Owen did not build the village of New Harmony, nor create the improvements which prepared his 30,000 acres for his family of nine hundred. He bought them outright from a previous religious Community; and it is doubtful whether he would have ever gathered his nine hundred and made his experiment, if he had not found a place prepared for him by a sect of Christian Communists.
Macdonald was an admirer, we might almost say a worshiper, of Owen. He gloats over New Harmony as the very Mecca of his devotion. There he spent his first eighteen months in this country. The finest picture in his collection is an elaborate India-ink drawing of the village. But he scarcely mentions the Rappites who built it. No separate account of them, such as he gives of the Shakers and Moravians, can be found in his manuscripts. This is an unaccountable neglect; for their pre-occupation of New Harmony and their transactions with Owen, must have thrust them upon his notice; and their history is intrinsically as interesting, to say the least, as that of any of the religious Communities.
A glance at the history of the Rappites is in many ways indispensable, as an introduction to an account of Owen's New Harmony. We must therefore address ourselves to the task which Macdonald neglected.
In the first years of the present century, old Würtemburg, a province always famous for its religious enthusiasms, was fermenting with excitement about the Millennium; and many of its enthusiasts were expecting the speedy personal advent of Christ. Among these George Rapp became a prominent preacher, and led forth a considerable sect into doctrines and ways that brought upon him and them severe persecutions. In 1803 he came to America to find a refuge for his flock. After due exploration he purchased 5000 acres of land in Butler Co., Pennsylvania, and commenced a settlement which he called Harmony. In the summer of 1804 two ship-loads of his disciples with their families—six hundred in all—came over the ocean and joined him. In 1805 the Society was formally organized as a Christian Community, on the model of the Pentecostal church. For a time their fare was poor and their work was hard. An evil eye from their neighbors was upon them. But they lived down calumny and suspicion by well-doing, and soon made the wilderness blossom around them like the rose. In 1807 they adopted the principle of celibacy; but in other respects they were far from being ascetics. Music, painting, sculpture, and other liberal arts flourished among them. Their museums and gardens were the wonder and delight of the region around them. In 1814, desiring warmer land and a better location for business, they sold all in Pennsylvania and removed to Indiana. On the banks of the Wabash they built a new village and again called it Harmony. Here they prospered more than ever, and their number increased to nearly a thousand. In 1824 they again became discontented with their location, on account of bad neighbors and malaria. Again they sold all, and returned to Pennsylvania; but not to their old home. They built their third and final village in Beaver Co, near Pittsburgh, and called it Economy. There they are to this day. They own railroads and oil wells and are reported to be millionaires of the unknown grade. In all their migrations from the old world to the new, from Pennsylvania to Indiana, and from Indiana back to Pennsylvania; in all their perils by persecutions, by false brethren, by pestilence, by poverty and wealth, their religion held them together, and their union gave them the strength that conquers prosperity. A notable example of what a hundred families can do when they have the wisdom of harmony, and fight the battle of life in a solid phalanx! A nobler "six hundred" than the famous dragoons of Balaklava!
Such were the people who gave Robert Owen his first lessons in Communism, and sold him their home in Indiana. Ten of their best years they spent in building a village on the Wabash, not for themselves (as it turned out), but for a theater of the great infidel experiment. Rev. Aaron Williams, D.D., the historian to whom we are indebted for the facts of the above sketch, thus describes the negotiations and the transfer:
"The Harmonists, when they began to think of returning to Pennsylvania, employed a certain Richard Flower, an Englishman, and a prominent member of an English settlement in their vicinity, to negotiate for a sale of their real estate, offering him five thousand dollars to find a purchaser. Flower went to England for this purpose, and hearing of Robert Owen's Community at New Lanark, he sought him out and succeeded in selling to him the town of Harmony, with all its houses, mills, factories and thirty thousand acres of land, for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This was an immense sacrifice; but they were determined to leave the country, and they submitted to the loss. Having in the meantime made a purchase of their present lands in Pennsylvania, on the Ohio river, they built a steamboat and removed in detachments to their new and final place of settlement."
Thus Owen, the first experimenter in non-religious Association, had substantially the ready-made material conditions which Fourier and his followers considered indispensable to success.
We proceed now to give a sketch of the Owen experiment chiefly in Macdonald's words. When our own language occurs it is generally a condensation of his.
OWEN'S NEW HARMONY.