Author Clarke James Freeman

ion and, in 1867-1871 professor of natural religion and Christian doctrine at Harvard. From the beginning of his religiously active life he wrote freely for the press and published 28 books and over 120 pamphlets during his life time. He edited the Western Messenger, a magazine intended to carry to readers in the Mississippi Valley simple statements of liberal religion, and what were then the most radical appeals to national duty, and the abolition of slavery. Copies of this magazine are now of value to collectors as they contained the earliest printed poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a personal friend and a distant cousin.[1] Clarke became a member of the Transcendental Club alongside Emerson and several others.[2] Many of Clarke's earlier published writings were addressed to the immediate need of establishing a larger theory of religion than that espoused by people who were still under the influence Calvinism, or as an American phrase states the "Hard-shelled Churches." For the Western Messenger, Clarke requested written contributions from Margaret Fuller. Clarke published Fuller's first literary review—criticisms of recent biographies on George Crabbe and Hannah More.[3] She later became the first full-time book reviewer in journalism working for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune.[4] After Fuller's death in 1850, Clarke worked with William Henry Channing and Emerson as editors of The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, published in February 1852.[5] The trio censored or reworded many of Fuller's letters;[6] they believed the public interest in Fuller would be temporary and that she would not survive as a historical figure.[7] Nevertheless, for a time, the book was the best-selling biography of the decade and went through thirteen editions before the end of the century.[5] In 1855, Clarke purchased the former site of Brook Farm, intending to start a new Utopian community there. This never came to pass, instead the land was offered to President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War; the Second Massachusetts Regiment used it for training and named it "Camp Andrew".[8] His work is sometimes called controversial. He declared that the business of the Church is eirenic and not polemic. Such books as Orthodoxy: Its Truths and Errors (1866) have been read more largely by members of orthodox churches than by Unitarians. In the great moral questions of his time, Clarke was seen as an advocate of human rights. Tempered and moderate in his views on life he was a reformer and a conciliator and never had to carry a pistol the way fellow preacher Theodore Parker did. He published but few verses, but at hart was a poet. A diligent scholar, among the books by which he became known is one called Ten Great Religions (2 vols, 1871-1883). James Freeman Clarke was one of the first Americans to explore and write about Eastern religions.