Abner Kneeland
Abner Kneeland was a prominent indigenous freethinker born in Gardner, Massachusetts, into a family with deep historical roots, including connections to a Mayflower immigrant. He initially trained as a carpenter but later became a schoolmaster and minister, embracing Universalist teachings while shifting away from traditional Christian doctrines under the influence of key figures such as Hosea Ballou. Throughout his career, Kneeland was known for his progressive views, advocating for universal education, labor rights, women's equality, and the abolition of religious tests for civil privileges.
Kneeland's theological evolution led him to reject Christianity, resulting in a series of controversial lectures that challenged societal norms and garnered both support and opposition. His outspoken nature and reform initiatives attracted criticism, culminating in his indictment for blasphemy in 1834. Despite facing legal troubles and imprisonment, Kneeland continued to promote his views, though he struggled to regain momentum afterward. He eventually relocated to Iowa Territory, where he spent his later years. Kneeland's legacy includes his role in the early freethought movement and his influence on subsequent reform efforts in America.
Subject Terms
Abner Kneeland
- Abner Kneeland
- Born: April 7, 1774
- Died: August 27, 1844
The outstanding indigenous freethinker of his generation, was born in Gardner, Massachusetts, a member of the sixth generation of American Kneelands. His father, Timothy Kneeland, enlisted three times during the Revolution, serving finally as lieutenant in the Battle of Bennington. His mother, Moriah (Stone) Kneeland, was on the maternal side a lineal descendant of Degory Priest, a Mayflower immigrant. Both parents were active in the Congregationalist church.
After two years in the common schools of Gardner, Kneeland took one term at the academy in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, and learned carpentry. In 1795 he and his brother, Asa, went up the Connecticut River Valley to Dummerston, Vermont, to work as carpenters. Abner Kneeland also served as schoolmaster. He married Waitstill Ormsbee in 1797. Although already sympathetic to the Universalist teachings of Elhanan Winchester, he submitted to immersion by the conservative Baptists in nearby Putney, probably in 1800. His American Definition Spelling Book was first published in 1802; it went through six editions.
In 1803 Kneeland moved to Alstead, New Hampshire, again as a carpenter. He became seriously ill, but preached occasionally while recuperating with his sister’s family in West Windsor, Vermont. The Universalists licensed him in 1803 and ordained him in 1805. In 1804 the Congregationalists and Universalists in Langdon, New Hampshire, jointly invited him as minister of the village. Under the influence of a friend, Hosea Ballou, Kneeland abandoned trinitarianism, the doctrine of the triune nature of God. In 1811 Kneeland moved to Charles-town, Massachusetts, as the first pastor of a new Universalist congregation.
Waitstill Kneeland had died of consumption in 1806, and while in Langdon he married Lucinda Mason; they had four children. She died of typhus fever in 1812, and the next year he married a widow, Eliza Osborn. He resigned the pastorate in 1814 to move to Salem, Massachusetts, to assist in his wife’s dry-goods store.
His business not prospering and his faith regenerated, Kneeland reentered the ministry. He and his wife settled in New Hartford, New York, in 1816. In this frontier setting he read Joseph Priestley’s Disquisitions and embraced the author’s amalgam of Christian piety and philosophical materialism. He took this eclectic faith with him to Philadelphia in 1818 and made the Lombard Street church one of the strongest in the Universalist denomination; in 1823 he built a second church in the Northern Liberties section of the city. In the winter of 1824-25 he was an enthusiastic member of the audiences for Robert Owen’s lectures on social and ethical issues.
In 1825 Kneeland became the pastor of the large Prince Street Universalist congregation in New York City. His eccentric preaching split the congregation in 1827; the majority followed him and reorganized as the Second Universalist Society. The controversial freethinker and labor and women’s rights advocate Frances Wright spoke from Kneeland’s pulpit in the Masonic Hall on Broadway in January 1829; his congregation dismissed him in February. His sympathizers again regrouped and met regularly in a hall on Pearl Street. He renounced Christianity in a series of lectures that was published as A Review of the Evidence and went through six editions in five years. Kneeland assumed a leading role in the movement for universal, state-sponsored education and was active in the New York Working Men’s party.
Whereas most of Kneeland’s congregants were understandably content with the social and economic arrangements of the American republic, he was concerned increasingly with the need to make more secure what he called “democratic liberties.” This was the motivation for his interest in free and universal education, for his opposition to religious tests for legal or civil privileges, for his advocacy of freedom of the press, and for his denunciation of white supremacy. In philosophical terms, Kneeland was groping toward a position for which the foundations had not been elaborated in this country. He was moving out of deism through pantheism toward secular democratic humanism. Values were to be grounded on human judgment and not on supernatural authority. This challenged the pervasive assumption that without a belief in the Christian God both private morality and social order would collapse.
Kneeland moved to Boston at the end of 1830 as Lecturer to the First Society of Free Enquirers and founded the Boston Investigator almost immediately. By March 1833 the weekly run of the Investigator had risen to 2,000 copies. Hundreds of people attended his morning and evening lectures on Sundays in Julien Hall; even larger crowds turned out for midweek dances. Kneeland made speaking tours throughout New England and upper New York State; there were agents for the Investigator throughout the United States and eastern Canada. He identified with the aims of the workingmen’s movement, advocated full equality for women, distributed birth-control information, attacked social and political privilege as a betrayal of the American Revolution, and criticized Christianity as intellectually delusive and socially repressive.
Leaders of the Boston liberal Protestant establishment cooperated in efforts to limit his expanding influence. George Ripley and William Ellery Channing relocated Orestes Brownson in Chelsea in 1834 to preach to the working classes. Samuel Gridley Howe denounced “this hoary-headed apostle of Satan” in the New England Magazine, threatening economic sanctions against those who had dealings of any sort with Kneeland. His combination of reform proposals threatened the synthesis of the sacred, the status quo, and sexual inhibition precisely at the moment in which New England’s proud theocratic experiment was crumbling. Opponents sought a pretext to force the courts to repudiate Kneeland’s secular republicanism in favor of an explicitly theocratic interpretation of American democracy.
In January 1834 Kneeland was indicted for blasphemy on the motion of the philanthropist Lucius M. Sargent; a trial that month before Judge Peter Thacher declared him guilty; he appealed. The Free Enquirers’ lease on Julien Hall was not renewed; they were unable to obtain adequate facilities anywhere in the city. Two subsequent trials ended in mistrials, and a fourth trial produced a second verdict of guilty. An appeal hearing led to a split decision against him that was not handed down until April 2, 1838. On June 18, 1838, he began a sixty-day term in the Suffolk County jail.
Kneeland never recovered momentum after his imprisonment. In March 1839 he and his fourth wife (he had married Dolly Rice in 1834, after the death of his third wife) left Boston to settle in Salubria, a village in the Iowa Territory colonized by members of the Boston Society of Free Enquirers. The Boston society floundered without his leadership, but the Investigator carried on as a significant radical paper into the first years of the twentieth century.
Kneeland’s efforts to enter territorial politics as a Democratic candidate in the 1840s led to his being burned in effigy and defeats for his party. Protestant missionaries from New England raised money from home for their efforts to suppress “Kneelandism” on the frontier. Kneeland died in Salubria. His body was removed later to the cemetery in Farmington, Iowa.
The columns of the Boston Investigator from 1831 to 1838 are the best source both for his own writings and for the study of his reform activities. For a complete checklist of his works, see R. S. French, “The Published Writings of Abner Kneeland,” Bulletin of Bibliography, October-December 1974. For Kneeland’s career as a Universalist, see H. M. Sherman, “Abner Kneeland: Religious Pioneer,” B. D. Thesis, Tufts College (1953). For a reinterpretation of Kneeland’s significance, see R. S. French, “The Trials of Abner Kneeland,” diss., George Washington University (1971). L. W. Levy, Blasphemy in Massachusetts: Freedom of Conscience and the Abner Kneeland Case (1973) reproduces selected documents from the trials, but with important omissions. For Kneeland in context, see A. Post, Popular Freethought in America, 1825-1850 (1943). S. F. Kneeland, Seven Centuries of the Kneeland Family (1897) is a patriotic reconstruction of the family tree. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1933).