BELLOWS, HENRY WHITNEY (1814-1882)

This article appears in Volume V03, Page 705 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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BELLOWS, HENRY WHITNEY (1814-1882) , American clergyman, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 11th of June 1814. He graduated at Harvard College in 1832, and at the Harvard Divinity School in 1837, held a brief pastorate (1837-1838) at Mobile,

Alabama

ALABAMA

, and in 1839 became pastor of the First Congregational (Unitarian) church in New

York

City (afterwards All Souls church), in charge of which he remained until his death. Here Bellows acquired a high reputation as a pulpit orator and lyceum lecturer, and was a recognized leader in the Unitarian Church in America. For many years after 1846 he edited The Christian Inquirer, a Unitarian weekly

paper

PAPER
PAPER (Fr. papier, from Lat. papyrus)

, and he was also for some time an editor of The Christian Examiner. In 1857 he delivered a

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of lectures in the Lowell Institute course, on " The Treatment of Social Diseases." At the outbreak of the Civil War he planned the United States Sanitary Commission, of which he was the first and only president (1861 to 1878). He was the first president of the first Civil Service Reform Association' organized in the United States (1877), was an organizer of the Union League Club and of the Century Association in New

York

City, and planned with his parishioner and friend, Peter Cooper, the

establishment

ESTABLISHMENT (0. Fr. establissement, Fr. etablissement,
late
- LATE
Norm. Fr. establishement, from O. Fr. establir, Fr. etablir, Lat. stabilire, to make stable)

of Cooper Union. In 1865 he proposed and organized the national conference of Unitarian and other Christian churches, and from 1865 to 188o was chairman of its council. He died in New York City on the 3oth of January 1882. A bronze memorial tablet by Augustus Saint Gaudens was unveiled in All Souls church in 1886. His published writings include Restatements of Christian Doctrine in Twenty-Five Sermons (186o); Unconditioned Loyalty (1863), a strong pro-Union sermon, which was widely circulated during the Civil War; The Old World in its New Face: Impressions of Europe in 1867-1868 (2 vols., 1868-1869); Historical Sketch of the Union League Club (1879); and Twenty-Four Sermons in All Souls Church, New York, 1865-1881 (1886).
See Russell N. Bellows, Henry Whitney Bellows (

Keene

, N.H., 1897), a biographical sketch reprinted from T. B. Peck's Bellows Family Genealogy; John White Chadwick, Henry W. Bellows: His Life and Character (New York, 1882), a memorial address; and Charles J. Stille, History of the United States Sanitary Commission (Philadelphia, 1866).

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