Frederic Dan Huntington, D.D. (1819-1904), our first rector

The years of Professor Huntington’s residence in Cambridge, from 1855 to 1860 [when he was Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard], were those of intense political feeling, high passions, and sectional bitterness. It was not partisanship, but the deeper struggle for supremacy of ideas which swayed North and South, while industrial and vested interests combined to combat the abhorrence, steadily growing in men’s minds, of that policy of the national government which upheld slavery as supported by judicial authority. 

From the pulpit and in the press Professor Huntington had always borne vigorous testimony against tyranny and oppression, as a strong believer in freedom and national righteousness, but he had never allied himself with the Abolitionist party. For Charles Sumner he had a sympathetic admiration, and in the heated atmosphere after the assault upon the senator his indignation rose high with that of citizens of Massachusetts of all classes and predilections.  [1]

 In June 1856, at a Cambridge protest against the extension of slavery into Kansas, Professor Huntington spoke with vehemence: [2]

It has been well said that the New Testament gives us not the Resolves of the Apostles, but the Acts of the Apostles. Sir, we must hold fast these fine sentiments we utter so fluently till they take shape and consistency in action…. We must keep them till next November. Then we must take them between our fingers, and put them into those boxes where are the fate-books of republics — the treasury-chests of every wise and upright democracy.  And if the Missouri rioters or the renegade knighthood of the Carolinas shall come on to snatch the very ballot-boxes out of our hands, then, sir, we must put them into….No, it shall not come to that!

On April 16, 1865, his Easter sermon dealt with the momentous week of the Confederate surrender and assassination of President Lincoln. [3]

We have finished a week of which it seems not too much to say, that in the concurrence of public glory and public crimes, it is without precedent or parallel in the human history of the world. No doubt, as these strangely contrasted events have been announced to us, first filling the land with a joy that could scarcely find moderate expressions as the sudden prospect of an early successful and righteous termination to four years of bitter alienation and bloody strife, and then overwhelming it with alarm, affliction, and indignation, equally sudden and even more unspeakable, as that appalling act of infamy that has struck the civil head of the nation from his seat and his life together.…When we lift up our hearty praises and thanksgivings, as must day by day, that the God of Liberty has struck off the bonds from four millions of enslaved men, and set our whole country free from that wretched wrong, how can we help remembering that it is all the working out, at last, of his infinite mercy by Whom all the families of men are made of one blood.

Ezra Stiles Gannett, D.D. (1801-1871), founding minister of Arlington St. Church

A friend and neighbor of the Huntingtons on Boylston St., Gannett had locked horns with radical Unitarians over the issue of slavery in the 1830s. Deploring the excesses of the abolitionists, he declared,  “I may sympathize in their objects, while I dread and abhor their spirit.”  In 1844, at a meeting of the American Unitarian Association, of which he was a founder, Gannett opposed an anti-slavery resolution as “an invasion of rights of conscience” and the creation of “a creed on the subject.”

Dr. Ezra Stiles Gannett, Unitarian minister

He reluctantly supported the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, but the arrest in Boston of Anthony Burns as a fugitive slave in 1854, and the violent protests that resulted, changed his mind. Believing the Union way no longer worth preserving at such a cost, he risked the disapproval of his congregation by preaching that “our national administration and our free soil must not be used to promote the interests of slavery”. In response to his daughter’s question, “What if the slave came to your door?” he replied, “If he comes to-night, or at any time, I should shelter him and aid him to go further on to Canada, and then I should go and give myself up to prison, and insist of being made a prisoner, would accept of no release.” [4]

Alexander Hamilton Vinton, D.D. (1807-1881), our second rector 

The Rev. Dr. Vinton and The Rev. Phillips Brooks, rector of Trinity Church, Boston, were both abolitionists.  In his memorial sermon Brooks said of Vinton: [5]

Bronze bas relief of The Rev. Dr. Vinton by Augustus St. Gaudens

There are two great recollections concerning him which will always be associated specially with his life in New York [at St. Marks Church, where he moved from Philadelphia in1861].  The first is his interest in the war for the Union and the abolition of slavery. It would have been a sad thing for our church if he, whose mind had now come to be recognized as one of its very greatest forces, had been hostile or indifferent when the nation was fighting for her life, and the slave was at last coming to his freedom.  But there was no danger….As soon, then, as the government was assailed, the Doctor’s heart was in the war, and his voice was freely heard. No cobweb objections about the danger of politics in the pulpit held him prisoner. And it would not be easy, I think, to find a more terrible indictment of the curse of slavery than burns on the pages of a sermon which he preached to his St. Mark’s congregation on the Thanksgiving Day of 1863. The men who were alive and grown up in this country in the years of the great struggle for the saving of the Union and the freeing of the slave will always be judged by the attitude which they took and the part which they played in those terrific days.

1. Arria Sargent Huntington, Memoir and Letters of Frederic Dan Huntington: First Bishop of Central New York. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906: 127. Available on the Internet Archive.
2. Ibid., 128.
3. F.D. Huntington, Easter sermon, 16 April 1865.  Copy in our archive
4. Twite, Stuart.  Entry for E.S. Gannett in Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, posted 2004 to https://www.uudb.org/gannett-ezra-stiles/ .
5. Phillips Brooks.  Alexander Hamilton Vinton : a memorial sermon preached at Emmanuel Church, Boston, Sunday evening, May 15, 1881.  Available on WorldCat.