Harvey Newcomb

Harvey Newcomb combined the roles of clergyman, editor, educator, and writer during the nineteenth century. Kind Words for Children appeared in 1859, whose expanded wording is Kind Words for Children, to Guide Them in the Path of Peace. It belongs to the body of moral and religious instruction he developed after years of teaching, newspaper work, and writing for the American Sunday School Union. The Negro Pew was an earlier reform pamphlet, published by Isaac Knapp in Boston in 1837. Its full title, The Negro Pew: Being an Inquiry Concerning the Propriety of Distinctions in the House of God, on Account of Color, states its argument against racial separation in churches. A Free Library of Philadelphia record classifies the work as antislavery literature and notes that attribution to Newcomb is not presented as absolutely certain. Newcomb was active in the antislavery movement during the 1830s and served Congregational churches. Read together, the books connect his teaching for children with his intervention in a public dispute over race, worship, and equality.