Jeremiah Hacker was a reformer and journalist who lived and wrote in Portland, Maine from 1845 to 1866. Born in Brunswick, Maine to a large Quaker family, Hacker moved to Portland as a young adult where he worked as a penmanship instructor, a teacher, and a shopkeeper. He lost his hearing, and used an ear trumpet. Eventually he sold his shop in 1841 and took to the road as an itinerant preacher during the Second Great Awakening. He traveled through Maine, telling people to leave their churches and seek their inner light, or "that of God within."
Career
Returning to Portland in 1845, Hacker began writing and printing a reform journal called The Pleasure Boat. According to Hacker himself, he sold his one good coat to pay for the newspaper's first edition. He wore a borrowed coat after that, which he referred to for years as "the old drab coat." He wrote his newspaper on his knee and lived in a boarding house in near-poverty, while he spent all his time getting his message out. He became known as an outspoken journalist who railed against organized religion, government, prisons, slavery, land monopoly, and warfare. He was an early proponent of anarchism, and free thought, he was also a prison reformer. Unhappy with how juvenile offenders were treated in the adult prisons, Hacker was influential in buildingpublic support for a Maine reform school which became the third in the country, after Philadelphia and Boston. Because of the culture of reform that existed in 19th-century New England, The Pleasure Boat enjoyed wide circulation until the approach of the American Civil War. On the brink of a war that many fellow reformers thought was unavoidable and morally justifiable, Hacker advocated pacifism, and lost so many readers his newspaper foundered. By 1864 he started another newspaper entitled The Chariot of Wisdom and Love.
Death
After the Great Fire of 1866, Hacker left Portland and retired to a life of farming in Vineland, New Jersey. He continued to write, sending letters and poems in to Anarchist and Free thought newspapers until his death in 1895.
