Angel on a Freight Train

Peter C. Baldwin

Description

Angel on a Freight Train examines the experiences of Samuel Edward Warren (1831–1909), a teacher and college professor in Troy, New York, who struggled to reconcile his same-sex erotic desires with his commitment to a Christian life. Unlike twenty-first-century evangelicals who try to "pray the gay away," Warren discerned no fundamental conflict between his faith and his attraction to younger males. Growing up in the antebellum Northeast, in a culture that permitted and even celebrated emotional bonds between men, he strove to build emotionally intense relationships in many overlapping forms—friendship, pedagogy, evangelism, and romance—which allowed him to enjoy intimacy with little effort at concealment. However, as he passed into mature manhood and built a prestigious career, Warren began to feel that he should have grown out of romantic friendships, which he now feared had become emotionally and physically excessive.

Based on Warren's deeply introspective and previously unexplored diaries, Angel on a Freight Train traces his youthful freedom and sensuality, his attempt to join with younger men in a spirit of loving mentorship, and, finally, the tortured introspection of a man whose age seemed to shut him out from an idyllic lost world. In the end, Warren came to believe rather sorrowfully in a radical division between his angelic, ideal self and what he called "the freight train of animal life below."
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Words, Flesh, and Spirit

1. Friendship

2. Teaching

3. Evangelism

4. Fatherhood

Epilogue: The Cross, the Grave, the Skies

Abbreviations in Notes
Notes
Index

Sujets

• États-Unis
• History of religions
• History of the Americas
• Denomination
• Christian Church
• Group
• 19th century
• United States of America
• USA

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438479965
• Langue: English

Extrait

Angel on a Freight Train
Angel on a Freight Train
A Story of Faith and Queer Desire in Nineteenth-Century America
Peter C. Baldwin
Cover image: Samuel Edward Warren with unidentified young man, circa 1870. On back is written: “The Patience of Hope, or Showing Him His Mark,” AC 18, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Baldwin, Peter C., author.
Title: Angel on a freight train : a story of faith and queer desire in nineteenth-century America / Peter C. Baldwin, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479958 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479965 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Words, Flesh, and Spirit
Chapter 1. Friendship
Chapter 2. Teaching
Chapter 3. Evangelism
Chapter 4. Fatherhood
Epilogue: The Cross, the Grave, the Skies
Abbreviations in Notes
Notes
Index
Illustrations Figure I.1. Part of the entry for June 9, 1849, from Volume 2 of Warren’s journal. Courtesy, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Conn. Figure 1.1. Page from Volume 8 of the Journal. Courtesy, the Winterthur Library, Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Figure 2.1. Charlton Schoolhouse No. 2, Charlton, Mass. (built 1848), where Warren taught in the fall of 1849. Photo by author, 2019. Figure 2.2. Warren as an RPI faculty member, ca. 1869 or 1870, AC 18, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. Figure 3.1 Crude erasures in Warren’s Journal, volume 7, 1994–6, Samuel Edward Warren papers, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. Figure 4.1. Erastus Dow Palmer, “Morning Star,” (c. 1851–1855), marble, 20 in. diameter. Minneapolis Institute of Art, anonymous gift in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Palmer Jaffray, accession number 89.124.2. Photo: Minneapolis Museum of Art. Figure 4.2. Digitally enhanced image of an erasure from Warren’s Journal, Volume 2. Courtesy, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Conn. Digital enhancement by Mark R. Smith of Macroscopic Solutions, LLC.
Acknowledgments
In completing an academic book, there is no moment of achievement that seems to demand champagne. Every step is incremental and slow. You certainly wouldn’t pop open the bubbly when you write the last word of the first draft, knowing that many drafts lie ahead. Nor does it seem worth celebrating when the manuscript goes to the publisher or when it passes peer review. Signing the contract is a formality, checking page proofs is a chore, and by the time the box of books arrives in the mail you’ve long since moved on to other projects. For me, this is the closest approximation to the finish line: writing the acknowledgments. During long years of working through this unexpectedly difficult project, I looked forward to the moment when I could thank the people who helped me along the way.
I started the project with modest ambitions. I built up more enthusiasm and new ideas as I talked about S. Edward Warren with my sister Sarah Baldwin Evangelista and my friend Randy Burgess, and when I shared a rough precis with my colleagues Alexis Boylan and Sylvia Schafer. Richard Brown, Howard Chudacoff, Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy Gilfoyle, Robert Gross, and Peter Stearns all supported me in seeking funding for the project.
A year’s fellowship at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute gave me time for uninterrupted research and for initial formulation of the narrative. While there, I benefited from the helpful suggestions of Mohammed Albakry, Bob Gross, Sharon Harris, Jessica Linker, and Nicola McDonald. Jessica Linker deserves special thanks for volunteering many hours to helping me decipher the manuscripts; assisting me also in grant writing, she was invaluable in leading me rethink and refocus my interpretation of S. Edward Warren. Mark R. Smith took some amazing digitally enhanced photos of the manuscripts; financial support for this work came from the Felberbaum Family Foundation and the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History.
I am grateful for the assistance of archivists and librarians at the American Antiquarian Society, Amherst College, the Charlton Historical Society, the Emma Willard School, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the Jackson Homestead and Museum in Newton, the Massachusetts Archives, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Newburyport Public Library, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the New York State Library, Phillips Academy Andover, the Rensselaer County Historical Society, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stevens Institute of Technology, the University of Delaware, the University of Connecticut, and the Winterthur Library. UConn Archivist Betsy Pittman and RPI Assistant Archivist Jenifer Monger were especially helpful and supportive. Frank Morrill of the Charlton Historical Society kindly showed me the places where Warren worked, lived, and walked.
Numerous people offered comments and suggestions in response to hearing my presentations or reading drafts of portions of the manuscript. Among the many helpful readers were Christopher Clark, Martha Cutter, Clare Eby, Kathryn Lofton, Vicki Magley, Susan Matt, Shawn Salvant, Nancy Shoemaker, and Chris Vials. I am particularly grateful to Dick Brown for reading and extensively commenting on the first completed draft. Thanks also to the editors at the State University of New York Press, Rebecca Colesworthy and Amanda Lanne-Camilli, and senior production editor Diane Ganeles; the copyeditor, Alan Hewat; and the peer reviewers (William Benemann, Janet Moore Lindman, and John Corrigan).
Throughout the long travail of writing and publishing the book, I was fortunate to have the encouragement and advice of wonderful colleagues, including Dick Brown, Pat Cohen, Frank Costigliola, Cornelia Dayton, Bob Gross, Micki McElya, Nancy Shoemaker, and Manisha Sinha. As always, I relied on the support of the efficacious Vicki Magley.
There are no doubt others I have neglected to thank. I may remember them later, with embarrassment and a slap to the forehead. (My apologies in advance.) But by then the book will be out and this project will have finally come to an end.
Introduction
Words, Flesh, and Spirit
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
—1 Corinthians 13:11
Professor Samuel Edward Warren loved to save boys and young men from sin, especially boys who struck him as pretty and young men who seemed sensitive or confused. An opportunity arose one day in 1860 as he walked the unpaved streets of Troy, New York: a loose ball from a boys’ game bounced into his path. Deep in thought as he tended to be on his walks, the grave young professor may have been too slow to stoop and make the catch, or perhaps he was disinclined to touch the grubby toy with his fingers. He simply turned his foot to stop the ball and watched as the pursuing boy ran up to him. The child had been cursing, much to Warren’s chagrin, but his profanity stopped and his frown cleared when he saw what the bearded gentleman had done. He flashed a brilliant smile before recovering the ball. As the boy ran back to his friends the professor walked on alone, pondering what had just happened.
Two lives, two very different consciousnesses, had briefly crackled into contact, and the encounter had seemed blessed. Warren had succeeded, he wrote, in performing God’s work on this “providential occasion of putting an end to another’s sin.” 1 But the human connection was weak and fleeting, a pale ghost of the full-blooded engagement with young sinners that Warren had once enjoyed. In his adolescence, Warren had cultivated intense friendships with slightly younger boys. He would draw, read, and sing with them, and when the time felt right he would engage them in conversation on the state of their souls. With a few, he became intimate, sealing their Christian brotherhood with kisses and loving embraces in bed.
There, then, and among Warren’s sort of people—affluent Northeasterners in the years before the Civil War—such behavior was understood very differently from how it would be today. Emotionally intense and physically affectionate pairings were commonplace among “youths”: males and females in the transitional phase of life between young childhood and mature adulthood. These “romantic friendships,” as scholars have called them, were not seen as signs of a homosexual orientation in either partner. Friends held hands and hugged, and shared beds for affection as well as convenience. “Physical