Edward Everett Hale was an American author, historian and Unitarian minister.
Background
Edward Hale was born on April 3, 1822, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was proprietor and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, the statesman and orator Edward Everett was his uncle, and his great-uncle was Nathan Hale, the martyr-spy. He was also a descendant of Richard Everett and related to Helen Keller.
Education
Hale Everett graduated from Boston Latin School at age 13 and enrolled at Harvard College immediately after. There, he settled in with the literary set, won two Bowdoin prizes and was elected the Class Poet. He graduated second in his class in 1839 and then studied at Harvard Divinity School.
Career
Hale taught school, studied theology on the side, and began journalistic writing. In 1842, although he had previously been unenthusiastic about the ministry, he began to preach and four years later he was called as pastor of the Church of the Unity in Worcester, a position he held for ten years. During the next 45 years (1856-1901) he was the Unitarian minister of the South Congregational Church in Boston. In 1903 he became Chaplain of the United States Senate, and joined the Literary Society of Washington. The next year, he was elected as a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Combining a forceful personality, organizing genius, and liberal practical theology, Hale was active in raising the tone of American life for half a century. He had a deep interest in the anti-slavery movement (especially in Kansas), as well as popular education (involving himself especially with the Chautauqua adult-education movement), and the working-man's home.
Hale supported Irish immigration in the mid-19th century, as he felt the new workers freed Americans from performing menial, hard labor. In a series of letters in the Boston Daily Advertiser, he noted the "inferiority" of immigrants: "[it] compels them to go the bottom; and the consequence is that we are, all of us, the higher lifted.
Quotations:
"The making of friends, who are real friends, is the best token we have of a man's success in life."
"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do. And by the grace of God, I will."
"If you have accomplished all that you have planned for yourself, you have not planned enough."
"In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival."
"You and I must not complain if our plans break down if we have done our part. That probably means that the plans of One who knows more than we do have succeeded."
"I can't do everything, but that won't stop me from doing the little I can do."
Membership
Literary Society
,
Washington
Academy of Arts and Sciences
1865
American Antiquarian Society
1847 - 1909
Connections
Hale married Emily Baldwin Perkins in 1852. She was the niece of Connecticut Governor and U.S. Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin and Emily Pitkin Perkins Baldwin on her father's side and Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher on her mother's side.
They had nine children: Alexander, b & d 1853; Ellen Day, 1854-1939; Arthur, 1859-1939;Charles Alexander, 1861-1867; Edward Everett, Jr., 1863-1932; Philip Leslie Hale, 1865-1931; Herbert Dudley, 1866-1908; Henry Kidder, 1868-1876; Robert Beverly, 1869-1895.