John Humphrey Noyes

Early Life & Education
John Humphrey Noyes was born in Battleboro, Vermont in 1811. His parents were John Noyes Sr., who taught at Dartmouth and was elected to congress), and Polly Hayes (aunt to future president Rutherford B. Hayes). 5509

Noyes attended Dartmouth, his father’s alma mater, for undergraduate studies. He then apprenticed in his brother-in-law’s office. After attending a religious revival in Putney in 1831, Noyes enrolled in the prestigious Andover Theological Seminary. The orthodox Congregationalist school was a poor fit for the “restless zeal of a fresh-saved convert” of Noyes.

After a year at Andover he transferred to the comparatively progressive Yale Theological Seminary. There Noyes co-founded an abolitionist group and preached in one of Boston’s black “free churches". 5519-5540 He was expelled in his second year there for his Perfectionist claim of sinlessness.

Abigail Merwin

While at Yale and shortly after converting to Perfectionism, Noyes fell in love with a bright woman 8 years older than him, Abigail Merwin. She attended a local Free Church and their spiritual connection was “intense.” She “became Noyes’s first real convert.” Her parents opinion of the young preacher, however, had been influenced by the public opinion of Perfectionism, which was already plagued by the idea that the practitioners “used their self-declared sanctity as a license for sexual adventure." 312-3

Likely at the order of her disapproving family, Merwin quickly renounced her new faith as soon as Noyes was ejected from Yale and New Haven, and refused to meet him when he returned to the city for visits. 312 Noyes would carry a torch for her for the rest of his life, sending letters and intermediaries to her even at the height of Oneida’s success in order to try to “coax his first love back into the fold. 312 “At the start of January 1837, Noyes learned that Abigail Merwin had married another man. Reeling, he wrote a long, speculative letter to his friend and fellow Perfectionist David Harrison. I will write all that is in my heart on one delicate subject, and you may judge for yourself whether it is expedient to show this letter to others. When the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven [that is, in the millennium] there will be no marriage. Exclusiveness, jealousy, quarreling have no place at the marriage supper of the Lamb….I call a certain woman my wife. She is yours, she is Christ’s, and in him she is the bride of all saints. She is now in the hands of a stranger, and according to my promise to her I rejoice. My claim upon her cuts directly across the marriage covenant of this world, and God knows the end.

Harrison passed the letter on to an infamous Massachusettes perfectionist by the name of Simon Lovett, who published it, with no authors name attached, in the Battle-Axe and Weapons of War, a radical pro-Free Love Perfectionist newsletter.

Noyes was not afraid of controversy and he quickly admitted himself the author The Witness, his own newspaper. As a biographer later wrote,

His tentative belief that monogamy was somehow unchristian—a belief clearly helped into existence by the news that Abigail Merwin was “in the hands of a stranger”—was now public knowledge. “A storm of censure rained down on the Putney believers. Many of Noyes’s followers and subscribers abandoned him. He came to interpret the inadvertent publication of his most private thoughts as a divine kick in the pants—God’s way of forcing him, long before he felt ready, “to defend and ultimately carry out the doctrine of communism in love.” At the time, he was a virgin. 312-313

Marriage & Family
As a junior at Dartmouth, he confided to his journal that he “could face a battery of cannon with less trepidation than I could a room full of ladies.[Ibid., 312.]”

Harriet Holton
Harriet Holton of Vermont, one of the countless who had heard Noyes preach during his travels, was ‘electrified’ by him. She had begun to correspond with the Perfectionist leader and occasionally sent small sums of money when his paper, The Witness, was in danger of having to close. “His starkly unromantic proposal addressed her as “sister” and invited Holton to be his spiritual “yoke-fellow.” He added that they could “enter into no engagements with each other which shall limit the range of our affections as they are limited in matrimonial engagements by the fashion of this world.” Apparently this sounded fine to Holton. She consented so quickly that Noyes worried that his fiancée had “imbibed the spirit of Shakerism” and expected a sexless union. She had not; she did not.[Ibid., 315.]”

With the marriage Noyes not only acquired a wife, but also access to her late father’s money. During their honeymoon in Albany, he bought himself, and the community, a printing press and a used set of type.[Ibid., 315.]

Early in their marriage Harriet delivered four premature babies, none of whom survived long. The couple did have one surviving child, Theodore. It was in response to these devastating losses that Noyes developed what came to be known as “male continence.[Ibid., 318.]”

Mary Cragin
Mary Cragin and her husband George Cragin were among the first Perfectionists to join Noyes in Putney. Prior to their conversion, George had been the Grahamite  editor of the deeply conservative Advocate of Moral Reform[Jennings (pg 316) describes the Advocate as “a paper that tracked signs of “moral decay” such as the rise of pornography and women working outside the home. The Advocate, which exemplified a certain strain of female-led, teetotaling, nineteenth-century reformism, singled out Noyesian Perfectionism for special abuse, calling it “a refinement of wickedness which puts papacy to the blush.”]. It had been the “passionately religious” schoolteacher Mary who had “steered the couple towards Perfectionism.[Ibid., 316.]”

Noyes found himself deeply attracted to Mary, whom he called “a second Mary Magdalene” and said of  her, “Her spirit [was] exceedingly intoxicating— one that will make a man crazy.[Ibid., 317.]”

In spring 1846 Noyes and Mary Cragin were taking a walk through the Putney property when they sat on a boulder for a chat."“All the circumstances invited advance in freedom and yielding to the impulse upon me I took some personal liberties. The temptation to go further was tremendous. But at this point came serious thoughts. I stopped and revolved in mind as before God what to do. I said to myself, ‘I will not steal.’ After a moment we arose and went toward home. On the way we lingered. But I said, ‘No, I am going home to report what we have done.’ ”[Ibid., 317.]"All four of the the Noyes’ and the Cragins immediately sat down to discuss the situation."“After some hesitation, Harriet Noyes and George Cragin, both of whom had already expressed a special spiritual affection for each other in letters, consented to go along with what their spouses had commenced. All four agreed to merge their two marriages into a single union. “The last part of the interview was as amicable and happy as a wedding,” Noyes recalled, “and the consequence was that we gave each other full liberty.””[Ibid., 317]"Noyes called the situation “complex marriage.[Ibid., 317.]”

Mary Cragin died on the Oneida Community’s sloop, the Rebecca Ford, when it capsized in the Hudson River while sailing to Brooklyn to deliver Limestone.[Ibid., 340.]"“On the floor of the Hudson, the ship righted itself. At low tide, the top few feet of the mast protruded above the river. When Noyes arrived the next evening, he rowed out into the river and hung a lantern from the tip of the mast to keep vigil over the drowned women.[Ibid., 340.]”"Noyes called Cragin and the young lady who also died martyrs for Bible Communism. “[They have] the North River for a grave, the sloop for a coffin, and their short dresses for uniforms; enough for any soldier.”

Noyes later wrote of Cragin, “There is no other woman I loved as I did her,” he wrote. He never did allow himself that  “special love” that he had for Cragin despite his own teachings against it.[Ibid., 340.]

As was his tendency, Noyes interpreted his private trauma as a turning point in human history, a station along the ascent into the millennium. The Oneida Community had already defeated “the domestic and pecuniary fashions of the world.” Following the shipwreck, Noyes aimed higher. “Mrs. Cragin’s death will lead me to overcome death just as Abigail Merwin’s marriage stimulated me to break up the marriage system.”341

Vagabond
After being expelled from Yale, the 23 year old Noyes moved to a boardinghouse in New York City. As a 21st century biographer put it, for the next three weeks he "“became completely unhinged. Tormented by visions of devils and angels, he did not eat or sleep. In a spell of paranoia, he wandered lower Manhattan by night. Test-driving his newfound sanctity, he drew close to sin, tasting his first hard liquor and preaching to stoned prostitutes in the narrow alleys of Five Points. One afternoon, he became certain that he was dying. He returned to the boardinghouse, lay down in his cot, and awaited the end. When the terror passed, Noyes felt reborn—purified. Satan had tested him and he had proven himself invincible.[Ibid., 306.]”"

For the next three years Noyes drifted across the Northeast, preaching when he could, and consistently broke. He once walked from New York City to New Haven without eating. It took three days. Despite everything, he began to get followers. “Noyes possessed a weird, otherworldly charisma that, among a certain kind of seeker, inspired complete devotion. As he traveled, he accumulated a modest flock.[Ibid., 307.]”

Putney
Noyes settled down in Putney in 1836. A brother, two sisters, and eventually his mother, grew to see John as their spiritual leader, and after John Noyes Sr.’S death in 1841, the four siblings set their inheritance towards the purchase of land that adjoined their family farm. They and Noyes’ followers who had begun to collect in Putney formed themselves into a community which they named the Putney Bible School.[Ibid., 306-7.] Soon Noyes began to publish The Witness to spread the word of his particular flavor of Perfectionism.

Noyes wrote that his choice to settle down in Putney was in order to solidify Perfectionism, “not by preaching and stirring up excitement over a large field…but by devoting myself to the particular instruction of a few simple-minded, unpretending believers.[Ibid., 308.]”

By the end of 1843 there were 37 people living on the Noyes property, 9 of which were children. At first the community claimed that they were neither socialistic nor utopian, but only a simple prayer group and publishing operation. In 1846, though, Noyes wrote later, “the little church at Putney began cautiously to experiment in Communism.” Since the community already “studied together, farmed together, prayed together, worked together, and ate together,” the next step to communal property ownership was not a large one.[Ibid., 308.] "Like similar religious groups of the time, the Putney Bible School followers were inspired by the communitarian nature of the early Christians as described in the book of Acts. Noyes believed that they, too, were Perfectionists, but that mainstream Christianity had since lost its way. He called the intervening religious dark ages “the Apostasy.” He believed that by “imitating the spiritual communism practiced by the first Christians, Noyes intended to revive true Christianity, thus initiating the long forestalled promises of the millennium.[Ibid., 308.]”"

After friend and fellow perfectionist David Harrison shared  Noyes’ letter on his thoughts about marriage after the nuptials of his beloved Abigail Merwin with Simon Lovett in the Battle-axe and Weapons of War, a radical Perfectionist and free-love newsletter, Noyes claimed the anonymous letter as his own in The Witness. “His tentative belief that monogamy was somehow unchristian—a belief clearly helped into existence by the news that Abigail Merwin was “in the hands of a stranger”—was now public knowledge.[Ibid., 313.]” The backlash began immediately. Many followers and subscribers left and denounced him.

“He came to interpret the inadvertent publication of his most private thoughts as a divine kick in the pants—God’s way of forcing him, long before he felt ready, “to defend and ultimately carry out the doctrine of communism in love.” At the time, he was a virgin.[Ibid., 314.]” After marrying Harriet Holton and with her inheritance money buying a printing press and a secondhand set of type, they returned to Putney and Noyes set to teaching his followers how to ‘compose articles, set type, and operate the press.[Ibid., 315.]’ “A month later, a Putney woman named Harriet Hall who had been bedridden for eight years with a mysterious ailment sent for Noyes. Hall could not walk and could barely see. The slightest movement caused her great pain. For three hours, Noyes and Mary Cragin prayed and spoke with her about salvation. Enthralled, Hall told Noyes that she would do whatever he commanded. He ordered her to sit up. She did. He told her to stand. She did. Mary Cragin raised the window shade, and for once, the daylight did not hurt Hall’s eyes. News of this miraculous cure—the most compelling of several faith healings attributed to Noyes—spread among New York and New England Perfectionists, helping secure Noyes’s position as the leading man of American Perfectionism.”  320-1

As a Leader
"Part of the answer clearly lies in Noyes’s powerful charisma. There is no limit to what a compelling individual can get people to do once he or she is draped in the mantle of divine inspiration. Many people, even nonbelievers, attested to Noyes’s disarming intelligence and wide-eyed magnetism. Charisma, however, requires proximity (or some technological approximation thereof), and Noyes spent almost half of his time away from the main community. During the early years, he was often in Brooklyn. Later, he spent much of his time at the Wallingford branch, where the community had established a profitable cutlery works. 345-6"

Oneida
“John Jr. was twenty, a gangly, gray-eyed, ginger-haired young man.” 1 5509 “Noyes’s defining quality was a total refusal to acknowledge any division between theory and practice. Every idea that popped into his head was immediately transmitted into experiment. He understood his own spiritual perfection as a sudden, mystical experience—a union with that which is metaphysically perfect (God). Although that experience freed him from the taint of original sin, it did not translate into worldly infallibility. Social perfection—the building up of the millennial kingdom—would not come like a flash. It would be a process, requiring hard thinking, trial and error, and a great deal of human creativity. Like all utopians, Noyes had little regard for the way things are usually done. He overthrew long held customs with remarkable ease.[Ibid., 308.]”

The Law
Noyes’ first run in with the law came when, in 1847, he tried to bring Harriet Hall’s husband into the community’s complex marriage. Daniel Hall was incensed and immediately set off for Brattleboro to inform the authorities. On October 26th Noyes was arrested and charged for having “carnal knowledge” of two women outside his legal marriage.[Ibid., 321.] “There was a preliminary hearing in the local tavern. After freely admitting to having sex with the women, Noyes was released on a $2,000 bond. Before the actual trial commenced, Larkin Mead, one of John’s non-Perfectionist brothers-in-law, learned that the state intended to prosecute Noyes and several of his male followers to the full extent of the law. Mead also heard disturbing rumors of a plan to drive the Perfectionists from Putney by force. Despite the fact that he had personally paid Noyes’s substantial bond, Mead advised his brother-in-law to jump bail and leave Vermont at once.*15 Reluctantly, Noyes conceded. Those Perfectionists who were not originally from Putney scattered, too, awaiting counsel from their fugitive prophet.” 321

Second Great Awakening
As a recent Dartmouth graduate who was apprenticing with his brother-in-law at the latter’s law firm, a skeptical Noyes accompanied his mother to a revival in Putney.[Ibid., 5519.] For two days, Noyes regarded the hysterics around him with smug undergraduate detachment. On the third day, a strange calm came over him. That night he couldn’t sleep. Soaked with sweat, he lit a lamp and reached for the Bible. The familiar sentences of the New Testament seemed to glow on the page, lambent with urgency. On the fourth and final day of the Putney revival, John Humphrey Noyes pledged his life to the Word. “Hitherto, the world,” he wrote in his diary, “henceforth, God!”[Ibid., 5519.]

He quickly enrolled in Andover Theological Seminary, soon transferring to Yale. Of this time Noyes later wrote “My heart was fixed on the millennium, and I resolved to live or die for it.[Ibid., 5530.]”

Perfectionism
Christian orthodox theology says that no human since Adam and Eve have been without sin, with even newborns being tainted by the moral corruption of humanity. While in seminary, however, Noyes discovered a differing philosophy. The ancient Perfectionism doctrine states that living Christians can, indeed, become sinless. “For a Perfectionist, being saved is to undergo a distinct transformation in the eyes of God. Some Perfectionists believe that this transformation exempts the perfected from the moral regulations that govern the unredeemed.[Ibid., 303.]”

There were several varieties of Perfectionism to be found in America during the Second Great Awakening, each named according to the location of their headquarters. There was “New Haven Perfectionism,” “Oberlin Perfectionism,” “New York Perfectionism,” and revival convert John Humphrey Noyes Jr., would create the fourth, “Oneida Perfectionism.[Ibid., 202.]”

In February 1834, during his third year of seminary, Noyes was slated to give a sermon at the Orange Street Chapel in New Haven. Deeply entrenched in his study of Perfectionism, Noyes had stayed up late for many nights, nose deep in his bible, “desperate for an epiphany on par with his conversion in Putney.” "Vanquishing sin could not simply be a matter of restraint or flawless behavior. Even sinful thoughts are an offense to God, and nobody can prevent the mind from wandering. He concluded that spiritual perfection must be more than rule following; it must be a mystical state, a purifying brush with the divine. Something that happens to you."Noyes delivered a brief, simple sermon to the Orange Street Chapel congregation, where he preached a literal understanding of a line from the book of John; “He that committeth sin is of the devil.” If you commit any sin whatsoever, you are not a Christian. With that, he abruptly left the church. That night Noyes got the divine experience he had been seeking.

“Three times in quick succession a stream of eternal love gushed through my heart, and rolled back again to its source. Joy unspeakable and full of glory filled my soul. All fear and doubt and condemnation passed away. I knew that my heart was clean, and that the Father and the Son had come and made it their abode.[Ibid., 305-6.]”

To Noyes, something truly significant had happened. Not only did he believe that he was now free from sin, but an important turning point in the history of humanity. Indeed, February 20th was to become a holiday amongst his followers, who labeled it “the High Tide of the Spirit.” It’s opposite date, August 20, was seen as it’s reverse, “the climax of the flesh.[Ibid., 305.]”

A curious classmate visited Noyes the next day. Confused by his message, the seminarian asked “Don’t you commit sin?” to which Noyes apparently replied, “No,” knowing that his answer would “plunge [him] into the depths of contempt.[Ibid., 305.]” Word got to the Yale faculty quickly, and they revoked his preaching license and expelled him. Noyes said, “I have taken away their license to sin and they go on sinning. So, they have taken away my license to preach, I shall keep on preaching.[Ibid., 306.]” He was also kicked out of the Congregationalist Church of which his family were members.

Non-Monogomy
(The letter about Abigail Merwin)

“For several years after his marriage, Noyes continued to philosophize dryly about the virtues of nonmonogamous sexuality, but nothing, as it were, happened. Along with every one of his statements about sexual relations in the “resurrection state,” he reiterated his initial claim that established sexual mores could be breached only after the Kingdom of God was established on earth. Christ may have already come and gone, but the millennium was clearly not yet in full flower. The Second Coming had opened the possibility of spiritual perfection, but the world was not yet perfect.”316

“By 1846, Noyes had begun to wonder whether there might be a reciprocal relationship between the coming of God’s kingdom and the abolition of marriage. If free love was going to define life in the millennium, maybe free love would help trigger the millennium.” 316

Sex & Male Continence
In 1844, in response to Harriet’s 4 premature births (and subsequent infant deaths), Noyes began practicing “male continence.”—”sex in which the man does not climax, within or without.[Ibid., 318.]”

In 1831 Robert Dale Owen wrote an influential and scandalous pamphlet called Moral Physiology. In it Owen defines two types of sex, “amative”— sex for pleasure, and “propagative”— sex for reproduction. During amative love, Owen recommends practicing ‘coitus interruptus’ (withdrawal).[Ibid., 318.] In his approving review of the pamphlet for his own paper, Noyes wrote “It is as foolish and cruel to expend one’s seed on a wife merely for the sake of getting rid of it as it would be to fire a gun at one’s best friend merely for the sake of unloading it.[Ibid., 319.]” A religious man, Noyes was too committed to the Bible to endorse “spilling” one’s “vital powers” via coitus interruptus, the “French Method” (condoms) or masturbation, of which Noyes said it is ““the most atrocious robbery of which man can be guilty; a robbery for which God slew Onan.” ”[Ibid., 319.]

“The ‘system’ of Male Continence,” he insisted to a skeptical public, “has more real affinity with Shakerism than Owenism. It is based on self-control, as Shakerism is based on self-denial.” 319

Noyes described male continence, “The situation may be compared to a stream in three conditions, viz., 1, a fall, 2, a course of rapids above the fall, and 3, still water above the rapids. The skillful boatman may choose whether he will remain in the still water, or venture more or less down the rapids, or run his boat over the fall. But there is a point on the verge of the fall where he has no control over his course; and just above that there is a point where he will have to struggle with the current in a way which will give his nerves a severe trial, even though he may escape the fall. If he is willing to learn, experience will teach him the wisdom of confining his excursions to the region of easy rowing, unless he has an object in view that is worth the cost of going over the falls.[Ibid., 319.]”

Other
"“Noyes can hardly be counted as a feminist—he claimed nominal allegiance to Saint Paul’s chauvinist statements about man’s natural dominion over woman—but he believed that “worldly” society made too much of the innate differences between the sexes.”329"

Later Years & Death
April 13, 1886 ‘died in his stone cottage above the thundering Horseshoe Falls. He was seventy-five. Two days later, on a green, early spring afternoon, his body was carried across the border and buried in the shady hill-side graveyard behind the Mansion House.’ 372

Not long before he died, noyes reflected on his effort to build an earthly paradise. “We made a raid into an unknown country, charted it and returned without the loss of a man, woman or child,” he wrote.” 372