Knowlton Biography, Chapter 31
Thirty-one: Trouble in Ashfield
Perhaps, Mr. Grosvenor, you will say you have a perfect right to endeavor to dissuade people from giving me support, I will admit that you have; [by fair means] but then I have the same right to endeavor to dissuade them from giving you support; if you exercise your right, I shall exercise mine, and vice versa—I ask no odds—I care not a straw which course you take. I only want to know where I am to look for you, that we may have fair open play, and no more of this secret conniving.
Freethinkers like Charles Knowlton, if they’re remembered at all today, are often imagined as people who went out of their way to antagonize their religious neighbors. There’s a small element of truth to this—after all, Charles did play his violin by an open window in Ashfield. But exposing the parishioners of the congregational church to a bit of Sunday morning fiddle music was hardly a life-or-death attack on religion and public morals. Charles was perfectly willing, he told the local minister, “if you would attend to soul-saving and let me alone, I would attend to body-saving, and let you alone.” Unfortunately, even today in a society that prides itself on its religious tolerance, it’s acceptable to wear unusual clothing, eat unusual foods, and act in unusual ways if you’re religious—but not if you are not.
About a year after Knowlton’s arrival in Ashfield, the congregational church hired a new pastor. Reverend Mason Grosvenor was about the same age as Charles. He was the son of a Connecticut minister, and had been educated and ordained at Yale College in New Haven. Although he’d been a founding member of a missionary group called the Yale Band that brought religion to the frontier in Illinois, Grosvenor had stayed behind due to illness and had been given the church in Ashfield when he recovered. The retiring minister warned Grosvenor about the rampant infidelity threatening Ashfield, and Deacon Jared Bement suggested the freethinker Knowlton was its source. Reverend Grosvenor thought he saw a soft target and an opportunity to make some sweeping changes in his remote, back-woods parish. He was wrong on both counts.
In early 1833, Charles began to hear from his friends in town that the new minister had begun denouncing him from the pulpit, telling the faithful they should avoid patronizing the infidel. Charles ignored the attacks for a while, assuming Grosvenor would soon find something else to sermonize about. But after months of unremitting denunciations, Charles and Roswell Shepard started to notice a decrease in their business. “Being aware of the vast influence which a minister of the gospel has the power of exercising upon the minds of a religious people,” Charles said, “and recalling to mind that I had already suffered from the mal-exercise of this influence, and, also, the persevering and relentless spirit with which an intolerant priest pursues his victim,” he decided it was time to defend himself. So in November 1833, Charles delivered a speech at the town hall.
Knowlton began with a quote from Scottish poet William Drummond, saying “He that will not reason is a bigot, he that cannot reason is a fool, and he that dares not reason is a slave!” Charles explained the difference between knowledge and belief. Experience and reflection turn beliefs into knowledge, Charles said. “I will not say whether it be too little or too much knowledge that makes one a sceptic” he continued, “but I can with truth say, that for myself I was once a believer, and that I have not lost one whit of the knowledge (if knowledge it may be called) that made me such, but I have acquired more, and I now am ycleped an infidel. Sorry thanks this, for proving all things and holding fast that which is good.”
Charles concluded by attacking Grosvenor’s order to his flock, that they should take their medical business to a church member. Charles called this type of behavior hypocritical and un-American:
The withholding of patronage on account of difference of opinion is the worst kind of intolerance, or rather it is intolerance put in practice. It is what every man is, or ought to be, ashamed of. Ask even the hot-headed fanatic why he does not employ his neighbor to shoe his horse, to mend his boots, or to give him physic, and he will hem, and hitch, and finally give you almost any other reason than because his neighbor’s thinking part don’t happen to act as his own does concerning the gods!...It is in fact awarding and punishing for opinion’s sake, and is directly opposed to the spirit of our sacred constitution. It encourages ‘mental lying,’ that is, hypocrisy, which to me is one of the most detestable jades that crouches around among us.
In spite of Reverend Grosvenor’s efforts, about half the people in Ashfield supported Charles and his partner. Not because the townspeople were freethinkers—only a few were—but because they objected to the ugliness of the minister’s attacks and the intrusions they represented into Ashfielders’ private lives. Also, Knowlton and Shepard were good doctors. The church had declared the health of Ashfield families was less important than Reverend Grosvenor’s definition of righteousness, and many families disagreed.
America in 1834 was a free market: a place where people sank or swam by their own efforts, with little or no social safety net. If a farmer failed to bring in a crop or a factory worker failed to earn enough to feed his family, they went hungry. “I have a wife and four sprightly children, and they must and shall be supported so long as my health continues,” Charles reminded his adversaries in Ashfield. Charles and Roswell Shepard had worked hard to build a strong practice, and Charles wasn’t about to run away again. “I have been hoisted about, from pillar to post, by the influence of priest craft, quite enough,” he said, “and I will not budge another inch.”
Charles and his family were not the only people who suffered as a result of Mason Grosvenor’s crusade. Roswell Shepard, Knowlton’s partner, was a tolerant man who everyone agreed was “far enough in all conscience from being an infidel, as you have the civility to denominate Free Enquirers.” It was true that Shepard agreed with Knowlton on birth control, and had certainly helped distribute Fruits of Philosophy and its ideas among their patients. That was apparently enough.
Lucy Kellogg, however, was innocent. Lucy was a young Ashfield woman suffering from a digestive disorder, who had been a patient of Knowlton and Shepard for about a year. Both Charles and Roswell had seen Lucy several times, and over the course of the winter “had doctored her to the amount of about twenty dollars without prospect of getting pay…by night and by day, through thick and thin, storm or no storm.” Around February, 1834, Charles had decided to wean Lucy off her medications, to give her a chance to build up some strength. Over the next few months, her condition improved and Charles’s treatments “operated as favorably as I could expect.”
Suddenly, in the early spring, Knowlton and Shepard discovered Lucy Kellogg was no longer their patient. Dr. Jared Bement, the deacon at Reverend Grosvenor’s church, had asked the minister to convince Lucy’s family to abandon their doctors and the treatment they had prescribed. Knowlton was a “dam’d fool,” said Dr. Bement. And an infidel, added Grosvenor. The minister claimed he’d heard from a parishioner that Knowlton had said, “It is no more for that girl to die than it would be for a horse.” This was how materialists thought about their patients, Grosvenor explained. Since infidels didn’t believe in the immortal soul, people were the same as animals to them.
The family Reverend Grosvenor claimed he was quoting about Knowlton’s beliefs said they’d never told the minister “any such thing,” but the damage had been done. Charles wrote Grosvenor an angry letter he later made public:
No person can have a greater regard for human life, or be more anxious to preserve it than I am. If I believed that to die is but to exchange one mode of conscious existence for another, perhaps I should be no more anxious to preserve the life of a fellow being than most people are. Nor did I ever express any such sentiment as the above…What must I think of the heart and head that can believe I should say, under the roof of a patient, that her life is of no more consequence than that of a horse, or to this effect. Or, what must I think of the man who, not believing it, can be instrumental in circulating such base slander, and that too with design to injure—yea, with design to injure—[actionable in law.]
Of course, Reverend Mason Grosvenor, D.D., of Yale College and pastor of Ashfield’s largest congregation, was not afraid of Charles’s threat—what judge would ever rule for an infidel against a minister in a libel suit? Grosvenor was so determined to take business away from the infidels that the church raised money to pay Bement. Unlike Knowlton and Shepard, the deacon didn’t treat poor folk for free. Dr. Bement took over the Kellogg case, and began treating Lucy with the old, heroic medicines. The young woman’s health worsened. Bement described an abscess “gathering and bursting,” explaining the case to parishioners in a way that Knowlton pointed out was not only inconsistent with her condition when he had treated Lucy, but made no medical sense.
After several months under Bement’s care, Lucy Kellogg died. Charles believed Dr. Bement could have saved her. “Why did you stand by and see a woman die,” he asked “without making use of means that were calculated to save her when such means were at hand, and would doubtless have been effectual?” Bement had been unable to compete with Knowlton and Shepard as a doctor, Charles told Grosvenor and the people of Ashfield, so he’d found another way to challenge them. “Unless the air is full of lies,” Charles said, “he has been letting off his slang against us for a long time—and this is what especially qualifies him for your low purposes—” But it was no longer just a question of using unfair tactics to drive Knowlton and Shepard out of business. A woman was dead because the church had cared more about running the infidels out of town than about the life of one of its own members. “Fine times—” Charles concluded, “fine business truly for a peace-maker!...Oh! the blessed fruits of that benign religion that teaches peace and good will to men.”