Attention has been paid to Elihu Palmer (1764–1806). He has been discussed in studies of the American Enlightenment and of the new nation's religious culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Still, he is often overshadowed by deistic freethinkers who were famous for other things, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. This is the case even though Palmer did more than any of them to try to institutionalize what all of them considered to be “rational religion” at the founding of the American republic. In the deist societies he helped organize, periodicals he published, speeches he gave, and works such as his Principles of Nature (1801), he offered both a skeptical critique of revealed religions (especially Christianity) and an alternative faith grounded on nature and reason. Kirsten Fischer's American Freethinker is the first full-length study of Palmer—a long overdue treatment of this intriguing figure.

At the climax of Principles, as the culmination of the preceding two dozen chapters and as he looked forward optimistically to the nineteenth century, Palmer named deism “a true idea of the religion of nature” that appeared after reason had stripped away the superstitious nonsense of allegedly “revealed” religions. Deism declared “the existence of one perfect God, Creator and preserver of the Universe,” who was “justly entitled to adoration.” Deism also held, he wrote, “that the practice of a pure, natural, and uncorrupted virtue is the essential duty, and constitutes the highest dignity of man” (Principles of Nature, 3rd ed. [New York, 1806], 241). If most that he (or we) could call deists agreed on this much, they often differed on more specific details about what reason disclosed of the moral principles of nature. Unlike Jefferson, for example, Palmer criticized Jesus's ethics. Unlike Ethan Allen, he denied the existence of an afterlife. Unlike many others, Palmer was a materialist with a naturalistic ethics: “If a thousand Gods existed, or if nature existed independent of any,” he wrote, “the moral relation between man and man would remain exactly the same” (Principles, 191). His ethics was bolstered by a notion, which he first picked up from physician Isaac Ledyard, of a vital force pervading nature. The eccentric Englishman John “Walking” Stewart went further, arguing that all atoms felt, stored, and shared sensations. This line of thinking, as Fischer has argued, has been called “vitalism.”

So taken with vitalism, however, Fischer is reluctant to even call Palmer a deist. Deism, she contends, was for Palmer merely the “next, best replacement for revealed religion,” merely “a platform from which to pursue” vitalism, the idea he “cherished most” (7–8). Palmer “resorted to using deist terminology” only because he lacked a “vitalist idiom” (193–194). Rather than seeing vitalism folded into and informing Palmer's larger deist project, Fischer offers a Palmer who has evolved beyond deism. It is this “unconventional” Palmer, distanced from his ally Paine and more of a precursor to the later Romantics or the contemporary deep ecology movement, she writes, that “can still spark our imagination” (10).

More persuasive is how Fischer places Palmer in the fraught cultural politics of the early republic and, as the subtitle signifies, “the struggle for religious freedom.” After graduating from Dartmouth in 1787, Palmer became a ministerial candidate with views already “far from orthodox” (a fully human Jesus, universal salvation, a benevolent Creator, and the perfectibility of man) (69). By 1792, he was lecturing to steamboat inventor John Fitch's Deistical Society in Philadelphia. When religious leaders in the city shut down his lecture arguing against the divinity of Christ, they thought they were fighting blasphemy, and Palmer thought he was fighting for freedom of conscience and speech. The incident inspired his public campaign against what he would come to describe as “the double despotism of church and state” (Principles, 235).

When Palmer went blind in the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, some of his Christian neighbors credited it to divine intervention, “a perfect, if painful, metaphor for the fact that he had lost his spiritual way” (126). Palmer responded with stoic endurance. He continued lecturing and participated in Democratic-Republican politics. Listening intently in his friend John Fellows's New York City bookstore, he absorbed the work of other freethinkers: Volney, Condorcet, Godwin, and, most especially, Paine. In 1796, Palmer helped found the city's Deistical Society, a name he insisted upon, and then “became a catalyst in connecting freethinkers and galvanizing their opponents” elsewhere (174). He supported the nation's first deist newspaper, Temple of Reason; he published Principles and his own weekly paper, Prospect; or, View of the Moral World. In the tense and polarized climate of the early nineteenth century, his religious radicalism became too toxic even for his Jeffersonian allies.

Not long after Palmer died in 1806 and Paine followed in 1809, as their friend John Fellows recalled, the deist societies dissolved and the freethought papers went silent. That is what scholars mean when they describe the end of the deist movement Paine had inspired and Palmer led in the 1790s—not that deist ideas suddenly disappeared. If Palmer's optimism about public rationality and universal benevolence now seems naïve, Fischer concludes, he “was right about at least one thing. A pluralistic and democratic nation required a common ground for morality that did not presume one, or even any, religious faith” (241).