Death and Life of Parker
1
The Death and Life of Theodore Parker
May 23, 2010
By Dean Grodzins
You are in Florence, Italy, in the summer of 2010.
The hotels
are full, the shops and restaurants packed, the line to the
Uffizi museum is six hours long, and on every corner stand knots
of people, in short sleeves, baseball caps and sunglasses,
cameras around their necks, puzzling over a map.
not among them.
You have a mission.
Today, you are
It is August 24, Theodore
Parker’s birthday, and you are going to visit him.
You leave your hotel near the Duomo and walk about 20 minutes to
the northwest, till you reach the spot where once stood the
massive city walls.
Just beyond them, in what is now a busy
traffic circle, you see a little hill, shaded by cypress trees
and spiky with white stones.
It is a graveyard for Protestants,
built when the laws did not allow them to be buried within the
city walls.
Florentines call it the “English Cemetery” because
the remains of so many British and American travelers lie there.
You enter the cemetery through a set of large iron gates.
At
the small mortuary chapel, an elderly, scholarly Anglican nun in
a blue habit greets you and has you sign the visitor’s book.
She tells you where to find Parker’s grave.
You climb the hill
along a path, past rows of bleached monuments, then at the
Death and Life of Parker
summit, turn right.
2
Ten steps down the slope and there, on your
left, in the shade of the trees, is a large, white stone.
The inscription honors Theodore Parker as “the great American
preacher.”
His name, it says, “is engraved in marble, his
virtues in the hearts of those he helped to free from slavery
and superstition.”
August 24, 1810.
He was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, on
Today, he is 200 years old.
He died here in Florence just over 150 years ago, on May 10,
1860.
Although he was just 49, he looked much older.
His
headstone has carved into it a large medallion portrait of a
bald and gray-bearded man who could have been 70.
Parker had
been worn down by overwork before being killed at last by
tuberculosis.
He had lived intensely.
Growing up without money in a family of
farmers and largely self-educated, by his twenties he had turned
himself not only into a Unitarian minister, but into one the
most learned biblical scholars in America.
His studies had
convinced him that the biblical miracles were myths, that the
biblical books were a jumble of texts composed, then rewritten
and redacted, by unknown people at different times for diverse
purposes, and that no part of the Bible ought to be understood
as the infallible word of God.
Transcendentalist movement.
He came to ally himself with the
Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott, he sought
Death and Life of Parker
3
divine inspiration not in the Bible, but in the soul and in
nature.
He always called himself a Christian, however, and kept
a bust of Christ on his desk.
In 1837, he was ordained here, in West Roxbury, then a tiny
parish.
Parker’s passionate and eloquent preaching soon
attracted attention, however, and in 1841, Parker became the
center of an explosive controversy when he preached about The
Transient and Permanent in Christianity.
In this sermon, he
denied the miraculous authority of the Bible and Jesus in strong
language.
His pronouncement shocked his fellow Unitarians, most
of whom denounced him as an infidel.
But many others saw in
Parker a brave reformer and champion of freedom of speech and
thought.
In 1845, Parker’s Boston supporters organized a new
church for him, which came to be called the Twenty-Eighth
Congregational Society; thousands turned out every week to hear
him.
In January 1846 he was installed as minister there.
He
was so isolated that he had to preach his own installation
sermon.
The following month, he preached his farewell sermon to
West Roxbury.
Over the next 13 years, while continuing to grow his Boston
ministry, he became a best-selling writer, a popular lecturer
across the North, and the leading intellectual of the
antislavery movement.
preoccupy him.
The slavery issue came increasingly to
In 1850, when Congress passed a law establishing
a federal fugitive slave-catching bureaucracy, Parker led
Death and Life of Parker
resistance to the law in Boston.
4
By the end of 1856, he had
grown convinced that slavery in America could no longer be ended
by conventional political means, and that a civil war was
inevitable.
In early 1857, during a particularly grueling season of
lecturing and preaching, he had suffered a physical collapse.
For two months, he was almost entirely confined to his bed.
He
finally did recover enough to return to work, but he never again
felt really well, and in the fall of 1858 he grew rapidly
feeble.
In October, surgeons came to his house, etherized him,
and removed a painful boil. The operation was supposed to cure
all his symptoms, but probably only weakened him further.
In
November, he had a carriage accident that wrenched his groin so
badly he could hardly walk.
Winter came hard and bitter that year.
solid to the horizon.
Boston harbor froze
By December, Parker rarely left the
library on the top floor of his Boston townhouse.
His meals
were brought to him by dumbwaiter, and he slept on a couch,
surrounded by his thousands and thousands of books.
Yet he still felt bound to perform his ministerial duties.
The
morning of January 2, 1859, found him at his preaching desk,
where he delivered a sermon on “What Religion May Do for a Man.”
On the evening of January 4th, despite a heavy snowstorm, he
ventured out again and delivered a lecture to the young men and
Death and Life of Parker
women of his congregation on “John Adams.”
5
He was prepared to
deliver another sermon the following Sunday, as well as a
lecture a few days later on “Thomas Jefferson;” both were
already written.
But in the early hours of Sunday, January 9,
his lungs began to bleed.
Later that morning, his congregation assembled to hear him.
Instead, the chairman of the standing committee rose and read a
short note from Parker, scrawled in pencil, saying he could no
longer preach.
People wept at the news.
His doctors soon confirmed he had tuberculosis and told him to
get away from the cold weather as soon as possible.
In a few
hectic weeks he put his affairs in order as best he could.
On
February 3, he took a train from Boston to New York City, and
five days after that he set sail, heading south.
He traveled
first to the balmy air and warm waters of the Caribbean, where
he stopped for a time in Cuba and then the Virgin Islands.
When
spring came, he crossed the Atlantic and visited England,
France, and Switzerland.
where he spent the winter.
Finally, in October, he reached Rome,
With him almost every mile of this
voyage were his wife, Lydia, and his longtime assistant and
confidante, Hannah Stevenson.
Other friends joined them for
various periods in Cuba and throughout their stay in Europe.
Parker was supposed to be resting, but he had difficulty being
idle.
Ever since he was a boy, he had risen before sunrise and
Death and Life of Parker
6
worked till past midnight, and these were hard habits to break.
His voice was now too weak to preach or lecture, but he
continued to write.
Besides working on an autobiography, which
he never finished, he kept a diary and a journal, and composed
hundreds of long letters, several of which were published in the
Boston newspapers.
In early 1859, while in the Virgin Islands,
he wrote a 40,000-word letter to his congregation.
It was
published later that year as a book with the title “Theodore
Parker’s Experience as a Minister” and is now regarded as one of
the most important confessions of faith produced by the
Transcendentalist movement.
While abroad, Parker also kept abreast of news from back home.
In the summer of 1859, he learned that a meeting of the alumni
of the Harvard Divinity School had considered a motion, offered
by a few of his friends, extending to him “our earnest hope and
prayer for his return, with renewed strength and heart unabated,
to the post of duty which he has so long filled with ability and
zeal."
A majority of the alumni, however, all of them Unitarian
ministers, declined to support this resolution.
Parker remained
a very controversial figure within Unitarianism; Unitarians
would not come generally to accept his views for another
generation.
Parker himself commented that for his fellow
ministers’ sake, he would rather they had passed the resolution;
for his own sake, it was of no consequence.
Death and Life of Parker
7
News of greater consequence for him came some months later.
In
October 1859, the abolitionist John Brown, backed by a small
militia of followers, had attempted to start a slave
insurrection by assaulting the federal arsenal at Harper’s
Ferry, Virginia.
He failed.
Many people had been killed, and
Brown himself was captured, tried, and in December hanged.
Parker was deeply implicated in the Harper’s Ferry attack, which
many historians believe made the civil war between the North and
South inevitable.
He had met Brown in January 1857, and they
had immediately seen eye to eye.
Both believed that the Slave
Power was on the march, and that only violent resistance could
now stop it.
In March 1858, Brown revealed to Parker his long-
contemplated plan to start a servile war in Virginia.
Parker
himself was already an advocate of slave uprisings; on his desk,
alongside the bust of Jesus, he had placed a small sculpture of
Spartacus.
Parker joined the so-called Secret Six conspiracy,
which provided Brown with gold and weapons.
Now, learning that
Brown was facing death, Parker wrote a long, public letter
defending what Brown had done as a blow for human rights.
When
the letter arrived in America in December, Parker’s friends
immediately put it in print as a pamphlet——his last publication
to appear during his lifetime.
At various points during 1859, Parker’s health had seemed to be
on the mend.
In letters, he happily reported every temporary
gain of weight and energy.
But he never stopped coughing.
Death and Life of Parker
8
During the winter in Rome, which was surprisingly cold and wet,
his health deteriorated rapidly.
By early 1860, he knew he
would soon die and so resolved to leave the “eternal city.”
He
hated its despotic ruler, Pope Pius IX, who was in the process
of setting the Catholic Church firmly against democracy and the
values of the Enlightenment.
In late April 1860, even though
Parker was critically ill, he and some companions undertook the
trip to Florence.
Only months before, Lombardy had come under
the control of the King of Sardinia, a constitutional monarch.
Parker wanted to die on liberal soil.
He arrived in Florence on April 26 and moved into a pension on
the south side of the Arno River.
With him, besides his wife,
were an American doctor, the doctor’s wife, and one of Parker’s
closest friends, a Swiss scientist named Edouard Desor; this
group was soon joined by Parker’s assistant, Hannah Stevenson,
who had been traveling for a few weeks independently, and by an
Anglo-Irish woman, the philosopher and feminist Frances Power
Cobbe.
Cobbe and Parker had never met, but they had
corresponded for years, and Parker had overseen the publication
of Cobbe’s first book.
Cobbe described their first encounter,
on April 28, 1860:
He was lying in bed with his back to the light. ...
He
took my hand tenderly and said in a low hurried voice
holding it, “After all our wishes to meet, Miss Cobbe, how
strange it is we should meet thus.” I pressed his hand, and
he turned his eyes, which were trembling painfully and
Death and Life of Parker
9
evidently seeing nothing, towards me and said, “You must
not think you have seen me.
This is not me, only the wreck
of the man I was. ... I am not afraid to die,” he smiled as
he spoke, “but there was so much to be done.”
Parker lived for 12 more days, often sleeping, sometimes awake
and delirious, occasionally awake and lucid.
day to visit him.
his room.
Cobbe came twice a
On May 10, at midday, she saw him asleep in
About 3 o’clock, Desor called on him.
Parker, now
awake, took his hand, looked at him, and fell again to sleep.
Desor left the room; Lydia Parker and Hannah Stevenson sat
vigil.
At about 4 o’clock, they noticed he had stopped
breathing.
Parker’s doctor placed the time of death at 3:15.
Parker had passed away so quietly, the women had not noticed.
In one of his last clear-headed moments, he had asked Desor to
arrange a very simple funeral for him.
It took place three days
later, on May 13, a Sunday, at 4 in the afternoon.
At that
exact moment, across the ocean in Boston, where it was 10 in the
morning, Parker’s huge congregation was gathering to worship.
In Florence, only seven people were present:
Lydia Parker,
Hannah Stevenson, Desor, Cobbe, Parker’s doctor and his wife,
and a retired Unitarian minister who happened to be residing
near Florence and who had been called in to officiate.
When Cobbe arrived at the English cemetery, Parker’s coffin was
lying in the little chapel.
Someone had placed laurels on it;
Death and Life of Parker
10
she added lilies, a flower she knew Parker loved.
Hired
pallbearers carried the coffin from the chapel to the grave
site.
Parker had asked Desor to have someone read the
beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount.
handed a Bible.
So the minister was
In a voice catching with emotion, he recited:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after
righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the
children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’
sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute
you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely,
for my sake.
You awake from your reverie.
to leave Parker’s grave.
It is 2010 again and time for you
You lay your hand on his stone once
more and wish him a silent goodbye.
Then you walk slowly out of
the cemetery, out of the nineteenth century, and into noise and
bustle of contemporary Florence.
Death and Life of Parker
11
A hundred and fifty years earlier, when the small band of
mourners took their own slow walk out of this same cemetery,
they also experienced a strange transition.
Florence had chosen
May 13 to celebrate the Piedmontese constitution, and every
building was gaily decorated with red, white, and green flags.
A common thought struck Parker’s friends.
"It is a festival for
us also," they said to one another, "the solemn feast of an
Ascension."
Sources:
Parker’s diary for 1859 is at Meadville Lombard Theological
School library; his journal for 1859-1860 is in the Theodore
Parker papers at the Andover-Harvard Theological School library;
original copies of his letters from his last year are in many
archives, notably the Boston Public Library and the State Archives of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in the Edouard Desor Papers.
Desor’s diary can be found at the University of Neuchâtel. John
Weiss’s Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker (1864) contains the first publication of Parker’s autobiography, a text of
his Experience as a Minister, and selections from his diary,
journal, and letters. It can be found on Google Books, as can
Cobbe’s memoir, The Life of Frances Power Cobbe (1904), which
contains her accounts of Parker’s death, and editions of all of
Parker’s writings. The large, carved, white marble stone found
today at Parker’s grave was erected his admirers 1892. It replaced the original stone, small, gray, and unadorned, which
they considered too modest.