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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01750 8653
GENEALOGY 977.102 C49SY
THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH OF CINCINNATI (UNITARIAN)
A HISTORY
BY GEORGE AUGUSTINE THAYER PASTOR EMERITUS
1917
5300
THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH (UNITARIAN) OF CINCINNATI
A HISTORICAL SKETCH
WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER, AND UNITY CHURCH
BY GEORGE AUGUSTINE THAYER PASTOR EMERITUS
CINCINNATI MAY, 1917
Unitarian Church Cincinnati in 1835-Fourth Street, West from Vine
A HISTORY OF THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH OF CINCINNATI
T `HE year 1830, from which dates the corporate existence of the Unitarian church of Cincinnati, was in the midst of an American religious revolution which began on the North Atlantic coast, notably in Massachusetts, some fifteen years before, about 1815, and spread into the new West, largely under the influence of emigrants from those older states.
This spiritual revolution known as the rise of organized Unitarianism, had indeed been quietly preparing for many years; for several of the ministers of the older Congregational Churches from the colonial days, and especially after the separation of the colonies from the mother country, Great Britain, had shown what then were termed liberal tendencies in their preaching, and some of them were openly charged by their more conservative fellow ministers with being disguised Socinians, this epithet being the prevalent term of odium against those who did not believe the doctrine of the Triune- God, one God in three persons.
John Adams, of Massachusetts, the second President of the United States, who was frankly and openly a Unitarian, said that as early as 1750 many of the ministers of the most impor- tant New England Congregational Churches, as well as con- siderable numbers of laymen and women, were Unitarians, and in 1787, James Freeman, Minister of King's Chapel, in Boston, an Episcopal Church, was ordained as an avowedly Unitarian teacher, the first instance of a public recognition of the right of a Unitarian to hold a ministerial charge.
Most of such liberal preaching was cautious and reserved in the expression of criticism or denial of the prevalent doc- trines; the hearers recognized its heretical drift rather by what was omitted than by any positive statements. But it was often remarked by those whose ears were alert for dangerous teaching, that from these liberal pulpits might be heard, year after year, sermons in which there was no allusion to such
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fundamental doctrines as the atonement, justification by faith, election and eternal damnation. Discourses upon the con- duct of life, the beauty of holiness, the dignity of human nature, were the characteristic emphases of such preachers.
Nor was this avoidance of controverted doctrines caused by timidity or by hypocrisy. Rather it was felt by the wisest of the Congregational ministers that doctrinal discourses upon points which had little relation to daily living, would inevitably tend to arouse resentment among the thoughtful and rational members of the churches, of whom there was an increasing number, as the nation grew older and richer, and so produce an open division among the churches, a schism and split, such as indeed came about a few years later.
William Ellery Channing, minister of the Federal Street Church of Boston, who presently became the champion and leader of the pronounced Unitarian believers, said in those earlier days that differences of opinion upon obscure points of theology, like the nature of God, the character of the future life, the distinction between the divine and the human in the person of Jesus, must unavoidably arise in all honest religious thinking, and for the peace and reputation for intellectual respectability of the churches, they must be allowed to exist, while the churches attended to their more important duty of developing moral integrity and piety in their members. "We all think it best to preach what we esteem to be the truth, and to say very little about speculative error." Since theological doctrine has always been the breath of life of the majority of church members, lay and clerical, it was soon plain that such non-committalism upon the central doctrines of the ancient Christian Church would not long be tolerated by the conserva- tive element in the churches, and so there was presently an open break between the liberals and the orthodox of all the leading churches of New England. And before the year 1820 most of the principal First Congregational Churches of the region, including those of Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, Plymouth, Cambridge, Salem and others, had arrayed them- selves deliberately and officially upon the Unitarian side.
The decisive marshalling of the two sets of theological opponents, the Trinitarian Congregationalists and the Uni- tarian Congregationalists, dated from the year 1819, when
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Channing preached an ordination sermon in Baltimore in which he maintained, for himself and the churches which were known to be in sympathy with him, that God existed in Unity and not in an unintelligible Trinity; that human nature was of God, for all its weaknesses, and not entirely depraved and hostile to all good, and that the Bible must be interpreted by enlight- ened reason which was the divine illuminationin the soul of man.
The Unitarian uprising marked a new Protestantism in America, an assertion of the right of new knowledge and new spiritual vision to take the place in the teachings of the Congre- gational churches-which, as the name Congregational signi- fied, were voluntary associations of self-governing people-of the old ideas of the past, many of which had become impossible of acceptance by enlightened and courageous minds. The movement spread over the country wherever the children of the Atlantic colonies dispersed to form settlements.
Under the inspiration and guidance of officers of the Ameri- can Unitarian Association, which was formed in 1825, churches of the liberal faith were started in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1825; in Cincinnati and Louisville in 1830; in Buffalo in 1832; in New Orleans in 1833; in St. Louis in 1834; in Chicago in 1836, and in Milwaukee in 1842. Most of these adopted the familiar name of First Congregational, but now and then other names were preferred, such as Church of the Messiah, which appellative was attached to the organizations in Louis- ville and St. Louis.
While Cincinnati had no lack of churches when the propo- sition was made to establish here a Unitarian church, all such as were already upon the ground had as their basis of faith the doctrines which New England Unitarians had abandoned, as unsuited to the intelligence and moral sense of the times. The new Cincinnati church was therefore to be founded upon the ideas of the essential dignity of human nature; the impartial goodness of God, as right reason should understand goodness; "Nothing can be good in Him which evil is in me;" the trustworthiness of cultivated reason or intelligence in deal- ing with all doctrines whether in the Bible or elsewhere; and of emphasis upon character and conduct as the true tests of worth in the sight of God and men, rather than upon beliefs and ceremonials.
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The men and women who undertook to establish this church were to a considerable extent of New England birth, so that they were influenced by the sentiments of their kindred across the continent; but others from more Southern states were interested in the undertaking, and it was not therefore a pro- vincial movement. Neither was theirs the Unitarianism of our present generation, which has dropped a number of the phrases and beliefs which were then deemed sacred parts of the true Christian doctrine.
Reverence for the letter and unerring accuracy of the Bible; the ascription of a nature somewhere betwixt Deity and humanity to Jesus, and a veiled acceptance of the idea that happiness in the future life was conditioned upon church membership in this life, such were some of the ideas deemed important and vital in a basis of religious union which no longer find a place in Unitarian preaching. But an ancient difference which had disturbed the peace of the New England churches soon developed in this church. This was between those who were willing to participate in the celebration of the Communion or the Lord's Supper, and those who contented themselves with the maintenance of the church revenues and with attend- ance upon the services of worship, and were indisposed to call themselves religious communicants.
In the early Summer of 1830, Rev. Charles Briggs, the representative of the American Unitarian Association, met a group of the friends of the proposed church, at some private house, and submitted a basis of organization to the following effect: "We, whose names are subjoined, having a firm belief in the Christian Revelation, and being desirous of making it the rule of our faith and practice, and advancing the cause of pure and undefiled religion, unite together to form a Christian church." Some twenty persons signed this agreement but when, in the following Autumn, Edward B. Hall, the first minister, proposed, after the uniform custom of the Unitarian churches, to have the Communion service, he found considerable reluctance upon the part of some of these signers to thus formally identify themselves with what they deemed a sur- vival of the old orthodoxy. Hence he proposed another formula which allowed a distinct classification of church members apart from church attendants and supporters, to the following
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purport: "I believe in the Holy Scriptures as the word of God, and receive them as the proper and only rule of faith and duty. I believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, exalted to be a prince and savior, the mediator between God and man, the way, the truth and the life. On His religion I rest my hopes of salvation, His precepts I wish to obey, and I now unite myself to this church, to commemorate His love in the ordinance which He instituted and gave to His disciples, the Lord's Supper. I do this as an expression of my firm faith in the divinity of His religion and my earnest desire to live as His disciple and become through the mercy of God an heir of sal- vation." To this covenant the following men and women subscribed their names: Timothy Flint, William Greene, William P. Rice, Abigail Flint, Peter R. Bryant, Timothy Walker, James Ryland, William E. Chamberlain, Em. H. Flint, William Donaldson, Mrs. Brigham, Mrs. Greene, Miss L. Lyman, Cornelia Brigham, Mrs. Smith, John R. Child, Hannah R. Child, T. Henry Yeatman, Robert Rands, Charles Fisher, Christian Donaldson, A. M. Donaldson, Mary Donald- son, Jane Donaldson, Jesse Smith, Charlotte Lyman, Francis Donaldson, Rebecca R. Stetson, M. A. H. Sampson, U. Tracy Howe, Abigail Thayer, Mary Jane Peabody, Eliza Putnam. Other names were added in the course of the following years, down to 1855, when the then minister, Abiel Abbot Livermore, drew up a new covenant which remained as the basis of church fellowship until the substitution in 1879, by Rev. Charles William Wendte, of the formula of church union which up to the present writing has not been disturbed.
Meanwhile the organization of a body of supporters of the proposed church had been completed by securing from the state government an act of incorporation of "the First Congregational Church of Cincinnati, in the County of Hamil- ton," which was granted January 21, 1830, the petitioners for the act of incorporation being Elisha Brigham, William Greene, Nathan Guilford, Jesse Smith and Christian Donaldson.
This formal establishment of a church corporation was, it would appear, the culmination of a series of gatherings for two or three years of sympathizers with the movement, both in private houses and in the Council chamber of the City Hall. The Rev. John Pierpont, one of the most influential of Boston
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Unitarians, came to the city in 1828, preaching and visiting, and made report to the American Unitarian Association to the effect that the field was admirably suited to the mainte- nance of a successful Unitarian Church.
The expedition with which the church edifice was erected, so as to be dedicated on the twenty-third of May, 1830, indi- cates that the project was under way before the act of incorpora-
Fourth and Race Streets-1830
tion. Indeed there is on record the purchase of a house and lot from Isaac Condin for $3,700, for a Unitarian Church, on the 20th of May, 1829, and in the Cincinnati Directory of that year the Unitarian Church is included in the list of the city churches. The new house of worship was situated upon the southwest corner of Race and Fourth streets, not far from another more pretentious edifice of the Second Presbyterian Congregation. The entire cost of the completed building with its land was $10,512.48, a value which indicates the modesty
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of its architecture. For the services of dedication the Reverend Bernard Whitman came from Massachusetts to preach the sermon and the Reverend John Pierpont contributed a hymn which remains upon a "broadside" preserved in the church records, as follows:
Hymn for the dedication of the First Congregational Church of Cincinnati to the One Almighty God
Composed for the occasion by Rev. John Pierpont of Boston.
I
IV
To God, to God alone This temple have we reared; To God who holds a throne Unshaken and unshared. Who'st heard our prayers And blessed our cares, To Thee 'tis given.
To all, O God of love, Dost Thou Thy footsteps show; The white and blue above, The green and gold below; The grove, the breeze, The morning's beam, The star, the stream
They're seen in Thee.
II
O Thou whose bounty fills This plain so rich and wide, And makes its guardian hills Rejoice on every side, With shady tree And growing grain This decent fane We give to Thee.
V
Where now, in goodly show Thy domes of art are piled, Thy paths not long ago Dropped fatness on a wild.
O let us see Thy goings here Where now we rear A house for Thee.
III
Thou who hast ever stooped To load our land with good, Whose hand this vale hath scooped, And rolleth down its flood To the far sea- This house we raise And now with praise Devote to Thee.
VI
Nursed by the blessed dew, And light of Bethlehem's star, A vine on Calvary grew And cast its shade afar. A storm went by- One blooming bough Torn off, buds now Beneath our sky.
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IX
VII
O let no drought or blight This plant of Thine come nigh; But may the dew, all night, Upon its branches lie; Till towards this vine All flesh shall press, And taste and bless Its fruit and wine.
The grace and truth that came By Thine annointed Son, Here let such lips proclaim As fire has fallen upon From out the high And holy place Where dwells in grace Thy Deity.
VIII
Because, O Lord, Thy grace Hath visited the West, And given our hearts a place Of worship and of rest; Old age and youth, The weak, the strong, Shall praise in song Thy grace and truth.
X
To Thee, to Thee alone, This temple have we reared- To Thee, before whose throne Unshaken and unshared, Sole king of heaven With thanks we bow- This temple now For praise is given.
Our city at this time was a place rather of promise, as to its development in the respects which constitute modern ideas of sanitation and convenience, good government and archi- tectural beauty, than of achievement. Its population was about twenty thousand, made up from the somewhat hetero- geneous elements which have always formed the new settle- ments of the West, among these as today, a considerable number of negroes, perhaps one or two thousand, whose relation to the peace of the community was often more irri- tating than at the present day, since across the Ohio River was slave-holding territory from which runaways were numerous, to stir up political animosities. The majority of the white settlers were from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Ken- tucky; their standards of education and intellectual interest different from, and somewhat lower than those of the fewer natives of New England. From the latter class came the initiative of the public school system and some of the most active promoters of popular education were among the founders of the Unitarian Church, the name of one of them, Nathan Guilford, being borne by one of the handsomest of recent school buildings, that on Fourth street east of Broadway.
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The existence of negro slavery at our doors was very certain to become an occasion of vehement differences of civic and religious duty among the citizens, one class of whom, from the more northern states, had learned to view with abhorrence the possibility that human beings should be bought and sold as chattels and brought their prejudices to this new country; while another class, familiar at close hand with the slavery system, familiarity breeding indifference, were hardened as to its moral consequences, and found ample justification for its toleration in the economic prosperity which it brought to the free states. Cincinnati, for the succeeding thirty years, was a much frequented resort of the Southern planters, who came to spend their leisure at its hotels and amusement places, often accompanied by their personal negro servants, and making liberal purchases of the wares of the manufacturers and tradesmen. To offend these visitors and their neighbors by unfavorable comments upon the institution which gave them their wealth and social distinction, was apt to be deemed a crime against the community's welfare which the newspapers resented habitually, and which was not infrequently taken in hand by mobs who damaged the property and threatened the lives of the offenders. A good many of these personal servants, attending their masters and mistresses in their visits, made escape from servitude by the aid of white anti-slavery friends, who maintained a chain of shelters for such fugitives, where they were fed and guarded against the pursuers until they could be safely landed in Canada, which was out of the jurisdiction of United States custom and law. These shelters came to be known in popular parlance as underground railway stations, chiefly because the business of passing the fugitives along to their destination of freedom was carried on mostly by night, out of the observation of spies and other enemies. Several of such "stations" have been famous in our local history, the houses demolished quite recently, the participants in the process of forcible emancipation being well-known, respectable citizens even at the early periods when their business was dangerous to their personal safety.
Since the ministers who were to take charge of the Unitarian church, from the first, were without exception, from New England, where hostility to slavery had been long a com-
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monplace of moral teaching, it was inevitable that their ideas of the freedom and responsibilities of the pulpit would clash with much of the prevailing sentiment of the community, and thus it came to pass that the exercise of such frankness of criticism and condemnation of the slaveholders and their control of national politics became the rock of offence upon the part of at least two of the pastors, William Henry Channing and Moncure D. Conway, upon which their pastorate broke to pieces, the irritation of those within the church who viewed their mode of discussion of such a sensitive subject as unwise and intemperate, joining with the anger of outsiders of the community and the denunciations of the daily newspapers, to make their tenure of the pastoral office unhappy and inexpe- dient of continuance.
To these native elements of the growth of the town popu- lation were slowly being added some European immigrants who reached our valley by the tedious roundabout course of landing at New Orleans and journeying up the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers, by steamboat when such conveyance was available, or by the more primitive process of flatboats "poled" upstream.
By 1829 the newly invented marvel of steam navigation had resulted in numerous fleets of side-wheelers and stern- wheelers in the larger rivers of the nation, the latter class adapted to the shallow streams; but the waters of the Ohio and its tributaries were not always at navigable depth for any craft of whatsoever light draught; railroads were not to come into general use until the forties and hence there were many discouragements to the daring Europeans who were ambitious of making their fortunes in the interior of our continent, who made their way by stagecoach over land or by small boats over the water. One such courageous adventurer was Mrs. Frances Trollope, an English woman who sought to retrieve her domestic losses by establishing some commercial enterprise in the new world. Her "Bazaar," upon the present East Third Street, not far from the mimic log house which commemorates the site of the first settlement, Fort Washington, a warehouse of miscel- laneous commodities appealing to the tastes of the people, was a financial failure; but with the elastic temper which sub- sequently made her prosperous as a story-writer, she turned
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her calamity in our neighborhood to good purpose in incorpo- rating her Cincinnati experiences into a story of her haps and mishaps in the new world called "The Domestic Manners of Americans." Mrs. Trollope's lively descriptions of the short- comings of our primitive social usages greatly scandalized our country-people at that time; but a later, less thin-skinned generation finds considerable amusement in the evident accuracy of a good many of her judgments, for ours was indeed a community in the first processes of civilization, often untidy, unsanitary, illiterate, with many frontier habits, notably in the matter of strong drink, and infected by the Southern slavery methods of not undertaking until tomorrow what can be postponed today. Thus she reports that droves of hogs served as the habitual scavengers of the town streets, and that her newly occupied dwelling was destitute of cistern, pump, drain or any public means of disposing of rubbish and offal. But she joins to that of most other newcomers her unstinted admiration of the natural beauty and fertility of the region, with the river set between attractive banks of verdure, in an atmosphere unclouded by the modern smoke of factories and locomotives, the background of wooded hills, with many strange flowers and noble trees of unfamiliar species; and especially the abundant markets supplied by the farmers' wagons. Some of the most attractive residences were upon the Third Street terrace west of Vine Street, facing the river, where the leaders of the new congregation held the social gatherings of the church, and besides, made a reputation for hospitality to distinguished visitors from the Eastern states and from abroad, which contributed much to the fair fame of the community.
Of the first active members of the congregation only a few men and women have left definite records in the city. Timothy Flint, whose name heads the subscription to the first of the church covenants, had been for several years a missionary sent by the Presbyterian church of Connecticut into the Missis- sippi valley, where he and his wife endured many hardships. Abandoning his office of Presbyterian missionary, in 1827, he became a resident of Cincinnati, which he had visited several times in the course of his itinerant duties, and remained for six years and a half, going farther South after this time for his health, and eventually dying in Massachusetts, in 1840. While
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here he was a highly prolific and notable literary worker, establishing among his many other activities, a magazine of religion, philanthropy and literature, called the "Western Monthly Review," which like some other similar periodicals whose foundations were laid by members of the Unitarian congregation, was suited by its cultivated standards to but a limited constituency of educated persons and suspended its publication in three years. Later ventures in the literary field, conducted chiefly by the Unitarian leaders, were the "Western Messenger," edited by Messrs. Peabody, Perkins, Cranch, Gallagher and James Freeman Clarke of Louisville; the "Western Monthly Magazine," edited by James Hall, to which Perkins freely contributed; the "Cincinnati Mirror," a weekly paper conducted by Perkins, Gallagher and not unlikely, Flint; and "The Dial," established and chiefly written by Conway.
Mr. Flint, who no longer desired to be recognized as a clergyman, was the author of several novels of distinction in their day; and of magazine articles of science and travel for numerous Eastern journals. But his most important writing was the History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley, in two volumes, published in 1828, which, with its appendix of description of the physical geography of the whole North American Continent, long held pre-eminence among such treatises throughout the country and still retains considerable value as a story of the pioneer conditions of this Western region. From the intellectual vigor of Flint, and his broad, advanced conceptions of the province of the churches which he thought were wasting precious strength and opportunity in sectarian theological discussion, when the age needed especially moral and spiritual guidance and stimulus, it may be presumed that the earliest suggestions of the formation of a liberal church came from him. In the first year of his residence in Cincinnati, in 1828, the "Pandect," a journal of orthodoxy among whose conspicuous writers was Rev. Joshua L. Wilson, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, assailed Mr. Flint for heretical ideas in his "Monthly Review," and accused him, among other alleged offenses, of being a denier of the doctrine of the Trinity, which especial accusation Mr. Flint acknowledged to be true. It was at this period that official Unitarian visitors from Boston came to consider the
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