Friend of the Poor and Needy:
The Life of Reverend Daniel Foster
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Discover CONCORD
| Spring 2022
he and his family settled in at the Thoreau boarding house on Main Street, they became well acquainted with Concord’s abolitionists, including Mary Merrick Brooks, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Thoreau family. Foster’s wife Dora, in particular, became good friends with Thoreau’s sister, Sophia. Things were rocky for Foster at the church. Not only did his abolitionism cause trouble with his congregation, but he openly outed himself as a Unitarian when he gave a sermon entitled, “The Bible; Not an Inspired Book”. Thoreau would mention in his journal that Concord’s Dr. Bartlett considered Foster to be “an infidel,” and he was not alone in that assessment; Foster’s ministry at the church lasted only a year. Thoreau, however,
Concord Trinitarian Church circa 1850
admired Foster, saying that the minister was “frank and manly,” while Emerson would remember Foster as a “brave, good pastor” with “certain heroic traits,” Despite his congregation’s frustration, Foster refused to soften his abolitionist stance, writing in his diary, “I feel a good deal anxious for I learn that some of the people are dissatisfied…because I make reference often to slavery. And so I…prepare sermons… in the hopes that they will convince these people of their errors and my truth.” The compromise of 1850 created a stronger Fugitive Slave Act, and Foster was appalled at the “abhorrent” legislation. He wrote dejectedly about the new law, “Oh my country, how hast thou fallen in this abject
All photos courtesy of the author
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The list of Concord abolitionists is long, and the names of Thoreau, Alcott, Bigelow, and Brooks are assured in the town’s history. But for every famous name involved in abolitionism, many more remain forgotten. One of Concord’s heroes, while not exactly lost to history, is certainly not a household name: he was the Reverend Daniel Foster. Minister, abolitionist, Transcendentalist, and soldier, Foster continually put his career in jeopardy and ultimately died for his beliefs. He was, perhaps, the most radical of them all. Born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on December 10, 1816, to a family of eight sons and one daughter, Daniel was the fourth of nine children. Seven of the boys would attend Dartmouth College; six of them would become Congregational pastors. However, Daniel left Dartmouth in 1841 before graduating and headed west to Kentucky, where he taught school for two years. Kentucky was a slave state, and he would write in his diary that he “became an abolitionist from a settled conviction of the inherent sinfulness of Slavery, a conviction forced upon me by what I saw of the evilworkings of the system.” Foster returned to New Hampshire in 1843 and finished his degree at Dartmouth in 1845. He was ordained two years later and served as pastor at several churches in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Like his ministerial contemporaries, Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Foster’s abolitionism was unrelenting, and his constant sermons on slavery aroused the anger of many of his parishioners, leading to early dismissals from his churches. In 1851, after being asked to leave yet another church, this time in Chester, Massachusetts, Foster accepted the pastorate at the Trinitarian Church in Concord. As
BY RICHARD SMITH
