Elihu Palmer was born on August 7, 1764 in Canterbury, Connecticut, United States. He was the eighth child of Elihu and Lois (Foster) Palmer and a descendant of Walter Palmer who was a freeman of Charlestown, Massachussets, in 1634 and later settled in Stonington, Connecticut.
Elihu Palmer graduated from Dartmouth College in 1787. In college he enjoyed a good reputation for integrity and literary proficiency and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received aid from the college's charity fund and taught school during vacations.
About 1878 Palmer preached at Pittsfield, Massachussets, and studied divinity under Reverend John Foster, who later became a Universalist and fellow radical. A few months later, he received a call to the Presbyterian Church of Newtown, Long Island, where his tenure lasted only six months (1788 - 1789) because of his liberalism. He removed to Philadelphia and joined the Universalists, but a proposed sermon against the divinity of Jesus was too much even for them, and Palmer found it necessary to quit the city to escape the wrath of outraged citizens. With his career as a Christian minister behind him, he studied law under the direction of a brother in western Pennsylvania, returned to Philadelphia, and was admitted to the bar in 1793. Three months later, in the plague of yellow fever, he lost his wife and was himself deprived of sight. This calamity unfitted him for the legal profession and he became a free-lance, deistic preacher. He sent his children to his father in Connecticut and removed to Atlanta, Georgia.
After about a year, he moved to New York, which henceforth was the center of his activities. Here he founded a deistical society, to which he preached every Sunday evening. This society was known successively as the Philosophical Society, Theistical Society, and Society of the Columbian Illuminati. Sister organizations in Philadelphia and Baltimore, where Palmer occasionally went to preach, called themselves Theophilanthropists. He also preached in Newburgh, New York, where the deists had formed a "Society of Druids. " The New York society, to further its activities, established a weekly paper, The Temple of Reason, under the editorship of Dennis Driscol, a recent immigrant from Ireland and an ex-priest.
On February 7, 1801, this paper was suspended in New York, but was resumed in Philadelphia the following April. Though experiencing some financial difficulties it survived there for nearly two years. In 1802 he published his book Principles of Nature; or, a Developement of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery among the Human Species (1802), which was the textbook of his deistical societies. In December 1803 Palmer began publishing in New York The Prospect: or, View of the Moral World. He was assisted in this undertaking by his second wife. The Prospect appeared weekly until March 1805.
Palmer was a contributor to The Temple of Reason and the Prospect. One of his best orations was An Enquiry Relative to the Moral & Political Improvement of the Human Species (1797). His efforts to build a Temple of Nature where deist services could be held, scientific lectures given, children taught, and astronomical observations made, were unsuccessful. At forty-one he had grown old, weary, and tired of opposing himself constantly to the current of public opinion. When he died of pleurisy in Philadelphia on April 7 1806, it was as the champion of a cause which had brought him only poverty and opposition.
Elihu Palmer's religious rationalism was quite out of harmony with the trend of the times. He declared that the Bible offered no internal evidence of divine authority, and that any religious system requiring miracles to establish it was neither reasonable nor true. Organized religion was the product of ambitious, designing, and fanatic men who had succeeded in taking advantage of human ignorance. He thought that Moses, Mahomet, and Jesus were all of them impostors. Two of them notorious murderers in practice, and the other a murderer in principle. These three together, Palmer believed, had perhaps "cost the human race more blood, and produced more substantial misery, than all the other fanatics of the world. Elihu characterized The Bible as a book, whose indecency and immorality shock all common sense and common honesty. With respect for neither the founders of religious systems nor for the Bible, which he characterized as "a book, whose indecency and immorality shock all common sense and common honesty, " Palmer preached the religion of unperverted Nature and rational education.
Palmer was a political as well as a religious liberal. More dominated by the ideas of the French revolutionists than by his New England background and directly influenced by Paine, Volney, Barlow, Condorcet, and Godwin, whom he regarded as "among the greatest benefactors of the human race, " he saw in the American Revolution the beginning of genuine republicanism and a universal age of reason. In the struggle between the Federalists and Republicans, Elihu Palmer was an eloquent and ardent opponent of "tyranny. "
Elihu Palmer was the member of the Deistical Society of New York.
Elihu Palmer was a boundlessly optimistic, an eloquent speaker with a deep and sonorous voice, honest in the expression of his beliefs to the point of utter tactlessness and disregard for his financial well-being.
Elihu Palmer's second wife was Mary Powell. They married in 1803.
