The Critic of Barrytown: John Jay Chapman
by Daniel Middleton

On August 12, 1911, a terrible thing happened in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. A black man named ZachariaWalker shot and killed a white man. Whether the shooting was an accident or deliberate was never decided, because the rule of law was abandoned in favor of the rule of the mob. Walker was pursued by an angry crowd, captured, and tied to a metal cot. He cried out for mercy, pleading "don't give me a crooked death because I am not white." The crowd was undeterred and placed the cot on a pile of trash, which was lit on fire. When the ropes holding Walker in place burned through and he tried to escape, he was thrown back into the flames. In the aftermath of this atrocity, newspapers reported that "the scorched torso, the only thing left of the negro Walker, was kicked around by children on the highway . . . " The guilty and the innocent were bonded by silence; their collective failure of conscience ensured that Walker's savage murder would go unpunished.

Here in Barrytown, the writer John Jay Chapman read of what had happened at Coatesville and was shocked. The brutality of the lynching was much in his mind for a year, and, as he later wrote in Harper's Weekly, ". . . as the anniversary came round my inner idea forced me to do something. I felt as if the whole country would be different if any one man did something in penance, and so I went to Coatesville, and declared my intention of holding a prayer meeting to the various businessmen I could buttonhole." When he arrived in Coatesville he encountered indifference and cold hostility; he wrote to his wife from the hotel that "no one who has not been up against it can imagine the tyranny of a small town in America . . . very hard to get a hall—the prejudice against the subject." Chapman persevered and conducted his service. After prayers and readings from Scripture, he delivered a remarkable address worthy of Lincoln for its concise yet passionate distillation of the enduring shame of slavery and racial hatred in America. Consider these excerpts from his speech:

"As I read the newspaper accounts of the scene enacted here in Coatesville a year ago, I seemed to get a glimpse into the unconscious soul of this country. I saw a seldom revealed picture of the American heart and of the American nature . . . no theories about the race problem, no statistics, no legislation, or mere educational endeavor, can quite meet the lack which that day revealed in the American people . . . this great wickedness that happened in Coatesville is not the wickedness of Coatesville or of today. It is the wickedness of all America and of 300 years of the slave trade. . . .I say that our need is new life, and that books and resolutions will not save us, but only such disposition in our hearts and souls as will enable the new life, love, force, hope, virtue, which surround us always, to enter into us. . . "

These stirring words were delivered to an audience of two—one of whom was a spy for the local government. To one who imagines Chapman orating to rows of empty chairs in that meeting hall in Coatesville, it may seem tragic that the intellectual energy and passion of such an articulate man was so misdirected. But John Jay Chapman was always true to his spirit; above all else, he believed that individual expression was essential: one must abandon constraints and calculations and simply act, regardless if one's words reached two or 2,000. Only through action and an unwavering fidelity to one's beliefs could one hope to discover truth. Whether it was literary and social criticism, philosophy, articles on religion or education or on behalf of political reform, Chapman wrote for himself, believing in the creative power of the individual to effect change. The philosopher William James described Chapman aptly when he wrote of him: "He just looks at things and tries to tell the truth about them—a strange thing even to try to do. . . "

John Jay Chapman (1862–1933) was a critic of literature and social issues who lived in Barrytown for the last half of his life. His output was prodigious: thousands of letters, 25 books of essays, plays, memoir, and biography. as well as a self-published journal, The Political Nursery, which ran from 1897 until 1901. Regardless of the form of his writing, his style had the coherence and flow of beautifully composed music. Chapman could shift in tone from indignation to humor, convey complex ideas with direct simplicity, and instruct and inform without losing his sense of rhythm and harmony. Critics and historians like Edmund Wilson and Jacques Barzun were dazzled by Chapman's abilities; Wilson declared that the artistic quality of Chapman's letters was unrivaled in the history of American literature.

Chapman's genius was never widely recognized. Sadly, his efforts to reform and educate through his writings was too often like whistling in the wind. This is not a surprise, for Chapman was an intellectual of intense moral conscience who was alienated by the bland and self-limiting commercial culture of America after the Civil War. Though he decried the increasing corruption of American politics by big business, he was by nature a rebel and iconoclast, unwilling to compromise principle for political expediency. Even when he was tirelessly involved in efforts to reform New York City politics during the 1890s, he believed that the most effective method of agitation rested with the independent individual rather than with the collective group. By espousing selflessness, morality, and principle, an individual could instruct by example and in that way bring about change. Like one of his heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Chapman rejected organizations of both church and state. He believed that the inevitable tendency of the organization was to generate dogma, and he condemned dogma as a promoter of conformity and stifler of creativity.

When William James described Chapman's mission to seek truth as "strange," he wasn't being derogatory. Chapman was akin to the lone prophet fighting against incomprehension and indifference with the power of his language. In his public life as an artist, John Jay Chapman was a gentle man who persevered to express himself against the grain of popular thought. That was strain enough. Given his several episodes of mental collapse and family tragedy, it is remarkable that he was productive at all.

As a young man, Chapman grew up in New York City among the cultured and privileged Protestants who were clustered around Washington Square. His mother was fluent in several languages, his father was made president of the New York Stock Exchange in 1873. They both came from long family traditions of civic prominence and moral integrity particularly concerned with the abolition of slavery. Chapman's mother descended from John Jay (1745–1829), a contributor to the Federalist Papers, president of the Continental Congress, the first Chief Justice of the United States, and organizer of the New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves. Chapman's paternal grandmother, Maria Weston (1806–1885), was a prominent abolitionist who sponsored the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society; she was known for her hymns, journalism and close association with the greatest abolitionist of the era, William Lloyd Garrison.

Chapman boarded for a time at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire before eventually going to Harvard both as an undergraduate and as a student at the law school; he received his degree and was admitted to the New York Bar in 1888. By 1890 he was a happily married lawyer in New York, ready to start a family. For someone of Chapman's class at that time, this resume was impressive but quite conventional; it does not indicate the unusual artistic sensibility that animated Chapman's thoughts and often left his soul desolate and shattered.

This first became apparent when he was at St. Paul's, where he reacted badly to the school's severe and exacting Calvinist religiosity. The young Chapman became oppressed by a self-imposed and extreme piety that left him physically and mentally unstable. He was asked to leave, and much to his benefit continued his education at home, where he immersed himself in music, poetry, and literature.

At Harvard, he discovered Darwinism and the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, which caused him to ponder and rethink the meaning of his religious beliefs. He never fully renounced his Protestant upbringing, and indeed would use the Bible as his literary and spiritual touchstone throughout the rest of his life, but at Harvard he came to view churchgoing as a doctrinaire ritual rather than an expression of true faith. (Because he refused to attend services, he was punished by being denied graduation with his class, and had to wait a year before receiving his degree.)

After Harvard, his intellectual interests were further stimulated by a tour across Europe, ending in England where he met Tennyson, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Though he was diligent in his law studies, he never gave himself to them completely. At the same time he was busy with an active social life, writing literary essays, poetry, and teaching himself Italian in order to read Dante.

In 1887, as he was nearing completion of law school, he had another attack of the kind of morbid hysteria that had ended his stay at St. Paul's. Though he hadn't acknowledged it to himself, he was in love with a vibrant Italian-American who was part of a prominent Boston family. Her name was Minna Timmons, and she would eventually become his wife, but not before a period of great distress. Chapman had decided that a man named Percival Lowell was also pursuing Minna, and thrashed him with a walking stick. Chapman not only regretted his behavior, he was seized with a lacerating sense of guilt and self-loathing. After the beating he returned to his rooms and held his left hand—the offending hand that had wielded the stick—into the flames of the hearth fire, holding it there until it was so badly burned that it had to be amputated. It was an inexplicable act of penance which alarmed Minna's family; they kept her from him for more than a year before they were satisfied that he was not, as others had come to think of him, "mad Jack Chapman."

He was not mad, but of such sensitivity and introspection that he was prone to similar expressions of hysteria. The artist is blessed and cursed by the unconscious need to create; he must be truthful but also measured, lest the coherence of his ideas be overwhelmed by emotion. Chapman's family motto was crescit sub pondere virtus: "courage increases under a burden." Chapman's perpetual burden was trying to maintain a balance between the instinct to create, which is all about passionate intensity, and the need for rationality. In the second part of this article, to appear in the spring issue of AboutTown, we will see how Chapman succeeded and failed to maintain this balance as he strove to educate and enlighten with the power of his words.