Knowlton Biography Chapter 28
Twenty-eight: Jailed in Cambridge
Having now, as I conceive, knocked out Dr. Channing’s underpinning, I need trouble myself no farther with his superstructure; but being for the good of society, I suppose, debarred from other business, I will notice here and there a clause.
Charles spent January, February, and March of 1833 in the Middlesex County Jail in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. A Lowell jury had found him guilty and the judge had chosen three months and hard labor as an appropriate punishment for publishing Fruits of Philosophy. Knowlton spent the winter months in a small, damp cell, far from his family and friends. Conditions in the Middlesex County Jail were so horrific that after one visit to the place a few years later, Dorothea Dix began her famous career as a prison reformer. Charles didn’t say much about his time in the jail. During his incarceration, Comfort White Knowlton, Charles’s mother, died in Templeton.
Knowlton’s supporters continued to write letters to the editors of their freethought papers, expressing their outrage that a man could be imprisoned for publishing a book in a region that proudly called itself the “Athens of America.” “Is this a free country—a country of equal laws and equal justice?” asked freethinkers. “It has the name—but is it so in reality? Let us no longer speak of the Inquisition in Spain. Let us no longer condemn the courts which punished with death those involved in the Salem witchcraft. But let us look to our own times, our own judges, and our own legislators.”
Once the verdict in his Lowell trial was read and his sentence began, Charles didn’t waste much time feeling sorry for himself. He was aware that Fruits of Philosophy was selling well and that his new notoriety was the best sort of advertising, especially among freethinkers and poor people who saw Knowlton’s imprisonment as proof that the law and society did not have their best interests at heart. And these, after all, were the people he’d written his book to reach. Even Knowlton’s jailer, “a very sensible man” named Watson, told Charles “his mind had undergone quite a change respecting the book; that at first he regarded it as a kind of catch-penny thing. He also said at another time, that the clerk of the court told him that I never ought to have been prosecuted for publishing that book.” The tide of public opinion was slowly beginning to change.
Charles did write a “prison letter” from the Middlesex County Jail that was published in the region’s main freethought paper, The Boston Investigator. Rather than describing his suffering or complaining about conditions, though, Charles took the opportunity to call people’s attention to the connection between religion and his imprisonment. Knowlton’s letter to the Investigator was his first exploration of a theme he’d return to many times.
A young man, Charles said, was “in the habit of visiting the inmates of my present habitation on the first day of the week.” This young minister talked to the prisoners “in a kind of religio moral sort of way.” He didn’t “degrade himself as to talk of ‘immortal souls,’” Charles said, but kept the conversation directed toward “their temporal rather than ‘spiritual’ good.” He was, in other words, a liberal, Unitarian minister, and not a fire-and-brimstone Calvinist like the ones Charles had known in his youth.
Historians have gone to great lengths tracing the liberalization of religion in early America. Many believe that theological differences between the old Yankee Calvinists and the new Unitarians springing up among Boston’s educated elite had important effects on American culture. While this may be true, to an outsider such as Charles these theological disputes seemed trivial. And in practice, the different doctrines of competing denominations had little effect on how the christians treated infidels like Knowlton.
The young Unitarian minister, Charles said, “seems to fear that I entertain sentiments which would turn society topsy turvy if they should become prevalent; and, to put me to rights, he left me a ‘Discourse on the Evidences of Revealed Religion,’ by one Dr. Channing.” The earnest young minister urged Charles to read the short book, as if he believed Charles would toss it aside. Charles replied, that was how “religionists are too much in the way of treating writings of the reformers. But as I am in the habit of greedily devouring whatever falls into my hands upon what is to me the opposite side of the question,” he continued, “I read the discourse very attentively.” Charles then wrote the Investigator “to offer a few remarks in relation to it.”
The Discourse on the Evidences of Revealed Religion the young minister had given Charles was a booklet by a Boston minister named William Ellery Channing. Channing was a leading Unitarian theologian, working to soften the Calvinism of the Puritans and bring christianity into the nineteenth century. Born into a wealthy, Rhode Island family, Channing had attended Harvard before becoming the pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston. Channing was considered an inspiring preacher, and was admired by Ralph Waldo Emerson and his following of Transcendentalists. There’s a statue of Channing at the entrance of the Boston Public Garden.
Evidences was reprinted from an 1821 lecture Channing had given at Harvard. In it, Channing claimed the basis of christian faith was belief in the miracles of the New Testament. Responding to eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume’s famous essay refuting miracles, Channing said, “This argument of Hume proves too much, and therefore proves nothing.” Broadly defined, Channing said, miracles were “wanton and useless violations of nature’s order; and it is accordingly against miracles, considered in this naked, general form, that the arguments of infidelity are chiefly urged. But it is a great disingenuity to class under this head the miracles of Christianity. They are palpably different. They do not stand alone in history; but are most intimately incorporated with it.” The fact that these miracles were the basis of a religion that controlled much of Europe and America, Channing concluded, made them more valid—it made them true.
Sitting in his cold, damp cell in East Cambridge, just a few miles from Dr. Channing’s Beacon Hill residence, Charles thought otherwise. If these christian miracles were so palpably different, Charles said, “What a pity, when they were about it, the miracles had not been such as to” build a religion that could “extend to more than one fifth of the human family in the space of eighteen hundred years.” Charles agreed with Hume—claiming Hume’s argument “occurred to me before I had seen or heard anything of it”—that the issue wasn’t about deciding what’s natural and what’s a miracle, but about the testimony of miracles:
I admit that an acquaintance of mine, whom I believe to be honest may satisfy me that he has a conviction of having witnessed a miraculous event; but when a story is handed down to us by nobody knows who, but probably interested persons, that eighteen hundred years ago one or more men witnessed a miraculous event, the case is very materially altered. And even if I were satisfied that men at that time had a conviction of having witnessed such event, I should by no means be bound to admit they did, if I could explain the cause of their conviction upon natural principles. Because we know much of matter, it does not follow that we know every thing respecting it; and as many things once ascribed to supernatural causes, have since been accounted for upon natural principles, it is more “consonant with experience” to regard the cause of a mysterious event as natural and unknown, than as supernatural. Hence the doctor’s reasoning does not effect the real force and spirit of Hume’s argument.
As for Channing’s claim that christian miracles were different because they had influenced history, it was belief in the miracles that gave them power, Charles said, and not their actual truth or falsehood. Like the disputes between Calvinist and Unitarian theologies, Charles concluded, Channing’s separation of christian miracles from all others was a distinction without a difference. For all his educated liberalism, the young Unitarian minister who’d given the Evidences to Charles was as convinced that Knowlton’s infidelity was a threat to social order as the strictest old Calvinist.
It’s interesting that this is the topic Knowlton chose to write about, in a prison letter he knew would be read by thousands of freethinkers interested in his case. But it isn’t unusual. Articles like Charles’s deconstruction of a famous theologian regularly filled the pages of the Investigator and freethought papers like it across the country.
It’s also interesting, while we’re on the subject, that William Ellery Channing is remembered as a gifted theologian and social reformer while Charles Knowlton has been virtually forgotten. A freethinker like Knowlton might ironically suggest that Channing’s fame came from the fact that it’s much more difficult to make something ridiculous sound enlightened than it is to plainly state the obvious. But there would be a serious point behind the irony. Channing was rewarded during his lifetime and revered afterward, for telling people with power things they wanted to hear. Knowlton was punished during his lifetime and forgotten afterward for telling people without power things they needed to hear. Which of them really deserves a statue in a public park?