Par-Pay: Parker through Payne

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Sources include: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography and Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.


PARKER, Charles,  abolitionist, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Executive Committee, 1851-1852.


PARKER, Gilman, Haverhill, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1838-40.


PARKER, James (March 3, 1776-April 1, 1868), legislator. During his legislative career he was particularly interested in the act of 1817 establishing free schools in the state, the act authorizing aliens to purchase and hold real estate in New Jersey, and the act passed in 1820 prohibiting, under the severest penalties, the exportation of slaves from the state.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 227-228:

PARKER, JAMES (March 3, 1776-April r, 1868), legislator, was born in Bethlehem township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey, the son of James and Gertrude (Skinner) Parker. His father was a member of the Provincial Council and of the Board of Proprietors of the colony. The family had taken refuge in Hunterdon County during the Revolutionary struggle but returned in 1783 to the ancestral home in Perth Amboy. Here James Parker was educated by the Reverend Joseph I. Bend, Rector of St. Peter's Church, before going to a preparatory school at Amwell, Hunterdon County. He entered Columbia, College, New York, in 1790 and was graduated second in the class of 1793. He was placed in the counting house of John Murray, then a leading merchant in New York, but the death of his father in 1797 obliged him to return home to take up the management of the family estate. In 1806 he was elected to the New Jersey Assembly from Middlesex County. He was reelected annually until 1811, and again in 1812, 1813, 1815, 1816, and 1818. During his legislative career he was particularly interested in the act of 1817 establishing free schools in the state, the act authorizing aliens to purchase and hold real estate in New Jersey, and the act passed in 1820 prohibiting, under the severest penalties, the exportation of slaves from the state.

Parker returned to the legislature in 1827 chiefly for the purpose of promoting the construction of a canal between the Delaware and Raritan rivers. Although the bill which he reported did not pass in the legislative session of t827-28, he had the satisfaction a few years later of witnessing the actual construction of a canal essentially the same as that which he had proposed when the Delaware and Raritan Canal Company was organized, he became a director and held this post until his death. His interest in the boundary question between New York and New Jersey led him to serve on the different boundary commissions until a settlement was reached in 1829. In 1815 and again in 1850 he was chosen mayor of Perth Amboy. Although he had always been a Federalist, he supported the candidacy of Andrew Jackson for the presidency and served as presidential elector in 1&'24. "When Jackson became president in 1829, Parker: was appointed collector of the port at Perth Amboy, which at that time had considerable foreign trade. While serving in this office, he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1832 and was reelected in 1834. His distrust of Martin Van Buren led him to align himself with the Whig party in 1840 and to support its candidates until the fifties, when he joined the Republican party. He was one of the most influential members of the convention called in 1844 to frame a new constitution for New Jersey and served as chairman of the committee on the bill of rights. His interest in education was recognized by his election to the boards of trustees of Rutgers College and of the College of New Jersey. He was elected vice-president of the New Jersey Historical Society at its formation and subsequently became its president. For many years he was a vestryman of St. Peter's Church, Perth Amboy, and usually represented that parish in the Protestant Episcopal Convention of New Jersey. Freed from the necessity of earning his own living by a generous patrimony, he was always willing to answer the call to public service. He was twice married: on January 5, 1803, to Penelope Butler, daughter of a once wealthy Philadelphia merchant, who di ed in 1823, and on September 20, 1827, to Catherine Morris Ogden, sister of David B. Ogden [q.v.]. John Cortlandt Parker [q. v. ] was a son by the first marriage.

[R. S. Field, "Address on the Life and Character of the Hon. J as. Parker," Proceedings New Jersey Historical Society, 2 ser. I (1869); K. M. Beekman, "A Colonial Capital: Perth Amboy and Its Church Warden, Jas. Parker," Ibid., n.s. III (1918); Jas. Parker, The Parker and Kearney Families of New Jersey (Perth Amboy, 1925); W. N. Jones, The History of St. Peter's Church in Perth Amboy, New Jersey (1923); Daily State Gazette (Trenton), April 3, 1868.]

W.S.C.


PARKER, Joel (January 25, 1795-August 17, 1875), jurist. In politics he was Whig, then Republican. When Senator Charles Sumner was brutally attacked in congress over the issue of slavery, he made a speech of protest which, according to a correspondent to the Edinburgh Review (October 1856, p. 595), "for earnestness and solemnity of denunciation has not been anywhere surpassed."

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 231-232:

PARKER, JOEL (January 25, 1795-August 17, 1875), jurist, was born in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. He was descended from Abraham Parker, a native of Wiltshire, England, who had settled in Woburn, Massachusetts, by 1645. His father, Abel Parker, a Revolutionary soldier, was married in 1777 to Edith Jewett of Pepperell and three years later moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and cleared a farm. Joel Parker studied at Groton Academy and at Dartmouth, graduating in 1811. He read law in Keene, New Hampshire, and was admitted to the bar in 1817. In 1821 he went to Ohio with a view to opening an office, but he returned in 1822 to resume his practice at Keene. He followed the law with singleness of purpose and achieved a success which was substantial but not sudden. In 1833 he was appointed to the superior court-the highest court in the state and five years later was promoted to be chief justice. As a trial judge he inspired juries with courage. Lawyers might call him obstinate, but as a colleague explained, this was excusable in a judge who was almost always right. In deciding cases he reasoned to his own conclusions. Upon declining to follow a multitude of decisions sustaining a certain rule, he said: "they are so many that their very number furnishes cause of suspicion that the rule is not quite sound .... It would seem, if the rule had a solid foundation, that one fifth, or one tenth, of the number might have settled the question. Its numerical strength, therefore, is weakness" (14 New Hampshire, 215, 228). This independence came to notice through his clash with Justice Story. The New Hampshire court gave one construction to the word lien in the Bankruptcy Act of 1841, while Story (who had framed the act) enforced a contrary view in the federal circuit court. Neither would recede, but after Story's death the Supreme Court upheld Parker's construction (14 New Hampshire, 509 and 48 U.S., 612).

In November 1847 Parker was appointed Royall Professor of Law at Harvard. On January 20, 1848, he was married to Mary Morse Parker, of Keene. In June he resigned from the bench after having moved to Cambridge. In his new position he was ill at ease and was tempted to go back to New Hampshire. The moot court was a pleasure, but lecturing required a painful adaptation, and he had to begin with unfamiliar subjects. His method was formal and thorough rather than vivid. The poorer men could not follow. "His law . . . was . . . exasperatingly sound; but he could no more give a comprehensive view of a whole topic than an oyster, busy in perfecting its single pearl, can range over the ocean floor" (Batchelder, post, p. 223). Yet such men as Joseph Choate and Henry Billings Brown [qq.v.] found him a fountain of knowledge, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, another pupil, referred to him as "one of the greatest of American judges, ... who showed in the chair the same qualities that made him famous on the bench" (Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1891, p. 35). In 1868 he resigned his professorship. For years the great triumvirate, Parker, Theophilus Parsons, and Emory Washburn, had reported that "there have been no new arrangements in relation to the organization of the School or the course of instruction." Unlike Langdell who presently came to invigorate the school, Parker in his methods had not been ahead of his time.

He served in the New Hampshire legislature for three years (1824, 1825, 1826); as delegate from Cambridge to the constitutional convention of 1853, and as commissioner to revise the statutes of Massachusetts. In politics he was Whig, then Republican. When Sumner was attacked he made a speech of protest which, according to a correspondent to the Edinburgh Review (October 1856, p. 595), "for earnestness and solemnity of denunciation has not been anywhere surpassed." He opposed the doctrine that secession was constitutional and criticised Taney's opinion in the Merryman case (J. D. Lawson, American State Trials, IV, 1918, p. 880). He defended the capture of Mason and Slidell. But as the drama of war and Reconstruction unfolded, his conservative nature recoiled. The Republicans had "dug the grave of the Constitution" (To the People of Massachusetts, 1862, p. 10). When Parker's conduct or opinions were impeached, he retaliated. "A good stand-up fight was meat and drink to him" (Batchelder, p. 225). He was especially irritated by clergymen who argued that the president might abolish slavery, saying that their "impudent assumption" that they had a greater knowledge of constitutional law than men trained to the profession was a "nuisance." "If any of them have D.D. attached to their names, that does not disqualify them from being also ASS, and mischief-makers besides" (Constitutional Law and Unconstitutional Divinity, 1863, pp. 6, 10). But he had a more genial side. He read poetry and loved flowers. At home and among friends he was affectionate. Students invited to dine were surprised to find he could regard a glass of wine with real enjoyment, and that he was witty. He published more than a score of articles and pamphlets, among which may be mentioned Daniel Webster as a Jurist (1852); Non-Extension of Slavery, and Constitutional Representation (1856); Personal Liberty Laws (Statutes of Massachusetts) and Slavery in the Territories (1861); Habeas Corpus and Martial Law (1862); International Law (1862); The War Powers of Congress, and of the President (1863); Revolution and Reconstruction (1866); and The Three Powers of Government ... The Origin of the United States, and the Status of Southern States (1869).

[G. S. Hale, "Joel Parker," American Law Review, January 1876; Emory Washburn, memoir in Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, volume XIV (1876), and in Albany Law Journal, August 28, 1875; C. H. Bell, The Bench and Bar of New Hampshire (1894); Charles Warren, History of the Harvard Law School (1908), volume II; The Centennial History of the Harvard Law School (1918); S. F. Batchelder, Bits of Harvard History (1924); New England Magazine, July 1912; F. C. Jewett, History and Genealogy of the Jewetts of America (1908), volume I; Boston Transcript, August 19, 1875.]

C.F.


PARKER, John P., 1827-1900, African American, former slave, abolitionist, businessman.  Born a slave.  Bought his freedom.  Worked in aiding fugitive slaves from Kentucky in the Cincinnati area.  May have helped more than 1,000 fugitive slaves.  Recruited volunteers for the U.S. Colored Regiment.

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 8, p. 592; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 17, p. 36; Hinks, Peter P., & John R. McKivigan, Eds., Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition.  Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 2007, Volume 2, pp. 522-523; Gara, 1961; Griftler, 2004; Hagendorn, 2002; Horton, 1997)


PARKER, Jonathan, Member of Congress from Virginia.  Opposed slavery as member of U.S. House of Representatives.

(Locke, Mary Stoughton. Anti-Slavery in America from the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619-1808). Boston: Ginn & Co., 1901, pp. 93, 138f, 139; Annals of Congress)


PARKER, Josiah, 1751-1810, Virginia, Revolutionary War soldier, politician, Member of the first Congress.  Supported citizens’ right to petition Congress against slavery.  Called slavery “a practice so nefarious.”  Voted against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. 

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, p. 54; Annals of Congress, 1 Congress, 2 Session, p. 1230; 2 Congress, 2 Session, p. 861; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, p. 234). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, p. 234:

PARKER, JOSIAH (May 11, 1751-March 14, 1810), Revolutionary soldier and politician, was the son of Nicholas and Ann (Copeland) Parker and descended from Thomas Parker, who obtained land grants in Virginia as early as 1647. This ancestor was a member of a landed family of Cheshire, and the family seat in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, Josiah's birthplace, bore the name "Macclesfield." In 1773 Josiah Parker married Mary (Pierce) Bridger, widow of Colonel Joseph Bridger, and they had one daughter. At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, Parker entered the army and also became a member of the local committee of safety and of the Virginia revolutionary convention. He served in Virginia under Lee, and later was attached to the northern army under Washington. He attained the rank of major in 1776 and that of colonel the following year, and at the battle of Trenton he was lieutenant-colonel of the 5th Virginia Regiment. In that battle, as well as at Princeton and Brandywine, he received the commendation of the Commander-in-chief. His figure is included in the group of soldiers in Trumbull's painting, "Capture of the Hessians," and it has been stated that he received the sword of Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall at Trenton. His temper was hasty and impulsive, and in consequence of a controversy he resigned from the army in 1778. Near the close of the war, when his native state became the scene of operations, he was appointed by Governor Jefferson to command the Virginia militia south of the James River, and cooperated with Lafayette. He received large grants of land after the war, was a member of the House of Delegates, and from 1786 to 1788 was naval officer for
the port of Norfolk.

Parker was an Anti-Federalist and a strong supporter of Patrick Henry. He presented himself as a candidate for delegate to the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788, but was defeated. He was a member of the First Congress, and with his colleagues he gave his vote for a future capital on the Potomac River. His career in Congress extended from 1789 to 1801, and he was at one time chairman of the naval committee. His death occurred on the family estate in Isle of Wight County.

[A. G. Parker, Parker in America (1911), pp. 257- 61; W. T. Parker, Gleanings from Parker Records (1894), pp. 38-41; F. B. Heitman, Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army (1893); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Norfolk Gazette and Public Ledger, March 19, 1810, which gives day of death as Wednesday, March 14.]

E. K. A.


PARKER, Mary S., leader, Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS).

(Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, p. 199; Yellin, Jean Fagan and John C. Van Horne (Eds). The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, 1994, pp. 36, 43, 51-53, 55, 61, 64, 174, 176)


PARKER, Reverend Theodore, 1810-1860, Boston, Massachusetts, Unitarian clergyman, abolitionist leader, reformer.  Secretly supported radical abolitionist John Brown, and his raid on the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, (West) Virginia, on October 16, 1859.  Opposed Fugitive Slave Act.  Organizer, Committee of Vigilance to help fugitive slaves escape capture in Boston, Massachusetts.  Wrote anti-slavery book, To a Southern Slaveholder, in 1848.  Also wrote Defense.  Supported the New England Emigrant Aid Society and the Massachusetts Kansas Committee.  Member of the Secret Six group that clandestinely aided radical abolitionist John Brown. 

(Chadwick, 1900; Dirks, 1948; Drake, 1950, p. 176; Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960, pp. 6, 94, 126, 140, 141, 184, 204, 214, 239, 241, 268; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 13, 82, 233, 253, 254, 256, 273, 302, 309, 316, 318, 320, 321; Pease, William H., & Pease, Jane H. The Antislavery Argument. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965, pp. 654, 656; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 207, 289, 327, 337, 338, 478; Sernett, Milton C. North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002, pp. 69, 205, 211, 213; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 654-655; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 238-241; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 17, p. 43; Commager, Henry S. Theodore Parker. 1947.). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 238-241:

PARKER, THEODORE (August 24, 1810- May 10, 1860), theologian, Unitarian clergyman, publicist, born in Lexington, Massachusetts, was a descendant of Thomas Parker of Norton, Derbyshire, England, who settled in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1635, and in 1640 was one of the founders of the town and church of Reading. A grandson removed to Lexington in 1712 and had for grandchild the Captain John Parker [q.v.] who led the Lexington minute-men, April 19, 1775. John (1761-1836), son of the Revolutionary captain, a farmer and mechanic with a vigorous mind and love of knowledge, married February 17, 1784, Hannah Stearns of Lexington, a woman of sensitive religious feeling without concern for doctrinal disputes. Of their eleven children only Theodore, the youngest, became eminent.

The boy's precocious childhood had marks of independent and varied aptitudes. To the end of his life he recalled the thrill of his first discovery of conscience when, in his fourth year, a childish misdeed was checked by a voice within saying loud and clear, "It is wrong." In advance of all instruction, religious awareness began in a form which in. his learned maturity he identified with the unrationalized experience of primitive man. When his New England Primer taught him the doctrine of eternal damnation he wept with terror, but vanquished the distress by trusting the divinations of his own kinder heart. In very early years he had an intense passion for beauty in every form. A child of seven years, he inferred from graduations of lichen, moss, grass, bush, and tree, a hierarchy of ascending forms throughout nature. In growing boyhood his historical lore claimed attention in the political discussions of his elders. These varied propensities, early awakened, prefigured his career.

His schooling was limited to four months of two summers, three months of ten winters in a district school taught by college students, and a few months in Lexington Academy. All other weeks were given to farm work and carpentry, but in leisure hours he read borrowed books with voracious appetite and a phenomenally retentive memory. Discerning teachers taught him Latin and Greek and he undertook modern languages by himself. At ten years he made a botanical catalogue of all vegetables, plants, trees, and shrubs that grew by his home, and when not yet twelve he turned to astronomy and metaphysics. At seventeen he began four years of teaching in neighboring district schools. He walked to Cambridge August 23, 1830, and passed the examination for entrance to Harvard College. Too poor to enroll, he was allowed to take the examinations throughout the course and in 1840 was made an honorary master of arts. In March 1831 he became assistant in a private school in Boston and a year later opened his own school in Watertown. He now gained the friendship of Watertown's learned pastor, Convers Francis [q.v.], steeped in German thought, and won the tender love of Lydia Cabot, daughter of John Cabot of Newton. Long hours of teaching, of studying for Harvard examinations, of acquiring Semitic languages and poring over Cousin and Coleridge made a life without play or exercise; they also deprived him of the give-and-take fellowship with other youths £hat might have trained him to more sustained good humor and more tolerant indifference to praise and blame.

In April 1834 he entered the Harvard Divinity School, where he. lived ascetically on scant savings, meager earnings, and a bursary, but prodigally in the expenditure of mental energy-"an athlete in his studies," said his fellow student Christopher P. Cranch [q.v.]. His journal shows a knowledge of twenty languages, and of the most necessary, the knowledge was exact. In Prof. John Gorham Palfrey's absence, he gave the instruction in Hebrew. Echoing the thought of the faculty, he believed in an inspired Bible, a revelation evidenced by miracles, in Christ as the Son of God supernaturally conceived. Nevertheless, in editing with two classmates The Scriptural Interpreter he made use of mild German criticism that brought protests from the readers, and when he graduated, July 1836, he had some doubt of miracles and the virgin birth. A month later he began to translate De Wette's Einleitung in das Alte Testament, a work for which America was not yet ready.

Half a dozen churches offered him a settlement, but because of its proximity to libraries he chose the modest parish of West Roxbury, a suburb of Boston, and there, after marriage with Lydia Cabot, April 20, he was ordained June 21, 1837. In his sermons he avoided controversial matters and presented religion only in terms of his inward experience, but this habit led him, in his private reflections, away from dependence on miraculous revelation to a main reliance on the direct, intuitive religious functioning of man's spirit, "the felt and perceived presence of Absolute Being infusing itself in me." Furthermore, the friendships now made were with the progressive spirits of the New England renaissance Dr. William Ellery Channing and his nephew W. H. Channing, Charles Follen, Frederic H. Hedge, Wendell Phillips, George Ripley, Emerson, and Alcott [qq.v.]. He hailed Emerson's Divinity School Address (1838) as "the noblest, the most inspiring strain I ever listened to ... [though] a little exaggerated, with some philosophical untruths" (Frothingham, post, p. ro6). To the controversy that followed he contributed a pamphlet under the pseudonym of Levi Blodgett, arguing that an intuitive religious faculty makes external props like miracles unnecessary. Difference of opinion on this question was then creating division in Unitarian circles and rumors of Parker's attitude cost him the customary exchanges with the Boston pastors. From such disfavor, in spite of a militant disposition, he suffered abnormally, and the more keenly since his intense studies were now often interrupted by physical depression and despondent moods. German thought and sympathy with Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson, however, were surely developing his native reliance on intuition into a systematic intellectual form. An undesigned rupture came with a sermon on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity, preached at an ordination in South Boston, May 19, 1841. In it he demanded that "we worship, as Jesus did, with no mediator, with nothing between us and the father of all." This was Emerson's lyrical deliverance done with a ruder prose, and a community already irritated by controversy reacted violently. The orthodox denounced him in the press; the liberal clergy withheld all tokens of fellowship; nevertheless, the following winter laymen in Boston arranged for Parker to deliver a series of lectures, which were published under the title A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842). In this remarkable work, ill received in America but of large circulation in English editions and German translation; Parker's vast erudition fortifies an eloquent appraisement of Christianity as the highest evolutionary ascent of the universal and direct human experience of divine reality. He demanded a new theology, which should be a science of religion and interpret its data by the immanence of God in nature and human experience.

The Boston Association of Ministers, to which Parker belonged, was disquieted. Its members had relaxed inherited doctrine, but they rested truth on supernatural revelation. Feeling became acute when they read an article by Parker in The Dial of October 1842. Some of them had served on a council called to consider the conflict of the Reverend John Pierpont with his church over a sermon on traffic in liquor, and now they found their decision denounced as a Jesuitical document in the interest of the liquor trade. In January 1843 the Association suggested that Parker resign his membership, but he refused on the ground that the right of free inquiry was at stake. Soon after, he published his translation of De Wette's Einleitung, and then, to secure needed rest, he spent a year in European travel (September 1843-September 1844). It was a year of rich experience for a mind stored with knowledge of history and literature, and significant in Parker's life since conferences with the scholars of many lands made him confident in his theological position and convinced of a mission to spread enlightened liberalism. Opponents created his opportunity when Reverend J. T. Sargent invited Parker to speak in his mission chapel the controlling Fraternity of Churches intervened and Sargent resigned (November 1844). The rules for a traditional lecture in the First Church of Boston were revised to exclude Parker from future participation (December 1844). James Freeman Clarke's chivalrous exchange with Parker, January 1845, caused members of his church to secede. A group of men, therefore, resolved "that the Reverend Theodore Parker shall have a chance to be heard in Boston" and secured a hall for Sunday services. Parker was heard, and in January, definitely resigning the West Roxbury pastorate, he was installed as minister of the new Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society of Boston, which in November 1852 found nobler quarters in the new Music Hall. Parker defined this church as a union to cultivate love of God and man with a common regard for Jesus as the highest known representative of God. It was to be active in all possible ways for human welfare, and Parker's devotion to its enterprises entailed the sacrifice of a cherished plan to elaborate a true science of religion with its own specific scientific method.

While in Rome in 1844, reflecting on America's historic task, he judged that popular ignorance and corrupt leadership required a campaign of intellectual, moral, and religious education. In his new pulpit and on lecture tours over a wide area, as well as in frequent publications, he discussed problems of war, temperance, prisons, divorce, education, human rights, the careers of American statesmen, always with a wealth of knowledge and a sober practical judgment. His faith was that social wrong would be righted as men attained consciousness of the infinite perfection of God, of the eternal right, of immortal life. Inevitably, the national situation involved him in the agitating discussion of slavery and thus of political parties and political leaders. Bold speech and bold courage gave him enthusiastic followers and bitter enemies, his frequent harsh invectives and ascription of rapacious motives intensifying the social division.

The results of his intensive study of the history and economic aspects of slavery were presented in A Letter to the People of the United States Touching the Matter of Slavery (1848) and in articles in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review (1847-1850). Webster's Seventh of March speech and the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) created a crisis, and Parker made passionate speeches in Faneuil Hall (March 25, October 14) and as leader of a vigilance committee was dramatically active in the escape of the fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft (November 1850) and in the foiled plot to rescue Thomas Sims (April 1851). On October 31, 1852, a week after Webster's death, Parker preached a sermon on the statesman's career, recognizing his great abilities but reprobating his character and motives. Believing in the right to secede and not averse to a separation of North and South, Parker failed to comprehend Webster's supreme devotion to national union and laid his policy to ambition for the presidency with Southern support and to financial obligations to Boston capitalists. Two days after the arrest of Anthony Burns [q.v.], another fugitive slave (May 24, 1854), Parker incited Faneuil Hall hearers to rescue the prisoner by an attack on the court house, but the plan miscarried and Burns was deported. With six others, Parker was indicted by the grand jury, but on April 3, 1855, the indictment was dismissed as ill framed. This fact did not hinder Parker from publishing an elaborate Defence, valuable for its accounts of the fugitive slave episodes but marred by invectives against the responsible authorities. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 occasioned a fresh outburst of sermons and addresses, some passionately rhetorical, others with forceful economic argument. He now foresaw and predicted civil  war. With voice and purse he supported the New England Emigrant Aid Society, the Massachusetts Kansas Committee, and as one of a secret committee abetted John Brown's project of a foray in the mountains of Virginia. At Parker's invitation Brown disclosed his plans at a secret meeting in Boston, March 4, 1858, and though Parker predicted failure, he favored the project as likely to precipitate the now inevitable conflict. His political influence is evidenced by his immense correspondence with Sumner, Seward, Chase, John P. Hale, and Charles Francis Adams. Through the mediation of William H. Herndon [q.v.] he influenced Abraham Lincoln, who probably derived from him the formula "government of the people, by the people, for the people" (see Chadwick, post, p. 323).

Parker's life was strenuous and exciting; sermons, voluminous correspondence, journeys, lectures-in one year as many as ninety-eight pastoral labor, and publications crowded full each hour. After exposure on a lecture tour in the spring of 1857 he became ill; an operation for fistula, a laming accident, and symptoms of tuberculosis followed. A violent hemorrhage, January 9, 1859, ended all public activity. With wife and friends he sailed for Vera Cruz, February 3, and, much improved, journeyed in June to London and Paris and then on to the home of his friend Edward Desor in Combes Varin, Switzerland. After a winter in Rome, he died in Florence on May 10, 1860, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery outside the Pinto Gate. At a great memorial meeting in Boston, June 17, he was eulogized by Emerson and Phillips. His rich library of nearly 16,000 volumes, bequeathed to the Boston Public Library, is a noble memorial of his far-ranging mind.

Parker's inability to forget social ostracism measures an affectionate man's craving for love. To humble folk and the unworldly great who were his friends, he abounded in beneficence and delightful discourse. Lacking distinguished presence, ungraceful in bearing, unmusical in voice, with little animation of manner, he yet dominated audiences by reasoning power, by full knowledge of facts, by the thrill of his moral idealism, his poetic joy in the world's ineffable beauty, and the glowing ardor of his disclosures of the mystery of communion with God. The sermons of this religious genius have lost none of their kindling power and claim the attention of students of religious experience. The theological views which disturbed his contemporaries have become characteristic of their descendants. His writings are collected in Theodore Parkers Works (14 volumes, 1863-70), edited by Frances P. Cobbe and published in London; also in the Centenary Edition (15 volumes, 1907-11), published by the American Unitarian Association, which includes a valuable introduction and critical notes. A German edition of his writings, Theodor Parkers Saemmtliche Werke (5 volumes, 1854-61) was prepared by Johannes Ziethen.

[John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker (1864); O. B. Frothingham, Theodore Parker, A Biography (1874); J. W. Chadwick, Theodore Parker, Preacher and Reformer (1900); Albert Reville, Theodore Parker, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres (Paris, 1865; English ed., London, 1865); Alfred Altherr, Theodor Parker in seinem Leben und Wirken (St. Gallen, 1894). Detailed bibliographies are in Chadwick's Life and in volume XV of the Centenary Edition of Parker's works.]

F.A.C.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 654-655:

PARKER, Theodore, clergyman, born in Lexington, Massachusetts, 24 August, 1810; died in Florence, Italy, 10 May, 1860. His grandfather, Captain John Parker, commanded the company of minute-men that were fired on by the British troops on 19 April, 1775. Theodore was the youngest of eleven children. From the father, a Unitarian and Federalist, he inherited independence of mind, courage, and Jove of speculation; from his mother, depth of religious feeling. The family were poor, and the boy was brought up to labor on the farm. At the age of six he was sent to the district school, which was then taught by young students from Harvard. The instruction was never systematic, quite rudimental, and very meagre, but the boy's thirst for knowledge overcame all obstacles. At eight he had read translations of Horner and Plutarch, together with such other works in prose and verse as were accessible, including Rollin's “Ancient History.” At the age of sixteen he was allowed to go to a school at Lexington for one quarter, an expensive indulgence, costing four dollars. Here he began algebra, and extended his knowledge of Latin and Greek. At the age of seventeen he taught himself. No school could give him enough. He studied all the time, and remembered all he learned, for his memory was as amazing as his hunger for acquisition. This year militia duties were added, and Theodore threw himself into these with his usual ardor, rose to rank in his company, and learned how to fight. All the time he was the light of his home, charming among his mates, exuberant, joyous, a pure, natural boy in all his instincts. One day in August, 1830, having obtained leave of absence from his father, he walked to Cambridge, was examined, admitted, walked back, and told his unsuspecting father, then in bed, that he had entered Harvard college. For a year he stayed at home and worked on the farm, but kept up with his class, and went to Cambridge only to be examined. Under these circumstances he could not obtain his bachelor's degree, and that of A. M. was conferred on him as a mark of honor in 1840. In March, 1831, he became assistant teacher in a private school in Boston, and toiled ten hours a day. In 1832 he undertook a private school at Watertown. There he remained ten years, becoming intimate with Convers Francis, the large-minded Unitarian minister there, reading his books, teaching in his Sunday-school with Lydia Cabot, whom he afterward married, and working his way toward the ministry. While in Watertown he read Cicero, Herodotus, Thucydides, Pindar, Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, and Æschylus; wrote a history of the Jews for his Sunday-school class, studied French metaphysics, began Hebrew in Charlestown, whither he walked on Saturdays to meet Mr. Seixas, a Jew, and began the pursuit of theology. In 1834 he went to the divinity-school, and his religious feeling took a conservative turn at that time. He seemed rather over-weighted with erudition, though by no means dry. His first venture in preaching was at Watertown from the pulpit of his friend, Mr. Francis. Then followed a period of “candidating” at Barnstable, Concord, Waltham, Leominster, and elsewhere. In June, 1837, he was ordained as minister at West Roxbury. This was a season of study, friendship, social intercourse, intellectual companionship, solid achievement in thought, unconscious preparation for the work he was to do. Here he gradually became known as an iconoclast. He was at West Roxbury about seven years, until February, 1845. During that time the Unitarian controversy was begun, the overworked student had passed a year in Europe, examining, meditating, resolving, clearing his purpose, and making sure of his calling, and the future career of the “heresiarch” was pretty well marked out. In January, 1845, a small company of gentlemen met and passed a resolution “that the Reverend Theodore Parker shall have a chance to be heard in Boston.” This was the beginning of the ministry at the Melodeon, which began formally in December. In that month an invitation from Boston—a society having been formed—was accepted. On 3 January, 1846, a letter resigning the charge at West Roxbury was written, and the installation took place the next day. The preaching at the Melodeon had been most successful, and it remained only to withdraw entirely, as he had in part, from his old parish, and to reside in the city. The ministrations at the Melodeon lasted about seven years, until 21 November, 1852, when the society took possession of the Music hall, then just completed. Here his fame culminated. He had met, at Brook Farm, which lay close to him at West Roxbury, the finest, most cultivated, most ardent intellects of the day; he had made the acquaintance of delightful people; he bad studied and talked a great deal; he had been brought face to face with practical problems of society. He was independent of sectarian bonds, he stood alone, he could bring his forces to bear without fear of wounding souls belonging to the regular Unitarian communion, and he was thoroughly imbued with the modern spirit. His work ran very swiftly. No doubt he was helped by the reform movements of the time, the love of poverty played its part, the natural sympathy with an outcast centred on him, the passion for controversy drew many, and the heretics saw their opportunity. But all these combined will not explain his success. True, he had no grace of person, no beauty of feature, no charm of expression, no music of voice, no power of gesture; his clear, steady, penetrating, blue eye was concealed by glasses. Still, notwithstanding these disadvantages, his intensity of conviction, his mass of knowledge, his warmth and breadth of feeling, his picturesqueness of language, his frankness of avowal, fascinated young and old. He had no secrets. He was ready for any emergency. He shrank from no toil. His interest in the people was genuine, hearty, and disinterested. He aimed constantly at the elevation of his kind through religion, morality, and education. He was interested in everything that concerned social advancement. Peace, temperance, the claims of morals, the treatment of animosity, poverty, and the rights of labor, engaged his thought. He did not neglect spiritualism or socialism, but devoted to these subjects a vast deal of consideration. Mr. Parker's interest in slavery began early. In 1841 he delivered a sermon on the subject, which was published, but it was not until 1845 that his share in the matter became engrossing. Then slavery became prominent in National politics, and menaced seriously republican institutions; then men began to talk of the “slave power.” Wendell Phillips somewhere tells of Theodore's first alliance with the Abolitionists, not in theory, for he did not agree with their policy, but in opposition to the prevailing sentiment. It was at the close of a long convention. There had been hard work. Phillips had been among the speakers, Parker among the listeners. As they left the hall, the latter joined him, took his arm, and said: '”Henceforth you may consider my presence by your side.” And faithfully he kept his promise. Probably no one—not Garrison, not Phillips himself—did more to awaken and enlighten the conscience of the north. By speeches, sermons, letters, tracts, and lectures he scattered abroad republican ideas. As a critic of pro-slavery champions, as a shielder of fugitives, as an encourager of fainting hearts, he was felt as a warrior. His labors were incessant and prodigious. He was preacher, pastor, visitor among the poor, the downtrodden, and the guilty; writer, platform speaker, lyceum lecturer, and always an omnivorous reader. His lecturing engagements numbered sometimes seventy or eighty in a season. In 1849 he established the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review,” a worthy successor of the “Dial,” but more muscular and practical—“a tremendous journal, with ability in its arms and piety in its heart.” The editorship was pressed upon Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sumner, but devolved at last on Parker, who was obliged also to write many of the articles, as his contributors failed him. The “Quarterly,” thanks to him, lived three years, and died at length quite as much through the stress of political exigency as through the want of support, though that was insufficient. The fugitive-slave bill was passed in 1850, and entailed a vast deal of toil and excitement. He took more than one man's share of both, was a leader of the committee of vigilance, planned escapes, and entertained runaway slaves. During the fearful agitations incident to the escape of William and Ellen Craft, the chase after Shadrach, the return of Sims, and the surrender of Burns, his energies were unintermitting. Then came the struggle with the slave-holders in the west, when John Brown came to the front, in which he bore an active part, being an early friend and helper of the hero of Ossawattomie. But for extraordinary strength in youth, a buoyant temperament, love of fun and jest, fondness for work, moderation in eating and drinking, sufficient sleep, exercise in the open air, and capacity for natural enjoyment, such excessive labor must have exhausted even his vitality. These supported him, and but for an unfortunate experience he might have lived to an old age. Indeed, he expected to do so. He used to say that if he safely passed forty-nine he should live to be eighty. But he inherited a tendency to consumption. In the winter of 1857, during a lecturing tour through central New York, he took a severe cold, which finally, in spite of all his friends could do, settled upon his lungs. On the morning of 9 January, 1859, he had an attack of bleeding at the lungs. At once he was taken to Santa Cruz, and in May he left the island for Southampton. The summer was spent in Switzerland, and in the autumn he went to Rome. The season being wet, he steadily lost ground, and could with difficulty reach Florence where he died. He lies in the Protestant cemetery there. (See illustration.)  Theodore Parker's system was simple. It was, so far as it was worked out, theism based on transcendental principles. The belief in God and the belief in the immortality of the soul were cardinal with him; all else in the domain of speculative theology he was ready to let go. He followed criticism up to this line; there he stood stoutly for the defence. He was a deeply religious man, but he was not a Christian believer. He regarded himself as a teacher of new ideas, and said that the faith of the next thousand years would be essentially like his. It is sometimes said that Parker was simply a deist; but they who say this must take into account the strong sweep of his personal aspiration, the weight of his convictions, his devotion to humanity, the enormous volume of his feelings. There is no deist whom he even remotely resembled. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Hobbes, Hume, suggest oppositions only. Parker affirmed and denied merely in order to make his affirmation more clear. He was a great believer, less a thinker than a doer. His bulky resources were so much fuel to his flame. His sympathies were all modern; he looked constantly forward, and was prevented only by his plain, common sense from accepting every scheme of his generation that wore a hopeful aspect. But he saw the weak points in reforms that he himself aided. He criticised women while working for their elevation, and laughed at negroes while toiling against their bondage. He was not aesthetic, and had no taste in painting, sculpture, music, poetry, or the delicacies of literature. He knew about them as he knew about everything, but his power was moral and religious, and it was inseparable from his temperament, which was human and practical on the side of social experiment. He bequeathed his library of 13,000 volumes to the Boston public library. He was a prolific author, publishing books, pamphlets, sermons, essays without number, but never with a literary, always with a philanthropic, intention. His publications include “Miscellaneous Writings” (Boston, 1843); “Sermons on Theism, Atheism, and Popular Theology” (1852); “Occasional Sermons and Speeches” (2 vols., 1852); “Additional Speeches and Addresses” (2 vols., 1855); “Trial of Theodore Parker for the Misdemeanor of a Speech in Faneuil Hall against Kidnapping,” a defence that he had prepared to deliver in case he should be tried for his part in the Anthony Burns case (1855); and “Experience as a Minister.” His “Discourse on Matters pertaining to Religion” (1842) still presents the best example of his theological method; his “Ten Sermons of Religion” (1853) the best summary of results. His complete works were edited by Frances Power Cobbe (12 vols., London, 1863-'5); (10 vols., Boston, 1870). A volume of “Prayers” was issued in 1862, and one entitled “Historic Americans” in 1870. It included discourses on Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. “Lessons from the World of Matter and the World of Mind,” selected from notes of his unpublished sermons, by Rufus Leighton, was edited by Frances P. Cobbe (London, 1865). See also “Théodore Parker sa vie et ses oeuvres,” by Albert Réville (Paris, 1865). On the death of Mrs. Parker in 1880, Franklin B. Sanborn was made literary executor, and he, it is said, intends to issue some new material. Mr. Parker's life has been presented several times; most comprehensively by John Weiss (2 vols., New York, 1864), and by Octavius B. Frothingham (Boston, 1874). Studies of him have been made in French and English. There is a fragment of autobiography and innumerable references to him as the founder of a new school in theology. There are busts of Parker by William W. Story and Robert Hart.  Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 654-655. 


PARKER, Thomas, abolitionist leader, Acting Committee, the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 1787.

(Basker, James G., gen. ed. Early American Abolitionists: A Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings, 1760-1820. New York: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2005, p. 92; Bruns, Roger, ed. Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688-1788. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977, p. 515)


PARKHURST, Jabez, New York, abolitionist leader.

(Sorin, Gerald. The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971)


PARKHURST, Jonathan, Essex County, New Jersey, abolitionist.  Manager, 1833-1840, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.

(Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833)


PARKMAN, John, Greenfield, Massachusetts, abolitionist, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1838-1840, 1840-1841.


PARRIS, Albion Kieth, 1788-1857, Portland, Maine, lawyer, jurist, U.S. Congressman and Senator, Mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, former Governor of Maine.  Co-founder of the local auxiliary of the American Colonization Society. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 659; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, p. 254; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 211)


PARRIS, Susan, abolitionist, Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 659; Yellin, Jean Fagan and John C. Van Horne (Eds). The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, 1994, p. 74)


PARRISH, Dillwyn, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Society of Friends, Quaker, member of the Association of Friends for Advocating the Cause of the Slave.

(Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, p. 154)


PARRISH, Isaac, 1811-1852, Philadelphia, physician, Pennsylvania, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1834-1837. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume IV, p. 659)


PARRISH, John, 1729-1807, preacher, Society of Friends, Quaker, anti-slavery activist.  Wrote Remarks on the Slavery of Black People (1806), in which he said:  “I am no politician, but it is clear that the fundamentals of all good governments, being equal liberty and impartial justice, the constitution and laws ought to be expressed in such unequivocal terms as not to be misunderstood, or admit of double meaning…  A house divided against itself cannot stand; neither can a government or constitution.” 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 659; Bruns, Roger, ed. Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688-1788. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977, p. 470; Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961; Locke, Mary Stoughton. Anti-Slavery in America from the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619-1808). Boston: Ginn & Co., 1901, pp. 65, 132, 173, 175-177)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 659:

PARRISH, John, preacher, born in Baltimore county, Md., 7 November, 1729; died in Baltimore, Md., 21 October, 1807. He was a member of the Society of Friends, and followed Anthony Benezet in pleading the cause of the African race. He published “Remarks on the Slavery of the Black People” (Philadelphia, 1806).  Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 659.


PARRISH, Dr. Joseph, 1779-1840, abolitionist, Society of Friends, Hicksite Quaker, Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania, leader and president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, p. 113; Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume IV, p. 659)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 659:

PARRISH, Joseph, physician, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2 September, 1779; died there, 18 March, 1840, followed the business of a hatter until he was of age, when, yielding to his own inclinations, he became a student under Dr. Caspar Wistar, and was graduated at the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1805. He was appointed resident physician of the yellow-fever hospital in the autumn of that year, and in 1806 one of the physicians of the Philadelphia dispensary, which post he held until 1812. He was also surgeon to the Philadelphia almshouse from 1806 until 1822, of the Pennsylvania hospital in 1816-'29, and consulting physician to the Philadelphia dispensary in 1835-'40. Dr. Parrish achieved reputation by his scientific attainments, which were somewhat unusual in that time. Among his experiments were a series that led to a proof of the harmlessness of the “poplar worm,” supposed at that time to be exceedingly venomous. In 1807 he began the delivery of a popular course of lectures on chemistry, which he subsequently repeated at various times. Notwithstanding his large practice, he also received medical students, and at one time had thirty under his instruction. Dr. Parrish was associated in the organization and subsequent management of the Wills hospital for the lame and blind, and was president of the board of managers in that institution from its beginning until his death. He was active in the proceedings of the College of physicians and in the medical society of Philadelphia. He contributed largely to the medical journals, and was one of the editors of “The North American Medical and Surgical Journal.” His books include “Practical Observations on Strangulated Hernia and some of the Diseases of the Urinary Organs” (Philadelphia, 1836), and an edition of William Lawrence's “Treatise on Hernia,” with an appendix. Says Dr. George B. Wood in his “Memoir of the Life and Character of Joseph Parrish” (Philadelphia, 1840): “Perhaps no one was personally known more extensively in the city, or had connected himself by a greater variety of beneficent services with every ramification of society.” Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 659.


PARRISH, Joseph, Jr., born 1818, Burlington, New Jersey, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1841-1846. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 659).

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 659:

PARRISH, Joseph, physician, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 11 November, 1818, was graduated at the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1844, and then settled in Burlington, N.J. He returned to his native city in 1855, and in 1856 was called to fill the chair of obstetrics in Philadelphia medical college, but soon resigned to go abroad. While he was in Rome his attention was directed to the imperfect management of the insane hospital, and by addressing the pope he succeeded in rectifying the abuse. On his return in 1857 he was appointed superintendent of the Pennsylvania training-school for feeble-minded children, and this institution, with its buildings, grew up under his management. At the beginning of the civil war he entered the service of the U. S. sanitary commission, for which, under orders from the president, he visited many hospitals and camps with orders for supplies and hospital stores. Dr. Parrish also had charge of the sanitary posts of White House and City Point, and subsequently visited the governors of the loyal states, whom he aided in the organization of auxiliary associations for the continued supply of hospital stores. When the war was over he established and conducted for seven years the Pennsylvania sanitarium for the treatment of alcoholic and opium inebriety. In 1875 he settled in Burlington, New Jersey, where he has since continued in charge of a home for nervous invalids. He has been most active in relation to the care of inebriates, and in 1872 he was summoned before the committee on habitual drunkards of the British house of commons. His advice and recommendations were approved and adopted by the committee, and were made the basis of a law that is now in existence. He issued the first call for the meeting that resulted in the formation of the American association for the cure of inebriates, and has since been president of that organization. Dr. Parrish was vice-president of the International congress on inebriety in England in 1882, and was a delegate to the International medical congress in Washington in 1887. He is also a member of scientific societies both at home and abroad. In 1848 he established the “New Jersey Medical and Surgical Reporter,” which is now issued from Philadelphia without the state prefix and under new management. He also edited “The Sanitary Commission Bulletin,” and has been associated in the control of other publications, such as the Hartford '”Quarterly Journal of Inebriety.” Dr. Parrish is the author of many papers and addresses on topics pertaining to that branch of medical science, and “Alcoholic Inebriety from a Medical Standpoint” (Philadelphia, 1883). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 659. 


PASTORIUS, Francis Daniel, 1651- c. 1720, lawyer, poet, scholar, educator, opponent of slavery.  Founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania.  In 1688, signed the Germantown Quaker Petition against slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888,Volume IV, pp. 668-669; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, p. 290)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 668-669:

PASTORIUS, Francis Daniel, colonist, born in Sommerhausen, Franconia, Germany, 26 September, 1651; died in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 27 September, 1719. He was the son of a judge of Windsheim, educated in the classical and modern languages, and all the science of his age, and had entered upon the practice of law, when, having joined the sect of Pietists, he concerted with some of his co-religionists a plan for emigrating to Pennsylvania. They purchased 25,000 acres, but abandoned the intention of colonizing the land themselves. Pastorius, their agent, had formed the acquaintance of William Penn in England, and became a convert to the Quaker doctrines. He was engaged by his associates, who in 1686 organized as the Frankfort land-company, and by some merchants of Crefeld, who had secured 15,000 acres, to conduct a colony of German and Dutch Mennonites and Quakers to Pennsylvania. He arrived on 20 June, 1683, and on 24 October began to lay out Germantown. He was until his death a man of influence among the colonists, was its first bailiff, and devised the town-seal, which consisted of a clover on one of whose leaves was a vine, another a stalk of flax, and the third a weaver's spool with the motto “Vinum, Linum, et Textrium.” In 1687 he was elected a member of the assembly. In 1688 he was one of the signers of a protest to the Friends' yearly meeting at Burlington against buying and selling slaves, or holding men in slavery, which was declared to be “an act irreconcilable with the precepts of the Christian religion.” This protest began the struggle against that institution in this country, and is the subject of John G. Whittier's poem, “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim.” For many years he taught in Germantown and Philadelphia, and many of the deeds and letters required by the German settlers were written by him. He published a pamphlet, consisting in part of letters to his father, and containing a description of the commonwealth and its government, and advice to emigrants, entitled “Umständige geographische Beschreibung der allerletzt erfundenen Provintz Pennsylvaniae” (Frankfort-on-Main, 1700). Several volumes were left by him in manuscript, containing philosophical reflections, poems, and notes on theological, medical, and legal subjects. His Latin prologue to the Germantown book of records has been translated by Whittier in the ode beginning “Hail to Posterity.” Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 668-669.


PATTERSON, Daniel Todd, 1786-1839, Naval Commander, USS Constitution.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 671; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 301-302; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 17, p. 134), 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 301-302:

PATTERSON, DANIEL TODD (March 6, 1786-August 25, 1839), naval officer, was born on Long Island, New York, the son of John Patterson, former collector of customs at Philadelphia, and Catharine (Livingston) Patterson, great-granddaughter of Robert Livingston [q.v.]. On June II, 1799, he joined the sloop Delaware as acting midshipman and sailed in her on two West Indian cruises during the naval war with France. He was warranted midshipman in August 1800, after his first cruise, and was one of the 159 midshipmen out of 352 retained in the peace establishment of May 1801. He carried on nautical studies till December. Until March 1803 he was in the Constellation of the second squadron sent against Tripoli. In May following he sailed again for the Mediterranean in the Philadelphia and was a prisoner for more than nineteen months after she was stranded and captured by the Tripolitans on October 31, 1803. Under the excellent tutelage of Captain William Bainbridge and Lieut. David Porter [qq.v.], he was, however, enabled "to profit by the seeming misfortune" (manuscript memoir of his services, November 1813, in Navy Department Library). Upon his return he was stationed at New Orleans from January 1806 to June 1807. He was married in 1807 to George Ann Pollock, the daughter of George Pollock of New Orleans. They had two sons, Carlile Pollock and Thomas Harman [q.v.], and three daughters, one of whom, George Ann, was married in 1839 to David D. Porter [q.v.].

In March 1808, after a visit to the North, and promotion to the rank of lieutenant, he returned to New Orleans where his friend Porter was in charge. From January 1810 to February 1811 he had a semi-independent command of twelve gunboats, that operated from a base at Natchez and transported most of the troops for the occupation of Baton Rouge in 1810. He was made master commandant on July 24, 1813, and from December following commanded the New Orleans station. Against the Gulf buccaneers his most effective stroke was delivered on September 16, 1814, when, raiding the base of the pirate Jean Laffite [q.v.] at Barataria Bay, Louisiana, with the schooner Carolina and six light gun vessels, he captured six schooners and other small craft. Although it was supported by twenty guns mounted on shore, Laffite's band, about 1,000 strong, fled without resistance, much to Patterson's disappointment (C. F. Goodrich, "Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates," Naval Institute Proceedings, September-October, 1916, p. 1471). He foresaw clearly the designs of the British against New Orleans in 1814 and indicated the best lines of defense. On September 2, 1814, he refused Jackson's request to send his naval forces to Mobile, and maintained his position at New Orleans where the delay he caused the enemy by the gunboat action on Lake Borgne on December 15 greatly facilitated Jackson's final victory. He was aboard the Carolina during her very effective two-hour bombardment of the British camp on the evening of December 23, shouting at the first discharge, "Give them this for the honor of America" (Niles' National Register, September 28, 1839, p. 71). The Carolina was destroyed by enemy fire on December 27, but with his remaining vessel, the Louisiana, he continued to render valuable artillery service, and in the battle of January 8 he commanded a battery of naval guns on the west bank of the river. These had to be spiked and abandoned on the retreat of Morgan's militia but were repaired and ready for action next day. His excellent cooperation throughout the campaign has perhaps not been fully recognized, though he was highly commended by Jackson, received a vote of thanks from Congress, and was made captain on February 28, 1815. Patterson is described at this time as a "stout, compact, gallant-bearing man ... his manner ... slightly marked by hauteur" (J. Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 1860, volume II, p. 28).

A welcome change from the isolated southern station came finally in 1824 when he was appointed fleet captain and commander of the flagship Constitution in Commodore Rodgers' Mediterranean Squadron. Upon his return in 1828, partly no doubt as a warm friend and supporter of Jackson, he was given the important office of one of the three navy commissioners. Afterward he commanded the Mediterranean Squadron from 1832 to 1836. In negotiations to enforce claims against Naples for commercial injuries during the Napoleonic wars, his squadron gave effective support by entering the harbor at Naples one ship after another, until all six were assembled. His death occurred at the Washington navy yard, of which he was commandant, 1836-39, and he was buried in the Congressional Cemetery.

[Master Commandants' Letters, 1813, and Captains' Letters, 1814-24, in Navy Department Library; E. N. McClellan, "The Navy at the Battle of New Orleans," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, December 1924; Daily National Intelligencer, January 30, February 3, 22, 23, March 6, December 2, 1815, August 26, September 23, 1839; E. B. Livingston, The Livingstons of Livingston Manor (1910); information from family sources. ]

A. W.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 671:

PATTERSON, Daniel Tod, naval officer, born on Long Island, New York, 6 March, 1786; died in Washington, D. C., 15 August, 1839. He entered the U. S. navy as a midshipman in August, 1800, and was attached to the frigate “Philadelphia,” under Captain William Bainbridge when she ran upon a reef off Tripoli, and was taken by a flotilla of gun-boats. Patterson was kept a prisoner in Tripoli until 1805, and in 1807 he was promoted to lieutenant. In 1813 he was made commander, and in 1814 bad charge of the naval forces at New Orleans, co-operating ably with General Andrew Jackson, and receiving the thanks of congress. He commanded the flotilla that captured and destroyed the forts and other defences of Jean Lafitte (q. v.) on the island of Barataria. Subsequently be attained the rank of captain, and had charge of the “Constitution” in 1826-'8, while on the Mediterranean. In 1828 he was made naval commissioner, and in 1832-'6 he commanded the Mediterranean squadron, after which he was, until his death, commandant of the navy-yard at Washington. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 671.


PATTERSON, James Willis, 1823-1893, educator.  Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New Hampshire.  Congressman 1863-1867.  Elected U.S. Senator 1866-1873.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 672; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, p. 303-304; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, p. 303-304:

PATTERSON, JAMES WILLIS (July 2, 1823-May 4, 1893), educator, politician, the second child of William and Frances (Shepard) Patterson, was born at Henniker, New Hampshire. His boyhood was spent for the most part in hard work on his father's farm and in the mills at Lowell, Massachusetts, where the family resided for several years. About 1838 he completed his early schooling, which had been somewhat meager, at the local academy in Henniker. After two years' employment in Lowell, and four years as a teacher, he was able to complete his preparation for college. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1848 with high honors. Planning a legal career, he served as principal of Woodstock Academy in Connecticut (1848-5I), studying law in the meantime. For a time he considered the ministry as a career and spent a year in the study of theology at New Haven, but he had already made a reputation as a successful teacher, and in 1852 he received and accepted the offer of a tutorship at Dartmouth. In 1854 he was appointed professor of mathematics and on December 24 of the same year married Sarah Parker Wilder of Laconia, New Hampshire. Five years later he was appointed professor of astronomy and meteorology and held this chair until 1865.

From 1858 to 1862 Patterson was school commissioner of Grafton County. In the latter year he served a term in the New Hampshire legislature and in 1863 he was elected, a Republican, to the national House of Representatives. His House service covered the years 1863-67 and in 1866 he was elected to the United States Senate. Throughout his ten years in Washington he was especially interested in the District of Columbia for which he drafted several education laws, emancipation having created many new problems. As chairman of the joint select committee on retrenchment he submitted notable reports on the consular service (Senate Report 154, 40 Congress, 2 Session) and on the excessive costs and abuses in the collection of customs revenue (Senate Report 380,41 Congress, 3 Session). His career in Washington closed under a cloud created by the Credit Mobilier scandal, but historians have been puzzled to understand why he was recommended for expulsion when no drastic action was taken in the cases of other more serious offenders. That his conduct had been indiscreet is unquestionable; and his apparent attempt to conceal relevant facts created a bad impression; but many believed the truth of his own statement that he had supposed the stock purchased for him was Union Pacific rather than Credit Mobilier. His term ended within a few days after the Senate investigating committee had submitted a report recommending his expulsion, and without opportunity for discussion on the floor, a fact which led many to believe that he had been unjustly dealt with. His defense subsequently published, and reprinted in a public document (Senate Report 519, 42 Congress, 3 Session), is somewhat naive but strengthens the impression that he was innocent of corrupt motives.

He had been defeated for renomination in 1872 and spent the years following his retirement in Hanover. He traveled extensively and was in frequent demand as a public speaker and lecturer. He again represented Hanover in the legislature for two terms, 1877-78. From 1881 to 1893 he was state superintendent of public instruction. He was largely instrumental in securing the passage of the Act of 1885 substituting the town for the local district as the unit of public-school organization. He resigned in 1893 when again appointed to the Dartmouth faculty, this time as professor of rhetoric and oratory. His reappointment was considered a measure of vindication which he did not live to enjoy fully, his death occurring unexpectedly a few weeks later.

[Sources include: G. W. Patterson, las. W. Patterson as an Educator (1893), reprinted from Annual Report of Supt. of Public Instruction ... of New Hampshire, 1893; L. W. Cogswell, History of the Town of Henniker (1880); J. O. Lyford, Life of Edw. H. Rollins (1906); containing references to Patterson's political career; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Granite Monthly, October 1892, June 1893; J. K. Lord, A History of Dartmouth College (1913); obituary notices in New Hampshire newspapers. There is manuscript material on Patterson in the archives of Dartmouth College and the Dartmouth College Library has a large collection of Patterson's printed addresses and miscellaneous pamphlets.]

W. A. R.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 672:

PATTERSON, James Willis, senator, born in Henniker, Merrimack county, New Hampshire, 2 July, 1823. He was graduated at Dartmouth in 1848, and studied divinity at Yale, but was not licensed to preach. He was tutor at Dartmouth in 1852-'4, professor of mathematics there in 1854-'9, and occupied the chair of astronomy and meteorology from the latter date till 1865. He was school commissioner for Grafton county in 1858-'61, and at the same time secretary of the state board of education, and prepared the state reports for five years. He was in the legislature in 1862, was elected to congress as a Republican in the same year, served till 1867, and in 1866 was chosen U.S. senator, serving one term, during which he was the author of the measure constituting consular clerkships, and the bill for establishing colored schools in the District of Columbia, and was chairman of the committee on the District of Columbia and of that on retrenchment and reform. At the close of the congressional investigation of the Credit Mobilier (see AMES, OAKES) the senate committee reported a resolution expelling Mr. Patterson, 27 February, 1873; but no action was taken upon it, and five days later his term expired. He was a regent of the Smithsonian institution in 1864-'5, and was a delegate to the Philadelphia loyalists' convention in 1866. In 1 877-'8 he was again a member of the New Hampshire legislature, and in 1885 he was appointed state superintendent of public instruction in New Hampshire. Iowa college gave him the degree of LL. D. in 1868. In 1880 he was the orator at the unveiling of the Soldiers’ monument in Marietta, Ohio. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 672.


PATTERSON, Robert, 1743-1824, Pennsylvania, mathematician, educator, soldier, member and delegate of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, founded 1775.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 671; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 305-306; Basker, James G., gen. ed. Early American Abolitionists: A Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings, 1760-1820. New York: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2005, pp. 223, 240n14; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 17, p. 139). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 305-306:

PATTERSON, ROBERT (May 30, 1743- July 22, 1824), mathematician, was born near Hillsborough in the north of Ireland, the son of Robert and Jane Patterson. His great-grandfather had emigrated from Scotland to escape the persecution of the Presbyterians by the Stuarts. He was sent to school at an early age and distinguished himself for his progress in mathematics. During the wave of martial spirit that spread over Ireland when the French descended upon the coast, Patterson enlisted in a militia company. He was offered a commission in the British army but this he declined. After finishing his education, he emigrated to America in October 1768 and landed in Philadelphia practically penniless. He secured a position as schoolmaster in Buckingham, Bucks County, but left this position to return to Philadelphia, where he taught many of the leading navigators the computation of longitude by means of lunar observations. In 1772, having accumulated the sum of approximately five or six hundred pounds, he opened a country store in New Jersey. He was unfitted for business, however, and seized the first opportunity to close out the enterprise, resuming his former vocation as principal of the academy at Wilmington, Delaware. His early experiences in Ireland put him in a position to render valuable services as a military instructor upon the outbreak of the Revolution. Three companies were put under his charge. Later he entered the army with the rank of brigade major and served until the British evacuated Philadelphia.

Upon the reorganization of the College and Academy of Philadelphia as the University of Pennsylvania, Patterson was appointed professor of mathematics. He entered the services of the University in December 1779 and served continuously until 18r4 when he resigned and was succeeded by his son, Robert M. Patterson. For a period he was vice-provost of the University. He contributed several scientific papers to the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society and was a frequent contributor of problems and solutions to mathematical journals. He also published Lectures on Select Subjects in Mechanics (2 volumes, 1806), and Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles (1806, 1809), revised editions of the works of James Ferguson, the Scotch scientist. In 1808 he published a small book entitled the Newtonian System of Philosophy and in 1818 he published A Treatise of Practical Arithmetic, elaborated from his lectures on the same subject at the University of Pennsylvania. Though the exposition was clear, the book never reached the circulation it deserved because it was difficult for beginners. In the second volume of Robert Adrain's Analyst he set as the prize problem the question as to how to correct the measurements of a polygon whose sides are given in size and direction but which when plotted do not close up. The problem was renewed in Volume III and was finally solved by Nathaniel Bowditch in Volume IV.

In addition to his services at the University Patterson found time for public service. He was a member of Select Council of Philadelphia and was elected its president in 1799. In 1805 he received from President Jefferson the unsolicited appointment as director of the mint. He filled this office with distinction and resigned only at the time of his last illness. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1783 and became its president in 1819. He was richly endowed both in mind and body. His especial mental inclination was for exact science. He was not alone interested in the discovery of a mathematical or physical truth but was never satisfied until he could see its application in the world of every-day life. Patterson was married, on May 9, 1774, to Amy Hunter Ewing of Greenwich, New Jersey They had eight children.

[Memoir of Patterson in Trans. American Phil. Society, n.s. volume II (1825); F. Cajori, The Teaching and History of Mathematics in the U. S. (1890); J. L. Chamberlain, Universities and Their Sons: University of Pennsylvania, volume I (1901); G. B. Wood, The History of the University of Pennsylvania (1834); W. E. Du Bois, A Record of the Families of Robt. Patterson (1847); Poulson's American Daily Advertiser, July 24, 1824.]

J. R. K.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 672:

PATTERSON, Robert, director of the mint, born near Hillsborough, County Down, Ireland, 30 May, 1743; died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 22 July, 1824. He emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1768, found employment as a teacher, and in 1774 became principal of the academy in Wilmington, Del. When the Revolution began, he volunteered in the patriot army was at first a military instructor, and subsequently adjutant, assistant surgeon, and brigade-major. He was elected professor of mathematics in the University of Pennsylvania in 1779, occupied that chair for thirty-five years, and in 1810-'13 was vice-provost of that institution. Chief-Justice William Tilghman says of him: “Arduous as were his duties in the university, he found time for other useful employments. He was elected a member of the select council of Philadelphia, and was chosen its president in 1799. In 1805 he received from President Jefferson, with whom he had been in habits friendship, the appointment of director of the mint. This office he filled with great success until his last illness.” Mr. Patterson took an active part in the proceedings of the American philosophical society, and was its president from 1819 until his death, being a constant contributor to its “Transactions.” The University of Pennsylvania gave him the degree of LL. D. in 1819. He published “The Newtonian System” (Philadelphia, 1808) and a treatise on “Arithmetic” (Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, 1819); and edited James Ferguson's “Lectures on Mechanics” (2 vols., 1806); his “Astronomy” (1809); John Webster's “Natural Philosophy” (1808); and Reverend John Ewing's “Natural Philosophy,” with a memoir of the author (1809). See “Records of the Family of Robert Patterson (the Elder)” (printed privately, Philadelphia, 1847). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 672.


PATTERSON, Thomas, charter member of the American Colonization Society, founded in Washington, DC, in December 1816. 

(Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 258n14)


PATTERSON, William, New York, American Abolition Society

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


PATTON, William, 1798-1879, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, clergyman, opponent of slavery, father of abolitionist William Weston Patton. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 317-318). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 317-318:

PATTON, WILLIAM (August 23, 1798-September 9, 1879), clergyman and author, was the third son of Colonel Robert Patton, who was of Scotch.-Irish ancestry, and had come to America when a young man. He had served under Lafayette in the American Revolution, and for more than twenty years, until his death in 1814, was postmaster of Philadelphia. William's moth er was Cornelia (Bridges) Patton, who traced her ancestry to the Culpeper and Fairfax families of Virginia and England. She died when William was eight years old. He united at the age of eighteen with the First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, his native city, graduated at Middlebury College in 1818, and studied several months in Princeton Theological Seminary (1819-20). In 1819 he married Mary Weston. After being ordained to the ministry in 1820 by the Congregational Association of Vermont, he removed to New York City, the home of his wife. Impelled by a missionary spirit, he gathered together the members who constituted his first church, the Central Presbyterian, and served it several years without salary.

His pulpit and business ability led to his being called in 1833 to the secretaryship of the Central American Education Society. During the next four years he recruited the ministry and raised money for educational purposes, but in 1837 returned to the pastorate. At Spring Street Presbyterian Church he won much success in reviva1 work, in persuading young men to enter the ministry, and particularly in influencing children. Apparently the first to propose that a Presbyterian theological seminary be established in New York City, Patton in 1836 became one of the four ministerial founders of Union Seminary, and served as a director from the beg inning until 1849, and as instructor or "professor extraordinary" for three years. His last pastorate, begun in 1848, was at Hammond Street Congregational Church, New York, a new enterprise initiated by some of his close friends. Financial difficulties compelled the organization, in spite of increasing membership, to surrender its property in 1852.

During the remaining twenty-seven years of his life his home was in or near New Haven, Connecticut, and his time was devoted largely to supplying pulpits and to the literary work begun early in his career. In 1834 he h ad recast a British commentary, Thomas Williams' Cottage Bible and Family Expositor, making it substantially a new work. More than 170,000 copies of it were sold in America. In collaboration with Thomas Hastings, he published The Christian Psalmist (1839), a hymn book which for a time had a wide circulation, and he prepared British editions of Edwards on Revivals (1839) and of C. G. Finney's Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835). Between 1825 and 1879 he made fourteen voyages to Europe, partly on account of his health, which until middle age was precarious. Ambitious to inform Britain of the true spirit of America, in 1861 he wrote articles for English dailies explaining the anti-slavery background of the Civil War, and published in London a pamphlet, The American Crisis; or, The True Issue, Slavery or Liberty. In England, as in the United States, he constantly attacked slavery and the alcoholic traffic. He proposed and attended the meeting at London in 1846 which organized the Evangelical Alliance for promoting Christian union and religious liberty throughout the world. During his New Haven days he published additional books, including The Judgment of Jerusalem Predicted in Scripture, Fulfilled in History (1877) and Bible Principles Illustrated by Bible Characters (1879).

From 1830 to 1870 he was a member of the executive committee of the American Home Missionary Society, and at his death, in New Haven, he left legacies to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, to the American Missionary Association in Aid of the Freedmen, and to Howard University, whose president was his son, Reverend William Weston Patton. Of his ten children, five died early, the survivors being two so ns and three daughters. The mother of them all was Mary (Weston) Patton, who died in 1857. In 1860 he married Mrs. Mary (Shaw) Bird of Philadelphia, whose death occurred in 1863. His third wife, whom he married in 1864, was Mrs. Emily (Trowbridge) Hayes.

[W. W. Patton, A Filial Tribute (1880); Jonathan Greenleaf, A History of the Churches of All Denominations in the City of New York (1850); G. L. Prentiss, The Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (1889); General Catalog of the Union Theological Seminary (1926); and Necrological Reports and Annual Proceedings of the Alumni Association of Princeton Theological Seminary, volume I (1891); New Haven Evening Register, September 10, 1879.]

P. F.


PATTON, William Weston, 1821-1889, theologian, educator, college president, abolitionist, anti-slavery activist.  Massachusetts Abolition Society, Executive Committee, 1845-46.  On September 3, 1862, petitioned Lincoln to issue a proclamation of emancipation.  President of Howard University, 1877-1889. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888)

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 677-678:

PATTON, William Weston, clergyman, born in New York city, 19 October, 1821, was graduated at the University of the city of New York in 1839 and at the Union theological seminary in 1842. After taking charge of a Congregational church in Boston, Massachusetts, for three years, he became pastor of one in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1846, and in Chicago, Illinois, in 1857. From 1867 till 1872 he was editor of “The Advance” in that city, and during 1874 he was lecturer on modern skepticism at Oberlin, Ohio, and Chicago theological seminaries, since which time he has been president of Howard university, Washington, D. C., filling the chair of natural theology and evidences of Christianity in its theological department. He took an earnest part in the anti-slavery movement, and was chairman of the committee that presented to President Lincoln, 13 September, 1862, the memorial from Chicago asking him to issue a proclamation of emancipation. He was vice-president of the Northwestern sanitary commission during the civil war, and as such repeatedly visited the eastern and western armies, publishing several pamphlet reports. In 1886 he went, on behalf of the freedmen, to Europe, where, and in the Orient, he remained nearly a year. He received the degree of D. D. from Asbury (now De Pauw) university, Ind., in 1864, and that of LL. D. from the University of the citv of New York in 1882. He is the author of “The Young Man” (Hartford, 1847; republished as “The Young Man's Friend,” Auburn. New York, 1850); “Conscience and Law” (New York, 1850); “Slavery and Infidelity” (Cincinnati, 1856); “Spiritual Victory” (Boston, 1874); and “Prayer and its Remarkable Answers” (Chicago, 1875).   Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 677-678.


PAUL, Nathaniel, 1793-1839, New Hampshire, clergyman, abolitionist.  Founder of the First African Baptist Church in Albany, New York.  Advocated for immediate emancipation.  Against American Colonization Society.  Co-founded Freedom’s Journal, 1827-1829.  Worked with Albany Anti-Slavery Society. 

(Pease, William H., & Pease, Jane H. The Antislavery Argument. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1963; Quarles, 1969; Swift, 1989; Hinks, Peter P., & John R. McKivigan, Eds., Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition.  Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 2007, Volume 2, pp. 523-524)


PAUL, Susan, 1809-1841, African American, Boston, Massachusetts, abolitionist.  Member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.  Paul authored the first autobiography of an African American published in the United States, entitled, Memoir of James Jackson, published in 1835.

(Yellin, Jean Fagan and John C. Van Horne (Eds). The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, 1994, p. 58n40). 


PAYNE, DANIEL ALEXANDER (February 24, 1811-November 29, 1893), bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, president of Wilberforce University.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 2, pp. 324-325:

PAYNE, DANIEL ALEXANDER (February 24, 18rr-November 29, 1893), bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, president of Wilberforce University, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of London and Martha Payne, who were free persons of color. His parents having died before he was ten years old, he was cared for by relatives. For two years he attended a local Minor's Moralist Society School established by free colored men. He next studied under Thomas Bonneau, a private tutor, and not only mastered English and mathematics but made himself conversant with Greek, Latin, and French. Apprenticed first to a shoe maker and la ter to a tail or, Payne also worked for four years in a carpenter's shop, of which his brother-in- law was foreman. In 1826 he joined the Methodist Episcopal Church and three years later opened a school for colored children, which in a short while became the most successful institution of its kind in Charleston. It flourished until the South Carolina legislature passed a law, on December 17, 1834, imposing a fine and whipping on free persons of color who kept schools to t each slaves or free negroes to read or write. Obliged to discontinue his school, Payne on May 9, 1835, left Charleston for Pennsylvania, where he entered the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg. There he supported himself by blacking boots, waiting at table, and doing other menial tasks. In 1837 he was licensed to preach and in 1839 was ordained by the Franckean Synod of the Lutheran Church. He accepted a call to a Presbyterian church in East Troy, New York. but in 1840 moved to Philadelphia, where he opened a school. In 1841 he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church and in 1842 was received as a preacher at the Philadelphia Conference of that denomination. After serving as a traveling preach er he was appointed to the Israel Church in Washington, D. C. In 1845 he was transferred to Baltimore, Maryland, where he was pastor of Bethel Church.

Chosen historiographer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1848, he traveled extensively in the United States searching for materials. In May 1852 he was elected bishop. As such he exerted himself to raise the cultural standard of the communicants of the denomination by promoting th e formation of church literary societies and debating lyceums. During the Civil War he pleaded with Lincoln and other prominent men for the emancipation of the slaves. Without a doll r in hand, on March 10, 1863, he had the temerity to purchase Wilberforce University, an Ohio institution established by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856 for the education of colored youths, to which many natural children of slave holders had been sent prior to the War. He was its president for thirteen years. On the day Lincoln was assassinated the main building of the institution was burned. This loss increased the financial burden he had to assume, but during his administration he was instrumental in securing more than $92,000. The enrollment of students also increased greatly. In 1867 he visited Europe for the first time. A delegate to the first Ecumenical Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, held in London, England, Payne on September 13, 1881, read a paper on Methodism and Temperance, impressing all by his dignified manners. He also took part in the Parliament of Religions, held in 1893 during the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago.

After his retirement from Wilberforce he devoted himself to writing and to a continuance of his unrelenting fight against the illiteracy of the colored Methodist ministers. He was of a light brown complexion and below the average height. Very thin and emaciated and weighing only one hundred pounds, he looked like a consumptive. He had sharp features, an intellectual forehead, keen, penetrating eyes, and a shrill voice. Among his publications were The Semi-Centenary of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the U. S. of America (1866), A Treatise on Domestic Education (1885), Recollections of Seventy Years (1888), The History of the A. M. E. Church from 1816 to 1856 (1891). Payne was married in 1847 to Mrs. Julia A. Ferris, daughter of William Becraft of Georgetown, D. C.; she died within a year thereafter, and in 1853 he married Mrs. Eliza J. Clark.

[C. S. Smith, The Life of Daniel Alexander Payne (1894); J. W. Cromwell, The Negro in American History (1914); G. F. Bragg, Men of Maryland (1925); W. J. Simmons, Men of Mark (1887); Wm. W. Brown, The Rising Son (1874); A. R. Wentz, History of Gettysburg Theological Seminary ... 1826-1926 (n.d.).]

H. G. V.



Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.