John Brooke, “The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844” (1994) – Colonial and early-republic New England and New York become a whole lot weirder — or weirder in a different way — in this book from that most fascinating and fraught subfield, the history of popular (read- not produced by and for academics or other specialists) ideas. Historian John Brooke argues that far from the staid Puritan monoculture we’re used to, the early northeast was rife with assorted oddball sects and people pursuing a Protestant variation on hermetic or occult practices. Massholes who read this book won’t be able to think about Hopkinton, MA or a few other places now known as mere sleepy bedroom communities again, after reading about how they were hotbeds of “perfectionists” or alchemy, in resistance to the mainline Puritan power center in Boston. Hopkinton!

Furthermore, Brooke argues, it was this gestalt of hermetic and perfectionist Protestantism that formed the foundation stone for the theology of Mormonism. Joseph Smith and those around him were steeped in the sort of folk-hermeticism Brooke describes as endemic to the back-country northeast at the time. Brooke depicts these as adapted reiterations of Renaissance-era hermetic concepts and practices: the perfectability of man through gnosis and ritual practice; the belief in secret knowledge of the nature of the cosmos passed down by groups of initiates; assorted proto-scientific practices in medicine, metallurgy, etc.

All of these beliefs, especially when adapted to early American circumstances, hold out the great promise of power in this world, more than contentment in the afterlife. The great innovation of the religions originated in America, be it Mormonism, Scientology, various positive-thinking cults, or at least some of the off-shoots of the Nation of Islam, is offering to unlock what amounts to super-powers for use in this life. Joseph Smith both claimed them for himself — he had a “seeing stone” with which to find buried treasure, and of course, he was the only one who could read the golden tablets — and offered them to his followers. Immersed, as Brooke argues, in a culture of this sort of folk-magic and often driven to equal parts despair by debt and failure and wild hope by the promise of (white, settler) America, the people of the frontier parts of the Northeast were “a prepared people,” ready to hear and follow his message. Among other things, this is a great study in the construction of belief systems almost completely outside of the scope of certified idea-mongers in academia, philosophy, or elsewhere.

More than a scam — or along with being a scam, or anyway creating a scamogenic environment — there was a philosophical through-line here. Much of it involves the rejection of both original sin and of the separation of spirit and matter. Challenging these concepts entailed an attack on much of the religious order that undergird society in Europe and America at the time. It implied antinomianism and the rejection of religious hierarchies (though, often enough, the establishment of new ones), along with whatever kind of occult superpowers people could acquire if they could gain the gnosis of the Primal Adam or whatever.

The rejection of the separation of spirit and matter lays at the heart of some of Mormonism’s more eccentric beliefs, like the idea of multiple ascending material heavens, through which good Mormons ascend like so many wagon trains westward, peopling them with demi-gods (one of the reasons, along with sheer horniness on Smith’s part, why they got into multiple marriages- all the more demi-god/angel babies for space-heaven). It’s not hard to see why all of this would appeal to people ripped from a cold, often authoritarian culture of establishment Protestantism, in New England or Britain or Germany, and starting anew out in the back of beyond, defined by equal parts opportunity and danger.

These sorts of history are fascinating but also frustrating. Establishing the chain of influence is hard enough with professional pedants who leave voluminous paper trails. It’s much harder with extramural people who left fragmentary record, often using obscure or shifting terms (not that that’s so rare in academics!). Brooke makes some leaps and I think overreaches in terms of how much he links Renaissance hermiticism with the folk beliefs of early New England and, in turn, Mormon theology. My sense of it is that the links in the chain are much looser than that. Perhaps it’s more there was a grab-bag (to use the annoying academic term, “reticule,” which means the exact same thing as grab-bag) than a chain of influence. The bag only had so many things in it for an enterprising young sect-leader and/or scam artist to pick, and a lot of the contents of the bag were handed down, originally, from the hermetics (via many hands who also added stuff, took stuff out, did their own weird modifications, etc). I really can’t say how accurate this is. But it mostly colors inside the lines of historical practice (it won the Bancroft, fwiw). And moreover, it’s just cool, and that has to count for something. ****’

John Beatty, “The Citizen-Soldier” (1879) – The knot at the heart of all Civil War memoirs is that the contrast between the story of a war — full of blood, pain, failure, comedy deriving from all of these things, and other messy human realities — in language that a late-19th century American publisher (and audience) would find acceptable. Ulysses Grant had help from his friend, Mark Twain, though even his written orders show the lucid, forceful prose quality that make his memoirs a classic. Lost Cause propagandists like Jefferson Davis and Jubal Early could more easily pitch themselves to the cheap sentimental romanticism that rhetoric of the era encouraged than could Union people and abolitionists (though lord knows both tried).

John Beatty, an Ohioan who rose to Brigadier-General over the course of the war, created a classic with a consistent voice and a wry critical eye. He saw heavy action at Stone River and Chickamauga, but for the most part he talks about marching and camp life. If language is generally inadequate for the experience of battle (though there have been some decent tries), it can do wonders with the display of humanity that is an army on the move, and Beatty’s language is keenly suited for the Army of the Cumberland as it marches through Tennessee and parts of Alabama and Georgia.

His battle descriptions are decent but the real visceral stuff he packs in surrounds food, cold, exhaustion, and smells. He records the songs the men sing (seemingly all of them some genre of ethnic impersonation or another- German, Irish, and French as well as the imitations of black peoples we’re familiar with) and amusing incidents. He talks about the endless politicking. At first this is mostly between officers; seemingly ever ambitious man from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois saw the war more as an opportunity to make connections than anything else. But eventually a different kind of politics takes hold amongst the men- over the course of the war, you see them come to see themselves as a liberating army, and Beatty takes pride in that (and castigated both dithering, soft generals like Buell and domestic dissidents in harsh terms).

Neither Beatty nor his men are exactly “woke” — black dialect humor abounds — but he (and, in a rough way, seemingly many of his men) are deadly serious civic republicans. Beatty can be humorous but that’s a flip-side to his deeply-held belief in both preserving a union and creating genuinely republican institutions for everyone in it… and with his frustrations with both the rebels and those on his own side who won’t take the war seriously — who see it as a means for career advancement or a temporary inconvenience or whatever. The story of the Union in the Civil War was, in many respects, the story of deeply imperfect people trying — and in more ways than one would expect, succeeding — to be equal to an epochal historical change. Beatty’s book is a great look at what living that change was like. ****’