This post concludes a series in which I reposted Benjamin Franklin’s reflection after meeting Alexander Campbell in person. Click here to see the full article.
I find the article striking for several reasons; here they are, in no particular order:
–This assessment comes from one of the most prominent 19th century Reformers. Franklin was already an influential editor, debater, and preacher in his own right. In 1850 his public reputation is rising while Campbell’s is at its zenith. This article is a primary source of information and a self-conscious reflection on Campbell’s substance, style, and demeanor. It comes from within the movement, by a fellow-editor whose commitments basically aligned with Campbell’s.
–Articles such as this remind me I experience the world in ways quite different than Benjamin Franklin. The technologies and habits of public discourse available to him, and others who read Campbell’s words but had not yet beheld his face, in 1850 are so utterly different from what we knew across much of the 20th century. Those in turn are worlds different from even the past dozen years.
–To repeat, but I hope not belabor, I cannot grasp the ways our familiar technology makes a scenario such as what Franklin describes about Campbell seem so strange. Today I find it difficult not to have access to some kind of video that could give me the kinds of personality clues Franklin describes forming, in absentia, about Alexander Campbell.
–This item provides a quality of self-reflective assessment that I find remarkable in two ways. The first is Franklin’s admission that his assumptions concerning Campbell’s appearance aligned with the in-person perception. Second, Franklin admits his mistaken assumptions about Campbell’s manner, method, and tone of speech. Without widespread access to Alexander Campbell’s face, in live video, it is difficult for us to appreciate the impact of a face-to-face encounter with someone of such public notoriety as Campbell enjoyed in 1850….whose tone of voice, inflection, pace, and emphasis you could only imagine as you read printed words or hear about them second-hand. That doesn’t begin to account for the subtleties of verbal and non-verbal cues that can only be perceived face-to-face.
–I wonder what, if any, description of Campbell’s physical appearance Franklin had read? What, if any, depiction of Campbell’s physical appearance had he seen? If Franklin saw some of the second printings of the debate with N. L. Rice, he would have seen this frontis portait of Campbell:
frontis portrait of Alexander Campbell from the Campbell-Rice debate, 1844, second printing. https://archive.org/details/debatebetweenrev00camp_0/page/n7/mode/2up
I cannot off-hand recall any other book by Campbell of the era which contained a similar frontispiece, at least the copies I have examined do not contain any. The only other such from the era (prior to 1850) that I can recall or locate is one of the illustrated editions of Trollope’s Domestic Manners which contain a drawing of the 1829 debate with Owen in Cincinnati. Not all of the 1832 London editions have them, but here is one that does. Admittedly it is difficult to form much more than an impression from this sketch. Lastly, Franklin might have had access to O. S. Fowler’s The American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany (see pp. 233ff). L. N. Fowler conducted a “phrenological character” assessment of Campbell in New York on 28 April 1847. Campbell was amazed at Fowler’s accuracy and insight.
–I wonder how else might the public have formed any conception of his physical appearance aside from reports published in the papers, or by word of mouth?
–I do not know what occasion brought Franklin and Campbell together. Probably it was a missionary society meeting of some kind. How might that affect the manner of Campbell’s speech? Does he sound any different in a sermon in a Sunday gathering of Christians? How does that align or diverge from an affirmative speech in a formal debate? Negative speech? How does that align with or diverge from a lecture hall at Bethany? Or Stranger’s Hall in the Bethany mansion? I don’t know, but I think the occasion and purpose of this meeting would be good to know.
–I assume Franklin is basically friendly to Campbell’s doctrinal positions. I claim no expertise on Benjamin Franklin. But I notice Franklin touches neither hide nor hair of the content of Campbell’s doctrinal affirmations. He estimates they have a wide effect, but my close reading of this account leaves me at a quandry as to how Franklin feels about Campbell’s doctrine. I have learned something from this note about how Franklin views the manner of Campbell’s speech and the deportment of his person. I cannot see very much here, though, about the content of Campbell’s teaching or Franklin’s estimation of it.
–Franklin makes two asides, both quite plain, about those preachers who make things about themselves. Self-aggrandizement, self-dealing, and who cannot seem to let their words speak for themselves. As I read it, these asides (and the relatively large amount of real estate they occupy in this short article) function to underscore how deeply Campbell must have impressed Franklin. Benjamin Franklin has been around enough to have heard preachers in and out of the Christian Churches. He does not name names, but whomever he has in mind, the contrast in his mind between them and Alexander Campbell is simply profound. I take it that perhaps Franklin expected it to be otherwise. There must have been something about how Campbell spoke and conducted himself in person that caused Franklin to reevaluate his assumptions. He certainly lit into these unnamed preachers.
–Clarity, affection, tenderness, mildness, ease, simplicity, elegance. These are the qualities Franklin sees in Campbell. Franklin praises them.
–Several years ago a passage from Leroy Garrett’s ESCM article caught my eye. Then a few months later, this passage from Silena’s Home Life and Reminiscences caught my eye. I wish the Garrett piece had footnotes; I would like for him to prove his case. This from Franklin seems to align with Silena. That said, here are only two eyewitness reflections and one estimation of a historian. Others will have different views. And there are no doubt more eye-witness accounts we should consider.
–Any who speak of Alexander Campbell’s temperament do well to base claims on primary sources that speak directly to the question at hand, i.e. eyewitnesses or contemporaries who reflect on his manner of speech and personal deportment.
–Any who evaluate Campbell’s temperament do well to take a cue from Benjamin Franklin, who heard Campbell in the flesh and admits that the experience corrected a prior mistaken assumption he held about Campbell’s demeanor. How much more so could I at this far distance misapprehend Alexander Campbell?
–One citation of one incident seems hardly a sound basis for generalization. I shudder to think what could be made about any one of us from one or two of our worst moments. Or our best moments for that matter.
–I can envision one thing worse than that, and that is a generalization without any citation, even of one incident such as this from Franklin. One incident cannot capture the totality of a person’s life; at the same time our lives are composed of moments which reveal our character.
–I do not think our lives, though, are the sum total of moments. I think a tally of them, in balance sheet form, is neither possible nor desirable. What a reductionist way of construing a human life. I would not want someone to do that to me while I am alive; therefore I hesitate to do that to the dead.
–I do think each and every scrap of evidence is useful and were we to have at our disposal a range of such candid reflections as Franklin provides it should tell us something indeed of Alexander Campbell. Would that we had such from his opponents in forensic debate; from colleagues in the ministry with education and training and experience comparable to his; from listeners who had no formal education but who met him as an equal at the Lord’s table in the Christian assembly; from those who had significant theological differences, and from those who were close to him; from his neighbors and those who worked in his employ; from his children and grandchildren; from his slaves and from their children. The more the better, and even if there be but this one, I will still count it valuable and useful.
–I am sure there are other such estimations of Campbell and others. Somewhere in my files–I hope–is scrap of paper with my notes about when David Lipscomb heard Alexander Campbell. I cannot find it just now. I will be happy to learn of other such descriptions, either of Campbell or of other such leading lights of the Nineteenth Century Reformation. Like this one, they are often buried deep in the pages of the periodicals. They are there to be found: let any who want to know of them, search for them.
I have beat thus drum quite enough. On to other things.
eScriptorium 