As Kirsten Fischer reminds us in American Freethinker, Elihu Palmer (1764–1806) was once such an infamous religious iconoclast that his name was frequently mentioned in the same breath with such freethinkers as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and William Godwin. Today, however, Palmer has completely passed from public consciousness, surviving only as a footnote in histories of American Deism. Fischer seeks to remedy this with her new book, although her task was not an easy one, since little documentary evidence of Palmer’s life has come down to us beyond his published writings. What we do know can be succinctly narrated. Born into a Congregationalist family in a small Connecticut town, Elihu Palmer grew up during the excitement of the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States. He was educated at Dartmouth, where he was probably exposed to the emerging literature of European skepticism, which likely influenced his decision to...
University of California Press