Revolutionary Conscience

Paul E. Teed is professor of history at Saginaw Valley State University where he has taught since 1997. He is the author of John Quincy Adams: Yankee Nationalist. His articles have appeared in Civil War History, the Journal of the Early Republic, and American Studies. In 2012, he was chosen as Distinguished Professor of the Year by the Presidents Council of the State Universities of Michigan.

Teed’s is the first complete life study of Parker to appear in many decades. Teed shows readers the full sweep of Parker’s remarkable career and his wide range as a thinker....Teed is the first biographer to recognize Parker’s important role in the antislavery movement as a mediator between the contentious Garrisonian and other political factions; the first to look dispassionately at Parker’s growing support for antislavery violence in the 1850s; the first to deal forthrightly with Parker’s racial theories and his sometimes shockingly racist pronouncements; the first to look critically at Parker’s ideas about gender and women’s rights; and the first to take seriously Parker’s reaction—which shaped his later theology—against the philosophical atheism of Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. “Bred Up Amid the Memories”2. Divinity School and Beyond3. Spiritual Indifference4. The Transcendentalist Controversy5. The Making of a Public Radical6. A Reckoning with Ministers7. Church and Society8. Classes, Families and Reform9. Slavery, Politics and the Revolution10. Making Antislavery Culture11. Conscience and the Fugitive Slave Act12. Continual Alarms13. Race, Politics and Antislavery Violence14. Conscience, Politics and Religion15. The Anthony Burns Crisis16. The Politics of Confrontation17. The Idea That Blood Must Flow18. Principles, Parties and Partings19. The Final Journey20. ConclusionNotesSelected BibliographyIndex