USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume II > Part 12
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The case had been a severe strain upon the members of the faculty, who although handicapped, had carried on their teaching without a break. The case had also resulted in a decline in attendance at the seminary, because students did not want to go to a school where they might be involved in such issues; moreover, it might be hard for them to get a parish if they were tainted with heterodoxy. The hands of the Liberals had been strengthened, but at a real cost to the seminary.
In 1896 the faculty suggested to the trustees that the seminary should grant the degree of Bachelor of Divinity to "students who had had College training and who had completed the full course at
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Andover." The trustees agreed, and the Massachusetts Legislature granted the privilege.
About the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century anxiety began to be felt about the future of the school. To quote from Rowe:
"Since the new century opened the conviction had been growing that something more was necessary than to hope for the rejuvenation of the old school. The controversy of twenty years earlier had weakened the Seminary seriously. The new temper of the age which was finding in life rather than in theology the best expression of religion, was impatient of out- worn creeds and doubtful of the value of institutions that were based on such creeds. Particularly were college men shy about connecting themselves with a school that had a reputation for theological difficulties and still required its faculty to give lip service to ancient symbols. Recovery from the theological depression had been discouragingly slow. It began to seem as if the school might not live much longer unless something radical was attempted."
The reason for the founding of the seminary and the reason for its decline was essentially the same --- indifference to the set form of religious doctrine and of man's relationship to God. Andover had attempted to adopt a vital form of religious doctrine and expression, but had made that form so rigid that it was not accepted at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In spite of the unfriendly relations between Harvard and the seminary at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it seemed feasible to some of the trustees that Andover and the Harvard Divinity School at Cambridge should be affiliated if a suitable plan could be arranged, but no such plan was apparent. The alumni of Andover was not in favor of such a move.
It had also been felt that the seminary should have a board of trustees which should be independent of the academy board of trus- tees. It was necessary to obtain the consent of the Massachusetts Legislature for such a move.
"In 1907 [quoting from Rowe] the Legislature accord- ingly incorporated the persons then constituting the Trustees
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of Phillips Academy as the Trustees of Andover Theological Seminary, to be governed by all the provisions and regulations as to organization, membership, etc., by which the Trustees of Phillips Academy were governed, and to hold all the prop- erty then held by the Academy Trustees for the benefit of the Seminary 'subject to all trusts and conditions upon which the property had been held by the Trustees of Phillips Acad- emy.' Upon the establishment of the new corporation the Trustees of Phillips Academy transferred to it the land and buildings occupied by the Seminary, together with all invested funds held for the benefit of the Seminary. Most of those who were trustees of Phillips Academy when the act of 1907 was passed and who under the act became the first trustees of Andover Theological Seminary, resigned, and their places were taken by men who were primarily interested in the semi- nary, thus recognizing the fact that the Academy and the Seminary had grown apart and that one governing body was no longer suitable."
A committee of alumni had been appointed to sound out the alumni on the question of the affiliation of Andover with Harvard and the removal to Harvard. The committee reported that the con- sensus of opinion was against affiliation and removal because it was felt (to quote from Rowe) "that the small number of students at the Harvard Divinity School over a period of twenty-five years did not give much encouragement for an increase in attendance near the Uni- versity. The decline of interest of students in the colleges regarding the ministry as a profession was by no means limited to the Andover constituency. One man said, 'An empty Seminary is as well off at Andover as at Cambridge.'"
But the trustees saw advantages in the affiliation that would offset the objections. Using Rowe's words :
"It was expected that the Seminary would have increased facilities, that the Faculty would be given equal standing with the Faculty of the Harvard Divinity School, and that Andover would retain its full independence. It would be possible to have a plant that would house the library adequately and that would be modern in every way. Most important of all was
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the opportunity to acquaint the students with the values of psychology, sociology, and ethics, and other sciences of recent development, which could not be provided at Andover with the limited resources of the Seminary. The social passion, which had been felt at Andover and had led to the foundation of Andover House as a social settlement in Boston, could be fostered and guided in the new environment. The Trustees recognized in Cambridge the historic shrine of education in America. The University enjoyed freedom of thought and discussion. It could furnish the highest type of intellectual culture along with the theological discipline. And that was a Congregational tradition."
The trustees finally voted for removal on March 12, 1908.
In 1908 the Reverend Albert Parker Fitch had been chosen as Bartlet professor of sacred rhetoric and president of the faculty of the seminary. Due to his energy and influence the eight years of his administration was a period of growth in student attendance and in expansion of the seminary. Thirty-four students were on the roll at the end of his third year, while only twelve had been enrolled at the beginning of his first. About that time affiliation had been estab- lished with the Episcopal Theological School of Cambridge. In 19II Andover Hall was dedicated, and thus the necessary physical equipment was provided.
But things had not gone well with the school. The war had inter- fered, and in 1918 one student graduated and only thirteen were enrolled. In 1922 an arrangement was attempted for the closer affili- ation of Andover and Harvard, and the name of the joint institution was to be "The Theological School in Harvard University." This plan was set aside by a decision of the Judicial Court of Massachu- setts in 1925, because such an affiliation was not allowed by the original constitution, associate statutes, and other fundamental doc- trines, although it "had become impossible for any theological scholar to subscribe to the Creed if literally interpreted." In 1926 the faculty resigned and instruction was suspended by vote of the trustees.
It did not seem right that the seminary which had rendered such wonderful service should be allowed to die, so proceedings were insti- tuted by the trustees and the visitors before the Supreme Judicial Court.
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"On April 10, 1931 [according to Rowe], the Court entered a decree reciting that it had become impossible to carry out the purpose of the founders and the subsequent benefactors of the Seminary so long as the creedal require- ments of the Constitution and Statutes were strictly enforced, and relieving the Trustees and Visitors from the necessity of complying with these requirements except to the extent of see- ing to it that the theological views held by the professors and by the members of the Board of Visitors are in conformity with those obtaining among Trinitarian Congregationalists generally."
But still the seminary was in a dilemna. Andover lacked the endowment to resume instruction alone, her old buildings at Andover had been sold to Phillips Academy, and Andover Hall in Cambridge was not available. And then a way out appeared. Andover had received an invitation from the Newton Theological Institution to join forces. Andover was Congregational and Newton was Baptist, but that did not matter, for denominational lines no longer set up the barrier that they formerly had.
In 1930, while the court proceedings were going on, the invitation was formally accepted by the proper authorities, and undergraduate instruction was resumed at the beginning of the year 1931-32. The name of the new school was to be the "Andover Newton Theological School," and it was to be located at Newton Center. The affiliation has been most friendly and it is hoped that it will remain so. At last a quarter of a century of unrest had resulted in an amicable and profitable arrangement, thanks to those who had kept the purpose of and the interest in the seminary ever before them.
We have thus seen the vital part that Essex County has played in the development of organized religion. The first Congregational Church founded on the soil of this country was in Salem in 1629, and the first Sunday school was founded in Beverly in 1810. It was in this county that George Whitefield did so much to revivify religion and it is in Newburyport that his body rests. Here it was that in 1808 the Andover Theological School was founded in which the impetus was given for the beginning of missionary work at home and abroad and at which most of the Congregational ministers of the first half of the nineteenth century in Massachusetts received their
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training. Well may the accomplishments of Essex County, in reli- gion as well as in many other matters, be admired.
BIBLIOGRAPHY-The following works have been used in the preparation of this chapter :
"The Emancipation of Massachusetts, the Dream and the Real- ity," Brooks Adams, Boston and New York, 1887.
"Old New England Churches and Their Children," Dolores Bacon, New York, 1906.
"Old Andover Days," Sarah Stuart Robbins, Boston, 1908.
"And Old New England School, a History of Phillips Academy, Andover," Claude M. Fuess, Boston and New York, 1917.
"History of Andover Theological Seminary," H. K. Rowe, New- ton, 1933.
"Salem in the Seventeenth Century," J. Duncan Phillips, Boston and New York, 1933.
"The Founding of New England," J. T. Adams, Boston, 1927.
"Puritan's Progress," Arthur Train, New York, 1931.
"The Religious History of New England," King's Chapel Lec- tures, Cambridge, 1917.
"The Life of Mary Baker Eddy," Sibyl Wilbur, Boston, 1907.
"Main Currents in American Thought, an Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920," V. L. Parring- ton, New York, 1927.
"Commonwealth History of Massachusetts," A. B. Hart, New York, 1930.
"The Standard History of Essex County," published by C. F. Jewett and Company, Boston, 1878.
"History of Essex County," published by J. W. Lewis and Com- pany, Philadelphia, 1888.
"Municipal History of Essex County," published by Lewis His- torical Publishing Company, New York, 1921.
"History of the Catholic Church in the New England States," published by Hurd and Everts Company, Boston, 1899.
Literature in Essex County
CHAPTER XVII
Literature in Essex County
By Katharine Thompson
By far the greatest number of the writers of Essex County were concerned with politics and religion. The first writers, Nathaniel Ward and Anne Bradstreet, had themselves come to this country because of their religious convictions, which had necessarily become political convictions, and once here, continued to express them. Later in the same century John Wise was also preoccupied with religion and politics. After him there were more than a hundred sterile years in which parson and politician alike were dull and dusty. It was not until the crusade against slavery that new emotion and, therefore, new eloquence appeared. Without Essex County, what would Abolition have been ?- without William Lloyd Garrison and his "Liberator"; without John Greenleaf Whittier and his poetry; without Harriet Beecher Stowe and her "Uncle Tom's Cabin; without Gail Hamilton and her "National Era" articles. On the other side, with only less vehemence, the democratic George Lunt fought to prevent the Civil War, which he foresaw as the only outcome of the Abolitionist campaign.
Though Abolition ended by becoming a political issue, it was, like the cause which brought Essex County its first inhabitants, origi- nally a religious one. For all the Abolitionist writers it was a battle for the Lord that they were waging. Moreover, Whittier wrote hymns, as did his elder, Hannah Flagg Gould; Mrs. Stowe published religious tracts; and, later on in the nineteenth century, Charles Timothy Brooks published his sermons, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward interpreted the life beyond.
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After the Civil War, politics and religion gave place to criticisms of literature. But, unfortunately, though the fervor of crusade had faded, the consciousness of moral superiority, the necessity for making over the world, the intolerance of fanaticism still persisted. Edwin Percy Whipple, Samuel Thomas Pickard, William Winter, and George Edward Woodberry were all in varying degrees distinguished as critics; but too often they looked on literature from the point of view of morality, and tended to judge according to rather sterile dogmas. .
First in time among Essex County's historians were Joseph Bar- low Felt and Alonzo Lewis, who wrote local history; then came the very distinguished William Hickling Prescott, who was followed by the scholarly Cornelius Conway Felton, the dry Epes Sargent, the industrious James Parton, and Lucy Larcom, whose autobiography is the best history of Essex County during her childhood.
There are other solitary stars, belonging to no constellation- Nathaniel Bowditch, the man of science, and, perhaps, scarcely visible to the naked eye, Wilson Flagg, the naturalist.
With most of the novelists and the poets, as well as the critics of literature, the wish to improve and to enlighten has been greater than the wish to communicate emotions or to create character. Thus the poetry of Hannah Gould and William Bingham Tappan may once have improved, but cannot now give pleasure; Robert Stevenson Cof- fin, who combined moralizing with self-pity, is merely an historical curiosity; much of Whittier's poetry can no longer be read; and Charles Timothy Brooks is as much the minister in his poems as in his sermons. But there were exceptions : .
Henry Pickering, in the early eighteenth century, was concerned with poetry as an art; Jones Very had a touch of the true mystic's penetration; some of Whittier's poems survive because of their genuine emotion; and William Wetmore Story, at the end of the nine- teenth century, and George Edward Woodberry, in the twentieth, though by no means great, were yet poets for the love of poetry, and not for the sake of instruction.
Though Epes Sargent, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Arthur Sherburne Hardy were either over- moral or trivial, some of the novels of Mrs. Stowe are still alive, and, to a less degree, there is life to be found in the writing of Elizabeth
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SALEM-CAPTAIN JOHN TURNER HOUSE "The House of the Seven Gables," 54 Turner Street, built about 1668
Courtesy of The Essex Institute
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Stuart Phelps, while Nathaniel Hawthorne, the chief glory of Essex County literature, is accounted one of the great novelists of America. And today Essex County shows as lively a devotion to literature as in any time in the past.
The first author of Essex County, and one of the first of America, was Nathaniel Ward, whose wit, according to Cotton Mather, "made him known to more Englands than one." He was born in Haverhill, England, around 1570, the son of the Reverend John Ward, the "painful minister." Though his two brothers were also clergymen, he studied law; he went to Emmanuel College and took his Master of Arts degree in Cambridge in 1603. He read law in the Temple, and studied and practiced law in London for ten years. Then he traveled on the continent. While he was in Heidelberg, at the court of the Elector Palatinate and the English Princess Elizabeth, he met the learned Calvinist, David Pareus, who prevailed upon him to take orders. For some time he was chaplain to the Eastland Company, which had a factory in the little town of Elbing, lost in East Prussia. Then he became rector of Stondon Massey in England. Related by marriage to the Winthrops, he became a freeman of the Massachu- setts Bay Company before the charter was transferred from Eng- land; he was offered, in 1629, the opportunity to go with the Win- throp fleet as its pastor, but declined. It soon became clear to him, however, that England, under Laud, was no place for him; he was first charged with non-conformity, in 1631; and then, in 1633, excom- municated and deprived of his living for heresy. His wife died; he left England and came to America in 1634. Almost at once he was called to Ipswich.
This tiny frontier settlement, founded the year before, already included such a group of distinguished inhabitants as few American cities to this date have been able to boast. Living there, Ward found Nathaniel Rogers, who also had been excommunicated by Laud; John Norton, whose scholarship was famous; John Winthrop, Jr .; Rich- ard Bellingham; Thomas Dudley, his daughter Anne and her husband, Simon Bradstreet, and his daughter Patience and her husband, Daniel Denison; Giles Firmin, Ward's own son-in-law; Samuel Symonds, and Sir Richard Saltonstall.
Three years later he resigned his pastorate, because of illness, but continued to live in Ipswich. In 1638 he was appointed a member of
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a commission to prepare the Body of Liberties, the first bill of rights in the Colony. Though several others had tried to draw it up and failed, Ward succeeded. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his brilliant chap- ter on Nathaniel Ward in the "Builders of the Bay Colony," said of him :
"He shared, and in a sense led, minister as he was, the struggle for democracy against theocracy, the struggle to secure for the people of Massachusetts a government of laws and not of men."
For in the few years since the founding of the Colony, the magis- trates had increasingly taken the power into their hands. The assist- ants governed according to the law of God-and that, Morison points out, meant that "the magistrates' discretion, or maybe indigestion, was the real law." Adopted in 1641, the Body of Liberties was fairly liberal and humane for its time, and above all, it was founded on common law and not on Leviticus.
To recompense him for his labors, the grateful Colony voted him some land in Haverhill, which when he came to sell it, returned him only £12. He was bitter about his poverty: "I am very destitute : I have not above 6 bushels of corne left, and other things answer- able. . .. And he used the simile, "empty as a New English purse, and emptier it cannot bee."
In 1643 he was among those who signed the petition against Governor Winthrop's intervention in the battle over Nova Scotia between Charles de la Tour and the Sieur d'Aulnay-a disrespectful and mutinous petition, the tone of which was later to be echoed by Ward's addresses to his King. And he was chosen, in 1645, by the General Court to be a member from Essex County of a commission to draw up laws to be submitted at the next Legislature. The next year he returned to England, where he finished and, in 1647, published the work for which he is chiefly known -- "The Simple Cobler of Agga- wam" -- the Indian name for Ipswich. He used as his pseudonym the thin disguise of Theodore de la Guard, a translation of his first name into Greek and his surname into French. This little book was, in the words of Professor Morison, "a serious but witty argument against religious toleration, arbitrary government and extravagant fashions." His rage ran high against
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"futulous women and phantasies which are the very petitoes of infirmity, the giblets of perquisquilian toys."
He was far from being an indiscriminate lover of his fellowmen:
"Cursed be he that maketh not his sword starke drunk with Irish blood."
and
"All Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists and other En- thusiasts shall have free Liberty to keepe away from us and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better."
Not even the King's Majesty is immune from his attacks :
"what moves you to take up armes against your faithfull sub- jects when your Armes should bee embracing your mournfull Queen ?"
and he reminds him roundly of the
"vast heritage of sinne your Intombed father left upon your score; your own sinful marriage; the sophistication of Reli- gion and Policy in your time; your connivance with the Irish butcheries. . . ..
Yet for all his sturdiness, he had a simple and lovely talent for verse-making :
"There, lives cannot be good, There, Faith cannot be sure, Where Truth cannot be quiet, Nor Ordinances pure.
"No King can King it right, Nor rightly sway his Rod, Who truely loves not Christ, And truely fears not God."
He continued to do battle for the rest of his life. In June, 1647, he preached a sermon before the House of Commons vigorously attacking the King, the army and the Long Parliament, and "His Religious Retreat Sounded to a Religious Army" in the same year exhorted the army to lay down its arms. "Mercurius Anti-mechani-
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cus, or the Simple Cobler's Boy," in 1647, attacked those who discour- aged learning in preachers and thought that they should do lay work all the week. He died in Shenfield, Essex, of which he had been made minister.
Whether Nathaniel Ward seems to the reader, as he does to Professor Morison, "the outstanding figure in the legal phase of our history"; or whether it appears to him as to Ludwig Lewisohn that Ward's "unconscious exposition of the moral pathology of Puritanism is complete," he is not only the earliest literary man of America, but also one on whom the United States can still continue to pride itself.
"Reader," said Cotton Mather, eulogizing one of Na- thaniel Ward's Ipswich neighbors,
"Reader, America justly admires the learned women of the other hemisphere. . ... But she now prays that into such catalogues of authoresses as Beverovicius, Hottinger and Voetius have given unto the world, there may be a room now given unto Madam Ann Bradstreet, the daughter of our Gov- ernor Dudley and the consort of Governor Bradstreet, whose poems have afforded a grateful entertainment unto the ingeni- ous and a monument for her memory beyond the stateliest marbles."
In exactly such high-sounding catalogues of literary curiosities, Anne Bradstreet has languished until she was recently rescued by Samuel Eliot Morison, who showed her to be a very human person and a writer of poems which, though for the most part too artificial for modern taste, are often very touching.
She was born about 1612 in Northampton, England, and was brought up in Tattershall Castle, where her father, Thomas Dudley, was steward to the Earl of Lincoln. She was well-educated :
"When I was about seven, I had at one time eight tutors in languages, music and dancing."
She was from birth delicate, and all her life, though she had eight children and lived to be sixty, she suffered from fainting fits and fevers. A faithful student and a devoted admirer of her scholarly and able father, she read much Greek and Latin. From him also she inherited her love of poetry, though little is known of his own writing.
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When she was sixteen, she was married to Simon Bradstreet, who was also steward for the Earl of Lincoln. Son of a non-Conformist minister. he had taken his Master of Arts degree in 1624. In 1630 Dudley was appointed Deputy Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company and Simon Bradstreet one of the assistants. The Dudleys and the Bradstreets came over together on the "Arbella."
After the comfort and ease of her previous life. the wilderness was for Anne Bradstreet at first a great trial. In this new country, she said :
"I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose. But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it."
She was aided, too. in her submission, by her devotion to her husband, whose "loving and grave companionship" was the mainstay of her life.
They remained for a while in Cambridge, and then all went together to Ipswich. It is significant of the family's passion for learn- ing that even to that remote settlement, approached by no roads except Indian trails. Governor Dudley took along a good library. Later Simon Bradstreet helped to found the new settlement at Cochi- chawick (later North Andover ) and about 1650 he moved there.
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