Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Putnam, Samuel Porter

PUTNAM, Samuel Porter, atheist, b. 23 July, 1838, in Chichester, N. H.; d. in Boston, 11 Dec., 1896. He graduated at Dartmouth in 1861, when he entered as a private, and was promoted during the war to a captaincy. In 1865 he entered the theological seminary in Chicago, where he was graduated in 1868, and preached for three years thereafter in the orthodox pulpits of Illinois. In 1871 he became a Unitarian minister, and after preaching for several years in various states he renounced the Christian religion and became an avowed freethinker. He attacked the Bible and Christianity upon the platform, and for twenty years probably making more speeches against them than any other American, speaking almost every day for months together. In 1887 he established a “Journal of Freethought” in San Francisco. He was the author of “Prometheus,” “Gottlieb: His Life,” “Golden Throne,” “Waifs and Wanderings,” “Ingersoll and Jesus,” “Why don't he lend a Hand?” “Adami and Heva,” “The New God,” “The Problem of the Universe,” “My Religious Experience,” “Pen Pictures of the World's Fair,” and “Four Hundred Years of Freethought.”