American Unitarian Hymn Writers and Hymns

Compiled by Henry Wilder Foote for the Hymn Society of America for publication in the Society’s proposed Dictionary of American Hymnology
Cambridge, Massachusetts January, 1959
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Misses Ruth and Orlo McCormack in the preparation of this compilation.
H.W.F.
Many of the later collections in this series of Unitarian hymn books have been no less notable for their introduction to use in this country of new English hymns, such as Pope’s “Father of all, in every age;” Sir Walter Scott’s “When Israel of the Lord beloved;” translations of hymns in the Roman Breviary; Sarah Flower Adams’ “Nearer, my God, to Thee” (only three years after its publication in England); and Newman’s “Lead, kindly Light;” and for the ability of their compilers to discover fresh materials near at hand, as when Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson were the first to notice the hymnic possibilities of Whittier’s poems.
The story of American Unitarian hymnody begins with the publication in 1783 of the Collection of Hymns—designed for the use of the West Society of Boston. This church belonged to the liberal wing of New England Congregationalism, destined to become known as Unitarian a generation later. The book contained a small selection of traditional psalms and hymns by British authors and a number of quaintly didactic moral ditties in doggerel, presumably contributed by Boston versifiers who cannot now be identified.
The first group of Unitarian hymn-writers whose names are known and whose productions have survived did not begin to write until the opening decades of the 19 th century. Of this group the earliest born was John Quincy Adams, (1767-1848), best remembered as the sixth President of the United States. That he was also a hymn writer, and the only president of the country who was one, has generally been forgotten. Two or three hymns by him were written earlier but most of them came from the period following his retirement from the presidency in 1829. Soon after that event he wrote one for the 200 th anniversary of the First Church in Quincy, of which he was a member, and later in life he composed a metrical paraphrase of the whole Book of Psalms. When Dr. Lunt, minister of the Quincy church, was preparing his Christian Psalter , 1841, Mrs. Adams put into his hands the mss. of her husband’s poems, and Lunt included in his book five hymns and seventeen psalms by his distinguished parishioner. None of them rose above the level of respectable verse but his version of Psalm 43 survived in one or more hymn books 100 years later.