William Channing Gannett: Early Life and Work

William Channing Gannett: Early Life and Workand His Role in the Creedal Issue A paper Presented to the Prairie Group Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Roy Phillips Tucson, Arizona Introduction

Early in the American nineteenth century, the liberal part of Congregational Christianity branched off and formed a separate identity. During this period it developed supporting organizations and a distinctive outlook. This paper centers on one person born into that burgeoning left branch. It shows where he fit within his cultural setting. It suggests some of the personal and social influences upon him. It tells the remarkable way he participated in the greatest event of Americas nineteenth century, the War between the States. It takes him into his ministry and shows the press of his personality and intellect upon the later development of the new religion and its organizational structure. The Creedal Issue and one of its fragments, the Issue in the West, were significantly shaped by his outlook and the range of his characterpersistent sometimes to the point of stubbornness and, at the same time, genial, conciliatory and inclusive. To set him in his context, key events will be dated in their relation to his birth. The Cultural SettingWilliam Channing Gannett was born on March 13, 1840. The events that constituted the burgeoning of the new religious outlookbefore he arrived and in his early yearsfilled the air and reshaped the intellectual culture in New England and beyond, and of his own household located there, and provided the setting for his life and work. 37 years before Gannett was born, Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803. 35 years before, in 1805, the leadership of Harvard College passed to the liberal branch of New England Congregationalism with the election of Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity at the College. 30 years before, in 1810, Theodore Parker was born. 24 years before William was born, the Harvard Divinity School was founded by the liberal party in 1816 as the first non-denominational (but de facto Unitarian) school. The Divinity School itself was established in reaction to the creation of Andover Theological School by the orthodox eight years earlier in 1808. The founding of these two schools had been energized by the 1805 appointment of Henry Ware.21 years before William was born, William Ellery Channing delivered the 1819 landmark sermon in Baltimore, Unitarian Christianity, which helped the liberals begin to claim a separate identify as a movement with a unique religious orientation and, however Copyright 2007 by Roy Phillips, Tucson, Arizona

reluctantly, to take upon itself the name of a theological doctrine, Unitarianism. 20 years before Williams birth, in 1820, the Massachusetts Supreme Court settled the Dedham Case in favor of the liberals, a decision that shook New England Congregationalism to his core. Within twenty years, by the time of Williams birth, according to David Parke, one-quarter of the 544 Congregational churches in Massachusetts were Unitarian . . . with the Unitarians claiming most of the leading ministers and laymen . . .

In the 8 years before Williams birth, Emerson left the ministry (1832), published Nature (1836), and, on September 8, 1836, the day before that volume was published (and during the bicentennial celebration of Harvard College), met with Henry Hedge, George Putnam, and George Ripley at Willards Hotel in Cambridge to plan a symposium or periodic gathering of persons who, like themselves, found the present state of thought in America very unsatisfactory. The club founded on that day came to be called the Transcendental Club and, in the words of Emerson biographer, Robert Dale Richardson, Jr., quoting Margaret Fuller, was thus born in the way of protest on behalf of deeper and broader views than obtained at present. . . . More specifically, Richardson continues, the impulse behind the Transcendental Club was a protest against the arid intellectual climate of Harvard and Cambridge. Perry Miller saw the larger Transcendentalist movement itself as an excitement, an exhilaration, in the course of which a few bold American spirits made a gallant effort to introduce this mercantile and pragmatic nation to some of the deeper currents in the intellectual life of the Westand of the East.

3 three years before William Channing Gannetts birth, Emerson delivered what Oliver Wendell Homes, Sr., later declared Americas intellectual declaration of independence, the famous 1837 Phi Beta Kappa lecture, The American Scholar. 2 years before Gannett was born, Emerson gave the momentous Divinity School Address on the refulgent summer evening of July 15, 1838. From 1840, the year of Gannetts birth to 1844, when he was four, the Transcendentalists produced The Dial, a quarterly journal of commentary on the culture (professions, business practices, reform of the state, art, philosophy, and spiritual life.) The editor for the first two years was Margaret Fuller; for the second two, Emerson. The magazine never made any money, and never attained more than 300 subscribers. . . . Judged by modern standards of journalism, it was an abysmal failure; judged by other standards, it was a first and memorably gallant effort of the American mind.

Gannett was born and reared close to the source of many of these developments. His father, Ezra Stiles Gannett, had been Channings associate at the Federal Street Church in Boston since his own ordination in 1824. Indeed, when it was decided on May 25, 1825, that an American Unitarian Association should be formed, Ezra Gannett, whom Wilbur refers to as Dr. Channings young colleague . . . full of fervor, zeal and energy helped provide the leadership and was chosen as Secretary, its chief administrative position. When William was one year old Theodore Parker, then 31, preached the famous ordination sermon in South Boston, The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity. When William was 11, Parker delivered a speech to the Boston ministers on the Fugitive Slave Law that required northerners, as well as southerners, to return runaway slaves to their rightful owners. In that speech Parker threw down the gauntlet and used Ezra Gannett (who was present) as a foil.

I have in my church black men, fugitive slaves. They are the crown of my apostleship, the seal of my ministry. It becomes me to look after their bodies in order to save their souls. This law has brought us to the most intimate connection with the sin of slavery. I have been obliged to take my own parishioners into my own house to keep them out of the clutches of the kidnapper. Yes, gentlemen, I have been obliged to do that; and then to keep my doors guarded by day as well as by night. Yes, I have had to arm myself. I have written my sermons with a pistol in my desk, loaded, with a cap on the nipple, and ready for action. Yea, with a drawn sword within the reach of my right hand. This I have done in Boston; in the middle of the 19th century; have been obliged to do it to defend the innocent members of my own church, women as well as men! . . . A parishioner of my brother (Dr. Ezra) Gannett came to kidnap a member of my church; Mr. Gannett preaches a sermon to justify the Fugitive Slave Law; demanding that it should be obeyed; yes, calling on his church members to kidnap mine and sell them into bondage forever. Yet all this while Mr. Gannett calls himself a Christian, and me an infidel; his doctrine is Christianity; mine only infidelity, deism at the best!

The Family ContextBesides the events in the world outside, Williams family must have provided the most intimate influence on him and on the ways he interacted with people and events in later years. Powerful forces were at work in his familys situation. The atmosphere in which he was reared shaped who he becamenot only who the parents were, but also who they could not be. Carl Jung has written that Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived. The fathers fame and foibles, the mothers care, self-criticism, and disappearance from him when he was a lad of 6, influenced the tone of the home and became part of him in ways that, perhaps, can only be surmised.Were it not for a recent feminist study and biography by Sarah Ann Wider, Williams mother, Anna Linzee Tilden, age 29 at his birth, might have been overlooked as merely another of that eras unknown Angels in the House.

This biography of th(at) unknown life tells of Tildens diaries and the careful notes she took throughout her adulthood on the sermons delivered by the preachers of the day, among them, preacher R. W. Emerson. Tilden is presented as a regrettable illustration of ways the self-culture advocated by the liberals could become a negative force. Some people, already inclined to judge their own shortcomings severely, were unwittingly encouraged by the Unitarian preachers to attempt further self-improvement by striving to become an exemplary life shining with a Christ-like perfection of character. Anna Tilden Gannett tried to be an exemplary wife (and was, in many ways), an exemplary ministers wife (and was), but was troubled continually with remorse over her shortcomings and her lack of enthusiasm about being on display to parishioners. Sarah Wider tells of a letter Anna wrote to her sister Catherine in which she portrayed Boston as a center of gossip in which many unpleasant things will be said about [them], for a minister and his wife are always open to observation in our blessed talking city of Boston. In the spring of 1835, she had told her husband-to-be, I do so dislike to be talked about. In Gannetts illness she was certainly exemplary in her willingness to rearrange her life to provide the care he required according to doctors orders. Anna died in childbirth at 35 years of age, on Christmas Day, 1846. She left three living children: Catherine Boott Gannett, age 8, William, age 6, Henry, age 4and the stillborn.

In 1842, two years after William was born, his namesake, William Ellery Channing, who had baptized him as a newborn, died. Channings Associate at the Federal Street Church, Williams father, Ezra Stiles, then took over as that flagship congregations minister and continued on until his death 29 years later in August, 1871a ministry of 47 years in one congregation.

Ezra was not only the long-time minister of one of the most prestigious Boston congregations and Channings associate. He had been the Secretary and later President of the American Unitarian Association, and well-regarded as an administrator, author, lecturer and preacher. Though he certainly exhibited the fervor, energy and zeal Wilbur recounted, he was troubled by deep self-doubts. His son, William wrote: From the outside all seemed bright enough in the busy life. Parish success as pastor and as preacher, pleasant relations with Dr. Channing, unusual repute in the denomination as a stirring young champion of the faith,this was his. In late 1824, however, Ezra wrote to a friend, You are right in speaking of my situation as very difficult to me, but it would not be to a man of decent ability and industry a more laborious place than many others . . . But I know so little of books, of men, or of religion, and am so abominably and almost insuperably lazy, that I encounter mortification and toil every step of my way. Its hard work to be good, and its monstrously hard to be a good minister. Though he was given reassurance again and again by Channing and others, he suffered from this feeling for many of the years of his ministry. He and Anna Tilden had been married by Channing in October, 1835. Of their early years, the son later wrote The new home began. Barely a half-year had they been in it, darkened not seldom by his sad mood, when the hour long delayed arrived. That long-delayed hour was a nervous breakdown. At the end of March, his doctor said, Mr. Gannett, from excessive and long-continued exertion of mind, has fallen into a state of great nervous weakness and all work must cease. Reluctantly, and filled with guilt about leaving his work to others, Ezra went away to stay with some friends at their country home in western Massachusetts. But nothing helped. It only made him heart-sick, recalling his inability to do what his brethren were doing. One month, at most two months of rest,--then, surely, he would be well enough to be again among them! But the friends knew better. His wife gave up the six-months home to strangers and joined him. The doctor soon decreed new grief,a voyage to Europe; and, to make the change from home associations as complete as possible, it was thought that he should go alone. His congregation voted to relieve him of his responsibilities for a year and gave him money for the tripwhich added to his self-blaming. When I think how small, how less than nothing . . . are my claims to the love of these friends, when I consider how much more I might have done, I wonder at them and I wonder at myself. In Europe his problems continued. Sarah Wider says these were: severe depression and chronic constipation, a dual manifestation of a single problem. He had not learned the self-control that led to a regular life. The consequent irregularity was jointly physical and mental. The perpetually late hours (sermons were rarely finished before 2 or 3 A.M. Sunday morning) and the number of projects he pursued (editing and writing for a number of religious periodicals, in addition to the weekly sermons, vestry lectures, Bible study classes, and Sunday school work) left him exhausted.

In London, he had the good fortune to meet a physician, a Dr. Francis Boott, an expatriate from Boston who had become the doctor of choice for many American travelers in the 1820s and 1830s. He gained Gannetts confidence at once. The doctor took it upon himself, without consulting Gannett, to send a letter back to Boston saying that Anna should come at once, and in two days she was on her way to be with her husband. The congregation extended his leave and the couple traveled through England, Scotland, France, Switzerland, Italy and--Ezra in much better state of healththey returned to England where in April, 1838, their first child, a daughter, Catherine Boott Gannett, was born. It was a difficult birth and Anna was confined to bed for nearly three months. This delayed their return to the United States by that much longer. In July, 1838 the couple returned to Boston and moved into their new home at 4 Bumstead Place. Ezra had been away two years and the change of pace had made his life much better. The next few years seem to be good ones for Ezra but not so good for Anna. The couple were separated at times so she could be away to recuperate from unspecified ailments. She wrote in a letter to her husband that she was more run down than she realized, and in the country, away from Boston and parish duties, she found herself in better health and with more freedom from pain (28 June 1839). It may have been that the unspecified ailment this time was pregnancy, for, in less than nine months William was born (March 13, 1840). That summer Ezra suffered a stroke. He partially recovered from it enough to return to work in October, though his right leg was totally paralyzed, requiring the use of a pair of canes, short hand-crutches the rest of his life. They became part of him, the signal to eye and ear, by which every one knew Dr. Gannett in Boston streets, wrote his son. When in a hurry for the cars, and he always was, -- his quick leaps between them, as he fled clicking along the sidewalks, used to make the boys turn and shout . . . Once recovered, the disability seems not to have limited his ministry. He wrote, lectured, made parish calls and preached.In January, 1842 another son, Henry, was born. In April Ezra was out of the pulpit sick for two months and in October word came that Dr. Channing had died. Now the primary responsibility for the parish fell to him.The Ministries of Father and Son

Three aspects of Ezra Gannetts ministry should be especially noted because of their contrast with the later emphases of his son, William. The father was actively involved in the creation and leadership of the American Unitarian Association; he was its Secretary from 1825 to 1831 and President from 1844 to 1849. In another, later time, in 1889, the son would write to his colleague, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Till Unitarianism not by any means utterly, but much more thoroughly than now, de-Bostonizes itself, it can never do much to this big land. As late as 1891 when the AUA asked Gannett to join its Board of Trustees, he declined the invitation saying:It would not be fair to either you or me. I do not feel myself sufficiently at one with the AUA to represent it by holding office under it or in it. And I expect to have to remain one of its outspoken critics, and it would not be right to be inside its councils and at the same time its outspoken critic.

The second emphasis of Ezras ministry was his identification as a Christian who believed in the supreme and sole deity of God the Father, the miracles, the Lordship of Christ and in the authority of Scriptures. He disagreed with the Transcendentalists and vehemently with Theodore Parker. William wrote: He was wary of intuitions. What was this peering consciousness, this higher reason, that seemed like feeling trying to play the role of intellect while decrying intellectual processes and outcomes? His own reason led him through plain processes of the understanding to profound convictions clearly outlined: at the same time he had the enthusiastic temper seldom found with thought so logically fashioned, and absolute sincerity of speech. No wonder, then, that his voice was as strenuous against the new views . . . . The son, William, was a follower of Emerson and Parker. He was a Transcendentalist. His hymns and sermons show that he believed in God as immanent in Nature and in the human heart and in fellow-feeling among humans. His later work and writings show what he thought of the Lordship of Christ and the authority of Scriptures. The hymn he wrote in 1894, now known as It Sounds Along the Ages (with an indefinite It) was originally titled: The Word of God. Part of the original text is given here.1 It sounds along the ages,

Soul answering to soul;

It kindles on the pages

Of every Bible scroll;

The psalmists heard and sang it,

From martyr-lips it broke,

And prophet-tongues outrang it

Till sleeping nations woke.

2 From Sinai's cliffs it echoed,

It breathed from Buddha's tree,

It charmed in Athens' market,

It hallowed Galilee;

The hammer-stroke of Luther, The Pilgrims' sea-side prayer,

The oracles of Concord

One holy Word declare.3 It dates each new ideal;

Knows naught itself of time;

Man's laws but catch the music

Of its eternal chime;

It calls and lo, new Justice!

It speaks and lo, new Truth,

In ever nobler stature And unexhausted youth!Another, and now forgotten, hymn that illustrates William Gannetts theological outlook, uses a rare word for the felt-sense of the presence of God, Shekinahand uses it in a shockingly extra-biblical way. Again there is the mystical sense of Nature, of humanitys important place within the natural order, and of the presence of God.

1 The Lord is in his Holy Place,

In all things near and far,

Shekinah of the snowflake, he,

And glory of the star,

3 Our art may build its house of God,

Our feet on Sinai stand,

But Holiest of Holies knows

No tread, no touch of hand.

2 And secret of the April wind

That stirs the field to flowers,

Whose little tabernacles rise

To hold him through the hours.

4 He hides himself within the love

Of those whom we love best;

The smiles and tones that make our homes

Are shrines by him possessed.

5 He tents within the lonely heart,

And shepherds every thought;

We find him not by seeking long,

We lose him not, unsought.

A third characteristic of Ezra Gannetts ministry was his attitude toward the Anti-slavery movement. His son wrote of him that he judged the leaders of that movement fanatics whose violence offended both his sense of justice and his sense of practicality. To press first principles by open attack, (Ezra) said would snap the bonds of union, and then what could we do? Nothing next year and perhaps nothing for a century. Proceed, but proceed slowly by moderate and gradual measures, with forbearance towards the master as well as sympathy for the slave,and he doubted not that every year would see a decrease of the evil and a multiplication of the facilities for the deliverance of the South from this burthen and the country from its disgrace. His daughter, Catherine later speculated that his reason for taking this anti-abolitionist position was his love for order . . . loyalty to the powers that be,to God, to the government, to elderly people, all representing authority; and this leaning on his part sprang from his Puritanical child-life and his humility.

When the war came, No war-sermons rang from his pulpit, his son wrote, no young men of the parish were urged to enlist. His first loyalty was to the peace-principle. He engaged only in the work he referred to as the great charity of the agethat of the Freedmans Aid Society. His son, as we shall soon see, became deeply involved in the work of that society, to the extent of traveling to the South while the war was still raging, and living and working there so that he could personally bring such aid.The differences between the fathers outlook and ministry and the sons are readily apparent. Their relationship, however, is intriguing. They stayed in frequent touch with each other over the miles. The son must have noticed the fathers vulnerability: the paralysis of his leg from the year of Williams birth onward and the canes he used all the rest of his life; the criticisms of him by colleagues in the theological disputes over the years; the melancholy that gnawed at him life-long; the flare-ups of anger; the fathers poor work habits and his self-condemnation about them. But William also felt, all his life, the esteem in which Ezra was held in his congregation and in the city of Boston and beyond. The senior Gannett was outspoken, opinionated and both admired and criticized for it. The complexity of his personalityimpulsive, nervous, vehement, indignant and saintlyis expressed in countless ways, perhaps best in a Memorial Address delivered in St. Louis by the Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot in the autumn after Ezras death:He was one of the most saintly menthere is no other word to express itI ever knew. With a natural temper of impulsive vehemence, with a nervous sensibility of almost morbid quickness, he had yet so learned the lesson of self-control that only for a moment did the flashing of the eye and the trembling voice reveal if it: he was quickly again self-governed and quiet, and with a loving smile. He felt wrong and injustice keenly, but bore no malice, and forgave with that perfect forgiveness which forgets the wrong and shields the wrongdoer. . . . I have known him in private conversation to be severe in invective against whatever he thought wrong or base. His indignation would burst out in a torrent which seemed like a prophet's wrath. But his deliberate word was always calm and dignified, and the remainder of his own wrath he knew how to restrain. . . . It was in his pulpit that, in the summer of 1834, I was ordained as an evangelist to come as a missionary to this place [St. Louis]. . . . The brave words of Dr. Gannett, and the hearty grasp of his hand, gave me a God-speed upon the unknown errand. . . .

What, one wonders, was this like at homethis torrent of wrath followed by the loving smile?

When, in 1866, William, age 26, had, at last, mostly overcome his doubts about entering the Unitarian ministry, he wrote to his father sharing his lingering misgivings about a life in ministry, about his disagreements with commonly held beliefs about God, scriptural authority and the nature of Christ, and asking his father to write him his opinion. The answer came in a long letter which illustrates the forthright expression of Ezras own opinion, but also shows his forbearance toward the sons different opinions and his sense of Williams freedom and responsibility to decide.Spring, 1866 You ask me to give you my opinion about your entering the ministry. I have wished not to influence you, for the decision on so serious a question should and will rest with you. But, as you desire me to write you, I will answer your inquiry so far as I can. Upon reading your letter, I was pained by the necessity which you felt for using such strong language in regard to your distaste for a life of praying and preaching. I was relieved in a measure by turning back to your remark concerning the real motive of the minister, that it should be a wish to do God service, as quite a different thing and implying quite different purposes from a wish to do people service. I think you have mistaken this service towards God. . . . As I believe you lie under a misapprehension, I certainly cannot on this ground dissuade you from it. There is another point of view, however . . . The Bible will grow on you. Giving up its authority on grounds which seem to you untenable (on some of which I concur, on others differ from you), you will see in it an adaptation to human want, a sufficiency, and a power, which belong to no other book. The speciality of Christ's position is what I most insist on. . . We puzzle ourselves over definitions, when we dwell upon the miraculous and the supernatural; but, if we believe that Christ's mission and work were special through a Divine purpose and gift, we have the essential truth, I believe, which clothes him with authority. ... I agree with you in holding indefinite, rather than precise, views of Christ's nature and rank. . . . Some of the men from whom I widely disagree, on the Rationalistic as well as on the Orthodox side, claim my admiration for personal worth and professional industry. A great deal of error may not prevent one from being both good and useful. I dislike the tendencies of thought around me, yet they awaken mental activity, and will probably lead to some firmer results than have yet been reached. . . . One word more: do not take your idea of the ministry from what you have seen in me. My temperament and character make me a most unfortunate example of the clerical life. Other ministers, if you knew them, would show you how much they loved it, and how much their own experience recommends it. May God guide you to a right decision. Ask his counsel and keep your heart open to receive it, and He will lead you. Yours affectionately, Ezra S. Gannett

In some of the fathers words here we feel his unsentimental openness to differing opinion. This is reminiscent of words he had written to William a year before: I wish you had more faith in a historic revelation, but it cannot be forced, and I doubt not it will come in due time. It displays a similar openness to that which he showed, back in the 1840s when Theodore Parker was asked, but himself refused, to dissociate from the fellowship of Unitarian ministers. When some of the Unitarian colleagues and members of the wider community pressed for a vote to dismiss Parker from the association of ministers, Ezra refused to join in and recalled to them the principle of inclusiveness. In these letters from the elder generation liberal minister to the younger, we have, among other things, two bridge statementsexpressing a key strand within Unitarian community from its earliest days. This emphasis was later to find vehement, thoroughgoing expression in the creedal issue. Creative religious community must be broadly inclusive. Faith cannot be forced. Openly aired differences are good for us. Again in the fathers words (above):I wish you had more faith . . ., but it cannot be forced.

I dislike the tendencies of thought around me, yet they awaken mental activity, and will probably lead to some firmer results than have yet been reached. Harvard, Teaching, The Port Royal ExperimentWilliam enrolled in Harvard College in 1856. He brought with him some of the same sensitive conscience that his mother, Anna, and his father, Ezra, had tried to live by. At the end of his Freshman year, William Pease writes, (looking back), he felt that he was singularly weak, overly influenced by others opinions, desirous of identifying himself with the bright, flashy boys instead of with the less quick but more solid students. . . it seems to me he wrote accusingly, this term has seen little improvement, in me. I have not learnt much northe chief thinglearnt how to learn. This is reminiscent of the mothers self-judgment, and of the fathers. But, contrary to their frequent experience, he was able to use it as a motivation for real change. In the next fall, as a Junior, he resolved to show a greater interest in and love for people; to have a less selfish and narrow outlook toward them; to practice greater self-sacrifice, self-forgetfulness, and humility (without any morbid introspection)perhaps he had indeed benefited from the parents unfortunate examples in this regardto cultivate perseverance, honesty, and steadiness of purpose; to be more decisive and prompt to action. His election to the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society in his Junior year suggests that at least some of those resolutions had been fulfilled.

After his graduation in 1860, he went to Newport, Rhode Island to teach in a private school, with additional responsibility for a Sunday School class composed of the more difficult students. He had a successful year at the school in Newport. In about a year he would be in a new place and beginning to teach a very different kind of difficult students. This was, no doubt, motivated by the national political climate and a vacation trip he took in April, 1861 to Washington, D. C. and Richmond, Virginia.

Abraham Lincoln had been elected as the 16th president in November, 1860 and inaugurated in March of 1861, the month before Williams vacation. By the time of the inauguration, several Southern states, led by South Carolina, had seceded from the Union. Lincoln could have allowed secession, but refused. He made it clear, however, that he would take no action against the South or against slavery unless Federal property itself was attacked. This happened in April, 1861 when Fort Sumter, off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, was fired upon by the Confederate forces, and the forts Union soldiers there were forced to surrender. Gannett, still on vacation, was in Virginia at the time and observed its legislature debating whether or not to join the newly forming Confederacy. He quickly left for Washington and then returned to his teaching post in Newport. Following the surrender of the Union soldiers at Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for militia from the remaining Union states to retake the seized federal properties. In the fall, Gannett enrolled at Harvard Divinity School without much enthusiasm, but for want of a better decision. The excitement of the war, however, the desire to do his part for the war effort, caught up with him.

In early November, 1861, Union ships sailed south past Charleston and on down to Port Royal Sound, to anchor off Hilton Head Island, just north of Savannah, Georgia. At 9:25 on the sunny morning of November 7, the warships steamed toward the Sounds entrance; they received fire, and then returned a deadening, thunderous cannonade of continuous firepower against the two earthwork forts defending the harbor. The defenders, including those at Beaufort on Port Royal Island, suffered the shrieking, unrelenting cannon fire of the passing ships throughout the morning and into the afternoon. But by mid-afternoon the Confederate flags had been lowered, and soldiers as well as plantation owners had begun to decamp for the mainland. The largest amphibious assault force ever to assemble on the continent13,000 soldiers and 1,500 horsesdisembarked and took the Sea Islands into Union handsalong with a wealth of contraband: plantation buildings and property, the largest cotton crop ever raised there, and about 10,000 slaves left behind, because the battle had ended with the hasty departure of the owners of the areas one hundred eighty nine plantations. This amounted to a local emancipation; the official decree of emancipation would not be in effect, and then only in limited ways, until January, 1863, more than another year into the War. Taking possession of the cotton would be a financial boon for the Federal government. But the freed slaves were a serious problem. They lacked resources, having lived as dependents for all their lives, receiving whatever they had of food, shelter, clothing, as well as direction and management from their previous owners. They were illiterate also. The Slave Code of 1740 made it illegal in South Carolina to teach slaves to write, and since 1834 it had also been illegal to teach them to readprimarily for fear of insurrection because of what they might read in the abolitionist literature.

Sensing the great need and the challenge, General Thomas Sherman, who commanded the federal force that had attacked Port Royal recommended that suitable instructors be sent to the Negros [sic], to teach them all the necessary rudiments of civilization and . . . that agents properly qualified, be employed and sent here to take charge of the plantations and superintend the work of the blacks until they be sufficiently enlightened to think and provide for themselves.

The call eventually went out from Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, whose department was in charge of captured plantations and who, himself, held the arguably strongest anti-slavery views in Lincolns cabinet. A loose coalition was formed between the federal government and three private aid societies from New York, Boston and Philadelphia. The aid societies would provide plantation superintendents and teachers. William Channing Gannett, then just shy of 22, dropped out of his first year at Harvard Divinity School to be among the first of these to go Southleaving on March 3, 1862 aboard the Steamer Atlantic. There were 53 of them that trip. There were certainly practical reasons for the ventureshipping the cotton already harvested, preparing the fields for the next years crop, producing edible crops to support the war effort and providing relief and guidance for the freed slaves. But, more symbolic interests motivated a desire to use the Sea Island blacks as an example for the antislavery cause. All the northern actors in (the Port Royal) experiment shared one goal in this enterprise: to demonstrate to the world that black people would work without the lash, and indeed to prove that free labor could grow more cotton more cheaply than slave labor.

In his 1957 article Three Years among the Freedmen: William C. Gannett and the Port Royal Experiment in The Journal of Negro History, William H. Pease details Gannetts experience. This work provides the basis for the brief summary given here. On March 6 the ship arrived just off Hilton Head between Forts Walker and Beauregard. Gannett was assigned as a clerk and assistant to one of the plantation superintendents; their territory was the Coffin Plantation of St. Helena Island, the largest plantation on the islands. On March 25 Gannett began teaching and quickly experienced success. Within two months Gannet and Harriet Ware had 135 students between them, and reports indicate that the twelve schools on the islands in late 1862 had increased to more than thirty a year later. Gannett observed that a good percentage of the former slaves took to the schools appreciatively. The adults were generally excluded form the schools because of the demands of their work. They appreciated the opportunity given to their children but missed it for themselves. As one old person expressed it, We pant for it, Sir. Gannett soon established himself as a man of good sense, patience, and cheerfulness and wished to take on new responsibilities. So at age 22 he was appointed superintendent of thirteen plantations at the far end of St. Helena Island. As superintendent he was completely responsible for running the plantations. He had to visit each of his plantations periodically to supervise work. He had to protect the cattle and all public property, procure tools from the storehouse, distribute food and clothing, compile census data, make out the payroll and make periodic reports to his superiors. He was to direct the freedmen in their plantation work, instruct them in religion and explain to them their new social status. He was expected to elevate them, and prepare them to become worthy and self-supporting citizens. Gannett and others were negatively affected by decisions made by governmental officials from afar, especially in relation to sale or distribution of the plantation land confiscated when the owners fled the Port Royal region. He wrote to his father a bitter lament. Government superintendency protected the Negro, but it did little to ameliorate his condition; it prevented deterioration, but it did not insure progress. Above all else, he emphasized, the Negro must be put on his own. He had been too much coddled by the Government. By having all decisions made for him by the former slave-owner, he had been, in that sense, coddled before being freed. Gannett believed that the real experiment in American emancipation would take place when the freed slaves had their own land to work. I am convinced that the sooner the people are thrown upon themselves, the speedier will be their salvation. Let all the natural laws of labor, wages, competition, etc., come into play,and the sooner will habits of responsibility, industry, self-dependence and manliness be developed. . . . I think it would be most unwise and injurious to give them landsnegro allotments . . .

When, by their work, they would earn their own plot of land, they would develop a sense of ownership, a feeling for possession, an understanding of the value of money, and a recognition of the necessity of hard work. They should use some of the wages they now received for their work to purchase land. The issues of how to handle the land were many and complex and would be a problem for years to come. The telling of that story is beyond the scope of this paper.A number of those who came to Port Royal from the north to offer Freedmans relief were Boston Unitarians. Part of their responsibility at Port Royal was religious instruction. In the blacks praise meetings they encountered a very different way in religion than they themselves preferred, and some were quite critical of what they saw and heard. On the other hand, the New York segment of the Port Royalists was heavily influenced by the evangelical strain of the northern abolitionist movement. Willie Lee Rose, in her important resource on the Port Royal Experiment, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, gives a sense for this difference. These evangelical northerners quickly became the preferred preachers of the colored people. Moral discourses on duty, truth, cleanliness, and so on were apt to pale in interest beside the stirring message of the crucified Christ. Belonging almost exclusively to the Close-Communion Baptist denomination, the island Negroes regarded vigorous revivals and emotional conversions as the outward and visible sign of a deep spiritual life to the Boston Unitarians and to their group in general the emotional excesses seemed an easy way of paying lip service to a faith that did not require much in the way of behavior. . . .But the evangelical sermon was what inspired the Negroes, as Mansfield French informed . . . Secretary Chase. He insisted the the Unitarians dont get hold of things in the right way, for the people are mostly Baptist, and like emotional religion better than the rational, so called. They could not understand a religion not based on the divinity of Jesus. At least one young Unitarian minister acknowledged the strength of the opposition in the most conclusive way, by imitation. Throwing off his intellectualism, young William Gannett put in all the Methodist he could and talked ahead without thought or fear, finding he rather enjoyed himself. (It is a grand practice, he said. After the service we shake hands all around.) Most of the liberal Christians could not compromise, and they criticized the fervent evangelicals instead.

William Pease reports that in January, 1865, just weeks after Savannah fell to General Shermans Union troops, Gannett left Port Royal and worked in Savannah as a clerk and an assistant in the Governments Negro Colonization Office. The Office helped to register and resettle blacks displaced by Shermans march to the sea. He also acted as agent for the New England Freedmans Aid Society, hiring teachers to work in the Savannah area.

After six months in Savannah, Gannetts work in the South was at an end and he returned to Boston. Soon after his return his rich, lengthy report of his stay in the South, The Freedmen at Port Royal, was published in the North American Review of July 1865. William Pease has summed up Gannets conclusions:Three years of daily contact and work with the Negro convinced Gannett that the traditional Southern characterization of the Negro was incorrect, that his integration into American society was as possible as it had become essential. There was nothing inherently lacking in the Negros moral or mental constitution, nothing to prevent his adjustment in free society. That he was an intellectual child was only the result of bondage, and correlatively, of his lack of educational opportunity . . .Freedom, Gannetts experience had taught him, did not increase Negro vices. . . . (F)urthermore, (it), had accomplished a better quality in the Negros work. . . . (T)he total outlook of the Negro had improved; he was more aware and more interested in his physical surroundings, his home, his dress, his food; he had developed a generally good respect for law and order . . .; his social relationships were on a higher level; family, marital, and moral situations, principles of honesty, self-confidence and independence had all improved.

What most struck Gannett, perhaps, . . . was the fact that growth and development, whether of the individual or of the social group, are the result, less of charity and first aid, than of self-help. One must give the opportunity and the possibility, provide the essential groundwork, then put the individual on his own. Gannett began his important North American Review article summing up the Port Royal experience with a paragraph that suggests some of what lay behind his later battle against creeds. Outside of slavery, he wrote, even in almost every depth of barbarism, circumstances serve to increase human power. But in slavery, not only are natural rights denied, but, what is quite as injurious, necessary wants are supplied; everything contributes to the repression of faculty. The slaveholders institution is a nursery for perpetuating infancy . . . This is an insight not to be overlooked. Enslavement damages the human spirit in two ways: first, by taking away freedom and second, by supplying all wants; thus, on both counts, depriving people of the dignity and challenge of autonomy and self-care.This orientation seemed to carry into his later thought and work. We have to imagine it; he nowhere says it. But it does seem likely. A creed both binds an individuals freedom to range in thought and in spirit and, what is quite as injurious, a creed supplies what is neededthe text, the commandments, the principles. A creed contributes to the repression of faculty. It is a nursery for perpetuating infancymental, moral and spiritual. Growth and development, whether of the individual or of the social group, are the result, less of charity and first aid (havng their beliefs given to them), than of self-help.The Creedal Issue EmergesHenry Whitney Bellows, minister of the Church of All Souls in New York, was founder and President of the United States Sanitary Commission. During the Civil War the Commission was concerned with the health and well being of the Union troops and coordinated the work of thousands of aid volunteers, mostly in womens auxiliaries, throughout the North. Conrad Wright, whose essay on Bellows and the National conference is a principle resource for this section (along with the cited works by Wilbur and Pease), writes that (d)uring the course of the war, Bellows had become convinced that new tides of popular feeling were beginning to surge through the country, that old theological formulations were crumbling, and that the churches were entering a period of flux from which new patterns and alignments were likely to emerge. Because of the war and other changes in the culture, great numbers of people sensed their former faith crumbling and many were trying to find some substitute in ethics or pseudo or real science, for a religion in which they can no longer believe. Towards the end of 1864, preliminary planning for a National Conference of Unitarians had begun. Bellows wrote his son that he had a buoyant hope that we are on the verge of a grand revolution in the theological & religious views of Society & that now is the day& hour for great undertakings in our [Unitarian] Body.

While there were signs of significant possibilities for denominational growth, there were also serious tensions within the Association. Emersons 1838 Divinity School Address and Parkers South Boston sermon of 1841 had stirred things in creative and troublesome ways. Wright summarizes the climate of the times among the Unitarians:

The more conservative wing was insistent that Christianity was of divine origin and sanction and that Jesus Christ, though not a person of the Trinity, was divinely authorized to proclaim the way of salvation to erring men. At the other extreme the radicalsas they were coming to call themselveswere moving towards a wholly naturalistic interpretation of religion, which allowed no specially privileged place for Jesus. . . . (T)o the extent that Unitarianism was becoming polarized this way, it was also becoming paralyzed, and support for the Unitarian Association was diminished.

While Bellows tended to favor the theological stance of the conservatives, he was critical of the conservatives as very spiteful towards the transcendental or radical wing, and pretty jealous of any thing which dont originate in Boston. I think Dr (Ezra) Gannett may be considered the head of this section. He was critical of all the Boston ministers as having a faulty doctrine of the church. The conservatives, he thought, had a limited, parochial understanding of the church (congregational self-sufficiency) and the radical wing, while intellectually alive and stimulating, seemed to have no corporate vitality (individual self-sufficiency and freedom). He wrote to Hedge, though, saying The real life in our body is in the heretical wing. If we cut it off, there is nothing to move with. Bellows own hope was the creation of a broad, non-sectarian Liberal Church of America. He believed that any vital national organization must have some statement for the public at large of what its essential theological stance was to be. When it became clear, several weeks before the convention, that there would be great resistance to anything that seemed like a creed, Bellows indicated that he was willing to adopt a practical statement of purpose instead of a Christian creed. The gathering took place at Bellows church in New York, with opening worship on the evening of April 4, 1865. Ezra Gannett was present, but all indications are that William was still in the South. After heated discussion, a constitution was adopted whose Preamble was opposed by the radicals. It referred to Unitarians as being disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, their churches as Christian and the purpose of the National Conference as being for the service of God and the building up of the Kingdom of His Son. Discussion of the Constitution had been stifled, perhaps to avoid a controversy that would break apart the Conference before it got started. A compromise resolution was unanimously added stating that all resolutions and declarations were but expressions of the convention majority, binding on none. Whatever these theological and ecclesiological differences might be, in the first year of the National Conferences existence, significantly more interest was shown in the work of the Association, including financial giving for denominational causes, including establishing new congregations and other missionary work. It had made a great difference in energizing the movement. A few days after the first National Conference adjourned, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865. Five days later, Good Friday, April 14, President Lincoln was shot and died on Saturday. Over the next few months, the remaining Southern field armies would also surrender. The four year war had ended after 650,000 had died.Soon after his return to Boston in June, Gannett left for Europe, accompanied part of the time by his father on vacation. William made the Grand Tour during his year abroad, hiking through the Swiss and Italian Alps, examining the museums and cathedrals of western Europe and studying for a time in Germany. He returned to Boston and Cambridge in 1866 and enrolled in Harvard Divinity School. In a helpful 1928 thesis at Meadville Theological School, Alfred Hobart wrotes that, while at the Divinity School, Gannett felt the beginning effect on religious thinking of Charles Darwins evolutionary theory and of the approach to Bible studies known as the Higher Criticism. This outlook on both Bible and species, of course, visualized them as products of change and development within the natural and human order of things. A further influence on Gannetts developing perspective came from his professor of comparative religions, The Rev. James Freeman Clarke, who had him pair up with his classmate Charles Wendte in studying Buddhism. He also heard lectures by experts in various social reforms in a program instituted, not by faculty, but by the students themselves.

The second meeting of the National Conference was held at Syracuse in October, 1866. The radicals offered a substitute for doctrinal terms in the Constitution they had found objectionable, declaring that the conference was intended for practical work and not for uniformity of belief, but on unity of spirit. After good-spirited debate, the substitute wording was defeated by a proportionate vote of two to one, but the name of the organization was broadened to read The National Conference of Unitarian and Other Christian Churches. After this meeting the radicals, unhappy with the results, gathered on the railroad train returning to Boston and, under the leadership of Meadville alumnus (class of 1863) Francis Ellingwood Abbot, resolved to organize an association that would secure the freedom that had been denied by the National Conference. A meeting was held in Boston on May 30, 1867 attended by a large number and led to the founding of the Free Religious Association, to promote the interests of pure religion, to encourage the scientific study of theology, and to increase fellowship in the spirit. Half its original members, including Emerson, were or had been Unitarian ministers, but most of those who joined the FRA also remained within the Unitarian Association.William was probably not in attendance at any of these early meetings, but he was there at the National Conference meeting of 1868, as a delegate with James Freeman Clarke, both sent to represent Harvard Divinity School. Bellows preached the Conference Sermon asserting that some minimal creed was needed and that Unitarianism was Christian and must recognize the discipleship of the Lord Jesus Christ. Clarke proposed adding a new article to the Conference Constitution stating that all statements in the Constitution and its Preamble be considered as merely non-binding expressions of the majority. Gannett voted for this, but as time went on he found the whole dual stance of the organization draining and counter-productive. By defining itself as Christian, it excluded those who didnt take on that name. He wrote to his friend John White Chadwick saying he thoroughly approved of the Free Religious Association and then, in Peases words he then cut straight to the heart of the problem.

I wanted to feel that the Unitn body really contained or might contain Radicals as one of its essential wings. But when that union can be brot about only by a constitution whose 2 halves contradict each other . . . (it may be time to bid) Good bye to the Unitarn body.

In 1868 Gannett took his first parish in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and served there until 1870. In 1871 he returned to the Boston area to be near his father who, now 70, was again in poor health. William was minister in East Lexington from 1871 to 1872. From 1872 to 1875 he remained in Boston writing the memoir Ezra Stiles Gannett: Unitarian Minister in Boston, which is both a tribute to his father and a fine statement of the early history of Unitarianism and its then contemporary expressions.As it comes through in the accessible materials and especially in this memoir, Williams relationship with his father is respectful and tender. In the home he must have experienced some of his fathers irascible and moody temper and learned there to deal with the depressed self-doubt that overcame Ezra over the years. Yet he knew his father had accomplished a great deal for the faith and was held in high esteem by colleagues and parishioners. He must have come gradually to see him, however, as the faded hero of an older Unitarianism, one being replaced by the new spirit in liberal religiontranscendentalism, Emersonianism, radicalismtoward which he, the son, was drawn. That book, which was published in 1875 in Boston, was written as a tribute to his father, but shows Williams own openness and range in accepting, honoring and cherishing the complex Other that his father was.

Through the years he was working on the book, the Unitarian struggles continued on in different forms. The Potter-Year-Book controversy began in 1873 and continued as a rallying point for Radical Unitarians for the next decade. William Potter, who was Secretary of the Free Religious Association, announced that, while he considered himself a theological Unitarian, he did not consider himself a Christian. The AUA Year Book editor wrote to ask if he, as a non-Christian, wanted to be listed as a minister in the Year Book. George Cooke states that Mr. Potter replied that he did not ask for the removal of his name, but . . . that he did not call himself a Unitarian Christian or by any denominational name. The officers of the Association thereupon instructed the editor of the Year Book to remove Mr. Potter's name from the list of Unitarian ministers published therein. At the 1874 meeting of the National Conference the radicals brought a motion to censure the AUA for this, and a resolution of sympathy with the purposes of the Free Religious Association. Gannett sided with the Radicals, who again lost in the vote.

All these stirrings in the national body were known collectively as the Creedal Issue. William Pease gives a helpful overview: If a fragment of the creedal issue has been called the Western Issue and also has been separated from the dispute which raged in the East, the distinction has been essentially a convenient artificiality. There was no separate issue, East and West. It was in fact but one. During the roughly two decades between 1875 and 1894, the Creedal Issue centered in the Western Conference, although it was never absent from the East; and it was finally settled in the National Conference where it had first taken shape.

At its 1875 meeting in Chicago, the Western Unitarian Conference withdrew its support of the AUAs missionary program because the Christian and partially doctrinal emphasis of eastern Unitarianism seemed not able to deal with the needs and the tone of much of liberal religion in the west. The delegates at that Western meeting voted a resolution that made clear the majority stance: Resolved, that the Western Unitarian Western Conference conditions its fellowship on no dogmatic test, but welcomes all thereto who desire to work with it in advancing the kingdom of God. Of even greater importance, the Western conference hired its own part-time Missionary Secretary, Jenkin Lloyd Jones from Wisconsin, of Welsh descent, then 32 years old, a veteran of the Union side in the Civil War, a fiery graduate of Meadville Theological School, now settled as minister of the Unitarian Church in Janesville, Wisconsin. With him as its leader, the Western conference stirred with new energy: new congregations were founded and existing ones reinvigorated, new publications were set up and distributed regularly, lecture series were established, money was raised, Sunday school curricula were developed, hymnbooks were compiled, (Unity) clubs were created within congregations for support, study and fellowship.

And under Joness leadership controversy flared and continued. In 1878 the publication, Unity, (initially titled the Pamphlet Mission) was established with the masthead of Freedom, Fellowship and Character. The founders were Gannett, Robert Collyer of Chicago, Charles Wendte of Cincinnati, John Learned of St. Louis and Jones of Janesville. It became the unofficial organ of the Western Conference. Jasper Douthit, minister in Shelbyville in southern Illinois, a conservative, felt Unity was too radical and published Our Best Words to counteract it. Gannett and others wrote for Unity over the years from his new position, now the second minister of Unity Church of St. Paul in Minnesota (1877-1883). Though he was thoroughly involved in that city and his congregation there, he continued as a vital presence within the work of the Western Conference. In 1878 he delivered an address to that conferences Chicago convention, an address on destructive and constructive liberalism. Pease summarized it:

The true religious liberal takes the middle ground, searches out the golden mean, stands mid-way between the churched masses and the anti-religious. The religious liberal takes the broad view, has wide vision and a capacious intellectual horizon. His thinking is ecumenical rather than parochial. In the modern world it is the religious liberal who fully appreciates the contemporary scientific frame of reference and who adapts it to his cosmology, thus deepening his understanding and his religious experience. . . .

Pease says the implications of the address seemed dangerous to some: It widened the interpretation of the 1875 no dogmatic test; welcomes all resolution. It opened doors in all directions. Why, one might ask, would the true religious liberal choose to stand on that particular ground? Is this just to be courteouschoose to stand on the ground between church masses and the anti-religiousjust so everybody feels included and has a place in the choir? It seems to have been more than simply thatmore, perhaps about the kind of choral music that can emerge when the range of voices is vast. By the 1880 convention in Milwaukee, the Western Conference showed little interest in theological or ecclesiological controversy. Gannett put together a plan making Chicago the real heart of the Conference with Jones there as Secretary full-time. There was practical unanimity about this. The Conference was strengthening with the radicals now in the lead.

But controversy reemerged at the 1882 convention in Cleveland over the wish of Gannett and others that the Western conference build into its Articles of Incorporation the implied assertion that what religion is about is adequately summed up in the motto Freedom, Fellowship and Character in religion. The following June, in an article in Unity, Gannett referred to the delegates negative vote as The Lost Opportunity and The Great Refusal. He saw in the motto the creed that never grows old, as he titled an article that appeared in Unity. Jabez Sunderland, minister in Chicago and later in Ann Arbor, Michigan, disagreed. He wrote an article, also in Unity, stating his position, as summarized by Pease, To adopt the ethical creed . . . was to rely solely upon method, spirit, and moral purpose in religion. But to be vital, religion had also to rest upon a specific belief in God. Unless Unitarianism acknowledged a strong religious content, it would degenerate into a discussion group, dedicated only to noble thoughts and high ideals. He wrote to Gannett that he had no problem with Freedom, Fellowship and Character, but would add worship and God. The Moral Law? he wrote. Yes! But also an Infinite Heart of Love, or else religion, as religion, not is born again, but dies. In 1883 the Western Conference accepted Gannetts recommendation that a series of tracts be published and distributed through the U. S. mails, disseminating liberal Unitarian views. This was called the Post Office Mission. Many titles were printed, including basic selections from Channing and from Emerson, and more Western-leaning sermons and essays like Gannetts own The Faith of Ethics and the Thought of God and his The Three Stages of a Bibles Life.

In an address to the 1884 convention Sunderland said that in order to fulfill its mission, the church must maintain the grand religious truths, bringing the doubters up to it, not lowering itself to accommodate non-theists and agnostics. . . .The Western Unitarian Conference c(an) save itself only by returning to religious fundamentals, only by returning to the theistic, Christian basis of Unitarianism. In a move to pull things together, when Jones relinquished his position as Conference Secretary, Sunderland was chosen to succeed him. Gannett and the other more liberal leaders endorsed that choice. His year of working with the liberals made him more firm in his conviction that, as he told the 1885 Western Conference in St. Louis, the conference platform must rest on Jesus dictum Love to God and Love to man; and that it must be Christian and worshipful as well as ethical. Again Sunderlands position as Secretary was reaffirmed and the liberals invited him to become a member of the editorial Board of Unity. Gannett expected that there would be friction all year, but hoped, if we can do all round as well as we did at the conference, it will do us all good.

That hope was not realized. There was too much internal strife in the Unity editorial board with Sunderland trying to pull it in his direction and the others holding firm in theirs. They mutually agreed that it wasnt working and Sunderland quickly withdrew.

But he didnt go quietly. He went East and publicly attacked the Western liberals. Sunderland and the conservatives were laying the axe to the root of the Western tree.

Independence from the AUA had been an issue for the Western Conference from the 1860s, but it surfaced anew but now the creedal issue was involved. Gannett, Frederick L. Hosmer and John Learned agreed that Sunderland should not receive any of his salary as Western Secretary for the AUA. Though Sunderland originally agreed, he later felt that there should be better cooperation and proposed that the Conference Secretary should also serve as the western agent of the AUA, including some financial remuneration. The conservatives in the West carried this issue, and the liberals agreed to try it out for one year.While all this was happening in the Western Conference the Creedal Issue had grown quiet in the National Conference. Things had eased somewhat. The Year-Book controversy had been resolved by the reinstatement of Potters name and the National Conference had passed a resolution in 1882 which said that no one who sympathized with the general principles and practical aims of the Unitarians should be excluded from the Unitarian fellowship by any specific test of faith.

The one significant remaining issue centered around the conservatives insistence on a minimal platform of Christian theism; the liberals called this a restrictive creed. The conservatives said the liberals insistence on complete inclusion was similarly dogmatic and restrictive. No resolution seemed possible, and the issue simmered beneath everything they tried to do in common, threatening to erupt.Gannett wrote to Chadwick in Brooklyn: The discussion wh. in Parkers day was at the miracle-linein 1865-70 at the Lordship line,in 1880 at the Christian line, (is) now at that last still, but verging toward the God-word line . . .

The issue did erupt at the 1886 Cincinnati convention of the Western Conference after Sunderland distributed his pamphlet The Issue in the West which argued the conservative position in a way that illustrated, after all, the liberals contention that the issue of creed was at stakegiving people conclusions whether they wanted them or not and taking away the freedom and responsibility to find ones own way.Motions were presented and tabled or voted down throughout the two days of the conference. In the end only the first part of a three-part motion developed by Gannett was passed:Resolved. That the Western Unitarian Conference conditions its fellowship on no dogmatic tests, but welcomes all who wish to join it to help establish truth, righteousness, and love in the world.

The parts that were rejected were important too, and they were soon to reappear. The second part said that while the Western Unitarian Conference has neither the wish nor the right to bind itself or any single member by a declaration of doctrine, yet it may do some good to set forth in simple words the things most commonly believed among us; the statement to be always open to restatement, and to be regarded only as the thought of the majority. The third part called for a Committee to draw up such a declaration of beliefs. Those last two parts that were voted down left only the one about no dogmatic tests and the overall result, by surprise, was a victory for the liberals. In reaction, the conservative leaders resigned from the Western Conference and founded the Western Unitarian Association, which intended to work more closely with the AUA to diffuse the knowledge and promote the interests of pure Christianity. Gannett countered Sunderlands Issue in the West article with one of his own. He said Sunderland misunderstood the liberals intention: they wanted to include Christians and theists and to base Unitarianism on principle, not on a statement of belief. He said also that, though the conservatives kept denying it, when they stated their minimum requirement for inclusion, it turned out always to mandate the imposition of a test of beliefa creedal test.Pease sums up the problem concisely: The problem at Cincinnati had been twofold. There was the fear that a purely ethical basis would mean the complete elimination of doctrinal belief; and there was the converse fear that any statement of doctrinal belief would mean a rigid creed.

At the 1887 convention of the Western Conference in Chicago, the issue was engaged again. Resolutions were put forward from both the conservatives and the liberals and they were all defeated. The convention returned to consider the motion Gannett had earlier offered. So he presented the now-famous Things Commonly Believed Today Among Us. (The full text is found in the Appendix, together with the interesting preface Gannett provided giving a context for his statement.)

Unfortunately, an incomplete version of that important text is all that several recent generations have known. Given the intensity with which the issue had been fought, it makes no sense that what the commonly available historical records say was voted would ever have been passed by the surprisingly large margin of 59 to 13. A recent notice of the significant omission is found in historian David Robinsons The Unitarians and the Universalists. He speaks of the text that was adopted as

. . . a masterpiece of rhetorical and linguistic strategy. . . . Gannett was not only poetic but deft with words for practical reasons as well. The statement does all it can to make room for as many shades of belief as possible. It ends with a very significant reference to the Eternal God, our Father, a phrase necessary to accommodate the majority of Christian theists in the conference. But the significance of that phrase is suggested by Charles Lyttles omission of it, perhaps by error, from his Freedom Moves West, a book with decidedly radical and Humanist sympathies.

The final paragraph as submitted by Gannett to the conference and as adopted is given here. The sentence omitted from Lyttles account is shown in italics.We worship One-in-All, that Life whence suns and stars derive their orbits and the soul of man its Ought, that Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, giving us power to become the sons of God, that Love with whom our souls commune. This one we name,the Eternal God, our Father.

This complete text was given in the report of the Conference meeting presented in the double issue of Unity of June 4 and 11, 1887. And the complete text was contained in the pamphlet Gannett circulated before the Chicago conference, entitled Unitarianism, or Something Better. It is also intact in George Willis Cookes 1902 history, Unitarianism in America; the complete text appears also in the Meadville Theological School dissertation William Channing Gannett submitted in 1928 by Alfred Hobart.

Subsequent scholars who list Lyttles book in their notes or bibliography repeat his truncated version: David Parke does it in The Epic of Unitarianism. William Pease does it in his 1955 University of Rochester doctoral thesis, William Channing Gannett. And the omission was repeated in the Sept/Oct 2003 issue of the UUWorld in a section titled We Believe and the error continues even now on the Famous UUs website. The 1887 convention also dealt with the issue of the Western Conferences relation to the AUA, now with the added complication of Sunderlands conservative missionary organization, the Western Unitarian Association, working in the area. A meeting held during the convention involved representatives of each body. The AUA representative offered to cooperate with the Western Conference in its missionary work on the condition that it would be done on theistic and Christian basis. If this was not acceptable, the AUA would conduct its own missionary work in the west. Of course, this was not accepted by the Unity men and the issues of open fellowship and East-West cooperation were still unsolved.Gannett urged that the liberals stand firm and they did. The AUA tried reaching out to the leaders in the West and asked Gannett to become a member of the AUA Board of Directors, an invitation which he refused (see pg. 5 and note 24). Gannett proposed that regional centers be formed within the AUA. But in 1892 Gannett concluded that Unitarianism is perhaps doomed to be a Boston Notion.One cant help but wonder what kept these Unity Men and their followers so doggedly engaged in this decades-long controversy. And wondering too what made them subside and settle for less than their ideal. Much that we read about Gannett portrays him as saintly, but at the time, some looked at his ferocity and expressed a different opinion. All sides saw their own part in the battle as staking out for themselves the good, the true positionthe most Christian, the most ethical. A few days before the Cincinnati conference Charles Ames wrote that the controversy continued on less because there were irreconcilable issues than because a few excellent people feel it their duty to be very persistent in pressing a needless issue.

Isabel Barrows wrote to Gannett, after the 1886 meetingYou little know . . . how much blame you are getting as being the progenitor of all this imbroglio. As I heard one of your admirers say the other day: Dear Will Gannett, I know he was honest in it, but what a pity that he should have felt it necessary to start up this quarrel.

And Charles Wendte, Gannets life-long friend, broke with him for a time over this. He wrote to Samuel Barrows that to say we are ethical does not make us truly ethical,

. . . if it costs so much. Never was the W.C. so unethical as now. The personal feeling, antagonisms & divisions created by the extreme measures advocated by earnest but extreme men is saddening, and might all have been averted if spiritual affinities & not platforms or declarations or creeds (ethical or theological) had been trusted . . .

These sentiments were expressed just before and just after the 1886 Western Conference meeting. But Gannett, along with the other combatants, were mellowing, or wearying, or things were changing in their lives. We do know that soon after the 1887 Things Commonly Believed statement was adopted in Chicago by the Western Conference, he and Mary Thorn Lewis, whom he had known for 15 years, were marriedhe was 47 years old, she was 33. Rabbi Edwin Friedman used to talk about the mutual relationship between what is happening in the ministers private life and what is happening in the life of his congregation (or, we may suppose, his Conference). Gannett had left St. Paul in 1883 and had been a kind of extension minister for the Western Unitarian Conference since then. With his marriage to Mary, he began his ministry in Hinsdale, Illinois. Two years later, in 1889, after the birth of his first child, Charlotte Catherine, he began his ministry in Rochester, New York and settled in. Their son, Lewis Stiles, was born in 1891. He remained in Rochester as minister until his retirement at age 68 in 1908 and then as Minister Emeritus until his death on December 15, 1923.Cooke summarizes the end-phase of the National Conferences Creedal struggle. As this conflict wore on, neither side wished to disfellowship the other, or to put any restrictions upon its expression of its opinions. . . . The conflict was finally brought to an end by the action of the National Conference at its session in 1894, held at Saratoga, though this result had been practically reached in 1892. A committee on the revision of the constitution . . . (reported its new preamble) . . . which was to be a substitute for the preamble of 1865 and 1868. There seemed to be not much opposition, but Gannett proposed that the vote be delayed until the afternoon session so delegates could study the revisions in detail. This is the text:The Conference of Unitarian and other Christian Churches was formed in the year 1865, with the purpose of strengthening the churches and societies which should unite in it for more and better work for the Kingdom of God. These churches accept the religion of Jesus, holding, in accordance with his teaching, that practical religion is summed up in love to God and love to man. The Conference recognizes the fact that its constituency is Congregational in tradition and polity. Therefore, it declares that nothing in this constitution is to be construed as an authoritative test; and we cordially invite to our working fellowship any who, while differing from us in belief, are in general sympathy with our spirit and our practical aims.

(Pease tells the rest). Promptly at 3:30, the president put the vote to the convention. Immediately a tumultuous Aye sounded through the hall. When the No vote was called for, there was a deathlike silence. The effect was spontaneous. Seconds passed. Then the convention rose to its feet as a man, with a deafening roar and with frantic handclapping. Handerchiefs waved in the air, mens eyes filled with tears. All dispute, editorialized the Unitarian later, disappeared in faith, all wrangling in love, all individual idiosyncrasies were hushed in the one great Holy Spirit of Gods peace.

(Mary Gannett summarized the action.) At noon report of Revision CommitteeWill urged time to consider & went without dinner to get resolutions printed & distributedthen at 3:30a unanimous aye& the 30 yr. struggle is over.

Conclusion

This paper can be seen as evidence that a full-length biography of William Channing Gannett is needed. I have relied extensively upon the best that is available, William Peases unpublished PhD thesis, of which there are only two known copies in existence, both in the University of Rochester in New York. Gannett was a complex man who played a pivotal role in a pivotal time in the religious history of America. His life is an inherently interesting one and the telling of his story opens up parts of the nations history unknown even to some of the best educated people of our day.

The story should be told, beyond this brief paragraph, about Gannetts relationship with Jenkin Lloyd Joness nephew, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the influence Gannett had on Wrights radical innovations in home design. After he helped dedicate a chapel on the Jones family farm in Helena Valley, Wisconsin, Gannett wrote a late-summer 1886 article for Unity in which he referred to the then 19 year old Wright as a boy architect belonging to the family and noting that the boy had looked after the interior design of that cottage church, a gem of a church, the daintiest, coziest nest of a church . . . Some years later, when he was beginning to experience some success, Wright paid tribute to Gannett by issuing a limited edition of 90 copies of Gannetts widely circulated 1887 essay The House Beautiful. Wrights little book, printed in 1896 on a hand-operated press, in collaboration with publisher William H. Winslow, contained exquisite designs developed for the book by Wright himself. In the Preface to the 1996 reproduction of the book John Arthur touches on the influence of Gannetts essay on Wrights architecture, saying The (Gannett-Wright) book provides an important key to the romantic and deeply humanistic concerns that lie at the heart of Frank Lloyd Wrights architecture. [Bill Haney, who taught me most of what I know about this Gannett-Wright connection, can undoubtedly tell us more.]

The story should be told about Gannetts work, together with his wife, Mary Thorn Lewis and Susan B. Anthony and others on behalf of Womens suffrage. We need to know about his relationship with his sister, Kate Gannett Wells, a vigorous Anti-Suffragist. We need to know about the relationships he had with key figures in his life, like Jones, his wife, and the leading religious figures of his day. We should hear about Gannetts involvement in the Temperance movement and the barrel of ice-water kept, with its tin cup hanging from a chain, out at the Wabasha Street sidewalk of the St. Paul churchplaced there in case a passer-by on the way to the saloon had a change of heart.

We should hear about his sermons, his lecture courses and pamphlets. The excerpts from these which have sometimes been lifted from his work by the partisan have left the impression that his outlook can be summed up as that of a traditional Unitarian Humanist or a Social Gospeler. His sermons are deeply pastoral in tone, often theistic and filled with poetic language and imagery from Biblical and other sources, as are his hymns. The sermons inspire and arrive at uplift and affirmation, coming to that point the long way around, acknowledging fully the hardships and discouragements that are often met along the way.

We should have a focused examination of his theological outlook. We are left with intriguing questions. Why does he seem not to have expressed the positive, creative reason for a creedless Unitarianism? He is against binding individuals and providing them answers in a creedal approach, but he doesnt seem to articulate the importance of speaking ones own perspective in a listening environment. He doesnt tell of the value of opening oneself and receptively listening to others; nor does he spell out the emotional, intellectual and spiritual enrichment that can come to all sides who are engaged in what Henry Nelson Wieman much later named creative interchange. Gannett sets forth an intriguing theological position in his sermon, The Faith of Ethics and the Thought of God, where he seems to be saying that action on behalf of the Ought will open us up to a mystical sense of union with the heart of things. That is an appealing reversal on the (also appealing) traditional justification by grace through faith, not works. His Ethical Basis, not Creedal Basis leaves unacknowledged, however, the clear divisiveness that has, from time to time, come into Unitarian Universalist organizations (and other places)bringing enmity and alienation, not unitywhen opposing sides of an ethical issue are acting on the basis of their incompatible Oughts. Appendix AThe Complete Text of Gannetts (1887) Things Most Commonly Believed To-Day Among Us with his IntroductionOur History

In this country Unitarians came out from the Congregational churches of New England some eighty years ago,came out as New Protestants, asserting(1) The supremacy of Character above Belief, in Religion.

(2) The Rights of Reason in the use of the Bible Revelation(3) The Dignity, as against the Depravity, of Human Nature

(4) The Unity, not Trinity, of God; the Divinity, not Deity of the Christ; and that Jesus was sent as a teacher to save us from our sins, not as substitute to save us from the penalties of sin.

Channing was their leader then. Since Channings day belief in the Bible as a miraculous revelation, and in Jesus as having any authority save as his word coincides with natural reason and natural right has largely faded away among them. This second movement of their thought began some fifty years ago; and Emerson and Theodore Parker have been their real, though at first unaccepted, leaders in it.

To-day few Unitarians but trust free thought and trust it everywhere; we only fear thought bound. Therefore our beliefs are still deepening and widening, as science, history and life reveal new truth; while our increasing emphasis is still on the right life and great faith to which the right life leads,faith in the Moral Order of the Universe, faith in All-Ruling Righteousness.

Our FellowshipIn all matters of church government we are strict Congregationalists. We have no creed in the usual sense; that is, articles of doctrinal belief which bind our churches and fix the conditions of our fellowship. Character has always been to us the supreme matter. We have doctrinal beliefs, and for the most part hold such beliefs in common; but above all doctrines we emphasize the principles of freedom, fellowship, and character in religion. These principles make our all-sufficient test of fellowship. All names that divide religion are to us of little consequence compared with religion itself. Whoever loves truth and loves the good is, in a broad sense, of our religious fellowship; whoever loves the one or lives the other better than ourselves is our teacher, whatever church or age he may belong to. So our church is wide, our teachers many, and our holy writings large.

Our Doctrines

With a few exceptions we may be called Christian Theists: Theists as worshipping the One-in-All, and naming that One, God our Father; Christian, because revering Jesus as the highest of the historic prophets of religion; these names, as names, receiving more stress in our older than in our younger churches. The general faith is hinted well in words which several of our churches have adopted for their covenant: "In the freedom of the truth, and in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we unite for the worship of God and the service of man." It is hinted in such words as these: "Unitarianism is a religion of love to God and love to man." "It is that free and progressive development of historic Christianity which aspires to be synonymous with universal ethics and universal religion." But because we have no creed which we impose as test of fellowship, specific statements of belief abound among us, always somewhat differing, always largely agreeing. One such we offer here:We believe that to love the Good and live the Good is the supreme thing in religion. We hold reason and conscience to be final authorities in matters of religious belief. We honor the Bible and all inspiring scriptures, old and new. We revere Jesus and all holy souls that have taught men truth and righteousness and love, as prophets of religion. We believe in the growing nobility of man. We trust the unfolding universe as beautiful, beneficent, unchanging Order; to know this order is truth; to obey it is right and liberty and stronger life. We believe that good and evil inevitably carry their own recompense, no good things being failure, and no evil things success; that heaven and hell are states of being; that no evil can befall the good man in either life or death; that all things work together for the victory of Good. We believe that we ought to join hands and work to make the good things better and the worst good, counting nothing good for self that is not good for all. We believe that this self-forgetting, loyal life awakes in man the sense of union, here and now, with things eternalthe sense of deathlessness; and this is to us an earnest of the life to come. We worship One-in-All,that Life whence suns and stars derive their orbits and the soul of man its Ought,that Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, giving us power to become the sons of God,that Love with whom our souls commune. This One we name the Eternal God, our Father.

From Unity, Vol. XIX, Nos. 14 and 15 (in one), Chicago, June 4 and 11, 1887, Report of the Proceedings of the Thirty-third Annual Meeting of the Western Unitarian Conference, All Souls Church, Chicago, May 17-20, 1887Appendix BFrom Gannetts sermon, The Faith of Ethics and the Thought of God, preached before the Illinois Fraternity of Liberal Religious Societies, at Geneva, Illinois, October 13, 1885.He quotes Channings question toward the end of his life: Are there not seasons of Spring in the moral world, and is not the present age one of them? Gannett replies that it is. In religion Aprils here! . . . As for ourselves, our little Unitarian history in America has been, thus far, one continuous April, with here and there a day of halt, and there some special day of freshening and forth-putting. In 1810 and 20, Channings middle life, when that history began, the words that showed the April signs were Bible, Revelation, Human Nature, salvation, Heaven and Hell; these all were swelling with new meaning then. In 1840, Emersons and Theodore Parkers time, the swelling word was Miracle. In 1870, National Conference time, it was Lordship of Christ. In 1880, Year Book time, it was Christianity, the term that still today is struggling into blossom. . . . At every crisis of the advancing change there has a stir, a trouble, a pause . . . How beautiful within a single lifetime the wide fields of religious thought have growth . . . From one specific Bible as the root, generic Scripture has sprung up . . . In place of Revelation as event, Revelation as continuous process is discerned . . . In place of Human Nature of the worms wormy, Human Nature with seeds and sparkles of divinity in it . . . Instead of Miracle as a kind of heavenly coup detat, rare and risky . . ., Miracle as another name for Natures every result, her least thing . . . For Lordship of Christ, the recognition that truly great men are seen greatest bare of title. For the name of Christianity used as a test and shibboleth of fellowship, the recognition that the spirit of Christianity is the only thing worth fellowship, and that that spirit in itself assures a fellowship which no man and no name can confer, and no man at his best will try to deny. . . In each case the larger meaning in the old word has made the old word more beautiful.

I think this April process has now reached words more important than any I have named; that today God, Religion, Ethics, are the words swelling with new meanings which will unfold them in the same way to something larger, more forceful and more beautiful . . .

William C. Gannett, The Faith of Ethics and the Thought of God, Boston, American Unitarian Association, [Memorable Sermons No. 22], printed April, 1922 and (fifth printing) February, 1929,

p. 3-5.

NotesAbbreviations used in these notes.

Frequently cited works:

WCGESG William C. Gannett, Ezra Stiles Gannett: Unitarian Minister in Boston, 1824-1871, Boston: Roberts Bros., 1875.

PWCG William H. Pe