Jonathan Baxter Harrison - Life

Life

Born in a log cabin in Greene County, Ohio, he early showed an eagerness for reading, often studying beside the fire at night after a long day spent working in the fields. As a young man, he became a backwoods Methodist minister, and then worked for a Quaker-run abolitionist paper. Volunteering for service in the Union Army, he was soon given a medical discharge, and spent the remaining war years as editor of the Winchester Journal in Randolph County, Indiana. During this time he began corresponding with Charles Eliot Norton, the secretary of the Loyal Publication Society, beginning a lifelong friendship. In Norton’s papers we see Harrison described as a figure much like Abraham Lincoln: an unaffected frontiersman, at once virtuous and wise.

After the war, Harrison became a Unitarian minister and active in Spiritualism, a religious movement that attracted many abolitionists and other reformers. To be closer to Norton, Harrison moved east, obtaining a position as Unitarian minister 1870-1873 in Montclair, New Jersey, and then from 1879-1884 in Franklin Falls, New Hampshire, where he lived until his death. He made the acquaintance of members of Norton’s circle, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect and social critic, and William Dean Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

At the encouragement of Norton and his friends, Harrison began writing on some of the most important social issues of the day. These included the conditions in the South after the end of Reconstruction; working class culture and political life in New England; the condition of the American Indians; and the deforestation of the Northeast. During the 1882 campaign to preserve the natural environment around Niagara Falls, Harrison wrote a series of letters to newspapers in Boston and New York that turned public opinion in favor of preservation. By 1889 he was a well-known figure among New England journalists and intellectuals; in that year he was awarded an honorary degree (Artium Magister) by Harvard University.

Harrison was recognized by his friends as someone with a unique and perceptive view of American life. His work has an ethnographic feel, particularly his documentation of life in the post-bellum South, based on extensive travels and contact with ordinary people in the everyday business of life. One of his major concerns was to show the highly educated cultural elite how the rest of America lived, thought, and felt. Like Charles Eliot Norton, he was a conservative in the stamp of Matthew Arnold, worried that capitalism insidiously worked to degrade culture, and part of his intentions—particularly in documenting the life of the New England working class—was to make the cultured elite more aware and more concerned about the spiritual life of ordinary people. His work remains today as an important testimony of the conditions of life in the United States of the late nineteenth century.