USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Newburyport > History of the First Religious Society in Newburyport, Massachusetts > Part 6
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Little information in regard to this change is available. The pillars that support the pulpit are reeded rather than fluted, and probably were new at this time. Where the sounding board once hung a chandelier was suspended, and another was suspended from the ceiling in the center of the church.
It may be questioned whether the alteration of the pulpit was an improvement.
*"There was a grandeur in that ancient pulpit with its rich crimson velvet drapery and cushions, and the graceful sounding board was suspended above that and added much to the impressive- ness of the structure. The space under the pulpit was a large closet where the Sunday school library was kept."
On May 26th, 1835, an interesting event took place in the church when the people of the three towns that once constituted Newbury (Newbury, Newburyport and West Newbury) celebrated the 200th anniversary of the landing of the first settlers on the bank of the river Parker. After a long procession which started at the town house in Newbury, and marched through several of the Newburyport streets to this church, a brilliant young parishioner, Caleb Cushing, delivered an oration which won high praise.
*Newburyport News, an article signed by Miss Sarah Emery.
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The reasons for the resignation of Mr. Fox on the first of April, 1846, were given as ill health, the necessity of living near his aging father and mother in Boston and the need of more money for his growing family than the parish could afford to pay him. His loss was severely felt. "There was," said one of his parishioners, "a power, an intangible attractiveness about Mr. Fox that was seen and felt, but words are inadequate to describe it."
During this pastorate the organ, the "box of whistles" and "tooting tub" which had caused so much derision when it was installed in the old meeting house in 1794, was replaced by a new organ. This one was built by Joseph Alley, a resident of Newbury- port, and a man of unusual musical genius. It was considered the finest organ in the vicinity and was in constant use until about 1884. Then it was rebuilt by George S. Hutchings of Boston. Many of the old parts were used, and it is still a serviceable and acceptable instrument.
While Mr. Fox created interest and drew a large congregation to his services he did not make many permanent additions to the parish. The Essex Memorial of 1836 gives the number of communi- cants of the church as ninety. The church school, for which he did much, numbered in this year 130.
During his years here transcendentalism was rising into promi- nence in intellectual circles. Some of the parish were interested in the current abstruse speculations; others were drawn into the so-called great revival that, beginning in about 1831, became general in New England. Almost every church then received large additions to its membership, but *"the same causes which had previously brought about a diminution in the society continued in part in his ministry. The older members died off; and there were few recruits from the outside."
It remained for a new minister to conciliate the extreme liberals and those less intellectually advanced, and to plant in the ground so vigorously plowed by Mr. Fox seeds of stable growth. To this field the society invited Thomas Wentworth Higginson, at that time an arch agitator for an unpopular cause.
*Oration of Amos Noyes, 150th Anniversary of the Founding of the Parish.
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CHAPTER IX THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
A year and a half elapsed after Mr. Fox's resignation before the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was ordained as minister of this society. In that interval the pulpit had been supplied by several ministers, three of whom, David S. Fosdick, Jr., Octavius B. Frothingham and Samuel Longfellow, declined invitations to become settled over the parish. In the summer of 1847 Mr. Higginson accepted the society's invitation. He believed that his ordination was strictly the affair of the parish that had chosen him, and of himself. Therefore the guests at this ordination were a few of his friends among the clergy and a committee from the parish.
The event took place on September 15th. The ordination sermon, preached by his cousin, William Henry Channing, was entitled "The Gospel of Today." The charge to the young minister was given by James Freeman Clarke who exhorted him to reforms by construc- tive, not by destructive measures, but urged him, unnecessarily, it seems, to scathingly rebuke the sin of slavery.
The Rev. Laurence Hayward, present minister of the society, has written in regard to the ordination sermon and Mr Higginson's work in the parish. * "I have been interested and surprised in reading it," he says, "to see how much it is the gospel of this day also. It insists in just the terms that are being used now, and as wholly new and startling principles, that churches should direct their aims to the solution primarily of socialogical and economic principles.
"Mr. Higginson was in perfect sympathy with his cousin's sermon, and immediately threw himself into one of those practical causes that the latter had described. It was then the troubled period of anti-slavery agitation leading up to the war-a period the conflict and angry feelings of which, I suppose, none of us who are of a generation who did not immediately know them can realize. Newburyport, in spite of having produced William Lloyd Garrison, was a center of pro-slavery feeling, particularly the parish part of it, and Mr. Higginson soon showed that he was very much on the other side. His sermons were, to a considerable proportion, on the
*From an address delivered before the Women's Alliance at Newburyport on November 7th, 1911.
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one subject of the abolition of slavery. People who remember the time say that even his opponents in the parish did not object to occasional sermons upon what they considered his hobby; but with the one sided intensity of the born reformer, he constantly dwelt on the sole thing that loomed large in his eyes. With the incumbent and many of the parish so out of sympathy with each other, little good could come to either side, and accordingly, in just two years and a day from his installation, he gave up the parish.
"I have always been extremely interested in those two years, and have tried to gather every hint of their character. Some of the traces of his influence that come to one are good, some not so admirable. He was, I take it, an able and effective preacher. His sermons, whether polemic or spiritual, went home to the mark. He was not always engaged in one agitation, after all. I have had the pleasure of reading two most practical sermons of his preached here, on the Tongue, and I wished we could every one of us take home to ourselves the charity and good-will and self-restraint they inculcate. J judge that a great proportion of his sermons were of this helpful character, and I have heard him classed by good judges as an eloquent preacher. Others have also told me of the beauty of the way he read the service, particularly the psalms and the hymns."
The parsonage was at 18 Essex street, a large old-fashioned house. To this house, two weeks after his ordination, Mr. Higginson brought a young bride. Mrs. Higginson was a second cousin of her husband, the daughter of Dr. Walter Channing of Brookline and sister of the Concord poet, Ellery Channing. She was the fifth young bride that parish ministers, in their youth, had brought to the town. A woman of great intelligence and charm, in sympathy with her husband's aims, but capable of finding amusement in them, she undoubtedly moderated to some extent his too intense zeal. She is reported to have said to him once : "Why do the insane always come to you?"
Shortly after his marriage Mr. Higginson wrote to his brother : "I am fairly settled here now in a lovely house, with a noble hearted wife and a marvelous parish."
After finishing his university course, and before he had settled to any life work he had written: "What I want now most urgently is more of a controversial spirit, the will and the power to pitch right
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THE REV. THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
into people and show 'em how foolishly they are thinking and acting, instead of my present spirit of being willing people should think what they please if they'll only leave me alone."
It fell to the lot of the Newburyport parish to be the field where the successfully developed spirit which Mr. Higginson craved for himself was first exercised. He was not unmindful of the attitude of the parish toward himself as he led some of its members to a firing line of sought reforms. He seems to have been hopeful of strength- ening this line when he wrote of his parishioners :
"They manifest regard for us only by a full and attentive presence at church-certainly the most agreeable way, but queer. Not a particle of petting. Rather afraid of us, in fact Mary (Mrs. Higginson) thinks-as if we were handsome spotted panthers, good to look at and roaring finely-something to be proud of perhaps- but not to be approached incautiously, or too near ; except by a few familiar ones. . ... . I find less to complain of and far more to enjoy in the ministry than I ever anticipated; my people are thus far willing and impressible at least; I say whatever seems right, and I preached yesterday to about 400 If I can do my duty, there is much to be effected here. We met Mr .- -, the richest man (about) in the Society he ere long proceeded to com- pliment me on the 'good whipping' I gave them Sunday afternoon on 'Freedom of Speech'. .I have not yet found one who approves of war or disapproves free speech on the minister's part and I begin to feel somewhat confident that they will stand the trials I have ready for them. ..... I have talked very plainly in private."
In "Cheerful Yesterdays" he describes the downfall of these high hopes. "The parish which at first welcomed me, counted among its strongest supporters a group of retired sea-captains who had traded with Charleston and New Orleans, and more than one of whom had found himself obliged, after sailing from a southern port, to put back in order to eject some run-away slave from his lower hold. All of their prejudices ran in one direction and their view of the case differed from that of Boston society only as a rope's end differs from a rapier. One of them, perhaps the quietest, was the very Francis Todd who had caused the imprisonment of Garrison at Baltimore. It had happened besides, that the one political hero and favorite son of Newburyport, Caleb Cushing, was fighting
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HISTORY OF THE FIRST RELIGIOUS SOCIETY
slavery's battles in Mexico. Of Garrison himself they felt ashamed. It now seems to me strange that, under all of these circumstances I held my place for two years and a half. Of course it cannot be claimed that I showed unvarying tact; indeed I can now see that it was quite otherwise; but it was a case when tact counted for little ; in fact, I think my sea-captains did not wholly dislike my plainness of speech, though they felt bound to discipline it; and moreover the whole younger community was on my side. It did not help matters that I let myself be nominated for Congress by the 'Free Soil' party in 1848 and 'stumped the district' though in a hopeless minority. The nomination was Whittier's doings, partly to prevent that party from nominating him.
"Having been, of course, defeated for Congress, as I had simply stood in a gap, I lived in Newburyport for more than two years longer after giving up my parish, serving on the school committee and organizing public evening schools, then a great novelty. The place was and is a manufacturing town and I had a large and intelligent class of factory girls, mostly American, who came to my house for reading and study once a week. In this work I had enlisted a set of young maidens of unusual ability, several of whom were afterward well known to the world."
No other minister in the long years of the parish has given us opinions or descriptions of it. The view point has been from the parish toward the minister. The facts that have been salvaged from the past and the opinions and descriptions lingering with us have always been from this latter view point.
Among the young girls from whom Mr. Higginson had such pleasant help with his class of factory girls were the granddaughters of the Rev. Dr. Andrews, and Harriet Prescott, later Mrs. Spofford, and Louisa Stone, afterward Mrs. Hopkins. These ladies became writers of more than local fame. To what extent Mr. Higginson trained and encouraged their talents cannot be known, of course; but his influence was constructive and valuable. It was, in a very true sense, a parish influence and one that penetrated the intellec- tual life of the town. Even the antagonisms which he aroused by his aggressive advocacy of the anti-slavery cause promoted thought and awakened consciences. His work for better educational facilities for girls, for women's suffrage and for temperance, whatever the
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opinions current in his day, should reflect credit upon the religious society that invited him to the town. He retained his membership in the society throughout his stay here.
Mr. Higginson kept no church records. He seems to have been fully occupied in vigorously pushing forward reforms and the affairs of the town. He wrote to a neglected correspondent *"People don't lecture and edit and keep school for 135 factory girls for nothing, and cannot expect to have much time left afterward to answer bright letters."
He wrote to his mother in regard to his resignation as minister of the parish thus : §"The case is perfectly simple. Mr. W. distinctly stated that they had no fault to find with me personally, they liked and respected me; they were always interested in my preaching, they had no complaint as to personal matters; the only thing he had ever heard mentioned was Slavery and Politics; my position as an Abolitionist they could not bear. This, he admitted, could not be altered; and he tacitly recognized that I had but one course to pursue."
Another letter written at this time reports : "I intended to write to you, but for procrastination, and the knowledge that ill news travels fast. Mine is good though, for I had resolved to release myself from the whole thing next year for various reasons. But the discontents of the Pleasant St. 'upper ten'. have led to it now. I said so Sunday before last, to the surprise of many and the tears of all women, poor men, young men, Democrats and Come- outers. A kind of reaction has followed since, and now all the rest are shedding tears-still they have accepted my resignation only not to take effect for six months. With a free church I could carry off half the society and many urge it-but I will not. I intend to give lectures here by and by or something of that sort. We are never going to leave these parts and are to board for the present at Mrs. Curzon's Artichoke Mills, three miles from the town and the loveliest place on earth
"Not a dozen are really opposed to me, but they have all the wealth. Oh, Christian Church !"
*§Thomas Wentworth Higginson-The Story of His Life, by Mary Thacher Higginson. Letters in this chapter are taken from this book.
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So another able and potentially great man was practically turned away from the pulpit of this society. It was not large enough or important enough to have kept either Mr. Fox or Mr. Higginson for a life service as former ministers had been kept. While they were here, by their aid, it held its high place in the community at a time when new churches were rising, the population only slowly increas- ing and its liberal tendencies a scandal to many.
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CHAPTER X SUCCEEDING MINISTERS
A Newburyport author described the local social conditions of the fourth decade of the 19th century, and said of the two leading churches : * "The Episcopal parish, so-called St. James because an air of superior gentility seemed to pervade the precinct, so that some cavillers saw fit to call it St. James in allusion to the Christian name of the excellent §rector who succeeded the venerable Bishop Bass ........ and the congregation of the successors of those who founded the First Church, who had at length become what was called 'liberal,' in contrast with the orthodoxy of the rest of the town, aspired to a higher degree of gentility and accomplishment than the commonality."
On November 29th, 1850, the Rev. Charles J. Bowen was ordained as the successor of Mr. Higginson. He was a graduate of Brown University, but his theological training had been in the Harvard Divinity school. Mr. Bowen was the sixth young minister of this society to bring a bride to the town. Mrs. Bowen was the daughter of the Rev. Samuel Gilman, D. D., of Charleston, S. C., and was remembered as a gracious and devoted helpmeet in the work and social life of the parish. Mr. Bowen is described as a conserva- tive.
This was a time when myths, dogmas and many creeds were beginning to feel the devastating attacks of science. Many of the more intellectual persons in the parish were dissatisfied with the trend of the thought issuing from the pulpit. So, although major commotions ceased with the retirement of Mr. Higginson, there were minor frictions.
t"The radical element in the society desired something more speculative and progressive. Mr. Bowen was a man who in many respects was a reaction from Mr. Higginson. He did not interest himself in politics or even in the public affairs of any kind. He was, however, in his parochial duties faithful and kind, and attentive to the sick, and in his manners and conversation set an example of
*Old New England Traits, by George Lunt.
§ The Rev. James Morse.
tOration of Amos Noyes, 150th anniversary of the founding of the parish.
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urbanity and courtesy which won him many friends and made him no enemies."
Mr. Bowen resigned on June 10th, 1853. During his incumbency Newburyport was incorporated as a city. Changes in business, in the social atmosphere and in politics were taking place ; but when it needed a progressive leader, in tune with the times, the society chose another conservative. For a year and a half, however, the pulpit was supplied by the Rev. Robert C. Waterson, whose sermons are said to have been neither controversial nor doctrinal.
The Rev. Artemas B. Muzzey was installed as minister of the parish on September 3rd, 1857. The sermon on this occasion was preached by the Rev. Andrew J. Peabody, most eminent, most learned and often heard from this pulpit.
Mr. Muzzey *"was a man who believed in the time honored methods of reaching the people. He established for a time in the meeting house daily public prayers. He invoked and frequently quoted the scriptures, and endeavored to make converts to the doctrine of atonement by example and reconciliation. He was active in public works, a most estimable citizen, interested in our schools."
Graduated from Harvard in 1824 and from the divinity school there Mr. Muzzey brought to the parish, as had every minister who had preceded him, the cast of Harvard scholarship. Although an alumnus of Brown University Mr. Bowen, his predecessor, had attended the Harvard divinity school, it will be remembered.
Mr. Muzzey remained in charge of the parish until November, 1864. Had Mr. Higginson occupied the pulpit during the last four or five of these years he would have had a congregation in full sympathy with his anti-slavery views. Strangely enough the parish numbers him among the five colonels which it sent to the Civil War; but his name is not in the official list of Newburyport soldiers. The names of the other four colonels are given as Frederick J. Coffin, Eben F. Stone, David P. Muzzey, and Charles Fox. The latter was a son of the Rev. Thomas Fox. Two other sons of Mr. Fox were engaged in the war, one of whom died from the result of wounds received at Gettysburg. David P. Muzzey was a son of the Rev. Artemas B. Muzzey. He was an occasional correspondent of the Newburyport Herald while he was at the front.
*Oration of Amos Noyes, 150th anniversary of the founding of the parish.
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In the Herald Mr. Muzzey is mentioned from time to time as officiating at the funeral services of some soldier killed in the war. His name is among those mentioned as attending public meetings, called to promote relief work. He preached a sermon on Thanks- giving day, 1864, on "The Compensations of War." Although his resignation was given in November he remained in the parish for several months. His name is signed with that of other clergymen of the city to a communication to the governor of Massachusetts, John A. Andrew, which expresses sympathy for the loss which he personally, as governor, had sustained in the death of President Lincoln. He did not officiate at the community service held in tribute to Mr. Lincoln's memory, although it took place in this church. It is recorded that upon this occasion every seat was occupied and that many were unable even to gain admittance.
*"While Mr. Muzzey was here the North church was burned, and the same good feeling between the two societies, which was exhibited when the separation was made, was also shown in the action of the Pleasant street church on this occasion. The use of their house for worship, while the North church was rebuilding, was offered, and, although not accepted, the offer was courteously acknowledged with thanks."
Until a new minister was installed the pulpit in this church was supplied by the Rev. Samuel Calthrop. He is characterized as possessed of §"an irrepressible enthusiasm, quick imagination and ready spontaneity, which, with great learning and considerable eloquence made his discourses peculiarly suggestive and inspiring." +"He was a man of marked eccentricities, with a method of present- ing a subject which was his alone. A majority of the society wished his installation as pastor but an unfortunate interview with one of its members ended any prospect of an acceptance which may have existed."
The Rev. Joseph May was installed as minister of the society on July 21st, 1868. The Newburyport Herald speaks of him as a "scholarly, refined and faithful pastor." He was born in Boston in
*From the Newburyport Herald, March 2nd, 1872.
§Oration of Amos Noyes, 150th anniversary of the founding of the parish. TOration of Henry Bailey Little, 200th anniversary of the founding of the parish.
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1830, and was a grandson of Col. Joseph May, a well known officer of King's Chapel, and one of the first, if not the first, to become an out and out Unitarian. Joseph May, his grandson, graduated at the head of his class at Harvard, studied at the divinity school there, and so brought again to the society the stamp of that University.
Mr. May was one of the brilliant preachers who have been resident in Newburyport. His church was well filled; even some of the gallery pews were used. Unfortunately his health was not good. In 1874 the society granted him a six months leave of absence. He spent this time in traveling abroad. Upon his return he was invited to become the minister of the First Unitarian church in Philadelphia. The society accepted his resignation regretfully even though it approved his acceptance of a larger field for the exercise of his unusual talents.
During his pastorate here the names of women are found in the church records, as members of the parish committees, for the first time. A hospitality committee of women was appointed ; and women also served as members of the music committee. In 1874 a meeting of the parish was called to consider the advisability of selling the meeting house. It reported that it had "carefully considered the subject and would respectfully report that in their judgment the best interests of the society would be promoted by a change from our present place of worship to one more modern and better adapted to our needs. They would therefore recommend that they be authorized to entertain proposals for the purchase of the church property and if a satisfactory price can be obtained that they be instructed to call a parish meeting to take the necessary steps to effect such sale."
Fortunately such a sale was never made.
The outstanding event of Mr. May's pastorate was the 150th anniversary celebration of the founding of the parish. This is described in another chapter. While he was here Sunday afternoon services were discontinued; although, according to the religious notices in the Saturday editions of the Newburyport Herald, occas- ionally a special service was held on Sunday afternoons.
For two years the society was without a settled minister. Among those who supplied the pulpit in this interval were the Rev. Samuel Longfellow, who was always a favorite here, and the Rev.
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