Vermont-born Orestes Brownson, 1803-1876, was initially raised Presbyterian but by age nineteen, like many New Englanders, was immersed in “a speckled crowd of sectaries, Universalists, deists, atheists, “nothingarians,” as they were called, as well as those professing no particular form of religion. By 1824 he became a Universalist though soon afterward declared it a “false theology” – then was drawn to Unitarianism.
Brownson’s Various Conversions
“On August 3, 1836, the Anti-Slavery Society of Boston attempted to celebrate the anniversary of the emancipation of British West Indies Island slaves, a mob gathered around the building where the Society was to assemble, which forced the landlord to bar the entrance. The Society repaired to a private residence to hear Brownson deliver a prayer, and the Society dispersed afterward. It was reported that the “mob” which had interfered was made up mainly of very respectable Southern gentlemen and Boston merchants.
It was the Great Depression of 1837 which brought Brownson for the first time into practical politics . . . [he thought brought on] by the wickedness of the banks, in refusing to pay their debts, and the moral obtuseness of the community which could tolerate, nay defend, in these moneyed corporations, conduct which would have been severely punished in the case of private individuals. [He now felt] compelled to align himself more closely with the Democratic party. For him, Jacksonian democracy had neither been sufficiently radical nor earnest in carrying out the true principles of what he called social democracy. But with the extra session of Congress then called by President Van Buren, he thought he saw the Democratic party on the eve of adopting, on the one hand, the States’ rights doctrines of the South – to which he had become a convert by the famous Senate debate between Webster and Hayne – and of accepting, on the other hand, the Locofoco doctrines of equal rights for all with a corresponding campaign against all privileges and monopolies of banks and banking, and other corporations.
Brownson came to understand the dangers of democracy in the United States, as did John C. Calhoun. He wrote: “[But] when the Federal Government has succeeded in getting under its control, directly or indirectly, nearly all the internal affairs of the States, and is able to make its act, like the frogs of Egypt, reach our domestic hearths, and to come up in our sleeping chambers and kneading troughs, we may be assured that the first barriers to a consolidated despotism have been leaped.”
(Orestes A. Brownson. A Definite Biography. Thomas Ryan. Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 1976, pp. 114; 119-120, 131)