Angel on a Freight Train

A Story of Faith and Queer Desire in Nineteenth-Century America

Peter C. Baldwin

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438479941, 9781438479958
• eBook ISBN: 9781438479965
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The story of a nineteenth-century New Yorker's struggle to reconcile his same-sex erotic desires with his commitment to a Christian life.

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."

1

Friendship

Very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

—2 Samuel 1:26

“A youth leaving home! There is something not a little melancholy in the idea.” So begins an advice book that Edward Warren may well have carried with him as he left his parents’ home to attend boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1846.1 Warren was a diligent reader of religious tracts who strove to follow their advice about faithfulness in prayer, regularity in habits, and resistance to temptation. He would have learned from his reading that youth was a perilous time in a male Christian’s lifelong struggle against sin. “Character for life, and for eternity too, is usually formed in youth,” warned the English clergyman John Angell James, in The Young Man from Home (1839). Warren, having departed “the sweet fellowship of domestic bliss,” had like so many other nineteenth-century youths embarked “on life’s stormy and dangerous ocean.” His future on earth and in the afterlife could be determined during the next year or two.2

If Warren pored over one of the American Tract Society’s inexpensive editions of James’s book during a quiet moment at Andover, he would have been reminded that friends posed the greatest danger during this chapter of his life. “Man is a social being, and the propensity is peculiarly strong in youth,” James explained. Once away from parental supervision, a youth might fall in with wicked companions who would gradually destroy his morals. A charming co-worker or fellow boarder might give sin a cheerful face, leading the once pious youth into new social vices: the conviviality of the drinking party, or the pleasures of lewd women. “Set a strict guard upon your senses, your imagination, your passions,” James implored. “Once yield to temptation and you are undone: purity is then lost, and, sunk from self-esteem, you may give yourself up to commit all uncleanness with greediness.”3

Warren was fourteen years old when he left his childhood home in the little village of West Newton, Massachusetts, for the uncertain company of strangers. He went first to Andover, a small town near the border with New Hampshire, and then to the growing commercial and industrial cities of Newburyport and Troy. Every year during the mid-nineteenth century thousands of teenagers and young men were making similar journeys throughout United States, England, and Western Europe, drawn by expanding opportunities for education and especially for work. These journeys, like Warren’s, often led to towns and cities. America’s older seaports grew quickly between 1820 and 1860 while new towns sprang up along canals and navigable waterways in the interior. Ambitious young men flocked to these places to find work in the factories, shops, waterfronts, and construction sites. In 1830, only three-quarters of a million Americans lived in cities and towns of at least ten thousand people. By 1860, 4.6 million did so. Many a young man arriving in one of America’s sudden metropolises or raw settlements found himself in a world of strangers. Young workers in antebellum cities were no longer likely to be brought under the surrogate family governance of their employer. As work units expanded with industrialization, and as affluent men and women sought greater privacy for their nuclear families, employees were left to find their own lodgings.4

How could personal morality survive without traditional structures of personal influence? Some evangelicals placed their faith in the written word. “Words produce actions,” declared a speaker at the 1856 convention of the American Baptist Publication Society. “The public mind, and consequently public and private transactions, are pre-eminently the product of the Press. From books men derive thoughts. Those thoughts become motives; and those motives action. … The printed page, then, is a thing of power.” Evangelical publishing societies put this philosophy into action in the antebellum decades by distributing free religious pamphlets and inexpensive books. The largest of these organizations was the American Tract Society, created by the merger of New England and New York groups in 1825 and lavishly funded by wealthy Presbyterians and Congregationalists. High-speed steam presses at its New York headquarters cranked out five million tracts and volumes a year by 1850, ranging from short, sentimental narratives to older and more challenging works such as Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Despite their interest in exerting power, producers of evangelical literature strove for an egalitarian, intimate tone on paper. Authors directly addressed the reader as a “friend” and declared a personal interest in the reader’s well-being. Whether issued by the tract societies or by commercial presses, antebellum advice for solitary young men conjured a caring companion to fill the place of parental authority.5

The friends who spoke from the pages of evangelical literature sympathized with the torment of a youth who feared sin but lived “in a state, so far as any real affection or friendship is concerned, of complete orphanage.” No matter how badly he needed companionship he must keep his distance from those who were not truly Christians, for they would lead him to value pleasure over piety. Better fellowship might be found through the church. Since Biblical times, writes the historian Janet Moore Lindman, devout Christians had celebrated a style of friendship rooted in religious faith and in concern for the spiritual state of fellow believers. Such friendships encouraged emotional intimacies. Still, even a congenial Christian friend might lack the power to be the moral protector that a young person needed, observed Jacob Abbott, another advice author that Warren is likely to have read. Abbott was an educator who had trained for the Congregational ministry at Andover Theological Seminary, a few hundred yards east of Warren’s room in the English Commons dormitories at Phillips Academy. Abbott explained in The Young Christian, published in multiple editions beginning in 1832, that the best friend of all would combine power and sympathy, and could through diligent effort be welcomed into one’s life as an inseparable partner and guardian. This was the Friend, of course, who could be encountered through prayer and devotional reading. Abbott’s idea of Christ was widely shared. Even before a Canadian school teacher penned the words in 1855 that would become the famous hymn, many nineteenth-century evangelical writers were fervently expressing the general sentiment: “What a friend we have in Jesus!”6

Youths were sensitive to the benefits of earthly friendship, too, antebellum American writers believed. From classical antiquity through the eighteenth century, secular European writers had suggested that true friendship required qualities they ascribed to men: rationality in place of emotionality, and virtue instead of self-interest. In its highest form, friendship rested on mutual esteem, shared ethical values, and reciprocal devotion, not on considerations of personal advantage or pleasure. Women could not experience this, since they were capable only of passion and love, while boys had not reached the age of reason. The friendship of Damon and Pythias was cited by Cicero and other writers as representing the ideal. The story goes that when one of the friends was condemned to death by the tyrant of Syracuse, the other offered himself as collateral so that the prisoner might have a brief furlough to visit his family before his execution. When the condemned man honorably returned to face death, the tyrant was so impressed that he freed both men and asked to be their friend so that he too could learn virtue. Into the early nineteenth century, a dramatic version of the Damon and Pythias tale portrayed feminine emotion as the antithesis of virtuous male friendship, as the two men spurned the weak tears of their women in order to act with integrity.7

The value of emotion was reconsidered by Romantic writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and by affluent and cultured gentlemen. “Male friends often characterized the feelings that bound them to one another in terms of sensibility and sympathy, associating themselves with a culture of emotional awareness and expression that was highly influential in eighteenth-century polite society,” writes Richard Godbeer. “According to those who wrote about sentimental friendship, whether in general terms or as a personal experience, developing an intense capacity for emotion and a loving intimacy with the feelings of others constituted an important part of becoming a worthy and refined man.” Sympathetic bonds between men took on tremendous cultural and political importance in the era of the early Republic, as they were seen as an essential glue holding the Republic together in the absence of monarchy’s patriarchal power.8

By Warren’s time, the dominant view was that friendship thrived among women and sensitive youths who had not yet learned to suppress their feelings. Indeed, as Caleb Crain has observed in his study of early-nineteenth-century literature, “[M]en and women shared their styles of same-sex intimacy, even when intimacy itself did not cross the line of gender.”9 The qualities of selflessness, like-mindedness, and mutual concern that had been idealized in earlier writing were now reimagined to emphasize their emotional qualities. “Friendship, in virtuous minds, is but the concentration of benevolent emotions, heightened by respect and affection,” begins one 1847 article in a Boston publication. “A generous, disinterested, affectionate spirit, elevation of character, and firmness of principle, are among its essential elements. It comprises sympathy in sorrow, council in doubt, encouragement in virtue, that blending the strength of two minds, which nothing but death can part, and which, cemented by piety, looks to a consummation in that purer clime, where ‘affection’s cup hath lost the taste of tears.’ ” As implied by the marital overtones here, the line between romance and friendship was blurry.10

Both men and women were said to be most inclined toward meaningful friendships in their early years. A poetess writing for the Lowell Offering in 1843 sighed about the exquisite “friendships of childhood and youth,/ Before the heart loses its freshness and truth,/ When its best, kindest feelings gush joyously forth.” A male poet in 1850 recalled his college friendships, when “the unquenched stars of Passion trembled o’er us,/ Luring and lovely to our tearless eyes.” Such feelings faded as the sorrows of passing years chilled the heart, leaving only the afterglow of memory. Other writers warned that passions, understood as intense feelings surpassing rational control, took uglier forms in later years. Envy, hatred, and greed—as well as cold calculation—often choked out purer sentiments. An essay on college friendships saw only a passing phase between the undiscriminating love felt by children and the sober reserve and grasping self-interest of adulthood. “Friendship,” claimed this essayist, “is only experienced when the mind of its possessor is partially matured.”11

A fortunate youth might form loving friendships to last throughout life. Arising from innocent affections, such friendships might survive whatever misfortunes befell one of the partners. While fickle acquaintances, like most self-interested friends encountered in adulthood, would fall away at the approach of adversity, kindred spirits could share misfortunes and solace each other. “Sickness only draws such friends the closer, and afflictions causes [sic] their love to burn the brighter,” wrote one essayist. Friends of a forgiving nature could overcome their inevitable moments of conflict, knowing “how much of sin and ingratitude there is in every thought of our mind, and every act of our life.” Even physical distance was no barrier.12 Warren believed he had a true friend like this back in his hometown. This was “my long loved Dickey,” whom he kept, with Jesus, ever present through the love in his heart and through the power of the written word.13

Sweet Tones of Innocence

Warren had grown up as an only child, experiencing a quieter, more isolated, early childhood than was typical for the time. Families in antebellum America were large by today’s standards. Multiple siblings crowded the rooms and beds of small homes, and competed for the attention of parents. Warren’s parents each had at least eight siblings, all born in quick succession; his paternal grandmother finally died in childbirth when Warren’s father was a toddler.14 Families of that size were not quite so common by the time Warren was born, on October 29, 1831. Married women’s fertility rates had begun to fall in New England around 1800, partly because of a pattern of somewhat later marriage, while premarital pregnancy rates dropped even faster. New England couples successfully spaced pregnancies out during women’s years of peak fertility so that fewer children were born and nuclear families shrank. Still, it was considered a misfortune for a couple to be childless and it was unusual to stop at one child.15 The absence of any births after Warren suggests that one of his parents might have experienced an event that impaired their fertility; possibly Catherine Warren suffered lasting damage while birthing her only child. Lacking brothers or sisters to play with, the young Warren was left to amuse himself in the family’s large, Georgian home in West Newton.16

His father, the elder Samuel Edward Warren, came from an affluent farming family in nearby Weston. He had received the best education New England had to offer: after attending Phillips Andover Academy, he had continued his studies at Yale University and Harvard Medical College. Though trained as a physician, he lost interest in the profession and devoted most of his time to studying the Bible, aided by his self-taught knowledge of Hebrew. He also took an interest in botany and amassed a collection of rare plants.17 Samuel Warren tried to live the easy life of a leisured gentleman without quite enough wealth to make it easy. His son later estimated his net worth in 1857 at $10,600, half of it in his house and land. Samuel Warren’s income from interest and dividends came to a paltry $410 at that time, Edward Warren estimated (an amount that roughly corresponds to the purchasing power of $12,200 in 2018 dollars).18

Newton, which included the village of West Newton, was a rural township during Warren’s early childhood. The U.S. census had counted a total of only 2,377 inhabitants in all of Newton in 1830, a number that doubled during the next two decades. Before Edward Warren’s third birthday in 1834, the Boston and Worcester Railroad began service to West Newton from Boston. A hotel opened near the depot shortly before the railroad arrived; over the next fifteen or twenty years West Newton developed into a thriving railroad suburb. By 1850 about sixty houses stood in the village, along with a blacksmith and a cluster of small shops along Washington Street, abutting what is now the Massachusetts Turnpike. The local educator Nathaniel T. Allen, who arrived in West Newton in 1848, recalled it as a “pleasant and healthful village.” Allen’s younger brother James gushed about the views of the Charles River valley and the verdant countryside that could be enjoyed from the nearby hills. But Julian Hawthorne, the son of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived briefly in a house near the village, recalled it differently: “A more dismal and unlovely little suburb than West Newton was in the winter of 1851 could not exist outside of New England. It stood upon a low rise of land, shelving down to a railway, along which smoky trains screeched and rumbled from morning till night.”19

Warren took the positive view of his surroundings. Trains fascinated him. In early childhood he enjoyed “playing c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• 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
• Back Cover