Edward Thompson Taylor was an American chaplain of seamen making port in Boston.
Background
Edward T. Taylor was born near Richmond, Virginia, on December 25, 1793. Left an orphan so young that he had but the dimmest recollections of his parents, he was given a home by a woman about whom he seems to have remembered hardly more, for at the age of seven he left her and went to sea as a cabin boy.
Education
A widow in Saugus, Massachussets, offered him a home if he would care for her farm. He accepted the proposition, and the widow taught him to read.
Career
After ten years spent chiefly on shipboard, being ashore in Boston, he experienced an oldfashioned conversion in a Methodist chapel of which the Rev. Elijah Hedding was in charge. In 1812 he went to sea again, on the privateer Black Hawk, which was captured by a British man-of-war, and Taylor presently found himself in a prison at Halifax. Not relishing the prayers for the King read by the prison chaplain, the American captives successfully petitioned the commandant to let them provide their own chaplain, and Taylor was requisitioned to pray for them and to preach. Upon his release, he returned to Boston and became a peddler for an Ann Street junk-dealer.
Although he was illiterate, his religious fervor and unusual natural gifts led the quarterly conference of the Bromfield Street Methodist Church to license him to preach, and as he traveled about the country he combined exhorting with the collecting of rags and the selling of tin ware.
Holding meetings regularly in a schoolhouse of the town, and preaching occasionally elsewhere, he exerted a powerful influence upon people by his blunt, fearless honesty, his quickness of wit, his lively imagination, and his picturesque language. Impressed with his capabilities, a merchant, Amos Binney, sent him to Wesleyan Academy, Newmarket, N. H. , but he was badly out of place there and remained only six weeks. In 1819 he was admitted to the New England Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church on trial and later into full connection.
The first ten years of his ministry were chiefly in towns lying along the coast. Nowhere was he so much at home as among seamen. Late in 1829 some Methodists formed the Port Society of Boston to further the moral and religious welfare of sailors, and the following year established the Seamen's Bethel. Taylor was immediately chosen as the one uniquely fitted to be its minister. He soon won the admiration and affection of all classes, and in 1833 a building costing $24, 000 was erected for him, largely through the activities of Unitarian merchants and ministers. Here for more than forty years Father Taylor, as he came to be affectionately called, walked "the quarter deck, " more like a sea captain in appearance than a parson, but admittedly one of the greatest American preachers of his generation. Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Emerson, and Walt Whitman have all left tributes to his uniqueness and power, and the sermon of Father Mapple in Herman Melville's Moby Dick is obviously a portrayal of Taylor's manner of preaching. His sermons were full of the imagery and language of the sea, of pathos and sarcasm, of humor and striking similes, of hope and denunciation--all unpremeditated and delivered with unstudied dramatic effect. Sailors knew he was their stanch friend; others, of whatever rank, had to give place to them in the Bethel, which was commonly crowded to the "hatches"; they trusted him implicitly and firmly believed that his prayers for them must be answered, so full of impassioned pleading were they.
He made three trips to Europe, the last as chaplain on the Macedonia, laden with supplies for starving Ireland. Survived by four of his six children, he died at his home in Boston.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
"I am no man's copyist, " he declared; "I go on my own hook, - shall say what I please".
Personality
He was affectionately tolerant toward all, and radiated a wholesome joyousness and faith. He was noted for his epigrammatic sayings, and his blunt honesty.
Quotes from others about the person
Emerson said of him: "He is the work of the same hand that made Demosthenes, Shakespeare, and Burns, and is guided by instincts diviner than rules".
Connections
On October 12 of that year, he married Deborah D. Millett of Marblehead, Massachussets.