WEBVTT

NOTE Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812–1886)

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with

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Jeff Rigenbach.

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Suppose you decided to spend a little time boning up on the individualist anarchists

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of 19th century America.

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There are four names you'd be likely to run across repeatedly in your reading.

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Benjamin R. Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, and Stephen Pearl Andrews.

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There are a couple of other names that would pop up a bit less frequently, but still pretty

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frequently, as Rahaywood, Voltairine DeClair, but Tucker, Spooner, Warren, and Andrews would

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be the big four.

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In the cases of Tucker, Spooner, and Warren, the reasons for their prominence will likely

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seem pretty obvious once you've done a little reading.

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In the case of Andrews, however, the situation is far otherwise.

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Andrews is likely to seem less like a central figure in individualist anarchism, and more

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like a great eccentric, a starry-eyed dreamer and impractical visionary, a zealot in perpetual

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search of a movement, who passed through a brief period of libertarian zealotry while

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on his way to another destination entirely.

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But this likely first impression is not that far from the truth.

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Let me explain.

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Stephen Pearl Andrews was born 199 years ago this week, on March 22, 1812, the youngest

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of eight children born to the Reverend Elisha Andrews and his wife, Anne Lathrop.

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Pearl, as he was known to friends and associates throughout his life, was born in the small

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in the small town of Templeton, Massachusetts, where his father had charge of the local Baptist Church.

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When he was four years old, the family moved about 35 miles northwest to another small town, Hinsdale, New Hampshire.

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There, Pearl grew up.

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In 1831, when he was 19, he moved with one of his older sisters to Louisiana.

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Two older brothers had already moved there some years before.

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One had established a school for the daughters of wealthy planters.

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The other was practicing law.

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The school, now run by Pearl's widowed sister-in-law, was in Jackson, Louisiana.

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The law office was in Clinton, Louisiana.

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Jackson and Clinton were a pair of small towns about 12 miles apart, about 35 miles north

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of Baton Rouge and about 15 miles south of the Mississippi state line.

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Perle accepted a teaching job at the school while studying the law under his brother's

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tutelage in his spare time.

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His biographer, Madeleine Stern, reports that on March 27, 1833, five days after his 21st

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birthday, he was admitted to the practice of law in Louisiana.

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After two years of practicing with his brother in Clinton, Stephen Perle Andrews moved in

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1835 to New Orleans.

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He was 23 years old.

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Four years later, in 1839, when he was not quite yet 27, he picked up and moved again,

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this time to Texas.

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It's the Republic of Texas we're talking about here, founded three years before in

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1836, and as yet rather sparsely populated.

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Galveston, the biggest city in the Republic, had little more than 4,000 residents in 1850.

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Houston, 55 or 60 miles to the northwest, reported a population of about 2,400 in that year.

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1850 was, of course, the first year in which population figures for any settlement in Texas

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were included in a U.S. census.

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Until 1845, when it joined the Union as a slave state, Texas was an independent republic.

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And both Houston and Galveston were growing rapidly in the mid-19th century.

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The population of both towns roughly doubled in each 10-year period between 1850 and 1880,

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when the rate of growth began slowing a little.

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I haven't been able to locate any figures for Houston's population when Pearl Andrews

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arrived there in 1839, but the pattern of growth later documented by the U.S. Census

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Bureau suggests it was probably little more than 1200.

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Pearl Andrews practiced law very successfully in Houston, just as he had before in New Orleans,

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and quickly became a prominent member of the community.

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He took a leadership role in the First Baptist Church of Houston, and had a hand in the founding

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of the school that eventually became Baylor University.

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He also continued the virtually compulsive reading and studying that had long been his

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chief way of filling his hours away from his professional work.

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He seems to have had something of a talent for languages, and before he shuffled off

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this mortal coil, he managed to teach himself no fewer than thirty-two of them.

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But it wasn't only languages and philology that interested him.

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He also read omnivorously in philosophy, religion, the sciences, history.

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By the time he reached his mid-fifties, in the years just after the U.S. Civil War, he

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had attained a measure of national fame as a polymath and a man of great and extraordinary

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Learning.

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But I get ahead of my story.

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For now, Pearl Andrews is in Texas, practicing law.

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He's about 30.

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At the request of the government of the Republic of Texas, he has translated the Constitution

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and Legal Code into Spanish, and he has latched on to the first of the various causes that

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ultimately came to dominate and define his personal and professional life.

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The first of these great causes to possess Stephen Pearl Andrews was abolitionism.

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As a child, he had been present when his parents offered overnight shelter and needed provisions

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to fugitive slaves making their way to Canada, but he had never witnessed the reality of

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slavery itself until he had come south.

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And now, after witnessing that reality for a decade, he decided he could no longer tolerate

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it.

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He had to, as they say, do something.

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So he tried to drum up support in both Texas and England for a plan to free all the slaves

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in Texas, amend the Constitution to forbid slavery, and compensate the slaveholders for

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the loss of their property.

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This basic approach had been successfully used to end slavery in various countries in

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what, in the 1830s, had just begun to be widely called Latin America.

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Andrews saw no reason it shouldn't work just as well in Texas.

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He did manage to drum up considerable enthusiasm for his plans in England, even at high levels

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within the British government, but these official supporters hastily withdrew when they were

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informed by the Chargé d'Affaires, who represented the Texas government in London, that the government

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in Austin did not sanction Mr. Andrews' scheme, and when Mr. Andrews returned home to Texas,

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His reception was far from what he'd hoped for.

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Andrews was a tall man, imposing, with a beard of the sort you could easily imagine God himself

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wearing.

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He was an impressive public speaker, and he had given lectures and Independence Day orations

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in both Houston and Galveston, and before that in New Orleans, in the late 1830s and

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early 1840s, that were quickly recognized by those few who bothered to think about their

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In Houston, his home was mobbed, and he and his wife were forced to flee through the swamps

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on Horseback to the Relative Safety of the Louisiana Line.

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Oh yes, had I mentioned that Pearl Andrews had acquired a wife by now?

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Actually, he had acquired her some years before when he had first taken up residence in New

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Orleans.

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Almost nothing is known about her, beyond her name, Mary Ann Gordon, her hometown, Norwich,

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Connecticut, and the fact that the two met at the Jackson Female Seminary, where she

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was a student and Pearl Andrews was a young teacher.

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Pearl's biographer, Madeleine Stern, writes of her as

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her husband's faithful aide, housekeeper, and eventually the mother of his sons.

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Her name is apparently seldom found in the extensive papers and journals Andrews left

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behind at his death in 1886.

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It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was not his wife, but his causes that were

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the true love of his life.

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He had already found his next cause on the long shipboard ride back home from England.

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In London, he had picked up several books by a member of parliament from Bath, one Isaac

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Pittman, who had developed a new system of shorthand that he believed would improve the

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efficiency of secretaries, court reporters, anyone who needed to reproduce accurately

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the spoken words of another.

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Andrews saw an even greater potential in Pittman's invention.

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He thought it could revolutionize the teaching of reading, transform the world into a planet

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of literate and ultimately educated individuals.

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He moved to New York, started up an institute that promoted Pittman shorthand, and offered

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classes in it, and published magazines, newsletters and pamphlets in it.

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A few years down the line, according to Wikipedia, Pittman shorthand became the most commonly

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used shorthand system in the entire English-speaking world.

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But that was maybe 40 years in the future.

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In the 1840s, it was hard to find paying customers who wanted to take courses in it, or read

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publications printed in it.

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So Andrews moved on to the temperance movement, and from there to Fourierism, the doctrines

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of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, who believed, or so he said, that once socialism

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had ushered in the millennium, children and animals would do all the work so that adults

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could live at leisure, and the oceans would be full of lemonade instead of salt water.

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No, I'm not making this up, and my source for all this is no less reliable an observer

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than Ludwig von Mises himself in his books Socialism and Human Action.

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But not long after Pearl Andrews became a Fourierite, sometime early in 1850, probably

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Before his 38th birthday had come and gone, he met a most interesting character, a musician,

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tinkerer and social philosopher named Josiah Warren.

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Warren was lecturing in Boston on something called equitable commerce, his belief that

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people should sell goods to each other at cost and trade their labor with each other

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hour for hour.

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And this idea entranced Andrews, though it might well be argued that the idea of Warren's

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One of the ideas that most swept Pearl Andrews away was not this one, but another, Warren's notion of what he called individual sovereignty.

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Little more than a year after their first meeting, Andrews published what is today his best-known book, The Science of Society,

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a work that has come to be widely acknowledged as not only the best book on, but also the best single presentation of, Warren's ideas.

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William Gary Klein states flatly in his book The Individualist Anarchists, A Critique of Liberalism,

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that Andrew's principal contribution to individualist anarchism was his lucid elaboration of the thought of Warren.

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Andrews must be credited with passing this philosophy to the individualist anarchists that were to proliferate in the 1880s.

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And the science of society does contain a number of admirable and memorable passages.

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So does Andrew's 1853 book, Love, Marriage and Divorce and the Sovereignty of the Individual.

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This slender volume reprinted a discussion between Henry James, Horace Greeley and Stephen Pearl Andrews

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that had originally seen publication earlier that year in the pages of the New York Tribune.

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The Henry James referred to here is Henry James the Elder, the father of the novelist.

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At one point, Andrews exhorts James and Greeley to give up, I beseech you, the search after the remedy for the evils of government in more government.

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The road lies just the other way, toward individuality and freedom from all government.

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Andrews argued that what he called the inherent viciousness of the very institution of government itself

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was never to be got rid of until our natural individuality of action and responsibility

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is restored.

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Nature made individuals, not nations, and while nations exist at all, the liberties

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of the individual must perish.

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There were, Andrews insisted, two conflicting principles of government.

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Stripped of all verbiage and all illusion, they are simply, first, that man is not capable

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2. That man is capable of self-government, potentially, and that if he be not so actually,

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he needs more experience in the practice of it, including more evil consequences from

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failure, that he must learn it for himself as he learns other things, that he is entitled

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of Right to his own self-government, whether good or bad in the judgment of others, whenever

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he exercises it at his own cost, that is, without encroachment upon the equal right

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of others to govern themselves.

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This last is the doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual.

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Yet by the late summer of 1857, scarcely four years after his exchange with Greeley and

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James had appeared in book form, Pearl Andrews had, again, moved on.

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His new enthusiasm was the positivism of the French philosopher Auguste Comte.

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He was, as James J. Martin puts it, a thorough-going anarchist no longer.

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And in the years that followed, his principal intellectual concern became the torturous

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task of reconciling antithetical conceptions of the nature of human society, an attempt

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to Fuse the Diverse Contributions of Fourier, Warren and Comte into a Grandiose Eclectic

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Social Order.

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But this short list is woefully incomplete, for Andrews hoped to include not just the

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ideas of Fourier, Warren and Comte in his new synthesis, but also the ideas of Immanuel

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Swedenborg and Karl Marx.

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Yes, Karl Marx.

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William Gary Klein reports that Andrews was among the first Americans to discover Marx

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and the first to publish his Communist Manifesto in the United States.

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And it's not hard to find echoes of Marx's thought in Andrews' work.

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For example, according to Klein, in the late 1850s, under Comte's influence, Andrews began

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to believe that government, if manipulated by social scientists, might be an effective

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agent for the social reforms he wanted to see.

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In this condition of world order, anarchism would eventuate as government control was

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discarded.

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In effect, the withering away of the state.

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Even as early as 1851 in the original edition of his Science of Society, Andrews had written

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that if the labourer enjoyed the full results of his own labour in immediate products or

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or equivalence of cost, two hours of labor a day would be ample to supply the ordinary

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wants of the individual, that is, to bring his condition up to the average standard of

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comfort, even without the benefits of labor-saving machinery or the economies of the large scale.

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The remaining time of the individual would then be at his disposition for providing a

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higher grade of luxury, for mental improvement and amusement, and for laying up accumulations

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The Endulgence of Wealth as a Provision for Sickness, Old Age, The Indulgence of Benevolence, Taste, etc.

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One is reminded with a start of Marx's prediction in The German Ideology in 1845 that in communist society where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity,

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but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production

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and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt

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in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner,

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just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

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Andrews seems to have been one of those people whose mind is so open that all his brains

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fall out.

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He was persuaded by virtually everyone he read, everyone he heard speak.

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He was the ideal sympathetic reader for any author, the ideal sympathetic listener for

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any lecturer.

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He made an honest effort to understand where that author or lecturer was coming from, what

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his or her fundamental premises were.

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He made an effort to see how, given those premises, the rest of the doctrine being promulgated

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by that author or lecturer must follow inescapably.

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And if there was any sense, any sense at all, in which the fundamental premises in question

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could be said to be true, why, then the author or lecturer promulgating them must be right.

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To Andrews it seemed obvious that Swedenborg was right, Fourier was right, Warren was right,

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Comte was right, and Marx was right, and if they were all right, then it must be possible

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to explain logically in exactly what senses they were all right, and exactly how their

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seemingly incompatible ideas actually could be reconciled and made to work together harmoniously.

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Stephen Pearl Andrews spent his last years trying to create that great synthesis, which

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he called universology.

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Today, few remember that he made the effort. Fewer still have read any of what he wrote

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about universology. Today, Stephen Pearl Andrews is known best for the period in the early

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to mid-1850s when he was an individualist anarchist and made his fleeting contribution

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to the libertarian tradition.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.

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The Theory of Money and Credit