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James Freeman Clarke
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James Freeman Clarke (April 4, 1810 – June 8, 1888) was an American preacher and author.
ke was born in Hanover, New Hampshire. He was prepared for college at the public Latin school of Boston, and graduated at Harvard College in 1829, and at the Harvard Divinity School in 1833. He was then ordained as minister of a Unitarian congregation at Louisville, Kentucky, which was then a slave state. Clarke soon threw himself into the national movement for the abolition of slavery, though he was never what was then called in America a radical abolitionist.
In 1839 he returned to Boston, where he and his friends established (1841) the Church of the Disciples.
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James Freeman Clarke (April 4, 1810 – June 8, 1888) was an American preacher and author.
Biography
Clarke was born in Hanover, New Hampshire. He was prepared for college at the public Latin school of Boston, and graduated at Harvard College in 1829, and at the Harvard Divinity School in 1833. He was then ordained as minister of a Unitarian congregation at Louisville, Kentucky, which was then a slave state. Clarke soon threw himself into the national movement for the abolition of slavery, though he was never what was then called in America a radical abolitionist.
In 1839 he returned to Boston, where he and his friends established (1841) the Church of the Disciples. It brought together a body of people to apply the Christian religion to the social problems of the day, and he would have said that the feature which distinguished it from any other church was that they also were ministers of the highest religious life. Ordination could make no distinction between him and them. Of this church he was the minister from 1841 until 1850 and from 1854 until his death. He was also secretary of the Unitarian Association and, in 1867-1871 professor of natural religion and Christian doctrine at Harvard. From the beginning of his religiously active life he wrote freely for the press.
From 1836 until 1839 he was editor of the Western Messenger, a magazine intended to carry to readers in the Mississippi Valley simple statements of liberal religion, involving what were then the most radical appeals as to national duty, especially the abolition of slavery. The magazine is now of value to collectors because it contains the earliest printed poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was Clarke's personal friend. Clarke became a member of the Transcendental Club alongside Emerson and several others. Most of Clarke's earlier published writings were addressed to the immediate need of establishing a larger theory of religion than that espoused by people who were still trying to be Calvinists, people who maintained what an American phrase states as "hard-shelled churches."
For the Western Messenger, Clarke requested written contributions from Margaret Fuller. Clarke published Fuller's first literary review—criticisms of recent biographies on George Crabbe and Hannah More. She later became the first full-time book reviewer in journalism working for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. After Fuller's death in 1850, Clarke worked with William Henry Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson as editors of The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, published in February 1852. The trio censored or reworded many of Fuller's letters; they believed the public interest in Fuller would be temporary and that she would not survive as a historical figure. Nevertheless, for a time, the book was the best-selling biography of the decade and went through thirteen editions before the end of the century.
In 1855, Clarke purchased the former site of Brook Farm, intending to start a new Utopian community there. He never did and instead offered the land to President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War; the Second Massachusetts Regiment used it for training and named it "Camp Andrew".
His work is sometimes called controversial. He was always declaring that the business of the Church is eirenic and not polemic. Such books as Orthodoxy: Its Truths and Errors (1866) have been read more largely by members of orthodox churches than by Unitarians, quite obviously. In the great moral questions of his time, Clarke was seen as an advocate of human rights. Without caring much what company he served in, he could always be seen and heard, a leader many considered courageous, in the front rank of the battle. He published but few verses, but at the bottom he was a poet. He was a diligent scholar, and among the books by which he is best known is one called Ten Great Religions (2 vols, 1871-1883).
Many believe that few Americans have done more than Clarke to give breadth to the published discussion of the subjects of literature, ethics and religious philosophy. Among his later books are Every-Day Religion (1886) and Sermons on the Lord's Prayer (1888). He died in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on June 8, 1888.
His Autobiography, Diary and Correspondence, edited by Edward Everett Hale, was published in Boston in 1891.
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