Beyond Immediate Emancipation: Jonathan Blanchard, Abolitionism, and the Emergence of American Fundamentalism

BEYOND IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION: JONATHAN BLANCHARD, ABOLITIONISM, AND THE EMERGENCE OF AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM Richard S.Taylor It is customary to regard evangelical abolitionism and the Social Gospel as part of the same historical tradition. Abolitionism, writes Sydney Ahlstrom, was a "decisive prelude to the Social Gospel," and Charles Howard Hopkins describes the Social Gospel as heir to the "hope and fervor" that fueled the "crusade against slavery."1 It is also true, however , that there was an equally significant link between evangelical abolitionism and the conservative Protestant impulse that prepared the way for fundamentalism. And nowhere is that link clearer than in the career of Jonathan Blanchard (1811-92), an abolitionist ministereducator who founded Wheaton College—a school that became, in the twentieth century, a bastion of fundamentalism.2 1 Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972). p. 787; and Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism (New Haven, 1940), p. 14. 2 For Blanchard's own account of his career, see Jonathan Blanchard. "My Life Work," in Sermons and Addresses (Chicago, 1892), pp. 7-14. Studies of Blanchard's life include Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. "Blanchard, Jonathan": Clyde S. Kilby. Minorili/ of One: The Biography of Jonathan Blanchard (Grand Rapids, Mich , 1959); and Richard S. Taylor, "Seeking the Kingdom: A Study in the Career of Jonathan Blanchard, 1811-1892" (Ph.D. diss., Northern Illinois University, 1977). Kilby, a professor of English at Wheaton College, undertook his research with financial assistance from the school's alumni association , and Minority of One was published in conjunction with Wheaton's centennial. It is a warm and often perceptive chronicle of Blanchard's life written from an evangelical perspective. Yet Kilby's reverent tone and high regard for "Jonathan" obscure Blanchard's considerable significance as a representative of the small cadre of youngevangelicals who enlisted in the war against slavery and who survived into the post-Civil War period Blanchard lived through acritical period in the history of American evangelicalism, and his life deserves study from that perspective, there are discussions of Wheaton College and twentieth-century fundamentalism in Thomas A. Askew, Jr., "The Liberal Arts College Encounters Intellectual Change: AComparativeStudy of Education at Knox and Wheaton Colleges, 1837-1925" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University. 1969), pp. 226-50; and Wyeth W. Willard, Fire on the Prairie: The Story of Wheaton Coltene (Wheaton, III, 1950) Civil War History, Vol. XXVII, No. 3 Copyright© 1981 by The Kent State University Press 0009-8078/81/2703-0005 $01.00/0 JONATHAN BLANCHARD261 Like many other abolitionist evangelicals, Blanchard believed that individual conscience was the mainspring of American society and that conscience would provide a peaceful mechanism for purging that society of impurity. By appealing to conscience, he expected to create a millennial "perfect state of society" in an evangelical Protestant mold. But when the Civil War dashed abolitionist hopes for a nonviolent end to slavery and when, at the same time, Blanchard suffered setbacks in his career, his optimism ebbed. Many of Blanchard's frustrations flowed into a miniature Gilded Age revival of the antimasonic movement, a crusade tiiat allowed him to organize and express his fears about social, cultural, and intellectual trends that seemed to run counter to his expectations. It no longer appeared possible to expect social progress based on individual conscience; indeed, the two evangelical abolitionist articles of faith—social progress and an atomistic view of society— seemed incompatible. While liberal evangelicals chose social progress, Jonathan Blanchard joined those conservatives who continued to organize their thinking around individual conscience but began to espouse a considerably chastened view of human history and American culture. Born in 1811, Blanchard, like many other abolitionists, grew up in rural New England, experienced conversion as an adolescent, and began his career as a social reformer in the temperance movement. His father was a Vermont farmer who survived the agricultural depression that swept New England in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and it was in the basement of his father's farmhouse that young Blanchard first evinced the exalted moral absolutism that colored his life. There he smashed a jug of rum to protest...