The Year of Decision 1846, page 15
And Satan was hard at work. While Israel plodded westward the recreant William Smith was rousing the Gentile wolf pack and the Strang heresy was winning the Eastern stakes. Strang had cozened away important leaders and was filling the land with abuses, as a heresiarch’s demonic energy carried him raging through the undefended sheepfolds. Even in the Camp itself there was apostasy. Just as February ended and the migration began Apostle John E. Page had to be disfellowshiped for obstructing counsel; a small group followed him to Strang’s kingdom at Voree, Wisconsin. Halfway across Iowa, another apostate group split off and headed toward Texas, where another Apostle, Lyman Wight, had set up his community. If two Apostles, why not another one? Why not, indeed, any casual enthusiast who might tap the source of private revelation after a night of hunger and ecstasy, and convince others that his inspiration was superior to Brigham’s? Why not a really formidable, perhaps fatal secession? There was much grumbling, quarreling, and despair, many were obstinate, many on the verge of open rebellion, many were terrified by the unknown ahead, many were too selfish to share their goods, many too willful to accept counsel. Israel had not shaped into an obedient instrument, the Saints were not welded together.
All this tried Brigham’s genius and dismayed his counselors. Moreover, the news from Nauvoo grew ominous: the mob was more demanding and seemed likely to close in for the kill. Also rumors about the Missourians to the southward grew urgent. They were said to be raising armies and posses, determined to seize this chance to wreak the extermination they had been refused eight years ago. There were repeated alarms; the guards were always turning up some fancied spy or outpost; there was always some new plot on foot. Young took the rumors so seriously that he ordered the Saints never to fire a gun except when hunting, never to flourish or even display a rifle, pistol, or sword in the presence of Gentiles but to keep them hidden in the wagons. They were to be kept charged while hidden, however, and Hosea Stout was ordered to drill his command in the old Danite tactics.
All this made a sufficient test of leadership, organization, and public control, not to mention prophecy. But there was a still greater anxiety, the finances. At the sacrifice of their property the Mormons had raised all the money they could. The Eastern and European stakes had sent all the money they could raise. Missionaries and special couriers went about the land gleaning their petty pence, stripping the faithful still further, calling on all Gentile agencies that could be moved to contribute. The sum was short of what Israel must have in order to reach the mountains. Brigham held fast to his intention of getting an advance party to Zion in this summer of ’46. But it became increasingly clearer to him that he could not get the main body of the Church farther than the Missouri River this year. There was before his mind the possibility that he might not get them beyond it in ’47 or even in ’48. On reaching the Missouri they might truly find that the wilderness had shut them in.
Well, he would get them to the Missouri. Richardson’s Point, the Chariton, Garden Grove, Mount Pisgah, and at last Council Bluffs.9 The pioneer company reached the river on June 14, the last refugees from Nauvoo on November 27. Through eight months, continuously across more than four hundred miles, the Iowa prairies witnessed such a pageant as no one had seen since the Goths moved on Rome — and moved on it inward from the frontier, not outward toward it. Between fifteen and twenty thousand people uprooted from their land and seeking a new land. Thousands of wagons, tens of thousands of oxen, horses, mules, milch cattle, beef cattle, neat cattle, sheep, goats. Chickens, geese, turkeys, guinea fowl, ducks, pigeons, parrots, love birds, canaries. Seedlings with their roots bound in sacking, slips from the shrubbery back home, seeds for the harvest to come, the disassembled machinery of flourmills and sawmills, a college, the mysteries of Heaven, the keys to eternity, the Dispensation of the Fullness of Time. Through sleet and rain, through drouth and prairie summer, half-starved and half-sick, dispossessed, believing, and faithful unto the last, Israel traveled the unknown, toward the land of Canaan, in God’s faith and for His glory and under the shadow of His outstretched hand, to build Zion and inherit the earth.
Before they got to the Missouri a pattern began to shape out of the undetermined, the filings formed along the lines of force. On June 28, Clayton, who was traveling in the rear of the headquarters, noted in his journal that some United States Army officers had come up the trail from the east and gone on ahead to find Brigham at Mount Pisgah, eight miles farther on. They — or rather he, for there was only one, though he had three troopers with him — had roused terror and rebellion all along the emigration, for the Saints supposed that the army had been ordered to head them off, perhaps to massacre them. But the truth was far different. Mr. Polk’s war had caught up with the Mormons and they were going to be solicited, ever so courteously, to take a patriotic part in it.
IV
Equinox
ON Sunday the younger Channing told the Brook Farmers to be pure unto their mission. As the crusaders sacrificed so much to restore the tomb of the buried Lord, how much more ought George Ripley’s phalanx to sacrifice, whose work it was to restore the whole earth. As the monks and nuns withdrew from the world to be free from temptations and sin and to become pure, how much greater need had the phalanx of earnest devotedness, whose work it was to regenerate and purify the world.
On Monday carpenters went to work on the Phalanstery again, resuming after the winter’s lull. It was not such a mountainous edifice as the “Palaces” which Fourier’s trance reared against the clouds — twenty-two hundred feet long, wings five hundred, grand square twelve hundred, with parallel ranges of outbuildings and columned porticos passing among trees and shrubbery.1 It was just a three-story frame structure, as formless as a summer hotel in the White Mountains, a hundred and seventy-five feet long, but it was the Farm’s most ambitious undertaking. The attic was a hive of single rooms, the second and third floors were divided into fourteen family apartments, and the ground floor held a kitchen, a vast dining room, “two public saloons, and a spacious hall and lecture room.” Also it was mortgaged. Some of the Farmers felt that it was badly planned and cheaply built, others that the community was unwise to sink so much capital in it. But, designed to be the nerve center of the community, it was the embodiment in fragrant white pine of the Brook Farm vision and the symbol of the hope to be.
Tuesday evening there was dancing in the Hive, the original farmhouse — cotillions, waltzes, hops, the blue and brown blouses pleasant in the dining room. They were a high-spirited company, the Archon, the Poet, the Hero, the Time-Keeper, the Admiral, the General, the Parson — the Farming Group, the Amusement Group, the Dormitory Group, the Kitchen Group. Their genial and very learned repartee flashed through the candlelight, and doubtless one heard above the music the terrible puns that Association had come to love. (Is Mr. —— much of a carpenter? not a bit of it, that’s plain. These Grahamites will never make their ends meet, you may stake your reputation on that. Italics supplied without fee.) … The dance was to celebrate resumption of work on the Phalanstery. And, passing the Phalanstery, Mr. Salisbury saw a light in an upper window. A moment later the revels at the Hive were halted by an awful cry: “The Phalanstery is on fire.”
They saved the Eyrie, the little square house near by, though its paint blistered. They could not save the Phalanstery. They could only watch it burn. Marianne Dwight, the artist, noted the liquid turquoise and topaz of the flames, and John Codman, the florist, how his camellias and azaleas were “glorified in the transcendent light.” Crowds gathered from as far away as Cambridgeport; the Dedham engine got stalled in a snowdrift; rivals from Jamaica Plain, Newton, and Brookline could only soak the embers after the walls fell in. Only two hours of transcendental flame, then the thing was over and there were guests to feed. The colonists “made coffee, brought out bread and cheese and feasted about 200 of the fatigued, hungry multitude,” and Mr. Orange ran about West Roxbury borrowing milk. Then the world’s people departed and darkness closed over the faithful. Marianne Dwight saw the calm radiance of Orion and was reminded of the unchanging, the eternal.
There was an ecstatic renewal of devotion, but the burning of America’s first Phalanstery brought a belated realism to Brook Farm. John Codman’s family called him home. The General left, Peter Baldwin the baker, saying that the new order had not succeeded — and the Association lost a humble worker who had done much for it. The Poet was next, John Sullivan Dwight, ex-minister, fine teacher, fine musician, a sweet and troubled soul. He left to lecture and teach and raise money, intending to send it back to the Farm. But before he could begin his remittances Brook Farm was ending: after the first fissure it split rapidly. By October there were only the children’s school and the Phalanx left of all that aspiration. Just a year after the fire the farm was for rent at $350 a year, and two years later the City of Roxbury bought it at auction for $19,150 — $1704 above the mortgage.
They had lived in dream and they had lived on capital. Gifts from admirers, the board bills of transcendental visitors, and a trickle of profits from the industries had a little slowed the steady consumption of the paid-in shares, but they had been consumed and all the Yankee inheritance of the Associates knew that spending capital was the unforgivable sin. They kept asserting that if they had had more capital they could have succeeded, and seem neither to have seen the paradox in joint-stock exploitation of “a radical and universal reform” nor to have understood that there was not enough capital in “Incoherence or Civilization” to support their experiment.
Their aim was to destroy (by developing past it) the competitive organization of industry. But in withdrawing from the system, they had to premise the continuation of competition to support them. They had to compete with the competitive order, and competed with it on hopeless terms — gentle, unskilled, literary amateurs against “the dwarfed and mutilated” who had been shaped to win. As the paradox hardened they could by successive “retrenchments” reduce their living fare to little more than bread, cheese, and beautiful ideas, but they got no farther and wondered why the paying guests fell off. And though they began by sawing the little sticks they must, as Henry Thoreau told them, sooner or later saw the great sticks too. The biggest stick of all was that they had to produce. It was all very well to establish an eight-hour day for winter and a ten-hour day for summer — but if there was still hay to rake after ten hours, there would be more hay to buy out of capital next winter. They could paint wildflowers on lampshades for Boston stores and so raise the equivalent of a parish sewing society’s fund for a new melodeon. They could set up a workshop to make sashes and blinds, a hothouse for the cultivation of flowers, a truck garden, similar attractive “industries” for which they felt one or another of Fourier’s passional attractions. But philosophers achieved a low index of production relative to that of journeyman cabinetmakers, and they had to incorporate in their group an alien element of the skilled who worked for profit and did not share, or only partly shared, the vision. Once that began, it was no longer possible to maintain the subterfuge. Frankly, they could not love the hard-handed and malformed as they loved one another. Brook Farm endured as the communion of amateurs, as the ineffectiveness of amateurs it ended, and Mr. Emerson wrote an indorsement in his journal: —
Tell children what you say about writing and laboring with the hands. I know better. Can you distil rum by minding it at odd times? or analyze soils? or carry on the Suffolk Bank? or the Greenwich Observatory? or sail a ship through the Narrows by minding the helm when you happen to think of it? or serve a glass-house or a steam-engine, or a telegraph, or a railroad express? or accomplish anything good or anything powerful in this manner? Nothing whatever. And the greatest of all arts, the subtlest and most miraculous effect, you fancy is to be practised with a pen in one hand and a crowbar or a peat-knife in the other.
They were even amateur reformers. It is significant that of the generation’s men and women who accomplished something toward the reduction of social chaos and the furtherance of justice, opportunity, and good sense — of the effective reformers, only one or two were Brook Farm associates and they but briefly. The Associators were, in a word, generous, high-minded, self-sacrificing people, literary folk mostly, who felt the world’s pain and lacked a sense of reality. Like most literary dreams, Brook Farm was a flight, a withdrawal from the dust and wounds. The destructive element did not bear them up because they did not submit themselves to it.
But Marianne Dwight wrote, after gazing at the charred beams of hope’s Phalanstery, “It does seem as tho’ in this wide waste of the world, life could not possibly be so rich as it has been here.” She was right. Though they were amateurs, though all their activities bring to mind young Francis Parkman’s sneer at them, “the she-philosophers of West Roxbury,” nevertheless they had been members one of another. Probably nothing they did left any mark, except that their school for children picked up education where Alcott’s had left off, substituted some intelligence for the traditional stupidities, and so, as the children grew up, left an expectation here and there that better things could be. But they had so good a time that all of them, even the agnostic Dana (who, like thirteen others, found a wife there), always looked back on West Roxbury as the time of idyl and belief, the planting and the spring.
So much laughter, so much honest weariness after work, so much dreaming together! The time when Mr. Allen brought back an orphaned child and many of the colonists caught the smallpox, and the women waiting on the sufferers in the Hive. The day the bull broke loose and chased an ox out of the barn. The sweet grave face of the Dwight girl at her wedding, when all the colonists made a ring round her in the Pilgrim House. Always the singing — in the fields, at supper, at the shocking, in the long winter evenings. The poet Cranch’s gifted imitations of animal cries. The search by night for a rumored highwayman through the woods at Muddy Pond. Spring festival with roses and jasmines from the greenhouse and the great name FOURIER on the wall with his beehive, and the Archon making a splendid speech. The long hours of talking together while we raked hay or sewed bonnets for the industries and the heart swelled with generous indignation for the poor — and Mr. Brisbane’s eloquence a fierce flame, and the dream stretching out till God was almost come again. And over all the great hope so near fulfillment, “the light of universal principles in which all differences, whether of religion, or politics, or philosophy, are reconciled, and the dearest and most private hope of every man has the promise of fulfillment” — the great belief that “the Infinite Power ordained social laws so universal and equitable that the fulfillment of them would make all unqualifiedly happy, and that it is the mission of this race of beings to be attracted to this earth, to this universe, until their happy human destiny is accomplished.”
They were fly specks on the periphery of a globe which was swelling out in tidal promontories as a wandering sun drew near and pulled it out of shape — under the omen of a comet that had split in two. They have an essential innocence, asserting in blue tunics universal principles of benevolence at a moment when the disregardful country was pushing through the desert to its last boundary, when the newly manned machines were loosing a new and irresistible energy across the country they hoped to master with some gracious wishes, and when the armies formed for a war of which this year’s war would be only a prologue. And yet they were members one of another. Something in the moment of their experience brought it partly out of dream. The American nation has formed so very slowly, for such brief times, in such haphazard symmetry! For a moment not pathetic only because it was ridiculous, the nation formed here, on some pleasant farmland a mile from West Roxbury, where some ineffective literary people worked, sacrificed, and dreamed together. It was not lost altogether and its small deposit is laid down.… Only, the nation needed hotter fires than the flame that consumed the Phalanstery. Only, welded in such fires, the Mormons, for one group, were members one of another much more truly than Brook Farm — and may leave our history the moral that Association needs the lowest social denominator. And, of course, Bill Bowen and his tribe watched the frost come out of the ground and turned westward.
* * *
Through March the inner tensions of the Democratic Party heightened so that the skin was like to burst, but in Congress everything was Oregon. Mr. Polk’s design to reduce the tariff of ’42 was in danger of getting lost from inattention, and the President reminded his callers that they were accountable. Mr. Calhoun, the metaphysician, twisted on the inadvertent rack. He had no simple emotions and if any of his ideas were simple they have been clear to no one else. And all his stands were at the third remove of calculation. But, without enthusiasm for Oregon and committed to appeasement by his negotiations as the previous Secretary of State, he had guessed that the party would plump for peace and he had had some hope of seizing its leadership. But it was now clear that the country wanted Oregon in earnest. He had to hedge and would not head the Democracy this year. (Here was the surface of deeper conflicts in Mr. Calhoun himself. He was committed to expansion as the hope and glory of the South, yet had some dim premonition that expansion must reduce the price of cotton forever and so destroy the economy of the Southern seaboard if not of the entire South. He was now logically committed also to the separation of the South, to secession, but saw drifting down that path ahead of him the specter of Great Britain. Even to the metaphysician it was clear that to divide the Union was to make Great Britain supreme in this hemisphere.) Others besides him read the nation’s desire, and opposition to Polk’s Oregon policy all but disappeared before the triumphant oratory of the Western states. But at the same time, the majority warhawks began to quarrel. They had to be vigilant against compromisers who might find a parliamentary or a sectional leverage and use it. Haywood, Cass, Hannegan, Allen shouted in the Senate all day, then rushed to the White House to sound out Polk. He would not be sounded but grew irritated, for delay in terminating Joint Occupancy would be plain evidence to London that we were irresolute. He now felt that Allen and Cass, if not the others, were maneuvering not so much for Oregon as to succeed him in the White House. Buchanan’s unsleeping candidacy had also got the idea: at Cabinet meetings he was suddenly firm about Oregon. And Walker, the Secretary of the Treasury, impartially considering candidates for the Presidency, had begun to see excellent material in himself. So the month ran out in oratory and intrigue and the resolution to terminate Joint Occupancy did not come to a vote.
