Knowlton Biography, Chapter 25
Twenty-five: Stephen J. W. Tabor
Although there be a very wide difference between a bad man and a man of bad principles, yet few will stop to look for, and some cannot see this difference. As to what principles are bad, the question is easily settled, for all erroneous principles are bad, and all principles that differ from mine are erroneous: this every body will say.
After his arrival in Ashfield, Charles split his time between building his medical practice and promoting Fruits of Philosophy. Charles was much more successful finding general booksellers interested in carrying the birth control book than he’d been selling Modern Materialism, and of course many of the freethought bookshops that had carried his first book also stocked his second.
One of these shops belonged to Gilbert Vale. Like Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, Vale was a British expatriot who had emigrated to America and operated a small publishing business and freethought bookshop in New York City. Vale was also an author himself, who had written a biography of Thomas Paine and organized the monument that still stands at Paine’s home in New Rochelle. The “Catalogue of Liberal Works” for his Chatham Square shop alphabetically listed “Fruits of Philosophy, Knowlton’s” for fifty cents, just below Vale’s own book, “Fanaticism; It’s Source and Influence.”
It’s possible that Gilbert Vale’s press in the Bowery may have been where Charles printed Fruits of Philosophy in early 1832. That would explain why the book’s cover page says it was printed in New York. And printing the book in Vale’s shop would have given Charles a chance to get to know the Englishman’s young assistant, Stephen Tabor. It’s uncertain whether Tabor helped Charles produce Fruits of Philosophy—what we do know is that Charles took the young man home to Ashfield with him and began training him as a doctor.
Stephen James Wilson Tabor was born in Corinth, Vermont, in 1815. Orphaned at a young age, Stephen managed to educate himself and become an accomplished writer. Tabor took Vermont’s examination to become a schoolteacher, and scored well on all the academic subjects. But in a conversation after the exam, the minister in charge of testing discovered that Tabor was a freethinker. An angry letter to a freethought newspaper told the story:
The examination accordingly commenced, with regard to his scientific qualifications, and ended satisfactorily…But after a conversation had taken place between the salaried and arrogant dispenser of the gospel, and the humble claimant of the toils of school keeping, the former finding the latter to be an Infidel, refused to give him any other than the following certificate, which not attesting to his moral character, was, according to the laws of this State…null and void.
Reverend Clark Perry, the superintendent of the Newbury schools, certified that he had examined Tabor, and was “willing to approbate him, so far as literary attainments are concerned—But as he professes not to believe in the Bible as the word of God, we will not take the responsibility of recommending him as to moral character.”
Stephen Tabor tried to reason with the minister. He offered to bring Perry written testimonials of his moral character from all the leading men of Bradford, who had known him all his life. But Reverend Perry refused to reconsider, apparently believing a seventeen-year old without religion would corrupt the children of Vermont. Disgusted, Stephen packed his things and headed for New York, where his writing skills quickly got him a job on Gilbert Vale’s freethought newspaper, the Beacon.
Stephen and Charles met in 1832, and Charles invited the young man to come home with him and study medicine. Like the physicians he had trained with, Charles had begun opening his home to young men beginning their study of medicine. But unlike the other young men who came to study with Charles in Ashfield, Stephen lived in the Knowlton household for nearly a decade. He became a doctor, and settled in the neighboring town of Shelburne. The early infidelity he’d been punished for in Vermont grew into a lifetime commitment, and Tabor regularly wrote articles for freethought papers. And in the summer of 1843, Stephen J. W. Tabor married Lucy Melvina Knowlton, three days after her seventeenth birthday.