One of Wasson’s later essays, “Unity,” opens a particularly large window on his readjustment of Transcendentalist ideals to the exigencies of the Gilded Age. Here he explores the notion that underneath the world’s seemingly illimitable variety, there is unity, which science helps us to know. Though the mind sees everywhere what it takes to be contradictions, rival “egotisms and dogmatisms,” contending “quarrels and opinions,” the heart demands that they be resolved and finally testifies that they are. This desire for and discovery of the unity of all is the religious element in man. Religion, Wasson concluded, is simply the soul’s attraction to this oneness. Toward that
unity which enfolds and saturates the all; toward the eternal wholeness, which has neither parts nor wants; toward that ineffable centrality, which rounds in and includes the circumference; toward that which is all-in-itself, and all-in-all to that which is not itself; toward this eternal rest and sufficiency of oneness, the heart, the soul, the centrality of man tends with a transcendent attraction.40
“Unity” or “Over-Soul” returns man to his wholeness, his oneness, with the natural world.
Acknowledgment of this oneness shapes the moral life, and the person who recognizes it realizes that “love and equity alone make unity,” while selfishness is divisive, and egotism “insular.” What humanity has to realize is its hunger for wholeness. This is the atonement, the at-one-ment, a doctrine found in virtually every religion. This is our “God-manhood,” the spiritual nature of man “in which God abides, and ever reproduces himself.” In every man, Wasson continued, this spiritual nature tries to realize itself wholly, and “as you ally your will with it, and give it effect in your bosom, you enter upward into a union with absolute life and Godhead, you enter outwardly into a unity with all humanities, all souls, all immortalities, now and evermore.”41 There was no more eloquent or compelling argument for brotherhood than that which science could help reveal.
“What do I think of Wasson?” the great Harvard psychologist and philosopher Williams James was asked shortly after Wasson’s death. “I look upon him as one of the great instructors of mankind.” And so Wasson’s essays reveal. Through his particular understanding of the supernatural, Wasson had achieved unity, his friend Stearns reported, “the one complete cosmopolitan mind of his time.”42
Such mysticism had pushed first-generation Transcendentalists toward recognition of their contemporaries’ equality in the spirit, whatever their gender, but the dreams of radical women’s rights advocates like Fuller were sidetracked with the onset of the Civil War. Among the second-generation Transcendentalists, what became of Fuller’s pioneering work, particularly her call for economic and psychological freedom for women? Caroline Healey Dall (1822-1912), one of Bartol’s parishioners whose wealthy family lived on Beacon Hill, assumed her mantle. At eighteen she had wandered into Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop and fallen under Transcendentalism’s spell. While still in her teens she placed essays in religious periodicals, and in 1849, five years after her marriage to the Unitarian minister Charles Henry Appleton Dall, she published a collection of Essays and Sketches.43 She attended Fuller’s Conversations and heard Parker lecture, including his series that eventuated in A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion. His calls to social action moved her to begin to teach Sunday school classes to Boston’s urban poor, and she frequently attended to her students’ material and medical needs as well.
Dall’s world fell apart in 1855, when her husband left the family as a missionary to Calcutta, work he continued for thirty-one years with only brief visits home, until his death. She essentially was widowed and thrown on her own resources. She had written on women’s issues even before Charles left, particularly for The Una (1853–55), the first periodical devoted entirely to the women’s movement and which for almost a year she coedited with its founder, Paulina Wright Davis.44 After her husband’s departure, Dall threw herself into the nascent women’s movement and rapidly became a well-known and powerful speaker and writer on the subject, worthy successor to Fuller, who always had fascinated her and about whom she wrote at length.
Dall’s radical social and political views already were displayed in her first book, dedicated to her father, who disapproved of some of its contents, a reaction that hurt her deeply. “He had read it steadily through,” she recorded in her diary, but said that the article on the “Sabbath” should have been left out, “that on Reforms would do me no credit—nor that on the [Mexican] War—[and that] nobody would buy the book but abolitionists.”45 He did not object to Dall’s essays on the rights of women, on which, oddly at this point, she still held fairly conservative views.
That soon changed, however, and in later work the influence of Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century is patent. In 1860, in her Historical Pictures Retouched, a collection of essays and “fancies,” most of which had appeared in The Una, Dall spoke at length of Fuller’s importance to her. Dall called Woman in the Nineteenth Century “doubtless the most brilliant, complete, and scholarly statement ever made on the subject.” Counting Fuller with other such pioneers for women’s rights as Mary Wollstonecraft and Madame de Staël, she lamented how “very far from Margaret’s is the standard of noble truth, of womanly aspiration, of literary culture, which satisfies the demand of society now.”46 The memory of Fuller was a constant stimulus to endeavor, Dall said elsewhere, and if she had to characterize her in two phrases, they would be “Truth-teller and Truth-compeller.” Something in her presence, Dall continued, tore away all disguises, for there was “an electric power to her womanhood, which claimed the inmost being of every one with whom she came in contact.”47
Dall’s father had educated her as a son, allowing her to range freely in languages, philosophy, theology, and other subjects usually reserved for young men preparing for college, an upbringing remarkably similar to Fuller’s. Dall later recalled that early on she knew well where her natural sphere of work lay. Could she have had a theological education, she wrote, or “had even the paths of the ministry been open to women,” she had every reason to believe that she would have become a “settled minister.”48 In her early Essays and Sketches, in treating woman’s place, like Fuller she longed for the time when “a finished education” would be every woman’s birthright, the respect of the other sex “her legitimate inheritance,” a woman of any rank would be able to obtain a livelihood for herself or her children “without overtasking the generosity of man,” and she would no longer find herself, even for a moment, “a tool or a plaything.”49 Such changes would improve men as well as women, for by putting women on equal educational and economic footings, men would find their relationships to them more meaningful.
Dall extended this argument in lectures delivered in the late 1850s and published in 1860 as “Woman’s Right to Labor”; or, Low Wages and Hard Work; in Three Lectures and again in her magnum opus, The College, The Market, and the Court; or, Woman’s Relation to Education, Labor, and Law—except for Fuller’s treatise the most important work from the early period of the American women’s movement. Dedicated to suffragette Lucretia Mott, Dall’s book was an ambitious attempt to speak to the complex connections among systems of education, labor, and law that kept women subordinate. Writing with more clarity than Fuller, Dall stitched essays from three different series of lectures she had delivered, and she offered them now in a format “popular in form and low in price.” “I believe,” she declared in the book’s preface, in “the elevation of woman through education, which is development; through labor, which is salvation; through legal rights, which are only freedom to develop and save,—as part of the mission of Jesus on earth, authorized by him, inspired of God, and sure of fulfillment as any portion of his law.”50 Her work on behalf of her sisters became her divine mission.
Although Fuller was sophisticated in historical matters, Dall’s book was of a different order, a set of related quasi-sociological treatises buttressed with fact and example. She included much, for example, from her own firstha
nd experience with Boston’s working poor, including their frequent descent into prostitution, and offered as well a prospectus, “The Opening of the Gates,” describing which professions were beginning to welcome women. Even more pathbreaking was her detailed treatment of the history of law as it pertained to women, from the French legal system and English common law to a lengthy section on the current American jurisprudence on inheritance and divorce. How could a woman have a right to life, she wrote, who never consented to laws which may deprive her of it? How could she have a right to liberty, “whose person, if not yet in custody, almost inevitably becomes so” when she married, for with that act she lost her own earnings, could make no valid contract, and was “taxed without representation”? How could she have a right to happiness if she was deprived of the custody of her own person, of the guardianship of her children, of the right to devise or share her property? 51
In an appendix, she assembled examples of the progress that had been made for women in education, labor, and law since she first had given her course of lectures. She never lost interest in statistically charting such gains, and later she became active in the American Social Science Association, founded in 1865 by Franklin Sanborn and others to forward reform in such areas as the treatment of prisoners and the insane, the plight of the urban poor, and the civil service, long corrupt. In 1895, for another of these groups, the Society for Philosophical Inquiry, she lectured on “Transcendentalism in New England,” an invaluable retrospective of the movement.52
More than Elizabeth Peabody, who in the postbellum years wandered in a maze of reform activities, from kindergarten education to Native American rights, Dall centered herself and became the most prominent, and effective, second-generation Transcendentalist devoted to women’s rights. She and Peabody stayed in contact, but the older woman never was as outspoken on the subject and often chided her erstwhile protégée for what she regarded as her indiscretion in proselytizing for the cause.
In February 1859, for example, Peabody took Dall to task for her comments about Horace Mann’s presidency of Antioch College, the first to admit women with men. Evidently, Dall had suggested in a lecture that Mann had not been as open to women’s rights as some assumed, and Peabody jumped to her late brother-in-law’s defense. “I thought the lecture in which you spoke of him in so bad taste that it would be an argument against women’s education,” she wrote. Peabody also mentioned that she had heard of Dall’s plan to lecture “upon labour” and that she was “going to make painful statements [a reference to her plan to treat prostitution],” so that Peabody would not attend “with a gentleman by [her] side.” “I do feel,” she sniffed, “that the natural sphere of woman is above the slough of human nature.”53
Peabody also frequently raised the issue of Dall’s role in the organized women’s rights movement, whose direction and tactics Peabody often questioned. For once, however, she was quite complimentary. “I do not like conventions of women for Women’s Rights—as you know,” she wrote Dall. “I did not when I first heard of them & would not sign the first call that was made.” But, she continued, in a recent convention over which Dall had presided, she had liked her “action & speech.”54 At this event Dall had behaved with much decorum, prompting Peabody to comment that she thought the speaker thus would win many converts to the positions she advocated. She also approved Dall’s Woman’s Right to Labor, admitting that her book was “better than lectures” and would “penetrate beyond the reach of a single voice & be read & reread & cannot fail to awaken attention.”55
More frequently than not, though, Dall and Peabody went their separate ways. Like her eminent predecessor Fuller, Dall believed that the chief obstacle to a realization of Emerson’s imperial self, regardless of gender, resided not so much in the new science as in the bonds of social and economic convention. Not surprisingly, given Dall’s radicalism, other prominent women’s right advocates such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who focused their activities on women’s political empowerment, did not bring Dall into their inner circle. Thus, as with her much-admired predecessor, Dall’s immediate influence was not as great as it should have been.
If Fuller was Dall’s presiding genius, Theodore Parker, the student of world religions, was Samuel Johnson’s. Born in Salem, Massachusetts—his father a physician and his mother a member of one of the town’s prominent families—Johnson (1822-82) graduated from Harvard in 1842 and entered its Divinity School. A classmate remembered him as striking: tall, with a “warm and rich complexion” and long black hair, always walking “with a swinging gait,” the head thrust forward “as if in quest of some object … before him in the distance.”56
Johnson excelled in Greek, which he began under Jones Very, another Salem native and a poet in whom Emerson took an interest. Unfortunately, Very had to relinquish his classes during Johnson’s freshman year, when he was institutionalized after insisting that he was under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, a claim met unsympathetically. When Very showed Emerson some verse supposedly written at the Spirit’s behest, for example, the Concord sage quipped, but “cannot the spirit parse & spell?”57 With Very on leave, Johnson took modern languages—French from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, recently appointed as professor of Romance languages, and German, for his divinity studies.
Some of Johnson’s professors introduced him to the New Thought, and he immediately responded to the Transcendentalism in the air.58 His biographer noted that the cast of his mind was intuitive rather than logical, and thus he was “a transcendentalist by nature, a born idealist.” Johnson, he continued, “sought spiritual truths by direct vision, not by any process of induction; by immediate inward experience, rather than by inference from outward experience.” Moreover, in these years his Transcendentalism, later “a carefully-weighted rationale of thought,” was more “a nature, a perception, a sentiment, an inward, unargued [sic] faith” that soon assumed a “mystical phase.” His fellow divinity student and closest friend, Samuel Longfellow, for example, cited a letter in which Johnson spoke of his mystical sense of an “All-Filling Presence” as a “centre-soul” that “not only floats around, but actually is all things, is ourselves.”59
Seniors at the Divinity School preached gratis in neighboring churches as part of their apprenticeship, and Johnson was initiated at Alvan Lamson’s liberal church in Dedham and then in the West Roxbury church, with which Parker recently had cut his ties when he settled over Boston’s Twenty-eighth Congregational Society.60 Johnson approved of Parker’s radical theology and supported his right to fellowship with other Boston-area churches, but this position eventually cost the young man opportunities for permanent settlement. In 1846, for example, he began to minister (although he never was formally called) to the newly formed Harrison Square church in Dedham, only to lose the pulpit within the year because of his radical political and antislavery views.
Johnson next began to preach to a Unitarian congregation in Lynn, Massachusetts. When, a year later, in 1853, they asked him to remain permanently, he accepted on the condition that they change their name to that of a “Free Church,” because he never formally identified himself as Unitarian. They agreed and also allowed him to eschew both ordination—he believed that the inward call to preach and the outward call of those who wished to hear him comprised the formal seal of his ministry—and the administration of sacraments. For seventeen years Johnson preached a “natural religion,” which, as he explained it, was simply “another name for truth, freedom, piety, righteousness, [and] love.”61 He attended the meetings at Bartol’s to plan the Free Religious Association but never formally joined the organization. He occasionally spoke before it, however, and published essays in The Radical.62 He also lent his voice to the antislavery and temperance causes.
Johnson remained with the Lynn Free Church until a bad fall and ensuing disability forced his resignation. In his farewell address he related how, when once asked to what religion he belonged, he replied, “You shall count me nowhere; but you
shall exclude me nowhere. I will have the freedom of all times and all hearts; but I will, of my own motion, take on no special bonds, and wear the special labels, of none.”63 He remained loyal to that definition, maintaining that all religions had inherent worth and dignity that allowed their adherents to overcome life’s manifold trials, and whose study made him appreciate the commonality beneath various faiths’ seemingly contradictory versions of the divine.
Johnson’s major contribution to postbellum Transcendentalism did not come in theology, but in religious anthropology, specifically his monumental Oriental Religions and Their Relation to Universal Religion, with separate volumes on India, China, and Persia. As early as 1854 he had given lectures in Salem that were the germ of his scholarship in comparative religion; as he explained to Samuel Longfellow, he had been “putting the Oriental Lectures into a more sermonic form, to awake, if possible, some desire for a broader culture in the people.” He later termed his project an attempt to demonstrate “the Universality of Religious Ideas.”64 The complexity of Johnson’s effort was tremendous, for he read assiduously the work of “scholars, linguists, [and] travelers, in German, French, and English.” He published his first volume, India, in 1872 and China in 1877. Persia, uncompleted at his death, was prepared for the publisher in 1885 by his brother-in-law.65
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