Day: April 6, 2012

Front facade of Houghton Library

You’ve Got Mail: “These long dyings are dreadful”

Grief overcame members of the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society of Boston as Deacon Samuel Joseph May read aloud a letter from their ailing minister, the Unitarian abolitionist Theodore Parker: “I shall not speak to you to-day; for this morning, a little after four o’clock, I had a slight attack of bleeding in the lungs or throat.”…