John Humphrey Noyes

• John Noyes
• Born: September 3, 1811
• Died: April 13, 1886

Founder of perfectionism and of the Oneida Community, was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, the fourth of nine children and first son of John Noyes, a teacher and businessman, and Polly (Hayes) Noyes. John Noyes was a descendant of Nicholas Noyes, who emigrated from England to Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1633; he was elected to the Vermont legislature in 1811 and served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1815 to 1817. Polly Noyes was the oldest daughter of Rutherford Hayes and the aunt of Rutherford B. Hayes, the nineteenth president of the United States.

John Humphrey Noyes was born on the day his father was elected to the state legislature. As a boy, Noyes “was always fond of thinking. . . . He used to say that he would go to bed early, because he wanted to think.” He received his early schooling at Dummerston, Vermont, and Amherst, Massachusetts. In 1822 the Noyes family moved to Putney, and soon afterward Noyes was sent to Brattleboro Academy to complete his preparation for college. In 1826 he entered Dartmouth College, from which he was graduated in 1830. During the year following graduation he studied law in the office of his brother-in-law, Larkin G. Mead, at Chesterfield, New Hampshire.

In September 1831 Noyes was eagerly preparing to join an uncle in Brattleboro for another year of legal study and practice. He was now something of a Yankee dandy, having resolved, by his own account, “to indulge the lust of the eye and the pride of life for the present.” Hearing of a revival meeting to be held at Putney by the stirring preacher Charles Grandison Finney, he decided to attend for the sake of opportunities for social pleasures, not for the purpose of religious awakening. “I looked upon religion . . . as a sort of phrenzy to which all were liable, and feared lest I should be caught in the snare.” Finney’s preaching inspired him, and within a few weeks the young hedonist had abandoned his legal career to become an ardent student at the Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts.

Here Noyes steeped himself in the pages of the Bible, and wrestled with the pressures of his emerging religious vocation. He studied biblical exegesis under Moses Stuart, whose revisionist interpretations of disputed scriptural texts would later embolden Noyes to create his own. Always practical, Noyes pledged to work as a missionary and joined a society called the Brethren. This group met to examine and support each member’s faith and mission by means of frank mutual criticism. But a “want of spirituality” at Andover, and the attraction of doing doctrinal studies with Nathaniel Taylor at New Haven, persuaded Noyes to transfer to the Yale Divinity School in 1832.

At Yale Noyes moved from subjective exercises to objective pastoral work among the blacks of New Haven and helped found the New Haven Anti-Slavery Society, one of the first abolitionist groups in the United States. He also participated in the gatherings of the ecumenical New Haven Free Church, which attracted the zealous members of many regular Protestant denominations. In the summer of 1833 Noyes resumed private exegetical studies. Pursued in the light of his recent experience in religious and social reform, these studies yielded a radical reinterpretation of the New Testament that challenged and revalued the whole tradition of Christian teaching.

Noyes’s attention was fixed by a text from the King James version of John 21:22: “If I will that he [John] tarry till I come, what is that to thee?” This appeared to Noyes to be a promise that Christ’s second coming would occur before John died. The church taught, on the contrary, that Christ’s return and the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth had not yet come. To resolve this contradiction, Noyes “read the New Testament through ten times with my eye on the question as to the time of Christ’s second coming. . . . When my investigation was ended, my mind was clear: I no longer conjectured, I knew that the time appointed for the second coming of Christ was within one generation from the time of his personal ministry.” Noyes located the event in A.D. 70, immediately following the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans under Titus.

Noyes’s heretical pronouncement created a new chronology for Christ’s ministry to humanity and a revision of biblical and secular history. Since Christ had come again, millennial conditions were present that promoted human perfectibility. Such “perfectionism” had been advanced by some of Noyes’s contemporaries. But Noyes took the idea further, asserting that any person who accepted Christ as already having established the kingdom of heaven on earth could live totally free from sin, in perfect holiness.

Noyes first declared himself saved from sin on February 20, 1834. The day was later regarded by his followers as a spiritual New Year’s Day, the “high tide of the spirit.” But Noyes’s announcement compelled his superiors at Yale to convict him of heresy, revoke his license to preach, and expel him from the seminary. “My good name in the great world was gone,” Noyes later wrote. “I was . . . an outcast. Yet I rejoiced and leaped for joy.”

For the next two years Noyes traveled in New England and New York, proclaiming, debating, and publishing his views. With his follower James Boyle, who had been dismissed from his pastorate at the New Haven Free Church, Noyes founded the Perfectionist, a monthly religious paper published from the summer of 1834 through the early spring of 1836. In 1836 he established a Bible school in Putney, where he converted many townspeople, including members of his family. The following year he began publication of his periodical Witness at Ithaca, New York. He returned to Putney in 1838 after his marriage to Harriet A. Holton, a wealthy convert who funded his ventures. In six years they had five children; four of them were stillborn.

The group at Putney—thirty-one adults and fourteen children—soon became the nucleus for a “holy community” of the saved, organized according to Noyes’s teachings. The members, most of whom were well-to-do, pooled their resources (including Noyes’s inheritance) and in 1845 formed a corporation. It published several papers, including the Perfectionist and the Spiritual Magazine, and a compilation of Noyes’s writings entitled The Berean (1847).

The system of complex marriage for which the group became famous was first articulated by Noyes in 1837 in a letter published by Theodore Gates’s Battle-Axe. In a “holy community,” he wrote, there is no occasion for shame, no sexual exclusivity, no marriage, and no “reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law.” This doctrine was not put into effect until 1846, when Noyes and his wife exchanged partners with another couple in the group. The complex marriage soon expanded to include Noyes’s two sisters and their husbands.

Rumors of these sexual irregularities ended in the arrest of Noyes on charges of adultery and fornication. In the fall of 1847 he jumped bail and fled to New York City, where he learned that one of his followers had acquired an isolated parcel of land on the Oneida Reserve in central New York. By the end of 1848, eighty-seven perfectionists were in residence there.

The Oneida Community embodied the perfectionist faith that “God has commenced the development of his kingdom . . . and prepared a Theocratic nucleus in this the most enlightened and advanced portion of the earth.” In his subsequent History of American Socialisms (1870), Noyes identified the Oneida Community among the general communitarian organizations of the period as “a conjunction between the Revivalism of Orthodoxy and the Socialism of Unitarian-ism.” It was a theocratic version of Brook Farm. If Noyes was the inspired agent of a newly revealed covenant, and if the Oneida Community under his direction was the nucleus of the kingdom of God on earth, then its members would live as resurrected saints, obeying Christ’s requirement that the saved would observe community of property. This was construed to mean community of persons as well.

Unlike many other nineteenth-century communal experiments, the Oneida group began with adequate capital. The contributions of the members totaled about $100,000. In the first few years they established a sound economic base through the manufacture of an animal trap invented by one of the members. Eventually the community’s industries included a farm, a sawmill, a flour mill, a canning plant, and factories for the manufacture of chains, suitcases, silverware, woolen goods, and silk thread. Members were assigned to jobs according to talent and were allowed to rotate jobs. The prosperity enjoyed by the community enabled it to build a library, a progressive school, a theater, and a Turkish bath.

The community, which numbered some 250 adults by the mid-1870s, was governed as a direct democracy, with all decisions made by consensus. Daily meetings were held at which mutual criticism was administered and “Father Noyes” gave anecdotal homilies (collected in 1875 as Home Talks). The group maintained a vegetarian diet and allowed neither alcohol nor tobacco; dress was simple, and women wore pants. On some occasions faith healing was practiced.

Despite its economic success, the Oneida Community was best known for its sexual arrangements. Noyes’s mandate that the sanctified were to love one another equally eliminated nuclear, male-dominated families, but the result was not free love. Prospective lovers were required to apply for permission to proceed. Contraception was the responsibility of the men, who practiced continence, a technique requiring extreme self-control; sexual acts were intended to produce as much spiritual as physical enjoyment. Only the most spiritually advanced members were selected to have children, who were raised in communal nurseries. (Noyes coined the term stirpiculture to describe this kind of selective breeding.) Of the fifty-eight children born at Oneida between 1869 and 1879, forty-five were planned and thirteen were accidental. Nine of the planned children were fathered by Noyes, who also had the responsibility of initiating young women into complex marriage.

Annual reports, a Handbook of the Oneida Community (1867, 1875), various pamphlets, and a daily paper mailed to subscribers informed the outside world of the community’s progress. Visitors traveled by train to its estates, ate strawberries on the wide lawns surrounding the communal Mansion House, and marveled at the scene. The community flourished for thirty years, becoming the wealthiest and most cohesive of all utopian socialisms.

The disintegration of the Oneida Community began in 1875, when Noyes tried to appoint his son Theodore as his successor. In 1879 Noyes fled to Canada to avoid a possible charge of statutory rape. The leaderless group, overwhelmed by outside hostility and internal dissension, abandoned complex marriage and economic communism and reorganized itself as a privately owned joint stock company. Noyes died at the age of seventy-four in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.

The Oneida Community was perhaps the most radical and most successful example of communitarian socialism of the nineteenth century. Its theocratic foundations, which are not well enough appreciated, provided the basis for its social policies, which are often distorted. Noyes’s theology offered the opportunity for believers to strive for a personal, spiritual heaven on earth. The social policy he elaborated provided for the liberation of men, women, and children of all ages from capitalism and sexism. Oneida’s origins in the aftermath of the depression of 1837 suggest that its anticapitalist attitudes reflected the entrepreneurial values of preindustrialism. Noyes’s Bible communism was the system of a religious visionary with considerable scientific knowledge and secular wisdom and ability. The Oneida Community’s Mansion House still stands, inhabited largely by descendants of members. The community’s heritage of industrial success persists in the modern Oneida Corporation. Changes in American attitudes toward the social roles of individuals, changes advanced and instituted by Noyes more than a century ago, are evidence that Noyes was a man ahead of his time.

Noyes’s autobiography is Confessions of John Humphrey Noyes (1849). Other books by Noyes are Male Continence (1848) and Essays on Scientific Propagation (1875). In addition, Noyes published numerous pamphlets and articles. Documentary histories include G. W. Noyes, ed., Religious Experience of John Humphrey Noyes (1923) and John Humphrey Noyes: The Putney Community (1931); and C. N. Robertson, Oneida Community: An Autobiography, 1851–1876 (1970), and Oneida Community: The Breakup, 1876–1881 (1972). An archive at Syracuse University’s library houses a large collection of primary and secondary materials. J. M. Whitworth’s chapters on the Oneida Community in God’s Blueprints (1975) are a good survey, as is M. Hollo-way’s chapter in Heavens on Earth (1951). M. L. Carden, Oneida: Utopian Community to Modern Corporation (1969), and R. D. Thomas, The Man Who Would Be Perfect: John Humphrey Noyes and the Utopian Impulse (1977), are two of several twentieth-century studies. A sound brief biography of Noyes appears in the Dictionary of American Biography (1934). See also R. G. Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860 (1978).