Leonard Bacon

Reverend Leonard Bacon (February 19, 1802 – December 24, 1881) was an American Congregational preacher and writer. He held the pulpit of the First Church New Haven and was later professor of church history and polity at Yale College. Biography Leonard Bacon was born in Detroit, Michigan. He was the son of David Bacon (1771–1817), a missionary among the Indians in Michigan and founder of the town of Tallmadge, Ohio. There his sister Delia Bacon, later a major Shakespeare scholar, was born in 1811. Leonard Bacon prepared for college at grammar school in Hartford, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale College in 1820, where he was a member of Brothers in Unity, and from the Andover Theological Seminary in 1823. From 1825 until his death he was pastor of the First Church (Congregational) in New Haven, Connecticut, occupying a pulpit which was one of the most conspicuous in New England, and which had been rendered famous by his predecessors, Moses Stuart and Nathaniel W. Taylor. In 1866, however, though never dismissed by a council from his connection with that church, he gave up the active pastorate; still, in 1868 he was president of the American Congregational Union.