IV. ANTISLAVERY LECTURES IN CONCORD
IV.C. Theodore Parker:
Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was a radical Unitarian minister in Boston, an abolitionist, social reformer, founder in 1847 of The Massachusetts Quarterly Review, and a member of Emerson's Transcendental circle. He attended meetings of the Transcendental, or Hedge, Club and wrote for The Dial. His famous 1841 sermon "A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity" (also known as the "South Boston Sermon") was as resounding and controversial a rejection of inherited religion as Emerson's 1838 "Divinity School Address" at Harvard.
During the 1840s and 1850s, Parker blasted slavery from the pulpit and the lecture platform. Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, he increasingly devoted himself to antislavery and to urging others to place a higher premium on conscience than on the law. He chaired the executive committee of Boston's Vigilance Committee, which helped fugitive slaves en route to freedom, worked with the New England Emancipation Aid Society, and looked after fugitives in his own home. In 1850, he harbored William and Ellen Craft, escaped slaves from Georgia, keeping "a sword in the open drawer" and "a pistol in the flap of the desk." In 1855, he stood trial for inciting an abolitionist riot. He served on the Massachusetts Kansas Committee and was—along with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Gerrit Smith, George Luther Stearns, and Concord's Frank Sanborn—a member of the "Secret Six," who aided John Brown in his plans for armed insurrection.
Theodore Parker spoke in Concord on slavery at least three times—on January 31, 1841, on June 18, 1845 (the lecture advertised in the Concord Freeman notice shown on this page), and, at the invitation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, on July 16, 1854. Emerson wrote Parker on July 10, 1854: "Our people wish me to ask you whether you cannot come & read them a discourse on a Sunday evening, say next Sunday evening We will bring you up in a carriage at what hour after your morning service you choose, & you shall go home in the cars [by train], next day, unless you like our green fields better. The design of the inviters is to draw the town to hold weekly meetings on Sunday evening for liberty, & they wish to open them with eclat." The following week, Parker read his Concord audience "A Sermon of the Dangers which Threaten the Rights of Man in America," which he had first delivered in the Music Hall Boston on July 2nd.
61. Newspaper notice of upcoming lecture on slavery by Theodore Parker: "We understand that a lecture " [in June 13, 1845 issue of Concord Freeman]. CFPL Concord Newspaper Collection.
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