Adin Ballou (1803-1890), founder of the utopian community at
Hopedale, Massachusetts and a leading 19th century exponent of
pacifism, was during his long career a Universalist, a
Restorationist, a Practical Christian, and a Unitarian minister. A
tireless reformer, he sought to bring his Christian and socialist
vision of society into practice. He earned the love of his allies
and the respect of his adversaries. He disconcerted them all,
however, with his frequent conversions. Taking up a succession of
social reforms, he put himself and those who followed him more and
more at odds with established society.
Adin was born to Ariel and Edilda Ballou on a farm in
Cumberland, Rhode Island. Raised a Six-Principle Baptist until
1813, he and his whole family were that year converted in a
Christian Connexion revival. Adin wanted to go to college, but his
father wished him to run the family farm. Inspired by a vision of
his deceased brother, Cyrus, whose specter pressed him to
"preach the Gospel of Christ to your fellow-men" or
"the blood of their souls will be required at your
hands," Adin felt called to the ministry. His father said
that he should remain on the farm and pastor the local
meetinghouse part-time.
In early 1822 Adin Ballou married Abigail Sayles. Abigail's
mother, a Universalist, lent him a copy of Elhanan Winchester's Dialogues
on the Universal Restoration. This reading and debates with
some Universalist neighbors challenged his assumptions about
salvation. At a Universalist meeting in nearby Wrentham,
Massachusetts that year, Adin, attending as a spectator, was
introduced to his distant cousin Hosea Ballou 2d, the Universalist
minister from Roxbury, Massachusetts, who encouraged him to seek
fellowship with the Universalists. After a period of study and
prayer, Adin sent a letter to Ballou 2d announcing his conversion
to Universalism. The Christian Connexion excommunicated him and
his father disinherited him.
Adin visited the Boston area that fall and stayed in the homes
of both Hosea Ballou 2d and Hosea
Ballou. At this time the Restorationist controversy—a
theological, political, and personal dispute between Hosea Ballou
and Edward
Turner, Paul Dean, and four other Universalist
ministers—was about to reach a climax. Theologically, the
controversy concerned the existence or non-existence of a limited
period of punishment for sin in the afterlife. Hosea Ballou
disbelieved in "future punishment"; his opponents, the
Restorationists, held such discipline an essential part of God's
plan. Adin, who believed in "future punishment," was
assured by Hosea Ballou 2d that Universalists tolerated diversity
in the matter. In his autobiography Adin recalled that his cousins
described the controversy as a personal and political vendetta
against Hosea Ballou on the part of Restorationists,
"represented as mere ambitious factionists and
mischief-makers in the order, with no honest, solemn convictions
of doctrinal faith or of Christian duty."
As a Universalist Adin Ballou at first preached in Bellingham,
Massachusetts and other communities near the family farm. During
the latter half of 1823 he filled the pulpit of the First
Universalist Society in Boston. Though Ballou was seriously
considered for this prestigious position, the call went to an
experienced Universalist preacher, Sebastian Streeter. Within
months Ballou accepted a call to the Universalist society in
Milford, Massachusetts. He was ordained when the Southern
Association met at Milford in December, 1824.
Ballou's Milford pastorate, 1824-31, was interrupted by stint
of service, from 1827-28, to the Universalist society on Prince
Street in New York City. In New York Ballou founded and edited a
short-lived periodical devoted to Universalist apologetics, The
Dialogical Instructer. Ballou's ministry, however, did not
thrive in New York City. His efforts to spread Universalism were
hampered by the fragmentation of the Prince Street society. A
portion of the congregation had withdrawn to form another society
led by his predecessor, Abner
Kneeland. Ballou was repelled by Kneeland's brand of
Universalism which seemed to him beyond the bounds of
Christianity.
As Adin prepared to leave New York, the desperate Prince Street
congregation prevailed on him to help them lure Hosea Ballou away
from Boston. Adin thought his cousin's tough and devious manner in
the salary negotiations inappropriate for a minister. Nor did he
appreciate Hosea's wit when, in answer to a question about future
punishment, Hosea replied, "So then, Brother Adin, you think
they'll have to be smoked a little, do you?" Adin's
disillusionment with Hosea was compounded a year later when, at
the New England Universalist General Convention, Hosea Ballou used
his influence to prevent David Pickering, an out-of-fellowship
Restorationist minister, from offering a prayer. Afterward, Adin
recorded in his diary his resolution "not to attend another
convention of that sort."
Abigail Ballou died in early 1829, soon after the birth of a
daughter, Abbie. Of Adin Ballou's four children only Abbie Ballou
lived to adulthood. Later that year Adin suffered a
life-threatening illness. He was nursed back to health by Lucy
Hunt (1810-1891), daughter of a prominent family in the Milford
congregation. He and Lucy were married a few months later, Hosea
Ballou 2d performing the ceremony.
Adin's break with Universalism was part of a resurgence of the
Restorationist controversy. In 1830, preaching in Medway,
Massachusetts, he gave a pro-future punishment sermon, "The
Inestimable Value of Souls." His hearers so liked the sermon
that they sent it to Boston to be printed on the press of the
Universalist periodical, the Trumpet and Universalist Magazine.
When the Trumpet's editor, Thomas
Whittemore, a disciple of Hosea Ballou, read the sermon, he
instituted a campaign to have Adin Ballou removed from the Milford
pulpit. Under fire in the denominational press and in his church,
Ballou joined the Providence Association, recently founded by
Pickering as a haven for Restorationists. Members of the
Providence Association soon received an ultimatum: Leave the
renegade association or renounce fellowship with the New England
Universalist General Convention.
In 1831 Adin Ballou, David Pickering, Paul Dean, and a small
group of other ministers formed a new denomination, the
Massachusetts Association of Universal Restorationists (MAUR).
This group also founded a newspaper, the Independent Messenger,
with Ballou as editor. For four and a half years, until he handed
the editorial reins to Dean, Ballou engaged in a journalistic war
with Thomas Whittemore.
Shortly after the appearance of the first number of the Independent
Messenger, Ballou was dismissed from the Milford church. He
immediately accepted a call to the Congregational (Unitarian)
society in neighboring Mendon, Massachusetts. Although he served a
Unitarian church, 1831-42, Ballou continued to identify himself as
a Restorationist and treated with Unitarian ministers in a spirit
more ecumenical than fraternal. In this period Ballou formed what
was perhaps the most intense friendship of his life with Bernard
Whitman, the Unitarian minister in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Together they tried to break down the barriers—social,
educational, and theological—between Unitarians and
Restorationist Universalists. Their efforts were terminated by
Whitman's untimely death in 1835. After Whitman's death, although
Ballou remained a Restorationist, he took little part in
apologetic and ecclesiastical affairs. Instead, he devoted his
energies to social reform.
Ballou had already been won to the temperance cause. In 1837 he
came out publicly as an abolitionist. Although his stand caused
turmoil in the Mendon church, Ballou's supporters prevailed. He
was less successful in introducing a reform platform at the 1837
meeting of the MAUR. His proposal caused a rift in the fellowship
between social reformers who followed him and conservatives who
sided with Paul Dean.
In 1838 Ballou converted to a form of pacifism called Christian
Non-resistance. Acting with a few ministerial colleagues and some
laymen, Ballou composed the "Standard of Practical
Christianity" in 1839. The signatories announced their
withdrawal from "the governments of the world," which
they judged contaminated by dependence on the use of force to
maintain order. While they could not participate in government,
neither would they rebel nor "resist any of their ordinances
by physical force." "We cannot employ carnal weapons nor
any physical violence whatsoever," they proclaimed, "not
even for the preservation of our lives. We cannot render evil for
evil . . . nor do otherwise than 'love our enemies.'"
Ballou came to believe that Practical Christians were called to
make their convictions a reality; they should begin to fashion a
new civilization. Accordingly, after studying other current
utopian community plans, such as Brook Farm, Ballou and his fellow
Practical Christians began to design their own community.
Beginning in 1840 they published a newspaper, the Practical
Christian, for the "promulgation of Primitive
Christianity." In 1841 they purchased a farm in the western
part of Milford and christened it Hopedale. The conservative
Restorationists abandoned both the Practical Christians and the
MAUR and fell back upon their Unitarian connections established
over the years. The pro-reform fragment of the MAUR became the
nucleus of the Hopedale Community.
Ballou was chosen president of the organization, called
"Fraternal Communion No. 1." He held the office until
1852. Two couples were the core leadership of the community, Adin
and Lucy Ballou and their friends, Anna and Ebenezer Draper, who
made the largest economic contribution to the joint-stock company.
Other important members during the community's early period were
drawn from the Restorationist ministry: George W. Stacy, Daniel S.
Whitney, William H. Fish, and David R. Lamson. Because of the hard
economic times, many pressed for admission to a share of the
experiment's benefits.
Disagreement about Hopedale's form of socialism led to a crisis
in the first year. David Lamson and a group of the poorer members
demanded that all property be held in common. But Ballou felt that
what was needed to defuse tensions within the overcrowded
community was not, as he later wrote, the "absorption of the
individual in the community," but rather "more
opportunity for personal seclusion, activity, and
development." Thus the constitution was amended to allow more
privacy and increased economic reward for effort and contribution.
The most intransigent communists, including Lamson, left Hopedale.
In 1847 further constitutional modification favored individualism
still more.
During the Hopedale years Ballou traveled around New England
lecturing on and debating Practical Christianity, Christian
Non-resistance, abolition, temperance, and other social issues. He
made anti-slavery lecture tours in Pennsylvania in 1846 and in New
York State in 1848. Starting in 1843 he served as president of the
New England Non-resistance Society. In this cause he worked with
his friend William Lloyd Garrison until they broke over Garrison's
support for violence in fighting slavery. In 1846 Ballou published
his principal work on pacifism, Christian Non-Resistance.
In 1854 he wrote his main justification of the Hopedale Community,
Practical Christian Socialism.
The first section of Practical Christian Socialism was
Ballou's only completed work of systematic theology. He believed
that God permeated an "infinitarium," that is, an
infinity of universes, and that space and time are without center
or limit. Every separate universe, he thought, has an unending
sequence of "grand cycles," each appropriately described
as an "eternity." His christology was neither unitarian
nor trinitarian, but similar to the ancient heresy of
Sabellianism. He believed Christ to have been a manifestation of
God, proportioned to the comprehension of finite minds.
Nevertheless, Ballou recognized that Christianity was not the only
religion containing divine truth. Like Hosea Ballou, Adin Ballou
portrayed atonement as a form of demonstration by God, an appeal
to human beings for a spiritual and moral response. He differed
from Hosea in believing divine punishment in the afterlife
necessary both for the sake of justice and as the means of
individual correction and progress. Gradually regenerated human
spirits would finally become one with God.
In his work at Hopedale and elsewhere, Adin Ballou depended
upon a great deal of support from his family, especially the
women. In 1842 the community appointed Lucy Ballou "director
of housekeeping." She ran the Ballou household as a free
hotel for Hopedale visitors and prospective residents. She also
helped to compose and edit her husband's works. The burdens she
bore during the Hopedale period affected her health. She was a
semi-invalid in her later years. The Ballou's son, Adin Augustus,
worked in the printing office. Among his other tasks, he produced
a newsletter for the community's children, the Mammoth.
Daughter Abbie taught the school in Hopedale. In 1851 she married
the Practical Christian minister, later a Unitarian, William S.
Heywood.
Ballou and other residents at Hopedale were sympathetic to
spiritualism. They readily listened to the Universalist
Spiritualist minister John
Murray Spear and published some of his work on the Hopedale
Community Press. Around 1850 there was a flurry of spirit activity
in Hopedale. Having investigated and tested these phenomena,
Ballou concluded that he was a Spiritualist. After Adin Augustus
Ballou died of typhoid in 1852, Adin and Lucy Ballou took comfort
from the spirit messages they received from him.
In 1856 the Hopedale Community came to an effective end.
Ebenezer Draper's brother George, who had recently joined the
community, persuaded his brother to join him in withdrawing their
assets from the community, claiming that the community was not
using sound business practices. As the brothers owned the majority
of the shares, the community collapsed without their support. The
Drapers converted Hopedale's industrial operations into a private
company. Ballou later wrote that "this overthrow of my most
cherished hopes and plans for the regeneration and progress of
individual and social humanity" was "almost
unendurable." He felt "like one prematurely consigned to
a tomb."
For the rest of his life Ballou wondered how the failure of his
utopian dream could have been avoided. He was convinced that what
he had attempted was right, though premature. He worked on The
History of the Hopedale Community and his Autobiography
in order to preserve a legacy for the future. "Times and
generations are coming that will justly estimate me and my
work," he wrote. "For them, it has proved, I have lived
and labored, rather than for my contemporaries. To them I appeal
for vindication and approval; to them I bequeath whatever is
valuable and worth preserving of my possessions."
The Hopedale Community feebly survived in the form of a
religious organization until 1867 when it was converted into the
Hopedale Parish. Three months later the society was accepted into
the local Unitarian association. Ballou continued as pastor of the
Hopedale church until 1880. He commented that "as a religious
body, the Unitarians in some respects were quite below my ideal of
Practical Christianity." He thought them lukewarm on the
subject of moral regeneration and did not like their theologically
radical wing. Nevertheless, he allowed "they were an
intelligent, tolerant, and courteous people, having among them
truly elect souls, with whom I could heartily sympathize and
co-operate for good and noble ends."
Ballou spent his later years doing historical writing. From
1875-82 he compiled the History of Milford. From 1882-88, with the
help of his wife, Lucy, he worked on the massive genealogical
volume, The History of the Ballou Family in America. His Autobiography
and The History of Hopedale, unfinished at his death, were
completed by his son-in-law, William Heywood.
In his last year of life Ballou corresponded with the novelist,
Leo Tolstoy. Some of Ballou's works were sent to Tolstoy, who had
them translated into Russian. Though Ballou disapproved the
passivity of Tolstoy's pacifism and thought his theology
"untrue, visionary, chaotic, and pitiably puerile,"
Tolstoy was much impressed with Ballou. In The Kingdom of God
Is Within You, 1894, Tolstoy wrote "one would have
thought Ballou's work would have been well known, and the ideas
expressed by him would have been either accepted or refuted; but
such has not been the case." He thought there was "a
kind of tacit but steadfast conspiracy of silence about all such
efforts." Through Tolstoy the pacifist ideas of Americans,
such as Garrison and Ballou, were transmitted to the 20th century
non-resistants, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Adin Ballou died in Hopedale in 1890 and Lucy Ballou in 1891.
The Bancroft Public Library in Hopedale, Massachusetts has a
collection of materials pertaining to Adin Ballou and Hopedale,
including the Practical Christian. The Dialogical
Instructer, the Independent Messenger, and the Trumpet
and Universalist Magazine are available at the Andover-Harvard
Theological Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Anti-Universalist,
which published some pro-Universalist articles by Ballou, is in
the Rhode Island Historical Society Library in Providence, Rhode
Island. In addition to the works mentioned in the article above,
Ballou wrote The Touchstone (1837), Non-Resistance and
Human Governments (1839), Spirit Manifestations (1852),
and Primitive Christianity and Its Corruptions (1870), as
well as many published tracts, speeches, and sermons. He also
wrote a number of hymn texts and compiled the Hopedale
Collection of Hymns and Songs (1850).
Ballou's Autobiography was published in 1896 and the History
of Hopedale in 1897. The "Epistle General to
Restorationists," from the Independent Messenger
(January 1, 1831) is an important early autobiographical statement
written close to the time of the events described. The controversy
that followed between Ballou and Whittemore in the Messenger
and the Trumpet also contains significant biographical
material. Although there are no modern published biographies,
Edward K. Spann's Hopedale: From Commune to Company Town,
1840-1920 (1992) treats Ballou's career in substantial detail.
Article by Peter
Hughes
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