George Barrell Cheever--clergyman, reformer, editor, and critic--was born in Hallowell, Maine, to Nathaniel and Charlotte Barrell Cheever on 17 April 1807. His strong conservative political and religious tendencies were formed early in life chiefly by his mother, a zealous Federalist and Congregationalist. It is interesting to speculate what turn his life would have taken if his father, a Jeffersonian-Republican and Unitarian who died when Cheever was twelve, had lived to liberalize him. Cheever rose to national prominence as a Congregational clergyman and antislavery and temperance reformer. He won respect as a literary and journal editor, and author of about sixty books and pamphlets on diverse subjects. He published at least twenty-five articles on literary and religious subjects in such established journals as the Arena, the American Quarterly Register, the Biblical Repository, Bibliotheca Sacra, the New Monthly magazine, the North American Review, and the United States Literary Register.

Cheever's early formal...