Men Against the State

The Genealogy of Josiah Warren

“In an unmarked grave in Lot 2078, Eglantine Path, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, are interred the remains of Josiah Warren, a 19th century philosopher, inventor, and founder of Utopian villages.” So begins a short manuscript on the ancestry of Josiah Warren by a first cousin, three times removed, Lyman O. Warren, M.D., now (1970) of St. Petersburg, Florida.

After three years of unusual diligence and the conduct of a vast correspondence and investigation, Dr. Warren has established the proper descent of the “Peaceful Revolutionist,” long a matter of scholarly interest.

In his possession for some time has been a family bible, published in London in 1770, handed down through his branch of the Warren family from the time of his grandfather’s great grandfather, Captain Josiah Warren, a Revolutionary War soldier and Massachusetts farmer, born in Watertown, April 9, 1748.

On one of the blank pages in this bible had been recorded in long hand the names of each of the children of Captain Josiah, with the dates of their birth, marriage and death. From this data, and stimulated by having read in the Encyclopedia Britannica a paragraph on the famous American individualist, Dr. Warren proceeded to establish, with the help of Bond’s History of Watertown and a veteran genealogist of Cambridge, W. Burton Webster, that “Josiah the Reformer,”1 as Dr. Warren prefers to distinguish him, was the son of a second Josiah, the son of Captain Josiah, born in Watertown March 25, 1770. Mr. Webster uncovered in the records of the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, that the second Josiah, by that time a resident of “Little Cambridge” (now Brighton), married one Mary (Polley) Parker on December 25, 1793.

From the same source it was then established that “Josiah the Reformer” (who probably should be known as Josiah III) was the third of their five children, born in 1798. Additional research, involving sources ranging from Historical Brighton by J. P. C. Winship (Boston, 1899) to the facilities of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, established that “Josiah the Reformer” was descended, through his grandfather, from Warrens of both Pilgrim and Puritan origin: Richard Warren, who was on the Mayflower when it put in at Plymouth in 1620, and John Warren of Watertown, who arrived at Massachusetts Bay on the Arbella in 1630.

The year of birth of “Josiah the Reformer” has never been in question, though no record of the day and month can be found in the vital statistics records of Boston, despite a prodigious effort to establish it. Precise dates have been located for an older brother and sister, born in Brighton. Then, some time after the birth of the second born, the family moved, presumably to Boston. But Dr. Warren points out that the records fall silent in the case of the “Peaceful Revolutionist,” even though Masachusetts Vital Records, Deaths, gives his place of birth as Boston. In May 1969 Dr. Warren confirmed the evidence already uncovered by visits to the Mount Auburn Cemetery and to the Division of Vital Statistics in the State House in Boston.

“Josiah the Reformer”’s father, Josiah II, died July 9, 1809, in the former’s eleventh year, but his mother lived until March 21, 1853. It would appear that she was about 23 years of age at the time of Josiah Ill’s birth. Warren’s failure to mention his parents or brother and sisters by name or to discuss his family at all in his extant correspondence or in any printed sources has been a source of mystery to this writer in particular. It was even believed by some at one time that he was an only child and an orphan at an early age. But we now know he was 55 years old when his mother died, that he was survived by the three girls in the family, and that his older brother died in Cincinnati in 1872, only two years before the “Reformer”’s passing.

Fully as puzzling is the absence of any mention of birth date, parents, or surviving members of the family in the substantial obituary which appeared in the Boston Globe the day after Warren died, April 14, 1874. But thanks to the efforts and persistence of Dr. Lyman O. Warren a satisfactory picture of the antecedents of the “Peaceful Revolutionist” is now a matter of record.

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2Wrote Warren in 1854, “I really object to being called a Reformer, for no word is less calculated to place me in the position which I choose to occupy. If those classed as conservatives do not at once reject, without examination, everything called Reform, I think it argues a great share of courtesy on their part, as well as an almost unconquerable hope for improvement, not surpassed by those who have had experience as Reformers.” Periodical Letter, I (July, 1854), 14.

• 1It has been evident to thoughtful observers for more than two generations that the words “anarchist,” “anarchism,” and “anarchy” have been used so loosely by writers and the general public alike that they have practically ceased to have any definite meaning. The problem here is similar to that existing in many other cases where abstract terms or generalizations having no or little substance have been overused or misused. Nor has the use of these terms by scholars tended to promote any greater degree of understanding. In too many cases the tendency has been to resemble the weaknesses of the general observer. Here the situation has been usually created by the repeated interpretation of expressions of hostility to the status quo as evidence of anarchist thought.
• 2 An example of the problem involved in the matter of accurately using such specialized words can be found in the interesting study by Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., “The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, IX (June, 1948), 259-302.