Frances Wright

In the summer of 1828 a religious revival swept through Cincinnati. It was run by three of the orthodox sects, and its victims, she wrote later, were "invariably women."¹² A Scottish-born woman of thirty-two, just back from a failed experiment in the Tennessee woods, read about it and went to answer it. "A circumstantial account of the distress and disturbance on the public mind in the Ohio metropolis," she wrote, "led me to visit the afflicted city; and, since all were dumb, to take up the cause of insulted reason and outraged humanity."³ She hired the court house and gave three lectures on Sundays, and then gave them again in the theatre.¹

A woman speaking from a platform to an audience of men and women was a rare and shocking thing in the America of 1828.⁴ Her name was Frances Wright. Within a year the New York papers were calling her "a female monster," and a Boston preacher would remember her as "the female apostle of atheistic liberty."⁵⁶ This chapter follows her from an orphan's childhood in an English library to that platform, and asks why a woman who had kept her doubts to herself for fifteen years decided, in 1828, to say them aloud.

An orphan in the libraries

She was born in Dundee on 6 September 1795.⁷ Her father, James Wright, was a well-to-do merchant with radical sympathies, who helped to spread a cheap edition of Paine's Rights of Man in 1794 and changed the motto on the family crest to "Patria cara, carior libertas": dear is my country, dearer liberty.⁸ Both her parents died before she was three.⁹ Her brother was raised in Glasgow, and Frances and her younger sister Camilla were taken to England and brought up as wards in the household of their mother's father, General Duncan Campbell, in London and at Luscombe in Devon. On that side of the family, her biographer writes, "the influences were wholly conservative and orthodox."¹⁰¹¹

She called that childhood "singularly calamitous." The drawing-rooms were empty of affection, and she took her comfort in the "rare and extensive libraries" of the houses around her.¹² She was, she wrote later, a believing child: "I too in childhood was religious, devoutly, enthusiastically, yet I fear hardly savingly."¹³¹⁴ But she was also the kind of child who asked why. When she put a question to one of her masters, a mathematician, he told her it was a dangerous one. "Can Truth be dangerous?" she asked, and he answered, "It is thought so." She concluded, she said, that the truth was still to be found, and that men were afraid of it.¹⁵¹⁶

That childhood question was a crack, not yet a loss of faith. The loss came later, slowly, and by her own account through books: "Study, observation, reading, and perhaps more than all, reflection, gradually supplied the answers which the foolish could not and the wise perhaps would not give."¹⁷¹⁴ At seventeen, in one of those aristocratic libraries, she happened on Carlo Botta's history of the American Revolution, and "from that moment" her attention was fixed on America.¹⁸¹⁹

Epicurus

The decisive reading came at eighteen or nineteen, on a visit to her great-uncle James Mylne, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. In his house she first met the Greek philosophers, and she became an Epicurean, "a devotion which lasted throughout her life."²⁰ When she came of age she and Camilla went back to Scotland to live at Whitburn in West Lothian with a friend, Mrs Millar, and there she wrote plays, poems, and a dialogue about Epicurus.²¹

A diary she kept in those years records a Sunday at an Anglican service, where the Athanasian creed and a sermon on the Trinity disgusted her. "I think I have done with churches," she wrote. "When I can hear of one that does honor to God and good to man it shall have my presence and my love."²²²³ The year of the entry is uncertain; her biographer thought 1816 to 1818 most likely, but perhaps as late as 1821.²²

The dialogue became her first book. It tells how a young Stoic in Athens is shocked by the school of Epicurus and gradually won over by it, and her biographer reads it as her own conversion told as fiction.²⁴ Her publishers thought a title with the name of Epicurus in it would frighten buyers, so it came out in London in 1822 as A Few Days in Athens, dedicated to Jeremy Bentham, whom she called "my Socrates."²⁴²⁵²⁶ Her Epicurus tells his pupil: "The first and the last thing I would say to man is, think for yourself!"²⁷²⁸ The chapters on the gods were held back, and appeared only in 1827. In them Epicurus says that "to deny the existence of the Gods would indeed be presumption in a philosopher; a presumption equalled only by that of him who should assert their existence," and: "As I never saw the Gods, my son, I cannot assert their existence; and, that I never saw them, is no reason for my denying it."²⁹³⁰³¹

America, and a quiet tolerance

In August 1818 the two sisters sailed from Liverpool and reached New York on 3 September.³² She wrote letters home about everything she saw, and they were published in London as Views of Society and Manners in America (1821), at first anonymously.³³ What struck her about American religion then was its freedom. The churches were full, she wrote in March 1820, though no one was forced to enter or to pay for them, and she drew a lesson she would later have to unlearn: "Where religion never arms the hand of power, she is never obnoxious; where she is seated modestly at the domestic hearth, whispering peace and immortal hope to infancy and age, she is always respected, even by those who may not themselves feel the force of her arguments."³⁴³⁵

The book won her a friend. In September 1821 the Marquis de Lafayette, who had admired it, received her at his château of La Grange outside Paris, and in 1824 she and Camilla went back to America in the train of his triumphal tour.³⁶³⁷ In Virginia that autumn she saw slavery for the first time, and heard Lafayette talk it over with James Madison.³⁸

Nashoba

For the next four years slavery, not religion, was her cause. In 1825 she visited the communities of the German Rappites at Harmonie and Economy and came away with a plan: enslaved people would buy their freedom by working together on a co-operative farm, and then be freed and settled abroad.³⁹⁴⁰ She bought land on the Wolf River in West Tennessee, about fourteen miles from Memphis, called it Nashoba, and in March 1826 the first settlers and eight enslaved people arrived.⁴¹ In December she signed the estate over to ten trustees, among them Lafayette, Robert Owen and his son Robert Dale Owen; a school for the children was always to be part of the plan.⁴²

Religion entered even here. Explaining why she had not handed the scheme to the existing emancipation societies, she wrote: "Emancipation based on religion has hitherto effected but little; and, generally speaking, by the tone and arguments employed, has tended rather to irritate than to convince."⁴³⁴⁴

Nashoba failed. One of the trustees kept a record of the community's views on sex and race, and in July 1827 extracts were printed in Benjamin Lundy's antislavery paper; a correspondent called the place "one great brothel."⁴⁵ Her sister Camilla defended the trustee and called marriage an invention of priestcraft.⁴⁶ Frances herself, on the ship back to America that December, wrote a defence of the experiment that argued for the eventual "amalgamation of the races."⁴⁷ Madison wrote to Lafayette that her "open defiance of the most established opinion & vivid feelings" had created "insuperable obstacles."⁴⁷⁴⁸ The English writer Frances Trollope, who crossed with her and spent ten days at Nashoba in January 1828, called it "desolation."⁴⁹ In June 1828 Wright left for New Harmony, ill and exhausted, having spent about $16,000, more than half her fortune.⁵⁰

The platform

From the failure she drew a conclusion that sent her into public life. The only remedies for slavery and the other evils of the country, she wrote, were "the rational training of youth, and, so far as possible, the instructional improvement of the present generation."⁵¹⁵² On the Fourth of July 1828 she gave the holiday address at New Harmony and found that she could hold an audience.⁵³ A few weeks later she was in Cincinnati.

Why did she go public about religion then, after so many years of keeping it to herself? Her own explanation was political. In 1820 she had praised American religion because it "never arms the hand of power." By 1828 she believed it was beginning to. In 1827 a Philadelphia minister, Ezra Stiles Ely, had preached a Fourth of July sermon calling for "a Christian party in politics," and campaigns were under way to stop the Sunday mails.⁵⁴ She saw the churches' influence as "a secret influence at work, which all feel and none distinguish. It infects all society, taints every institution in the land."⁵⁴⁵⁵ And she saw women as the channel. The neglected state of the female mind, she wrote, placed "the most influential half of the nation at the mercy of that worst species of quackery, practised under the name of religion," and so "virtually lays the reins of government, national as well as domestic, in the hands of a priesthood."⁵⁶⁵⁷

Frances Trollope heard the first Cincinnati lecture. She thought one passage, the phrase "all men are born free and equal," a piece of "mischievous sophistry," and she rejected most of what her friend believed. But she wrote of the speaker: "I never heard or read of any enthusiasm approaching her's, except in some few instances, in ages past, of religious fanaticism."⁵⁸⁵⁹

New York and the Hall of Science

On Saturday 3 January 1829 she gave her first lecture in New York, at the Masonic Hall, to a crowd she put at fifteen hundred to two thousand. "The same spirit of enquiry and reformation," she wrote to Camilla, "seems to exist throughout the land and to require only the match to burst into flame."⁵⁶⁰⁶¹ The press was polite after the first lecture and savage after the third. The New York American decided that she "ceases to be a woman, and is no longer aught else than what we have taken the liberty of calling her—a female monster." Once a barrel of burning turpentine was set in the doorway; once the gas was turned off with some two thousand people in the room.⁵⁶²

She stayed. With Robert Dale Owen she moved their paper to New York as the Free Enquirer, which first appeared there on 28 January 1829.⁶³ She bought an old church in Broome Street near the Bowery for $7,000, refitted it to seat about twelve hundred, and opened it on 26 April 1829 as the Hall of Science. The building, she said at the opening, "raised and consecrated to sectarian faith, … stands devoted this day to universal knowledge."⁶⁴⁶⁵⁶⁶ That autumn her lectures came out as a book, Course of Popular Lectures, which ran to six editions by 1836.⁶⁷

The lectures were careful to say what she did not claim. Religion, she argued, was not knowledge, because it dealt with "things unseen and causes unknown."⁶⁸ About anything beyond the world we can see, she kept her own counsel: "If beyond the horizon of things seen ... any speculations should force themselves on my fancy, I keep them to myself, even as I do the dreams of my nightly sleep."⁶⁹⁷⁰ She remembered what doubt had cost her: "I can well conceive, for I myself have experienced, the doubts, difficulties, hopes, fears, and anxieties, which beset the awakening mind in the early stage of enquiry."⁷¹ And she said plainly what she was: "My friends, I am no Christian, in the sense usually attached to the word. I am neither Jew nor Gentile, Mahomedan nor Theist; I am but a member of the human family, and would accept of truth by whomsoever offered."⁶⁹⁷² What she offered instead was a church of a different kind: "the true bible is the book of nature, the wisest teacher he who most plainly expounds it, the best priest our own conscience, and the most orthodox church a hall of science."⁷³ To her audiences she said: "Come! learn, then, of a stranger and a woman! Be bold to speak what ye think and feel."⁷⁴⁷⁵

She never called herself an atheist in anything that survives. Her enemies called her one, and "infidel" too, and in May 1830 she took the second word and turned it round: "Does infidel, then, mean one conversant with realities, and by infidelity are we to understand knowledge? If such be the meaning of the terms, I, for one, will hold them in honor; and the warmest wish of my heart shall be, to see all my fellow creatures infidels, and the whole earth flooded with infidelity."⁷⁶⁷⁷

The critics

The most serious answer came from Boston, where she lectured to large crowds in July 1829.⁴ Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian minister in Boston, later described the visit: "the female apostle of atheistic liberty visited the city, and her lectures were thronged, not only by men, but even by females of respectable standing. … She made her converts, and that, too, not among the low and vicious alone."⁴⁶ Beecher was careful, too, to say that he did not accuse every sceptic or deist of the political aims he feared.⁷⁸ His daughter Catharine, an educator, named Robert Owen and "Fanny Wright" as the heads of "the Atheist school," and argued that a woman who put herself on a stage invited the disgust she received.⁷⁹

Her friends had their criticisms too. Robert Dale Owen, her partner on the Free Enquirer, wrote forty-five years later that "an inordinate estimate of her own mental powers and an obstinate adherence to opinions once adopted detracted seriously from the influence which her talents and eloquence might have exerted."⁸⁰

The bond of union

In January 1830 she kept her promise to the people of Nashoba, sailing from New Orleans with about thirty of them to Haiti, where President Boyer settled them.⁸¹ Then she went to France. Her sister died in Paris in 1831, and five months later Frances married William Phiquepal D'Arusmont, a teacher; their daughter Sylva was born about 1832.⁸²⁸³ The marriage went badly, partly over money and her public life, and ended in divorce.⁸²⁸⁴

When she came back to America and the platform in 1836, she said something new about religion. Her earlier writings, she now held, had confounded theology, talk about unseen beings, with religion, which she called "a very fundamental and a very dangerous error, because a most demoralizing, and a socially and politically disorganizing error."⁸⁵⁸⁶ She went back to the Latin: "religio, a binding together, a bond of union."⁸⁷⁸⁸ In her lectures of 1836–38 she described history as passing through a series of such bonds, ending in a coming "Religion of the People" founded on justice.⁸⁷ She still did not speak of God. In 1848 she wrote: "Religion is the bond of union. One, only one, the just and true, must hold the world in confraternity."⁸⁹⁹⁰ The audiences were rougher now; in Philadelphia the mayor forbade her to speak again and a platform was torn out from under her.⁹¹

Her last years in Cincinnati were "lonely and sad." In the winter of 1851–52 she fell on the ice and broke her hip, and she died there on 13 December 1852, aged fifty-seven.⁸⁴⁹²

What she left

Her biographer credits her with helping to make the country more open to liberal religion, and to win more liberal marriage laws, property rights for married women, free schools, and the end of imprisonment for debt.⁹³ Her unbelief changed shape more in its language than in its substance. The child who asked whether truth could be dangerous became, through Epicurus, a young woman who would neither assert nor deny the gods; she kept that view private for years and spoke it aloud only when she came to believe that the churches were reaching for political power; and in middle age she took back the word "religion" for a human bond while still declining to talk about heaven. In 1828 almost nobody in America had heard a woman say such things from a platform. A few years later Ernestine Rose, a rabbi's daughter from Poland, began to say them from American platforms too, and she has her own chapter in this book.