Orestes Augustus Brownson

• Orestes Augustus Brownson
• Born: September 16, 1803
• Died: April 17, 1876

Writer and editor, was born in Stockbridge, Vermont, the son of Sylvester Augustus Brownson, descendant of an old Connecticut family, and Relief (Metcalf) Brownson of New Hampshire. He had a twin sister, Daphne Augusta. His father died soon after the birth of the twins and his mother struggled to keep the family together, but when Orestes Brownson was six years old, she turned over the care of the two children to neighbors.

Brownson spent the next eight years with the farm couple that took him in—the husband more than sixty years old, the wife fifty. It was a Spartan life, and Brownson later said, “Properly speaking, I had no childhood.” He also had no formal schooling, a fact that always made him feel humble. However, he educated himself and was an early and eager reader, especially of the Scriptures and religion. He was naturally intelligent and intense in temperament.

When Brownson was fourteen, he moved to upper New York State and for a time was employed by a printer. In 1822 he joined the Presbyterian church, in the first of several attempts to find a religion that he could accept completely, but the Calvinist doctrines of predestination and eternal punishment disturbed him, and he left the church in 1825. He went to Detroit to teach school, contracted malaria, and spent a year in recovery and meditation. He decided to become a Universalist, and was ordained as a minister in that faith on June 15, 1826. Until 1832 he preached in various churches in New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire.

One of his biographers, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., describes Brownson as an eloquent speaker and “a striking figure in the pulpit, two inches over six feet, slim and active, with black hair brushed straight back from his forehead and deep-set eyes of mixed gray and hazel that seemed black when he grew excited.”

On June 19, 1827, Brownson married Sally Healy of Elbridge, New York. They had eight children. Apparently he was a stern husband and father. His daughter Sarah once noted that he read by himself for hours at a time, adding that her father was never intended for home life. If he was in the mood, however, he would play chess by the hour, insisting that his son Orestes Jr. join him. “There was no respite,” his son reported years later.

In the next few years, Brownson’s thoughts began shifting to the problems of society. He became interested in the cooperative community ideas of Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright, which led to the Utopian communities movement in the 1840s. He also helped to organize the short-lived Working Men’s Party in 1829. In their platforms, the state Working Men’s parties, most widespread in New England, demanded such reforms as mechanics’ lien laws, communal education, and abolition of debtors’ prison. Some sought to condemn both private ownership of land and inheritance of wealth.

Brownson summarized his objectives in Volume IV of his Works: “to organize society and government as to secure all men a paradise on the earth. This view I held steadily and without wavering from 1828 till 1842. ... My end was man’s earthly happiness, and my creed was progress.”

Although Brownson eventually came to believe that workingmen were too weak ever to achieve political power, he did not abandon their cause. In his article “The Laboring Classes,” published in the July 1840 issue of The Boston Quarterly Review, he stated: “Now the great work for this age and the coming is to raise up the laborer ... to emancipate the proletaries.” Working people, he hoped, would recognize their rights and their destiny and act to achieve those goals without violence or revolution.

Brownson’s religious views were also becoming more liberal. In 1829 he became editor of a semimonthly journal, The Gospel Advocate and Impartial Investigator, published in Auburn, New York, and his comments on such matters as the divinity of Christ, inspiration in the Bible, and life after death displeased the Universalists. He left that ministry in 1832 and moved to New Hampshire. There he became influenced by the ideas of William Ellery Channing and became a Unitarian, serving in the Walpole, New Hampshire, church from 1832 to 1834 and as minister of the Canton, Massachusetts, Unitarian church from 1834 to 1836. During that first year in Canton, the Brownson family had a young boarder at the parsonage, Harvard sophomore Henry David Thoreau, who came to teach in the local school. Thoreau studied German with Brownson and spent the following winter tutoring the latter’s sons.

In 1836 Brownson moved to the Chelsea area of Boston and organized his own church among poor laboring people, calling it the Society for Christian Union and Progress. That same year he published his first book, New Views of Christianity, Society and the Church, in which he praised what he called “the Church of the Future” and sharply criticized the Protestant and Catholic churches for their failings.

Through his friendship with Thoreau, he met Ralph Waldo Emerson and, also in 1836, joined the Transcendental Club. When a group of Transcendentalist intellectuals including Emerson, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Fuller, and Hawthorne established the Utopian community Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841, Brownson supported the effort and sent his adolescent son Orestes Jr. to join the community. In Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, a novel based on the author’s brief experience at Brook Farm, the major character of the reformer Hollingsworth is said to be based partly on Brownson. In Chapter VI Hawthorne has Hollingsworth say: “And you call me tender! I should rather say that the most marked trait in my character is an inflexible severity of purpose. Mortal man has no right to be so inflexible as it is my nature and necessity to be.”

In January 1838 Brownson founded The Boston Quarterly Review, in which he expounded his social, political, and intellectual views, winning national attention. In 1839 he published American Literature, calling for a native literature proud of its original voice and free from imitation of European styles. His critical acumen may be judged perhaps by his assessment of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter : that it was a glorification of sin and should never have been published. In 1840 Brownson published Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted, a novel whose hero is converted to Unitarianism; but only two years later, in The Mediatorial Life of Jesus, he espoused the doctrine of the Trinity.

The Boston Quarterly Review was merged in 1842 with the New York Democratic Review. Brownson wrote articles for that journal entitled “Synthetic Philosophy” and “The Origin and Constitution of Government” that were revised and published in 1865 as The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies and Destiny. In January 1844 he resumed publication of his own magazine, which he then called Brownson’s Quarterly Review.

The defeat of the Democratic party in the elections of 1840 disillusioned Brownson about the ability of the people to recognize and act in their own best interests, and he began to turn away from the ideals of liberal democracy toward a more conservative view. At the same time, he began to question his own religious beliefs and to conclude that men and women, with all their faults, could be improved only through the grace of God acting through an appointed church.

In October 1844 Brownson became a Roman Catholic, as did his wife and all of their children. His conversion shocked the thousands to whom he stood as a symbol of New England Protestant liberalism. Brownson was by then well known for his intelligence, the power of his prose, his unbendable honesty, his passionate search for truth as he saw it, and his belief that each new path was at last the right one. In The Convert, or Leaves From My Experience, an account of his religious search and development published in 1857, he explained: “I was unwilling to be an unbeliever, and felt deeply the need of having a religion of some sort.”

The decision cost him a measure of financial security as well; his Review lost most of its Southern readers and many Northern ones. Brownson continued to publish, however, until 1865, when the journal was suspended; it was published again from October 1872 until 1875. During the Civil War, Brownson, who believed that the South was wrong to have seceded, wrote patriotic articles in support of the Union. He also lost two of his sons in the Northern cause; both were killed in 1864, one in battle and one on his way to the front lines.

After his conversion, Brownson, who became one of the leading Catholic writers and editors of his time, devoted most of his writings to a defense of the Catholic church and to attacks against its enemies. He especially deplored the anti-Catholic attacks of the nativist movement of the period, which were spurred on by the Native American or “Know-Nothing” party. Born out of fear of the constantly increasing immigration of those years, the movement transferred this fear and hatred to Catholicism, the religion of many of the new immigrants. Although Brownson believed that the sole object of nativism was to attack Catholics, and that nativists used immigration to disguise their intent, his arguments against prejudice were an important contribution to the creation of more tolerant attitudes.

Never one to avoid controversy, he also found it in his own relations with his church and at various times argued with such adversaries as Cardinal Newman, American bishops, and leaders of the Irish community. But rejecting the vacillation that had characterized him in the past, he always deferred to the authority of the church and never questioned its role as a divine mediator or its conclusions about life and religion.

In 1855 Brownson moved to New York City and in 1857 to Elizabeth, New Jersey. In 1875 he went to live in Detroit, where he died the following year at the age of seventy-two.

A major work of Brownson’s is Catholic Schools and Education (1862). His complete works were edited by his son H. F. Brownson as The Works of Orestes Brownson, 20 vols. (1882-87). Biographies include H. F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson’s Early Life, Middle Life, Later Life, 3 vols., (1898-1901); A. M. Schlesinger Jr.’s gracefully written Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress (1939); T. May-nard, Orestes Brownson (1943); and T. R. Ryan, Orestes A, Brownson (1984). See also A. S. Ryan, ed., The Brownson Reader (1955); L. Gilhooley, Contradiction and Dilemma: Orestes Brownson and the American Idea (1972); and the Dictionary of American Biography (1929).