author
R. B. (Richard Bowers) Thurston
1819–1895
A 19th-century Congregational minister and writer, he is best remembered for contributing to the antislavery volume Three Prize Essays on American Slavery. His work speaks in a clear moral voice shaped by New England religious life and the national crisis over slavery.
1 Audiobook
Three Prize Essays on American Slavery
by R. B. (Richard Bowers) Thurston, A. C. (Abraham Chittenden) Baldwin, Timothy Williston
About the author
Born on June 28, 1819, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, Richard Bowers Thurston spent his childhood in Frankfort and Bangor, Maine. He prepared for college in Bangor’s high school, entered Bowdoin College in 1837, and graduated there in 1841.
Thurston became a Congregational minister and was known as Rev. R. B. Thurston. He wrote The Error and the Duty in Regard to Slavery, his contribution to the 1857 collection Liberty or Slavery; the Great National Question: Three Prize Essays on American Slavery, a book that argued against American slavery from a Christian perspective.
He died on April 14, 1895. Though not widely known today, his surviving work places him among the religious writers who took part in one of the most urgent moral debates of 19th-century America.