Jacksonian Miscellanies, #1: Jan. 12, 1997

Copyright by the editor, Hal Morris, Secaucus, NJ 1997. Permission is granted to copy, but not for sale, nor in multiple copies, except by permission.

Jacksonian Miscellanies is a weekly email newsletter which presents short documents from the United States' Jackson Era, with a minimum of commentary. Anyone can receive it for free by sending to hal@panix.com a message with

as either the subject line, or as the *only* line in the message body. If you want to make a comment or query, please send a separate message to hal@panix.com.

Jacksonian Miscellanies can also be read at http://www.panix.com/~hal/jmisc. The WWW version is augmented with much biographical, bibliographical, and other information information.

Please direct responses to hal@panix.com, even though you may receive Jacksonian Miscellanies by way of a mailing list. That way I am more certain to read them, and perhaps, with your permission, post useful excerpts in a later issue.


God in New England, from Judge Dred to Mr. Rogers

Religious Contrasts In New England

By 1800, New England's Congregationalist churches had roughly split into: an orthodox, still strictly Calvinist, wing; and a liberal wing, especially strong around Boston. The liberals had been strongly influenced by enlightenment ideas, and would soon give rise to the Unitarian Association. Two major events that mark this separation are: the ascendency, in 1805, of Henry Ware (senior), a liberal to the Professorship of Divinity at Harvard, after which Harvard was seen as a unitarian stronghold, and the founding, in 1825, of the Unitarian Association, which made an institution out of the movement.

The first piece, "Lord I am Vile", is from Watts Select, p133. Watts was a famous old hymnal which, though tending away from Calvinism in some ways, still reflects the Calvinist viewpoint that man is innately depraved, that no one "deserves" salvation, but that God has pre-selected some people to save.

LORD I AM VILE

The second piece, called "Morning Hymn", is found in on p159, vol 3, of Specimens of American Poetry ... [ed.] by Samuel Kettell, originally published in Boston in 1828, and reissued in 1967 by Benjamin Blom, New York.

The writer, Levi Frisbie (1784-1822), was part of what was, in the early 1800s, the Unitarian establishment of Boston and Harvard University, in particular, and was Professor of Moral Philosophy when Ralph Waldo Emerson was at Harvard. Never a minister, he had studied for the law, but abandoned this because of his blinding eye disorder, becoming Latin Tutor, then Latin Professor at Harvard before attaining the Professorship of Moral Philosophy, which he had from 1817-22.

"Morning Hymn" may never have been sung as a hymn by any congregation, but is probably representative of how those liberal Congregationalists, who would soon join the Unitarian Association (see Edgell, Channing), thought.

MORNING HYMN


QUESTIONS:

[1] What, if any, hymnals might a Unitarian, or Liberal Congregationalist church have used in the 1820s?

[2] How were the church services structured in either Orthodox Congregationalist (or Presbyterian for that matter) or liberal Congregationalist, and later Unitarian, churches? To what extent were hymns used? What accompanying music, if any, was used?

[3] Can anyone provide information of who used Watts Hymnal? its publication history?

[4] Why did the ultra-liberal form of Christianity, Unitarianism, and later Transcendentalism grow out of the originally Calvinistic Congregationalist churches?


From the title page of Watts Select:

The

Psalms, Hymns,

and

Spiritual Songs,

of the Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D.


to which are added

Select Hymns

from other authors;

and Directions for Musical Expression

by Samuel Worcester D.D.

Late Pastor of the Tabernacle Church, Salem, Mass.


New Edition

The selection enlarged, and the indexes greatly improved,

by

Samuel M. Worcester, A.M.

Professor of Rhetoric in Amherst College, Mass.

Boston, published by Crocker and Brewster, 1856