent in defence of the church, and instances the cries of the Jewish populace for the crucifixion of the Saviour, the mob at Athens that condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock, and, taking a very recent example: “It was the most brutal and degraded of the English population which assaulted the pure-minded Wesley, and cock-fighting, horse racing, drunken priests and justices established their orthodoxy to the satisfaction of so competent a constituency by reviling or indicting him. Now that it has become necessary to protest against Protestantism, it is the ignorant and unthinking who are so eager to defend the right of private judgment by tarring and feathering all who differ with them.” The mass of men, Lowell goes on to say, love an easy religion, which affords a cheap and marketable kind of respectability. “Puritanism has always been unpopular among them as a system which demands too much and pays too little.” The clergy, too, in the United States, being dependent upon their hearers for support, unconsciously slip into the habit of adapting themselves to the prejudices and weaknesses of their supporters. Thus by degrees the church and religion are held to be synonymous terms, and the church becomes a kind of private estate, silent in the face of a great evil which the great body of Christian people has learned to tolerate. In point of fact true religious sentiment is the most powerful weapon in the world against slavery and all other social vices, but the religious system of the country as corrupted by connivance with evil is the greatest obstacle in the way. The only sure way of accomplishing its great object is for the church to keep in advance of popular morality, and “the surest and safest test for deciding when the time has arrived for the church to take another step forward is by observing whether it is reverenced by the wisest of its members as merely an external symbol of some former manifestation of Divinity, or is reverenced as containing in itself a present and living Divineness.”

But why, it might be asked, should the clergy be picked out for blame in the matter of upholding slavery, rather than any other class, as that of the merchants for example? The answer is plain. If the church professed to be no more than a society of private citizens meeting once a week, the clergyman would be simply the chairman of the gathering, and a mouthpiece of the majority. But the church sets up the claim to be of divine origin and the depository of truth. If this be so, it should always be in advance of public opinion. “It should not wait till the Washingtonians, by acting the part which, in virtue of the station it arrogates to itself, should have been its own, had driven it to sign the pledge and hold fellowship with the degraded and fallen. It should not wait until the Abolitionists, by working a change in the sentiment of the people, have convinced it that it is more politic to sympathize with the slave than with the slave-owner, before it ventures to lisp the alphabet of anti-slavery. The glorious privilege of leading the forlorn hope of truth, of facing the desperate waves of prejudice, of making itself vile in the eyes of men by choosing the humblest means of serving the despised cause of the master it professes to worship, all these belong to it in right of the position it assumes.” And he calls upon the clergy to produce certificates of martyrdom before he will accept the claims they set up for themselves.

The whole discussion is characterized by sincerity and a scarcely veiled sarcasm, and is interesting not only as showing Lowell’s thought at the time on a burning subject, but also as disclosing a certain academic air as if he had written carefully and with restraint, perhaps thinking how it would sound to his father’s ear. There is hardly more than a faint suggestion of the wit and humor which marked his later political writing, and there is one passage which may be noted as distinctly literary in tone. “In many parts of Germany,” he writes, “there are legends of buried churches and convents, whose bells are often heard, and in which, now and then, some person by a lucky chance can hear the monks chanting the ritual of many centuries ago. It seems to us that the religion of our churches is of very much the same subterranean and traditionary kind. To one walking in the pure light of upper day, the sound of their service seems dim and far off, and, if he catches a word here and there, it is an obsolete language which does not appeal to the present heart and soul, but only to a vague reverence for what is ancient, a mysterious awe for what is past.”

The winter had been passed in this experimental fashion, Mrs. Lowell translating poems from the German by her husband’s side, as he wrote now verse, now prose, intent on the questions of the day, yet never really giving himself out except now and then in some spontaneous bit of poetry. They made hosts of friends in Philadelphia and spent the last few weeks of their stay on a visit to the Davis family, with whom they had become close companions. Mrs. Hallowell, who was a child at the time, recalled the delight that attended their stay, especially the pleasure given the children by Mrs. Lowell, who told them fairy tales and recited ballads, giving the Caldon Low in a soft crooning voice sweeter than singing. They took a short driving tour with their hosts through Chester County, but near the end of May set out on their return to Cambridge, stopping by the way for a week’s visit with Mr. and Mrs. Briggs in Staten Island. They went home by way of Albany in order to see Page, and by the middle of June were established at Elmwood, where they formed one household with Lowell’s father, mother, and sister.