Knowlton Biography Chapter 29

Twenty-nine: The Boston Investigator

I here connect with this work, by way of Appendix, the following extracts from and article which appeared in the “Boston Investigator,” a paper which, mirabile dictu, is so “crazy” as to be open to the investigation of all subjects which mightily concern mankind.

Abner Kneeland, like Charles Knowlton—and unlike most of their adversaries—was the son of regular people.  Kneeland was born in 1774, in Gardner, Massachusetts, just a few miles from Knowlton’s childhood home, Templeton.  Kneeland’s grandfather, like Knowlton’s, made a name for himself fighting in the Revolutionary War.  An old history of Gardner remembers Abner as a boy “brought up in the good old-fashioned ways of our ancestors.”  Abner educated himself “with little assistance,” and worked for a while as a schoolteacher.  Later, after finding he was not cut out to be a merchant, Abner “gave up the business for the carpenter’s trade; saying, the only way to be rich, is to be contented with what you have.”

Kneeland was fascinated by philosophy and religion.  He became a lay reader in a Baptist Church in Vermont, and was invited to become the congregation’s minister.  Abner read a book on Universalism, and was attracted by its approach to theology, which was even less dogmatic than the Baptists.  Kneeland was a Universalist minister for six years in New Hampshire, and served his town as their representative to the legislature.

After moving from congregation to congregation in New England and New York as his ideas about religion continued to evolve, Kneeland became pastor of a liberal Universalist Church in Philadelphia.  But even in the most liberal parish he’d found, Abner quickly offended many of his parishioners when he declared from the pulpit that he no longer believed in punishment after death.  Like Knowlton, Kneeland discovered how slight the distinctions between “conservative” and “liberal” christianity really were.

Abner took over a parish in New York City, and once again even the most liberal Universalists found him too radical for their tastes.  The end came in 1828 when Kneeland invited Frances Wright to speak to the congregation.  Wright had just returned to New York from Nashoba, the cooperative community she had financed for freed slaves in Tennessee.  Kneeland’s affluent congregation resented Wright’s radical social and political views, and after a year of controversy he was taken off the Universalist Society’s list of acceptable ministers.  Luckily, Abner had already outgrown Universalism and had found people who appreciated his evolving perspective.

Abner Kneeland joined the freethought community in New York City, where he worked closely with Wright and Robert Dale Owen, and probably met Charles during Knowlton’s visits to promote Modern Materialism and print Fruits of Philosophy.  When Frances Wright began a satellite Society of Free Enquirers in Boston in 1829, Abner moved there to be its leader and main lecturer.  Kneeland gave regular talks and sold freethought books—including Knowlton’s—from the Society’s headquarters in Julien Hall, at the corner of Congress Street and Milk Street, a block from Liberty Square.  He began publishing The Boston Investigator there in 1831.     

Early editions of the Investigator featured a masthead illustration of a printing press with a banner that read “Tyrant’s Foe, the People’s Friend.”  Beneath this, in a column called “Working Man’s Department,” Kneeland listed the paper’s political agenda.  The platform included “Universal Education,” “Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt,” “Equal Taxation on Property,” and “No Legislation on Religion.”  The Investigator’s second edition in 1832 dropped the illustration and added “Abolition of Capital Punishment,” “An Effective Lien Law for Laborers,” and “Abolition of All Licensed Monopolies.”

As a friend of British-born freethinkers such as Wright and Owen, Kneeland was keenly aware that freethought was a transatlantic social movement.  The Investigator regularly carried articles about British reformers such as Richard Carlile, Robert Taylor, and Eliza Sharples.  In the summer of 1832, for example, Kneeland devoted the middle three columns of page one to a transcript written by Robert Dale Owen of a lecture given by Sharples at the Rotunda in London.  The right-hand column carried an announcement of Owen’s marriage to Mary Jane Robinson, including Owen’s objection to the legal authority New York’s marriage laws gave him over his wife and her belongings.  Owen called these laws “barbarous relics of a feudal and despotic system,” from which he “cannot legally, but I can morally divest myself.”  Owen’s new wife wrote, “I concur in these sentiments.”

Freethinkers in cities like New York and Boston met regularly to socialize and listen to speakers on a variety of subjects, but most frequently on social change.  When William Lloyd Garrison returned to Boston to begin publishing his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, he was unable to find a church or a public hall willing to let him speak against slavery.  Garrison wrote to leading Bostonians such as politician Daniel Webster, Calvinist minister Lyman Beecher, and Unitarian minister William Everett Channing.  None of them responded to his appeals.  Instead, Abner Kneeland offered Garrison the use of his freethought “pulpit,” and Garrison made his first public appearance as an abolitionist speaker at Julien Hall, on October 15, 1830. Reverend Beecher, who attended the Julien Hall speech, told Garrison after it, “your zeal is commendable, but you are misguided.”

The Investigator also featured transcripts of lectures and announced upcoming events.  Freethinkers held dances and celebrated occasions like Thomas Paine’s birthday, and the paper carried accounts of these parties including lists of toasts made by the attendees.  And there were always announcements of new books arriving at the Julien Hall shop, and of “Books Kept Always On Hand.”  Some of these included Frances Wright’s Lectures and Addresses for sixty-two cents, Robert Dale Owen’s Popular Tracts and Moral Physiology for forty-four cents each, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary for seventy-five cents, and portraits of Thomas Paine and Elihu Palmer for ten cents each and of Richard Carlile and Robert Taylor for twenty cents.  Also, Knowlton’s Modern Materialism for a dollar twenty-five, and Fruits of Philosophy for fifty cents.

When Charles was prosecuted for Fruits of Philosophy, the Investigator jumped immediately to his defense.  Kneeland wrote editorials denouncing the prosecutors for violating the freedom of the press.  He printed letters to the editor arguing both sides of the case.  It was the Investigator’s policy to print all sides of an issue, if opponents to the editor’s views cared to write in.  The paper carried a few letters supporting Knowlton’s prosecution.  In one, a christian offended by Knowlton and Kneeland’s infidelity warned them, “If there be a Lord in the Heaven above let the Atheist imagine what punishment is fit for the traitor who denies and blasphemes the power that created him.”  But most of the paper’s readers were freethinkers who supported the Investigator’s platform, understood what was at stake, and stood with Knowlton and Kneeland.