In 1849, I took a voyage to America. Vast numbers of my readers wanted to emigrate to America, and they looked to me for information respecting the country. I had given them the best I could get, but they wanted more and better. They wanted me to visit the country, and give them the result of my observations and inquiries. I did so. To fit myself the better for giving them counsel, I crossed the ocean in a common emigrant sailing vessel, and saw how the poor creatures fared. We were nearly eight weeks on the water. For much of the time the winds were idle. They refused to blow. They might have struck for shorter hours or better pay. When they did blow, they blew with all their might, but almost always in the wrong direction; as if they regarded us as their enemies, and were bent on giving us all the annoyance they could. Many were sick; more were discontented; and all longed wearily for land. These eight weeks were the longest ones I ever lived. They looked like years. At length we got a sight of land, and rejoiced exceedingly. For myself, I had other feelings as well as joy, when I first got sight of the great New World of which I had heard, and read, and thought so much, and so long, and of which I had dreamt so often. For America had lived in my thoughts from my early days; and the first faint glimpse of her wooded shores thrilled my whole soul with unspeakable emotions.
We landed. I examined the emigrant boarding houses. I sought information about work and wages, and about means of transport to the West. I called on Horace Greeley and others, to whom I had letters of recommendation, who helped me to books about the West. I made my way through New York, and across Lake Erie to Cleveland. I had three brothers who were settled in different parts of Ohio, and a number of old friends. I visited them. I explored Ohio. I went into Western Virginia, and examined some lands there that had been advertised for sale in England. I passed on to Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. I spent some days in Chicago. The city was awfully dull. The people were despondent. I almost think I could have bought the whole city for fifty thousand pounds. I had a farm offered me for seven dollars and a half an acre, on which now a great part of the city I suppose is built. I went to Milwaukie. There the people seemed more hopeful; though several were leaving for warmer climes. It was autumn, and I treated myself freely to the peaches and other rich fruits of the country. About the end of October I started for England, in one of the Cunard Steamers, crossing the ocean in nine days, about one-sixth of the time I spent in the voyage out.
I gave to my readers an account of all I had seen, and heard, and read, and thousands of them left the land of their birth in search of homes in the domains of the Great Republic. Some got home-sick, and cursed me. Some got profitable work, or promising farms, and blessed me. And I learned two lessons; first, that a man must not look to men for the reward of his beneficent services, but to God and a good conscience; and, second, that some will be miserable, and that some will be happy, go where they may:—that it is not the land they live in, but the dispositions they cherish, and the life they live, that makes their heaven or hell.
I had already made up my mind to settle in America myself, and early in 1851 I disposed of my business, and prepared to transport myself and my family to Central Ohio. I had suffered so long from pain, and weakness, and depression, and I was so utterly wearied with continual over-work, and so disgusted too with the government and institutions of the country, and with some of its inhabitants, that I felt it an infinite relief to be freed from all further care and concern about business, and in the first rush of my new wild joy, I took my gun and blew off part of the top of the chimney of my printing establishment. No child could be wilder in his delight, when escaping from long confinement in a weary school, and starting for the longed-for society and pleasures of his home.
But preparing for a journey of four thousand miles, with wife and children, was itself work enough for a time. There were a hundred things to be bought, which you would need in your new and far off home. And there were a thousand things which you already had, to be packed, and as many more to be set aside, to be destroyed, or sold, or given away. And there were a thousand letters and papers to be examined, and a judgment formed, as to which should be preserved, and which should perish in the flames. And there were visits to be paid and repaid, and there were partings, and regrets, and tears. But all was over at length, and we were on our way to the world beyond the flood.
It was pleasant to get away from one's religious and political opponents, but painful to part with so many devoted friends, who had proved their affection for me and for my family by so many sacrifices, and their steadfastness in times of so much trial. But I had hopes of keeping up my intercourse with them through the Press, and of ministering to their gratification and improvement by sending them accounts of all I saw or learnt of an interesting character in the land to which I was going. I had also hopes that a quiet home, in a retired and peaceful part of a new country, might prove conducive to my own improvement and happiness.
One of the objects I had in view in going to America was to obtain a little quiet for calm reflection on the course I had so long been pursuing, and a sober consideration of the position which I had reached. I was not satisfied that the changes which had taken place in my views and way of life, since my separation from the Church and the ministry, had all been changes for the better. I had had suspicions for some time, that amidst the whirl of perpetual excitement in which I had lived, and the continual succession of angry contests in which I had been engaged, I had probably missed my way on some points, and I wished for a favorable opportunity of ascertaining whether these suspicions were well grounded or not.
But when I got to America I found myself in a condition less friendly to calm reflection and to a just and impartial review of my past history, than the one from which I had fled. The very day we landed in New York we fell in with the Hutchinson family. I had become acquainted with them in England, and had spent some time in their company, and had attended some of their concerts at Leeds. They were to sing that night in New York, and we attended the performance, and were delighted with their sweet wild music, and with their wisdom and their wit. They were all reformers of the radical school, and though their songs and conversation were not immoral or profane, they were advanced beyond the bounds of religion, into the neutral ground of Latitudinarianism.
When we got to Akron, Ohio, we found a Woman's Rights Convention in session; and there we got introduced to a number of advanced spirits, both male and female, and in their society became acquainted with quite a multitude of strange and lawless speculations, of which, till then, we had lived in happy or in woful ignorance. We reached at length the region where we were to make our home, and now other matters engrossed my mind. I had, in the first place, a farm to select, and then the purchase to make. I had then my goods to look after, my house to arrange, and my food to provide. Then work wanted doing on the farm—a hundred kinds of work, all new, and many of them hard and very perplexing. We wanted men to aid us; and men were not to be got; or, when got, were difficult to manage, and hard to please. And horses, and cows, and sheep, were wanted; and poultry, and pigs; and ploughs, and harrows, and wagons, and harness. And stoves and fuel were required. And the house had to be enlarged, and the barns rebuilt, and the gardens cultivated, and the orchard replanted. And a hundred lessons on farming had to be learnt, and a hundred more to be unlearnt. And we were always making mistakes, and sustaining losses. And our neighbors were not all that we could wish; and we were not all that they could wish. It was impossible to avoid impositions, and difficult to take injustice quietly; so we remonstrated, and resisted, and made things worse.
Before we had got ourselves fairly settled we began to be visited by a number of friends. And many of those friends were wilder and more extravagant, in their views on religion and politics, than myself; and instead of helping me to quiet reflection, did much to render such a thing impossible. They were mostly Garrisonian Abolitionists, with whom I had become acquainted while in England, or through the medium of anti-slavery publications. Many of them had had an experience a good deal like my own. They had been members and ministers of churches, and had got into trouble in consequence of their reforming tendencies, and had at length been cast out, or obliged to withdraw. They had waged a long and bitter war against the churches and ministers of their land, and had become skeptics and unbelievers of a somewhat extravagant kind. Henry C. Wright was an Atheist. So were some others of the party. My own descent to skepticism was attributable in some measure to my intercourse with them, and to a perusal of their works, while in England. The first deadly blow was struck at my belief in the supernatural inspiration of the Scriptures by Henry C. Wright. It was in conversation with him too that my belief in the necessity of church organization was undermined, and that the way was smoothed to that state of utter lawlessness which so naturally tends to infidelity and all ungodliness. My respect for the talents of the abolitionists, and the interest I felt in the cause to which they had devoted their lives, and the sympathy arising from the similar way in which we had all been treated by the churches and priesthoods with which we had come in contact, disposed me, first, to regard their skeptical views with favor, and then to accept them as true.