The Birthday of Eternity

Theodore Parker, died May 10, 1860

Theodore Parker's supporters organized the 28th Congregational Society of Boston in December 1845 and installed Parker as minister in January 1846. His congregation, which included Louisa May Alcott, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, grew to 7,000. The 28th Congregational Society was not generally considered a Unitarian organization. It was called a "free church" and its members were sometimes called "Parkerites."

In a speech delivered in 1850, Parker used the phrase, "A democracy — of all the people, by all the people, for all the people;" which later influenced the wording of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

In Boston, Parker led the movement to combat the stricter Fugitive Slave Act enacted with the Compromise of 1850. It required law enforcement and citizens of all states- free states as well as slave states- to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves. Parker called the law "a hateful statute of kidnappers", and helped organize open resistance to it in Boston. Parker and his followers formed the Committee of Vigilance, refusing to assist with the recovery of fugitive slaves, and helping to hide them. They smuggled Ellen and William Craft when slave catchers from Georgia came to Boston to arrest them.

Ellen and William Craft

Due to Parker's effort, from 1850 to the onset of the Civil War in 1861, only twice were slaves captured in Boston and transported back to the South. On both occasions, Bostonians combatted the actions with mass protests.

Parker predicted the inevitable success of the abolitionist cause this way:

"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."

A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. paraphrased these words in his "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech of August 1967 to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, when he said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice".

Parker's Study

Parker was involved with almost all of the reform movements of the time: "peace, temperance, education, the condition of women, penal legislation, prison discipline, the moral and mental destitution of the rich, and the physical destitution of the poor" though none became "a dominant factor in his experience" with the exception of his antislavery views. He "denounced the Mexican War and called on his fellow Bostonians in 1847 'to protest against this most infamous war.'"

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

Parker also supported Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's Foreign Library where many intellectuals gathered.

William Wesselhoeft

Parker's health began to fail in 1857. Parker was a patient of William Wesselhoeft, who practiced homeopathy. In 1859, Parker's ill health led to a physical collapse which forced his retirement. He suffered from tuberculosis, then without treatment. On February 8, 1860, he left wintry Boston with his wife, Lydia and a few friends for the warmth of the Caribbean. While on the island of Santa Cruz in March and April, he wrote a long, autobiographical letter to his congregation that was also a confession of faith. It soon was published as Theodore Parker's Experience as a Minister. Parker then traveled to England, France, Switzerland, and Italy.

Parker left the Eternal City on April 21, but his condition worsened over the five-day journey to Florence. “Having arrived at Florence, it happened as he had foreseen and predicted,” wrote another travelling companion, the Swiss geologist Edward Desor, “Overcome by the fatigues of the journey, he had but one desire, to rest. He reached his bed, never more to quit it.” At Parker’s bedside, Miss Frances Power Cobbe remembered him saying “in a wandering mood … ‘I have something to tell you―there are two Theodore Parkers now. One is here dying in Italy, the other I have planted in America. He will live there, and finish my work.’”