Richard Eddy

Richard Eddy (1828-1906) was an American Universalist minister and the denomination's foremost nineteenth-century historian. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he entered the ministry in the early 1850s, served congregations in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Massachusetts, and was chaplain of the 60th New York Infantry during the Civil War. He held long tenures as an officer of the Universalist General Convention and of the Universalist Historical Society, and Tufts College gave him an honorary doctorate in 1883. His two-volume Universalism in America (1884-86), with its extensive bibliography of Universalist publications, remains a standard history of the movement. He died in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

The first volume of what remains the fundamental documentary history of American Universalism. Richard Eddy, minister and historian of the General Convention, traces the idea of universal salvation in America from scattered colonial voices through the arrival of John Murray in 1770, the Gloucester church, the Philadelphia conventions, and the movement's consolidation at the century's end. Dense with letters, records, and original documents that survive nowhere else.

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Eddy's second volume carries the history through the nineteenth century: the era of Hosea Ballou and the Winchester Profession, the explosive growth of societies and periodicals, the Restorationist controversy, and the maturing of the denomination's colleges and institutions. It closes with a bibliography of Universalist literature that is itself a landmark of American religious bibliography and a principal finding aid for collections like this one.

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The denomination's historian tells the story of its birthplace. John Murray's congregation at Gloucester was the first organized Universalist church in America, and its refusal to pay taxes to the parish church produced a landmark lawsuit for religious liberty. Eddy's centennial discourse, with its appended documents and records, is the fullest account of the Gloucester church's founding generation.

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A double biography of a remarkable partnership. Thomas Jefferson Sawyer was the denomination's foremost champion of an educated ministry — New York pastor, founder of its theological schools, and professor at Tufts to his eighties; Caroline Mehitable Sawyer was a poet, essayist, and long-time editor of the Ladies' Repository. Eddy, the denomination's historian, wrote this from their papers as the record of the generation that built Universalism's institutions.

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