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By Root 7617 0

in 1820s England. Radical urban artisans argued that religion bolstered authoritarian regimes, crippled freedom of thought, and undermined the independent rationality essential to citizens of the republican society they longed to create. English radicals took to celebrating Paine’s birthday each year, and when many of them fled depression and repression in the late 1820s, they transplanted the custom to New York City. Joining forces with local freethinkers, they gathered at Harmony Hall on each anniversary and raised their glasses in toasts such as “Christianity and the Banks, on their last legs.” In 1827 a weekly lecture series on deism was regularly drawing three hundred people, and George Henry Evans, a journeyman printer of English parentage, had begun bringing out fresh editions of Paine, Elihu Palmer, and other freethought advocates.

Radicals hoped thus to inoculate New York’s workers against the tractarians who, they believed, threatened the separation of church and state, and thus reason and republicanism itself. When Sabbatarians tried in 1828 to prohibit mail deliveries on Sunday, radicals denounced them as a would-be Christian party in politics, intent on compelling the citizenry to their standards. Proving themselves as disciplined as the evangelicals, the freethinkers, aided by a still-widespread anticlericalism, helped beat back the Sabbatarian offensive. Not surprisingly, when Fanny Wright arrived, they hailed her as a spectacular champion of their cause.

At first, however, distinguished elites, men like Cadwallader Golden and Philip Hone, also came to hear Wright speak, in part because for all her radicalism Fanny had impeccable social credentials and was no stranger to Manhattan’s upper class. Wright’s father was a linen merchant who admired Tom Paine, and her mother a child of the British aristocracy. Born in Scotland in 1795, she had first visited New York in 1818, aged twenty-three, with her sister Camilla, to meet liberal thinkers and political exiles. Back in Europe in 1820, she published her Views of Society and Manners in America, an enthusiastic, prorepublican book that won her the attention and affection of Lafayette. With characteristic boldness, Wright suggested he either marry or adopt her.

In 1824 she followed Lafayette to the United States, and in New York her special relationship to the hero won her special attention. She returned yet again in 1828, to undertake a speaking tour of U.S. cities, and quickly became the most notorious orator of her age. In January 1829 Wright decided to “pitch [her] tent” in New York City. “All things considered,” she wrote, New York “is the most central spot both with respect to Europe and this country,” and whatever worked on the Hudson would soon “spread far and wide.”

Wright’s support from the likes of Golden evaporated even before her six-lecture series ended. Not only were the gentry unsettled that a woman was speaking to large sexually mixed audiences, they were appalled by what she was saying. William Leete Stone, editor of the Commercial Advertiser, championed many of the same causes Fanny stood for—he admired Lafayette and supported Greek independence—but Wright’s attacks on clergymen and Christianity drove him to near-pathological rage. Declaring that she had “unsexed herself,” he denounced “her pestilent doctrines” and labeled her a “bold blasphemer, and a voluptuous preacher of licentiousness.” Newspapers attacked her boarding-school idea as an infringement of parental rights and an assault on the family and refused to print letters written on her behalf. Old friends denounced her. Society refused to receive her. “Fanny Wrightism” became an epithet in gentry circles and would remain one for decades.

By the time Wright’s fifth lecture got underway, opponents had moved from words to deeds, setting a barrel full of oil of turpentine afire at the entrance door. Suffocating smoke billowed up the staircase into the hall above, touching off a panic-stricken race to escape. None of this daunted her followers, including a young Brooklyn carpenter and