A while back I wrote about Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, a distant cousin who in 1865 published a family genealogy containing some of my ancestors. In it, he erroneously killed off my 6x great-grandmother Martha Burgess before she could marry and have the child whose line leads to me. Shades of Back to the Future there. I also mentioned that Rev. Ebenezer was smack in the middle of a theological controversy known as the “Dedham decision,” but the story was too long for inclusion in that diary. So I’ll tell it here.
The “Dedham decision,” officially known as Baker v. Fales, was an eagerly awaited 1820 decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (the “SJC”), the highest court in the Massachusetts court system. It was the SJC that ruled in 2003 that the Massachusetts constitution forbids discrimination against same-sex couples in awarding marriage licenses. The Dedham case, another case implicating religious issues nearly two centuries earlier, pitted rival factions of the First Parish of Dedham against each other and was a watershed moment in the religious history of Massachusetts and perhaps the nation.
Dedham is a town just south of Boston, the historic seat of Norfolk County. In the early twentieth century it would be the home of Justice Louis Brandeis and the site of the Sacco & Vanzetti trial. Its roots, however, go back to 1635. A few months after the first settlements, in August 1636, 125 men (including my ancestor Abraham Shaw) signed the Dedham Covenant to form a community. Two years later, on November 8, 1638, a smaller group of men signed another covenant, to form the church of the First Parish in Dedham.
The Dedham Covenant of 1636
The roots of the 1820 controversy can be found in the early days of the colony as well. Massachusetts Bay Colony, like Plymouth Colony, was first established as a theocracy. Each new town was largely co-extensive with a new parish of the Puritan, or Congregational, church. The name derived from seventeenth-century Puritans’ practice of “congregational polity.” They eschewed hierarchical forms of Ecclesiastical authority, and leaders of such hierarchies like the Catholic Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England/Episcopal Church. Massachusetts and Plymouth Puritans instead believed that all members of a local church were placed on an equal footing, not by assent to a formal creed but by entering into a covenant with each other to run their religious community as a cooperative.
As a result, for all its Calvinistic harshness Puritanism as practiced in colonial Massachusetts was a highly democratic religion. The officers, ministerial and lay, in each parish were not appointed by outside, but chosen by a vote of the particular parish’s members. Each parish largely handled its own religious affairs, united with the neighboring parishes only by “fellowship.” In practice this meant inviting neighboring ministers to be guest preachers and, in times of trouble, asking the neighboring churches for advice. The advice, though, could be declined: each church’s congregants remained in charge of their own affairs.
Nonetheless, divisions between theological “liberals” and “conservatives” within each church happened early, and continued for over 200 years. Some parishes became known as relatively liberal, others as hardline. By the late 1700s, many of the churches in Eastern Massachusetts had fallen into liberal hands. Influenced by the Enlightenment, increasing numbers of liberal New England ministers rejected the Calvinist belief in predetermination, which they deemed incompatible with a merciful God. They began to embrace Arminianism and, through it, Unitarianism, which held that there was one God and although Jesus was the Son of God, he was not God nor had he claimed to be. This doctrine was unpalatable to Calvinist ministers, who more and more declined to invite Unitarian-leaning ministers to preach in their churches.
In 1805, after a bitterly contested faculty chair at Harvard Divinity School was awarded to a liberal, the conservative Calvinists deemed Harvard lost to them. Thus it was that Ebenezer Burgess’s school, the Andover Theological Seminary, was established in 1808 (just five years before he entered) to train Calvinist ministers.
As pastors in Massachusetts churches retired or died, a pitched battle often erupted between Calvinist and Unitarian factions to elect their replacements. Such a dispute arose in Dedham when the Rev. Joshua Bates resigned in 1818 to become president of Middlebury College in Vermont. A few months later the “parish” (meaning essentially all the adult males in Dedham; some larger towns like Boston were geographically split into multiple parishes, but in many cases “town” and “parish” were co-extensive) voted to appoint the liberal Harvard graduate Rev. Alvan Lamson as pastor. The much smaller group of church “members,” limited to regular attendees who had publicly confessed their faith and accepted Christ’s saving grace, rejected Rev. Lamson by a vote of 18 to 14.
Rev. Alvan Lamson, the controversial liberal choice of the broader parish, but not the enrolled members, to head Dedham's First Parish in 1818.
Anticipating a break in the church community, the Calvinist “church members” withdrew from the First Parish and took the church’s silver (made by many of the colonies’ most prominent silversmiths, including Paul Revere), as well as securities, bonds, records and other documents home with them. The “parish members” elected new deacons and sued for return of the property. The Supreme Judicial Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Isaac Parker, ruled for the parish and the First Parish of Dedham fell into Unitarian hands (though apparently some of the silver remained secreted away for over a century thereafter).
The First Parish of Dedham, now Unitarian
The Court’s opinion noted that Congregational churches then were not corporations with the right to own property in their own names. Rather, they were cooperatives and thus commonly owned. But the real question was “owned by whom?” By the church members alone or all the members of the parish?
Chief Justice Parker reasoned that, in the early days of the colony, political rights were available only to church members. Thus just about everyone joined the church to obtain these rights. As a result, he wrote, a grant to the “church” was the equivalent of a grant to the “town” or “parish,” not just to joiners. He noted that Congregationalism remained at the time (and until 1833) the official state religion of Massachusetts, and concluded that the Congregational Church belonged to all. Selection of its minister thus was a public matter; the rights of “parish members” could not be overridden by the smaller group of “church members.”
Though I like the result because it favored religious liberalism, it seems this could have easily gone the other way. The logic seems a little dubious:
1. In 1638 only church members had political rights, so everyone joined.
2. As political rights became available to non-members, most people did not join.
3. Because, two centuries ago, “everyone” joined, today “everyone,” including the non-joiners, controls the church, not just the joiners.
(In defense of the court, the idea that a grant made to what was understood to be the whole community should stay with the whole community makes sense.)
The decision had an enormous impact. It has been suggested that, on the cusp of the “Jacksonian era,” the Dedham decision was a blow for broader democracy because Chief Justice Parker ruled in favor of the broader town population rather than a smaller entrenched elite. It should be noted, though, that while “parish members” constituted a much larger group, voting rights among this group was restricted to men. “Church membership,” on the other hand, was open to women, who had full voting rights. In fact, women constituted a majority of “church members” in Dedham and many other towns.
More obvious was the decision’s impact on the New England church. Angry Calvinists noted that the Chief Justice himself was a Unitarian, suggesting his decision was motivated by personal bias. In this climate the possibility of Calvinists and Unitarians coexisting within the same church was greatly reduced. As a result of this conflict, the original New England church split in two, with “First Parishes” going one way or the other depending on the views of the parish majority. To this day the “First Parish” in all Massachusetts towns is either Unitarian or Congregationalist. When the “First Parish” in a town fell under Unitarian control, the Calvinists generally resigned and formed their own church (and vice-versa).
By 1825, recognizing the irreconcilable schism, the Unitarians had founded the American Unitarian Association to unite the newly Unitarian churches. Over the next twenty years or so, about a quarter of the Congregationalist churches in Massachusetts became Unitarian. Included in this number were all in Boston except the Old South Church, so that Unitarianism was the religion of most nineteenth-century “Boston Brahmins.” The angry Congregationalists forced out of their original churches teamed up with other denominations to abolish state religion in Massachusetts altogether in 1833 rather than risk Unitarianism run off with the designation. And it's been a long time since any state had an official religion, though some state legislatures seem to have forgotten that.
Thus the Dedham decision accelerated a trend that had started two decades earlier in the First Parish of Plymouth itself. If you visit Plymouth today, you will see the First Parish of 1620, which semi-accurately calls itself the church founded by the Mayflower Pilgrims. Right next door, on the side of the same square, is the Church of the Pilgrimage, a Congregationalist church founded in 1801 when fifty-two conservative members resigned from the First Parish in protest of its liberal and Unitarian tendencies. A plaque on the front of that church states that those who left the First Parish remained truer to the Trinitarian theological beliefs of the Mayflower Pilgrims than those who stayed, a view the Church of the Pilgrimage continues to assert on its website. One clever Calvinist summed up this view: “the Unitarians kept the furniture, but the Trinitarians kept the faith.”
The First Church of Plymouth (1620), now Unitarian, claims direct and unbroken descent from the church of the Pilgrims in Scrooby, England; Leyden, Holland; and aboard the Mayflower.
The Trintarians (Congregationalists) next door beg to differ.
Following the SJC’s Dedham decision, the Calvinists who had moved out of the First Parish of Dedham moved forward with their plans to establish a separate church, which they called the First Congregational Church of Dedham. (Since 1927 it has been called the Allin Church after the first pastor of Dedham’s First Parish in 1638; as the conservatives in Plymouth had done, the Congregationalists of Dedham appear to have been asserting their claim as proper theological heirs to the founders of the Dedham church).
The Allin Congregational Church, where Rev. Ebenezer Burgess was pastor for 40 years.
Dueling churches in Dedham: the First Parish (gathered 1638) is on the left in the foreground, the Allin Congregational Church (gathered 1818 in protest) is directly across the street.
The thirty-year-old Ebenezer Burgess, who patterned his theology on the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards, was the man they selected as their first pastor. His forty-year tenure (1821-1861) largely overlapped with the tenure of Rev. Lamson at the now-Unitarian First Parish (1818-1860). Although the buildings are practically carbon copies of each other, in the early days there was some tension between the two churches, which are across the street from each other; the First Parish even reconfigured its building’s entrance so congregants would not have to bump into Congregationalist congregants when leaving Sunday services.
In 1838 the Unitarians, under Rev. Lamson, published a history of the First Parish on its 200th anniversary. Rev. Ebenezer struck back with his own 200th anniversary sermon, but also by compiling in a book all of the sermons he could find going back to the first pastor, Rev. Allin, but continuing after 1818 with himself and the Congregational church rather than Rev. Lamson and the now-Unitarian First Parish. No mistaking the message there.
Rev. Ebenezer Burgess in later years, resembling John Quincy Adams
During his time as pastor of the First Congregational Church, Rev. Ebenezer was involved in most of the political and social causes typical of the times. He supported, albeit cautiously, the abolitionist cause and spoke from his pulpit in favor of Lincoln and the Union during the 1860 campaign. Despite the fervor of his religious belief, he strongly supported secular public education (a public school in town was called the Burgess School for him, and apparently he was the first in New England to open an infant school based on the kindergarten model). He organized the first temperance meeting in town, a major Protestant reform cause in the nineteenth century. Rev. Ebenezer also founded Dedham’s first savings bank in 1831 and served as its president for the rest of his life, becoming quite wealthy.
An excerpt from Rev. Ebenezer Burgess's bio in D. Hamilton Hurd's History of Norfolk County (1884). Hurd, as many here may know, published many histories of counties across the northeast, with biographical sketches of prominent citizens. Many of the sketches were written by said citizens, their children, or their friends.
A snippet from Rev. Lamson's bio in Hurd's History of Norfolk County (1884)
You might have thought Dedham wasn't big enough for Rev. Ebenezer and Rev. Alvan Lamson, but both became institutions in the town. Rev. Lamson served for 42 years, retiring in late October 1860. Rev. Ebenezer retired barely four months later, stepping down on the fortieth anniversary of his ordination as pastor, only ten days after Abraham Lincoln assumed the Presidency in March 1861. His first task in retirement was to join the New England Historic Genealogical Society and write his Burgess genealogy, apparently because a Cape Cod historian told him that materials on the Burgess family were sorely lacking.
Rev. Ebenezer Burgess died on December 5, 1870. He and Rev. Lamson, who died in 1864, did not live long enough to see the First Parish and the First Congregational Church put aside their old animosities to celebrate, together, the 250th anniversary of the church in Dedham in 1888. His surviving children, however, participated in the ceremonies, and one of the addresses was given in his honor. By 1888 the controversy was 70 years old and most of those who had lived through it were no longer living. These days the two churches routinely celebrate such anniversaries together.
How about you, open threaders? Church intrigues hiding in the leaves of the family tree?