Stowe and Her Foremothers: The Newport Female Society in The Minister's Wooing

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 135-155
Author(s):  
Laura Henigman
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Romance Plot

The publication of The Minister's Wooing in 1859 marked a turn in Harriet Beecher Stowe's fictional output. Having published two antislavery novels earlier in the decade, the first of which, of course, made her an international celebrity, she turned to what we think of now as the next phase of her writing career, a series of nostalgic, partly autobiographical novels about historic New England, following Minister's Wooing with The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1978), and Poganuc People (1878).Set in 18th-century Newport, Rhode Island, The Minister's Wooing is built around the historical character of Samuel Hopkins, one of the generation of New Divinity theologians, who, having studied under Jonathan Edwards, attempted to carry on his legacy. Stowe's Hopkins is historically accurate to the extent that he is identified in the book with one of the theological teachings for which he was known, “disinterested benevolence,” which meant for him that a true Christian duty was to accede to one's own damnation for the glory of God; he is also, as was the historical Hopkins, an antislavery activist, prodding his Newport congregants who are slave owners or are profiting by the slave trade to exercise that disinterested benevolence in a socially conscious way and withdraw from the sinful practice, even though it may cost them dearly. What Stowe adds is the romance plot alluded to in the title: Hopkins falls in love with the daughter of his landlady, Mary Scudder; she loves a young sailor, James Marvyn, who has been her companion since youth but who is, it seems, unre-generate.

Slavery in New England

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Warren
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The 19Th Century

In popular imagination, the history of chattel slavery in North America is largely linked to the southeastern quarter of the continent, and focused on the 19th century. But the slave trade and institution of chattel slavery functioned in other regions and at other times. One region that has drawn much scholarly attention is New England; the first records of enslaved Africans in that region (in the Massachusetts Bay Colony) appear in 1638, and the region’s enslaved African population grew steadily throughout that century and well into the 18th. Numbering less than two thousand in 1700, there were more than fifteen thousand people of African descent, both free and enslaved, in the region by 1770. Neither the slave trade to New England nor the institution of slavery itself, consisted only of Africans and people of African descent; historians have increasingly paid attention to the ways that commodified enslavement ensnared Native Americans, who worked as unfree labor in the region and were also exported to the West Indies and elsewhere as chattel slaves in the Atlantic slave trade. Indeed, studies of slavery in New England, by focusing on a region seemingly relatively marginal to the greater Atlantic economy and one mostly lacking (save a few areas of Rhode Island) a stereotypical plantation economy, have usefully emphasized the various ways that chattel slavery could be experienced, and have also emphasized the broad reach of Atlantic racial hierarchies and labor systems. Slavery in New England was not the monocrop plantation slavery typical of the 19th-century US South; enslaved people in New England worked in a more varied labor system. The small holdings of New England also meant the slave market worked differently than the antebellum South. Enslaved women in New England were valued differently than in other regions; for example, their reproductive capacities meant less than they would in societies with large-scale holdings of enslaved people. Enslaved children could be a liability rather than an investment. Emancipation in the region was truly gradual: though laws were passed in the late 18th century that sought to outlaw slavery, enslaved people were still legally held in New England as late as the 1840s.

Reforming Church and Nation

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-85
Author(s):  
Larry Abbott Golemon
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Theological Education ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Theological Schools ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Narrative Interpretation ◽  
Princeton Theological Seminary

This chapter explores Protestant theological schools that educated pastors as reformers of church and the nation after religious disestablishment. This education built upon the liberal arts of the colleges, which taught the basic textual interpretation, rhetoric, and oratory. Rev. Timothy Dwight led the way in fashioning a new liberal arts in the college, which served as the foundation for advanced theological education. At Yale, he integrated the belles-lettres of European literature and rhetoric into the predominant American framework of Scottish Common Sense Realism. He also coupled these pedagogies with the voluntarist theology of Jonathan Edwards and the New Divinity, which bolstered Christian volunteerism and mission. With Dwight’s help, New England Congregationalists developed a graduate theological at Andover with a faculty in Scripture, theology, and homiletics (practical theology) who taught in the interdisciplinary, rhetorical framework of the liberal arts. Dr. Ebenezer Porter raised a generation of princes of the pulpit and college professors of rhetoric and oratory, and he wrote the first widely used manuals in elocution. Moses Stuart in Bible advanced German critical studies of Scripture for future pastoral work and for scholars in the field. The greatest alternative to Andover was the historic Calvinism of Princeton Theological Seminary, as interpreted through the empiricism of Scottish Common Sense. President Archibald Alexander, historian Samuel Miller, theologian Charles Hodge, and later homiletics professor James Wadell Alexander emphasized the text-critical and narrative interpretation of Scripture, and the emphasis on classic rhetoric and oratory in homiletics culminated the curriculum.

The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England

1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Bailey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Triangular Trade

The significance of the slave trade and slavery-related commerce—what I will call the slave(ry) trade—in contributing to the development of colonial America and the United States has been a persistent theme in the work of Afro-American scholars. Two scholars in particular should be cited in this regard. W. E. B. DuBois (1896: 27) pointed out that slave labor was not widely utilized because the climate and geography of New England precluded the extensive development of agriculture: “The significance of New England in the African slave-trade does not therefore lie in the fact that she early discountenanced the system of slavery and stopped importation; but rather in the fact that her citizens, being the traders of the New World, early took part in the carrying slave trade and furnished slaves to the other colonies.” DuBois’s account of the role of Massachusetts and of Rhode Island, which later became “the clearing house for the slave trade of other colonies,” was similar to what was popularized as the “triangular trade” thesis.

The Women of the ABCFM Oregon Mission and the Conflicted Language of Calvinism

1995 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve McCoy
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Conversion Experience ◽  
Free Grace

Among the books Oregon missionaries Elkanah and Mary Walker kept in their mission home at Tshimakain was a Bible in which was written a quotation attributed to Martin Luther: “Men are never more unfit for the sacrament, than when they think themselves most fit—and never more fit and prepared for duty than when most humbld ‘sic’ and ashamed in a sense of their own unfitness.” Fitness founded in unfitness, ability based on inability, and autonomy grounded in dependence were qualities that the Walker' sponsor, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), encouraged in its emissaries. The country's first foreign missionary program was established in 1810 by a small group of New Divinity ministers. Dominating the rural pulpits in New England and New York during the Second Great Awakening, New Divinity preachers aimed to legitimate their conception of revival and conversion by appealing to the earlier revival theology of Jonathan Edwards. In the process, they insisted that predestination and free grace did not violate human free will and moral responsibility. Based on these convictions antebellum ABCFM missionaries, including the Oregon group, learned to assess their own spiritual condition and calling. However, the internal conflicts prompted by New Divinity understandings of the conversion experience alternatively produced debilitating and vitalizing effects that continued to trouble these women and men throughout their missionary careers. In effect, the vocation of the missionaries of the Whitman-Spalding mission proceeded from an uncommonly heroic effort to achieve a salvation that could not be guaranteed by their own theology. Moreover, contemporary clashing views regarding the nature and social role of women became intertwined with this disabling discourse. This, in turn, limited the Oregon women's conception of themselves and their capacities as missionaries.

Jonathan Edwards Jr.’s Relish for True Religion: The Advance of the New England Theology in the Sermon on the Mount

2020 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-92
Author(s):  
John S. Banks
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
New England ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Sermon On The Mount ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Civil War Era

Jonathan Edwards Jr. is often portrayed as a spiritless preacher who drove away his congregation with metaphysical preaching. This narrative, produced by the early liberalism of the pre-civil war era, has stuck to Edwards Jr. for nearly two hundred years. Accordingly, this narrative typically describes Edwards Jr. and his fellow New Divinity pastor-theologians as distorting the Edwardsean legacy. This essay begins to amend the inherited narrative by showing that between the younger and elder Edwards there can be no line of demarcation. In particular, the younger shares his father’s relish that true religion would flourish in his own congregation through the Holy Spirit’s influences. Since the Sermon on the Mount has been the traditional territory of theological liberalism, this research examines Edwards Jr.’s forty-six manuscripts from the Sermon on the Mount which demonstrate a strong reliance upon Religious Affections.

Conducting “Siteless Survey”: Results from Coastal New England

1993 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan E. Kerber
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Archaeological Survey ◽  
Land Use Patterns ◽  
Use Patterns ◽  
Statistical Validity ◽  
Survey Results ◽  
Survey Strategy

Selecting an effective archaeological survey takes careful consideration given the interaction of several variables, such as the survey's goals, nature of the data base, and budget constraints. This article provides justification for a “siteless survey” using evidence from a project on Potowomut Neck in Rhode Island whose objective was not to locate sites but to examine the distribution and density of prehistoric remains to test an hypothesis related to land use patterns. The survey strategy, random walk, was chosen because it possessed the advantages of probabilistic testing, as well as the ease of locating sample units. The results were within the limits of statistical validity and were found unable to reject the hypothesis. “Siteless survey” may be successfully applied in similar contexts where the distribution and density of materials, as opposed to ambiguously defined sites, are sought as evidence of land use patterns, in particular, and human adaptation, in general.

Emancipation and Free African Americans

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Archer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African Descent ◽  
American Population ◽  
African American Population ◽  
Free African Americans

Except in parts of Rhode Island and Connecticut, slavery was a peripheral institution, and throughout New England during and after the Revolution there was widespread support to emancipate slaves. Some of the states enacted emancipation laws that theoretically allowed slavery to continue almost indefinitely, and slavery remained on the books as late as 1857 in New Hampshire. Although the laws gradually abolished slavery and although the pace was painfully slow for those still enslaved, the predominant dynamic for New England society was the sudden emergence of a substantial, free African American population. What developed was an even more virulent racism and a Jim Crow environment. The last part of the chapter is an analysis of where African Americans lived as of 1830 and the connection between racism and concentrations of people of African descent.

The Crompton Closing: Imports and the Decline of America's Oldest Textile Company

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 231-260
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY J. MINCHIN
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Apparel Industry ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Continuous Operation ◽  
Manufacturing Industries ◽  
The South ◽  
Textile And Apparel ◽  
Textile And Apparel Industry

This article explores the demise of the Crompton Company, which filed for bankruptcy in October 1984, causing 2,450 workers in five states to lose their jobs. Crompton was founded in 1807 in Providence, Rhode Island and when it went out of business it was the oldest textile firm in the country, having been in continuous operation for 178 years. Despite its history, scholars have overlooked Crompton, partly because most work on deindustrialization has concentrated on heavy manufacturing industries, especially steel and automobiles. I argue that Crompton's demise throws much light on the broader decline of the American textile and apparel industry, which has lost over two million jobs since the mid-1970s, and shows that textiles deserve a more central place in the literature. Using company papers, this study shows that imports played the central role in causing Crompton's decline, although there were also other problems, including the strong dollar, declining exports, and a reluctance to diversify, which contributed to it. The paper also explores broader trends, including the earlier flight of the industry from New England to the South and the industry's unsuccessful campaign to pass import-restriction legislation, a fight in which Crompton's managers were very involved.

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