Thomas Whittemore (Universalist)
Thomas Whittemore (January 1, 1800 – March 21, 1861 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was a Christian Universalist author, speaker and influential member of the Universalist Church of America. He founded and was the editor of The Trumpet and Universalist magazine, which succeeded the Universalist magazine of Hosea Ballou in 1828. Like Ballou and Ballou's grand-nephew, Hosea Ballou II, first president of Tufts College, Whittemore contributed to Universalist historiography by identifying precedents for Universalist beliefs in earlier Christianity. With Thomas J. Sawyer of New York, he co-founded the Universalist Historical Society in 1834. These histories were influential in bringing many readers to regard the Christians of the first centuries as Universalists. Massachusetts Legislature From 1831 to 1836, Whittemore served as Cambridge's representative in the Massachusetts legislature, serving as chair of the committee that oversaw the disestablishment of the Congregational Church and Unitarian Church, to whose special status Whittemore was opposed, from the privileged position they had been accorded in the Massachusetts Constitution. Whittmore held that "no civil government has a right to compel the citizens to support any system of religion whatsoever" and supported calls for a popular referendum on the separation of church and state in 1834. The results of that