The Travel Letters of Alexander Campbell . . .

SUNRISE ON LONG ISLAND SOUND

In our last issue we left Mr. Campbell in Cicero, New York, ready to move on to Syracuse and finally to New England and Long Island sound. All along the way he chronicles his experiences with such depth that we are allowed to share his reactions as he discovers more and more the exciting new world that had become his adopted country. He was thrilled by the wonders of nature, and he sought to capture them upon the printed page so that his far-flung readership could share in the scenes that they were not likely to see for themselves.

But he was not oblivious to the more delicate forms of nature, even if more animate, particularly the fairer sex. If such Campbellian scholars as Louis Cochran and Perry Gresham find evidence that Alexander was attractive to women, there being the instance of one who followed him home all the way from Scotland and another who could see him only in the finest navy blue when actually he was dressed in Kentucky jeans, it is equally probable that women were attractive to him. At least he did not ignore them as he perused the United States of the 1830’s.

In a letter from Lewiston, N. Y., June 18, 1836, to his wife and daughters back in Bethany, he ventures this comparison: “There are many very elegant ladies, highly cultivated and refined, from Boston and New York, as well as from other places, but none for whom God has done more intellectually, morally, and, indeed, in every way, than for my excellent wife and amiable daughters.” And to Selina a few days latter he writes, perhaps reassuringly: “The New Yorkers are intelligent and shrewd. Generally the ladies are well accomplished; some very refined, but not superior to the Virginia ladies. They read much, work little, but are great economists.”

From Saratoga Springs, a popular health resort in those days if not still, he says to Selina: “Here they are from all States and countries, and from Europe. The lame, the halt, the feeble are here drinking the healing streams. But there are more, many more, here who come to show themselves and to be seen rather than for health — many ladies to look for husbands and many men for wives. So that we have beauty and fashion, pride and pomp in full style and glory.”

It is therefore evident that Alexander did not miss anything in his ventures abroad when it came to style, glory, charm, and beauty — whether in the form of rushing rivers or lovely women! And the women were an important part of his effort to restore the ancient order. He found them receptive to his desire to liberate them from oblivion in sectarian religion, and they represented a large percentage of those who joined the Restoration Movement. To Selina he wrote from Syracuse: “Yesterday there followed me nine miles a Presbyterian lady from Cicero — where some persons had been immersed — with many tears, desiring to obey the Lord.”

Campbell was disturbed in finding burgeoning America so enamored of the things of this world. He complained that his day audiences in Syracuse were thin because “the people in New York generally are determined to seek, first and chief of all, the good things of this world, and then leave it to the mercy of Heaven whether the kingdom of heaven shall be added.” It seems strange to us that back in the 1830’s it was common for a popular speaker to do his thing in the morning or afternoon, leaving the evenings for the social amenities. But in Syracuse Campbell had to lecture at night. And they heard from him about it. Said he: “In their Testament it reads ‘Seek first the present world, and the honors and rewards thereof. and heaven will be added to you,’ while in the original Greek it reads, ‘Seek first the kingdom of God and the righteousness required by him, and all these things (food and raiment) shall be added.’”

Along the way he observed the natural resources and the means of livelihood. He was impressed with the salt wells around Syracuse, noting that 186 factories with their potash kettles produce upwards of three millions of bushels of salt annually. Along a canal he observed immense strata of plaster of Paris, and in the environs were inexhaustible beds of water-lime used for hydraulic cement. All of this awed him as blessings of God that should lead people to repentance.

From Pompey hill, near Syracuse, he looked out from a 14,000 feet summit upon “the finest American landscape as respects beauty and grandeur we have yet seen.” He likened it to the summit of Mexico City with all its rich varieties of landscape, and even to some distant Elysium (a paradise in Greek mythology) that only bards of a more favored age may see. Revealing his positive attitude toward people and things, he looked out on a beautiful world with its many peaceful homes and rural bliss, and hoped for all men the tranquility of the scene before his eyes, that could be captured in words only by the poetry of the Mantuan bard of the Augustan age, a reference to Virgil.

In this setting he found “an excellent society of disciples,” led by a brother Wells whose eight sons and daughters were so exemplary of the faith that they made a picture even lovelier than the landscape. Campbell was most impressed with the solidarity of the home, ruled over by a priestly father and a devout mother, believing that it is here that the future of both church and society has its hope. Having immersed 16 in the Syracuse area, mostly Presbyterians, he was on his way to Albany.

These travel letters reveal a very observant man who immensely enjoyed himself. Life was exciting to Alexander Campbell. His world was the creation of God, and he was confident of ultimate victory for the forces of good. Equally important was his conviction that he was under commission of God to help usher in the grand millennium, which embraced all of life’s experiences, whether education or business or politics or religion. He wrote not only with a sense of history and destiny, but also in the spirit of a poet. Moving into the Mohawk valley toward Albany, he writes: “Here you see extensive plains covered with cattle, feeding on rich pastures or reclining under the cool shades of wide-spreading trees; there the hills are clothed with sheep cropping the tender grass. On this side the country rolls in gentle undulations, and on that it spreads into fertile valleys. Here it rises in stately hills decorated with every shade of forest green, and there it suddenly breaks into towering cliffs, whose rugged eminences, yet unbleached by ten thousand storms that have spent their fury upon their dark bleak surface, stand majestic, as if defying alike the hand of man and the wear of time.”

That doesn’t sound as much like a dyed-in-the-wool Lockean empiricist, as Campbell is so often described, as it does a romanticist touched by the spirit of a Robert Burns whose heart is aflame for old Scotia. It is note-worthy that in these travel letters there is as much of Campbell the poet, the naturalist, the ecologist, and the economist, as there is Campbell the reformer and theologian.

He supposed one could find no more beautiful country than those hills and vales he saw between Utica and Schenectady, sailing 80 miles of stretch along the Mohawk river. If favorable circumstances make for happiness, Campbell conceded, then surely those New Yorkers would be happy. But he thought of those lines of the poet that he often quotes:

They build too low who build beneath the skies,

Content and peace from no condition rise.

He saw that for the majority, at least, devotion to wealth and the nobility and aristocracy of New York dries up every fountain of pleasure which nature, art and religion open to mankind.

At Schenectady he left the river boat and took the railroad to Albany, which was then, with its 35,000, the seventh largest city in the nation. And Campbell mentions that it is the second oldest settlement in the union, next to Jamestown, founded in 1614. Having already delivered 59 discourses on this trip, and being “at least 50 percent below par,” Mr. Campbell decided to take it easy in Albany. He visited a splendid cathedral of the Regular Baptists, where both the governor of New York and the President of the United Stated held pews. Martin Van Buren, who had a law office in Albany, was to take office as the eighth President the following March, allowing Andrew Jackson, then in the White House, to retire to his beloved Hermitage in Tennessee, where Alexander Campbell also visited.

Campbell was never impressed with display in religion, so this “Patrician church,” which must have been ahead of its time in architectural splendour, turned him off. He was more impressed by the second Baptist church in town, though really first in origin, which was more fitted for “the Plebeian ranks.” This leads him to comment sardonically: “What a blessing it is that in this age the Christian religion accommodates itself so pliantly to the various tastes, fashions, and circumstances of mankind!” Kings, Governors, Popes, Patriarchs, and Arch-bishops may all be saints elect and become candidates for immortality, he observes, the poverty, ignominy, and devotion of old fashioned Christians to the contrary notwithstanding.

On to Saratoga Springs, he was impressed with the great numbers that had come to “make or mend their fortunes rather than repair their constitutions.” But there were the feeble who were waiting upon the moving power of the healing waters. As for himself, his depleted energies longed for rest and repose, so he “drank and bathed, and bathed and drank in good earnest” as if he had some faith in the health-restoring powers of the springs.

The elders of the Baptist church of Saratoga village told Alexander that since his views were regarded as heretical he would not be allowed. to address the Baptist community. After expressing this decision, they went on to ask him what his views were! This reminded Campbell of the pagan who ordered Paul to be whipped, and then asked him what he had done. He went on to speak in both the Methodist and Universalist churches, but with so little cooperation from the clergy as to have much smaller crowds than was his custom. At one point he had to give way to the celebrated revivalist, Mr. Burchard, the preacher who converted Charles Finney, who was holding forth in Saratoga Springs. Campbell, after hearing him, describes him as vehement, boisterous, and declamatory; and as wild, enthusiastic and perserving in phiz and voice. He was “impassioned in his oratory, illogical in much of his reasoning, and extremely hazardous in his quotations and applications of scripture.”

The likes of Burchard and Finney, almost as prevalent in our own day as in his, stand in bold contrast to a teacher of religion like Alexander Campbell. This helps us to understand how refreshing Campbell was to people who hardly ever heard any other kind. He never blasted people, but taught them simply and forcefully, with articulate and resonant voice. Once at his place in the pulpit, he seldom moved from his position and his gestures were few. Sometimes leaning on a cane, which he used even in his prime, he would occasionally reinforce a point with a rap of the cane upon the floor. His intention was to teach the people, believing as he did that ignorance was the church’s besetting sin, and there was no place for display in his performance.

“The people nowadays love excitement, strong feeling, noise, shouting, vehemence, and passion,” he complained after hearing Burchard.” He that shouts loudest, cries longest for fire from heaven, and talks most of hell, damnation, and eternal burnings, will catch the greatest multitude, and be most sainted by the ignorant and thoughtless mass, who cannot tell the difference between Old Testament and New, Sinai or Jerusalem.”

Mr. Burchard might have fared better with Campbell had he not openly branded him a deist and a Unitarian, which led Campbell to insist that his cause did not depend upon either misrepresentation or stopping the ears of the people.

In Manchester, Vermont he met a W. P. Reynolds, a disciple who had planted the ancient gospel in numerous places in that area. He impressed Campbell as both intelligent and zealous, and he was touched by this man’s willingness to sacrifice under such untoward financial circumstances. He calls upon his readers to lend him a helping hand. Now in the Green Mountains, he is again lost for words to describe the beauty that he enjoys. He made his way through these mountains just to bask in their sheer loveliness, being accompanied by a brother that not only knew his way around, but whose own father had fought in the Revolutionary War and had seen action along the banks of the Hudson in that very area, where the British surrendered to the American army.

Once in New England, he began comparing the advantages of the North with those of the South, and decided that God in his goodness grants full compensation to all habitations of man, by matching weaknesses with strengths and disadvantages with advantages. Vermont may not have the luxuries of the South, but they have firmer vegetables and better appetites. The soil may be less abundant in corn, but it is more profuse in grass and fine meadows. The ground may be comparatively sterile, but its mountains are rich in minerals. God has arranged it so that in the end, Campbell concluded, it will be as it was with Israel and the manna: “He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack.”

From Manchester he proceeded to Pawlet, where he broke bread with some 40 or 50 disciples, addressing them on their Christian duties. Without any “invitation song,” a few arose to declare their determination to follow the Lord, though it was not convenient for Campbell himself to attend to their immersion, for he soon departed for New Hampshire and Massachusetts, taking his passage in the stage for Boston.

In Boston he found the heterodox more open to his view than the orthodox, and since heterodoxy was then having its day in New England, he could not accept half the invitations extended him. But these included two famous churches of that time, the Temple on Tremont street and the great Cathedral of William Ellery Channing, the renowned Unitarian who made the church conscious of its social responsibilities, especially in reference to slavery. Campbell filled both edifices to capacity, and he went on record that audiences were as attentive and intelligent as could be found in any American city, but there is no evidence that he visited with Channing himself, who lived on until 1842.

Despite their willingness to listen, Campbell found that a quarter of a century of debating Unitarianism had left the Bostonians too fond of speculation, suspicious, and politely indifferent. They had a form of religion in terms of its decencies and good taste, he observes, but had lost the power of it in reference to virtue and holiness.

But Campbell was clearly impressed with the spirit he found in New England. Respecting intelligence, decency, and good order as he did, he found the people exemplary along these lines. Despite the weaknesses of Puritanism, its stamp of virtuous character was yet upon its sons. The stern discipline, rigid morality, and untemporizing conscientiousness of the pilgrim fathers was still evident in the moral vigor, health, and prosperity of the people. He took pride that the newer states of the West could look to “so pure a cradle, so healthful a nursery” from which to replenish their regions with virtuous sons and daughters as the old states of New England, where industry, wealth, morality and respect for the Bible all grow together.

It was apparently common for folk in the West to be “taken” by some cunning emissary from New England, so Campbell assures his readers that the head is not to be judged by its tail, and that the Yankees (his term) in general are highly trustworthy. One vantage point from which he judged Boston was Capitol Hill, from which he could see the homes of 200,000 people, without seeing one dwelling unworthy of the residence of man or what might be called a mean habitation. Moreover the intelligence, industry, and prosperity that he saw formed such a contrast to what was often so evident in the West and South that he was profoundly impressed. He noticed the woolen manufacturing in Lowell and the shoe industry of Lynn, better understanding how New Englanders can afford to educate their children.

As for the Restoration plea, he found numerous leaders advocating religion based upon the Bible alone, but they were so concerned with denouncing Trinitarianism and Calvinism, and otherwise being noisy in camp meetings, that he had little in common with them. But he did find a group of real disciples of reform in Salem, and at Lynn he himself immersed ten or twelve believers who formed the nucleus of a congregation there. Several were also added to the church in Boston while he was there.

In Boston he found a brother Himes who had started a school at Beverly, near Salem, an act that was to become a common experience in disciple history. Campbell visits the infant institution, and in recalling the experience sets forth reasons why concerned Christians should build such schools.” We may have schools of our own as well as our neighbors,” he says, “and we can have moral and religious and learned teachers under whom to place our children, as well as those of other societies. And is it not right that we should have our children educated in the principles which we most conscientiously approve?” And perhaps in anticipation of his own Bethany College, then barely five years away, he adds: “If, then, it can be done as cheap, and as well, and more in accordance with our notions of moral propriety, is there any law, or statute, or example in the good Book that forbids it; or that will not sanction it!”

Threatened by fatigue after much speaking in Boston, Campbell canceled his plans to visit Connecticut, “the land of steady habits.” He had to be satisfied with viewing the goodly land as he sailed Long Island Sound for short visits in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore before returning to his Virginia home. He was impressed with the conveniences of modern travel, for he made it from Boston to New York, 250 miles, in but 18 hours.

August 16, 1836 was a special day to Campbell, for early on that day he witnessed the rising of the sun at sea. The experience was so delightful that he awoke his traveling companions to share it with them. Once they were all seated on deck, each designated the spot on the eastern horizon where he expected the sun “to lift upon us his effulgent countenance.” As they gazed upon the far reaches of the Atlantic, which as a splendid mirror reflected the glories of heaven, they saw a brightness in the Orient which indicated the near approach of the joyful monarch of the sky.

“The crepuscular glimmerings gradually spread over all the East,” he later recorded, “and as they swept a loftier arch toward the Empyrean they assumed the brightness of liquid brass, while, deeply bedded in the far distant horizon, two pyramidal columns began to rise as if the clouds from the Atlantic had suddenly formed themselves into pillars for the gates of the morning, erecting a sublime porte for the entrance of Nature’s luminary.”

Describing the sun as if it were an artist at work, he adds: “Deeper and broader he laid on the molten gold till these two columns capped with rubies stood gilden from top to bottom. The curtains of night, which seemed to encircle this glorious arch, culminated over the spot where the eyelids of the morning began to open; but before we could take the dimensions of this new portico of day, the sun himself in all the gorgeousness of his own peerless glory, gently raised himself as if to peep over the silvery deep from which he was about to emerge.”

Now seeing the rising sun as if it were an actor upon Nature’s great celestial stage, he writes: “After a single glance, which dazzled on the back of every gentle curl on the surface around him, he suddenly, at a single bound, stood upon the sea, and by another effort drew after him, he suddenly, at a single bound, stood upon the sea, and by another effort drew after him from the briny deep a golden pedestal as if from a furnace of liquid fire, on which he seemed for a moment to sit, while from his dazzling locks floods of light and splendor began to flow. His yellow hairs, as if baptized in a sea of glory, dropped light and joy upon a world starting into life, while the gradual expanding of his wings proclaimed him about to fly the circuit of the universe.”

Finally, he was reminded of David’s poetry, “The heaven’s declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.”

This too was Alexander Campbell. Sitting there on a steamer on Long Island Sound watching the monarch of the day at work, he was more a poet than theologian, more a man of deep sensitivities in tune with the wonders of Nature than merely a critic and reformer of the American that he knew.

Campbell talked more about the rising sun on Long Island Sound than he did his brief visits in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, which he had visited earlier. After an absence of 94 days, during which time he delivered 93 discourses, averaging one hour and twenty minutes each, and after traveling 2,000 miles by sea and land with considerable hardship, he arrived home on July 26, 1836, the same summer that Texas joined the union. Along the way he had immersed 70 persons and planted the cause of reform in many villages and cities. But as much as any reason, he traversed the land in order to disabuse the public mind of all those misrepresentations heaped upon the disciples by the enemies of reform. — the Editor