Background
John Anderson Collins was born around 1810 at Manchester, Vermont, United States.
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John Anderson Collins
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Collins attended Middlebury College in his twenty-fifth year, and left it, without graduating, to enter Andover Theological Seminary.
Career
This was the period of the rising tide of sentiment against slavery. Feeling, both bitter and warm, with regard to the question ran high at Andover. Collins is said to have played a leading part in revealing the so-called “Clerical Plot” to the abolitionists. This incident probably had an influence in his ensuing abrupt departure from the seminary and his installation as general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. The Society sent him abroad to try to rouse sympathy for its work in England and to try to raise funds for carrying on propaganda. He carried letters of introduction from William Lloyd Garrison, commending him as “a free spirit, a zealous advocate” who had made large sacrifices for the cause. But his lot was no more easy than that of the other abolitionists. A group that included one particularly virulent clergyman went to great lengths to discredit him abroad, and on his return, accused him of importing “foreign gold to destroy the government” and of “disloyal and subversive propaganda. ”
From July 1840 to November 1841, Collins edited the Monthly Garland, a small magazine dealing with slavery, for which he wrote most of the material. Like many others of his enthusiastic temperament he was particularly attracted to the various Utopian doctrines newly imported from Europe, and he came to feel that the abolition of physical slavery was only a small part of a greater social reformation that was to free mankind. In 1843 he planned a series of “picnics” and the “hundred conventions” that were designed to rouse the country to the cause of the abolitionists. To the dismay of his backers, he began to follow the anti-slavery meetings with “constructive meetings” at which he preached a kind of Fourieristic doctrine. For reasons both diplomatic and conservative, he was reprimanded.
He then decided to resign in order to devote himself to the founding of a commune. Garrison parted from him with regret. Collins, with two or three other enthusiasts, selected a farm at Skaneateles, New York, for the experiment, and he made a large part of the cash payment on the farm, giving his note for the rest. He then issued a call in the newspapers to others “of like mind” to join him, announcing a creed in which he denied all religious doctrines, denounced individual property, and advocated a social system founded on the negation of all force, admitting marriage only if accompanied by the right of easy divorce, and prescribing universal education and vegetarianism. This creed, which was somewhat modified later, aroused the usual stormy discussion far and wide. A group gathered about Collins, composed chiefly of those who saw an opportunity for free maintenance. The colony did not prosper, and Collins’s disillusionment and disappointment were keen. In May 1846, he decided to liquidate.
He next appeared in California in 1849. In 1852, with John Wilson, he organized a company to mine the sands of the Klamath River. Many unfortunate investors lost all they had in the scheme. J. S. Hittell gives Collins credit for honestly believing in the plan. He was living in California as late as 1879 but he seems to have abandoned his schemes of philanthropy and social improvement.
