Abolitionism

The North likes to tell a self-congratulatory history about the Civil War, but abolitionists had to fight tooth and nail—sometimes literally—to advocate for the abolishment of slavery. From the emergence of abolitionism as an organized movement in the 1820s and 1830s through the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery in 1865, Boston’s abolitionists used a variety of tactics to assist, raise awareness for, and gain support for their cause in the face of continuing, widespread backlash. Their activism through words and demonstration centered on the same ground that an earlier generation of protesters fought upon: Boston’s “corridor to revolutions.”

Print Culture, Mob Violence: Garrison & The Liberator vs. Boston’s Anti-abolitionist “Gentlemen”

Like today, getting the word out was a major focus for activists in 19th century Boston. For some, activism was getting the word out.

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) was a Massachusetts-born journalist who was inspired by abolitionist writing to support emancipation in 1826.^[1]Denis Brennan, Making of an Abolitionist: William Lloyd Garrison’s Path to Publishing the Liberator (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014), 5, 114, 118–9, ProQuest Ebook … Continue reading

William Lloyd Garrison’s first public appearance as an abolitionist was on July 4, 1829 at the Park Street Church, depicted here, center, for the American Colonization Society (ACS). By that September, Garrison changed tack: he publicly apologized for supporting ACS’s transportation of African Americans, wrote that ACS members “neither cease from their own oppressive acts, nor act much more honestly than the slave dealers,” and called for immediate (rather than gradual) emancipation and full rights for all Black Americans. These positions were inspired, at least in part, by the reactions of Black Bostonians at a July 14 celebration at the Belknap Street Church to ACS speakers arguing against immediate emancipation.

Courtesy Norman B. Leventhal Map Center Collection at the Boston Public Library

With his publishing experience, Garrison took to the press to fulfill the moral duty he felt the state and church were neglecting: eradicating slavery. On January 1, 1831, he launched The Liberator, Boston’s most famous antislavery newspaper, from an office on Congress Street. Garrison wrote with no holds barred. In The Liberator’s first editorial, he wrote, “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.” This unforgiving attitude won him staunch supporters, but later contributed to splits in Boston’s abolitionist community. ^[2]William Lloyd Garrison, “To The Public,” The Liberator, January 1, 1831, 1.

This masthead illustration, in use from April 1831 through February 1838, depicts a slave auction separating a Black family. In the background, a slave owner whips a Black man in front of Capitol Hill, where a flag reading “Liberty” flies. Later Liberator mastheads were more optimistic, focusing on a future of emancipation.

Courtesy Rare Books Department at the Boston Public Library via Digital Commonwealth

Garrison believed in complete editorial autonomy; he didn’t accept money with strings attached to keep The Liberator up and running because linking himself to a specific patron or organization would have meant bowing to their demands. As a white man, Garrison had access to a broad advertising network that helped The Liberator stay in print as an autonomous newspaper.

Over one hundred periodicals across the nation—including some in the South—reprinted columns from The Liberator. This vastly expanded the reach—and notoriety—of Garrison’s voice. The Liberator in turn reprinted the outrage from Southern editors and readers. This cycle kept the debate over the institution of slavery in the national spotlight for over thirty years. Garrison drove it from his printing press in the center of Boston at various offices on Washington Street before settling at 25 Cornhill Street.^[3]Augusta Rohrbach, “Truth Stronger and Stranger Than Fiction: Reexamining William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator,” American Literature 73, no. 4 (2001): 730, accessed March 2, 2021, … Continue reading

Garrison’s relentless abolitionism quickly earned him the hatred of proslavery, or at least, anti-abolitionist, Bostonians. Anti-abolitionists frequently targeted Garrison with written, verbal, and even physical attacks.

On October 21, 1835, 1,500–2,000 “highly respectable gentlemen,” as the Boston Commercial Gazette wrote, marched on a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) where Garrison was scheduled to speak. They destroyed the meeting’s sign and eventually found Garrison, who left through a back door. The mob tied and roughhoused Garrison until Boston’s mayor, Theodore Lyman Jr., secreted him in the Old State House for safety and, eventually, arrested him for disturbing the peace.^[4]Jack Tager, “Antebellum Boston: Norm Enforcement, Race, and Abolition Riots,” in Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2019), 87-93, accessed … Continue reading

This ink drawing depicts the Garrison riot of October 21, 1835. Some of the rioters cheer for anti-abolitionist politicians Harrison Gray Otis and Peleg Sprague. Mayor Theodore Lyman Jr., who took Garrison into protective custody, was himself a vocal anti-abolitionist. Lyman, Otis, and other notable Bostonians spoke at an August proslavery meeting in Faneuil Hall aimed at placating the South.

Courtesy Anti-Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library, Digital Commonwealth

Although the charges against him were dropped the next day, Garrison’s arrest reveals the unpopularity of abolitionism in antebellum Boston. Most Boston rioters were poor white men, denounced by the press and the authorities, who used protests to express their often ignored political opinions. The anti-abolitionist “gentlemen” who accosted Garrison, on the other hand, were upper- and merchant-class. They couldn’t silence Garrison and other abolitionists through the legal process, but they had enough financial and political sway that their extralegal (read: violent) efforts to do so went largely unpunished.^[5]Lyndsay Campbell, “The ‘Abolition Riot’ Redux: Voices, Processes,” New England Quarterly 94, vol. 1 (2021): 7–46.

Garrison’s enemies in Boston and throughout the nation ultimately failed to silence him. Garrison published The Liberator weekly from 1831 through the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, when the mission of his paper at last succeeded.

Anti-Slavery Societies and Racism in Boston

The Massachusetts General Colored Association (MGCA), Boston’s first abolition association, was formed in 1828 by entrepreneurial Black Bostonians. Their goals? Abolitionism, of course, but also civil rights for free Blacks. Blacks made up only a small—and shrinking—percentage of Boston’s antebellum population. They faced discrimination even from supposed supporters. In the 1820s, many white abolitionists were members of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which only supported abolitionism if freed African-Americans returned to Africa. Emancipation was one thing; integration was something else. Many whites would not accept racial integration.^[6]Marc M. Arkin, “‘A Convenient Seat in God’s Temple’: The Massachusetts General Colored Association and the Park Street Church Pew Controversy of 1830,” The New England Quarterly 94, no. 1 … Continue reading

Table 1. Antebellum Boston’s Black Population

Boston’s social and religious institutions were racially segregated in the 19th century. The Park Street Church, which had segregated pews, was the site of an MGCA-organized sit-in by member Frederick Brinsley, who acquired a pew close to the pulpit in early 1830. The congregation barred Brinsley from the church. His experience, emblematic of Boston’s racism, was later published in The Liberator and beyond.^[8]Arkin, “‘A Convenient Seat’”: 48-49.

Boston’s radical white abolitionists formed their own antislavery societies. In 1831 Garrison and other like-minded white abolitionists founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) at the African Meeting House. They welcomed all genders and races and spread the Garrisonian agenda. On January 15 1833, MGCA petitioned to join the NEASS umbrella, losing some of its early distinctions. Still, MGCA’s work in exposing racism in Boston galvanized the NEASS to support immediate emancipation without transportation, directly opposed to the American Colonization Society.^[9]Arkin, “‘A Convenient Seat’”: 51-52.

NEASS’ open-door policy was the exception. The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society was founded as an auxiliary of NEASS by middle-class white women in October 1833. Women in antebellum America were rarely public figures, and many preferred an all-female forum. Although NEASS was integrated, BFASS initially barred membership to Black women. They only welcomed Black members after an April 9, 1834 rebuke from Garrison, who refused to speak to the segregated organization. BFASS quickly integrated, adding their first Black board member just two days later.^[10]Lois Brown, “Out of the Mouths of Babes: The Abolitionist Campaign of Susan Paul and the Juvenile Choir of Boston,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 1 (March 2002): 58-59.

“Breaking Down That Unholy Prejudice”: Susan Paul and her Juvenile Choir

That Black board member was Susan Paul (1809-1841), a schoolteacher from Beacon Hill. She made her first public appearance at an NEASS meeting on September 30, 1833, likely at Julien Hall or Tremont Temple, at the age of twenty-four. Instead of making a speech of her own, Paul led a choir of about thirty Black children, ages three through ten, who sang a series of abolitionist songs. The Juvenile Choir delighted the crowd and performed at future meetings in Julien Hall, as well as at other meetings in eastern Massachusetts, through February 1837.^[11]Brown, “Out of the Mouths of Babes”: 52-53, 64. At a May 1837 meeting of the NEASS, the choir included a twelve-year-old boy named Hoyt, who sang a pro-education song. Brown, 65-66.

A children’s choir was a brilliant activist method for the period. As a woman, and particularly as a Black woman, Paul had limited opportunities for public expression where she could maintain respectability. Leading a choir made that possible for herself and the children she led. Paul’s role as choir leader was a quiet one—compared to the singers, at any rate—yet it was an active demonstration of her beliefs. Because not all of the choir members were her students, Paul was a community builder as well.

Paul took an active role in Boston’s established abolitionist community. She was the first Black member of BFASS and the first African-American female life member of NEASS, and she traveled to New York as a BFASS delegate to the 1837 Antislavery Convention.^[12]Stephanie J. Richmond, “Race, Class, and Antislavery: African American Women in the Transatlantic Antislavery Movement,” Journal of Women’s History 31, no. 3 (2019): 59, 61, … Continue reading

In 1835, Susan Paul published Memoir of James Jackson, a biography of one of her students who died at six. Memoir of James Jackson was sold at the Anti-Slavery office and advertised in The Liberator for two years. Paul demonstrates African-American intelligence, morality, and skill in herself as author and in the Jackson family. In the preface, Paul writes, “Let, then, this little book do something towards breaking down that unholy prejudice which exists against color.”

Courtesy Boston African American National Historic Site, National Park Service

Paul’s work wasn’t easy. She encountered racism from within and without her organizations, but she also found herself isolated from Boston’s Black community. A white colleague in BFASS wrote that “the colored people regard [another Black BFASS member] as one of themselves, a light in which they do not regard Susan Paul.” Paul’s activism left her with few welcoming spaces for herself. Nevertheless, she continued her abolitionism until her death in 1841. In her final weeks, Paul worked at Boston’s famous antislavery fair.^[13]Anne Warren Weston to Deborah Weston, 18 April 1837, p. 28, MS A.9.2 v.9, Antislavery Collection, Boston Public Library, emphasis in source; and Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and … Continue reading

Raising Money, Raising Awareness

Movements cost money. Legal fees, publishing fees, advertisements… It’s a lot!

BFASS started an antislavery charity fair that ran, in various forms, from 1834 to 1858. They held their first fair in December 1834 at 46 Washington Street, selling useful goods and attracting mostly abolitionists. This modest first effort led to a wave of new upper-class BFASS members.^[14]Alice Taylor, “Selling Abolitionism: The Commercial, Material and Social World of the Boston Antislavery Fair, 1834–1858,” order No. NR73400, The University of Western Ontario (Canada), … Continue reading

Table 2. Money Raised at Boston’s Antislavery Fairs

Maria Weston Chapman, one of the new upper-class members of BFASS, took a lead role organizing subsequent fairs. Chapman (1806–1885) lived a half-mile south of Faneuil Hall at 53 Federal Street. She was a member and occasional host of Boston’s Anti-Slavery sewing circle, a frequent contributor to The Liberator, and a vocal Garrisonian. As a BFASS member, Chapman used connections she’d made while living in Britain to elevate the modest bazaar into a transatlantic commercial endeavor with high-quality goods and foreign ephemera.^[16]Naomi Gardner, “Embroidering Emancipation: Female Abolitionists and Material Culture in Britain and the USA, c. 1780–1865” PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2016), accessed March … Continue reading

This quilt was described in the January 2, 1837 issue of The Liberator as an object on sale at Boston’s December 1836 Anti-Slavery Fair. The quilt isn’t only practical: the hand-inked inscription reads, “Mother! when around your child/ You clasp your arms in love,/ And when with grateful joy you raise/ Your eyes to God above,—/ Think of the negro mother,when/ Her child is torn away,/ Sold for a little slave—oh then/ For that poor mother pray!”

Courtesy Historic New England

But BFASS middle-class evangelical members clashed with Chapman’s commercialism—and her support for Garrison. Garrison’s pronouncement that the Sabbath was “one of the main pillars of Priestcraft and Superstition” and his tendency to attach other causes, including women’s rights and pacifism, to abolitionism alienated evangelical abolitionists. In 1839, conservative BFASS members wanted to donate the majority of money raised at that year’s fair for a new antislavery organization, the Massachusetts Abolition Society, instead of the Garrisonian Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS, formerly NEASS). Maria Chapman and other Garrisonians in BFASS hosted a separate fair in support of MASS.^[17]Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told By His Children (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894), … Continue reading

This banner celebrating Garrison and The Liberator was hung at Maria Weston Chapman’s antislavery fairs. Chapman’s Garrisonian agenda contributed to the disbanding of BFASS in April 1840. The evangelical contingent founded the Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society; Chapman, her sisters, and other Garrisonians reestablished BFASS. Both groups continued to advocate for immediate abolition and run antislavery fairs, but Chapman’s fairs dominated thanks to her international contacts, business acumen, and savvy marketing.

Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society

Anti-slavery fairs succeeded in raising money and acceptance for abolitionism. In 1845, abolitionism was mainstream enough that Chapman’s re-titled National Antislavery Bazaar was allowed to rent out Faneuil Hall, where abolitionists had never been able to organize before.^[18]Taylor, “Selling Abolitionism,” 277. Abolitionist women used the skills they learned managing the anti-slavery fairs to host Sanitary Fairs during the Civil War in support of the Union army. See … Continue reading

The Liberty Bell, a gift book filled with poetry and short fiction, was edited annually by Maria Weston Chapman and sold at Boston anti-slavery fairs. On the cover, Lady Liberty’s staff is topped with a liberty cap, which were commonly worn by freed slaves.

Courtesy Boston Public Library

A Split Success: Growing Support, Internal Tensions

As the abolitionism of Garrison, Paul, Chapman, and others became national news, proslavery southerners pushed for not just compromise, but outright concessions to keep their “peculiar institution” intact. As Boston abolitionists argued and eventually split in the 1840s–50s over women’s roles in the movement, violence versus nonviolence, and whether the Constitution was a pro- or anti-slavery document, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 highlighted just how far there was to go.^[19]Hansen, Strained Sisterhood, 94–95.

Broadening support for abolitionism in the 1850s didn’t stop its opponents. During the Secession Winter (1860-1861), Boston faced its worst anti-abolitionist violence, which targeted not only abolitionists but Boston’s Black community at large.

On December 3, 1860, anti-abolitionists took over an abolitionist meeting at Tremont Temple. Emancipated slave and renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–1895), pictured here, spoke over the uproar, but the meeting quickly devolved into violence that spread to the African Meeting House and Beacon Hill, targeting Boston’s Black community in particular. Douglass had begun his abolitionist career as an ally to Garrison, but unlike Garrison, Douglass believed the Constitution was an abolitionist document.

Courtesy National Portrait Gallery

Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), a charismatic white abolitionist, was deeply inspired by William Lloyd Garrison. His speeches on December 16, 1860 at the Music Hall and at the January 24, 1861 Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society meeting in Tremont Temple manipulated anti-abolitionists into rioting. Phillips put himself at risk to show that anti-abolitionists were literally attacking free speech—behavior that even proslavery journalists condemned.

Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society

Ultimately, abolitionism succeeded. Even anti-abolitionists were outraged at the South’s treasonous attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery was ratified on December 6, 1865. Organized abolitionist activism in Boston’s revolutionary corridor spanned thirty-seven years. Boston’s abolitionists wrote, published, spoke, listened, sang, conducted, bought, sold, and organized. Their success stemmed not only from their resilience, nor from any one figurehead or organization.

Abolitionism succeeded because they did it all.

Comments for Abolitionism:

Further Reading

Annual Report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, With a Sketch of the Obstacles Thrown in the Way of Emancipation by Certain Clerical Abolitionists and Advocates for the Subjection of Woman in 1837. Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cdocument%7C2513822.

Browne, Patrick. “'This Most Atrocious Crusade Against Personal Freedom:' Anti-abolitionist Violence and Shifting Abolitionist Tactics in Boston on the Eve of War.” New England Quarterly 94, no. 1 (2021), 47–81.

Hastings, John K. “Anti-Slavery Landmarks in Boston,” Boston Transcript, September 1, 1897. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/aslabos0001&i=5.

Jeffrey, Julie Roy. “The Liberty Women of Boston: Evangelicalism and Antislavery Politics.” New England Quarterly 85, no. 1 (2012): 38–77.

Wirzbicki, Peter. "Black Intellectuals, White Abolitionists, and Revolutionary Transcendentalists: Creating the Radical Intellectual Tradition in Antebellum Boston." Order No. 3546490, New York University, 2012. https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.umb.edu/dissertations-theses/black-intellectuals-white-abolitionists/docview/1266242959/se-2?accountid=28932.