My Biography of Dr. Charles Knowlton
First in a series of "Freethinker" posts
General introduction to the process, then a reading of the Preface and Chapter 1, with the text beneath for you to read along:
Preface
I ventured out all alone, one night in January, without saying a word to any one, and took up a subject. As I was about shouldering it, to convey it out of the yard to the sleigh—for I had ventured to take the doctor's horse and sleigh without bells, and scud off without consulting him—wind or gas was forced upward out of the stomach with a somewhat frightful noise; but I commanded the said subject to be still, and trudged on, nothing daunted. In the morning I told the doctor that if he would walk in, I would "show him the bison." On beholding the bare subject so unexpectedly, he was far more surprised, not to say frightened, than I had expected.
An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy is the story of a freethinker. Charles Knowlton called himself a “free enquirer”—his enemies called him an “Infidel.” Knowlton was also, as the title says, a “Body-Snatcher.” As a medical student, Charles Knowlton stole corpses to dissect. Charles was caught and convicted, and served time in jail.
“The Fruits of His Philosophy” refers to a book Charles wrote in 1831. It was the first medical birth control manual in America, and Knowlton was convicted and imprisoned for that as well—this time with hard labor. Charles was an outsider for most of his life, swimming against the stream of religious and social conformity. So this is a story about why outsiders are important, and what they can achieve.
Growing up surrounded by superstition and hypocrisy, Charles developed an unswerving dedication to finding and telling the truth. If the truth he’d found was opposed by authorities in the church and government, Charles went ahead and told it anyway. So this is a story about the power of integrity.
It’s also an adventure story, full of conflict, drama, humor, and a little horror. Charles Knowlton led an unusual life; it gave him a radical outlook and led him to develop a unique personal philosophy. But it was what Charles did with this outlook and the fruits of his philosophy, that really mattered. So this is a story about how experiences become ideas, and how ideas become actions.
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History, like travel, exposes us to foreign people and unfamiliar environments. These new people and places are interesting in their own right, and often tell us a lot about ourselves and where we live. Although Knowlton’s story is dramatic and fast-paced, it’s history, which means it all really happened and it’s all backed up by evidence that is cited at the back of the book in endnotes. Charles left behind observations and recollections of many of the events in his story, and this particular history is told from Charles’s perspective. While he was committed to finding and telling the truth, Charles, like everyone, was formed by his experiences. Many of Knowlton’s adversaries had a different point of view and didn’t understand why he had to be such a pain—that’s why Charles’s story and perspective are so important. Most of the histories available today were written by people representing the other side of struggles Charles found himself in, and many celebrate the religious orthodoxy and social conformity Knowlton fought throughout his life. History often praises “reformers” Charles would have considered little different from the old status quo. Charles Knowlton’s life offers us a rare opportunity to see his world from a much more radical perspective, to watch a troubled young man become a famous nonconformist, and to challenge what we think we know about life in early-nineteenth century America—and today.
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A note about quotes and capitalization: Quotes are reproduced exactly. Occasional misspellings and archaic words are retained. Punctuation and sentence structure are original. Like many nineteenth-century writers, Charles Knowlton used a lot of commas and sometimes wrote very elaborate, run-on sentences. But that’s part of the charm. Also, Knowlton did not capitalize the word “christian.” Since this is a story from the freethinker’s perspective, I’ve adopted this practice—after all, “freethinker” isn’t capitalized. So “Christian” only appears when I’m quoting a passage where it’s capitalized. “God,” when used as a proper name, is capitalized.
One: A Hundred Thousand Shingles
My father was a farmer in moderate circumstances, and used to make many good pine shingles, and so did I. Probably I shaved more than one hundred thousand before I was 17 years of age. But how much influence this has had on my course of life, thus far, it is impossible to calculate; but certain it is, that I often worked very hard for one of my strength, and took many swigs of New England rum, for such was the fashion in those days, and especially in Templeton. Most of my school-mates—males, I mean—are now either dead or inebriates.
Charles Knowlton was born in 1800 and died in 1850. He lived during a period of rapid change, when age-old traditions and institutions were fighting a desperate battle against new knowledge, ideas, and opinions. Historians have taught us that the modern world was created by a combination of great men such as Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, or Charles Darwin, and impersonal forces such as “Democracy” or “the Enlightenment.” Charles Knowlton was a regular man who struggled all his life against very personal forces. But through these struggles, Knowlton helped create the world we take for granted today.
When Charles told his own story, he began it with shingles. Shingles are long, narrow slices of pine or cedar that are still used in parts of America to roof and side buildings. Nowadays, they’re cut by machines and used mostly for their homey, old-fashioned appeal. In the early 1800s, shingles were split one by one from a large log of even-grained softwood, by hand. The shingle-splitter used a broad axe and had to be very careful with it, to cut narrow, tapering shingles—and nothing else. Assuming an expert splitter could cut about fifty shingles in an hour, Charles Knowlton spent at least two thousand hours of his youth swinging his axe at very precise targets. That’s more than enough time to become an expert with sharp-edged tools. Knowlton’s trouble with the law began when he started applying sharp edges to human flesh.
Charles Knowlton was born in the village of Templeton, Massachusetts, on the tenth of May, 1800—but no, although Knowlton helped create the modern world, there’s no statue and Templeton doesn’t have an annual parade or party to celebrate his birth. Outsiders who push for major changes are rarely remembered as fondly as insiders who compromise on minor ones. We’ve been taught to believe these insiders and their compromises tell the whole story of change in history—and because of this, that we should work for small, incremental changes from inside the system. Charles Knowlton’s story challenges this belief, and that’s why it’s important.
Templeton in 1800 was a little community, less than fifty years old and surrounded by Worcester County farmland. The Knowlton family first appears in the town’s records around 1763, when Templeton lay beyond the frontier line in the western Massachusetts wilderness. The year 1763 is remembered in that part of the world for the end of the Seven Years War between Britain and France, which Americans called the French and Indian War. Charles’s grandfather Ezekiel arrived in Templeton just as conflict was ending and the threat of Indian raids on isolated frontier villages was fading. It’s not clear whether Ezekiel fought for the British in the Indian war, but he led his neighbors as a militia Captain twelve years later when they took up arms against Britain in the American Revolution.
By the time of Charles Knowlton’s birth, Templeton had just under a thousand residents. Knowlton’s world was quite different from our own. Most families lived on the food they raised, wore clothes made from homespun cloth, and feared diseases we would simply take a few pills to cure. The things Charles did and ways people attacked him for his actions make more sense when seen from the perspective of his own place and time. Remembering that Knowlton’s world was different from ours will also remind us how in many ways, it was the same—and that’s why his story is relevant for us, today.
Charles Knowlton’s world was also the regular world. Most of us live in the regular world today. Unfortunately, many histories focus only on exceptional, elite people in the past—and we mistakenly assume they were normal. Thomas Jefferson, for example, is remembered as a great champion of regular people. Jefferson believed the “Yeoman farmer,” who tilled his own acres and lived an independent, self-sufficient life, was the foundation of American Democracy. But Jefferson wasn’t a Yeoman himself. Thomas Jefferson grew up on his family’s fourteen hundred-acre tobacco plantation in Virginia and as his most recent biographer says, was “born to command.” Jefferson had servants and slaves to do most of the day-to-day work of basic survival for him, and so he was able to concentrate on reading the classics and mastering complicated rituals of colonial society and politics. Everyone agrees that Jefferson’s contribution to American history was hugely important, but by focusing exclusively on these exceptional elites, history loses sight of everybody else.
There were a thousand regular people for every one of the exceptional elite men we normally read about. Many of these regular men, women, and children led lives that wouldn’t interest anyone but historians or their own descendants. But more often than you’d think, regular people did exceptional things we ought to know about. They discovered, invented, built, fought, read, wrote, voted, and challenged authority in ways that helped create the modern world. The call to arms that led to the American Revolution, we should remember, wasn’t a political treatise written by Jefferson or one of his elite Virginian friends. It was Common Sense, written by a corset-maker’s son named Thomas Paine and read by a half-million regular American colonists. Once Paine had won them over to the patriot cause, the few dozen elite delegates at the continental convention had no choice but to swallow hard, settle their differences and sign Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.
The American Revolution was fought and won in 1781 by the regular people Thomas Paine had written Common Sense for, including Charles Knowlton’s grandfather and his father. But the new State of Massachusetts saw more rebellion and revolutionary bloodshed when Daniel Shays led a few hundred western farmers against the militia in a fight over high taxes and farm foreclosures. Shays’s Rebellion helped push the thirteen states to adopt a new Constitution and elect “Federalists” George Washington and John Adams as America’s first two Presidents. Then, an opposition party under Thomas Jefferson took the government away from John Adams in what Jefferson called the “Revolution of 1800.” Luckily, Adams gave up the Presidency peacefully, so this revolution was bloodless.
When Charles was born in 1800, the slave rebellion that became the Haitian Revolution was in its ninth year. Ironically, President Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence the Haitians had copied when writing their own, cut off the aid his predecessor John Adams had been sending the rebels. In 1800, Jefferson’s friend Thomas Paine was in France, where he’d gone to support the French Revolution. Paine had been elected to the French National Convention, but was later imprisoned and sentenced to death because he opposed the execution of the French king. Paine was released when fellow freethinker James Monroe protested the imprisonment of an American citizen. But Paine remained in Europe, because he was no longer welcome in the United States. After writing Common Sense, Thomas Paine had published The Rights of Man, supporting the French Revolution, and The Age of Reason, attacking organized religion. Although Paine’s arguments for natural rights and against authority in these books were merely extensions of the ones that had led Americans to independence in Common Sense, they were not as welcome in post-Revolutionary America. Supporters of religion and many who believed America had already had quite enough revolution decided that Paine simply didn’t know when to stop.
Although his family was almost certainly among those that agreed America was better off without hearing any more from Thomas Paine, Charles Knowlton would choose a life that put him in constant contact with ideas like Paine’s and with freethinkers who revered the transatlantic revolutionary. But that’s later in the story—it’s 1800 and Charles has only just been born. Charles Knowlton was the second son of Stephen Knowlton and Comfort White Knowlton. His mother, Comfort, was a farmer’s daughter from the neighboring town of Gerry. His father, Stephen, was the son of Captain Ezekiel Knowlton, commander of Templeton’s militia. Captain Ezekiel had led his neighbors to war in April 1775, when they marched to defend Boston from the redcoats after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Although only fourteen at the time, Stephen had gone along. Both men were town heroes who served regularly as Templeton Selectmen, and the Captain went to Boston several times as Templeton’s Congressman in the late 1700s.
His father Stephen Knowlton was a “farmer in moderate circumstances,” according to Charles. Stephen was one of those Yeomen Farmers who made their own way in the world and were the backbone of American Democracy, in the eyes of romantic politicians such as Thomas Jefferson. Charles and his brothers grew up working on the family farm. In addition to the hundred thousand shingles Charles split as a boy, he and his brothers had a daily routine of farm chores. The average early-American farmhouse burned thirty to forty cords of wood in a year. Firewood was boys’ work, so while living with their parents Charles and his two brothers probably cut, split, and stacked about five hundred cords, or a thousand tons of wood. But firewood was just one of many daily chores for a farmer’s son in the early 1800s. Charles Knowlton’s family, like all the farm families of Templeton, grew nearly all the food they would eat or feed to their animals during the year. The amount of hard physical labor it took to feed even a small family like the Knowltons is very difficult to imagine, in an age when most of us get our food from supermarkets and when the few farmers left have tractors, combines, irrigation, chemical fertilizers and pesticides to help them feed the rest of us. Farmers like the Knowltons were responsible for their own survival—they literally reaped what they sowed. And in addition to producing nearly everything they would consume each year, a farm family needed to make something it could sell in town, for the cash they’d need to pay taxes and buy what they couldn’t make themselves. Something like pine shingles.