Maria Weston Chapman (July 25, 1806-July 12, 1885) was described by Lydia Maria Child as “One of the most remarkable women of the age.” Chapman and three of her five younger sisters played vital roles in the antislavery movement. Even the smaller Weston girls were pressed into service for the cause that dominated the lives of this family.…
Angus Hector MacLean (May 9, 1892-November 11, 1969), Universalist minister, theological school professor and dean, played a major part in reshaping the philosophy and practice of religious education within the Universalist and Unitarian denominations during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.
Lydia Maria Child (February 11, 1802-Oct. 20, 1880) was a novelist, editor, journalist and scholar who produced a body of work remarkable for its brilliance, originality and variety, much of it inspired by a strong sense of justice and love of freedom.…
Richard Hildreth (June 28, 1807-July 11, 1865) was a journalist, philosopher, historian, and antislavery activist. His 1836 novel The Slave is considered the first American antislavery novel. His History of the United States of America broke new ground with its “warts and all” portrayal of the founders of the American republic.…
Lady Frances Russell, who became a Unitarian at 70, and her grandson, Bertrand Russell, Unitarian until age 15, were members of a British family long prominent in reform politics. Although Lady Frances’s husband, Lord John Russell, was never a Unitarian, from 1859-73 he regularly attended the preaching of James Martineau and, in his Whig (Liberal) political career, he had a considerable impact on the history of Unitarianism in Britain.…
Adlai Ewing Stevenson (February 5, 1900-July 14, 1965), politician and diplomat, was twice the Democratic Party’s candidate for President of the United States. He brought a freshness, a depth, passion, wit and vision to American politics and to international diplomatic discourse, that illumined an era.
Ezra Ripley (May 1, 1751-September 21, 1841) served as minister of the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts for almost 63 years. Although not himself an intellectual, Ripley possessed extraordinary personal and spiritual authority. He, more than any other, created the religious and moral climate of this small town which nurtured far more than its share of the writers, artists, and political figures—whose names are synonymous with the flowering of the American Renaissance.…
Samuel Ripley (March 11, 1783-November 24, 1847) and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley (July 31, 1793-July 26, 1867) played significant roles in the Unitarian movement, especially through their close connection with the Emerson family. Although the Ripleys were intimates of Ralph Waldo Emerson and friends of Boston area Unitarian ministers and transcendentalists, notice of them has been largely confined to mention in works of their better known associates.…
Mary Augusta Safford (December 23, 1851-October 25, 1927), a Unitarian minister of remarkable energy, zeal and dedication, did much to plant and promote the growth of Unitarian churches in the middle west during the late 19th century. The central figure in a cadre of women Unitarian ministers known alternately as the “Iowa Sisterhood” or the “Iowa Band,” she led her ministerial colleagues in their common work of founding and serving new Unitarian churches in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and North and South Dakota.…
Horace Mann (May 4, 1796-August 2, 1859), was an educator and a statesman who greatly advanced the cause of universal, free, non-sectarian public schools. Mann also advocated temperance, abolition, hospitals for the mentally ill, and women’s rights. His preferred cause was education, about which he remarked that while “other reforms are remedial; education is preventative.”
Theodore Clapp (March 29, 1792-May 17, 1866), an early Unitarian preacher in the southern United States who established an outpost of liberal religion in New Orleans and built it into a beacon of religious moderation, was born in Easthampton, Massachusetts. His childhood memories, he wrote, were laced with the pain he felt at the Calvinist preaching he heard about God’s “hatred of man.”…
Thomas Starr King (December 17, 1824-March 4, 1864), a Universalist and a Unitarian minister, was a lecturer and orator whose role in preserving California within the Union during the Civil War is honored by statues in the United States Capitol and in Golden Gate Park in California.…