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Who were the evangelicals?: conservative and liberal identity in the Unitarian Controversy in Boston, 1804-1833
Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by Marie Kuplec Cayton
5. Many of the evangelical social reform movements of the period prior to the Civil War were spearheaded by Congregationalists. See John R. Bodo, The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues, 1812-1848 (Princeton, 1954); Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers' Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800-1865 (New Brunswick NJ, 1960); and Mary K. Cayton, "Social Reform Through the Civil War," in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, III, 1429-1440. On Unitarian paternalism, see Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Boston Unitarianism, 1820-1850: A Study of the Life and Work of Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (New York, 1890); Richard Eddy Sykes, Massachusetts Unitarianism and Social Change: A Religious Social System in Transition, 1780-1870," Ph.D. Diss., University of Minnesota, 1966; Eric C. Schneider, In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s (New York, 1992), 17-24. Joseph Tuckerman's Ministry-at-Large to the Poor of Boston was the primary instance of Unitarian philanthropy. As early as 1882, historiography on Unitarianism noted its lack of evangelical impulse and want of "the spirit of propagandism." See Rev. Andrew P. Peabody, "The Unitarians in Boston," in Justin Winsor, ed., The Memorial History of Boston, Including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880, III (Boston, 1882), 468.
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6. Conrad Wright, "Ministers, Churches, and the Boston Elite, 1791-1815," in The Unitarian Controversy, 53-57.
7. See Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870 (Middletown CT, 1980), 34, 24-40.
8. Jedidiah Morse, Review of American Unitarianism (Boston, 1815).
9. William Ellery Channing, "A letter to the Rev. Samuel C. Thacher," in Sydney E. Ahlstrom and Jonathan S. Carey, eds., An American Reformation, 76; orig. published as A Letter to the Rev. Samuel C. Thacher on the Aspersions Contained in a Late Number of the Panoplist, on the Ministers of Boston and the Vicinity (Boston, 1815).
10. Channing, 82.
11. Channing expressed this point of view succinctly, for example, in his charge to the newly ordained Jared Sparks in his 1819 Baltimore sermon entitled "Unitarian Christianity":
You will remember, that good practice is the end of preaching, and will labor to make your people holy lives, rather than skillful disputants. Be careful, lest the desire of defending what you deem truth, and of repelling reproach and misrepresentation, turn you aside from your great business, which is to fix in men's minds a living conviction of the obligation, sublimity, and happiness of Christian virtue.
("Unitarian Christianity. Discourse at the Ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks, Baltimore, 1819," Works, 10th ed., III [Boston, 1849], 101.)
12. For more on the differing cultural values of Congregationalism and Unitarianism, see Mary Kupiec Cayton, Emerson s Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800-1840 (Chapel Hill, 1989), 83-111.
13. The principal source on Beecher's life and work remains his Autobiography, edited by his son Charles in two volumes (New York, 1865). Good secondary sources include Vincent Harding, A Certain Magnificence: Lyman Beecher and the Transformation of American Protestantism, 1775-1863 (New York, 1991), and Milton Rugoff, The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981).
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