Edward Atkinson was born on this day in 1827 in Brookline, Massachusetts. Although now largely forgotten, he stood out during the late nineteenth century as a dynamo of classical liberal activism. In the decade before the Civil War, he began a long career as a successful entrepreneur as an executive of some of the leading cotton mills of New England. At the same time, he threw himself into the fight against slavery by supporting the Free-Soil Party and a Boston committee to aid escaped slaves. Growing weary of compromise, he soon began raising money to pay for rifles and ammunition to support the insurgent guerrilla force of John Brown.

Inspired by the ideas of Adam Smith, Richard Cobden, and John Bright , Atkinson became a leading publicist for free trade. In many ways, he can be described as the American counterpart to Bastiat . He spoke out against the inflationist ideas of William Jennings Bryan and others but, unlike some, favored the total denationalization, or privatization, of money.

Always a man of action, he campaigned for Grover Cleveland and participated in the formation of the Clevelandite National (gold) Democratic Party third party in 1896. Atkinson was appalled by the colonialist and imperialist policies of the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations in the wake of the Spanish-American War. He reacted by becoming a full-time activist in the American Anti-Imperialist League.

As a vice president of that organization, he wrote, printed, and distributed pamphlets demanding immediate independence for the conquered territories and challenging the rising tide of militarism and jingoism. When Atkinson attempted to mail anti-imperialist literature to the troops fighting the insurgents in the Philippines, federal officials seized the material and considered charging him with sedition. In the end, they thought better of it deciding that such action would only make the seventy-two year old agitator into a martyr. Atkinson remained committed to the principles of free markets and anti-imperialism until the end. He died in 1905.