Harriet Livermore - Preaching Career

Preaching Career

Livermore was raised a Congregationalist but showed little interest in religion until the year 1811 when she was twenty-three. She reflected later that:

It was in September, A.D. 1811, that tired of the vain, thoughtless life I had led, sick of the world, disappointed in all my hopes of sublunary bliss, I drew up a resolution in my mind to commence a religious life-to become a religious person....Neither fears of hell, nor desires for Heaven influenced the motion. I fled to the name and form of religion, as a present sanctuary from the sorrows of life.

By 1821, Livermore had decided she was called to be a preacher. "I felt under the most solemn obligations to dedicate the whole of my time to...God". A year later she had begun preaching in Christian Connection and Freewill Baptist congregations in New Hampshire.

Nevertheless, her fame spread, and she was invited to speak in the House of Representatives Chamber of the United States Congress in January 1827. Livermore was not the first woman to preach there (Dorothy Ripley was the first in 1806, but Livermore's sermon was such a success that she was able to speak before Congress three more times: in 1832, 1838, and 1843. President John Quincy Adams was in the audience for her first sermon and according to contemporary reports many of her listeners were deeply moved:

Her language was correct, persuasive, and judging by my own feelings, the profound attention and sympathy of the audience, extremely eloquent. Many wept even to sobbing....Judging, as I said, by my own feelings...I should say she is the most eloquent preacher I have listened to since the days of Mr. Waddell. But no language can do justice to the pathos of her singing. For when she closed by singing a hymn that might with propriety be termed a prayer...her voice was so melodious, and her face beamed with such heavenly goodness as to resemble a transfiguration, and you were compelled to accord them all to her.