William Batchelder Greene

From the Archives

“Fact and Rumor,” 1886

August 31, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
From the Christian Union, June 3, 1886: Concerning the Unitarian the Rev. William B. Greene, of West Brookfield, this story is told. A man died in the neighborhood, and the reverend Colonel was called upon to officiate at the funeral. Some time afterward, on inquiring why he was summoned to the funeral of a man not of his flock, he was told: “Mr. — did not believe in much of anything, and we thought your belief came the nearest to nothing of anybody’s, so we sent for you!” — [[Worcester Spy I guess that’s one way of looking at Greene, […]
Contr'un

William Greene’s Small World

August 28, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
I haven’t posted much recently because the research for the chapter on William B. Greene suddenly blossomed into the makings of a book on its own. So I’m running with it, and hope to have a basic manuscript together around the first of the year. There are a few things I probably won’t be able to do in that time, some research travel I doubt that I can fit in, and this will hardly be a finished or definitive account–but it will be substantially more than we’ve had in the way of a biography of Greene, and I think it […]
Contr'un

Just a bit more on Greene and Transcendentalism

August 8, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
Philip F. Gura has a useful article, “Beyond Transcendentalism: The Radical Individualism of William B. Greene,” in a collection called Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts (Mass. Historical Soc., 1999), edited by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright. He concentrates on Greene’s philosophical and theological writings from the 1840s, but also speculates a bit on Greene’s reasons for leaving the pulpit in West Brookfield in 1850. Greene’s relationship to Orestes Brownson, who was an important early mentor, is also explored a bit. Dean Grozdin’s American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002) adds a […]
Blazing Star Library

William B. Greene, “Song of Espousal” (1840)

August 7, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
We find in the “TOKEN” for 1841, the following beautiful poem from the pen of Lieut. GREENE, son our our esteemed Postmaster, Nathaniel Greene, Esq. It breathes the very soul of martial poesy, and resembles in spirit the celebrated “Sword Song” of Kerner, which once rung through the German forces, calling them to valiant deeds.–Boston Eve. Gazette

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Contr'un

Mutualist and transcendentalist bits — William B. Greene

August 6, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
William Batchelder Greene (1818-1878), the “American Proudhon,” is a strangely underdocumented character, given his importance to the individualist anarchist tradition. He has yet to find his biographer, though many of his contemporaries considered his life interesting enough to mention in other contexts. This entry from George Willis Cooke’s Historical and Biographical Introduction to the Rowfant Club reprint of The Dial gathers some of those accounts (and I have gathered the relevant text in the Libertarian Labyrinth.) We know that there are articles and letters in periodicals going back into the early 1840s which have, at best, been mentioned as sources […]