Parker Pillsbury

• Parker Pillsbury
• Born: September 22, 1809
• Died: July 7, 1898

Abolitiionist, women’s rights advocate, and editor, was born in Hamilton, Massachusetts, the oldest of eleven children born to Oliver Pillsbury, whose ancestors came to Massachusetts around 1640, and Anna (Smith) Pills-bury of Essex, Massachusetts. In 1814 the elder Pillsbury, a blacksmith, moved his family to Henniker, New Hampshire, where he had bought a farm. A deacon in the Congregational church there, he was among the first in Henniker to champion the causes of temperance and anti-slavery. Anna Pillsbury appears to have been a woman of exceptional physical and intellectual strength.

Parker Pillsbury’s early formal education was meager, confined to a few years at the district school in Henniker. Like his father, he became a blacksmith and a farmer, leaving home in his early twenties to try his luck as a wagoner, hauling freight between Boston and Lynn, Massachusetts. In 1832 he returned home to work on the family farm, and for a brief while he headed a militia company in Henniker.

He joined the Congregational church there in 1833. His interest in temperance and religious issues impressed the church’s elders, and they suggested that he study for the ministry. In 1836 he did so, entering the Theological Seminary at Gilmantown, New Hampshire, for a two-year program that he followed with a year at the Andover (Massachusetts) Theological Seminary. The Suffolk North Association of Congregational Ministers licensed him to preach in 1839, and a church in Loudon, New Hampshire, hired him as its pastor.

Before he assumed his duties in Loudon, a former classmate at Andover persuaded him to spend two months as a general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. William Lloyd Garrison sent him to Fitchburg, in north central Massachusetts, where he preached on Sunday mornings and lectured on slavery Sunday and Monday evenings.

To the dismay of his congregation in Loudon, he carried his abolitionist fervor to New Hampshire. “I am in a little den of proslavery as filthy as can be found this side of the Caverns of the pit,” he wrote a friend on November 18, 1839. He had just read James G. Birney’s American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery, which confirmed his view from the pulpit. His subsequent denunciations of church officials who failed to condemn slavery led the Suffolk Association to revoke his license in 1841, and his church in Henniker to demand an explanation. Characteristically, his defense in both instances was a self-righteous attack. He assailed both bodies, the association for “your guilt of the awful crimes of slavery” and the Henniker congregation for “its grossly immoral behavior.”

Pillsbury’s belief in the complicity of the church—a theme he would return to throughout his life—led him to quit his Loudon pastorate in 1840 and become a field lecturer for the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society at eighty-three cents a day. For a few years he lived in poverty with his wife, Sarah H. Sargent of Concord, New Hampshire, whom he married on January 1, 1840. Yet she was an enthusiastic supporter of his work, even after their only child, Helen, was born in 1843.

In 1840 and again from 1844 to 1846, he edited the influential abolitionist weekly, Herald of Freedom, from Concord, New Hampshire. The editorship helped propel him to the forefront of the movement. Members of New England’s intelligentsia sought him out. After hearing Pills-bury speak in 1846, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked: “Pillsbury… is… a tough, oak stick of a man not to be silenced or insulted by a mob, because he is more mob than they; he mobs the mob … and flings his sarcasms right and left, sparing no name or person or party or presence.”

His style, both in speech and in writing, was somber, direct, and hortatory. Once, in a Danvers, Massachusetts, church, with Garrison in the audience, he tried to make his listeners grasp the absurdity of treating fellow Christians—slaves—as domestic animals. To drive home his point, he asked the audience to imagine a dog being baptized with the invocation, “ ‘Tiger,’ I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Stories circulated that Pillsbury had in fact baptized a dog in Danvers, and newspaper editors demanded his arrest for blasphemy.

James Russell Lowell immortalized another Pillsbury appearance, this one at an 1846 anti-slavery convention in Boston. In “Letter from Boston” Lowell wrote:

Beyond, a crater in each eye, Sways brown, broad-shouldered Pillsbury, Who tears up words like trees by the roots, A Theseus in stout cowhide boots. … His words are red-hot iron searers, And nightmare-like he mounts his hearers, Spurring them like relentless fate. …

Though he practiced nonresistance and refused to vote or exercise any political privilege under a government that tolerated slavery and war, as time went on he became convinced that only a war could end slavery. “The Nation is hastening to… a baptism of blood,” he predicted in the 1847 Garrisonian annual, The Liberty Bell. He repeated this apocalyptic message on annual speaking tours of New England and the Midwest, which he made for the American Anti-Slavery Society and its state affiliates. In 1854 the society sent him to Great Britain to stir up sentiment against slavery in the United States.

Pillsbury admired John Brown and saw him as a victim of slavery. After Brown was hanged in 1859, Pillsbury elogized him in Rochester, New York, in a speech sponsored by Susan B. Anthony’s Free Church.

Throughot the Civil War, he lobbied to keep the American Anti-Slavery Society alive as a moral force. Afterward, with others, he defeated Garrison’s resolution to dissolve the organization. He became editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City in June 1865 and for a year sued it to blast Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies. Johnson’s pronouncements he ran under the rubric, “Proslavery.”

Determined to raise the banner of woman suffrage, he refused to fight for the Fifteenth Amendment after its framers declined to extend its guarantees to women. He helped draft the constitution of the American Equal Rights Association, and when in May 1866 the managers of the Standard insisted that the association pay advertising rates to announce its meetings, he quit the paper. A year and a half later, at the age of fifty-nine, he helped launch another weekly, The Revolution. Pillsbury and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were editors, and Susan B. Anthony was listed as “Proprietor,” although the original funding came from an avowed racist named George Train. Train left the editors alone, however, and they promoted, first, women’s education and then universal suffrage, equal pay for equal work, an eight-hour day, an end to standing armies, Indian land claims, and a host of other causes. “Man seems naturally an oppressor,” Pillsbury wrote in one of his many ser-monical articles; “not always with malice, perhaps never with malice unless resisted. First, he subdued the earth, then the animals, then the weaker of his own race; now the negro, the Indian, and lastly woman. Without perhaps knowing it, certainly without consideration, he makes all these his victims. . . .”

When Train was arrested in Ireland for backing the nationalist cause, Anthony assumed the paper’s debts but she was eventually forced to sell the enterprise in 1870. Pillsbury returned to the field as a lecturer and preacher in free churches in Ohio, Michigan, New York, and elsewhere. In 1883 he published his memoirs of the Garrisonian movement, Acts of the Anti-slavery Apostles. Once more he took on organized religion. “We had almost to abolish the church,” he said, “before we could reach the dreadful institution [of slavery] at all.”

Pillsbury’s appearance was as fierce as some of his utterances. He faced his audiences in a sober black suit, his unruly hair combed straight back over his head and ears. A bushy moustache and a flowing beard failed to divert the eye from his jutting nose and fiery gaze. Yet he knew the value of comic relief, and his skill at using humor as a weapon accounted for much of his popularity as a speaker and a writer.

In retirement in Concord, New Hampshire, in his eighties, he studied theosophy and spiritualism and republished favorite pamphlets on abolitionism, his own and others. He kept in touch with women’s rights organizations until just before his death, about two months short of his ninety-ninth birthday, in Concord. William Lloyd Garrison Jr. delivered the eulogy.

An important figure in the abolitionist movement and one effective enough in the women’s struggle to be dubbed “Miss” or “Mrs.” Pillsbury by antifeminists, Pillsbury has been overlooked by many historians of nineteenth-century reform. The explanation seems to be that, for all his power as a speaker and a publicist, he was content to work in the shadows of major strategists such as Garrison and Anthony. His life is proof that the reputations of these great organizers owe a debt to men and women like Pillsbury who battled on the front lines, often far from the limelight, to remind Americans of their highest ideals.

Pillsbury was a prodigious publicist, and his byline can be found in all the major abolitionist prints of his day. He wrote numerous pamphlets—some of them recycled lectures—but only one book, Acts of the Anti-slavery Apostles. Many of his letters are included in the Garrison Papers at the Boston Public Library and in the Charles Sumner Papers at the Harvard University Library. Biographies include D. B. Pilsbury and E. A. Getchell, The Pillsbury Family, which was published in 1898 and is the best source on Pillsbury’s ancestry. The most satisfying treatment of his life is an article by L. Filler, “Parker Pillsbury: An Anti-slavery Apostle,” New England Quarterly, September 1946. His obituaries appeared in People and Patriot (Concord, New Hampshire) and the Concord Evening Monitor, both on July 7, 1898.