He was the eldest son of a shoemaker turned Universalist preacher. When he was 15, his father died, but his father’s message, “the gospel of inclusion”—that God loves us all, asking us to do the same for others—became his life mission. He became the sole support of his mother and five younger siblings, working in a store, as a teacher, a bookkeeper, while studying Latin, Greek, French, and German. At 17, he wrote a friend of mixed race, explaining transcendentalism.
