Boston Discovers Universal Salvation

I’ve been following the religious evolution of two men who left the Old South Meeting-House congregation in the late 1760s: retired artillerist Richard Gridley (1711-1796) and blockmaker Shippie Townsend (1722-1798).

As soon as the Revolutionary War began in April 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress sent for Col. Gridley. He had proven himself as an artillery commander and engineer in the attack on Fort Louisbourg in 1745. Even the British army had recognized his ability, giving him a rank and a pension. Would he take command of the Massachusetts artillery regiment?

Gridley agreed to that post, on the condition that the congress would take over the payments on his pension. He thus laid out the first siege lines around Boston, fought and suffered a wound in the Battle of Bunker Hill, and became the first artillery commander of the Continental Army. In late 1775, Gen. George Washington arranged for Gridley to be made Chief Engineer but relieved of battlefield command. Henry Knox replaced him.

Townsend, in contrast, had become a Sandemanian, and therefore felt religiously obligated to obey the government in power—i.e., the king and his ministers in London. Many of his fellow congregants sailed away with the British military in 1776 and resettled in Canada. But Townsend stayed behind. In August, the Boston Committee of Correspondence complained that he wasn’t fulfilling his militia requirement. Eventually he and the few remaining Sandemanians convinced the authorities that they weren’t threats, that they could be as loyal to the new government as the old. The fact that Townsend’s son David was serving as a Continental Army physician probably helped.

Meanwhile, Gridley had been given responsibility for strengthening the defenses of Massachusetts’s ports. According to his biographer, “when engaged on the fortifications on Cape Ann,” the colonel heard the Rev. John Murray (1741-1815) preach in Gloucester.

Murray (shown above, courtesy of Wikipedia) was an English minister who had moved from the Anglican church through Methodism to an early form of Universalism—he believed in universal salvation, though he also believed in the Trinity and many other Christian traditions. Murray had settled in Gloucester in 1774, prompting some locals to suspect him of being a British spy. Gen. Nathanael Greene and Col. James Varnum of Rhode Island insisted on employing him as a chaplain during the siege of Boston, but he then returned to Gloucester.

Gridley became one of Murray’s supporters and friends. In 1790, after the colonel’s wife died, Murray and his second wife, the feminist author Judith Sargent Murray, visited the Gridley house in Stoughton. According to Gridley’s biographer, Murray later preached at the colonel’s funeral.

As for Shippie Townsend, he also became a Universalist—in fact, a leader of the Boston society. An 1890 history of the Old South Meeting-House, where I found the quotation started this series of postings, reported:

In 1785 its members purchased and enlarged the meeting-house in Hanover street, in which the Rev. Samuel Mather had preached for forty years. Shippie Townsend’s name headed the list of contributors, and he was chosen deacon.

Townsend thus helped take over the church of the minister whom he had debated back in 1768. Even more ironically, the Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncy, who had encouraged Mather to attack the Sandemanian faith back then, had finally published his own Universalist writings in 1784; he had been sitting on them for years, worried that such unorthodoxy would rile his congregation.

In 1793 the Boston Universalists invited Murray to become their minister, getting Judith Sargent Murray in the bargain. Among their acolytes was Townsend’s former apprentice and journeyman Jonathan Balch, who in 1798 interrupted a visiting minister at Mrs. Murray’s behest. The blockmaker’s son Dr. David Townsend also became an ardent Universalist, writing Gospel News in 1794.

Meanwhile, Townsend continued to publish his own pamphlets on religious and other topics:

• Repentance and Remission of Sins Considered (1784)
• The Master and Scholar Attending Catechising: or, An attempt to imitate Timothy’s catechism (1787)
• Peace and Joy: being a Brief Attempt to Consider the Blessings of the Peace between Great-Britain and America, &c. (1788)
• A View of a Most Magnificent Singing-Choir (1793)
• The History of the Mother and Child: A new primer, attempting an easy, entertaining, and effectual method of teaching young children the alphabet (1794?)
• An Attention to the Scriptures: for an answer to the important inquiry, whether unbelievers are under the law and under the curse? (1795)
• Observations on the Religious Education of Children (1797)
  

Townsend’s name doesn’t appear in most of those publications, but his authorship seems to have been an open secret. The Universalist minister Nathaniel Stacy later credited “some of the writings of Shippy Townsend” for contributing to his own conversion. Not bad for a self-educated blockmaker.

Shippie Townsend, Author

In the spring of 1768, a pamphlet was published in Boston with the title A Modest Account concerning the Salutations and Kissings in ancient Times: In a Letter to a Friend, Requesting the same: Wherein Mr. Sandeman’s Attempt, to revive the holy and charitable kiss, and the Love Feasts, is considered. The title page gave the name of the author as “Constant Rockman, M.A.”

In fact, that essay had been written by the Rev. Samuel Mather of the North Bennet Street meeting-house (shown here, courtesy of Reformation Art). On 17 May, he sent the pamphlet to Thomas Hollis, a British philosopher and Harvard benefactor, with a cover letter that said:

I beg leave now to put into your Hands...a Letter obtained from me thro’ Importunity from Dr. [Charles] Chauncey, my Friend and Neighbour, and some others: which I have publish’d under a fictitious Name, lest some Offence might be given by my writing on such a Subject; tho’, I think, there is not any Thing justly exceptionable in it.

Mather had chosen the pseudonym “Rockman” as a contrast to the leader of the sect he was opposing, Scottish preacher Robert Sandeman. As I described yesterday, Sandeman had established a small church in Boston following his father-in-law’s unusual view of Christianity, and then moved on to Danbury, Connecticut.

On 25 July, the Boston Gazette carried the first advertisement for a response:

THIS DAY PUBLISHED,
And to be Sold by NICHOLAS BOWES, opposite the Old
Brick Meeting-House in Cornhill.
[Price 6d.]
An INQUIRY
Whether the Scriptures enjoin the Kiss of Charity, as
the Duty of the Disciples of Christ, in their Church
Fellowship in all Ages.——Or, only allowed it to the
First Disciples, in Consequence of the Customs that
then prevailed.
Occasioned by a LETTER lately Published by CON-
STANT ROCKMAN, M.A.
Intitled “a Modest Account concerning the Salutati-
ons and Kissings in ancient Times,” &c.
Containing some Remarks thereupon.

Bowes added helpfully that customers could also buy the “Rockman” letter at his shop. Which was, incidentally, right across the street from where the Rev. Dr. Chauncy preached. It was a small town. (I haven’t even mentioned that young Henry Knox was working as an apprentice at Bowes’s shop.)

The Inquiry essay was written by Shippie Townsend, a leading member of the Sandemanian meeting. He was a successful blockmaker—the period equivalent, perhaps, of the owner-manager of a tool and die shop. He hadn’t been to Latin School or college, and he was taking on the latest in Boston’s most learned line of ministers, the Mathers. So Townsend started his “letter” this way:

Apprehending something in Mr. Rockman’s Letter, about which we were lately conversing, contrary to what the Apostle glories in, in 2 Corinth. iv. 2. And fearing lest some who are exercised about the will of God in this matter, may receive a wrong bias, from the slight and craftiness wherewith the scripture texts seem to be mentioned.

Having no acquaintance with Hebrew or Greek, and scarce any with the ancient Fathers, and no common place-books, I set down, having only the Bible before me, to see if by a plain literal reading the divine will, may not been seen with controversy.

In other words, Townsend presented his lack of higher learning a virtue. He might not know about ancient languages (or complete sentences), but he could read the plain words of the Bible.

The next year, a committee from the Old South Meeting-House visited Townsend and another lapsed congregant, Col. Richard Gridley, and asked them to return to that fold. Both men convinced their visitors that their new theological views were sincere and firm, as described back here.

In fact, Townsend had discovered that he liked writing about religious questions. Four years later, in 1773, he published another tract titled An Attempt to Illustrate the Great Subject of the Psalms. This time he didn’t need an earlier essay to prompt him; he just had some theological ideas to share. The war interrupted Townsend’s publishing career, but he would resume it in the 1780s.

TOMORROW: Townsend and Gridley end up in the same faith again.

People Who Prayed in Glas Houses

In 1728, a Presbyterian minister named John Glas was asked to leave his pulpit in Tealing, Scotland, because he had published some unorthodox religious views. He then started a small Christian sect that lasted for about a century. In Scotland his adherents were called “Glasites.” In North America they became known as Sandemanians after Robert Sandeman, Glas’s son-in-law and chief disciple.

In late 1764 Sandeman arrived in Boston, come to convert people to “a return to the religious practices of the primitive Christians,” in the words of Jean F. Hankins’s article on the movement in the New England Quarterly for 1987. The Religious Creeds and Statistics of Every Christian Denomination in the United States and British Provinces, published by John Hayward in 1836, described what set the Sandemanians apart from other Protestant congregations:

They differ from other Christians in their weekly administration of the Lord’s Supper; their love-feasts, of which every member is not only allowed, but required to partake, and which consist of their dining together at each other’s houses in the interval between the morning and afternoon service; their kiss of charity used on this occasion, at the admission of a new member, and at other times when they deem it necessary and proper; their weekly collection before the Lord’s Supper, for the support of the poor, and defraying other expenses; mutual exhortation; abstinence from blood and things strangled; washing each other’s feet, when, as a deed of mercy, it might be an expression of love; the precept concerning which, as well as other precepts, they understand literally; community of goods, so far as that every one is to consider all that he has in his possession and power liable to the calls of the poor and the church; and the unlawfulness of laying up treasures upon earth, by setting them apart for any distant, future, or uncertain use.

They allow of public and private diversions, so far as they are not connected with circumstances really sinful; but apprehending a lot to be sacred, disapprove of lotteries, playing at cards, dice, &c.

Sandeman started to hold religious services in 1765, first at blacksmith Edward Foster’s house, later in the long room of the Green Dragon Tavern and the North Latin School. He eventually moved on to Danbury, Connecticut, where he died in 1771.

By then there were regular Sandemanian meetings not only in Boston and Danbury, but also in Providence, Rhode Island, which worried the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles. Like other Congregationalist ministers, he distrusted any form of worship that didn’t fit into his established hierarchy.

To be sure, there were significant religious differences between mainstream New England Calvinism and the Sandemanian creed. Though Glas and his followers rejected good deeds as a way to salvation, they didn’t emphasize repentance from sins like Puritans and their revivalists. Sandemanian worship services seemed strange, with all that foot-washing and kissing. And though they praised charity and brotherhood, eighteenth-century Congregationalists liked the idea of private wealth; the new sect’s emphasis on communal meals, weekly collections for the poor, and a theoretical abjuration of individual property seemed to be taking Christianity too far.

There were other, non-religious reasons that most New Englanders distrusted the Sandemanians. In the 1760s folks were suspicious about anything from Scotland. And Glas’s belief that true Christians shouldn’t get involved in politics came out as support for the established government—i.e., the Crown.

Thus, in the late 1760s the Boston Sandemanians gained a reputation as friends of the royal government. By then the group included some notable men, most drawn away from Congregationalist meetings:

• Walter Barrell, Inspector-General of the Customs
• merchants Isaac Winslow and Colburn Barrell
• Hopestill Capen, who was Benjamin Thompson’s employer and Isaiah Thomas’s landlord

The royal government’s favored printer, John Mein, was also linked to Sandeman, though not apparently a member of the church.

Among the most visible Sandemanians in Boston was Shippie Townsend, who had withdrawn from the Old South congregation by 1769, as discussed yesterday. Townsend even hosted Sandemanian services in his house in the North End for a while before the group bought property for their own church. And when a Congregationalist minister published a pamphlet meant to refute Sandeman’s preaching, Townsend took up his pen.

TOMORROW: A blockmaker becomes an author.

“Withdrawn Irregularly from the Communion”

The records of the Old South Meeting-House (shown at the right, courtesy of the Freedom Trail Foundation) contain this note of a discussion on 9 May 1769:

Richard Gridley, Shippey Townsend having withdrawn irregularly from the Communion of the Church, and the Church having appointed a Committee consisting of their Pastors and Deacons to converse with them on said conduct, and to endeavour to convince them of their error, so that they might be induced to return to that Christian Fellowship, in which they had covenanted to walk, which Committee had reported that their conference had not had the desired success, said Brethren declaring that they acted on the principles of Conscience, and that they could not see their way clear to return, The Church upon mature consideration voted, to forbear any further Judicial attention to said Conduct of said Brethren and to leave them to God and their own consciences.

Both Gridley and Townsend had risen from the mechanical class into that of gentlemen, and were the sort of men whom the Old South congregation would have liked to keep. But both were exploring new religious ideas.

Richard Gridley (1711-1796) had commanded the New England artillery during the first successful siege of Fort Louisbourg in 1745. In the years before the Revolution he became, according to his enthusiastic late-nineteenth-century biographer Daniel V. T. Huntoon, “an admirer of [Jonathan] Mayhew and [Charles] Chauncy.” Those admired Boston ministers both combined support for Whig politics with private doubts about the orthodox Congregationalist theology. I have no clue about what church services Gridley might have been attending in 1769, but clearly he was no longer showing up at Old South.

The religious journey of Shippie Townsend (1722-1798) is easier to track because he was more public in his ideas. He had been admitted to full communion at the First (Congregationalist) Meeting in Charlestown in 1740, still in his teens. He married Mehetabel Whittemore at the same church, then moved the family to Boston and joined Old South. Townsend was a blockmaker; his workshop supplied the blocks-and-tackle and other equipment ships needed. John Hancock’s brother Ebenezer bought tackle from Townsend in 1767, and Dr. Joseph Warren treated his child in 1765. He was able to send his son David to Harvard (class of 1770).

In the early 1760s Townsend donated “two quintals of cod and a barrel of rice” to the Rev. Eleazer Wheelock’s school, which later became Dartmouth College. But soon he became interested in a new, unorthodox religious group: the Sandemanians.

TOMORROW: The Boston Sandemanians, and why they seemed so dangerous.