Thy Neighbor's Wife (37 page)

Among Noyes’s first converts had been members of his own family—a younger brother, two of his sisters and their husbands. While Noyes’s mother and the rest of his family and relatives openly disapproved of Perfectionism, no attempt was made to deny Noyes, or his subservient siblings, the $20,000 in cash and various property that was left in a will after their father’s recent death. These assets, along with the $16,000 patrimony of Noyes’s wife and the contributions of the other followers, permitted the community members to concentrate on their Perfectionist indoctrination and to recruit new members.

The group did, however, derive some income from working in a general store that Noyes had acquired; and on the two Noyes farms that were inherited, the members grew much of what was eaten at the communal table. All the members and their children lived either in Noyes’s home or the homes of his two sisters, and on Sundays everyone gathered to hear Noyes preach in a small chapel that they had built. At Noyes’s insistence, each adult was required to devote three hours each day to religious meditation and reading the Bible; and if an individual persistently demonstrated signs of selfishness or possessiveness, or otherwise strayed from the communal spirit, he was summoned by Noyes to appear before the group and submit to stringent criticism. The accused member was expected to sit silently and humbly in the center of the room while the others took turns articulating their disapproval, and at times this experience was so excruciating that the individual abandoned the group in horror or fury.

But there was no sense of disharmony when George Cragin made an introductory visit to the Noyes homestead; and during the ensuing years little would occur to alter Cragin’s rapturous first impressions of that day. “The little circle of believers I found there appeared so different from any I had ever met before,” Cragin noted in his journal. “All were so kind, so quiet, so thoughtful and studious and yet, in spirit, so free…. Providence had now compensated me with a heaven upon earth.”

The birth in 1841 of the Noyeses’ first child, a son named Theodore, added to the joy and optimism of the group, since the event had followed two stillborn babies produced by Mrs. Noyes during their first two years of marriage. But when two more Noyes children were born dead in 1843 and 1844, John Humphrey Noyes determined that he could never again subject his wife to the physical risk and mental anguish of “propagative love,” and from then on he practiced what he called “male continence.” Soon he established this as a sexual policy within the settlement, not only because it reduced the dangers of childbirth and helped to control the communal population but also because it allowed Noyes to pursue his plan to further unite his followers in the bond of complex marriage.

With the approval of his wife, Noyes in the spring of 1846 decided to approach Mary and George Cragin and invite them to become their first partners. Noyes had for years been attracted to Mrs. Cragin, and his wife had expressed an affinity and an affection for Mrs. Cragin’s courtly husband; and after Noyes’s proposal had been privately tendered, the Cragins accepted without hesitation. In her diary before the appointed evening, Mary Cragin wrote of Noyes: “In view of his goodness to me and of his desire that I should let him fill me with himself, I yield and offer myself, to be penetrated by his spirit, and desire that love and gratitude may inspire my heart so that I shall sympathize with his pleasure in the thing, before my personal pleasure begins; knowing that it will increase my capability for happiness.”

The happy consummation of the comarital relationship between the Noyeses and the Cragins was followed in subsequent
weeks by other couples exchanging marital partners; and while the members were also tree to abstain, the practice of sexual sharing soon prevailed among Noyes’s Perfectionists. But in 1847, after rumors of bacchanalian revelry had been circulated by the citizens of Putney throughout the state of Vermont, there was a warrant for Noyes’s arrest.

Surrendering without contrition to the legal authorities, Noyes was booked on charges of adultery and, after posting a $2,000 bond, was released awaiting trial. But soon his attorney informed him that a group of moral vigilantes in Putney was planning to capture him and punish him in their own fashion; and being aware of what similar citizens in Illinois had done to the imprisoned Mormon leader, Joseph Smith, Noyes decided to jump bail and hide out temporarily in New York City.

This he did in November 1847, remaining in seclusion for several weeks until the furor in Putney had subsided. Then in early 1848 he informed his followers by mail that he had acquired a new site for their settlement—160 acres of good meadowland in upstate New York, in a quiet valley on the Oneida Creek halfway between the cities of Syracuse and Utica. On the land there were two small farmhouses, a shed, a sawmill, and also two log cabins that until recent years had been occupied by a dispersed band of Indians. While the accommodations were inadequate for the nineteen adults and their children in the Putney settlement, Noyes had fortunately befriended and converted a young architect from Syracuse named Erastus Hapgood Hamilton, who agreed to design a large chateau and, with the aid of Perfectionist labor, to supervise its construction.

The enthusiastic response to this proposal in Putney was promptly followed by the arrival in Oneida of the new settlers; and from the early spring of 1848 through the summer and fall, the men, women, and teenaged children worked indefatigably at clearing the land, sawing the forest timber, carting rock for the foundation and cellar, erecting and stabilizing the support beams and walls, the floors and ceilings, and finally painting the three-
story structure that comprised sixty rooms and was topped by a cupola.

Except for the architect and another new convert who was a skilled stonemason, all the construction work was done by people of very limited experience; and yet the large house was ready for occupancy during the winter of 1849, and it sturdily survived for two decades until it was later replaced by a grander hundred-room brick mansion.

After completing the main residence, the Oneida communitarians built a two-story children’s house, and also a school that was under the supervision of Mrs. Cragin, a former teacher. They then built smaller structures that sheltered Oneida’s many activities—the machine shop and blacksmith’s shed, buildings for clothing and shoe repair, the stables and poultry pens, a greenhouse, storage bins, and even beehives. There was also erected a building used entirely for the washing of the community members’ clothes—a task performed by men as well as women, and determined each week by the drawing of lots.

While farming was initially Oneida’s principal business, Noyes suspected that his settlement could never flourish if dependent on agriculture. This had been the problem of the Fourieristic communes like Brook Farm—their founders had placed too much faith in the land—and Noyes, who sensed the decline of the farmer and the rise of the industrial state, was soon to convert Oneida primarily into a manufacturing community.

By the early 1850s, as Oneida’s auspicious atmosphere and beautifully landscaped estate drew to it nearly one hundred new members who were anxious to contribute their talent and time to the cause of Perfectionism, Noyes was overseeing a variety of manufacturing ventures. Brooms were being made from corn husks and sold in nearby towns and villages, as well as in Syracuse and Utica. Rustic outdoor chairs fashioned from cedar were also distributed for sale, as were palm-leaf hats, carpet traveling bags, spokes for wagon wheels, and steel animal traps. The trap business, which had been introduced to the community by a rug
ged convert who had worked in the area as a hunter and blacksmith prior to meeting Noyes in 1848, would become Oneida’s most lucrative enterprise in the mid-1850s as the fur market expanded nationally, creating a demand for Oneida traps from wholesalers in New York City and Chicago.

Converts not only shared their skills but also were expected to yield their worldly possessions at the time they joined the community, arid it was in this way that the Oneidans acquired in 1850, from an affluent convert, a large sailing vessel—which led certain Oneida optimists, with Noyes’s blessing, into the business of freighting limestone along the Hudson River. But during a voyage on a July afternoon in 1851 near Kingston, New York, while the ship was being guided by an Oneida helmsman who had more trust in God than a knowledge of seamanship, a squall suddenly arose and caused the rock-laden boat to capsize. Among the passengers who had come along for the trip and did not survive it was Mary Cragin.

The event brought grief and despair to the entire community, and most New York City newspapers that reported the accident were sympathetic in their coverage; but a few upstate journals and religious publications that had long been critical of Noyes seized the opportunity to suggest that the drownings might be a sign of heavenly punishment against the licentious practices of the community. These articles, and similar criticisms from the pulpit and a few civic leaders, encouraged a small but vocal group of vigilantes who resided in towns near the Oneida settlement to approach the county magistrate and register a complaint that Noyes was fomenting “Mormonism,” “Mahometanism,” and “Heathenism.”

But Noyes, who had much more invested in Oneida than he had earlier in Putney and had no intention of leaving the area, vigorously defended his beliefs in a series of public statements, and in his community newspaper he wrote:

Because the Oneida community also had many influential friends among the citizens of the nearby towns, individuals with whom it had established good business relations—and because Noyes made a concession to the magistrate to abolish complex marriage—the charges against himself and his followers were never pressed.

Soon, however, Noyes decided that the imperfect men who sat in judgment of society had no authority over God’s paradise at Oneida, and thus the free-love system was reinstituted; but at the same time Noyes warned his followers that their only safeguard against a “barbarian” invasion of their land was in the greater worship of the Lord, and he urged that they spend more time with their Bibles and deepen their commitment to Perfectionism. “We shall escape the rod only by ceasing to need it,” he wrote, “and we shall invite prosperity only by being able to bear it without glorying.”

While Noyes had at first been gratified by Oneida’s progress in business, he was now concerned that his Bible communists might be developing capitalistic tendencies, a pride in profit making, a propensity for possessiveness and individual achievement. “The Lord alone shall be exalted,” Noyes warned; and during the
1850s and early 1860s, as the community’s earnings and donations continued to increase, Noyes directed his factory foremen to reduce the work schedule to a six-hour day, which was half the time demanded in most outside industries, and to reemphasize the communal goals of spiritual growth and self-improvement. To this end no moment went undirected: Even while the communists gathered in groups to stitch handbags or to braid palm-leaf hats, a member sat among them reading aloud from an inspirational volume or a book of historical importance or literary merit—a novel by Dickens, a biography of Jefferson. All adults were encouraged to attend the education courses held each evening in the mansion, conducted by converts who had once been teachers; and members with talent in music, or art, or playing chess, were expected to offer instruction to anyone interested in learning.

The principle of sharing extended to the nursery and school room, where children were told to never say “me” or “mine” but always “we” and “ours.” On the farm, in the factories, and in the craft shops, each senior worker trained a young apprentice; and each task, no matter how menial, was to be regarded not as a burden, but as an offering. Music accompanied many of these efforts: A clarinetist tooting melodiously on the front lawn was a signal to all who had free time that volunteers were needed to work on a special project—it might be a berry-picking bee, or a corn-cutting bee, or a vegetable-canning bee, or a road-repair bee. After the volunteers had gathered, and the required number were chosen by the project director, they were lined up and were enthusiastically paraded off toward the work site behind a fife and drum.

When the day’s work was completed, everyone from the bees, the factories, the shops, and the farmlands reconvened at the mansion and went to their rooms to wash and dress for supper, which began at 5:30 in the main dining room that seated no people. As the members arrived, they walked automatically to the back of the room, occupying whatever seats were available at the dining tables extending through the center of the room, or at the oval tables lined along the walls. Here there was a free spirit
of mingling, devoid of cliquishness, with no pairing off between Oneida’s senior or junior members, males or females, blood relatives or spouses. Except for the adolescents under twelve who ate in the children’s house, and the teenagers who were taking turns as kitchen helpers and table waiters, the community’s youths were accepted in the dining room as adults, and were expected to conform in all ways to the decorous dining atmosphere.