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Timothy Verhoeven
Secularists, Religion and Government
in Nineteenth-Century America
 Timothy Verhoeven

Secularists, Religion
and Government in
Nineteenth-Century
America
Timothy Verhoeven
Monash University
Clayton, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-02876-3 ISBN 978-3-030-02877-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02877-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959736

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
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exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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Cover illustration: George Barnard, 1862. Trinity Episcopal Church, 3rd & Ind. Ave.;
unfinished Capitol in the background. From Library of Congress: Brady-Handy Collection
Cover design: Fatima Jamadar

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 Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to this book from its earliest inception.
David Goodman at the University of Melbourne helped to shape the ini-
tial postdoctoral research proposal that marked the beginning of the pro-
ject. Since my arrival in 2010, the history program at Monash University
has provided a wonderfully supportive atmosphere, and thanks go to
the many colleagues who have listened to papers, read drafts and gen-
erally encouraged me to persist. I would particularly like to thank David
Garrioch, who read a full draft of the manuscript and made a number of
incisive comments, as well as Bain Attwood, who has been a great men-
tor and friend. As a research assistant, Nicholas Ferns had many thankless
tasks, but carried them out with immense diligence and also creativity.
I would also like to record my gratitude to the Australian Research
Council (ARC) which generously funded this project through its early
career researcher fellowship program. Writing books about the United
States from far away Australia has become easier in the digital age. But
rifling through boxes of petitions in the archives requires an enormous
investment in time and in money and would simply have been impossible
without the ARC’s support.
A number of archivists shared their expertise with me. For a while I
haunted the National Archives in Washington, DC, and I would like to
thank the legislative records staff there. Bill Davis and Rod Ross in par-
ticular showed a great interest in my research and pointed me to a num-
ber of valuable sources. Richard McCulley gave me a warm welcome and
a personal tour of the stacks. Two other institutions provided generous

v
vi    Acknowledgements

support. The Library Company of Philadelphia granted me a short-term

fellowship which accelerated the project at a critical period. In the final
stages, a month as visiting scholar at the American Antiquarian Society
sharpened my thinking and opened up a wealth of resources. In no
particular order, I also received wonderful assistance from staff at the
State Archives of Massachusetts, Harvard University archives, Harvard
Divinity School, Pennsylvania State Archives, Huntington Library,
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston City Archives, New York Public
Library, New York Historical Society, and the manuscripts division of the
Library of Congress. I would also like to thank Sally Barringer Gordon.
Not only has her work been a great inspiration, but she and her family
welcomed me twice to Thanksgiving celebrations in their home, which
was a marvelous experience for me.
My love and gratitude go to Jana, not least for giving up her holiday
time to whip the manuscript into shape. Lastly, a dedication to Mark and
Luise, who have grown into such fine young people over the course of
this project.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 “Stepping Stone to an Establishment”: The 1785

Campaign Against the Religious Tax in Virginia 19

3 “Prostrating Our Rights on the Altar of Superstition

and Bigotry”: The Sunday Mail Controversy
in the Early Republic 33

4 “Exposing Priestcraft and All Its Cognate -isms”:

Chaplains, Temperance and Sunday Travel 63

5 “God’s Vice-Regents”: Political Preachers

and the Crisis Over Slavery 93

6 How Christian Were the Founders? God

and the Constitution After the Civil War 121

7 The Bible Wars: Religion, Morality, and Schools

in an International Age 151

8 “Sunday Clubs for Wealthy People”: Taxing

the Churches 181

vii
viii    Contents

9 “A Professedly National Secular Show”: The Chicago

World’s Fair and the American Sabbath 207

10 Conclusion 241

Appendices 253

Select Bibliography 259

Index 277
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 James Akin, “The Holy Alliance,” or, Satan’s Legion at Sabbath
Pranks (1830) (Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society) 54
Fig. 4.1 “Hypocrisy and Rum”, John L. McGee (1852) (Courtesy
of American Antiquarian Society) 73
Fig. 4.2 A Remarkable Difference ‘Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee
(1859) (Courtesy of New York Public Library) 80
Fig. 4.3 Beauties of the Sunday Law (1855) (Courtesy of Library
Company, Philadelphia) 84
Fig. 6.1 The Prayer at Valley Forge. From the original painting
by Henry Brueckner (1889) (Courtesy of Library
Company, Philadelphia) 133
Fig. 9.1 An Unholy Alliance, Puck (August 24, 1892)
(Courtesy of New York Public Library) 222
Fig. 9.2 It Will Be Open! Puck (December 14, 1892)
(Courtesy of New York Public Library) 233

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

On May 31, 1892, Charles W. Smouse addressed a petition to Congress

on the subject of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Set
to open the following year, the World’s Fair promised to be a dazzling
showcase of American prowess for a domestic and international audience.
But Smouse, along with thirty-seven fellow residents of Mount Pleasant,
Iowa, worried that the much-anticipated Fair might become instead
a vehicle for clerical ambition. At the urging of evangelicals, lawmak-
ers were poised to pass a measure that would force the Fair directors to
shut the gates on the Sunday Sabbath. Were it to impose Sunday-closing,
Smouse warned, Congress would be embarking on a dangerous path of
“Religious Legislation,” and as such violating both the First Amendment
to the federal Constitution as well as the wishes of the founders of the
Republic. Now more than ever, Smouse declared, it was imperative to
keep “Religion and the State Separate.”1
This book is a history of men and women like Charles W. Smouse
who, across a range of church-state battles from the early Republic to
the Progressive era, campaigned for a greater separation between religion
and government. Smouse was not a prominent jurist, politician, or cleric,
and he lived far from the economic and intellectual centers of American
life. But his protest over Sunday-closing is a fitting point of departure
for three reasons. First, Smouse’s petition captures the core demand of
the group that I refer to as secularists. The terms “secularism” and “sec-
ularist” first entered American parlance in the antebellum era, though
they only became common after the Civil War. From the outset, their

© The Author(s) 2019 1

T. Verhoeven, Secularists, Religion and Government in Nineteenth-
Century America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02877-0_1
2 T. VERHOEVEN

meaning was contested. Protestant evangelicals dismissed them as a mere

dressing up of an old foe, atheism. But another understanding, which I
follow in this book, also took hold. A secularist, as a Protestant minister
who embraced the label explained, wanted “an absolute and unqualified
divorce of the State from things spiritual.”2 Opponents understood the
term in the same way. Secularists, the Congregationalist Josiah Strong
explained, believed in a distancing of religious and government insti-
tutions.3 To his dismay, their ranks included many Christians as well as
Jews and agnostics.
This points to a second revealing feature of Smouse’s petition, its
balance of religious and non-religious voices. Smouse, along with sev-
eral of his fellow petitioners, was a member of a religious minority, the
Seventh-Day Adventists. But others signed simply as citizens, eschewing
any affiliation with the Adventists or other churches. Nineteenth-century
secularists were a diverse group, and their diversity extended to religious
belief. The call for a secular state won support across the spectrum of
belief, from those whose faith was fierce to merely tepid or even non-
existent. Some secularists cited Scripture, others preferred Thomas
Jefferson, and many saw no contradiction in drawing on both. The third
reason to begin with Charles W. Smouse and his obscure fellow petition-
ers from their small town in Iowa is to signal the grassroots dimension to
this story. The lettered elite will play a significant role. But in analyzing
a series of church-state controversies, I have tried to incorporate popular
attitudes and protests. Without opinion polls or mass surveys, the best
way to do this is through collective petitions, which feature heavily in the
pages that follow. In sum, this is a history of secularist mobilization as
much as ideology.
Placing a figure like Charles W. Smouse at center-stage runs against
the grain of two interrelated approaches to church-state relations in
nineteenth-century America. The first sees most Americans as instinc-
tive non-preferentialists, a modern term which denotes an acceptance
of state support for faith so long as it is distributed equally among all
(Protestant) denominations. In his Commentaries on the Constitution of
the United States, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story famously argued
that the free exercise and establishment clauses of the First Amendment
had a clear and limited goal: to “prevent any national ecclesiastical estab-
lishment.” The national government was barred from levying taxes in
support of one church, or using its powers to enforce a specific creed.
But indirect and indiscriminate aid to religion was entirely appropriate.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

Since Protestant values provided the solid foundations of republican gov-

ernment, the majority expected their faith to, in Story’s terms, “receive
encouragement from the state.”4 Story was writing in the midst of the
explosion of evangelical energy known as the Second Great Awakening,
and historians have long seen a connection between the model of dises-
tablishment that he outlined and the religious vitality of the era. In one
account, the demise of direct state support infused religion with a new
democratic fervor. The rising Methodist and Baptist churches appealed
directly to previously marginal groups, developing new techniques of
persuasion that would enable them to prosper in an open marketplace
of religion.5 Other scholars paint a darker picture. Evangelical churches
in this view relied more on fear than on hope, binding Americans to
their faith by stoking fears about the alarming spread of irreligion and
immorality.6 But whether their vision was sunny or gloomy, evangelical
churches profited from the absence of a state church to construct a vast
network of reform and voluntary associations, in the process winning a
privileged public position for their faith.
The result, for many historians, was a swift march to social con-
trol. A second line of interpretation, then, emphasizes religious power.
Nineteenth-century Americans, as William R. Hutchison notes, liked
nothing better than to congratulate themselves for casting off the state
churches that disfigured the Old World. But they soon developed a
“very effective religious establishment of their own.”7 Whether through
Sabbath restrictions, temperance laws or censorship regimes, evangeli-
cals built an informal establishment. Along with other historians, Mark
A. Noll sees its highpoint in the antebellum era when a “republican cal-
culus” brought together the forces of faith and democracy in a mutu-
ally beneficial embrace.8 But many see a more enduring reign. In David
Sehat’s account, the regime of Protestant coercion, or what he terms
the “moral establishment,” was at its most imposing near the end of the
century, as the various groups who felt its lash—Catholics, Mormons,
freethinkers, and others—could attest. “For much of its history,” as
Sehat concludes, “the United States was controlled by Protestant
Christians who sponsored a moral regime that was both coercive and
exclusionary.”9
In this narrative, a figure like Smouse plays a marginal role, the forlorn
protester whose crushing at the hands of the moral establishment serves
only to underline its ascendancy. However, if we understand secularists
as a category to extend beyond the irreligious to encompass all those
4 T. VERHOEVEN

who rallied to a strict separation of church and state, a different narra-

tive emerges. Evangelicals remain an imposing force. But their energy
spurred an equally impressive secularist mobilization that managed to
defeat or at least hold in check the push for a tighter fit between reli-
gion and government. The result was not a sweeping secularist victory.
Smouse’s vision of a clean break between religion and state was never
achieved. But far from succumbing to an evangelical juggernaut, nine-
teenth-century secularists proved remarkably effective in rallying support
for their contention that the United States was not, in political or consti-
tutional terms, a Christian nation.
In making this case, my analysis builds on the work of other schol-
ars who have challenged the depiction of the nineteenth-century as the
golden age of the informal Protestant establishment. Steven K. Green
has argued most forcefully that this era witnessed a second disestablish-
ment which, extending the gains made in the Revolutionary era, intro-
duced secularist principles to law and public education. By the century’s
end, he argues, the majority of Protestants had “reconciled with the idea
that, while the culture retained Christian influences, the nation’s civic
institutions were secular.”10 The view that the Second Great Awakening
produced a united evangelical front which swept all before it has also
come under scrutiny. The competitive marketplace of religion, which is
often seen as spurring evangelical growth, also had the effect of pitting
preacher against preacher in the endless race for converts taking place in
communities across the nation. As much as they celebrated the advance
of religion as a whole, church leaders worried about losing ground to
their rivals.11 Nor, as Frank Lambert suggests, was there necessarily una-
nimity amongst Protestants in regard to political questions. On questions
such as Sunday mail delivery, he argues, “Protestant unity in the public
square was more illusory than real.”12 Perhaps the most striking chal-
lenge to the story of evangelical dominance is the tolerance, albeit often
grudging, granted to atheists. As Leigh Eric Schmidt shows, though
often ostracized and regularly subjected to legal persecution, freethink-
ers carved out a prominent place in cities and small towns across the
nation.13 A handful even achieved great public renown. To the dismay
of evangelicals, the notorious freethinker Robert Green Ingersoll dazzled
large audiences with his biting attacks on moralizing clerics and their
blind faith in dogma.14
This book goes beyond a focus on freethinkers to encompass the
diverse impulses which came together to make the case for a secular
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

state. Without discounting the influence of figures such as Ingersoll, we

need to look further than irreligion if we are to make sense of the vital-
ity of secularist mobilization.15 Some of the most prominent advocates
of a secular state in nineteenth-century America were men and women
of faith. It was a poor religion, they argued, that relied on government
props to keep it upright. True faith had need of nothing more than the
enduring power of its creed. But the social and cultural forces animating
political secularism did not end there. Class animosity was a further pow-
erful factor. In many church-state contests, labor activists denounced a
Protestant clergy that seemed more interested in currying favor with the
wealthy elite than uplifting the lives of the poor.
Nor can we ignore the element of race. The argument for a strict
separation of church and state served multiple purposes in nineteenth-
century America. In the hands of white southerners, it became a tool
to uphold racial privilege. This became clear when northern evangeli-
cals attacked the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the door
to the extension of slavery into the territories. The response of white
southerners was furious. By using their pulpit as a political soapbox,
they charged, these abolitionist preachers were overstepping the bound-
ary between faith and government. The call for a secular state served, in
this case, to silence critics of slavery. The defeat of the Confederacy only
hardened opposition to what southerners saw as the politicized religion
which ruled over northern society.
In short, secularist campaigns brought together an odd group of
bedfellows: religious skeptics, liberal theologians, minority faiths, white
supremacists, labor reformers, German radicals, and more. These alli-
ances were largely informal, often sporadic, and occasionally uncomfort-
able. For example, liberal Protestants held their noses when siding with
radicals who gave off in their view a strong whiff of atheism. But they
found common ground in the proposition that only a secular state could
keep religion free from government control, and just as importantly,
government safe from clerical ambition. Politics and religion were a com-
bustible and dangerous mix, they agreed, and both would suffer from
their combination.
These alliances were found at the grassroots as much as the elite
level of society. Much of the literature on secularization has a top-down
bias. In The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests and Conflict in the
Secularization of American Public Life, Christian Smith and other con-
tributors explore the manner in which secular models of knowledge and
6 T. VERHOEVEN

authority displaced religious understandings. Breaking with theories that

posit secularization as the inevitable outgrowth of modernization, Smith
argues that conflict drove this development. The secularization of public
life was the “outcome of a power struggle between contending groups
with conflicting interests and ideologies.”16 This emphasis on struggle
and contest as critical to advancing the secularist cause is important. But
whereas Smith and his contributors limit their analysis to elite producers
of knowledge such as sociologists, journalists, and educators, my book
introduces a bottom-up dimension. Through examining petition cam-
paigns, we begin to see how mass meetings and popular mobilization,
often taking place far from the political, economic, and cultural centers
of American life and drawing in thousands of largely anonymous figures,
played a vital role as well.
A further ambition of this study is to pay attention to the interna-
tional dimension of American secularism. For decades now, historians
have been investigating the cross-border connections and exchanges
which shaped the American past. In the case of nineteenth-century
reformers, these international ties were particularly vibrant. As they
campaigned to abolish slavery or to win the vote for women, American
activists reached across the Atlantic, forging networks with like-minded
fellows and absorbing lessons that might be applied at home.17 Studies
of secularist movements, in contrast, have tended to remain fixed in a
national frame. Yet nineteenth-century secularists were highly conscious
of developments abroad, seizing on key events both to make the case for
a secular state and to discredit the claims of their opponents. To demon-
strate the perils of bringing sectarianism into the classroom, for exam-
ple, or leaving church property untaxed, secularists routinely pointed
to the Old World, where a series of national governments seemed des-
perate to unwind the close ties between church and state that had
crippled civil and religious liberty. Another major theme of the book, anti-
Catholicism, shows the same outward-looking perspective. Hostility
to the church was no doubt stoked by domestic pressures and circum-
stances. But we should not overlook the impact of international contro-
versies, notably the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870, in sharpening
animosity toward Rome. Particularly in the second half of the century,
international events played an ever-increasing role in driving and direct-
ing the contest over the proper relationship between religion and
government.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

True Versus False Religion

At first glance, Charles W. Smouse’s plea for religion and state to be kept
apart seems beguilingly simple. Yet if we look harder, we begin to see
another powerful element in the secularist case, an effort to enshrine a
vision of true as opposed to false religion. In his influential study, Charles
Taylor argues that in a secular age, religion does not disappear but is
instead reconfigured.18 Scholars in the field of secularist studies have
made a persuasive case that political secularism’s core demand—that the
modern state remain aloof from clerical claims and theological quarrels—
carried a series of hidden injunctions about what counts as true reli-
gion.19 Good religion is deemed to be private, rational and grounded
in belief rather than coercion. Bad religion, in contrast, is emotional,
authoritarian and perhaps most damningly of all, politically ambitious.20
Read in this way, the First Amendment takes on a different light. It held
out the promise of religious liberty and state non-interference to all
faiths. But it worked to privilege certain expressions of religiosity while
demonizing others.
In the American context, historians have identified evangelical
Protestantism as the beneficiary of secularism’s discursive power. The
endless process of sorting good from bad religions which the First
Amendment unleashed provides a key, in this argument, to the creation
of the informal Protestant establishment. Evangelicals skillfully wielded
the specter of Catholicism—cast as an alien and authoritarian faith which
allegedly made no secret of its thirst for raw political power—to make
their own claims to public authority seem palatable. Tracy Fessenden has
described how this dynamic unfolded in the context of the fierce debates
over the reading of the Protestant Bible in public schools. Protestants
made two apparently contradictory claims. The first was that the nation’s
common schools must be nonsectarian in character. The second was that
their Bible, the King James, be read every day to students of all faiths
and backgrounds, including Catholics, who used a different version, the
Douai-Rheims Bible, and Jews. They were able to reconcile these two
claims because to their mind the public school was itself a creation of
the Protestant ethos. Only Protestantism, with its stress on unmediated
contact between the faithful and Scripture, could have created a mass
education system. Since the common school was an outgrowth of their
faith, the presence of their Bible escaped the censure of sectarianism. The
Catholic Bible, in contrast, could only be an intruder.21 The principle of
8 T. VERHOEVEN

church-state separation, then, offered a fiction of state neutrality, a fic-

tion which in fact served to smooth the path to Protestant dominance.
The problem with this account is that it limits conflict to a
broad Catholic-Protestant divide. Fessenden refers to a “nonspecific
Protestantism” dominating American public life, but even a casual glance
at the religious landscape of the nineteenth century reveals a Protestant
world riven with internal conflicts and rivalries. The same criticism might
be applied to John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America.
Modern sets out the processes through which an evangelical social
imaginary set the terms for what it meant to be religious in antebellum
America. Evangelical Protestantism in his account was an “imperial dis-
course” that enabled a “broad Protestant majority… to convince them-
selves that they were religious.”22 In Modern’s account, this majority
is capacious, encompassing not just conservative evangelicals but liberal
Protestants, spiritualists, and even freethinkers. But as Michal Warner
argues, even if we accept that these ostensibly rival groups all operated
within the same broad formation of secularism, “they certainly put com-
peting spins on its political implications.”23 This was clear in the Bible
Wars. Those who argued for the reading of the King James Bible may
have insisted that, in a republic founded on Protestant values, there was
nothing sectarian about such a practice. But it was not just Catholics
who realized how untenable this position was. Liberal Protestants, Jews,
freethinkers, and many others saw very clearly that the reading of the
King James Bible was as intrusive as the reading of the Douai Bible, and
that both had to be excluded.
The true/false religion dichotomy was indeed powerful, but we need
to see how it worked against evangelical claims to authority. No issue
demonstrates this more clearly than anti-Catholicism. Scholars often con-
tend that support for a strict separation of church and state has its roots
in anti-Catholic bigotry.24 The argument runs as follows. Nineteenth-
century Protestants were convinced that the Vatican thirsted after politi-
cal as much as spiritual authority. To beat back the threat, they embraced
the principle of church-state separation, a measure which they regarded
as an antidote to Catholic ambition specifically. Again, though, secular-
ism worked to enshrine Protestant influence. For at the same time as
they denounced Catholic aggression and proclaimed the virtue of sepa-
ration, these same Protestants were urging the state to enact and enforce
laws to stamp out drunkenness, blasphemy, and Sabbath-breaking.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

The purportedly watertight principle of separation, in this argument,

allowed Protestant claims to public authority to pass unhindered.
This interpretation ignores, however, the manner in which anti-
Catholicism rebounded against evangelicals themselves. Secularists
were as forthright as anybody else in nineteenth-century America in
denouncing Catholicism as a politicized, hierarchical, and intolerant
faith. But again and again, they skillfully directed this prejudice against
the Protestant clergy. By seeking political privileges for their faith, evan-
gelicals were guilty, they argued, of mimicking the sinister papists they
professed to oppose. In a culture saturated with anti-Catholicism, tar-
ring the Protestant clergy with the spirit of Romanism proved a powerful
weapon. In the never-ending effort to sort good from bad religions, in
short, the proponents of the Christian nation thesis could end up on the
wrong side of the ledger. By the end of the century, advocates of strict
Sabbath laws or state-backed Prohibition were coming to be seen by
more and more Americans as curious relics of a discarded age of zealotry.
Secularists were a diverse group. Some were deeply hostile to religion.
But most sought to circumscribe religious activism within what they
regarded as fitting limits in an era of progress and of democracy. And in
determining these limits, they held up certain faiths as foils—Puritans,
Mormons, and Catholics, but also conservative evangelicals who now
bore in their eyes the same fatal mark of the fanatic.25

The Role of Petitioning

In order to understand the nature and depth of secularist mobilization
in nineteenth-century America, this book draws on a neglected histor-
ical source, collective petitions to Congress. The right to petition gov-
ernment is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, the
same amendment which contains the religion clauses. But in stark con-
trast to the mountainous literature on the latter, studies of mass petition-
ing in American history are rare. The few that exist chart a crucial shift
from the colonial to the national eras. On matters of public controversy,
colonial-era petitioners aimed directly at reshaping policy and laws.26 By
the early Republic, the goal had expanded to the more diffuse aims of
mass politicking: generating publicity for a cause, bringing new members
into civic associations, and binding them together ever more firmly in a
shared cause. Petitioning became enveloped in what Johann N. Neem
has called the “massive release of civic energy” during the Jacksonian era
10 T. VERHOEVEN

and took on the hallmarks of mass mobilization.27 The masters of this

new style of petitioning were antislavery activists, who from the mid-
1830s bombarded Congress with protests signed by thousands of men
and women. As they understood, petitioning was becoming a numbers
game. Congress, as the abolitionist Liberator reminded its readers, “is
more powerfully moved by large numbers than by strong arguments.”28
This book begins in the Jacksonian era, when it was not uncom-
mon for petitions to be handwritten, and ends in the Progressive age,
when pages and pages of names followed a printed, uniform and often
terse text. But though changing in format, the petition remains a rich
source of information. Even as it became shorter over time, the claim at
the head of the document offers a window onto secularist arguments.
Studying petitions allows us to plot the regional strengths of secularist
feeling, and how this evolved over the course of the century. In addition,
as Daniel P. Carpenter argues, the process of collecting signatures brings
to light the shape of local organizational networks.29 Sometimes these
networks sprang into life in response to a particular issue before fading
away; others proved to be more enduring. But in preserving the names
of organizers, including all those tasked with distributing sheets and col-
lecting names, petitions allow us to grasp the outlines of networks which
otherwise would be almost impossible to trace.
Most of all, petitions offer the chance to take the temper of popular
opinion. Admittedly, it would be naive to see petitioning as an entirely
grassroots phenomenon. Petitions were often drafted, printed, and dis-
tributed by small groups of men and women, who then enrolled local
notables to fan out and to solicit signatures. “It is not so much the sig-
natory who seeks the petition,” in Carpenter’s neat description of the
process, “but the petition that seeks the signatory.”30 Yet nor was this
a purely top-down process. In certain eras, local meetings of townspeo-
ple either drafted their own petition texts or amended standard forms
to better convey their opinion. In some cases, signers added notes and
comments to make their views clear. Even signing one’s name was a sig-
nificant and public act. In short, petitions take us as close as we can get
to ideological battles on the ground.
In studying these petitions, I have privileged those that went to
Congress rather than to state legislatures. This book thus leans toward
national rather than state-level controversies. Studies of church-state rela-
tions in the nineteenth-century have often taken the opposite perspec-
tive.31 As a matter of law, the religious clauses of the First Amendment
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

were not yet binding on individual states. On many church-state issues,

state and local laws reigned supreme, and protestors were as likely to
direct their anger at town or city authorities as national legislators. Yet
there are good reasons to opt for a broader perspective. Even when well-
ing up from the local level, church-state controversies tended to bal-
loon quickly into questions of national import. This is notably true for
the issue of Bible-reading in schools, where the decision of one School
Board in the city of Cincinnati in 1869 touched off a nationwide debate.
Furthermore, many of the issues that vexed both evangelicals and their
opponents, from Sunday mails to legislative chaplains to the wording of
the nation’s founding text, revolved around federal power and responsi-
bility. But more than this, even if the First Amendment did not formally
hold sway over state constitutions, Americans looked on it as a deci-
sive reference point nonetheless. Petitioners sometimes quoted a state
Constitution or even a local ordinance, but most privileged the First
Amendment because they understood it to set the course for the entire
nation.
The story begins with a Revolutionary-era petition campaign that
in many ways set a template for those that followed: James Madison’s
successful effort to defeat a proposed religious tax in Virginia in 1785.
Decades later, some of the key arguments made by Madison would
reappear in a very different context. Chapter 3 examines the Sunday
mail controversy of the early Republic. When evangelicals launched
a campaign to stop the delivery and transportation of mail on Sundays,
a ­furious national debate ensued. Scholarship on this controversy focuses
on the Sabbatarian movement, a coalition of evangelical churches which
petitioned against Sunday mails. My focus is the petition campaign
in their favor. This chapter explores the major themes, arguments, and
social identity of these petitioners who defended Sunday mails and who
rejected what they saw as a clerical attempt to harness the power of the
state for the benefit of their faith.
The two chapters that follow explore the secularist impulse in
the antebellum era, when evangelical control is often seen to be at its
most imposing. But as Chapter 4 shows, contest rather than consensus
remained the rule, and faith itself often provided the spark. In the late
1840s, a small church known as the Primitive Baptists launched a deter-
mined effort to overturn what seemed a settled institution, legislative
chaplains to Congress. This effort failed, but resistance to other expres-
sions of religious control proved more successful. Temperance was one
12 T. VERHOEVEN

flashpoint. Sabbath controversy returned, this time around the ques-

tion of Sunday travel. In Philadelphia in 1859, uproar ensued when
Mayor Alexander Henry banned the city’s streetcars from running on
the Sabbath. The antebellum era also brought to a head an issue which
had long divided Americans, the political role of the pulpit. The trigger,
as demonstrated in Chapter 5, was slavery. When a group of clergymen
from New England publicly urged Congress to rescind the controversial
Fugitive Slave law, a furious backlash ensued against what was known as
“political preaching.” This episode reveals the manner in which the argu-
ment for separating religion and politics drew its energy from southern
resentment of abolitionist preachers, a resentment that would obstruct
clerical-led reform for much of the century.
The Civil War brought the controversy over slavery to an end, but
inaugurated a new round of church-state battles. Energized by their
belief that a nation cleansed of the sin of slavery could at last bask in
Divine favor, northern evangelicals embarked on an ambitious pro-
gram of government-backed moral reform. The decade after 1865 saw
three great contests. Chapter 6 examines the resistance to the campaign
to acknowledge God and Jesus Christ in the preamble of the federal
Constitution. Though sometimes dismissed as a foolhardy and eccen-
tric venture, the drive to amend the Constitution triggered a nation-
wide debate as well as a great petition campaign. This chapter examines
the question which to some degree inflected all church-state battles of
the nineteenth-century: How Christian were the Founders? Through
biographies, sermons, and prints, evangelicals portrayed the Founders
as devout Christians intent on forging a Godly republic. But secularists
resisted this campaign, depicting the Founders as Enlightenment deists
who had constructed a Republic in which faith was a private and not a
public concern.
The focus of Chapter 7 is the place of religion in public schools.
When, in 1869, the School Board in Cincinnati, Ohio voted to end the
practice of Bible-reading, the upshot was a fierce national controversy
known as the “Bible War.” Historians have studied this contest in some
detail. But a key element—the international dimension—remains largely
untold. As supporters and opponents of Bible-reading made their case,
overseas models were a vital point of reference. Leading educational
reformers went abroad, and particularly to Europe, to study the role of
religion in schools and drew on their experiences to guide the debate at
home. Chapter 8 investigates a secularist campaign that ultimately failed.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

In the aftermath of the Civil War, calls to tax church property were heard
in state constitutional conventions and legislatures, tax commissions,
the secular press, and even in some pulpits. The issue was important
because it crystallized a deep-seated resentment that religion was losing
its popular mission. As opulent churches sprang up in Gilded Age cit-
ies, more and more Americans feared that houses of worship were turn-
ing into exclusive clubs for the wealthy. The final chapter returns to the
question of Sabbath laws through the clash over the Sunday opening of
the World’s Fair at Chicago. As Gaines M. Foster has shown, far from
subsiding in a wave of secularization, reformers set about with renewed
vigor and purpose from the 1880s to enact their vision of a Christian
nation.32 For the leaders of this drive, the nation had the opportunity
to affirm its commitment to the Lord’s Day by shutting the gates of the
Fair on Sunday. But their push for Sunday-closing sparked an immense
backlash. Thousands of Americans petitioned Congress to ensure that
the Fair remained open on every day of the week, setting forth their view
not just of the meaning of Sunday, but more fundamentally, the proper
relationship between government and religion in a nation which was
increasingly diverse and now emerging as a global force.
The protagonists in these contests saw a clear-cut divide. The General
Secretary of the national association lobbying for a Christian amend-
ment to the Constitution, David McAllister, identified two antagonis-
tic theories of the relationship between government and religion. The
first, held by many evangelical churches, rejected a state church in the
mold of the Church of England but maintained nevertheless “that civil
government has a proper and necessary connection with religion.” The
opposing doctrine “excludes all matters of religion from the true sphere
of civil government. It separates not only the church, but all religion
from the state.”33 Such polarized depictions were common, but do not
do justice to the complexity of the debate. Some petitioners proclaimed
their desire for a thoroughgoing secularization of public life. But many
might be better characterized as situational, objecting vehemently to
certain expressions of clerical authority while remaining sanguine about
others. The attempt to enforce Sabbath laws produced great outpour-
ings of opposition. The saying of prayers in faraway Congress moved
fewer citizens to protest. Furthermore, there are reasons to be skeptical
of McAllister’s winner-takes-all approach. As legal scholars now increas-
ingly argue, apparently blunt concepts such as establishment and dises-
tablishment mask a much more fluid and dynamic set of relationships.34
14 T. VERHOEVEN

The key question becomes not if religion and government are connected
but rather the nature of their entanglement.
My aim, then, is not to replace a narrative of evangelical hegemony
with one of secularist triumph. At the end of the century, religion and
public policy continued to intersect in many ways. Yet McAllister was
not entirely wrong either to see a deep-seated disagreement about the
legacy of the Revolution, the origin of state authority and the shape of
religion in a democratic republic. Through a series of popular mobiliza-
tions, a loose alliance of activists and their supporters articulated a pow-
erful vision of a secular state, in the process branding their opponents as
threats both to democratic liberties as well as true religion. Showing how
this came about is the goal of this book.

Notes
1. Rec. June 6, 1892. SEN 52A-J27.1 (National Archives, Washington,
DC). Emphasis in original. In researching this book, I have examined
petitions held in archives. The alternative is to analyze lists of petitions
received that appear in Congressional journals. Each approach has its
pros and cons. The major disadvantage of my approach is that many rele-
vant petitions have no doubt been lost or discarded and therefore do not
appear in the archives. However, as I hope will become clear, taking the
time to study physical documents opens up rich and indispensable lines of
analysis.
2. Samuel T. Spear, Religion and the State, or, the Bible and the Public Schools
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1876), 38. Emphasis in original.
3. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New
York: Baker and Taylor, 1891), 99–100.
4. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States: With
a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and
States, Before the Adoption of the Constitution, vol. 3 (Boston: Hilliard,
Gray, 1833), 726, 728. For more recent iterations, Robert Cord,
Separation of Church and State: Historical Fact and Current Fiction (New
York: Lambeth Press, 1982), 15. See also Richard John Neuhaus, The
Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1984); John Witte jnr., “Review: That Serpentine Wall of
Separation,” Michigan Law Review 101 (2003): 1869–1905.
5. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
6. Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New
American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

7. William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious

History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003),
59. Daniel Walker Howe also argues that “the evangelical movement in
the antebellum United States was in many respects the functional equiv-
alent of an established church.” See his “The Evangelical Movement and
the Political Culture of the Second Party System,” Journal of American
History 77 (1991): 1222.
8. “By the early nineteenth-century, evangelicalism was the unofficially estab-
lished religion in a nation that had forsworn religious establishments.”
Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham
Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 208. See also
Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); James S. Kabala refers to a
“non-sectarian Protestant consensus” in his Church-state Relations in
the Early American Republic, 1787–1846 (Brookfield, VT: Pickering &
Chatto, 2013).
9. David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 8. Catherine L. Albanese charts the ongoing
power of “public Protestantism” after the Civil War in her America,
Religions and Religion, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Cengage, 2013), 276.
Robert T. Handy, though sensitive to the level of dissent and challenge,
nonetheless concludes that at the end of the century “an unofficial, diver-
sified establishment of religion continued to operate effectively in the
society.” Undermined Establishment: Church-State Relations in America,
1820–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 126. In Jon
Butler’s analysis, American Protestantism was as avid in its “pursuit of
coercive authority and power” as in its commitment to individualism.
Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1990), 287.
10. Steven K. Green, The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press,
2010), 385. Mark McGarvie has argued that “non-sectarian liberals”
managed to impose, albeit briefly, a secularist vision of the Revolution
and its legacy in the period of the early Republic. Mark McGarvie, One
Nation Under Law: America’s Early National Struggle to Separate Church
and State (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). For an
earlier separationist reading of the First Amendment, Leonard W. Levy,
Constitutional Opinions: Aspects of the Bill of Rights (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986).
11. Sam Haselby argues for a broad fissure between what he terms “frontier
revivalism” and “national evangelism” within Protestantism in the early
Republic. See his The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (New
16 T. VERHOEVEN

York: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Mitchell Snay, Gospel of
Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993). Denominational competition is
explored in Paul K. Conkin, The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity
in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1995), 130–37.
12. Frank Lambert, Religion in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008), 44.
13. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made
Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2016).
14. Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American
Freethought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). For other secular-
ist leaders, see her Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New
York: H. Holt, 2004).
15. Noah Feldman, Divided By God: America’s Church-State Problem—and
What We Should Do About It (New York: Macmillan, 2005), examines
the push for a strict separation of church and state after the Civil War,
but limits the scope to organized secularists. For an analysis which also
takes a capacious view, Eric R. Schlereth, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of
Religious Controversy in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Schlereth examines a series of what he calls
“infidel controversies” in the early republic which pitted the proponents
of the Christian nation thesis against a loose coalition of Deists, freethink-
ers, and non-evangelical Protestants.
16. Christian Smith, “Secularizing American Higher Education: The Case of
Early American Sociology,” in The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests,
and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, ed. Christian
Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 153.
17. Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Daniel T. Rodgers,
Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 1998); Margaret McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The
Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1999); and Kathryn Kish Sklar and James
Brewer Stewart, eds., Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in
the Era of Emancipation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
18. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).
19. Key works are Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Gil Anidjar,
“Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006): 52–77; Joan Wallach
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2007); Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority
Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); and Jonathon S.
Kahn and Vincent W. Lloyd, eds., Race and Secularism in America (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
20. Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People
Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2004), esp. 177–204; Winnifred Fallers Sullivan argues that
the “precondition for political participation by religion increasingly
became cooperation with liberal theories and forms of governance.” The
Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005), 7.
21. Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and
American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007),
Chapter 3.
22. John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015), 114.
23. Michael Warner, “Was Antebellum America Secular?” available at: http://
blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/10/02/was-antebellum-america-secular/.
24. The longest exposition of this argument is Philip Hamburger, Separation
of Church and State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). For
a critique, see Mark McGarvie’s comments at: http://www.h-net.org/
reviews/showrev.php?id=7329.
25. Several scholars have studied the ways in which Americans came to see
Mormonism as a theocratic, illiberal and therefore illegitimate faith. See
J. Spencer Fluhman, A Peculiar People: Anti-mormonism and the Making
of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2012); Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon
Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
26. For the colonial era, Raymond C. Bailey, Popular Influence Upon Public
Policy: Petitioning in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Westport, CN:
Greenwood Press, 1979).
27. Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil
Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2008), 113, 167–68.
28. Liberator, June 23, 1837.
29. Daniel P. Carpenter, “Recruitment by Petition: American Antislavery,
French Protestantism, English Suppression,” Perspectives on Politics 14,
no. 3 (2016): 700–23.
30. Ibid., 701.
18 T. VERHOEVEN

31. For interpretations of the First Amendment which emphasize its delinea-

tion of federal versus state responsibility, see Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas
Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York:
New York University Press, 2002), 59–62; Donald L. Drakeman, Church,
State and Original Intent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 74–76.
32. Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the
Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2002).
33. Proceedings of the national convention to secure the religious amendment of
the Constitution of the United States Held in Pittsburg, February 4, 5, 1874
(Philadelphia: Christian Statesman Association, 1874), 1.
34. See Lori G. Beaman, “Beyond Establishment,” in Politics of Religious
Freedom, eds. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba
Mahmood and Peter G. Danchin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015), 207–19; Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Lori G. Beaman, eds.,
Varieties of Religious Establishment (London: Ashgate, 2013).
 CHAPTER 2

“Stepping Stone to an Establishment”:

The 1785 Campaign Against
the Religious Tax in Virginia

Across the nineteenth century, petitions and counter-petitions were a

feature of many church-state battles. But the most famous single petition
setting out the proper role of religion in the republic dated from the
Revolutionary era. In 1785, James Madison rallied public opposition to
a proposed religious tax in Virginia. His “Memorial and Remonstrance
against Religious Assessments,” though designed to defeat a specific bill,
took on a more enduring status, providing a template for secularists in
the decades ahead. The campaign in 1785 looked forward in another
sense too. By bringing together Deists and religious dissenters, it prefig-
ured the uneasy, albeit effective alliances that would remain a hallmark of
secularist mobilization in the following century.

The Anglican Establishment in Virginia

In the colonial era, taxpayer support for established churches was
common. In Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut, towns
were obliged to select and support through taxes an orthodox, which in
these parts denoted Congregational, minister. In the South, the Anglican
Church reigned. Like the Carolinas, Georgia, and Maryland, colonial
Virginia established the Church of England and taxed all residents for its
support. This was far from a rigorous establishment, at least in relation to
Protestants. In 1699, the legislature recognized the British Parliament’s
Toleration Act, and as a result non-Anglicans, or dissenters as they
were known, were exempted from the requirement to attend Anglican

© The Author(s) 2019 19

T. Verhoeven, Secularists, Religion and Government in Nineteenth-
Century America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02877-0_2
20 T. VERHOEVEN

services, and allowed to build and maintain their own houses of worship.
Still, while enjoying a measure of toleration, dissenters could rightly
complain of being second-class citizens. In order to preach, ministers
required a license which was often difficult to obtain. Furthermore,
dissenters, like all parish residents, were obliged to pay the annual levy
which supported the Anglican Church and its activities.1
Events before the American Revolution would show the narrow
limits of toleration in Virginia. The backdrop was the spread of a new
and, from the perspective of the Anglican gentry, unsettling brand of
dissent. From the 1730s, a religious revival known as the First Great
Awakening swept the colonies. More than doctrinal innovation, the
Awakening was significant for enshrining a brand of worship that
emphasized the truth of experience. Denouncing orthodox ministers
for their obsession with ritual and form, itinerant preachers traversed the
colonies exhorting the faithful to cast aside their dry adherence to doc-
trine and to open their hearts to Christ. The main beneficiaries of this
surge in religious enthusiasm were the Presbyterian and Baptist churches,
which spread into the south. Within Virginia, these rising faiths were
strongest in the west, but soon began winning over followers in the east
of the state.
The expansion of Separate Baptists posed the greatest challenge to
the Anglican establishment. Separate Baptist preachers made no secret of
their scorn for state-backed creeds. Convinced that their authority came
from God alone, and deeply hostile to any form of state control, they
refused to apply for preaching licenses. Just as troubling was their defi-
ance of social hierarchy. The Baptists’ zeal for conversion and their con-
viction that redemption was accessible to all, regardless of race, gender
or class, clashed with the model of rank and deference so dear to the
gentry. A striking example of their willingness to upend convention was
their approach to selecting preachers. For the Anglican parson, social
rank was a reward for years of education. A Baptist preacher, in contrast,
only needed to convince his audience that he possessed an authentic
spiritual gift. For the Anglican gentry, these Baptists seemed a disruptive
element, and their potential to create disorder was only magnified when
large numbers of slaves began to embrace their message of individual sal-
vation. From the 1760s, county officials launched a crackdown. In 1768,
sheriffs and magistrates in several counties began to imprison Baptist
preachers for disturbing the peace. Over the next six years, at least thirty
would be jailed.2
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
friend was one of her three brothers, probably Manetto Portinari, to
whom a sonnet of Guido’s may have been addressed. Casella the
musician, and Lapo Gianni the poet, are mentioned with affection in
the Purgatorio (Canto ii.), and in one of Dante’s sonnets respectively;
Lippo de’ Bardi, evidently like Casella a musician, and a certain
Meuccio likewise appear as friends in other of his earliest lyrics. Cino
da Pistoia, like Cavalcanti, seems to have answered Dante’s dream;
their friendship was perhaps at present mainly confined to
exchanging poems. Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imola speak of an
early visit of Dante’s to the universities of Bologna and Padua, and
there is some evidence for thinking that he was at Bologna some
time not later than 1287. He may possibly have served in some
cavalry expedition to check the harrying parties of Aretines in 1288;
for, when the great battle of the following year was fought, it found
Dante “no novice in arms,” as a fragment of one of his lost letters
puts it, non fanciullo nell’ armi.
Popular Government.—Twenty years had now passed since the
victory of Colle di Valdelsa in 1269. Great changes had taken place
in the meanwhile. The estrangement between Charles of Anjou and
the Popes, Gregory X. and Nicholas III., the attempts of these latter
to weaken the king’s power by reconciling the Florentine Guelfs with
the Ghibelline exiles, and the dissensions among the Guelf
magnates themselves within the city, had led, in 1280, to the peace
arranged by Cardinal Latino Frangipani. A government was set up of
fourteen buonuomini, magnates and popolani, eight Guelfs and six
Ghibellines. But the city remained strenuously Guelf. Nicholas III.
had deprived King Charles of the offices of Senator of Rome and
Vicar Imperial and had allowed Rudolph of Hapsburg to establish a
vicar in Tuscany (Inf. xix. 99). In 1282 came the Vespers of Palermo
(Par. viii. 75). The Sicilians rose, massacred Charles’s adherents,
and received as their king Peter of Aragon, the husband of Manfred’s
daughter Constance (Purg. iii. 143). The hitherto united kingdom of
Sicily, which had been the heritage of the imperial Suabians from the
Norman heroes of the house of Hauteville, was thus divided between
a French and a Spanish line of kings (Par. xx. 63); the former at
Naples as kings of “Sicily and Jerusalem,” the latter in the island as
kings of “Trinacria.” Charles was henceforth too much occupied in
war with the Sicilians and Aragonese to interfere in the internal
affairs of Tuscany. In the June of this year a peaceful revolution took
place in Florence. Instead of the fourteen buonuomini, the
government was put into the hands of the Priors of the Arts or
Guilds, who, associated with the Captain, were henceforth
recognised as the chief magistrates of the Republic, composing the
Signoria, during the two months for which they were elected to hold
office. Their number, originally three, was raised to six; both grandi
and popolani were at first eligible, provided the former left their order
by enrolling themselves in one of the Guilds. A thorough organisation
of these Guilds, the Arti maggiori (which were mainly engaged in
wholesale commerce, exportation and importation, and the
mercantile relations of Florence with foreign countries) and Arti
minori (which carried on the retail traffic and internal trade of the
city), secured the administration in the hands of the trading classes.
Thus was established the democratic constitution of the state in
which Dante was afterwards to play his part. There was the central
administration of the six Priors, one for each sesto of the city, with
the council of a hundred “good men of the people without whose
deliberation no great thing or expenditure could be done” (Villani, vii.
16). The executive was composed of the Captain of the People and
the Podestà, both Italian nobles from other states, holding office for
six months, each with his two councils, a special and a general
council, the general council of the Podestà being the general council
of the Commune. The great Guilds had their own council (Consiglio
delle Capitudini delle Arti), and their consuls or rectors, while
specially associated with the two councils of the Captain, were
sometimes admitted to those of the Podestà; the nobles were
excluded from all these councils, excepting the special council of the
Podestà and the general council of the Commune. But, while the
central government of the Republic was thus entirely popular, the
magnates still retained control over the captains of the Guelf Society,
with their two councils, and exerted considerable influence upon the
Podestà, always one of their own order and an alien, in whose
councils they still sat. The Podestà, however, was now little more
than a chief justice; “the Priors, with the Captain of the People, had
to determine the great and weighty matters of the commonwealth,
and to summon and conduct councils and make regulations”
(Villani).
Battle of Campaldino.—A period of prosperity and victory
followed for Florence. The crushing defeat inflicted upon Pisa by
Genoa at the great naval battle of Meloria in 1284 was much to her
advantage; as was also, perhaps, the decline of the Angevin power
after the victory of Peter of Aragon’s fleet (Purg. xx. 79). Charles II.,
the “cripple of Jerusalem,” who succeeded his father as king of
Naples, was a less formidable suzerain. On June 11th, 1289, the
Tuscan Ghibellines were utterly defeated by the Florentines and their
allies at the battle of Campaldino. According to Leonardo Bruni—and
there seems no adequate reason for rejecting his testimony—Dante
was present, “fighting valiantly on horseback in the front rank,”
apparently among the 150 who volunteered or were chosen as
feditori, amongst whom was Vieri de’ Cerchi, who was later to
acquire a more dubious reputation in politics. Bruni states that in a
letter Dante draws a plan of the fight; and he quotes what seems to
be a fragment of another letter, written later, where Dante speaks of
“the battle of Campaldino, in which the Ghibelline party was almost
utterly destroyed and undone; where I found myself no novice in
arms, and where I had much fear, and in the end very great
gladness, by reason of the varying chances of that battle.”
Dante probably took part in the subsequent events of the
campaign; the wasting of the Aretine territory, the unsuccessful
attack upon Arezzo, the surrender of the Pisan fortress of Caprona.
“Thus once I saw the footmen, who marched out under treaty from
Caprona, fear at seeing themselves among so many enemies” (Inf.
xxi. 94-96). There appears to be a direct reference to his personal
experiences of the campaign in the opening of Inferno xxii.: “I have
seen ere now horsemen moving camp and beginning the assault,
and holding their muster, and at times retiring to escape; coursers
have I seen upon your land, O Aretines! and seen the march of
foragers, the shock of tournaments and race of jousts, now with
trumpets and now with bells, with drums and castle signals.” He has
sung of Campaldino in peculiarly pathetic strains in Canto V. of the
Purgatorio. On the lower slopes of the Mountain of Purgation
wanders the soul of Buonconte da Montefeltro, who led the Aretine
cavalry, and whose body was never found; mortally wounded and
forsaken by all, he had died gasping out the name of Mary, and his
Giovanna had forgotten even to pray for his soul.
Death of Beatrice.—In the following year, 1290, Beatrice died:
“The Lord of justice called this most gentle one to glory under the
banner of that blessed queen Mary virgin, whose name was in very
great reverence in the words of this blessed Beatrice” (V. N. xxix.).
Although Dante complicates the date by a reference to “the usage of
Arabia,” she appears to have died on the evening of June 8th;[1] and
the poet lifts up his voice with the prophet: “How doth the city sit
solitary that was full of people! How is she become as a widow, she
that was great among the nations!”

3. After the Death of Beatrice

Philosophic Refuge.—It is not easy to get a very definite idea of
Dante’s private life during the next ten years. With the completion of
the Vita Nuova, shortly after Beatrice’s death, an epoch closes in his
life, as in his work. From the Convivio it would appear that in his
sorrow Dante took refuge in the study of the De Consolatione
Philosophiae of Boëthius and Cicero’s De Amicitia; that he
frequented “the schools of the religious and the disputations of
philosophers,” where he became deeply enamoured of Philosophy.
Cino da Pistoia addressed to him an exceedingly beautiful canzone,
consoling him for the loss of Beatrice, bidding him take comfort in the
contemplation of her glory among the saints and angels of Paradise,
where she is praying to God for her lover’s peace. This poem is
quoted years later by Dante himself in the second book of the De
Vulgari Eloquentia (ii. 6), where he couples it with his own canzone
—

Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona,

“Love that in my mind discourses to me,” with which Casella
consoles the penitent spirits upon the shore of Purgatory: “The
amorous chant which was wont to quiet all my desires.”
Aberrations.—It would seem, however, that neither the memory
of Beatrice nor his philosophical devotion kept Dante from falling into
what he afterwards came to regard as a morally unworthy life. Tanto
giù cadde, “so low he fell” (Purg. xxx. 136). It is almost impossible to
hold, as Witte and Scartazzini would have us do, that the poignant
reproaches which Beatrice addresses to Dante, when he meets her
on Lethe’s banks, are connected mainly with intellectual errors, with
culpable neglect of Theology or speculative wanderings from
revealed truth, for there are but scanty, if any, traces of this in the
poet’s writings at any period of his career. The dark wood in which
he wandered, led by the world and the flesh, was that of sensual
passion and moral aberration for a while from the light of reason and
the virtue which is the “ordering of love.”
Friendship with Forese Donati.—Dante was evidently intimate
with the great Donati family, whose houses were in the same district
of the city. Corso di Simone Donati, a turbulent and ambitious spirit,
had done heroically at Campaldino, and was now intent upon having
his own way in the state. A close and familiar friendship united Dante
with Corso’s brother Forese, a sensual man of pleasure. Six sonnets
interchanged between these two friends, though now only in part
intelligible, do little credit to either. “If thou recall to mind,” Dante says
to Forese in the sixth terrace of Purgatory, “what thou wast with me
and I was with thee, the present memory will still be grievous” (Purg.
xxiii, 115). Forese died in July 1296; the author of the Ottimo
Commento, who wrote about 1334, and professes to have known the
divine poet, tells us that Dante induced his friend when on his death-
bed to repent and receive the last sacraments. Another sonnet of
Dante’s shows him in friendly correspondence with Brunetto (Betto)
Brunelleschi, a noble who later played a sinister part in the factions
and, like Corso Donati, met a violent death.
Loves, Marriage, and Debts.—Several very striking canzoni,
written for a lady whom Dante represents under various stony
images, and whose name may possibly have been Pietra, are
frequently assigned to this period of the poet’s life, but may perhaps
have been written in the early days of his exile. From other lyrics and
sonnets we dimly discern that several women may have crossed
Dante’s life now and later, of whom nothing can be known. Dante
married Gemma di Manetto Donati, a distant kinswoman of Corso
and Forese. In the Paradiso (xvi. 119) he refers with complacency to
his wife’s ancestor, Ubertino Donati, Manetto’s great-grandfather,
whose family pride scorned any alliance with the Adimari. According
to Boccaccio, the marriage took place some time after the death of
Beatrice, and it was certainly not later than 1297; but there is
documentary evidence that Gemma’s dowry was settled in 1277,
which points to an early betrothal. The union has generally been
supposed—on somewhat inadequate grounds—to have been an
unhappy one. Gemma bore Dante two sons, Jacopo and Pietro, and
either one or two daughters. Boccaccio’s statement, that she did not
share the poet’s exile, is usually accepted; she was living in Florence
after his death, and died there after 1332.[2] During the following
years, between 1297 and 1300, Dante was contracting debts
(Durante di Scolaio degli Abati and Manetto Donati being among his
sureties), which altogether amounted to a very large sum, but which
were cleared off from the poet’s estate after his death.

4. Dante’s Political Life

Election of Boniface VIII.—Upon the abdication of Celestine V.,
Cardinal Benedetto Gaetani was made Pope on Christmas Eve
1294, under the title of Boniface VIII. (Inf. xix. 52-57), an event
ominous for Florence and for Dante. Although canonised by the
Church, there is little doubt that St. Celestine is the first soul met by
Dante in the vestibule of Hell: Colui che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto
(Inf. iii. 58-60), “He who made from cowardice the great
renunciation.”
Giano della Bella.—Florence had just confirmed the democratic
character of her constitution by the reforms of Giano della Bella, a
noble who had identified himself with the popular cause (Par. xvi.
132). By the Ordinances of Justice in 1293 stringent provisions were
enacted against the nobles, who since Campaldino had grown
increasingly aggressive towards the people and factious against
each other. They were henceforth more rigorously excluded from the
Priorate and Council of the Hundred, as also from the councils of the
Captain and Capitudini; severe penalties were exacted for offences
against popolani; and, in order that these ordinances should be
carried out, a new magistrate, the Gonfaloniere di Guistizia or
Standard-bearer of Justice, was added to the Signoria to hold office
like the Priors for two months in rotation from the different districts of
the city. Thus was completed the secondo popolo, the second
democratic constitution of Florence. The third of these standard-
bearers was Dino Compagni, the chronicler. Giano della Bella was
meditating the continuation of his work by depriving the captains of
the Guelf Society of their power and resources, when a riot, in which
Corso Donati played a prominent part, caused his overthrow in
March 1295. By his fall the government remained in the hands of the
rich burghers, being practically an oligarchy of merchants and
bankers.
First Steps in Political Life.—In this same year 1295, the first
year of the pontificate of Boniface VIII., Dante entered political life.
Although of noble descent, the Alighieri do not seem to have ranked
as magnates. By a modification in the Ordinances of Justice in July
1295, citizens, without actually exercising an “art,” were admitted to
office provided they had matriculated and were not knights, if not
more than two persons in their family had held knighthood within the
last twenty years. Dante now (or perhaps a little later) enrolled his
name in the matricola of the Art of Physicians and Apothecaries,
which included painters and booksellers. For the six months from
November 1st, 1295, to April 30th, 1296, he was a member of the
Special Council of the Captain. On December 14th, as one of the
savi or specially summoned counsellors, he gave his opinion
(consuluit) in the Council of the Capitudini of the Arts on the
procedure to be adopted for the election of the new Signoria. On
January 23rd, 1296, the Pope inaugurated his aggressive policy
towards the Republic by addressing a bull to the Podestà, Captain,
Ancients, Priors and Rectors of the Arts, to the Council and the
Commune of Florence (purposely ignoring the new office of
Gonfaloniere). After denouncing in unmeasured terms the
wickedness of that “rock of scandal,” Giano della Bella, and extolling
the prudence of the Florentines in expelling him, the Pope, hearing
that certain persons are striving to obtain his recall, utterly forbids
anything of the kind without special licence from the Holy See, under
penalty of excommunication and interdict. The Pope further protests
his great and special affection for Florence, amongst the cities
devoted to God and the Apostolic See. “I love France so well,” says
Shakespeare’s King Henry, “that I will not part with a village of it; I
will have it all mine.”
Although Boccaccio, and others in his steps, have somewhat
exaggerated Dante’s influence in the politics of the Republic, there
can be no doubt that he soon came to take a decided attitude in
direct opposition to all lawlessness, and in resistance to any external
interference in Florentine matters, whether from Rome, Naples, or
France. The eldest son of Charles II., Carlo Martello, whom Dante
had “loved much and with good cause” (Par. viii. 55) during his visit
to Florence in the spring of 1294, had died in the following year; and
his father was harassing the Florentines for money to carry on the
Sicilian war. Dante, on leaving the Council of the Captain, had been
elected to the Council of the Hundred, in which, on June 5th, 1296,
he spoke in support of various proposals, including one on the
embellishment of the cathedral and baptistery by the removal of the
old hospital, and another undertaking not to receive men under ban
of the Commune of Pistoia in the city and contado of Florence. In the
previous May, in consequence of internal factions, Pistoia had given
Florence control of the city, with power to send a podestà and a
captain every six months. After this we do not hear of Dante again
until May 7th, 1300, when he acted as ambassador to San
Gemignano to announce that a parliament was to be held for the
purpose of electing a captain for the Guelf League of Tuscany, and
to invite the Commune to send representatives. But already the
storm cloud which loomed on the horizon had burst upon the city on
May Day 1300.
Blacks and Whites.—The new division of parties in Florence
became associated with the feud between two noble families, the
Donati and the Cerchi, headed respectively by two of the heroes of
Campaldino, Corso Donati and Vieri de’ Cerchi. The names Neri and
Bianchi, Black Guelfs and White Guelfs, by which the two factions
became known, seem to have been derived from a similar division in
Pistoia, the ringleaders of which, being banished to Florence,
embittered the quarrels already in progress in the ruling city. But the
roots of the trouble went deeper and were political, connected with
the discontent of both magnates and popolo minuto under the
hegemony of the Greater Arts. The Bianchi were opposed to a costly
policy of expansion; the Neri, who had wider international and
mercantile connections, looked beyond the affairs of the Commune,
and favoured intimate relations with the Angevin sovereigns of
Naples and the Pope. To the Bianchi adhered those nobles who had
matriculated in the Arts, the more moderate spirits among the
burghers, the remains of the party of Giano della Bella who
supported the Ordinances of Justice in a modified form. While the
Bianchi drew closer to the constitutional government, the strength of
the Neri lay in the councils of the Guelf Society and the influence of
the aristocratic bankers. Guido Cavalcanti (who, even after the
modification of the Ordinances, would have been excluded from
office) was allied with the Cerchi, but probably less influenced by
political considerations than by his personal hostility towards Messer
Corso, who was in high favour with the Pope. Florence was now
indeed “disposed for woeful ruin” (Purg. xxiv. 81), but there had been
a “long contention” (Inf. vi. 64) before the parties came to bloodshed.
The Jubilee.—On February 22nd, 1300, Pope Boniface issued
the bull proclaiming the first papal jubilee. It began with the previous
Christmas Day and lasted through the year 1300. Amongst the
throngs of pilgrims from all parts of the world to Rome were Giovanni
Villani and, probably, Dante (Inf. xviii. 29). This visit to Rome inspired
Villani to undertake his great chronicle; and it is the epoch to which
Dante assigns the vision which is the subject of the Divina
Commedia (Purg. ii. 98). The Pope, however, had his eyes on
Florence, and had apparently resolved to make Tuscany a part of
the Papal States. Possibly he had already opened negotiations with
the Neri through his agents and bankers, the Spini. A plot against the
state on the part of three Florentines in the service of the Pope was
discovered to the Signoria, and sentence passed against the
offenders on April 18th.[3] Boniface wrote to the Bishop of Florence,
on April 24th, 1300, demanding from the Commune that the
sentences should be annulled and the accusers sent to him. The
Priors having refused compliance and denied his jurisdiction in the
matter, the Pope issued a second bull, declaring that he had no
intention of derogating from the jurisdiction or liberty of Florence,
which he intended to increase; but asserting the absolute supremacy
of the Roman Pontiff both in spiritual and temporal things over all
peoples and kingdoms, and demanding again, with threats of
vengeance spiritual and temporal, that the sentences against his
adherents should be annulled, that the three accusers with six of the
most violent against his authority should appear before him, and that
the officers of the Republic should send representatives to answer
for their conduct. This was on May 15th, but, two days earlier, the
Pope had written to the Duke of Saxony, and sent the Bishop of
Ancona to Germany, to demand from Albert of Austria the
renunciation absolutely to the Holy See of all rights claimed by the
Emperors in Tuscany.
Dante’s Priorate.—But in the meantime bloodshed had taken
place in Florence. On May 1st the two factions came to blows in the
Piazza di Santa Trinita; and on May 4th full powers had been given
to the Priors to defend the liberty of the Commune and People of
Florence against dangers from within and without (which had
evidently irritated the Pope). The whole city was now divided;
magnates and burghers alike became bitter partisans of one or other
faction. The Pope, who had previously made a vain attempt to
reconcile Vieri de’ Cerchi with the Donati, sent the Franciscan
Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta as legate and peacemaker to
Florence, in the interests of the captains of the Guelf Society and the
Neri, who accused the Signoria of Ghibelline tendencies. The
Cardinal arrived in June. From June 15th to August 14th Dante was
one of the six Priors by election. “All my misfortunes,” he says in the
letter quoted by Leonardo Bruni, “had their cause and origin in my ill-
omened election to the Priorate; of which Priorate, though by
prudence I was not worthy, still by faith and age I was not unworthy.”
We know too little of the facts to be able to comment upon this
cryptic utterance. On the first day of office (June 15th), the sentence
passed in the previous April against the three Florentines in the
papal service was formally consigned to Dante and his colleagues—
Lapo Gianni (probably the same person as his poet friend of that
name) acting as notary. There were disturbances in the city. On St.
John’s Eve an assault was made upon the Consuls of the Arts by
certain magnates of the Neri, and their opponents threatened to take
up arms. The Priors, perhaps on Dante’s motion, exiled (or, more
accurately, put under bounds outside the territory of the Republic)
some prominent members of both factions, including Corso Donati
and Guido Cavalcanti. The Neri attempted to resist, expecting aid
from the Cardinal and from Lucca; the Bianchi obeyed. Negotiations
continued between the Signoria and the Cardinal, Dante and his
colleagues resisting the papal demands without coming to a formal
rupture.
The Bianchi in Power.—The succeeding Signoria was less
prudent. The banished Bianchi were allowed to return just after
Dante had left office (as he himself states in a lost letter seen by
Leonardo Bruni), on the plea of the illness of Guido Cavalcanti, who
had contracted malaria at Sarzana, and died at Florence in the last
days of August. At the end of September a complete rupture ensued
with Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta, who broke off negotiations and
retired to Bologna, leaving the city under an interdict. Corso Donati
had broken bounds and gone to the Pope, who, towards the close of
1300, nominated Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the Fair, captain-
general of the papal states, and summoned him to Italy to aid
Charles of Naples against Frederick of Aragon in Sicily and reduce
the “rebels” of Tuscany to submission.
We meet the name of Dante on several occasions among the
consulte of the Florentine Republic during 1301. It is probable that
he was one of the savi called to council on March 15th, and that he
opposed the granting of a subsidy in money which the King of
Naples had demanded for the Sicilian war and which was made by
the Council of the Hundred.[4] On April 14th he was among the savi
in the Council of the Capitudini for the election of the new Signoria,
of which Palmieri Altoviti was the leading spirit. On April 28th Dante
was appointed officialis et superestans, in connection with the works
in the street of San Procolo, possibly with the object of more readily
bringing up troops from the country. During the priorate of Palmieri
Altoviti (April 15th to June 14th), a conspiracy was discovered,
hatched at a meeting of the Neri in the church of S. Trinita, to
overthrow the government and invite the Pope to send Charles of
Valois to Florence. In consequence a number of Neri were banished
and their possessions confiscated, a fresh sentence being passed
against Corso Donati. The Bianchi were all potent in Florence; and,
in May 1301, they procured the expulsion of the Neri from Pistoia
(ruthlessly carried out by the Florentine captain, Andrea Gherardini),
which was the beginning of the end (Inf. xxiv. 143): “Pistoia first is
thinned of Neri; then Florence renovates folk and rule.”
The Coming of Charles of Valois.—The government still
shrank from directly opposing the Pope, who, by letter from Cardinal
Matteo d’Acquasparta, demanded the continuation of the service of a
hundred horsemen. On June 19th, 1301, in a united meeting of the
Councils of the Hundred, of the Captain, and of the Capitudini, and
again in the Council of the Hundred apart, Dante spoke against
compliance, urging “quod de servitio faciendo domini Papae nihil
fiat”—with the result that the matter was postponed. In the united
Councils of the Hundred, the Captain, the Podestà, and the
Capitudini, on September 13th, he pleaded for the preservation of
the Ordinances of Justice (a sign that the State was regarded as in
peril). On this occasion all the twenty-one arts were represented,
which we may connect with Leonardo Bruni’s statement that Dante
had advised the Priors to strengthen themselves with the support of
the “moltitudine del popolo.” On September 20th, in the Council of
the Captain, he supported a request of the ambassadors of the
Commune of Bologna (then allied with the Bianchi) for free passage
for their importation of grain. On September 28th, again in the
Council of the Captain, he defended a certain Neri di Gherardino
Diedati (whose father was destined to share the poet’s fate) from an
injust charge. This is the last recorded time that Dantes Alagherii
consuluit in Florence. Already Charles of Valois was on his way,
preparing to “joust with the lance of Judas” (Purg. xx. 70-78). On
November 1st, after giving solemn pledges to the Signoria (Dino
Compagni being one of the Priors), Charles with 1200 horsemen
entered Florence without opposition.
Leonardo Bruni asserts that Dante was absent at Rome on an
embassy to the Pope when the latter’s “peacemaker” entered
Florence. It would appear that the Florentine government had
requested the allied Commune of Bologna to send an embassy to
Boniface, simultaneously with an embassy from Siena with which
were associated three ambassadors from Florence: Maso di
Ruggierino Minerbetti, Corazza da Signa, and Dante Alighieri. Their
purpose was to make their own terms with the Pontiff in order to
avert the intervention of Charles. The mission set out at the
beginning of October; but one of the Bolognese ambassadors,
Ubaldino Malavolti, having business of his own with the Florentine
government, delayed the others so long that they did not arrive in
time.[5] Boccaccio asserts that, when the Bianchi proposed to send
Dante on such an embassy, he answered somewhat arrogantly: “If I
go, who stays? and if I stay, who goes?” According to Dino
Compagni, Boniface sent two of the Florentines—Maso Minerbetti
and Corazza da Signa—back to Florence to demand submission to
his will, but detained Dante at his court. The fact of Dante taking part
in such an embassy is confirmed by the author of the Ottimo
Commento, as also by an anonymous commentator on the canzone
of the Tre donne, and, though seriously questioned by many Dante
scholars, it is now generally accepted as historical. The other two
ambassadors returned almost simultaneously with the arrival of the
French prince. Yielding to necessity and trusting to his solemn oath,
the Signoria, in a parliament held in S. Maria Novella, gave Charles
authority to pacify the city; which he set about doing by restoring the
Neri to power. Corso Donati with his allies entered Florence in arms,
to plunder and massacre at their pleasure, the last Signoria of the
Bianchi being compelled to resign on November 7th (cf. Purg. vi.
143, 144). A second effort by the Cardinal Matteo from the Pope to
reconcile the two factions was resisted by Charles and the Neri; and
the work of proscription began. The new Podestà, Cante de’ Gabrielli
da Gubbio, passed sentence after sentence against the ruined
Bianchi. Finally, at the beginning of April, their chiefs were betrayed
into a real or pretended conspiracy against Charles, and driven out
with their followers and adherents, both nobles and burghers, six
hundred in number; their houses were destroyed, and their goods
confiscated, themselves sentenced as rebels. On April 4th, 1302,
Charles left Florence, covered with disgrace and full of plunder,
leaving the government entirely in the hands of the Neri. “Having
cast forth the greatest part of the flowers from thy bosom, O
Florence,” writes Dante in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, “the second
Totila went fruitlessly to Sicily” (V. E. ii. 6).
Sentences against Dante.—The first sentence against Dante is
dated January 27th, 1302, and includes four other names.
Gherardino Diedati, formerly Prior, is accused of taking bribes for the
release of a prisoner, and has not appeared when summoned.
Palmieri Altoviti (who had taken the lead in putting down the
conspiracy hatched in Santa Trinita), Dante Alighieri, Lippo Becchi
(one of the denouncers of Boniface’s agents in 1300), and
Orlanduccio Orlandi are accused of “barratry,” fraud and corrupt
practices, unlawful gains and extortions and the like, in office and out
of office; of having corruptly and fraudulently used the money and
resources of the Commune against the Supreme Pontiff, and to
resist the coming of Messer Carlo, or against the pacific state of
Florence and the Guelf Party; of having caused the expulsion of the
Neri from Pistoia, and severed that city from Florence and the
Church. Since they have contumaciously absented themselves,
when summoned to appear before the Podestà’s court, they are held
to have confessed their guilt, and sentenced to pay a heavy fine and
restore what they have extorted. If not paid in three days, all their
goods shall be confiscated; even if they pay, they are exiled for two
years and perpetually excluded as falsifiers and barrators, tamquam
falsarii et barattarii, from holding any office or benefice under the
Commune of Florence. On March 10th, a further sentence
condemns these five with ten others to be burned to death, if any of
them at any time shall come into the power of the Commune. In this
latter sentence there is no mention of any political offence, but only
of malversation and contumacy. None of Dante’s six colleagues in
the Signoria are included in either sentence; but in the second
appear the names of Lapo Salterelli, who had headed the opposition
to Boniface in the spring of 1300, but whom the poet judges sternly
(cf. Par. xv. 128), and Andrea Gherardini, who had been Florentine
captain at Pistoia.
There can be little doubt that, in spite of the wording of these two
sentences, Dante’s real offence was his opposition to the policy of
Pope Boniface. In the De Volgari Eloquentia (i. 6) he declares that
he is suffering exile unjustly because of his love for Florence. All his
early biographers bear testimony to his absolute innocence of the
charge of malversation and barratry; it has been left to modern
commentators to question it. In the letter to a Florentine friend, Dante
speaks of his innocence manifest to all, innocentia manifesta
quibuslibet, as though in direct answer to the fama publica referente
of the Podestà’s sentence. His likening himself to Hippolytus is a no
less emphatic protestation of innocence: “As Hippolytus departed
from Athens, by reason of his pitiless and treacherous stepmother,
so from Florence needs must thou depart. This is willed, this is
already being sought, and soon will it be done for him who thinks it,
there where Christ is put to sale each day” (Par. xvii. 46-51). “I hold
my exile as an honour”:

L’essilio che m’è dato, on or mi tegno,

he says in his canzone of the Tre donne. Had Dante completed the
Convivio, he would probably have furnished us with a complete
apologia in the fourteenth treatise, where he intended to comment
upon this canzone and discuss Justice. “Justice,” he says in Conv. i.
12, “is so lovable that, as the philosopher says in the fifth of the
Ethics, even her enemies love her, such as thieves and robbers; and
therefore we see that her contrary, which is injustice, is especially
hated (as is treachery, ingratitude, falseness, theft, rapine, deceit,
and their like). The which are such inhuman sins that, to defend
himself from the infamy of these, it is conceded by long usance that
a man may speak of himself, and may declare himself to be faithful
and loyal. Of this virtue I shall speak more fully in the fourteenth
treatise.”

5. First Period of Exile

“Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the most beautiful and
most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me forth from her
sweet bosom (in which I was born and nourished up to the summit of
my life, and in which, with her goodwill, I desire with all my heart to
rest my wearied mind and to end the time given me), I have gone
through almost all the parts to which this language extends, a
pilgrim, almost a beggar, showing against my will the wound of
fortune, which is wont unjustly to be ofttimes reputed to the
wounded.”
In these words (Conv. i. 3), Dante sums up the earlier portion of
his exile. There are few lines of poetry more noble in pathos, more
dignified in reticence, than those which he has put into the mouth of
Cacciaguida (Par. xvii. 55-60): “Thou shalt leave everything beloved
most dearly, and this is that arrow which the bow of exile first shoots.
Thou shalt test how savours of salt another’s bread, and how hard
the ascending and descending by another’s stairs.”
Early Days of Exile.—The terms of the first sentence against
Dante seem to imply that, if he had returned to Florence, he fled
from the city before January 27th, 1302. We do not know where he
went. Boccaccio, apparently from a misunderstanding of Par. xvii.
70, says Verona; if we suppose it to have been Siena, this would
explain Leonardo Bruni’s account of Dante’s first hearing particulars
of his ruin at the latter city. The sentence against Messer Vieri de’
Cerchi, with the other leaders, is dated April 5th in the terrible Libro
del Chiodo, the black book of the Guelf Party. Arezzo, Forlì, Siena,
Bologna, were the chief resorts of the exiled Bianchi; in Bologna they
seem for some time to have been especially welcome. Dante first
joined them in a meeting held at Gargonza, where they are said by
Bruni to have made the poet one of their twelve councillors, and to
have fixed their headquarters at Arezzo. For a short time Dante
made common cause with them, but found their society extremely
uncongenial (Par. xvii. 61-66). On June 8th, 1302, there is
documentary evidence of his presence with some others in the choir
of San Godenzo at the foot of the Apennines, where the Bianchi
allied with the Ghibelline Ubaldini to make war upon Florence. The
fact of this meeting having been held in Florentine territory and
followed by several cavalry raids induced a fresh sentence in July
from the new Podestà, Gherardino da Gambara of Brescia, in which,
however, Dante is not mentioned.
Failure of the Bianchi.—A heavy blow was inflicted upon the
exiles by the treachery of Carlino di Pazzi (Inf. xxxii. 69), who
surrendered the castle of Piantravigne in Valdarno to the Neri, when
many Bianchi were slain or taken. The cruelty of the Romagnole,
Count Fulcieri da Calboli, the next Podestà of Florence from January
to September 1303, towards such of the unfortunate Bianchi as fell
into his hands has received its meed of infamy in Purg. xiv. 58-66. It
is perhaps noteworthy (as bearing upon the date of Dante’s
separation from his fellow-exiles) that the poet’s name does not
appear among the Bianchi who, under the leadership of the
Ghibelline captain, Scarpetta degli Ordelaffi of Forlì, signed an
agreement with their allies in Bologna on June 18th in this year; but
this may merely imply that he did not go to Bologna. He was possibly
associated with Scarpetta at Forlì about this time. These renewed
attempts to recover the state by force of arms resulted only in the
disastrous defeat of Pulicciano in Mugello.
Death of Boniface VIII.—In this same year Sciarra Colonna and
William of Nogaret, in the name of Philip the Fair, seized Boniface
VIII. at Anagni, and treated the old Pontiff with such barbarity that he
died in a few days, October 11th, 1303. The seizure had been
arranged by the infamous Musciatto Franzesi, who had been
instrumental in the bringing of Charles of Valois to Florence. “I see
the golden lilies enter Alagna,” cries Hugh Capet in the Purgatorio;
“and in His vicar Christ made captive. I see Him mocked a second
time. I see renewed the vinegar and gall, and Him slain between
thieves that live” (Purg. xx. 86-90).
Benedict XI.—In succession to Boniface, Nicholas of Treviso, the
master-general of the Dominicans, a man of humble birth and of
saintly life, was made Pope on October 22nd, 1303, as Benedict XI.
He at once devoted himself to healing the wounds of Italy, and sent
to Florence as peacemaker the Dominican Cardinal, Niccolò da
Prato, who was of Ghibelline origin. The peacemaker arrived in
March 1304, and was received with great honour. Representatives of
the Bianchi and Ghibellines came to the city at his invitation; and,
when May opened, there was an attempt to revive the traditional
festivities which had ended on that fatal May Day of 1300. But a
terrible disaster on the Ponte alla Carraia cast an ominous gloom
over the city, and the Neri treacherously forced the Cardinal to leave.
Hardly had he gone when, on June 10th, fighting broke out in the
streets, and a fire, purposely started by the Neri, devastated
Florence. On July 7th Pope Benedict died, perhaps poisoned, at
Perugia; and, seeing this last hope taken from them, the
irreconcilable portion of the Bianchi, led by Baschiera della Tosa,
aided by the Ghibellines of Tuscany under Tolosato degli Uberti, with
allies from Bologna and Arezzo, made a valiant attempt to surprise
Florence on July 20th from Lastra. Baschiera, with about a thousand
horsemen, captured a part of the suburbs, and drew up his force
near San Marco, “with white standards displayed, and garlands of
olives, with drawn swords, crying peace” (Compagni). Through his
impetuosity and not awaiting the coming of Tolosato, this enterprise
ended in utter disaster, and with its failure the last hopes of the
Bianchi were dashed to the ground.
Separation from the Bianchi and Wanderings in Exile.—After
the defeat of Lastra, Bruni represents Dante as going from Arezzo to
Verona, utterly humbled. We learn from the Paradiso (xvii. 61-69)
that, estranged from his fellow-exiles who had turned violently
against him, he had been compelled to form a party to himself. It is
held by some scholars that he had broken away from them in the
previous year, and that, towards the end of 1303, he had found his
first refuge at Verona in “the courtesy of the great Lombard,”
Bartolommeo della Scala, at whose court he now first saw his young
brother, afterwards famous as Can Grande, and already in boyhood
showing sparks of future greatness (ibid. 70-78). Others would
identify il gran Lombardo with Bartolommeo’s brother and successor,
Albuino della Scala, who ruled in Verona from March 1304 until
October 1311, and associated Can Grande with him as the
commander of his troops. There is no certain documentary evidence
of Dante’s movements between June 1302 and October 1306. It is
not improbable that, in 1304 or 1305, he stayed some time at
Bologna. The first book of the De Vulgari Eloquentia seems in many
respects to bear witness to this stay at Bologna, where the exiles
were still welcome; a certain kindliness towards the Bolognese, very
different from his treatment of them later in the Divina Commedia, is
apparent, together with a peculiar acquaintance with their dialect.
But on March 1st, 1306, the Bolognese made a pact with the Neri,
after which they expelled the Florentine exiles, ordering that no
Bianchi or Ghibellines should be found in Bolognese territory on pain
of death. Dante perhaps went to Padua from Bologna, and, though
the supposed documentary proof of his residence in Padua on
August 27th, 1306, cannot be accepted without reserve, it is
tempting to accept the statement of Benvenuto da Imola that the
poet was entertained by Giotto when the painter was engaged upon
the frescoes of the Madonna dell’ Arena. In October, Dante was in
Lunigiana, a guest of the Malaspina, that honoured race adorned
with the glory of purse and sword (Purg. viii. 121-139). Here,
according to Boccaccio, he recovered from Florence some
manuscript which he had left behind him in his flight; possibly what
he afterwards rewrote as the first seven cantos of the Inferno. On
October 6th he acted as ambassador and nuncio of the Marquis
Franceschino Malaspina in establishing peace between his house
and the Bishop of Luni. This is the last certain trace of Dante’s feet in
Italy for nearly five years. There is a strangely beautiful canzone of
his which may have been written at this time. Love has seized upon
the poet in the midst of the Alps (i.e. Apennines): “In the valley of the
river by whose side thou hast ever power upon me”; “Thou goest, my
mountain song; perchance shalt see Florence, my city, that bars me
out of herself, void of love and nude of pity; if thou dost enter in, go
saying: Now my maker can no more make war upon you; there,
whence I come, such a chain binds him that, even if your cruelty
relax, he has no liberty to return hither.”[6]
 Dante had probably, as Bruni tells us, been abstaining from any
hostile action towards Florence, and hoping to be recalled by the
government spontaneously. There are traces of this state of mind in
the Convivio (i. 3). It would be about this time that he wrote in vain
the letter mentioned by Bruni, but now lost, Popule mee quid feci tibi.
Clement V.—Death of Corso Donati.—In the meantime
Clement V., a Gascon, and formerly Archbishop of Bordeaux, had
been elected Pope. “From westward there shall come a lawless
shepherd of uglier deeds” than even Boniface VIII., writes Dante in
Inferno xix. He translated the Papal Court from Rome to Avignon,
and thus in 1305 initiated the Babylonian captivity of the Popes,
which lasted for more than seventy years, “to the great damage of all
Christendom, but especially of Rome” (Platina). Scandalous as was
his subservience to the French king, and utterly unworthy of the
Papacy as he showed himself, it must be admitted that Clement
made serious efforts to relieve the persecuted Bianchi and
Ghibellines—efforts which were cut short by the surrender of Pistoia
in 1306 and the incompetence of his legate, the Cardinal Napoleone
Orsini. In October 1308, Corso Donati came to the violent end
mentioned as a prophecy in Purg. xxiv.; suspected, with good
reason, of aiming at the lordship of Florence with the aid of the
Ghibelline captain, Uguccione della Faggiuola, whose daughter he
had married, he was denounced as a traitor and killed in his flight
from the city.
Dante Possibly at Paris.—Villani tells us that Dante, after exile,
went to the Studio at Bologna, and then to Paris and to many parts
of the world. The visit to Paris is also affirmed by Boccaccio, and it is
not impossible that Dante went thither, between 1307 and 1309, by
way of the Riviera and Provence. A highly improbable legend of his
presence at Oxford is based upon an ambiguous line in a poetical
epistle from Boccaccio to Petrarch and the later testimony of
Giovanni da Serravalle at the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Dante’s stay in Paris has been seriously questioned, and still
remains uncertain. The University of Paris was then the first in the
world in theology and scholastic philosophy. Boccaccio tells us that
the disputations which Dante sustained there were regarded as most