Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780-1833. By Peter S. Field. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. xvi, 272 pp. $39.95, isbn 1-55849-143-0.)

During the first third of the nineteenth century, the Congregational establishment of Massachusetts, or Standing Order, broke apart. Unitarians and Trinitarians hived off into separate denominational clusters, beginning with the fight over Henry Ware's election to the Hollis professorship of divinity at Harvard in 1805. Over the next two decades, the two sides ceased their customary pulpit exchanges, set up rival periodicals and theological seminaries, and engaged in an acrimonious pamphlet war. At the local level, congregations often split into competing factions as well, pitting the church membership against the taxpaying parishioners. When the Massachusetts legislature proposed finally to disestablish the Congregational churches in 1833, the establishment had few supporters left, and voters ratified the eleventh amendment to the state constitution by a wide margin. A narrative of this train of events forms the backbone of Peter S. Field's The Crisis of the Standing Order. For those acquainted with the work of such scholars as Daniel Walker Howe, William G. McLoughlin, Lewis P. Simpson, and especially Conrad Wright, this story is familiar. . . .

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