Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
Vermont had ever seen anything quite like it. Train after train pulled into Rutland’s station and disgorged its unusual cargo. First dozens, then scores, then hundreds and finally thousands of visitors poured into town. To some Vermonters, these strangers represented the cutting edge of political and religious thought, while others viewed them as the lunatic fringe.
More than 3,000 men and women flocked to Rutland, then a community of roughly 7,600 people, one weekend in June 1858. At the Rutland Free Convention, they would debate and hopefully settle all manner of moral and political questions. “The gathering is free in all ways,” reported the New York Times in an article that carried no byline. “Its intention is to discuss abolitionism, spiritualism, free-love, free-trade, and all other queer things.” As disdainful as the Times’ coverage was, it reflected the free-for-all into which the convention would devolve.
One of the participants, New Hampshirite Parker Pillsbury, later summarized the agenda in a letter to his fellow, and far more famous, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison had been widely expected to attend, but had not. “The most prominent topics considered,” Pillsbury wrote, “were Spiritualism, the Cause of Woman, including Marriage and Maternity, Scripture, and Church Authority, and Slavery. Then the subjects of Free Trade, of Education, Labor and Land Reform, Temperance, Physiology and Phrenology were introduced, and more or less considered.” Pillsbury wasn’t mocking the disorderliness of the convention. Far from it. He enthusiastically declared the event one of the most important of its kind ever held.
In the mid-1800s, Americans were transfixed by the idea of reform. Social, religious, and political movements worked to perfect human nature and life on Earth in hopes of bringing on the Second Coming of Christ. Each movement saw different obstacles to perfection. For some, the greatest sin was slavery. For others, it was the abuse of alcohol. Still others saw it as the legal inequality of women.
In the wake of the supporters of abolition, temperance and women’s rights who traveled to Rutland, came advocates of such movements as spiritualism (the belief in communication between the physical and spiritual worlds), pacifism, public education reform, free love, celibacy, vegetarianism, hydropathy (the treatment of disease largely through the taking of baths and drinking of water), and phrenology (the study of the shape of the skull to assess intelligence and character). Most participants probably didn’t limit themselves to just one movement, instead embracing some combination of the causes.
The visitors were hardly welcome, the Times claimed. “A stroll about the place, in the evening, convinced me that the people of Rutland are furious at the advent of this demonstration,” the Times wrote. “The religious element of the town has been exercised in an unusual degree. Prayer has been offered that the Lord would graciously interpose to prevent the coming of the Free-Lovers and abolitionists.”
The Times reported that John Landon, a prominent Rutland merchant and the event’s organizer, was the only local resident involved in the convention. In reality, more than 150 Vermonters had signed the petition calling for a convention to be held in Rutland. Those Vermonters who attended included many who were prominent in their communities. Among them were ministers, farmers, merchants and practitioners of alternative medicine. Most were apparently drawn by their belief in either spiritualism or abolitionism, or both.
The idea of holding such a convention apparently came from spiritualists, either in Vermont or the Boston area (it is unclear which), but the convention soon grew far beyond the bounds of spiritualism.
Vermont may have been selected to host the event because it was a hotbed of abolitionism, or because it had a history of welcoming radical notions. After all, it was the birthplace of Mormon leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and had been fertile ground for the creators of several utopian communities. That said, most participants were from out of state, traveling north on special trains from Boston and New York.
Local press coverage of the event was surprisingly minimal, given the scale of the influx of visitors. The Rutland Herald and the Rutland Courier contained only two-sentence notices informing readers that the convention would take place and then provided only cursory – and dismissive – coverage of the proceedings.
Despite sweltering heat during the three days of the convention, June 25 to 27, roughly 3,000 people crowded under one large tent in a field off Grove Street. There they heard declarations against slavery, war and capital punishment; statements questioning the accuracy of the Bible and the value of attending church; and endorsements of a women’s right to choose whether and when to bear children.
Conventioneers wrangled over religion. Henry Clarke Wright, an itinerant preacher and abolitionist lecturer, defended Christian teachings but argued that religion was too often confined to churches. “You do not take (God) home to your houses, your stores, or your shops,” he declared. “You keep your God closed up in your churches through the week, and then open the doors and let him out again.” He said $100 million were invested in the country’s churches and thousands of priests were employed all for the sake of 52 Sundays each year. Some took offense at Wright’s comments, arguing for the superiority of conventional Christian practices. Parker Pillsbury warned participants against misusing the Bible by “discharging small shots of text at each other.”
Spiritualists also had their say. Samuel Brittan, an editor of spiritualist tracts, launched into an explanation of the “natural evidences of immortality,” and two Vermont “trance mediums,” Achsa Sprague of Plymouth and Helen Temple of Bennington, offered presentations.
On the second day, women’s rights advocate Julia Branch delivered a speech attacking marriage. She argued “that the slavery and degradation of woman proceed from the institution of marriage; that by the marriage contract, she loses control of her name, her person, her property, her labor, her affections, her children, and her freedom.”
Her comments launched a hot debate over free love and women’s rights, including whether women had the right to decide whether to bear children. One participant rose to support Branch, in so far as he believed that women should have equal rights within a marriage. But he declined to discuss the idea of free love, sexual liberation outside the bounds of marriage.
Joel Tiffany, a well-known spiritualist, said that free love was just “another name for free lust” and Frederick Evans, a Shaker from New Hampshire, called on people not just to “purify” their lusts through marriage but to “crucify” them through celibacy. The heated debate, and perhaps the salaciousness of the topic, led the press to label the free convention a free love convention, arguing that the topic was dominating the convention at the expense of other issues.
The New York Times reported that “the Free-Lovers, who are as thick as blackberries here, are chuckling to think that they have had the day to themselves, to the intense discomfiture and disgust of the red-hot Abolitionists, who have kept up a running skirmish, unsuccessfully striving to get the whip-hand of the Convention.”
If abolitionists were frustrated in their efforts to control the proceedings, so were the spiritualists, who discussed bolting from the gathering and convening their own. In truth, no one could control the convention. Participants stood one after another to offer unconventional cures for the ails of humanity. Combined, these prescriptions became a raucous debate.
When the convention ended, the Rutland Herald pronounced it a waste of time: “the idea of progress–possibly the word, without the idea–has been responsible for more gas within the last fifteen years than any other idea or word.” To the people advocating this “progress,” the Herald continued, “pretty much everything in the world is wrong, and needs fixing, or revolutionizing. They have a set of phrases that sound large and mean little, a rhetorical swagger about spiritual despotisms, and creeds, and the traditions of the elders, and general emancipation, and all that sort of thing, and a love of getting together to let off steam.”
The Rutland Courier was even more critical of the conventioneers, taking them to task for their radical ideas. In summary, the Courier wrote curtly that the convention “which was held at this place on Friday, Saturday and Sunday last, dissolved the Union, broke the Constitution, tore down the Church, buried religion, burned the Bible and challenged the Almighty to a duel.”
The reformers, like Americans as a whole, couldn’t have known that a civil war would erupt just three years later, one that would sidetrack many of the causes for which they fought. But in the century and a half since that cataclysmic war ended, many of those reforms have become part of American life, while others remain on the fringes, or have been largely forgotten.
