Elmina D. Slenker On this date in 1827, Elmina Drake, the daughter of a Shaker preacher expelled for becoming a "Liberal," was born in La Grange, New York. She wrote for nearly all of the freethinking journals of her era and knew many of the reformers. She advertised successfully for an egalitarian husband in the Water-Cure Journal and married Isaac Slenker, Quaker-style. She preached alcoholic and sexual temperance, adopting a philosophy called "Dianaism," which taught sexual sublimation and practices to avoid unwanted pregnancies in a manner too plain-spoken for the guardians of the Comstock Act. At the age of 60 in April 1887, Slenker was arrested for mailing sealed letters of advice on sex and marriage to private correspondents. With bail set at $2,000, she was shown into a cold cell with a blanket on the floor. The New York Times critically reported in its coverage of her newsworthy arrest that she refused to swear on a bible and testified at a preliminary hearing that she did not believe in god, ghosts, heaven, hell, the bible or Christianity. The pleasant, ordinary-looking woman was vilified as "homely" for sporting a short haircut. Unable to raise bail she spent six months in jail and was indicted on July 12, 1887. Freethinking attorney Edward W. Chamberlain represented her during her October trial, where a jury found her guilty. She was set free on a technicality by the judge on Nov. 4, 1887. Truth Seeker readers paid her legal expenses. She wrote Studying the Bible in 1870, edited Little Freethinker and wrote several novels, including The Clergyman's Victims, The Infidel School-Teacher and The Darwins. She died in Virginia in her early 80s in 1908. "I became a sceptic, doubter, and unbeliever, long ere the 'Good Book' was ended.” —Slenker, "Studying the Bible" (1870) Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor © Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.

Francisco Manoel de Nascimento On this date in 1734, Portuguese poet and heretical priest Francisco Manoel de Nascimento was born. Becoming deistic, he translated Moliere's anti-clerical "Tartuffe" (1778), which provoked the Portuguese Inquisition under the repressive reign of Dona Maria I to order his arrest. Nascimento fled Portugal. In exile he wrote satires and poems under the pen name Filinto Elísio. D. 1819. Nascimento was denounced to the Inquisition on the charge of having given vent to heterodox opinions and having read “the works of modern philosophers who follow natural reason.” —Biographer Edgar Prestage, Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 19 (1911) Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor © Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.

D.M. Bennett On this date in 1818, freethought publisher DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett was born two months prematurely in Springfield, New York. He had a lifelong limp. Bennett worked in a printing office and joined the New London Shaker community at 15. By the age of 27 he was working as the community's physician. He shook off the celibate Shakerism in 1846 when he and Mary Wicks, also a Shaker, fell in love and eloped. In 1873 Bennett started The Truth Seeker in Paris, Illinois. The paper began as a way to reply to a clergyman whose letters were published by local papers which had suppressed Bennett's responses. He took his paper to New York City the next year, where it was published at 335 Broadway. He deliberately published and mailed "An Open Letter to Jesus Christ" and a scientific work on marsupial propagation to challenge the Comstock Act, which allowed postal authorities to intercept "blasphemous" or indecent mail. He was arrested in November 1877, was defended by Robert Ingersoll and charges were dismissed. In August 1878 he was arrested for selling a copy of the anti-marriage pamphlet "Cupid's Yokes," for which he served a year in prison, the case becoming an international cause celebre. Some 200,000 people signed a petition for his release. His productivity can be gauged by his schedule between 1873 and 1882. During those years he spent a year in prison, went for a year-long world voyage, spent a season in Europe and wrote The World's Sages, Thinkers and Reformers (1,100 pages). He followed that book up with The Champions of the Church (even longer), The Gods and Religions of Ancient and Modern Times (two volumes of 1,000 pages each), An Infidel Abroad (800 pages), A Truth Seeker Around the World (four volumes of 750 pages each) and "unnumbered columns of editorial matter and articles for The Truth Seeker," according to his profile in Four Hundred Years of Freethought (ed. S.P. Putnam, 1894). Bennett built The Truth Seeker into a major publishing house of freethought and scientific titles. He died at 64. Freethinkers of America erected a monument over his grave. D. 1882. "Was the star which was said to point out to the wise men who sought you in the stable in which you was born, a real star like others, millions of miles away, and which are immense bodies of matter, or was it a little star gotten up especially for the occasion and which moved near the surface of the earth?" —Bennett, "An Open Letter to Jesus Christ," The Truth Seeker (November 1875) Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor © Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.