A nationally powerful reformer, editor, church leader, and author, Leonard Bacon (1802-1881) influenced the thinking of northern Protestants for more than fifty years. In this detailed biography, Hugh Davis offers the first scholarly treatment of Bacon's life and work.

Convinced that he was obligated to educate the American people on a broad range of social, political, and theological issues, Bacon, a Congregational minister, actively sought to connect his church and community to the larger world of organized benevolence, religious and reform journalism, social activism, and scholarship.

The son of New England Congregational missionaries to the native Americans on the Michigan frontier, he also endeavored to extend evangelical religion and New England ideas and institutions to the rest of the nation and even overseas.

Offering new insights into the nineteenth-century Protestant ministry, the evangelical mentality, and the efforts of Americans in Bacon's generation to address the moral and social issues of their time, Leonard Bacon will prove an invaluable contribution to American religious, social, and political history.