Blackstone River Valley National Historical ParkPagina 8 di 17
Adin Ballou was a pacifist, and his father fought in the Revolutionary War
Adin Ballou, a minister who founded the community of Hopedale in Massachusetts, was known as a "man of peace." His father, Ariel Ballou, had fought in the American Revolution. A National Park Service article from Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park uses the family's papers to ask how a pacifist made sense of a revolutionary inheritance.
Adin Ballou: minister, pacifist, and founder of Hopedale.
A minister who acted beyond the pulpit
Adin Ballou (1803 to 1890) grew up in the first generation to inherit the Revolution, alongside the rise of American industry. He chose not to pursue wealth and instead ministered to thousands of people across the Blackstone Valley, as a controversial but impassioned preacher. By the 1830s his convictions were strong enough that he felt he had to act beyond the pulpit. He led a group to found their own "Dale of Hope" in Mendon, Massachusetts. Hopedale, established in March 1842, became a prosperous commune and then a company town in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
His beliefs were polarizing: equality for women, the abolition of slavery, and Christian non-resistance. The article stresses that he did not arrive at non-resistance easily. It was a struggle that tested him throughout his life, and he left a long paper trail of writing about his journey, Hopedale and his family's ancestry.
The father
Ariel Ballou (1758 to 1839) lived in Cumberland, Rhode Island, where Adin was the seventh of eight children. He had a farm, a sawmill and a cider mill, and invested in woolen mills. Adin called him "an intelligent, upright, enterprising farmer" who owned over two hundred acres in Cumberland and nearby Wrentham, Massachusetts, and who made sure none of his family grew up idle.
A drawing of the Ariel Ballou House in Cumberland, Rhode Island.
Adin remembered his father's change from "the title of militia Captain" to "that of Deacon." He also recalled Ariel saying he hoped he had killed no one, though he never knew the effect of his bullets. The article suggests this may have been a selective way of remembering him.
A fuller account comes from the pension application Ariel made in the early 1830s, at the age of 74. By his own testimony and that of other servicemen, he served in a series of units:
| When | Service, as he described it |
|---|---|
| June 1775 | Joined a company of minute men for one year as a private, stationed at Newport and then at Bristol |
| September 1776 | Private in the Rhode Island State Troops, on Rhode Island when the British took possession in December 1776 |
| January 1777 | Minuteman again, in a company under the Governor's immediate orders, which he said he stayed with until the end of the war |
He spent considerable time on Aquidneck Island and was active in Newport, including in Spencer's Expedition (October 1777) and Sullivan's Expedition (August 1778). He testified that he was in the battle of 28 August 1778 "all day long." In June 1832 he was awarded $200 in backpay and a $40 semi-annual allowance set to end in 1836. Adin remembered his father as a militia captain, while the testimony gives his rank in the first two of these units as private.
Ariel Ballou's war record.
Two kinds of inheritance
Adin was too young to serve in the War of 1812 and went straight into ministry. While his father was sorting out the pension, Adin was working out his position on peace. After considerable debate and personal turmoil he decided, in the late 1830s, to live by "the principles of Christ's gospel in the spirit of holy martyrdom," and wrote: "I became a Christian Non resistant." He knew this put him out of step with many of his countrymen, and wrote that if it made him a fanatic in 1839, he was "a still greater one in 1889."
Adin also became his family's historian. His Elaborate History and Genealogy of the Ballous in America recorded birth and death dates and how he preferred to remember each relative, so much of what is known about the family comes from his pen. In many ways he saw his father as a pattern: by middle age he too had land, agricultural projects and a life in the ministry. But his world was different. Ariel spent three formative years fighting for independence; Adin chose to separate himself from the society his father and grandfather had fought to establish. His non-resistance tested even close allies when the Civil War came.
The gravestone of Levi Tower, Adin Ballou's maternal grandfather, who also served in the Revolutionary War. NPS photo.
Ariel Ballou died in 1839 and is buried with family in the Elder Ballou Meeting House cemetery in Cumberland, remembered as a Deacon. Nearby lies Levi Tower, Adin's maternal grandfather and a Captain of a Rhode Island company, whose grave carries a soldier's honors, with American flags refreshed each season. The article closes by noting that Ariel's descendants have not claimed his war lineage; instead a statue in Hopedale honors Adin, a man who believed in the power of peace.
Sources
- National Park Service, Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park, "A Revolutionary Inheritance" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-revolutionary-inheritance.htm); rewritten in hubnx's own words.