Noah Worcester

• Noah Worcester
• Born: November 25, 1758
• Died: October 31, 1837

Clergyman and editor of The Friend of Peace, was born in Hollis, New Hampshire, of an old New England family, the eldest of five sons of Noah Worcester Sr. and his first wife, Lydia (Taylor) Worcester, who also had two daughters. His paternal grandfather, Francis Worcester, was a Congregational minister in Sandwich, Massachusetts, and the family was descended from the Reverend William Worcester, first pastor of the Salisbury, Massachusetts, church, established in 1638. Noah Worcester and three of his brothers—Leonard, Thomas, and Samuel—became ministers. Their father, a justice of the peace for forty years, was a member of the convention that framed the constitution of New Hampshire.

Worcester ended his formal schooling at sixteen when he joined the Continental Army as a fifer, remaining in service nearly a year and almost being captured by the British at the Battle of Bunker Hill. After leaving the army, he taught in the Plymouth, New Hampshire, village school while also farming. He re-enlisted in the army in 1777 as a fife-major, taking part in the Battle of Bennington. For a time he lived in Plymouth with the family of an uncle, Francis Worcester, and there met his uncle’s stepdaughter, Hannah Brown, a native of Newburyport, Massachusetts. They married on November 25, 1779, on his twenty-first birthday, when she was nineteen.

In 1782 the young couple moved to Thornton, New Hampshire, where Worcester was a teacher, farmer, and shoemaker. He quickly became active in the affairs of the town and by 1787 had served as town clerk, selectman, justice of the peace, and representative to the state legislature. He also had been educating himself in religious subjects, and in 1786 was licensed to preach by the Congregationalists. In 1787 he was ordained pastor of the Thornton Congregational Church, where he remained for twenty-two years.

In November 1797, his wife died suddenly after a fall from her horse, leaving their eight children. She was described as “amiable, prudent, industrious, truly pious,” and Noah Worcester was obviously lost without her; on May 22, 1798, he married Hannah Huntington of Hanover, New Hampshire, a native of Norwich, Connecticut.

Soon after the New Hampshire Missionary Society was formed in 1802, Worcester became its first missionary and for the next seven years traveled throughout the remote northern part of the state as well as attending to his own Thornton church. In February 1810, because of the illness of his brother Thomas, a minister in Salisbury, New Hampshire, Worcester moved there to assist him.

His life began to change significantly in 1810 after he published Bible News of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, his interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity, in which he advocated a Unitarian viewpoint. The book brought severe criticism, and the Hopkinton Association of Ministers, of which he was a member, voted a formal sentence of condemnation against it. In answer, he published in 1812 A Respectful Address to the Trinitarian Clergy Relating to Their Manner of Treating Opponents, further acerbating his associates.

The first book had found favor, however, with more liberal theologians, and in 1813 Worcester was asked to become the first editor of the monthly Christian Disciple (later the Christian Examiner), published in Boston by a group of Unitarians including William Ellery Channing. The family moved to Brighton, Massachusetts, and Worcester edited the publication for the next five years, writing much of the material himself.

He was a gentle, peaceful man who tried to avoid controversy, and he gradually came to believe that any war was morally wrong. He believed in nonviolence for both nations and individuals, and in the power of love to subdue enemies. From 1813 until his death he worked to promote peace. In 1814 he published A Solemn Review of the Custom of War, a work that became widely known and that was translated into several languages throughout the world. The book also led to the founding of peace societies around the country, including the Massachusetts Peace Society, which was established on December 28, 1815, and of which Worcester became secretary.

In 1819 he founded The Friend of Peace, a quarterly, and was its editor for ten years. As writer of almost all of the contents, he tried to show the evil and foolishness of war and the beauty and wisdom of peace. Worcester himself considered this his greatest achievement and said that he wanted the words “He wrote The Friend of Peace” put on his tombstone.

In 1828, at the age of seventy, he retired to study and write. In addition to sermons and pamphlets, he published The Atoning Sacrifice, A Display of Love, Not of Wrath (1829), The Causes and Evils of Contentions Unveiled in Letters to Christians (1831), and Last Thoughts on Important Subjects (1833). He died in Brighton at seventy-eight and was buried there, but his body was later moved to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Bound copies, in four volumes, of a complete set of The Friend of Peace can be found at the New York Public Library. There is no full-scale biography of Noah Worcester. Most of the basic facts of his life and work can be found in H. Ware Jr., Memoirs of the Rev. Noah Worcester, D. D. (1844), which also contains a preface, notes, and concluding chapter by his son Samuel Worcester. See also W. E. Channing, A Tribute to the Memory of the Rev. Noah Worcester, D. D. (1837); S. A. Worcester, The Descendants of Rev. William Worcester (1914); W. B. Sprague, Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit (1865); and The Dictionary of American Biography (1936).