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170 CHAPTER SIX For Free Soil and Free Men A few days before Christmas 1846, Amos Adams Lawrence, accompanied by a British cousin, Arthur Lawrence, visited Laura Bridgman at the Perkins Institution. American and European guests like the Lawrences made frequent requests to view the remarkable blind and deaf girl, to see her read and do needle work, and to observe her communicating through finger spelling. The wealthy merchant and manufacturer had supported the school over the years and had recently contributed to the publication of Howe’s minority report of the Prison Discipline Society. All of his funds were given privately with the caveat that he would receive no public recognition. His support continued even though he was, at the time, a committed Cotton Whig with little use for Howe’s growing turn toward antislavery politics.1 During the same month, Howe’s friend Horace Mann and his family moved to the hamlet of West Newton. Also in December, John G. Palfrey won a run-off election as a Whig candidate to the U.S. House of Representatives and became the primary Massachusetts voice to oppose slavery in Congress. Before the winter was out Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had published his long epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. The members of the Five of Clubs had heard the poem for months and had, with Longfellow’s blessings, edited it. When it was published Howe wrote to Longfellow, “A book! A book that pleases, instructs & improves people, what a gift it is to the world!” Howe also received tributes, for his Prison Discipline Society minority report. Charles Sumner called it a work of genius, and Mann, who despite grumbling to Sumner about Howe’s terrible punctuation, lauded the work for its lofty sentiments. From South Carolina, Francis Lieber thanked Howe for the copy of the report he had sent him. He suggested that Howe distribute it throughout Europe and America, and he assured Howe that Louis Dwight’s “villainy” was best ignored for the foolishness that it was.2 Through the spring and summer of 1847, the Boston Vigilance Committee ( 171 For Free Soil and Free Men continued to meet in Howe’s Boston office on Bromfield Street. In May Howe attended a six-hour meeting at the home of Theodore Parker. The meeting concerned fugitive slaves and marked the beginning point in a deepening friendship that Howe had with one of the most brilliant and controversial ministers in Boston. Howe came to admire Parker, who had baptized Julia Romana in Rome in 1844 and who, in January 1846, had been installed as its minister by Boston’s Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society. Parker’s congregation met in Boston’s Melodeon Theater and later in the Music Hall, a grand facility that had the seats for the largest Sunday morning audience in Boston. An eclectic group of parishioners attended the society’s meetings: Longfellow, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Peabody, Louisa May Alcott, Moncure Conway, and, on occasion, the Howes. They were just as likely to be in attendance as were artisans, laborers, and small shop owners. People were known to read their favorite newspaper during parts of the service they found boring, but never during Parker’s sermons—brilliant, controversial, provocative, but never boring. More than anything else, Bostonians came to the Music Hall on Sunday mornings to hear Parker deliver blunt denouncements , often naming particular people who had not lived up to his heroic expectations. Parker, for example, was merciless to Judge Edward G. Loring after the Anthony Burns affair in 1854, and he repeatedly denounced the various Curtis family attorneys who served the interests of Boston’s Cotton Whigs. When the English poet Arthur Hugh Clough visited Boston in 1852, spending two weeks in November with the Howes, he attended services at the Music Hall to hear one of Parker’s sermons. After dining with Parker at Green Peace, Clough commented to his fiancée, “Theodore Parker has been preaching some very infidelical sermons proclaiming himself in Miracles and all that—by which the genteel Boston mind is a good deal disturbed, poor thing.” Clough was also left uneasy by Parker’s, and the Howes’, antislavery rhetoric and readings. And he was shocked to learn that Parker and the Howes had participated in the Underground Railroad.3 Parker’s theological and political positions had made Parker even more radical than Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Concord contemporary—so radical that most Unitarian ministers refused to exchange their pulpits with him...

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