The State Of The Nation Considered In A Sermon For Thanksgiving Day, Preached At The Melodeon Nov. 28th, 1850 (Thomas McClintock Signed Copy)

Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, Boston, 1851; First Edition; 8vo (5 1/2" x 9"), 38 pages; printed wraps. Impassioned oration delivered at Boston’s Melodeon theater by leading 19th century Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, and social and religious reformer, Theodore Parker. Styled a sermon for Thanksgiving Day, it is in actuality a vehement exhortation against the recently enacted federal Fugitive Slave Law, in retaliation for which Parker had two months previously in this same hall advocated the killing of arresting officers by captured fugitives as justifiable self-defense, igniting a firestorm of condemnation which he here attempts to quell. No stranger to controversy, Parker once notoriously vilified patriot Daniel Webster for his courage in supporting the nation-saving Compromise of 1850, and his radical religious views, particularly on the nature of Jesus, had already led to the disaffection of a large number of Unitarian laity, the denial of a pulpit by his fellow clergy, and the estrangement of his wife’s family. In 1843 the Boston Association of Congregational Ministers asked for his resignation, but Parker stubbornly refused, and his continued outrages kept him a source of discord for some time afterwards. Signed in the top front margin by prominent 19th c. Quaker abolitionist Thomas McClintock (1792-1876), founding member of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, whose home in Waterloo, NY is today preserved as a National Historic Park. Very Good. Paper spine covering chipped, few miniscule edge chips of the front and rear wraps, small (1/2") closed tear on the rear wrap repaired on the verso with japan paper, soft vertical crease, some exterior dampstaining not affecting text, pages bright, sewings tight. A rare historic item.