Albert Richard Parsons (June 20, 1848 – November 11, 1887) was a pioneering American socialist and later anarchist newspaper editor, orator, and labor activist. As a teenager, he served in the military force of the Confederate States of America in Texas, during the American Civil War. After the war, he settled in Texas, and became an activist for the rights of former slaves, and later a Republican official during Reconstruction. With his wife Lucy Parsons, he then moved to Chicago in 1873 and worked in newspapers. There he became interested in the rights of workers. In 1884, he began editing The Alarm newspaper. Parsons was one of four Chicago radical leaders controversially convicted of conspiracy and hanged following a bomb attack on police remembered as the Haymarket affair.
Early years
Parsons was born June 20, 1848, in Montgomery, Alabama, one of the ten children of the proprietor of a shoe and leather factory who had originally hailed from Maine.
Parsons claimed to be the scion of pioneer English immigrants, with "the first Parsons family" arriving at Narragansett Bay in what is now the state of Rhode Island in 1632. One of the Tompkins on his mother's side was with George Washington in the American Revolution and fought at the Battle of Brandywine. He was also a descendant of Major General Samuel Holden Parsons of Massachusetts, another officer in the Revolution, as well as a Captain Parsons who received wounds at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Albert's parents both died when he was a small child, leaving the boy to be raised by his eldest brother, William Henry Parsons (1826–1907), who was married and the proprietor of a small newspaper in Tyler, Texas, the Tyler Telegraph. In the middle of the 1850s, the family moved from Tyler to Johnson County, living on the frontier for three years. Thereafter, they moved again to the Texas Hill Country, establishing a farm in the valley of the Brazos River.
In 1859, at the age of 11, Albert left his brother's household to go live with a sister in Waco, Texas. Parsons attended school for about a year before leaving to become an apprentice at the Galveston Daily News, a relationship that Parsons characterized as being "indentured" for seven years in order to learn the printers' trade.
Civil War and Reconstruction
The coming of the American Civil War in 1861, or "the slave-holders' Rebellion," as he later called it, led Parsons to leave what he described as the "printer's devil": the position of newsboy. At 13 years old, Parsons volunteered to fight for the forces of the Confederate States of America in an irregular unit known as the "Lone Star Greys." Parsons' first military exploit was aboard the passenger steamer Morgan which ventured into the Gulf of Mexico to intercept and capture the forces of General David E. Twiggs, who had evacuated Texas en route to Washington, D.C.
Upon his return, Parsons sought to enlist in the regular Confederate States Army, an idea ridiculed by his employer and guardian at the time, publisher Willard Richardson of the Galveston Daily News. Parsons left his job at the paper, joining an artillery company at a hastily constructed fort at Sabine Pass, Texas, where an elder brother was the captain of an infantry company. For a year, Parsons participated in military drill and served as a "powder monkey" for the cannoneers. Upon the expiration of his first enlistment, Parsons left Fort Sabine to join the cavalry unit of the brother who had previously brought him to Texas, the 12th Regiment of the Texas Cavalry, also known as "Parsons' Mounted Volunteers." Albert Parsons was a member of the "McInoly Scouts" and saw battle during three separate campaigns.
After the war, Parsons returned to Waco, Texas and traded his mule for of standing corn. He hired ex-slaves to help with the harvest and netted a sufficient sum from the sale of the crop to pay for six months' tuition at Waco University, today known as Baylor, a private Baptist college.
After his time in college, Parsons left to take up the printing trade, first working in a printing office before launching his own newspaper, the Waco Spectator, in 1868. In his paper, Parsons took the unpopular position of accepting the terms of surrender and Reconstruction measures aimed at securing the political rights of former slaves. This proved to be a pivotal moment in the 20-year-old's life, as he later recalled in his memoirs: