Revolt (New York: 1807 - 1808)

Revolt

[ New York:1807-1808 ]

HUS, at nineteen, Adoniram was ready to begin the work of his life. But as yet he had no idea what it would be. Lacking any better plan, he opened the “Plymouth Independent Academy” within two weeks of graduation, probably keeping his classes in the family house on Pleasant Street. His Spare time he used to write a textbook, which he finished in February under the title Elements of English Grammar. He sent the manuscript to President Messer and Calvin Park, one of his instructors. They replied approvingly, “It exhibits a fresh instance of the ingenious literary enterprise and perseverance of the author; and should you decide to give it to the public, it will, we hope, meet, as its merits, a generous patronage.” He found a publisher for the book, Cushing and Lincoln, of Boston, and immediately went to work on another, The Young Lady’s Arithmetic, which he completed toward the end of july.

As he surveyed his accomplishments that summer of 1808 he might have felt a good deal of satisfaction. Here he was, less than twenty and a year out of college, the author of two textbooks. Nevertheless, he was dissatisfied. His work seemed nothing but a way to occupy the time.

Worse, he was living a lie. Every day he dutifully took part in family worship. Sundays he faithfully attended church. No one, least of all his father and mother, suspected his real beliefs. But his private creed did not deny ethics and morality, nor condone dishonesty. Living as he did, he could not help feeling a hypocrite every time he knelt at family prayers.

Every week he grew more restless. What kind of career was writing grammars and young ladies’ arithmetics? What kind of life was it to drill the Plymouth children whose parents sent them to his academy?

Unhappily he remembered the ambitions he had shared with Jacob Eames only a few years ago. What had happened to them? Were they nothing but dreams?

That summer, with The Y 02mg Lady’s Arithmetic done, he finally came to a decision. He would leave home. He would go to New York. He would become acquainted with the people of the theater. He would learn to write for the stage.

He knew that to his father and mother New York was the most sinful of American cities, and the theater the ultimate in depravity. In a way he was too much a product of their teaching to disagree with them. But, to a twenty-year-old phi1050phical Deist like himself, the immorality of the people of the Stage had to be balanced against the morality and grandeur of great tragedies; and to write the tragedies he must learn the requirements of the stage where it flourished best. After all, perhaps actresses and actors were not so very immoral. His parents took too narrow a View of many things. Most likely they took too narrow a view of the people of the theater as well.

Just the same, caution kept him from telling them exactly what he had in mind. When he closed his academy on August 9—his twentieth birthday—he merely said he planned to travel for a while and see something of the world. He thought he would visit his Uncle Ephraim, pastor of the church at Sheffield, some hundred and fifty miles westward. Since he would be so far west, he might go on and see Albany. The newly invented steamboat, Clermont, had been in service for a year. Perhaps he might take that to New York, just to see what it was like, and broaden himself by looking at some of the sights of the city.

His parents reacted precisely as if he had casually announced his decision to take a little trip to the moon.

At first, they were incredulous. Then, when they realized that Adoniram was determined, they displayed a sort of horrified amazement. What was wrong, his mother asked, with the pleasant family circle in Plymouth? Why, demanded his father, had he suddenly decided to interrupt a promising career? Adoniram had no answer. They could not realize he had come to the point where he must throw off their rule, no matter how benevolent, and act and think for himself. He could not explain it. And why should he have to?

As he restlessly listened to their remonstrances, unreasoning anger began to rise in him. His father—unyielding, unperceptive to the nuances of feeling in others—finally goaded him too far. Why, asked the Reverend Mr. Judson, did not Adoniram study to become a minister, if he had found that teaching was not to his taSte?

A minister? All at once Adoniram’s resentment boiled over. Furiously, he flung out the truth. His father and mother froze with horror as Adoniram’s words struck their startled ears.

The God of the Third Church of Plymouth was not his God, Adoniram told them. He could not believe that the Bible was anything but the work of men—any more than were the Koran or the sacred Writings of Buddha—great as its principles might be. Even Jesus... He was certainly the son of man, but almost as certainly not the Son of God except in the sense that all men are.

Mr. Judson was outraged. What had got into the boy? He had felt sure that at Brown, of all places, no harm would be done to his son’s soul. Certainly these pernicious vaporizings did not come from any of the faculty. They must have been picked up from some fellow student infected with the noisome Jacobinism blowing over from France these years. If so, a few solid arguments should set the boy right.

Swallowing his anger, Mr. Judson set himself to reason with Adoniram. Very shortly he realized with dismay that every argument he advanced was being met by two better ones. Not for nothing had Adoniram been valedictorian of his class. Exposing the fallacies in his father’s syllogisms was child’s play. Point by point, with crushing finality, he demolished every thesis his father set out to prove. By nightfall, Adoniram was completely master of the field. So far as logic and evidence went, Mr. Judson had to concede that Adoniram had everything in his favor. Mr. Judson was beaten. He still knew he was right, but he could not prove it. He lapsed into grim, impotent silence.

Adoniram might have gone to bed flushed with triumph had his mother not possessed other, more deadly, weapons: tears, prayers, and expOStulations. Weeping, she pursued him from 'room to room. How could he do this to his mother? If he loved her, how could he consent to fry in hell for eternity, while his mother and father enjoyed heaven? How could she enjoy heaven knowing her son was in hell? She used no logic. She simply assumed that, through some perverseness of his own, her beloved Adoniram chose the devil against God, hell against heaven, and wounding her feelings against making her happy.

When, finally, she saw that Adoniram withstood her, she turned to prayers. Wherever he turned, he saw her bowed in prayer and heard her lifting her voice brokenly, sobbing, pleading with God to change the heart of her wayward son and save him from damnation.

For Adoniram it was a little hell. He endured it for six days until, on the fifteenth of August, mounted on a horse his father gave him as part of his inheritance, he rode westward down the steep grade of Pleasant Street, crossed Town Brook, and slowly jogged on toward Boston, Worcester and Sheffield.

He had won his freedom, but he was not entirely happy with it. He passed over the broad Connecticut River at the village of Springfield and presently found himself among the mountains, green in August, rising around him like the huge combers of the sea. It was a kind of country he had never seen before. As he thought of the new life ahead, his spirits began to soar with the hills; yet he could not quite throw off a certain uneasiness.

At Sheffield his Uncle Ephraim, now an old man of seventy, received him kindly, but Adoniram stayed at the parsonage only overnight. In the morning, leaving his horse in his uncle’s care, he pressed on over the hills to Albany. There he took passage on the Clermont for New York.

The trip down the river was so much of a success that he always remembered it afterward with pleasure. As the little craft churned along, its paddle wheels thrashing and its stack belching thick clouds of wood smoke, Adoniram savored the thrill of being a passenger on the first successful steamboat. Even the Berkshires had not prepared him for the grandeur of the Hudson Valley. He never forgot beetling Bear Mountain, all but overhanging the deck as the Clermmzt threaded her way through a river narrowing to a few hundred yards; nor the lakelike expanse of the Tappan Zec—haunted at times, so it was said, by an old Dutch wraith ship; nor the towering rampart of the Palisades. He struck up casual acquaintance with a few of the men leaning idly along the rail. They muSt have pointed out to him the vast manor of the Van Rensselaers, its extent measured not in acres but in scores of miles, its wealth not by farms but by the cities flourishing on its land. Perhaps some of them told him the legends of the river—perhaps of the goblin who guarded the Donderberg, Thunder Mountain, to whom river vessels lowered their peaks as they sailed by. “There’s where Major Andre’ was captured,” one of them, a veteran of the Revolution, might have commented, pointing with his cigar at the Tarrytown shore. “There’s where they rowed him across the river. And over there, on the opposite shore, out of sight beyond the cliffs, is where they tried and hanged him.” And a few miles farther, “And down below there, see there. That’s the Harlem River, going off to the left. That point’s the upper end of Manhattan Island. Our troops skedaddled out of there upriver when the British drove them off that high land. And down there... ’way, ’way down—can’t hardly see it yet... that’s New York, down on the end of the island.”

They called him “Mr. Johnson.” Perhaps he mumbled his name when someone asked for it. Perhaps the clanking machinery and pufling steam muffled it. With some intuitive caution, he let the error stand.

Covered with cinders and smoke grime, he stepped off the Clemont, heart pounding with excitement, and made off over the cobbled streets for the theaters he had been dreaming of. Who knows how his enthusiasm pictured them? He may have expected to see brilliant temples of pleasure pe0pled with thespians almost more handsome, more witty, more talented than human.

If so, he was disappointed. It was true that commerce was in process of making'New York more populous and prosperous than either Boston or Philadelphia and its arts were beginning to flourish as never before on the continent. Only two years before, the play of a boy even younger than Adoniram—young John Howard Payne—had been produced, and he had even acted successfully though briefly. His family had promptly packed him off to Union College in Schenectady, from which he was to return, within six months of Adoniram’s arrival in the city, to act and write plays again with astounding success, though the future would remember him mainly for his haunting song, “Home, Sweet Home.”

But Payne came from one of New York’s best families. All doors were open to him as they were to such young men-about-town as Washington Irving. Then, as now, the city was cold to obscure young men. And a young man of twenty with nothing to recommend him but a wish to learn how to write for the stage could not expect to be received with open arms.

Worse, Adoniram had arrived in one of the quietest months of a rather poor theatrical year. Only a few theaters were open. Most of the entertainment consisted of variety: Pepin and Breschard’s circus, which had come down from Boston; sleight of hand, magic and tumbling acts (livened, to be sure, with a three-act farce, The Doctor’s Courtship) at the Lyceum. There were a few benefits, but well-known players were earning even less than the six dollars or so they were accustomed to make weekly in better years. By comparison, the Reverend Mr. Judson’s salary was munificent.

The prospects were poor for a young stranger. But Adoniram persisted, and in a few days he succeeded in attaching himself to a shabby little band of strolling players who were trying their prospects where they could outside the city. For a few weeks he roamed with them, living, as he said later, “a reckless, vagabond life, finding lodgings where we could, and bilking the landlord where we found opportunity—in other words running up a score, and then decamping without paying the reckoning.”

For some, the life might have been fascinating. For Adoniram it was the opposite of his anticipations. If there was a better theater somewhere, more like his dreams, capable of opening a road to the fulfillment of his ambitions, he did not know where it was or how to find it.

Disgusted, heartsick, he left without notice one night, and, nursing his disappointment, made his way back to his uncle’s home in Sheffield.

The experience in New York had left Adoniram without a plan. Unless he wanted to go home, he could think of nothing better than procuring his horse from his uncle and continuing to wander.

But he was uneasy. What should he strive for now? He felt aimless. He had expected to find a more honest, freer world, swelling with fresh, brilliant thought and companionship. But the world he did find was a tawdry world of bombast and fustian. Its honesty was a kind of thieves’ honor. By contrast, his father’s character, with all its obstinate wrongheadedness, stood out in simple grandeur. His father could be mistaken —- was mistaken, in fact —- but he was honeSt granite clear through.

In this bewildered mood Adoniram returned to Ephraim Judson’s parsonage. His uncle was away and a young minister, as yet without a regular charge, was taking his place. But it was too late in the day to ride on, so Adoniram decided to spend the night at the parsonage.

The two young men—close enough to the same age to talk as equals—spent several hours in conversation. Adoniram was struck by the fact that, although his host was as pious as his father, there was a warmth, “a solemn but gentle earnestness,” in his speech which kindled an answering warmth in the heart. To be a devoted minister it was not necessary, it seemed, to be austere and dictatorial like the Reverend Mr. Judson.

Adoniram rode away in the morning deeply impressed. Perhaps the young minister would never find the fame Adoniram was looking for, but neither would he experience the pain of Adoniram’s inner conflict. He was at peace with himself.

These were Adoniram’s thoughts as he rode on, still trending away from Plymouth. September’s frosts were already dappling the green mountainsides with flecks of red, but Adoniram scarcely noticed them. He was absorbed in trying to understand how this man, not much older than he himself, could apparently be without ambition and yet have such inner tranquillity.

As night drew on he found himself passing through a small village. Finding the local inn, he stabled his horse and asked the innkeeper for a room. The house was nearly full, said the landlord apologetically. But he had one next to a young man who was critically ill, perhaps dying. He might be disturbed, but... P No, said Adoniram, still wrapped in his own thoughts, he would not let a few noises next door deny him a night’s rest. After giving him something to eat, the landlord lighted Adoniram to this room and left him. Without further ado, Adoniram got into bed, and waited for sleep to come.

But though the night was still, he could not sleep. In the next room beyond the partition he could hear sounds, not very loud; footsteps coming and going; a board creaking; low voices; a groan or gasp. These did not disturb him unduly—not even the realiza— tion that a man might be dying. Death was a commonplace in Adoniram’s New England. It might come to anyone, at any age.

What disturbed him was the thought that the man in the next room might not be prepared for death. Was he, himself? A confusing coil of speculation unwound itself as he lay half dreaming, half waking, while the autumn chill stole down from the mountains and crept through every crack and cranny of the house. He wondered how he himself would face death. His father would welcome it as a door opening outward to immortal glory. So much his creed had done for him. But to Adoniram the son, the freethinker, the Deist, the infidel, lying huddled under the covers, death was an exit, not an entrance. It was a door to an empty pit, to darkness darker than night, at best to extinction, at worst to ——-what? On this matter his philosophy was silent. It had no answer but “Who knows?”

He had always been neat and well groomed. His mother had taught him to be fastidious. He cared for his own person. But he must die, and the grave was a cold, dark place. His flesh crawled. Was the wet earthy mold and the motionless body, the slow dissolution of muscle and tendon, the slower crumbling of bone, the immense weight of soil —— was this all, through the endless centuries? What of that part of Adoniram Judson he thought of as “I”? Did it go out like the flame of a candle? Or did it, too, stay in the ground with the flesh?

There was terror in these fantastically unwinding ideas. But as they presented themselves, another part of himself jeered. Midnight fancies! that part said scomfully. What a skin-deep thing this freethinking philosophy of Adoniram Judson, valedictorian, scholar, teacher, ambitious man, must be! What would the classmates at Brown say to these terrors of the night, who thought of him as bold in thought? Above all, what would Eames say—Eames the clearheaded, skeptical, witty, talented? He imagined Rama’s laughter, and felt shame.

When Adoniram woke the sun was streaming in the window. His apprehensions had vanished with the darkness. He could hardly believe he had given in to such weakness. He dressed quickly and ran downstairs, looking for the innkeeper. It was past time to have breakfast, pay his reckoning, saddle his horse and be on his way.

He found his host, asked for the bill, and—perhaps noticing the man somber-faced -— asked casually whether the young man in the next room was better. “He is dead,” was the answer.

“Dead?” Adoniram was taken aback. There was a heavy finality to the word. For an instant, some of his fear of the night made itself felt once more. Adoniram stammered out the few conventional phrases common to humanity when death takes someone nearby, and asked the inevitable question: “Do you know who he was?”

“Oh yes. Young man from the college in Providence. Name was Eames, Jacob Eames.”

How he got through the next few hours Adoniram was never able to remember.

All he recalled afterwards was that he did not try to leave the inn until some hours had passed. Whether he looked on Eames’s body, whether he made himself known as Eames’s friend, whether any of Eames’s relatives or family were in the village, whether he wept—on all this he was always silent.

Later, however, he found himself on the road, continuing his journey, without being sure how he came to be there. He was aware that one word was tolling in his mind like a bell: the word “Lost!”

Lost. In death, Jacob Eames was lost—utterly, irrevocably lost. Lost to his friends, to the world, to the future. Lost as a puff of smoke is lost in the infinity of air. If Eames’s own views were true, neither his life nor his death had any meaning. The coincidence of his dying on the other side of a partition from Adoniram, in a remote country inn, was simply a meaningless incident in a plan too huge and impersonal to take account of individuals.

But suppose Eames had been mistaken? Suppose the Scriptures were literally true and a personal God real? Then Jacob Eames was already lost in a most desperate sense. For already, this moment, Eames knew his error—too late for repentance. Knowing his mistake, regretting it with a bitterness which no living human could ever possibly imagine, he was eXperiencing already the unimaginable torments of the flames of hell—any chance of remedy, of going back, of correcting, lost, eternally lost.

Thus the pattern in Adoniram’s shocked mind. It was the nightthoughts back again, but in a more dreadful form. The road was an ordinary country road, barely more than a trail, dusty and warm in the September sun. The horse ambled quietly, almost unguided, the saddle leather squeaking as always. But there was an indefinable menace everywhere. Even the flaming reds against the thick evergreens on the hillside suggeSted hungry tongues of hell’s flame licking through the forest cover from under the granite beneath.

For that hell should open in that country inn and snatch Jacob Eames, his dearest friend and guide, from the next bed —— this could not, simply could not, be pure coincidence.

Adoniram knew his father’s God very well. He was omniscient. He knew everything. He was omnipotent. He had all power. He could foresee where Adoniram would be that night, could foresee his leaving New York when and why he did. He could foresee that Jacob Eames would be where he was, fall sick, die, be damned.

More: being All-Powerful, this He must have done with a purpose, for He could have arranged matters otherwise.

This God of the Bible, Adoniram had been taught, was an angry God, a vindictive God. But He was a just God. He could be a loving God. And He gave ample warning. If This was the real God, it was no mere coincidence that Adoniram had fallen in among rogues and left, disgusted. It was no coincidence that the pious young man had been at his uncle Ephraim’s house to converse with him. It was no coincidence that Adoniram had spent this particular night at this particular inn, thinking those particular thoughts. He had been warned, amply warned.

Was This the real God? If so, He had a purpose for Adoniram, which Adoniram must learn to read. In his very bones, all at once, logic or no logic, Adoniram was imbued with the feeling that the God of the Bible was the real God. And Adoniram was filled with despair and dread. For Deist logic and evidence said “No.”

Suddenly he reined in his horse. Without realizing it, he had been continuing the tour he had planned originally. He straightened in the saddle for a moment of decision. Yes, he must find out about this, once and for all. He turned the horse in the road, spurred it to a faster pace, and headed back in the direction from which he had come— homeward.

Toward Plymouth.