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The Crisis of the Standing Order
Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833
A study of the clash of cultural elites in the early American republic
This book examines the demise of one Massachusetts intellectual elite, the Congregational Standing Order, and the rise of another, the Boston Brahmins, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peter S. Field traces this division within the culturally dominant class to the emergence of a new group of wealthy urban merchants, who funded Brahmin efforts to create America's first secular high culture. With the founding of the Monthly Anthology, the establishment of the exclusive Boston Athenaeum, and the takeover of Harvard College, the merchant-backed Brahmins constructed a competing locus of cultural authority against the claims of the orthodox ministry.
A social history of intellectuals, Field's study focuses on the issues of power, prestige, and self-interest that fueled the struggle between the Brahmins and their orthodox rivals. It shows how this internal strife not only led to the dismantling of the last established church in the United States, but also laid the groundwork for the American Renaissance of the 1830s and 1840s. According to Field, the generation responsible for that remarkable flowering of New England literary culture—the generation of Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville—can only be understood in relation to its Brahmin parents and ministers.
"Significant, well-written, meticulous in its research, and witty, Field's book makes a major contribution to our understanding of religion in Massachusetts during the first third of the nineteenth century and to American intellectual history in general."
Mary Kupiec Cayton, Miami University
Peter S. Field is assistant professor of history at Tennessee Technological University.
American History / Intellectual History
280 pp.
LC 98-10818
$39.95s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-143-0
1998
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