More Unitarians
Alcott, Amos Bronson Burleigh, Celia C. Channing, William Henry Cordner, John Dall, Caroline Wells Healey Furness, William Henry Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Hosmer, Frederick Lucian Johnson, Samuel Judd, Sylvester Latimer, Lewis Howard Lowell, James Russell Ripley, George Savage, Minot Judson Sears, Edmund Hamilton Sullivan, William Laurence Taft, William Howard • Walker, James Weiss, John Wendte, Charles William Wooley, Celia ParkerJames Walker
(1794-1874)
 James Walker |
A founder of the American Unitarian Association (AUA), he was later a professor and then president of Harvard College. Walker was born in Woburn, Massachusetts on August 16, 1794, the son of a major general in the army. After studying with Caleb Butler, the principal of Groton Academy, he went to Harvard College, and graduated in 1814. He taught briefly at Phillips Exeter Academy, and then went on to Harvard Divinity School, where he graduated in 1817, in the first class to complete its studies. After studying with Henry Ware, Jr., he was ordained on February 11, 1818 to the ministry of the Harvard Church on Main Street in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where he stayed for 22 years. He was appointed secretary of the group that met in January 1825 to consider the formation of what became the AUA in May of that year. He married Caroline Bartlett of Charlestown.
Walker was known as a minister who was active in his community. He was also a staunch defender of the Standing Order. He said that while the Puritans followed an outmoded Calvinism, they were “ experienced and sober-minded statesmen,” who would not let vital religious institutions be “broken up and destroyed.” (Howe, Unitarian Conscience, p. 214) Walker was very critical of revival techniques saying preachers like Charles Grandison Finney and others were hypocrites who dispensed cheap, unearned grace. Although not a Transcendentalist, he was open to some radical views, and related common sense to intuitionism. For Walker, the proof of the existence of a spiritual world rested upon “intuitive suggestion.” In 1831 he became the editor of the Christian Examiner, and his tolerance of divergent views allowed him to publish many of the Transcendentalists in its pages. In 1839 he resigned from his parish. He had been appointed a Fellow of Harvard, and then in 1839 he became the Alford Professor of Moral Philosophy. He was a follower of the Scottish moral philosophy, and edited the works of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. Finally in 1853 he was made president of Harvard, a position he retained for seven years before his retirement in 1860. His failing health prevented him from leading a very vigorous presidency, but he survived for another 14 years after retirement. He died on December 23, 1874 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
