Samuel Joseph May

• Samuel Joseph May
• Born: September 12, 1797
• Died: July 1, 1871

Unitarian clergyman, abolitionist, pacifist, feminist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the third son and probably the eighth child of Colonel Joseph May, Boston merchant and religious liberal, and Dorothy (Se-wall) May, descendant of Judge Samuel Sewall of Salem. After attending private schools and academies in Boston and Marblehead, Massachusetts, May was graduated from Harvard College in 1817 and completed its divinity course in 1820. On June 1, 1825 he was married to Lu-cretia Flagge Coffin, daughter of Peter Coffin, a Boston merchant. Their four sons and one daughter were born between 1827 and 1844.

In 1822 May was ordained and installed as pastor of the Brooklyn, Connecticut, Unitarian Church, which he served through 1835. Then until 1842 he ministered to the Unitarian congregation in South Scituate (now Norwell), Massachusetts, before moving to his last pastorate in Syracuse, New York, where he preached from 1844 until his retirement in 1867. More pastor than theologian, May eschewed theoretical abstraction for practical concerns. His personal creed avoided doctrinal extremes. He joined conservatives in his belief in miracles, the Resurrection, and the “Godlike character” of Jesus; but he also held radical positions, pronouncing Jesus human, abandoning clerical garb, instituting open communion, and preaching on public issues.

As a committed reformer, May was beset by paradox, his head often at odds with his heart. A man of order and peace, he espoused the overthrow of a corrupt society; “one of the mildest and gentlest men in the world,” his vigorous action often produced violent responses. Before he was twenty, he had met Noah Worcester and embraced the peace movement. Ten years later (1826) he helped found the Brooklyn and Windham County Peace Societies in conservative rural Connecticut. Expanding his pacifism, he joined the New England Non-Resistance conventions of 1838 and 1839, although he rejected their anarchism, and applied his principles in opposing the Mexican War as “murder by wholesale.”

Active also in educational reform and influenced by his brother-in-law, Bronson Alcott, May not only organized the Brooklyn Lyceum and served on the town’s school committee but also sponsored (1827) the first statewide common school convention in Connecticut. Under Horace Mann’s aegis, he was principal of the recently founded Lexington, Massachusetts normal school (1842-1844). In Syracuse he served (1865-1869) as president of the Board of Education. Consistent throughout was his belief that schools should make practical and intellectual education available particularly to the poor and disadvantaged. “Love the unlovely,” he urged in this context, “and they will put their unloveli-ness away.”

Temperance too was a lifelong commitment—perhaps because his only brother to reach adulthood was an alcoholic. In Brooklyn and South Scituate May organized church youth in cold-water armies; by the 1840s he supported the Washingtonians’ voluntary teetotalism. Ten years later he endorsed state legislated prohibition. While his temperance activity was consonant with much public opinion, he espousal of women’s rights was not. Having, in 1837, asked Angelina Grimke to lecture to his South Scituate congregation, he expanded his feminism until in 1846 he published a pamphlet on “The Rights and Conditions of Women,” which was fully compatible with his role in helping organize the Syracuse women’s rights convention of 1852 and serving, the next year, as president of a similar meeting in nearby Rochester. Less dramatically, he campaigned to improve working conditions for Syracuse women. More sporadically or for more limited periods, May devoted time and effort to ending capital punishment, ameliorating factory conditions, educating Onondaga Indians on their reservation, garnering support for a hospital in Syracuse, opposing land monopoly, furthering Christian ecumenicism, encouraging eclectic medicine, and providing assistance to unmarried mothers.

For all this wide-ranging activity, antislavery lay at the heart of May’s career. An African colonizationist in the 1820s, he was converted to immediate, uncompensated emancipation by 1830 and retained his Garrisonian associations after the movement split in 1840. Throughout the 1830s and more sporadically in the 1840s, he participated in the annual New England Anti-Slavery Conventions and served as an officer of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was the paid general agent in 1834-35. He was also a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, in which he remained moderately active until 1863. Peripheral to anti-slavery’s organizational power struggle, he gained public notoriety in 1833-34 as Prudence Crandall’s principal local supporter in her efforts to maintain her Canterbury, Connecticut, school for black girls in the face of mob violence and a state law limiting education for blacks. The next year he gained further attention as spokesman for the cause when his abolition lectures again exposed him to mob violence throughout New England. Thereafter his official role was limited, but he continued to preach and write against slavery until emancipation, supported federal confiscation of Confederate land, and subsequently pressed for passage and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Connecting basic rights for blacks with preservation of white civil liberties, May testified before a special Massachusetts legislative committee in 1836 protesting proposed constraints on antislavery activity in the state. With similar reasoning, he denounced both the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War. And, after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, May publicly advocated resistance to its enforcement. Thus in 1851 he took part in rescuing the fugitive slave Jerry McHenry from federal authorities and thereafter not only supported his city’s vigilance committee and its underground railroad facilities, but hoped, in his anticipated but never held trial on federal charges of involvement in the Jerry McHenry case, to make the courts an antislavery forum. In 1856, having given up both a disunionism based on a belief that the Constitution was proslavery and a subsequent tepid interest in New York’s Liberty party premised on an antislavery constitutional interpretation, he backed Republican candidate John Charles FrFremont for the presidency.

Although he turned his sights to national political action to end slavery, May was nonetheless tortured by the ambivalences and dichotomies the Civil War forced on him. Still a pacifist and made physically ill by visits to battlefield hospitals, he nevertheless supported the war for emancipation. Being torn between conflicting ideals only accentuated May’s long struggle to reconcile practical expediency with platonic justice. While his sense of reality told him that enforcement of law and order was necessary for social harmony, his conscience frequently insisted that he preach and follow a higher law than the Constitution. A child of the American Revolution, he had since his conversion to pacifism been appalled by its destructive-ness and inhumanity, but he had also dedicated himself “to complete, by moral and religious means and instruments, the great work which the American revolutionists commenced; to do what they left undone. . . .” The immediate goal was to end black slavery; the ultimate victory, to free mankind; the means, another bloody war. It was the conjunction of May’s liberal religion and dedicated humanitarianism that precluded passivity in the face of fundamental paradoxes.

May died in 1871 at the age of seventy-three.

The most extensive collections of May material are in the Cornell University Library (including his books and diaries) and the Antislavery Collection of the Boston Public Library. Other repositories containing substantial amounts of relevant material include Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Onondaga Historical Society in Syracuse, and the Syracuse and Norwell Unitarian churches. Most useful of antislavery periodicals are The Liberator (1831-65), theJVa-tional Anti-Slavery Standard (1840-70), and the Anti-Slavery Bugle (1845-63). Valuable also are the Unitarian Christian Register (182 Iff) and The Friend of Peace (1815–27). Especially germane for the last twenty-five years of May’s life are the Syracuse newspapers The Journal and Daily Standard. May’s published sermons and lectures spell out his views on various reforms: Exposition of the Sentiments and Purposes of the Windham County Peace Society (1826); A Discourse on Slavery in the United States… (1832); Right of the Colored People to Education, Vindicated… (1833); Human Government Subordinate to Divine (1854); and Liberty and Slavery (1856). They are supplemented by his Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (1869) and G. B. Emerson et al., Memoir of Samuel Joseph May (1873), which contains an unfinished autobiography and generous selections from May’s correspondence. Modern secondary studies include W. H. Pease and J. H. Pease, “Samul J. May, Civil Libertarian,” Cornell Library Journal (1967); “Freedom and Peace: A Nineteenth Century Dilemma,” Midwest Quarterly (1967); and “The Gentle Humanitarian,” in Bound with Them in Chains… (1972).