Joshua Young (September 23, 1823 – February 7, 1904) was an abolitionist Congregational Unitarian minister who crossed paths with many famous people of the mid-19th century.

He received national publicity and lost his pulpit for presiding in 1859 over the funeral of John Brown, the first person executed for treason by a U.S.

Abraham Willard Jackson, a contemporary Unitarian Preacher and deaf man said about Young, "In a Massachusetts village there toils a minister, and for more than a quarter of a century has toiled, though his deafness is so extreme that speech with him is scarcely possible, who once told me that in all these years no unpleasant reminder of his infirmity, either by act or word, had ever come to him from his people...

At the age of 16 he entered Bowdoin College, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1845.

He saw the forced and public return of fugitive Anthony Burns to slavery, and gave a sermon on it, published as a pamphlet.

[3] Brown was executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia on December 2, 1859, after his conviction for murder, treason, and inciting a slave insurrection.

Young had never met Brown, but when his abolitionist friend Lucius G. Bigelow informed him that John Brown's body was passing through Rutland en route to be buried at his home in North Elba, New York, only 100 miles (160 km) away across Lake Champlain, they decided to attend.

[24] As the body was being lowered into the grave he felt moved to recite words of the apostle Paul: "I have fought a good fight.

[25] Honorable men there were who suggested it would be a spectacle not for tears to see me dangling at the end of a rope from the highest tree on the common, swinging and twisting in the wind.

[28] This article incorporates material from a work in the public domain: Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, 1872, pp.