Braintree, Plymouth and Brown (1800 - 1807)

C H A P T E R I V

Braintree, Plymouth and Brown

[ 1800—1807 ]

O, in that fall of 1799, ended the Judsons’ life in Wenham. The

following spring found the family in Braintree, a few miles south of Boston.

It was an uncertain time. As the father’s health improved, he made shift to support his family by any means at hand. Early in July the Massachusetts Home Missionary Society employed him as a missionary to the “interior parts of Vermont.” During the three months he spent in Vermont he gave some forty sermons, and his employers paid him one hundred and eight dollars— about a third of a year’s salary in Wenham.

He may have made other missionary journeys, and he probably filled in at neighboring churches from time to time. On at least one occasion he may have tried his hand at business, for an Adoniram Judson is mentioned as having conveyed to Wilson Marsh a patent for dyeing coach laces blue, a transaction in which this Mr. Judson acted as agent for a Noah Pond. Coach lace was a kind of brightly colored woven band, two or three inches wide, which was used as trimming for the upholstery of coaches; and at this time Wilson Marsh operated a flourishing establishment for its manufacture in Quincy, Braintree’s neighbor town to the north.

In this new and unsettled existence, how fared the boy Adoniram? The Wenham parsonage had meant security and home from his fourth to his eleventh year. The move must have shaken him, but though he had his reputation to make over again, he still enjoyed his mother’s love, his father’s faith, and the admiration of Abby and Elnathan. Nevertheless, thrown on his own resources in a strange neighborhood, he must have found his main occupation in books and study even more than ever.

As for ambition, that flame never flickered. His father, looking for compensation in a time of depression, would certainly have seen to that. The way from Braintree to Quincy led past the unpretentious house of John Adams— farmer, lawyer, diplomat, and now in 1800 President of the United States. If Mr. Judson ever walked with his son along that dusty road on the way to see Mr. Marsh about the coach lace patent, he could not have failed to point out the house to Adoniram and to draw the moral. Adoniram Judson the younger had just as much native ability as John Adams at the same age and just as good a start. He was capable of becoming as great a man. And he would. He must.

But the Judsons were to live only two years in Braintree; for even as they left Wenham events were in the making in Plymouth which would result in the offer of a pastorate to Mr. Judson. Once again the cause was the old liberal—conservative controversy.

As the year 1800 Opened Dr. James Kendall had become pastor of the Congregational Church of Plymouth. He was one of the liberals and, as it turned out, a very large minority of his congregation objected vigorously to his liberalism. Such feeling arose that in the fall of I801 eighteen men and thirty-four women——one less than half the membership of the church—withdrew. At the end of March, 1802, their number now grown to one hundred and fifty-four, they incorporated as the Third Congregational Church of Plymouth and immediately began to erect a church edifice on the west side of Plymouth’s Training Green, on the hill slope overlooking the harbor east of Town Brook.

They wasted no time in calling Mr. Judson. He was formally installed on the twelfth of May, and moved his family to Plymouth on the twenty-second. Two years to the day from their removal to Braintree righteousness had triumphed.

In the early 1800’s Plymouth had a population of about thirtyfive hundred. It was by far the largest town in which the Judson family had lived, but the section Mr. Judson chose for a home was still unpeopled.

The built-up area tended to cluster along the highway which led out onto Cape Cod, or between the highway and the harbor, west of Town Brook and near Leyden Street, the first street laid out by the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Colony, which ran straight back from the harbor and up a hill called “Burial Hill” or “Fort Hill.” On top of this hill the Pilgrims had placed their first fort, and its outlines were visible when the Judsons moved to the town. Later the hill was used for the town burial ground. Many years later, when Adoniram’s sister Abigail was laid to rest there beside her mother, the diggers of her grave were to discover part of the old Pilgrim fort’s guardhouse, the location of which had been forgotten for more than two centuries.

But the Judsons did not settle on this side of Town Brook. East of the brook, in the direction of the new church and the Training Green, the [and rose upward into what was then known as “Watson’s Hill.” Earlier it had been called “Mill Hill,” and even earlier, “Strawberry Hill.” On this hill the Indian Chief Massasoit had camped with his followers in April, 1621, while he sent his emissaries Samoset and Squanto across Town Brook to notify the Pilgrims of his presence. Here came Winslow to remain as hostage while the great sachem visited the little settlement and made the treaty with the Pilgrims which secured peace to them and protection to the Indians.

Watson’s Hill was still farm land when Mr. Judson bought land on the seaward slope for a house and garden. The house he built looked down to the harbor. A crude road in front of it, scarcely more than a wagon track, became known as “the way to the new meeting house.” Later, it was called “the way to Mr. Judson’s house”; still later, “Judson Street”; and today, “Pleasant Street.” The house still stands—Number 17 Pleasant Street.

In time Mr. Judson was to buy more land around his house. Eventually, as Plymouth grew, he divided it into house lots, which he sold. The money, along with what other funds he could spare from time to time, he invested in the stock of banks in the vicinity of Boston. Dividends were high by today’s standards. The stocks increased in value. Mr. Judson was never afterwards to be wholly dependent upon his ministerial salary, and was to die in comparative aflluence for a minister who never had a large church.

But this was in the future and was to have little to do with Adoniram. He was nearly fourteen when the family moved to Plymouth. Once more life took on stability and security, in the pattern of Wenham. But the boy had learned that solidity of place and position are not essential to existence. Any half-formed ambitions in his mind -— or his father’s— of becoming a navigator and captain had been left behind in Wenham. There was little in Plymouth to encourage them. As a port, it lacked the splendor of Salem. Its ships were numerous but smaller, engaged in the duller pursuits of coastwise trade and cod fishing, and rows of flakes on which cod were cured gave out their pungent aroma along the shore. Its seamen knew the haunts of cod and the price of molasses in the small harbors of the Caribbean, but not the teeming waterfront life of Singapore, Canton and Bombay, or the tangy scents of coffee and of pepper.

His destiny now, Adoniram felt, was to become an orator, a poet, or a statesman—another John Adams, perhaps. But something connected with books and learning, something involving moving people’s minds and hearts rather than grubby trade, something that would win him praise and fame and make his name ring down the ages.

Then, with the family scarcely settled in Plymouth, he fell ill ——critically, nearly fatally ill. For a long time it was a question whether he would live or die. When it became clear he would live, he had ahead of him more than a year of convalescence.

Bookish and intellectualized as he was becoming, he had nevertheless always been active physically. He had liked to walk for hours—Abby and Elnathan sometimes tagging along. He had thrown himself into work and play with restless energy. He had been outward-looking rather than self-centered; even his vague ambitions always included others with him as their leader.

Now, lying in bed for months with nothing to do, he became introspective. He began to think of different things, peculiar things, strangely frightening things, thoughts that cast a new, lurid ominous light on his ambitions.

Suppose he became the most famous, most idolized man in the country. What difference could that make to him when he was dead? He had read about the great men of the past. Caesar, Virgil, Cicero, Demosthenes —— their names were known, they were praised, but they did not know it, for they were only dust.

Slowly, another thought came to him as he lay under the expansive counterpane. It was not new, but it came to him in a new way, with a new force. There were two worlds, two lives, for each person: this one —— brief, narrow, finite; and the hereafter —— eternal, limitless, infinite. Fame, to mean anything, should go with one into the next world, where one could enjoy it perpetually.

But that fame, he thought, came only from goodness, holiness, religion. He began to modify his ambitions. Perhaps, he mused, he would like to become a famous minister in charge of a wealthy city church—a great Boston church, for example, where he could expound his sermons to a thousand or more fashionably dressed gentlemen and ladies who would hang on every word as he stood in the pulpit above them. He would have praise and fame, and not only in this world.

As he toyed with this pleasing prospect, half smiling as he imagined the sea of admiring faces staring up at him from the crowded pews, he began to be aware of a feeling of uneasiness. Without realizing how it happened, he found himself comparing this minister with an obscure country pastor, humbly striving only to bring his congregation and himself to God, without any thought of self. The minister in whose place he had imagined himself was really no better than any other ambitious man, anxious only for fame. What would the judgment be on him in the next world? If he achieved heaven, he would certainly not achieve fame in heaven. It would be the obscure country pastor whose fame would ring out there through eternity, even though he were never heard of here. The world was wrong about its heroes. The world was wrong in its judgments. The fame of the unknown country pastor was really the greater—so much greater that any worldly accomplishment shrank into insignificance. This was the only fame that triumphed over the grave.

Suddenly through his mind words rang out so powerfully that he all but heard them spoken: “Not unto us, not unto us, but to Thy name be the glory.” And with the words such a dreadful shock of realization that he almost sat bolt upright in bed.

He had always wanted to be truly religious. He had been learning the lessons of religion since he first understood words. Yet how could he be religious and accomplish any ambition in this world?

There was a terrible contradiction here. For a moment, in a flash of inner anguish, he saw that he did not really want to be a Christian at all, for being a Christian stood in the way of his being a great man. Yet his father, a Christian, and the very image of the obscure country pastor, had predicted that he would be a great man, had encouraged Adoniram’s ambitions; and, ever since Adoniram could remember, he had set himself to fulfill his father’s prediction.

The contradiction was insoluble. Dimly he must have sensed it involved something in his father as well as in himself. The only way to get rid of it was to force it quickly down, out of thought. Yet for that one brief moment the insight was so vivid and painful that he would remember it to the end of his life.

As he recovered, Adoniram’s unpleasant introspections were buried in the routine of study. He had lost a year of schooling. The next year he made it up and gained a year besides, so that by his sixteenth birthday in 1804 he was ready to enter college.

Though a graduate of Yale himself, Adoniram’s father did not select Yale for his son, perhaps because New Haven was too far from Plymouth. Yet Harvard, only fifty miles away at Cambridge, was out of the question on account of its lax theology. Instead, Mr. Judson decided on Rhode Island College at Providence. Providence was no farther from Plymouth to the south than Cambridge was to the north; and in doctrine, Mr. Judson felt, it was as sound as Yale. He knew the views of its president, Asa Messer, and on the whole approved of them. True, it was nominally a Baptist school, but Mr. Judson felt himself closer to most of the Opinions of the Baptists than to those of the liberal Congregationalist faction; and in any case three times as many of its graduates had become Congregational ministers as had become Baptist, and Congregationalists were represented among its trustees. As he turned the matter over in his mind, Mr. Judson felt Adoniram would be safe enough at Rhode Island College.

Adoniram entered college just six days after his sixteenth birthday. He could not have stood out particularly as he made his first appearance on the unimpressive campus, a rough ungraded field about eight acres in size, walled with stone on three sides, fenced with wood in front, enclosing a few dusty shade trees, their dark green leaves drooping in August’s heat. A slender lad of no more than medium height, he was not distinguished in physique. A girl might have glanced a second time at his curly chestnut hair, and perhaps sensed unusual vitality in the elasticity of his step and in the warm brilliance of his ready smile. But she might also have decided his nose was a little too large for even masculine good looks. His clothing was of distinctly inexpensive material. Although scrupulously neat and clean, it had seen plenty of wear. Before being finally discarded, it would be repaired again and again with the sewing kit Adoniram’s mother had foresightedly packed with his belongings — for she had taught him to sew long ago.

By superficial standards, he should not have attracted any particular attention. Yet the fact is that, without wealth, physical distinction or established reputation to pave the way in advance, Adoniram began to make an impression at once -— not only on the faculty but on his classmates, and soon, through the acquaintances he formed, even on the young ladies of Providence.

It began when he was admitted. On examination it appeared that he was already so well grounded in such subjects as Latin, Greek, mathematics, geography, and astronomy, which together with logic, oratory, rhetoric, and moral philosophy were the backbone of the curriculum, that there was no reason why he should have to take the studies of the Freshman year. Instead he was allowed to enter the Sophomore class.

His professors became aware of him almost instantly. Always perfectly prepared, always self-possessed, he never even hesitated in recitations, let alone ever failing. By the end of the school year (the college having changed its name, shortly after Adoniram entered, to “Brown University” -—in honor of Nicholas Brown, merchant prince, who had just given it the first of several magnificent gifts) President Messer felt it incumbent on himself to write Adoniram’s father about his son: “... and this, I can assure you, is not by way of complaint. A uniform propriety of conduct, as well as an intense application to study, distinguishes his character. Your expectations of him, however sanguine, must certainly be gratified. I most 3 2 heartily congratulate you, my dear sir, on that charming prospect which you have exhibited in this very amiable and promising son; and I most heartily pray that the Father of mercies may make him now, while a youth, a son in his spiritual family and give him an earnest of the inheritance of the saints in light.”

Mr. Judson’s heart must have swelled with pride as he read this glowing praise. But pleased as he was, he was not surprised. Adoniram was only turning out to be what he had always predicted and always hoped for.

But Adoniram did not make a favorable impression on his faculty alone. Brown had less than a hundred and fifty students who lived, dined, studied, and attended classes and chapel in the large four-storied “college edifice” now known as University Hall. They discovered at once that he was the opposite of a narrow bookworm and that, in spite of being a minister’s son, he had very little interest in the twice-weekly meetings of the Praying Society. Instead, he was high-spirited, irrepressibly gay, obliging, always easy to get along with. The student body at Brown in Adoniram’s years there included a number of men who were to distinguish themselves in later life: future Congressmen; a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court; a Governor of New York, Senator, Secretary of War and Secretary of State. But even among these men he stood out.

One future Congressman, Adoniram’s classmate John Bailey, his keenest scholastic rival, quickly became one of his two or three closest friends. Bailey proposed him for the Philermenian Society, which, with its membership limited to forty-five, played the role of a fraternity of today but devoted its meetings to debates, speeches and its members’ literary efforts.

An even closer friend, however, and one who influenced him more, was a member of the class ahead of Adoniram’s. In after years, his name was charitably disguised as “E——,” but he was almost certainly Jacob Eames of Belfast, Maine, “amiable, talented, witty, extremely agreeable in person and manners, but a confirmed Deist. A very strong friendship sprang up between the two young men, founded on similar tastes and sympathies; and Judson soon became, at least professedly, as great an unbeliever as his friend.”

Proud as he was of his son’s scholastic accomplishments, if Adoniram’s father had even suspected he was dabbling in Deism he would have ridden posthaste to Providence and removed him from Brown at once. Liberal Congregationalism was anathema. Unitarianism and Universalism were unspeakable. But Deism...! Mr. Judson’s creed was founded on a strict construction of the Scriptures, aided by logic. It was a creed with a hell of flame as well as a heaven of bliss. The Deist rejected all revealed religion—the Bible, New Testament and Old, no less than the words of Mohammed and Buddha held to be sacred by their followers. All the Deist admitted was the existence of a personal God. Voltaire had been a Deist. Tom Paine had been a Deist. Benjamin Franklin had been a Deist. But so had the monsters of the French Revolution. The trials of Job multiplied ten times over would have been as flea bites compared to the feelings of Mr. Judson if he had known his cherished son admitted himself a Deist.

But he did not. In the bliss of ignorance, the father read and reread Asa Messer’s congratulatory letter and flattered himself that Adoniram was turning out precisely as he had always hoped.

Meanwhile, Adoniram and Jacob Eames and John Bailey and their friends studied, attended parties in the homes of Providence’s young ladies, walked together, talked together, and played together. But of all his friends, Eames had the ascendancy. Together they discussed what they would do with their lives. Sometimes they favored law, because it could lead to Congress, to the Senate, even to the Presidency. Sometimes they favored literature. America needed a literature of its own. They could become the Shakespeares, the Ben Jonsons, of the New World; write great plays, see them performed, consort with the interesting denizens of the stage, the actors — yes, and the actresses, too. But the ministry was never even considered. Fame was tangible—in this world, here and now, achievable. Where and when were heaven and hell?

As easily as this, the whole structure of the belief so carefully indoctrinated in Adoniram by his father collapsed like a house of cards. Or was belief, sown and nurtured in infancy, more like a plant with deep roots penetrating far into the very foundations of personality, involving forces never to appear to memory or awareness?

At any rate, the youth Adoniram felt a sense of relief. Perhaps he felt logic had a sharp edge, like a scythe. Wielded by the confident Jacob Eamec it leveled the dark tangled growth of the old creed and let the sun shine in. Now everything was so much simpler. Fame was the goal, ambition the spur. This his father had taught him. Now he could pursue the goal unfettered.

Perhaps something else was satisfied: an unacknowledged wish to surpass his father, to conquer, yet to win his approval. In his new, more logical belief he surpassed the Reverend Adoniram Judson. Most certainly he defeated him. Fame for the son was the father’s deepest wish. Its pursuit was approved.

But there were uneasy flickers of guilt. Rejecting the father’s God was rejecting the father. Something quivered with fear, something linked with childish memory and emotion, at the thought of that stern man’s disapproval. Fortunately, it was not necessary to mention one’s new beliefs at home. If that did not resolve the inner conflict, at least it deferred the outer one. Meanwhile he concentrated on his immediate goal: to.be first in his class, valedictorian. This his father wanted; Adoniram himself wanted it. Together they had looked forward to it. He deliberately worked for it. There had been an obstacle: his Senior year he had had to teach six weeks in Plymouth to earn money for his support. Nevertheless, he succeeded. No sooner did he learn he had won the honor than he hurried to his room and wrote:

Dear Father,

I have got it.

Your affectionate son,

A. J.

As he sealed the note, he realized all at once how his flushed, almost wildly elated expression might seem to his classmates. Bailey, his closest friend since Jacob Eamw had left the year before, had raced him neck and neck to be first in class. Bailey had lost. Bailey would think Adoniram was exulting over him, glorying in his defeat! So would the other members of the Philermenian Society. But try as he would, he could not put on an air of indifference; the joy showed through too plainly.

Opening his door just a trifle, he peered down the hall, watching for a moment when no one was in sight. When he was sure it was deserted, he slipped rapidly down the stairs of the college

B R A I N T R E E, P L Y M O U T H A N D building, and made his way to the post office by a roundabout route. By the time he returned he was ready to receive congratulations with just the proper expression of pleasure for himself and sorrow for his competitor.

The commencement exercises were held September 2, 1807. Their length must have made them something of an ordeal for the audience —except, perhaps, for proud parents like Adoniram’s father and mother. Eighteen of the twenty-eight students in the graduating class gave orations. MOSt of the addresses were on the conventional subjects of the time: “Mental Preparation”; “The Dignity of Man”; “Literary Excellence”; “The Durability of the Christian Religion”; “The Rising Glory of America.”

The last speaker, in the position of highwt honor, was Adoniram. By the time his turn came the perspiring auditors must have been nearly stupefled by the interminable torrent of words. Perhaps even his father did not pay too much attention to precisely what his son said. And the son had too much tact to say precisely what he thought. But there was a hint in the title by which his part was listed on the program:

18. An Oration on Free Enquiry; with the Valedictory Addresses.

... ADONIRAM JUDSON.