The Pluralist

I. Introduction: American History and American Philosophy

On October 16, 1859, John Brown led an unsuccessful raid on the Harpers Ferry Armory. He planned to seize the cache of weapons in order to arm local slaves, to march south, and to deplete Virginia of the slaves who supported its economy. While it failed to realize this objective, the raid succeeded in driving a wedge between the Union and the Confederate States. The rift that Brown helped create grew into the gaping wound of the Civil War.

Four years later, Abraham Lincoln surveyed the site of the most gruesome aspect of that wound: Soldier's Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His Gettysburg Address signaled a turn in the war and a turn in the Union's favor. It is remembered as a significant step in the project that had been initiated at Harper's Ferry.

Today we regard these events as pivotal moments in American history. We tend to forget the fact that they were pivotal moments in, and embodied moments of, the American philosophical tradition. Behind each of these moments was the thinking and action of Theodore Parker (1810-1860), a Unitarian minister, transcendentalist, and social reformer who served as a forbearer to the American pragmatists.

Parker was a member of the "Secret Six," a group of wealthy abolitionists who provided financial and political support to Brown in his activities in Kansas and West Virginia. Parker provided material support, but also a solid ideological underpinning for the abolitionist movement. This ideology was developed while serving as a Unitarian minister in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston in the early 1840s. Parker was in the audience of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Divinity School Address in 1838 and took Emerson's [End Page 1] words to heart: "newborn bard(s) of the Holy Ghost,—cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity" (Emerson, Essays 40). For Parker, casting off conformity involved being a vocal and reliable opponent of slavery, ecclesiastical sectarianism, and gender discrimination. It is with these concerns in mind that he addressed an audience at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in 1850. In his talk, entitled "The Effects of Slavery on Men in America," Parker stated that, "Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people" (Collected Works 5: 106). Lincoln adopted this phrase in his 1864 address at Gettysburg, and it has achieved iconic status over the years, capturing the meaning and hope of a nation's founding. Parker's life has gained notoriety in recent years, largely due to Dean Grodzin's American Heretic: Theodore Parker and the Transcendentalists. The following article, however, attempts to approach this phrase not as the icon that Grodzin presents, but as a moment in the broader intellectual life of a Unitarian minister who championed a form of American philosophy in New England in the antebellum years.

Most scholars of American intellectual history such as Cornell West, Louis Menand, and John Stuhr argue that American pragmatism stems from the work of Transcendentalist thinkers, most notably that of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (West 9-41; Stuhr 1-7; Menand 9). Parker's work is routinely marginalized in this genealogy; rarely have scholars underscored the way in which Parker's thinking and social activism serves as a harbinger for the classical pragmatic tradition. Menand does treat Parker as an important figure in American intellectual history, but does not afford him the attention that might be necessary to explain the deep similarities between his work and the American pragmatic tradition. Remedying this oversight is important since Parker's work proves more practically oriented than the poetry and prose of his Concord colleagues. As Brent notes, Parker was a frequent visitor to Benjamin Peirce's Mason Street home in the 1840s, and his thinking permeated the walls and dwellings of other minds of the period (45). Many of his writings anticipate the positions that C. S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey would later develop in regard to inquiry, religion, and metaphysics, and Parker's social...