Adin Ballou

• Adin Ballou
• Born: April 23, 1803
• Died: August 5, 1890

Clergyman and founder of the Hopedale Community, was born in Cumberland, Rhode Island, the seventh of the eight children of Ariel Ballou and Edilda (Tower) Ballou. He was a descendant of Maturin Ballou, an Anglo-Norman settler who joined with Roger Williams as a proprietor of Providence Plantations in 1646. From childhood Ballou worked on his father’s farm and attended nearby schools until he was seventeen. His formal education ended when his father disapproved of his entering Brown University.

At the age of twelve, Ballou joined the Cumberland Christian Church. At eighteen, believing that he had received a supernatural call, he began to prepare for the ministry and preached his first sermon in his village church. He continued to preach at churches in the area while teaching himself theology and soon became interested in the Universalist doctrine of salvation for everyone. This led, before he was twenty, to his expulsion from the Cumberland Christian Church at the instigation of his father. In December 1823 he was ordained a Universalist minister; he preached in Massachusetts (Mendon, Bellingham, and Medway), and then for six months at the First Universalist Society in Boston. From 1824 to 1830 he was minister of the Milford, Massachusetts, Universalist church, and he spent several months in 1827 at the Prince Street church in New York City.

During this period the Universalist church, although united on the doctrine of salvation for all, was divided on whether no punishment existed after death or punishment was endured for a limited time before salvation. Ballou, in a noted sermon on April 25, 1830, proclaimed the rightness of the doctrine of eventual, not immediate, salvation as necessary for human morality on earth. Before the following Sunday, Ballou was dismissed from his Milton church, but he soon became pastor of the Mendon Universalist church.

Ballou, a handsome man with strong features and a full sensuous mouth, married Abigail Sayles of Smithfield, Rhode Island, in 1822. She died in Milford in 1829, and in 1830 he married Lucy Hunt of Milford. The Ballous had two children Abigail, who married W. S. Heywood, and Adin Augustus, who died at nineteen.

In 1831 Ballou and seven other clergymen formed the Massachusetts Association of Universal Restorationists, and Ballou founded the Independent Messenger, which promoted their views during the next eight years.

At this time he also began his involvement with social issues. He became a pacifist, defending the theory of Christian nonresistance, and an abolitionist, introducing a resolution before the restorationist association condemning slaveholding as a sin. He also began working and preaching to help the temperance movement. In 1839 Ballou published the Standard of Practical Christianity, in which he discussed the application of the ethics of the New Testament in everyday life. From 1840 to 1860 he was editor of The Practical Christian, a semimonthly publication that he owned and published for a time, in which he argued for human rights and a more equitable social order.

In 1841 Ballou and thirty-one others formed a joint stock association that became the Hope-dale Community, the first of the Utopian cooperative societies, such as Brook Farm, that appeared during the following decade. The community, which sought to establish a more just society without violence and class struggle, aimed at being self-supporting. Established on 250 acres in Milford, Massachusetts, it subsisted on farming and industrial enterprises. Profits were divided although individuals retained rights to property. Members promised to follow the principles of human brotherhood as taught by Christ, to abstain from liquor, and not to participate in military or civic activities (they took a a pledge not to vote).

Ballou was chosen president, and a school and library were established. The community grew from thirty members to 110 in 1856. Ballou remained president until 1852, when he decided to devote himself to formulating a “practical Christian republic” of independent communities, which he explained in his 1854 book Practical Christian Socialism. Of his cause, he wrote with assurance in the book’s preface: “He [Ballou] sincerely believes the movement to have been originated and thus far supervised by the Holy Spirit. He is confident that well appointed ministering angels have watched over it, and will never cease to do so.”

In his constitution for this new order of human society, Ballou set out “to ensure every ‘orderly citizen’ a comfortable home, suitable employment, adequate subsistence, congenial associates, a good education, proper stimulants to personal righteousness, sympathetic aid in distress, and due protection in the exercise of all natural rights.” He promised a civil government that would be powerful without tyranny, invincible without injurious force, and useful without being burdensome. His constitution forbade slavery; war; capital punishment; the manufacture, sale, or use of liquor; lotteries; gambling; and “pernicious amusements.”

A crisis arose at Hopedale Community in 1856 when two stockholders, owning three-fourths of the stock, withdrew it to invest in the Hopedale Manufacturing Company. They became wealthy and gradually changed the community into a manufacturing center. Hopedale Community merged with Hopedale Unitarian Parish in 1868, and Adin Ballou remained pastor until 1880. In 1886 the former community was incorporated as the town of Hopedale. Ballou always believed that the failure of Hopedale was due not to financial troubles but to the lack of wholehearted moral commitment to the cause. The last years of his life were spent in writing and preaching. He died at eighty-seven. Ten years after his death, a statue of Ballou was raised in Hopedale.

Important works by Ballou, in addition to those noted above, are his Autobiography (1896), ed. by his son-in-law, W. S. Heywood; History of the Hopedale Community (1897), also ed. by W. S. Heywood; Memoir of Adin Augustus Ballou (1853); and Primitive Christianity and its Corruptions (1870). See also G. L. Cary, “Adin Ballou and the Hopedale Community,” New World, December 1898, and L. G. Wilson, “Hopedale and Its Founder,” New England Magazine, April 1891. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1928). Obituaries appeared in The Milford Journal, August 5, 1890, and in the Boston Journal and the Boston Herald, August 6, 1890.