Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York

By Edmund Wilson

Historical recollections of life in upstate New York from Edmund Wilson, one of America's preeminent literary critics of the twentieth century.

“What I have written . . . shows the gradual but steady expiration of the world of New York State as I knew it in my childhood and the modifications that its life has undergone. It is true that Lowville and Boonville have changed less—unless perhaps Charlottesville, Virginia—than any other part of this country that I knew when I was a child. But, as has been seen, it has reflected all the changes that, to a greater degree, have been taking place in the life of the country as a whole.” - Edmund Wilson

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781466899704

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor but it is as a literary critic that he is most highly regarded. His more than twenty books include Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, To the Finland Station, and Memoirs of Hecate County.

Book preview

I

Prologue, 1969

I sit here in this old house alone. The little village was years ago a kind of family center, to which my parents and my cousins from all over the country were in the habit of returning in the summers to see one another again, when, after the emigration of our families from New England at the end of the eighteenth century, the members had further scattered to work or marry in other places. When my mother died in 1951, after not having been able to live in it for eleven years, she left the place to me, and I made it a habit, as she had done, to come up here for the summer. I also, in an attempt to revive the old reunions, induced some of my long-absent cousins to join me. But now my parents’ generation have died, my own generation are growing old, and my younger cousins who still live here have become rather remote from the rest of us. My own children do not much like it here because they do not have the swimming or the companionship of the beaches of Cape Cod, on which I have been living for some thirty years. The croquet set which I had hoped would occupy them—we always used to play croquet—is still standing by the front door, with nobody ready to set it up. The fishing rods that were once my father’s and which I have not made use of for years are also standing untouched in the hall by the old hat rack. Every year I have to make more repairs on the house. It took them five years to build and was finished about 1800. Though it’s still solid with its thick walls of stone, it is full of rotted beams and bad leaks. This region had enchanted me in my childhood. With its green hills and its wild rivers it was so much more attractive than the New Jersey town, Red Bank, already become suburbanized, in which I had been born, and I always felt excitement at coming here. It is associated in my mind with the first moments of my being conscious that I was capable of imaginative activity and some sort of literary vocation. When, before I was able to read, I was being read a bedtime fairy tale which had to be dropped because guests arrived, I invented, lying in the darkness before I went to sleep, the rest of the story for myself; and when being driven one day from Boonville to Talcottville, I said suddenly to myself, I am a poet, then after a moment corrected myself with, No: I am not quite a poet, but I am something of the kind. And there was my pretty dark cousin Dorothy whom I was always hoping to kiss.

Later, the place came to bore me. My favorite cousins were never there; and the much more stimulating experiences of prep school and college and travel had rescued me from Red Bank. But after I had reached my fifties and was in possession of the house myself, it became a refuge in the summers, where I thought that it was possible, as my parents had done, to get away from everything else. Now, it is true that this part of the United States has changed very much less since I first knew it as a child than any other part of this country I knew, but, nevertheless, all the things that make everywhere else unpleasant have been cropping up around me here. There are an air base at Rome, not far from me, from which planes start out every morning to make a flight in the direction of Russia before turning back to the base, and a nearby radar station which in the event of a Russian attack would of course be a prime target. The town of Talcottville—which at its peak, I understand, had a hundred and twenty-some inhabitants, and has dwindled to eighty-some—was in my youth a clean and trim little settlement; but today it looks partly disreputable with its tumbledown squalid houses whose inhabitants hardly get along by working in the Boonville chair factory or who cannot go to work at all in order not to lose their unemployment relief. There are many delinquent young people, one of whom, I am told, has announced that he is going, like his parents, to live on relief and make a point of having plenty of children in order to get plenty of this. These break into garages to steal and into unoccupied houses simply to mess them up. The Birch Society plasters the town with posters saying Impeach Earl Warren—I found one on my own property. When one of these posters disappeared, I assumed that a liberal spirit had been roused to action in Talcottville; but this turned out to be the work of the delinquents, who undoubtedly had no idea who Chief Justice Warren was.

One side of my stone barn fell down—it was built at the same time as the house—and I had to have much masonry rebuilt. Of my mother’s once considerable garden, only the clumps of peonies and the plantings of currants and gooseberries are left—I have tried to keep them weeded out—and my great-aunt Rosalind’s straggling roses. A white rose by the front porch, in spite of the weather and the insects, has by care been made to survive. At first, after my mother’s death, I filled shelves with the books from her Red Bank house—from her girlhood favorites, with signatures of the eighties, the stories of Juliana Horatia Ewing, which I never quite liked or understood, but, since her death I have had rebound; to W. W. Jacobs, which I read with her, and Somerville and Ross, which I didn’t; and my father’s collection of travel books, about Africa and Tibet, the Arctic and the Antarctic, which last explorations have always peculiarly bored me; and my own childhood favorites: Raffles and Sherlock Holmes, Frank Stockton and William De Morgan, with my later prep school reading: George Borrow, Francis Thompson, the Everyman Ring and the Book; complete family sets of such by now almost unreadable nineteenth-century writers as Wilkie Collins, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, Charles Kingsley and Ruskin; complete Dumas and Hugo and Balzac. But I soon came to see that this was not enough, and added Pushkin, Chekhov, Swift, some Henry James, a number of the Pléiade volumes, the new complete edition of the Goncourt diary, Skelton and Beaumont and Fletcher together with a number of books—Clarissa, Hazlitt, Gioacchino Belli, Milton’s complete prose, which I laid in for the dismal and impassable winters which I have always made sure not to spend here, so never had read these books. There are also bound files of Harper’s Monthly in the fifties and sixties, Littell’s Living Age for the seventies, St. Nicholas going back to its beginnings in the seventies, Harper’s Magazine for the seventies, and the Century Magazine for the eighties. I found these magazines very useful when I was writing about the Civil War period and after.

The memories of the past, the still lingering presences of the family, which so haunted me when I first came back here, have mostly evaporated. Although I have made new and interesting friends, my life up here now seems thinner. Here I am in the northern countryside, still beautiful but now somewhat empty, incapacitated physically now for bicycling, fishing and exploring—I was in the habit, in my youth, of walking every afternoon to a swimming hole called Flat Rock in Sugar River. Much of the time I am quite by myself in an interior which is now all my own. It is almost as if no woman’s hand has ever had anything to do with it since I cleaned out the old Franklin stoves and the stuffy old Victorian portières. My housekeeper, Mrs. Hutchins, keeps everything polished and clean: the pewter and crystal and silver. And every summer she seems to find something new: some object, quite blackened from disuse, that had been lying in an old drawer or closet: copper candlesticks, a brass oil-lamp on a long spiral stem, a silver napkin ring, silver salt and pepper shakers, a silver-topped inkwell with my great-aunt Rosalind’s monogram—which have all now been made to shine. I had already rescued myself the little silver smelling salts bottle, with pretty winged cherubs on one side and my mother’s married monogram on the other—for Helen Mather Kimball Wilson: she never wanted to drop the Mather, of which she was rather proud—that I am told was the first post-marital gift that was given by my father to my mother.

Is the writing of this Talcottville book a last effort to fill a vacuum? Though I spend much of my time in Massachusetts, I am legally a resident of New York, and my relations with Lewis and Oneida Counties are still closer than with Wellfleet on Cape Cod. But what more is there here for me to do? And yet I find it difficult to break the old habit—which goes back for me, it must be, seventy years—of returning to this place in the summer. In the later years of my mother’s life, she imagined every year that she would be able to come again, but her health, in her late seventies and her eighties, was never to make it possible—except on one occasion, when she was going into the hospital for an operation and she made the effort involved in a visit of inspection. She spent the night in Boonville; the house was unfit for habitation. When she told her sister-in-law, whose family had come from Knoxboro not far away, about going in at night to the Stone House, now become rather spooky, my aunt Caroline advised her, Nelly, when you go into those old houses, you ought always to take a flask of brandy. My mother, being very deaf, had to have this repeated, and, when she understood—she did not much approve of drinking—her only comment was Oh. I eventually became worried about the old place and without letting my mother know, for she did not like other people to meddle with her property, came up here and found it in deplorable condition. I have spent, in the years since her death, as much time as possible here, excavating the old drawers and attics and having something repaired every year. And now I am sitting alone here, and all the old ghosts are gone.

II

1802

In the summer and autumn of 1802, the Reverend John Taylor of Deerfield, Massachusetts, explored, on a missionary tour, by horseback and stagecoach journey, the Mohawk and Black River countries. His diary of this journey was published after his death by his son in some periodical or collection of papers which, since the copy I have is clipped out of it, I cannot identify.

Dr. Taylor, who had been to Yale, was evidently a Congregationalist, and he believed that the Methodists and Baptists were personally undesirable as people and theologically dangerous influences. The Methodists, very pious, would fall down … and, after lying twenty or thirty minutes, rise, crying glory to God. Some of them appeared to be senseless—others in great agitation. After preaching to about forty people, mostly Baptists, he writes that they are, a few excepted, extremely ignorant, and the ignorant Methodist preachers are leading them into errors and all kinds of disorder … General Floyd thinks that many of the best characters among them, when they have had time to reflect, and when their passions are a little subsided, will fall off from that sect, and will become Presbyterians or Congregationalists. At present he thinks that they ought to be treated with great tenderness. The people [in Sandy Creek] are Baptists from Rhode Island, and are a most wretched people—the filth of the world … [They] are in general nothingarians or fatalists—or Methodists and Baptists, who are the worst of all. Of Remsen, he writes, This is a broken society. The people are very ignorant and very wicked—about three months since a stranger came into town, who appeared to be a pert coxcomb, about twenty-eight years of age, who calls his name Alexander. He soon obtained a school, and in about a fortnight set up preaching, and he pretends to preach every Sunday. Who and what he is they know not—but that he is some notorious villain I believe there is no doubt. Most of the people—especially the wickedest part—are very much attached to him. There is no church in town, and but one professor [professing Christian], who belongs to the church in Stuben [Steuben]. At the house of a Rhode Island Baptist. Here is a mixture of all the physical and moral evils that can well be conceived of. Here may be found filth of all kinds, such as dust, mud, fleas, bedbugs, rotten meat, and sour bread; and, as to moral evils, you may here find ignorance, self-will, self-sufficiency, ill manners, pride, boasting, fanaticism, and witchcraft; and this description, I believe, will apply to all the families in the town, Mr. Hackley’s excepted. It is interesting to know that among the sects that Dr. Taylor regarded as competitors were the eighteenth-century Deists, who would not have a Bible in the house. They [a school of about forty-seven children] have a deistical instructor, to the great grief of some pious persons."

He is, nevertheless, impressed by the prevailing atmosphere of hopefulness: Poor people have, in general, been the first settlers. They have bought farms of about a hundred acres—have cleared ten or twenty—built a log-house—and then sold to others, for a sum as much greater than they gave, as to purchase them another hundred acres—and by this means have placed themselves in a short time in a good situation. It is considered here but a small affair for a man to sell, take his family and some provisions, and go into the woods upon a new farm, erect him a house and begin anew. Society is here made up of all characters. It is a mixture of everything that can be well conceived of, both as to nations and religions. The great body of inhabitants are, however, from Massachusetts and Connecticut. One thing is peculiar in this wilderness,—every countenance indicates pleasure and satisfaction. The equality of circumstances cuts off a great proportion of the evils which render men unhappy in improved societies, and the influence of hope is very apparent. I do not know that I have seen an unhappy person for ninety miles on this river. There is no complaining of hard times; but everyone is cheerful and contented—for they all foresee that in a few years they will have a great plenty of worldly goods, in a common course of events.

He emphasizes one of the most important factors in the development, or lack of development, of this part of New York: the obstinate feudalism of the landowners. It is incredible, he writes of the town of Western, how thick this part of the world is settled—and what progress is making in opening the wilderness and turning it into a fruitful plain. The land in this town is most excellent—crops are rich. The same evil operates here, however, as in many parts of this country—the lands are most of them leased. This must necessarily operate to debase the minds and destroy the enterprise of the settlers—altho’ the rent is small—only 19 [dollars] an acre; yet if men do not possess the right of soil, they never will nor can feel independent. And what is as great an evil, they will always be under the influence of their landlords. And from Turin, we came into Leyden [the township in which Talcottville is situated], where [Gerret] Boon made a settlement. This place does not appear to be very flourishing. The people are poor, and too much of the land is leased. The Americans never can flourish when on leased lands—they have too much enterprise to work for others, or to remain tenants—and where they are under the necessity of living on such lands I find that they are greatly depressed in mind, and are losing their animation. I have found in an old county history that the Talcotts were thought to have adopted a policy adverse to the building up of the village at the point where natural advantages greatly favored, since they refused to sell village lots to mechanics. The progress of the democratic processes was to some extent impeded here. No town meetings as in New England; the landlords were still in control. And it seems to me that every upstate New Yorker whose family belongs, or once belonged, to this landlord class retains something of this feudal mentality. They have never been able to get over the conviction that they ought to have the say as to what is for the good of the lower orders. Franklin Roosevelt was an obvious example of this: when he declared that he was going to be President of all the people of the United States, he spoke in detachment from the business world and meant that, as the lord of the nation, he was going to take responsibility for seeing that all the various ranks of people, as far as was in his power, were going to be given what was good for them. To establish the WPA and other devices for creating employment, to pack the Supreme Court with justices who would be sure to approve his policies, were expedients as to which Roosevelt did not feel the slightest hesitation. And he is said not to have been at home save with people of his own kind of background—if not well-to-do squires, at least people well established and educated in a similar way. The technique in which he had been trained was not good fellowship but a patriarchal kindness. An earlier product of New York State was James Fenimore Cooper of Cooperstown, who was horrified, on returning to the United States after seven and a half years in Europe, to find that, on Lake Otsego, the feudal domain of his family was being invaded by squatters. He very soon closed off to the public a little picnic ground on the lake which his father had thrown open for general use. The old buildings had been destroyed and a new one constructed without the son’s permission, and since the land did still belong to the Cooper estate, he was able to win a suit which he brought to keep interlopers off it. Though the death in 1839 of the last patroon—that is, Dutch landowner—Stephen Van Rensselaer, and the administration of Andrew Jackson 1829-37, put an end to the feudal era, Cooper, still professing his faith in democracy, in equal political rights, spent a very large part of his later life in fighting what was called the anti-rent war—that is the attempts of the tenant farmers to escape paying for leases on land which they had been living on and cultivating for years, during many of which Cooper had been living in Europe and celebrating America to the Europeans. He was in the habit of writing in his novels as if most of these anti-rent agitators were unscrupulous sharp-dealing New Englanders, who knew nothing of the seigneurial grand manner of New York, and he frequently found himself, at home, characterized as an arrogant aristocrat.

III

New York Religions

The Reverend John Taylor, a rooted New Englander, is already aware of all this and has foreseen that, in a newly settled section of America, a feudal social system could have no future. But what he did not foresee was that the vacuum created there by sloughing off the old religion was not to be filled by his own Congregationalism in competition with Methodism and Baptism but by a great proliferation of entirely new cults that had no Calvinism or even Wesleyanism to restrict them to older theologies. The Methodists and Baptists themselves, Mrs. Fawn M. Brodie says in her biography of Joseph Smith, were in a state of considerable confusion by the second decade of the century. The Methodists split four ways, and the Baptists became divided into Reformed, Hard-Shell, Free-Will and Seventh Day Baptists and Foot-washers, and other sects. Even the standing of strict Calvinists was dubious. My great-great-grandfather Ruel Kimball (as Reuel was then spelled), born in 1778, a Presbyterian minister married to Hannah Mather, a cousin of Increase and Cotton, came over from Vermont in 1805 and from about 1816 officiated in a church on Leyden Hill. He also organized in 1826 a First Presbyterian Church on what was called the Brantingham tract, which began with twelve communicants and, not having a regular church building, held services in Ruel Kimball’s and other people’s houses. The membership of this church increased in four years to twenty-three, but thirteen years later had shrunk to nineteen. It was then meeting in a schoolhouse, and did not get a real church, known as the Forest Church, till 1854. Kimball carried on the Calvinist tradition in sermons so full of hellfire that, according to local legend, the corn never freezes on Leyden Hill. This was apparently too much for his congregation, who were enjoying their freedom from the New England theocracy. They put Priest Kimball out of his pulpit—though they afterwards reinstated him. But other religions were introduced or actually founded in New York that were quite independent of the New England sects. Here was a great sparsely settled country, not ruled by the Calvinist Church, where worship could take any form.

The zeal that could in those days be manifested by members of the Presbyterian Church is illustrated by an anecdote in the Life of Thomas Brainerd, D.D. (1870). Brainerd was a man from Leyden, who later became a celebrated preacher in Philadelphia:

"When about the age of fourteen, Thomas was walking with young Reuel Kimball [my great-grandfather], two years his senior, when their conversation turned upon preaching. In the bragging style natural to boys of that age, Thomas said to his friend: ‘I can preach nearly as well as your father, now!’ Young Kimball questioned his ability, and challenged him to the proof.

"Springing upon a stump, in which that newly cleared land abounded, Thomas rehearsed Mr. Kimball’s sermon of the previous Sabbath, giving the introduction, the title, the divisions, the arguments, the illustrations, the application, and conclusion, in what seemed to his astonished auditor the very words, without variation, in which he heard it preached the day before. Although greatly surprised by this exhibition, young Kimball would not yield the victory. He added: ‘Well, you can’t pray as well anyhow!’ Thomas replied, in a lower voice, ‘I haven’t tried that!’"

My great-great-grandfather, Ruel Kimball (1778-1847); my great-great-grandmother Hannah Mather Kimball; my grandfather Walter Scott Kimball

Ann Lee, for example, the daughter of a Manchester (England) blacksmith, had joined an evangelical sect known as the Shaking Quakers, which profaned the Sabbath by shouting and dancing. She was punished for this by being sent to jail in 1774, but she had had a divine vision in which a voice told her to go to America. She managed to get some land near Albany and there founded her own branch of this sect. Having lost all four of her children, she led a crusade against marriage. As a substitute for sexual activity, the Shakers made a ritual of their shaking, which was a strange kind of non-sexual orgy. They marched and whirled about, but the women kept apart from the men. They pretended to play on invisible instruments and became possessed by tribes of Indians or George Washington and the Founding Fathers. Mother Ann announced herself as the second incarnation of Christ. They were organized in a communist economy, and wore linen, knitted their underwear and made slim and austere furniture. Mother Ann was succeeded by another able woman, and as late as the nineteen thirties there were still a few Shakers left.

The example of Mother Ann was followed by another somewhat younger woman prophet, Jemima Wilkinson of Providence, Rhode Island, who called herself the Public Universal Friend and who was also believed by her followers to be the second incarnation of Christ. She said that, in the course of a fever, she had fallen into a trance and waked up believing she had died and that her soul had gone to Heaven. She was now possessed by the Spirit of Life, which had come to warn a lost and guilty, gossiping, dying world to flee from the wrath to come. Jemima Wilkinson was said to be handsome: she had black hypnotic eyes. She was better bred and educated than Mother Ann, who could not read or write, and she appealed to a somewhat better class of disciples. They followed her on horseback, riding two by two; and Jemima rode ahead, wearing men’s clothes under a long woman’s robe. But she aroused such resentment in New England, and later in Philadelphia, where Mrs. Wilkinson was stoned by a mob, that in 1790 she fled and took refuge in western New York, near Seneca Lake, where no intruding foot could enter. The settlement she assembled was called Jerusalem. The Treaty of Fort Stanwick (now Rome) with the Iroquois Indians in 1784 had only just made that region safe for settlers. It was a rough forested country. Even the Iroquois had come there only in order to hunt in the forests. Jemima established good relations with the Indians, who called her Squaw Shinnewanajistawge, Great Woman Preacher. But she eventually fell out with her companions. She had appropriated twelve thousand acres and lived in what was thought to be luxury. As she grew older—I am quoting Ernest Sutherland Bates in the Dictionary of American Biography—she became more dictatorial in her methods and developed a penchant for degrading forms of punishment for infraction of the society’s rules, such as compelling one man to wear a black hood for three months and another to carry a little bell fastened to the skirts of his coat.

The Indians themselves at about this time had a new religious movement. A Seneca named Handsome Lake, notorious for hard drinking, was frightened in 1799 by a drunken brawl which caused the deaths of several persons, and in the course of an illness had a vision in which divine messengers appeared to him and ordered him to preach against the alcoholic habits that were ruining his people. Influenced perhaps by the Quaker missionaries, he formulated a code of morality which is recited once a year in the Iroquois Longhouse—that is, temple and council house—and which is now an integral part of the national religion that is an element of their nationalist movement.

The Mennonites arrived in New York in the thirties and invaded the unsettled wilderness near Lowville which is now the town of Croghan. The sect had been founded by a Friesland priest who, at the time of the Reformation, had become a kind of Reformer but one who was not accepted by either the Protestants or the Catholics. They dispensed with an official priesthood, repudiated the obligation to take oaths and refused to serve in the constabulary or be liable to military service. They left the state church and set up in Zürich from 1525 as an independent sect. They were mostly Alsatian or South German or German Swiss, and they did not learn to speak English till 1916, at the time of the first World War. Having crossed the Atlantic in a sailboat, they came to Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683; but some penetrated the New York forests. There was nobody here then but the Indians, and they were surrounded by bears, wolves and panthers. They built log cabins or slept under the trees. In time they organized a community, and this community is still thriving. They now have four churches, and six hundred communicants. They have abandoned their old details of costume, the special hat and jacket, the hooks and eyes which were substituted for buttons, because these were regarded as finery, and razors are no longer outlawed as they were when the Mennonites were obliged to wear beards. But a Mennonite Church I once visited had nothing so frivolous as a steeple, and was primly simple and bare. Outside, the neat and trim cemetery consisted of rows of little white stones, all with Germanic names and all exactly alike, in harmony with their rule of equality. They still maintain their principle of refusing to kill and will not take part in a war. Our government allows for this by letting them off with two years of working without pay for a government service: building projects or protecting animal life. Their ministers and bishops are not paid. They had no motorcars till 1963. They are trusted and liked by their neighbors. But I cannot be sure that their continued discipline was in every way desirable. Their complexions seemed rather unhealthy, like those of the Pennsylvania Dutch, many of whom are Mennonites; and I thought the young girls might be happier if they were allowed to wear gayer clothes than the rigorously plain and unenticing ones which the Mennonite system imposes. There are 300,000 Mennonites in North America.

The most successful of all these new cults, Mormonism, which called itself the Church of Latterday Saints, was born in Palmyra in the eighteen twenties, but did not have its full development there. Joseph Smith was brought as a child from Vermont to just north of the Finger Lakes. He had a lively megalomaniac imagination, and at the age of twenty, in 1827, among those exalting hills, over which the thunder hovered, he asserted that an angel called Moroni had appeared to him and given him a stone box in which were to be found revelations written in reformed Egyptian and inscribed upon gold plates, together with a pair of magic spectacles which enabled him to translate them into English. In 1830, he founded a church of which the congregation in a month increased from six to forty. But he was also mobbed and arrested by persons who thought him an impostor, and to escape from the hounding he invariably provoked, he was forced to go further and further west till, at the age of thirty-nine, he was shot while in an Illinois jail. Smith’s henchman Brigham Young led his followers to the wastes of Utah and, with steady tenacity of purpose and very shrewd practical ability, consolidated the Mormon state in the mountain-hemmed desert of Utah. I find that a distant Kimball relative of mine, Heber Chase Kimball, whose family like so many others had moved from Vermont to New York, where his father and he were blacksmiths, was converted in 1832 from the Baptist to the Mormon Church. Now, according to the Dictionary of American Biography, having a strong religious fervor, a ready belief in the existence of miracles, and a gift of prophecy of his own, he was ordained one of the twelve apostles who, in the early days of the church organization, stood next to Joseph Smith in rank and authority. He was sent as a missionary to England, where, according to varying reports, he was either extremely successful or extremely unsuccessful. In Utah, in 1847, he became, with Brigham Young, one of the members of the triumvirate, known as the first presidency, who ruled the Mormon community. Though he suffered some mental anguish on first receiving the doctrine of plural marriage, he in time accepted it wholeheartedly and practised it fully, attaining to forty-five wives and sixty-five children.

It will be noticed that common features of several of these religions were the attempts to come to terms with the coexistence of the Red Indians; with the second coming of Christ; and with the problem of regulating sex. In the first of these cases, Joseph Smith, who had been led by the Indian burial mounds to believe they were the graves of two hostile races—a white and a red people, who had fought one another for a thousand years, with the result that the whites were wiped out, included in his Book of Mormon an account of the origin of the Indians in Jerusalem. This is still used by Mormon missionaries for their proselytizing among the Indians. In the case of dealing with sex, which Mother Ann and Jemima Wilkinson had determinedly attempted to discourage, the polygamous solution of Joseph Smith was originally not inspired, it would seem, by any social considerations but simply by his own sensuality, which extended to stealing his colleagues’ wives; and was established by Brigham Young as an accepted institution that served certain useful ends. Women in the early nineteenth century, before contraceptives were common, were likely to be worn out by childbearing—the men often married second wives and produced a second brood after the first wife had given out; and before Ignaz Semmelweis and Oliver Wendell Holmes in the forties had discovered the antiseptic methods for preventing puerperal fever, an appalling number of mothers died of it. It was important both to have more potential mothers and to distribute the begetting of children among them. In the case of Mother Ann Lee and Jemima Wilkinson, they tried to avoid the problem by refusing to have children at all. In the system of the next great leader who emigrated to New York from New England, both the second coming of Christ and the reorganizing of sexual arrangements played very important roles. John Humphrey Noyes, also from Vermont, born in 1811, who had studied for the ministry at Yale, was the prophet of a heresy called Perfectionism. Noyes’s doctrine was that Christ had already come again, and that there was no longer any excuse for not getting rid of sin in this world—which meant getting rid of Calvinism, with its unalterably predestinated damnation. On a visit to New York City, he had been tormented by the temptations of sex and had gone to preach in the brothels; but later, in the town of Putney, Vermont, he trained a group of highly respectable Vermonters to