Leonard Bacon was a Congregational minister and reformer, was born in Detroit, Michigan. In the fall of 1817, Leonard Bacon entered Yale College. In the fall of 1820, having graduated from Yale, he entered Andover Seminary. Formally installed in March 1825, Bacon held the pulpit at First Church for the rest of his career. Throughout his career Leonard Bacon, Sr., was a prolific writer. In the social sphere, he was active on behalf of various reform issues, from temperance to slavery. Most of his efforts were directed against slavery. Of his various writings on the subject, Slavery Discussed in Occasional Essays (1846) reportedly influenced soon-to-be congressman Abraham Lincoln's thinking on the issue. However, although Bacon vehemently opposed the institution of slavery, he was not an abolitionist. Rather he argued on behalf of a gradual emancipation and for the resettlement of freed slaves in Liberia. Thus he and many like-minded clergymen supported the goals of the American Colonization Society. Theologically Bacon was a moderate proponent of the New Haven Theology. Yet in the theological arena he was not so much a creative thinker as an ecclesiastical politician. He died at New Haven.