American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation by Kirsten Fischer (review)

Those with a passing awareness of Elihu Palmer (1764–1806) might associate him with the pugnacious deism of Thomas Paine and his ilk, predecessors to the aggressive atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in recent times. But in this elegant and engaging intellectual biography, Kirsten Fischer challenges this tagline for Palmer in two significant ways. First, she takes seriously the early phases of Palmer’s career, before he completely rejected Christianity. For years after Palmer first doubted the divinity of Christ, he continued to enjoy theological reflection and debate, perceive himself as a Christian, and admire Jesus as a moral (if thoroughly human) teacher. Not until later, after encountering Paine’s Age of Reason, would Palmer develop more strident objections to Christianity itself. Fischer’s careful account of each phase of Palmer’s life and career—including the early, less documented ones—makes evident the considerable evolution in his thinking across his brief life.

Fischer further complicates the view of Palmer as a deist above all else by showing that deism was, for him, “a platform from which to pursue an idea he cared about even more: the notion of a divine life force residing within shared, sensate matter” (8). Palmer was inspired by vitalism (the theory that the entire universe is composed of the same substance), a philosophy he picked up from a Long Island physician and unorthodox believer whom he befriended during his short-lived ministerial career. Later, drawing on intellectual exchanges with another eccentric friend, Palmer added the idea that every atom of the universe was capable of experiencing sensation, including pleasure and pain. He contended that if more people understood the makeup of the physical universe as he did, they would develop radical empathy toward every being in the world. War, slavery, and other forms of oppression would cease—without the need for bloody revolutions. In short, Palmer believed that people could be taught to think themselves to a better world.

For all Palmer’s idiosyncrasies, this book nevertheless highlights his myriad connections to the cultural and intellectual ferment of the age of Atlantic revolutions. Throughout his short but vibrant career, Palmer was at least as much “a compiler of ideas” as he was a generator of them (226). One of the many delights of this book is encountering brief portraits of his diverse intellectual interlocutors. An intriguing example is John “Walking” Stewart, an erstwhile clerk for the East India Company whose travels on foot through South Asia (and well beyond) exposed him to mind-broadening philosophies, including, perhaps, the concept of “sensate matter.” Through another freethinking friend, the New York bookseller John Fellows, Palmer accessed the ideas of radical philosophers from across the Atlantic. Palmer had lost his eyesight in the Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic of 1793, but his imagination was fired by the community that gathered at Fellows’s bookshop to read aloud new philosophical works by such luminaries as William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet.

Fischer also deftly tracks Palmer’s many critics and those whose orthodoxies he resisted. In place of direct documentation of Palmer’s early life, Fischer uses the diary of his Connecticut hometown’s minister to sketch a picture of the spiritual and social world that brought him up—and made him hungry for new ideas. Later in life, Palmer fell into more direct opposition to those who didn’t share his freethinking inclinations. His detractors included, unsurprisingly, leading clerics in the various cities and towns where he lived or traveled, as well as Federalist civic leaders concerned that freethought would upend the moral and social order that was rooted, in their view, in religious commitment. But Palmer also crossed swords with other deists and freethinkers, who, while sharing his aversion to traditional Christianity, didn’t adhere to the same philosophical or...