CHRISTIAN ENGLAND'S ATHEIST OTHER

Southwell was born in London in 1814, the thirty-third and last child of a fiercely anticlerical piano maker, William Southwell, and the only child of Fanny, William's former servant and third wife.Footnote 8 At eleven, Charles left school to work as a finisher at the piano factory of Broadwood and Sons. After debating Calvinism with an evangelical workmate, he became a militant atheist dedicated to “unrestrained personal liberty.”Footnote 9

During the English Reform crisis of the early 1830s, Southwell took the offensive against Old Corruption. Opening an ultraradical bookshop near Westminster and a “rational school,” he championed the blasphemous and seditious press. In 1835, following a troubled marriage and the death of his first wife, he joined the British legion as a mercenary in the war in Spain. Returning to London in 1837, sick, half-starved, and penniless, he turned again to free thought, attracting huge crowds at Kennington Common with sensational open-air lectures for “rationalistic principles” and against Christianity. In 1840 Robert Owen's socialist movement enlisted Southwell as a missionary. A brilliant, uninhibited speaker, Southwell became British free thought's most electrifying advocate during the 1830s and 1840s. But he hated “priestcraft” too much to accept Owen's attempts to win respectability by ending attacks on Christianity. The two men fell out, and Southwell quit in 1841. In that year he launched the Oracle of Reason, whose fourth number, “The Jew Book,” provoked the reaction he desired.

On Saturday, 27 November, Sir James Wood, a Bristol magistrate, issued a warrant for Southwell's arrest on the charge of “unlawfully and wickedly” writing and publishing a “scandalous, impious, blasphemous, and profane Libel” of “the Holy Scriptures and the Christian Religion.” In January 1842, Southwell defended himself in one of the most celebrated blasphemy trials of the century. In an almost eleven-hour speech, he insisted that he could not be found guilty because he had simply told the truth. Sir Charles Wetherall, unconvinced, fined him a hundred pounds and sentenced him to a year in prison. Odious to the orthodox, revolting to the respectable, Christian England's diabolical Other languished in Bristol jail for thirteen months.Footnote 10

Yet the establishment triumphed only in its own eyes. Southwell, who set out to win martyrdom by using the most inflammatory language possible, claimed moral victory. By provoking Christian England into clubbing him into silence with the law, this hero of freedom had, in the eyes of a growing group of sympathizers, exposed Old Corruption's moral bankruptcy. Sales of the Oracle rocketed, reaching over six thousand by December 1841. Southwell's martyrdom inspired the publication of a rash of new atheist papers. Free thought leader George Jacob Holyoake, declaring “the persecution of my friend” the “grave of my religion,” announced his conversion to out-and-out atheism.Footnote 11

On his release early in 1843, Southwell angered his associates by refusing to resume the Oracle’s editorship. Over the next few years he repudiated intellectual arguments for atheism. Cease gassing about abstractions, he urged colleagues, and concentrate instead upon exposing Christian sins, errors, and crimes. Holyoake, the major free thought leader, preferred to concentrate on social reform rather than on attacking Christianity. Southwell quarreled and broke with Holyoake, much as he had with Owen.

By 1841 if not earlier, Southwell was wielding radical French evolutionary materialism against Christianity. All life evolved by purely physical and chemical laws from matter, he informed Oracle readers.Footnote 12 His conception of human evolution had a racialist tinge. To illustrate the “regular gradations” that linked “man” with “the inferior animals,” Southwell copied from the radical French materialist Pierre Boitard's L’homme fossile a sketch of “fossil man,” a hairy, half-clothed, axe-wielding creature, whose flattened forehead, low cranial angle, and dark skin appeared primitive and apelike. As historian James Secord has noted, this illustration resembled contemporary racist depictions of black Africans. Southwell was filling the gap between the highly evolved Briton and “inferior animals” with primitive races. Humans had evolved mind and body from lower forms, Southwell declared, and had no immortal soul or divine image conferring any “superiority over the brutes.” Such a naturalistic view of human origins might appear “impious” to Christians, he noted, an “insult to the creator, in whose image they tell us we are made.” So much the better. Shameful “ignorance” and “pride” had long led “clerical obstructives” [sic] to oppose “discoveries in science” that undermined their “prejudices.”Footnote 13

To “achieve its full potential as an ideology,” George Fredrickson has argued, “racism had to be emancipated from Christian universalism”—the doctrine that every human being had a soul to be saved. In England, “evangelical Christianity and its commitment to the [biblical] belief that all human beings descended from Adam” significantly inhibited the growth of virulent “scientific racism” before 1850.Footnote 14 Although Southwell never embraced evangelical Christianity, in Britain his racism remained inchoate and occasional largely because he did not see the dark races as much of a threat. There, he mainly attacked religious Others—Christians and Jews.Footnote 15

Between 1843 and 1855 Southwell launched several radical newspapers and wrote dozens of pamphlets, including an attack on the institution of marriage. In 1849, facing a £150 fine from the Inland Revenue for serving alcohol without a license, he almost fled for the United States, a “land of liberty” where “no one is denied the liberty of wolloping [sic] his own nigger.”Footnote 16 But freethinkers in Manchester asked him to take over their Hall of Science. In 1850 he returned to London and lectured on literature, religion, and politics. In April 1855, tired of fighting the authorities and freethinking colleagues, he sailed from Liverpool for Australia, hoping for a fresh start and a better life.

MELBOURNE'S MESSIAH

Arriving in Melbourne on 17 July, he launched “orations for the people” in the Protestant Hall in Melbourne's Stephen Street, hoping to attract attention and earn money. Supporting Britain in the Crimean war, he lauded national liberators such as Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy and Louis Kossuth in Hungary. Locals responded warmly. Few speakers “can interest the people better than Mr Southwell,” who had pitched his lectures to suit the “taste” of ordinary Australians, gushed the Age. He “seems to know what they will appreciate” and avoids all “tediousness.”Footnote 17

Soon Southwell waded into the thick of the social and political conflicts transforming colonial Australia. Gold attracted thousands into Victoria during the 1850s. Conflict erupted in December 1854 when heavy-handed police enforcement of government mining regulations provoked a miners’ revolt at Ballarat. By the time firing stopped at the Eureka stockade, five soldiers and thirty diggers lay dead. By mid-1855, many ordinary Victorians, critical of government heavy-handedness at Eureka, were also growing hostile toward pastoralists—the squatters—monopolizing large areas of productive land.

Early in August, Southwell addressed a huge public meeting, estimated at three thousand strong, in Melbourne. The colony could “progress” only if the “governing classes” acquired “wisdom,” proclaimed Southwell. The “greatest good of the greatest number” constituted the “true principle of government,” he declared, winning “cheers” from the crowd. A “few monopolists” were trying to “ground down” and “oppress” ordinary settlers. But “the people,” the “source of all legitimate power,” need only combine in a “temperate and firm union” and they could overthrow the “landlockers” and secure their “grand object”—lands for the people. The crowd nominated Southwell to a deputation to express their demands to the government on 13 August.Footnote 18 But the governor, Sir Charles Hotham, refused to open up lands for settlement without the appropriate legislation. On 24 August, declaring the people “masters of the Government,” Southwell announced his candidacy in Victoria's first Legislative Council elections. Political tensions were rising.Footnote 19

The local establishment responded. On 22 October the Age exposed Southwell's atheist past in a lead article titled “A Professional Demagogue.” The Australian colonies differed greatly from Britain, the editor observed, in having “no privileged or titled classes,” no “inveterate abuses in Church and State,” and “no poverty stricken classes” for a “political agitator” to work up. In Victoria the “people themselves” could fix the colony's “few” and “simple” problems. Yet Southwell, a “professional demagogue,” was “placarding the walls of the city” in an attempt to drum up support.Footnote 20

The Age then tabled its trump. We “happened lately to see a little pamphlet” titled “A Defence of Atheism: by Charles Southwell.” It showed that “very recently in England” Southwell had been a “public opponent of Christianity and defender of Atheism.” We do not “condemn any of our fellow citizens on account of his religious belief,” declared the writer. Yet, while “conceding the utmost freedom of opinion to every man,” the Age did not consider a “teacher of Atheism in England” worthy “of confidence when he appears as a teacher of political principles in Australia.”Footnote 21

The conflict plumbed new depths the next day. In his election manifesto, Southwell promised not to allow Mechanics Institutes receiving government subsidies to be turned by the authorities into “Normal Schools of Corruption.” Seeing Old Corruption's tentacles everywhere, Southwell charged Melbourne Christians with subverting the freedom of the people by trying to control the Mechanics Institutes. The editor of the Age responded by attacking the self-appointed “political regenerator of Victoria” as either a “conscienceless impostor or a raving lunatic.”Footnote 22

A week later, Legislative Council candidates and electors met in front of Melbourne's Supreme Court House at a nomination meeting presided over by the mayor. Southwell's popularity had plummeted after the Age’s exposé of his atheist past and the furor over the Mechanics Institute. Nobody would second his nomination. Undaunted, he spoke boldly. As a “thorough radical reformer” he promised to “deal with the squatting interest in a very direct, short, and comprehensive way.” He called for universal education, an end to all church endowments, universal suffrage, the ballot, no property qualifications for electors, payment of members, and equal electoral districts. But, aware that his candidacy was doomed, he withdrew in favor of a more moderate candidate—though not before attacking the Melbourne press as “vampires sucking the blood of the public.”Footnote 23

The Herald delivered its coup de grace. Not even the “egotistical” and abusive Southwell, a “splenetic slang-whanger,” could believe the nasty stories he had invented, wrote the editor. Southwell had offered himself to the people for “political prostitution.” But Melburnians found him “too imbecile” and “worthless” to “tempt a purchaser.”Footnote 24

Southwell stayed in Victoria until the end of the year, making ends meet by playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and giving Shakespearean recitals on the gold fields. But his goose was cooked. On 4 January 1856, he left for Sydney. There, he acted at the Victoria Theatre. He then joined W. H. Foley's theatrical troupe, with which he sailed for Auckland late in January. Before we follow him, a short sketch of New Zealand racial politics during the first half of the nineteenth century will help contextualize the final chapter of Southwell's career.

RELIGION, RACE, AND NEW ZEALAND POLITICS, 1814–55

In New Zealand, as throughout the empire, religion, race, and politics were inextricably interconnected. The following sketch of New Zealand history during the half-century before Southwell's arrival highlights three interrelated points. First, most Maori embraced Christianity during the 1830s and 1840s without becoming docile doormats. Rather, they vigorously defended their land and political rights against settler and government incursion. Second, high profile Pakeha (white) humanitarians in Britain and New Zealand, with Anglicans particularly prominent, also championed Maori rights and welfare. Humanitarians hoped that New Zealand would become a world exemplar of a racially amalgamated society, in which the races enjoyed equal rights and opportunities. Leading New Zealand historian Alan Ward has characterized this humanitarian racial vision as “in many respects the very antithesis of racism.”Footnote 25 Settlers from the subordinated classes in Britain, however, attacked what many saw as a biracial Anglican establishment monopolizing land and power and oppressing the ordinary colonist.

The Church Missionary Society (CMS) arrived in the Bay of Islands in 1814, followed by Methodist missionaries in 1823, and French Catholics in 1838. Maori, although happy to patronize missionaries in order to facilitate trade, at first showed little interest in Christianity. But the intertribal Musket Wars that exploded during the 1820s, decimating many tribes and destroying several, raised hard questions about old ways. During the 1830s, missionary peacemaking and condemnation of revenge warfare attracted growing numbers of Maori as ways to a more peaceful, prosperous future. Thousands attended mission stations to learn the tikanga (customs and correct behavior) of the God of the Bible and to equip themselves to make the most of modernity. The Anglicans of the CMS attracted most interest. The Church of England remained the strongest Maori church throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote 26

But danger loomed. Leaders of the major British Protestant missionary societies working in the Pacific warned an 1836 House of Commons Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes that incoming whites threatened the welfare of native peoples. In 1837–38 the CMS locked horns with the New Zealand Association, which was lobbying parliament for a charter to enable it to colonize New Zealand. Convinced that an influx of white settlers would undermine Maori Christianity, the CMS condemned “European Colonization” as “uniformly” producing “disastrous consequences to the Aborigines of uncivilized countries, in their rights, their persons, their property, and moral condition.”Footnote 27 The CMS hoped that, if they could not prevent British colonization altogether, they could at least delay it for several decades in order to enable Maori to build up the knowledge and skills necessary to cope. Such arguments won support from evangelical sympathizers in the Colonial Office such as Charles Grant and James Stephen.

New Zealand Company leaders, incensed, declared war. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the founder of the New Zealand Association and a lapsed Quaker who despised the Anglican oligarchy, spent three years in Newgate prison during the late 1820s for abducting a schoolgirl heiress. He savaged the CMS as a cabal of religious fanatics trying to turn New Zealand into a “‘Theocracy’ and ‘Levitical Republic.’”Footnote 28 Company leaders, closely linked to the Radicals in the House of Commons, knew that if Britain annexed New Zealand, land purchasing would prove difficult and expensive. They launched a preemptive strike. The first Company ship, the Tory, sailed into Port Nicholson (modern Wellington) in 1839. Soon William Wakefield, Edward's brother, claimed to have purchased millions of acres from local chiefs.Footnote 29

Its hand forced, the Colonial Office instructed William Hobson to draw up a treaty. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between the Crown and, eventually, some five hundred Maori chiefs, guaranteed Maori signatories all the rights and privileges of British subjects and entire chieftainship over their lands, forests, fisheries, and other treasured possessions. In return, Maori ceded sovereignty to Britain and were required to sell land to the government, not private companies or individuals. Maori chiefs with close links to the Protestant missionaries made the decisive speeches in favor of the Treaty. Church Missionary Society missionaries, led by Henry Williams, translated the Treaty into Maori and took it around the country for further signatures over the following weeks.Footnote 30

Early governors, all Anglican, relied heavily on CMS missionaries to advise them on land policy and race relations. Hobson's successor, Robert FitzRoy, a Tory Evangelical whose appointment the CMS had suggested, investigated early New Zealand Company purchases and often either denied their validity or reduced their extent. He held an official inquiry into the Wairau affray of 1843, in which several Maori and over two dozen Pakeha lost their lives in a land dispute that turned deadly near Nelson. Though condemning Ngati Toa chief Te Rangihaeata's “murder” of those settlers who surrendered, FitzRoy, following CMS advice, found the New Zealand Company ultimately responsible and refused to exact vengeance.

Alfred Domett, a Nelson lawyer who dismissed Christianity as “superstition,” despised the “exaggerated and mistaken philanthropy” of FitzRoy and his missionary advisers. Their “morbid and ostentatious sensitiveness to native rights” and “sentimental scrupulousness about depriving [Maori] of possessions” were obstructing the progress of the colony. The “rights of the aborigines to land, of the capabilities of which they cannot avail themselves, are not to be considered of any great value or entitled to much respect.” Revering Thomas Carlyle as “the deepest thinker of the age,” Domett suggested his fellow colonists emulate “the settlers of Connecticut and Massachusetts” who “gathered their forces together, [and] attacked and defeated the natives with great slaughter.”Footnote 31

The following year, Earl Grey, secretary of state for colonies, wrote to FitzRoy's successor, Governor George Grey, recommending the introduction of a new constitution granting self-government to the settlers. This proposal, restricting the franchise to those able to read and write English, would have excluded most Maori men. Earl Grey recommended that all lands not actually cultivated by Maori should be considered “waste lands,” which the Crown could take over and sell.Footnote 32

Anglican leaders protested. Earl Grey's proposals breached the Treaty of Waitangi and betrayed Maori and missionaries alike, declared George Selwyn, first Anglican bishop of New Zealand. He intended to “use all legal and constitutional measures” in his power, he wrote the earl, to “inform the Natives of New Zealand of their rights and privileges as British subjects, and to assist them in asserting and maintaining them.” Champions of Selwyn, Maori, and the Treaty in the heated Commons debate that ensued hailed mainly from England's Anglican elite. They included Selwyn's friend William Gladstone, Edward Cardwell, Sir E. N. Buxton, Lord Clive, and the earl of Arundel. The Aborigines Protection Society, dominated by Quakers and Anglican Evangelicals, also condemned Earl Grey's recommendations. Apart from land legitimately sold to settlers, declared the APS, “no land in New Zealand” had not “some native proprietor.” In New Zealand, Governor George Grey, who believed that Maori would go to war if he tried to implement Earl Grey's plan, refused to do so. Furious New Zealand Company supporters in the Commons denounced Selwyn as a “great agitator” favoring Maori, interfering in politics, and trampling on the “civil and political rights of the Colonists.” Joseph Hume, a Radical, urged Earl Grey to sack a clerical “firebrand” who dared “dispute the orders of the Home Government.”Footnote 33

Maori Christian chiefs also urged the British authorities not to devolve more power to the settlers. In 1851, senior Ngati Haua chief Wiremu Tamihana, a devout, mission-educated Christian, attacked demands for self-government made by the Wellington Constitutional Association, led by settler-politicians Isaac Featherstone and William Fox. In a letter to Queen Victoria, Tamihana observed that an exclusively settler government “might do if there were no Maories, and if all the Pakehas were good men” who “did not want land.” But a “few bad men” in the settler parliament would “spit out evil,” and the “good men would be afraid, and say nothing.” Soon it would “be with the Maories of New Zealand as it has been with many of the Maories of America: they would in a little time be seen no longer in the land of their fathers.” Tamihana urged Queen Victoria “never to give up New Zealand” to settler-politicians such as Featherston and Fox—“ignorant place-seeking quacks” who had become “drunk and giddy from elevating themselves in imagination to high and public places.” The Aborigines Protection Society published this and other letters from Christian chiefs in the Aborigines Friend and Colonial Intelligencer, which circulated in Britain and Europe.Footnote 34 Historian Lyndsay Head has drawn attention to “the intensity of the relationship between Maori and the Christian faith” in this period, the new religion transforming Maori “ideas about politics as much as religion.” Many chiefs besides Tamihana found Christianity “politically empowering.”Footnote 35

To a growing body of settlers, however, it seemed that leaders of both races were collaborating against them. New Zealand politics during the 1840s and 1850s strikingly illustrates David Cannadine's contention that British imperialism constituted “a class act” in which British and indigenous élites forged alliances across racial boundaries.Footnote 36 Into a colony bubbling with interconnected economic, class, racial, and religious tensions, Southwell sailed in January of 1856.

SAVING NEW ZEALAND FROM OLD CORRUPTION

After a brief season with the W. H. Foley acting troupe at Auckland's newly built Theatre Royal, Southwell quarreled with the company and quit. He staged his own productions, but they, too, failed. He ran the theater as a ballroom instead, teaching dancing. As in Melbourne, he launched a series of popular “orations” designed to attract attention and money on subjects including the Crimean war, education, and Napoleon III of France. He also published pamphlets on international and local political issues.Footnote 37

Hoping to avoid a repeat of his Melbourne debacle, Southwell reinvented his public persona yet again. This time, instead of keeping his atheism quiet, he played the Protestant. On 24 June, Southwell attacked Auckland's Freedom of Religion Society in a speech delivered in the Oddfellows Hall. This Society, led by ex-nonconformist Protestants—Methodists, Baptists, and Congregationalists— aimed to prevent any religious establishment from emerging in New Zealand. Members opposed government-sponsored Bible reading in Auckland schools as likely to favor those churches cozy with the provincial government. Only strict separation of church and state, the society believed, would ensure complete religious equality and freedom.

Far from applauding the society's campaign, as we might expect, Southwell “denounced” in “strong and sarcastic language” its efforts to keep the “Book of Books” out of schools. Without the Bible in schools, the “foundations of society would crumble into dust.” The Freedom of Religion Society was committing “an enormous crime against society.” Remarkably, it would seem, Christian England's most notorious atheist had become a pious Protestant. The Bible, which fifteen years earlier Southwell denounced as pernicious pornography, he now praised as the lynchpin of the good society. The “Jew Book” of 1841 had become, by 1856, the “Book of Books.”Footnote 38

When news of Southwell's “conversion” filtered back to England, old enemies in the free thought movement, led by G. J. Holyoake, claimed that Southwell had backslid into Christianity. Freethinkers, rationalists, and historians have debated its genuineness from that day to this. In fact, Southwell was almost certainly acting. The key to his apparent volte-face sat in his audience. Southwell targeted the Reverend Hamer, a Methodist, secretary of the Freedom of Religion Society. Why?

While living near Manchester in the late 1830s, Hamer had accepted an invitation to debate Southwell in London. Hamer turned up, but Southwell failed to show. Responding to Southwell's Auckland attack, Hamer declared that he had long known Southwell's reputation “as a public promulgator of Atheism” who used language “unfit to be repeated.” Southwell's attack on Hamer in Auckland thus constituted a preemptive strike. By posing as an outraged Protestant defending the Bible in schools against Hamer and the Freedom of Religion Society, Southwell was trying to silence a potential critic. He was prepared to try anything, including playing the Protestant, to prevent what had ruined his promising Melbourne career—being “outed” as an atheist—from happening again. It worked. Hamer pulled in his horns, expressing the hope that Southwell might become “altogether a Christian.”Footnote 39

In December 1856, hoping to supplement his income, Southwell collaborated with a couple of Auckland advertising men to launch a new weekly newspaper. The Auckland Examiner and People's Journal proclaimed “justice” its chief “principle,” unvarnished “truth” its “standard,” and “well-being of all” its “object.” Intending to reach “every class, however humble,” Southwell aimed to develop “the mind of our people” by discussing the latest science, literature, and politics. The paper paid its way by carrying advertisements from local businesses.Footnote 40

Early numbers suggest that the first British colony established after the Enlightenment delighted Southwell. New Zealand threw open “the paths of political fame and social power” to “all alike,” he enthused, without regard to birth, wealth, religion, or lack of them. It seemed just the sort of free, open, enlightened, and liberal society for which he had been crusading all his life. New Zealand rewarded “educated men of brains” over the “mere men of money” who dominated almost everywhere else. Southwell preferred an “aristocracy of Education, Sobriety, and Industry” to the aristocracies of birth and wealth that dominated the Old World, North America, and even Australia. In his adopted city of Auckland, even the most “humble” settler could reach the top by becoming mayor of the city or superintendent of the province. Providing “the best of all classes” governed, New Zealand would soon develop into a “pure” liberty-loving republic, with Auckland “the capital of a great empire.” The Auckland Provincial Council must import a “large and steady stream” of “healthy and industrious” British settlers, Southwell urged, in order to enhance the wealth of a colony destined to be the “brightest jewel” in the “British Crown.” A geologist and trigonometrical surveyor would help develop Auckland's mineral, agricultural, and industrial wealth.Footnote 41

Southwell delighted also in New Zealand's religious liberty. No established church existed. Southwell intended to keep his old enemy down. In late December 1856, he declared that the Auckland provincial government should allow religion no place in its primary schools. Children required only a “sound Commercial Education” to make them good, economically productive citizens. State-funded education should aim as its “sole object” to develop “the secular element of human nature.”Footnote 42

Aware that such views might arouse suspicion from Christians, Southwell kept up his pious pose. He reassured religious readers that he was friendly to faith in an article titled “Religion in Relation to Education” appearing in January 1857. Quoting the French Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal's “immortal aphorism” that “the heart has its arguments as well as the head,” Southwell argued that belief in God came from the heart. A “mystery,” faith had nothing to do with knowledge or understanding and must be kept out of schools. Clever “intellectualists”—Christian theologians and clergy—“profaned” faith by connecting it with knowledge and understanding in this world. Religion's “best friends” must “altogether disconnect” it from “principles, passions, and interests, purely secular.” Kicking religion upstairs, Southwell presented himself to readers as faith's noble champion. On this analysis, those who believed that Christianity had concrete ethical and political implications, requiring settlers to honor the Treaty and respect Maori rights, profaned true religion. Local Christians might well have wondered how Southwell's newfound fideism, which allowed religion no this-worldly significance, differed from his old atheism.Footnote 43

He did not fool everyone. In March of 1857 the Auckland YMCA, an interdenominational organization dominated by evangelical Protestants, banned Southwell's Examiner from its reading room. The committee divided, suggesting some reluctance about censoring Southwell's views. But the chairman, a Wesleyan, cast the deciding vote. Southwell exploded. “Woe to the Conquerors!” he warned the “politico-theological majority.” His brief honeymoon was over. Even in this almost Eden, the serpent had reared its head.Footnote 44

Soon Southwell was, as ever, spearheading a colonial nationalist crusade against Old Corruption. “Humanity-mongers” in government circles at Home constituted “the curse of the colony,” he fumed in January of 1857. Urging decent British settlers to “piece up a unity” with “savages,” these do-gooders allowed Maori “too much property and too much law.” If only England minded her own business and left the settlers alone to manage their own affairs, New Zealand's land and Maori problems would “soon be disposed of.”Footnote 45

Competing with established Auckland newspapers, Southwell also attacked his rivals, beginning with the New Zealander, edited by John Williamson, a humanitarian Methodist and superintendent of Auckland's Provincial Council. Williamson's “pro-Methodism” and “anti-Romanism,” displayed “antiquated prejudices” and a “sectarian spirit,” Southwell charged. Moreover, Williamson's “sworn devotion to Native Rights,” was crippling Auckland's economic progress.Footnote 46 Southwell also attacked Hugh Carleton, humanitarian Anglican editor of the Southern Cross and son-in-law of CMS missionary leader Henry Williams.Footnote 47

From Auckland, Southwell sent freethinking colleagues in Britain ammunition to fire at Exeter Hall and the “rather-too-gullible people of England”; secularist communication networks spanned the globe. In March of 1857, he told readers of G. J. Holyoake's Reasoner that New Zealand would become “the seat of a vast empire” as soon as it solved its Maori and missionary problems. On the basis of extensive personal experience of “savages” in Auckland and conversations with “clear-headed, honest” settlers, Southwell argued that the “native population” might “be exterminated, but never can be civilised.” Maori “professing the Christian faith” were “in every respect worse” than those “thoroughly indifferent to it.” Christian chiefs, hypocrites all, walked the streets of Auckland “self-confessed cannibals,” their faith an “affair of tobacco and blankets.” The missionaries, monopolizing “the richest lands, the finest houses,” and the “choicest women,” aimed, through “a wrong advocacy of native rights,” to win “for themselves the undisputed sovereignty of these fair islands.” With “Bible in hand they would govern the Maoris, and graciously permit the Maoris to govern the Government.”Footnote 48

In April 1857, Southwell elaborated his “intelligible and very simple” solution to the colony's problems. New Zealand could support in “ease and affluence” at least 25 million “civilized human beings.” Yet a mere hundred thousand Maori monopolized the land. How could the Colonial Office favor a handful of savages over millions of decent British settlers? Determined to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, Southwell recommended “picking the Native Lock” and reversing government land and Maori policy pursued since the “foolish Treaty of Waitanga [sic].” He exhorted fellow settlers to “sweep aside or break through” every “Native protection law” stopping direct land sales to settlers. The Crown must abandon preemption and allow settlers to purchase Maori land freely, unhindered by legal restrictions of any kind. Only by doing so could the “European population” open up the country and exploit its “immense resources” in “the interests of civilization.” Southwell's utilitarian solution to the Maori land monopoly problem was virtually identical to his short, sharp solution to Victoria's squattocracy problem.Footnote 49

By September 1858 the Examiner was selling well enough to be published twice each week. Doubtless encouraged, Southwell redoubled his attack on the idea that “bonds of love, equal terms, union physical, or political” should characterize Maori-settler relations. The humanitarian vision of New Zealand as a racially integrated society with Maori and Pakeha enjoying equal rights under the law revolted him: “We disclaim and detest the amalgamation of races doctrine” favored by “Pakeha whose lot is cast with the natives.”Footnote 50

Senior Anglican missionaries were trying to convince settlers that many Maori had embraced Christianity. The “natives” believed only in “land and women,” Southwell retorted, their Christianity a hypocritical “affair of blankets, or wheat, or potatoes, or tobacco, or pigs.” So-called Maori Christians would “with pleasure” sell “both [land and women] to the highest bidder.”Footnote 51

Eight months of enthusiastic Maori, missionary, and humanitarian bashing won Southwell growing popularity. He stood for the Auckland Provincial Council in August of 1857, winning the initial show of hands and 338 votes. He stood again in October, missing out on a seat by only thirty-one votes.Footnote 52

By 1859, as settlers streamed in and racial tensions escalated, Southwell attacked the Maori King movement. Burgeoning during the 1850s in the Waikato just south of Auckland, it aimed to unite Maori tribes under King Potatau and prevent further alienation of land. Led by Wiremu Tamihana the “Kingmaker,” a devout Christian, Kingites argued that the king would govern Maori just as Queen Victoria governed the British. God would reign over all, and love and law would bind both peoples together. According to historian Tony Ballantyne, the King movement, “profoundly Christian” in its “ideology and language,” emphasized “the primacy of the Gospel and the potency of the law.”Footnote 53 Southwell, by contrast, demonized it as black tyranny. Potatau aimed at “undivided dominion over all,” he thundered, threatening the settlers’ “very existence.” The king proposed levying import duties at every port where Maori outnumbered Pakeha. If he tried, warned Southwell, “war to the knife” was “inevitable.” India's British rulers had trusted their native sepoys before 1857 and suffered “massacre, wholesale and indiscriminate.” In Haiti, too, “blacks suddenly rose,” and “butchered” whites “by thousands.” New Zealand colonists awaited the same fate if Governor Browne, Grey's successor, continued to mollycoddle Maori.Footnote 54

The following year, war erupted in the Taranaki province a hundred and fifty miles south of Auckland. In 1862 fighting spread across the North Island, sparking the most protracted and consequential phase of the New Zealand wars that lasted until 1872. Trouble in Taranaki, brewing for years, boiled over late in 1859 when Te Teira Manuka, a minor Te Ati Awa chief out to settle an old score against Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake, the paramount chief of the tribe, offered to sell the flat, fertile Waitara block. Te Rangitake publicly opposed the sale of the land on behalf of his people. Up to this point colonial governors, following missionary advice, had generally respected tribal land rights, including the right of a chief to veto a sale, believing that the treaty required respecting Maori custom in this way. But Governor Browne, under pressure to buy land, claimed that Te Rangitake supported the King movement. Determined to break the land deadlock in Taranaki, Browne accepted Teira's offer. Te Rangitake instructed his people peacefully to resist government attempts to occupy the Waitara. They built a pa (fortified village) to assert their ownership. The government responded by declaring martial law and sending in troops. Some North Island tribes, such as Waikato, sent warriors to support Te Ati Awa. Others, reflecting the continuing strength of tribal rivalries and Christian reluctance to fight, kept their distance.Footnote 55

Upper crust Anglicans with close ties to the British establishment led the Pakeha attack on government policy. Bishop Selwyn, educated at Eton and Cambridge and friendly with William Gladstone and the duke of Newcastle, condemned the government's decision to declare martial law in Taranaki before Maori had resorted to arms. Te Ati Awa had long constituted “faithful and efficient allies of the Government,” he wrote the colonial secretary in April 1860. The state should never have resorted to “military force” before exhausting the resources of “civil power” to resolve the Waitara dispute. Te Ati Awa deserved “respect and gratitude,” said Selwyn; all the government gave them instead was bullets.Footnote 56

Archdeacon Octavius Hadfield, Oxford-educated CMS missionary at Otaki, had worked for decades with Ati Awa and knew Taranaki and Maori customary land law well. During the early 1840s, Ati Awa had won his affection and respect when he lived for four years in their huge pa at Waikanae. Accustomed to being consulted by governors over potentially controversial land and racial issues, Hadfield was furious that Governor Browne had not asked him either about the Waitara purchase or about the subsequent decision to attack Te Ati Awa, many of whom he had baptized. He exploded in a series of letters to the duke of Newcastle, secretary of state for colonies. Governor Browne had perpetrated a “gross act of injustice” and “acted illegally” by deploying British troops “to eject a native chief from land which he occupied,” declared the missionary. By attacking a “great chief who had always been loyal to Her Majesty's Government,” Browne's “act of folly” bordered on “insanity.” The governor's subsequent surprise that he had provoked “the whole native population” to “indignation” and caused “many to take up arms” simply proved his “entire” and inexcusable “ignorance” of Maori affairs. If the Colonial Office delayed intervening, a “war of races” might ensue. In a second letter, Hadfield argued that Taranaki Maori were “fighting in support of law and order” against “the illegal conduct of Governor Browne” and declared himself “thoroughly convinced of the deep hold the Christian religion had taken” on Ati Awa. Sir William Martin, ex–chief justice of the Supreme Court and a devout High Church Anglican, added his carefully reasoned protest to a swelling Anglican chorus. By mid-1860, most CMS missionaries and most of Selwyn's Anglican clergy were publicly condemning the Taranaki war.Footnote 57

Maori Christians, often Anglican, bombarded British authorities with letters and petitions of protest, vastly outnumbering Pakeha critics of the government. In March of 1860, Nepia Taratoa, Kingi Te Ahoaho, and 495 other Ati Awa Anglicans from Otaki petitioned Queen Victoria directly. They lamented that although they had lived for many years “under the peace-securing principles of religion” and had faithfully “upheld” the “laws” of the land, Governor Browne had “unwarrantably” taken Te Rangitake's land and then “fired upon” peaceful and “loving subjects” of Her Majesty. Te Rangitake and his supporters aimed “not to trample upon the law,” the petitioners declared, but simply to retain those lands they did not wish to sell. “Your loving children cry to you” to remove the governor before he did further “evil,” they importuned the queen.Footnote 58

In Hawkes Bay, Renata Kawepo Tamakihikurangi of Ngati Kahungunu, a senior chief, told a great hui (meeting) at the Pawhakaairo that when one member of the Body of Christ suffered, all suffer. The troubles of Te Ati Awa in Taranaki deserved the sympathy of Maori throughout the land. Governor Browne had committed “abominable murders” in Taranaki. Queen Victoria should remove this “Governor gun-feeder, powder-feeder, ball-feeder” and send one offering “soft and eatable food” such as “runangas [biracial councils] … quiet judgements … love and charity, and good works.” While the Maori people were worshiping the true God, said Kawepo, the governor had cast aside Jehovah to embrace Uenuku the man-eater, carrying him to Taranaki as his god in order to destroy the natives. Maori were writing directly to the queen, Kawepo declared, because they expected no help from the settler parliament—“the lick-platter assembly of the Governor.”Footnote 59 Hadfield brought Kawepo's condemnation of the government to an international audience by publishing this letter in the second of his tracts for the times.Footnote 60

This avalanche of protest from Maori and Pakeha Christian leaders created a moral crisis among the colonists. Anglican leaders of both races blamed the government for the war and depicted Te Ati Awa as law-abiding Christians defending their lands and lives against arbitrary and unjust interference by the state. Instead of sanctioning the Taranaki war, these critics condemned it as unjust and unholy.

Southwell responded decisively. Kingi had launched “open rebellion against law and the queen's authority in New Zealand,” he thundered. In early April he suggested that the government offer a “large reward” for Kingi “dead or alive.” Inciting the Maori “rebels,” however, and ultimately responsible for the colony's troubles, Southwell identified a more sinister enemy. “Nowhere but in New Zealand” had “savages been systematically corrupted upon Exeter Hall principles.” The missionaries had “systematically taught” Maori to consider themselves “more than a match for educated Europeans” and were now trying to delude the British government into thinking that Maori could embrace civilization and stand beside white settlers as equals. In fact, said Southwell, “no Native can ever be civilised” until “in his coffin”—the only good Maori was a dead one.Footnote 61

Southwell blamed “missionaries as a tribe” for the natives’ “anti-European disposition.” The missionary campaign to educate Maori led to disaster, as the King movement and letters and petitions from Maori Christians criticizing the government proved. “Everywhere,” Southwell fumed, the “missionary educated native is more priggish, and conceited, and cunning, and untruthful” than “the native who has all along held fast to his heathenism.”Footnote 62 Historians Jean and John Comaroff have described the idea of building a “multi-racial commonwealth” as a “missionary fantasy.”Footnote 63 To Southwell, in colonial New Zealand, Maori Christians, missionaries, and their allies were taking the idea much too seriously.

On 14 April Southwell attacked the racial views of the Reverend Richard Taylor, CMS missionary at Wanganui. In Te Ika a Maui, or New Zealand and Its Inhabitants (1855), published in London, Taylor criticized “civilized man” for looking “down upon the more unenlightened portion of his race as belonging to an inferior order of beings.”Footnote 64 According to Southwell, only “ultramontane missionaries” such as Taylor believed the races should “live together, love together, trade together, make laws together, upon one platform together.” No true Englishmen could forget “race,” “blood,” or “nationality” enough to accept a mixed-race parliament with Maori MPs “sitting in judgement upon British settlers.” A recent trip to Poverty Bay proved the absurdity of Taylor's view that Maori were “mentally equal to Europeans, or at least might soon be made so.” The “savages” Southwell encountered remained “as savage and turbulent and mean and ungrateful” as when they had “snarled” at Captain Cook a century before.Footnote 65

Southwell blended anticlerical, masculinist, racist, and ultrapatriotic rhetoric in his populist crusade. In an article titled “Blood for Blood,” he denounced Governor Browne's attempt to “conciliate” the “spoiled pets of a self-styled Christian government.” Invoking the “sacred name of justice and humanity,” he called on “Brother Colonists” to demand “the head of Wiremu Kingi” as payment for the “British blood” of “innocent settlers and their hapless offspring.” Self-respecting “white men” could no longer “tamely” suffer the “disgrace of our country's flag” and “the tarnishing of our national honour.”Footnote 66

In early May, Southwell urged Governor Browne to “put down” with a “strong hand” the Pakeha “abettors” of the Maori King movement. “Treason-hatching Bishops,” Southwell reminded readers, had before now suffered the “full penalty” of the law for their “high crime.” His suggestion that the government execute Bishop Selwyn won modest popular support.Footnote 67

Unlike most New Zealand commentators, Southwell classified the Maori below the African (“Quashee”) in the hierarchy of races. Some authorities had classified “Quashee” as the missing link between humans and “brute nature,” a view with which Southwell, an evolutionary materialist, agreed. Yet Africans, though incapable of “high civilisation,” were at least semi-human—they had an “emotional nature” and a rudimentary capacity for moral sentiment. The Maori (“Boshee”), by contrast, were incapable of moral feeling. The Maori language had no word for “gratitude,” claimed Southwell, and Maori never displayed any. “For payment” they would “lie, rob, and murder.” If the price was right, “Boshee” would “turn Christian, or Turk, Gentile or Jew.”Footnote 68

Throughout his almost five-year colonial career, England's most militant atheist expressed probably the most extreme, systematic, and inflammatory racism in colonial New Zealand. It cannot be understood apart from the militant secularism he brought with him from Britain. By embracing Christianity, Maori Christians had forged links with, and won support from, Southwell's nemesis, the Church of England. In the colony's capital, Southwell led a populist crusade against what he depicted as a corrupt biracial Anglican establishment that monopolized land and power at the expense of the ordinary settler.

Keith Sinclair, the most influential New Zealand historian of the second half of the twentieth century, claimed that Southwell's Examiner “adequately represented the views of the majority of Europeans.”Footnote 69 Southwell's ability to pick up and play on the hopes, ambitions, and fears of ordinary settlers won him more popularity than he had ever enjoyed in his life. In 1857, with his campaign against Britain, missionaries, and Maori in full swing, he barely missed election to the Auckland Provincial Council. The Examiner’s correspondence columns in 1860 suggest that Southwell's patriotic populism won considerable support during the colony's civil war over Taranaki.

Auckland settler R. McKenzie applauded Southwell's attack on “murdering savages.” Since Governor Browne, swayed by the “sighs” and “tears” of “native-loving missionaries,” was failing to put down the rebellion in a “manly, soldierlike, British fashion,” McKenzie called on patriotic Auckland citizens to crush “Church Missionary despotism,” which stood “in the way of the colony advancing.”Footnote 70

Some local Christians concurred. P. Mortimer, an Irish Catholic farmer from Onehunga near Auckland, agreed that Kingi should be hung. The missionaries, a new elite of “land and stock owners,” must cease “intermeddling with politics” and “leave rebellious Maories [sic] to be dealt with by the Civil power.”Footnote 71 “Colonist,” echoing Tom Paine, congratulated Southwell on exposing the “hideousness of priestcraft deformity.” The previous Sunday, the writer reported, his minister had preached a sermon designed to “smash intellect” and “enlist sympathy on behalf of lucre grasping priests and pseudo missionaries [sic],” a “black elite of clerical demagogues” intent on “Maori supremacy.” But “we Protestants have been emancipated from the thraldom of bigotry,” proclaimed the writer, leaving “the age of priestcraft” behind. “Reason and common sense” had emancipated enlightened colonists from “the scheming of a prelate” and his “thraldom of bigotry.”Footnote 72

Southwell converted some Anglican settlers. In May, a farmer from Beauty Bay near Turanga (modern Gisborne) wrote congratulating Southwell on the “extraordinary mental force” of his writings. Church Missionary Society missionary Thomas Grace, the writer reported, told Anglican settlers that they were not paying enough to the Maori owners of the land they rented for grazing. The settlers walked out of Grace's Turanga church en masse. They returned only when William Williams, another CMS missionary, replaced Grace. But this “reverend firebrand,” too, began “lashing” settlers and government for “swindling” Maori out of their lands at Ahuriri. “You are certainly right,” he wrote Southwell, that “the missionaries” lay “at the bottom of all the evil” afflicting New Zealand. Calling for “war to the knife,” the writer urged every freedom-loving “Briton” to shake off his “chains” and “submit” no “longer to be trampled on by a race of semi-savages.” Disputes over racial politics almost blew apart the colonial Anglican church.Footnote 73

Further evidence of Southwell's popularity in the religio-racial turmoil of 1860 may be seen by public reaction when the news broke in July that, with its editor ill with tuberculosis, the Examiner was struggling financially. Auckland citizens took up a subscription and presented Southwell with the remarkable sum of two hundred pounds to keep the paper afloat. In England in 1841, by contrast, secularist colleagues refused to collect even one hundred pounds to bail him out of the Bristol jail. Only in colonial Auckland did Southwell at last win some of the popularity and influence he craved.

Yet Sinclair's claim that the Examiner expressed typical settler racial and political views is too strong. Southwell expressed extreme views too violently for the more respectable settlers to stomach. Pinned between “the settlers, the Missionaries and the Maoris,” Governor Browne found it “difficult to decide,” he told a friend in 1860, whether missionary Hadfield or settler Southwell constituted his “fiercest” critic.Footnote 74 In April 1860, a writer in Auckland's Southern Cross, probably Hugh Carleton, condemned Southwell's “fiery articles,” inflaming “ill-feeling” between the races, as a “great evil.” They constantly “run the natives down” and “menace them with extinction.” Out-settlers, isolated and vulnerable, relied for their safety on Maori “forbearance” and stood to lose everything, including their lives. George Vaile, an Auckland Baptist minister, condemned “physical force” hotheads such as Southwell, Firth, and company and advocated “conference and mediation” to solve the colony's racial crisis.Footnote 75 In Taranaki, Jane-Maria Atkinson, a leading member of the Richmond-Atkinson families prominent in Taranaki and colonial politics, worried that the “violently anti-missionary” Examiner made the colonists appear ruthless, undermining their moral position in London. The Richmond-Atkinson clan, long determined to get hold of more Taranaki land, equally disliked the Anglican critics of the government but found Southwell's inflammatory rhetoric impolitic. In the South Island, the editor of the Canterbury Standard criticized Southwell and Selwyn's Church party as equally extreme.Footnote 76

The settler war on missionaries, humanitarians, and Maori that Southwell had fanned blazed as he died in August of 1860. By 1862, with war spreading from Taranaki to Waikato, Alfred Domett—as skeptical of Christianity and as determined a Maori, missionary, and humanitarian-basher as Southwell—headed a settler parliament that included among its key members Auckland businessmen such as Firth, Russell, and Frederick Whitaker, Russell's legal partner. This ministry passed a series of laws confiscating vast areas of Maori land, some of it taken from “friendly” tribes that had fought with the government.

Old World outsiders had turned the world upside down. Or, as Southwell, Firth, Domett, Russell, Ballance, and company saw it, right side up. Determined to build a prosperous, egalitarian, and secular society free of Anglican domination, they cut down the tall poppies of both races that stood in their way. In the Antipodes, the last were becoming first, and the first last.

CONCLUSION

Outwardly, Southwell's enemies changed as he traveled from metropolis to colonies. He targeted Christians and Jews in England, squattocrats in Australia, and Maori, humanitarians, and missionaries in New Zealand. Beneath the apparent discontinuities, however, the ultimate enemy remained much the same—a domineering Christian establishment keeping land, power, and liberty from the people. His violent racism in New Zealand cannot be understood except in relation to the militant antireligion he brought with him from England.

Nor can it be understood by focusing exclusively on the white world. Literate Maori Christians, often Anglican, vigorously defended their land and political rights, launched Christian political movements, bombarded the authorities with letters and petitions criticizing government and settlers, and, when peaceful protest failed, went to war. No wonder Southwell preferred the unspoiled “heathen.” His perception that a powerful biracial Anglican establishment had been running, and ruining, the colony, reflected, in however paranoid a fashion, undoubted local realities.

Southwell's ideal imagined community—a free, open, egalitarian, democratic, and secular society in which ordinary Britons flourished free of “Old Corruption”—eventually emerged in New Zealand. Yet, as this case study has shown, racism and hostility to Maori Christians and their mostly Anglican Pakeha champions fed off and fueled one another during the crucial early decades of colonization. F. B. Smith's apparent unwillingness to acknowledge Southwell's racism or its links with his militant antireligion suggests a scholarly tendency to exempt certain persons and processes from careful scrutiny. This in turn fits a larger historiographical pattern identified by Frank Turner in which “intellectual and cultural historians of Victorian Britain” have for most of the twentieth century “portrayed religious thought and activity in a critically negative light while favourably presenting secular intellectual activity as progressive and desirable.”Footnote 77 Although Southwell battled England's Anglican establishment with courage, energy, and polemical ability, he deployed those talents in New Zealand toward more problematic ends. Historians have too often treated the secularization of racial thought and politics, the rise of anticlericalism, the growth of colonial democracy, and the decline of religion as normal, natural, or even inevitable. Such processes, contingent, contested, and problematic, deserve critical scrutiny in colonial as well as metropolitan contexts.