{"id":1458,"date":"2008-06-26T06:20:21","date_gmt":"2008-06-26T06:20:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theliberatorfiles.com\/a-moment-in-abolition-history"},"modified":"2013-02-14T21:10:52","modified_gmt":"2013-02-14T21:10:52","slug":"a-moment-in-abolition-history","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.theliberatorfiles.com\/a-moment-in-abolition-history\/","title":{"rendered":"A Moment in Abolition History"},"content":{"rendered":"

A view by Horace Seldon<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Often history records an event which later is seen as a crucial \u201cmoment\u201d, filled with meaning beyond the specific time, place and personalities involved.\u00a0 Such a time happened in London, in June, 1840.\u00a0 In another place I\u2019ve written about the international significance of that time, when Garrison and other men from New England refused to participate in an international anti-slavery convention, because women delegates had been denied recognition.\u00a0 The effect on the movement became significant as a \u201cwatershed moment\u201d.<\/p>\n

In Boston, in 1835, a similarly significant \u201cmoment\u201d occurred, once again with William Lloyd Garrison at the center, this time encountered by an angry \u201cmob\u201d.\u00a0 To tell the story I will rely on Garrison\u2019s own words, on the historical accounts of Henry Mayer, and of Garrison\u2019s sons, Wendell Phillips Garrison, and Francis Jackson Garrison. Any particular \u201cmoment\u201d has a historical context, and the year 1835, is a time which Garrison himself called a \u201creign of terror\u201d, threatening individual abolitionists and the movement itself.<\/p>\n

In New England in premonition of \u201cterror\u201d, late 1834 saw the destruction of Prudence Crandall\u2019s school in Canterbury, Connecticut.\u00a0 She had opened her school for young black women, and that act enflamed a hatred that warned abolitionists of the depth of what previously Garrison had called the \u201cmountains of ice\u201d which needed to be melted.\u00a0 Then came the hot hatred of 1835. In Charleston, South Carolina, a post office was seized by a crowd of people who seized mailbags full of anti-slavery pamphlets; the fire which burned the literature became the scene of the hanging of effigies of Arthur Tappan and Garrison. In Nashville, Amos Dresser, a young man who had joined abolitionist protests at Lane Seminary, was publicly assailed and lashed twenty times in the public market. In Canaan, New Hampshire, voters of the town assembled in town meeting, and acted to appoint a committee to oversee the physical removal from the town of Noyes Academy.\u00a0 That Academy had been started to educate young black children, under leadership which included one of Garrison\u2019s devotees, David Child.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Also in New Hampshire, in that same year, in a church in Northfield, George Storrs, was lifted from his knees while offering an anti-slavery prayer, and thrown out of the church! This “reign of terror” became very real for Boston, and for Garrison. <\/p>\n

George Thompson, strong abolitionist leader from England, had come to the United States in the previous year, and was still touring the country in 1835.\u00a0 His speeches brought strength to the movement here, but he was under constant threat wherever he appeared.\u00a0 At an August speech in Boston abolitionist women had cleverly maneuvered him away from a threatening crowd.\u00a0 In the same month, a stone meant for Thompson, was thrown through a window, where he was speaking, in Lynn. Slaveholder hatred and fear took radical form. Subscriptions to a fund for procuring the heads of Garrison, Thompson, and Tappan, were invited to be made through a bookstore in Norfolk, Virginia.\u00a0 The Richmond Enquirer<\/em> urged that these \u201cwanton fanatics\u201d be \u201cput down forever\u201d, and warned the North against interference with the right of slavery. Some Northern commercial interests, threatened with the loss of Southern patronage, or the destruction of Southern branches, responded by bringing\u00a0 pressure against abolitionists in Boston.<\/p>\n

One Boston newspaper, the Commercial Gazette<\/em>, responded to an announcement of an August 14 annual meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and predicted resistance.\u00a0 \u201cThis resistance will not come from a rabble, but from men of property and standing, who have a large interest at stake in this community\u2026\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The paper warned ladies to keep away, and threatened that if Thompson were to appear, he would be lynched.<\/p>\n

Faneuil Hall was denied for abolitionist meetings, but on August 21, the same Hall was filled with those who wanted to \u201cprotect the rights of the South\u201d.\u00a0 Harrison Gray Otis, retired Mayor, was a featured organizer-speaker for that crowded meeting.\u00a0 Otis spoke of the intent of abolitionists to create auxiliary societies in \u201cevery state and municipality\u201d, asserting that this proved them to be \u201cimminently dangerous\u201d and \u201chostile to the spirit and letter of the constitution\u201d. In the same period Samuel May had a speech broken up in Haverhill, and John Greenleaf Whittier was pelted with eggs in Concord.\u00a0 The Garrison family was frightened by a gallows which was planted on the doorstep of their home, on Brighton Street.<\/p>\n

The postponed meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, was announced for three o-clock on Wednesday afternoon, October 21st.\u00a0 It was to be held at 46 Washington Street, in a hall at the Anti-Slavery office.\u00a0 The Commercial Gazette<\/em> reported on the indignation among business men who thought that \u201cwomen ought to be engaged in some better business than that of stirring up strife between the South and the North on this matter of slavery\u2026 they ought to be at home, attending to their domestic concerns \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Believing that George Thompson was to speak, anti-abolition forces distributed handbills which urged people to \u201csnake out\u201d Thompson, and offered a one hundred dollar prize for the first to lay violent hands on him. It hoped that\u00a0 Thompson would \u201cbe brought to the tar-kettle before dark\u201d.\u00a0 These warnings were widely distributed to insurance offices, hotels, reading rooms, from State Street to the North end. Fearful merchants petitioned Mayor Lyman to prevent the meeting.<\/p>\n

On the day of the meeting, a crowd had gathered along Washington Street, and in the vicinity of City Hall.\u00a0 Hisses, sarcastic cheers, racial epithets were accompanied by demands for \u201cThompson\u201d. The crowd was assured by the Mayor, who had arrived, that Thompson was not in the building.\u00a0 Word spread soon that Garrison was there. He had come from his home on Brighton Street, where he had hosted a dinner for John Vashon, a leader of the Pittsburgh colored community; he was accompanied by Charles Burleigh, abolitionist from Connecticut.\u00a0 Garrison, after consulting with the women leaders of the meeting, retired into the Anti-Slavery office, separated from the gathering by a partition.<\/p>\n

The President of the Society, Mary Parker, proceeded with the business of the meeting, with the customary prayers and reading of Scripture. She was interrupted by the Mayor bursting into the room, requesting that the ladies abandon the meeting and go home. A conference between Parker, Maria Chapman, and the Mayor resulted in the decision by the ladies to adjourn the meeting and reconvene at the Chapman home at 11 West Street.<\/p>\n

The story then becomes one of a remarkably dignified walk by the women, black and white, arm in arm, six blocks down Washington Street, through an angry mob, still resolute in determination to continue their meeting.\u00a0 It is also the story of a portion of the mob gaining access to the building, grabbing Garrison, and his final release from the crowd by \u201ctwo burly Irishmen not know as abolitionists\u201d. He was then rushed by constables, into a carriage, and taken to the Leveret Street jail for safety overnight. John Vashon visited Garrison the next morning, where he was in prison, and gave him a hat to replace the one which had been “cut in pieces by the knives of men of propoerty and standing”.<\/p>\n

History most often gives emphasis to the threat to Garrison, who was indeed nearly lynched, and could have been killed by some in the mob.\u00a0 Here I want to lift up the courage of the women who walked through that mob, undeterred in the immediate purpose of their meeting, or the overarching purpose of abolition.\u00a0 Here also it is appropriate to some who were present that day who were led to become dedicated abolitionists.<\/p>\n

Young Wendell Phillips, son of Boston\u2018s first Mayor, dated his \u201cconversion\u201d to the abolitionist cause from the day when he witnessed the mob.\u00a0 Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, just returned from medical training in Europe, knowing nothing of Garrison, was also infuriated by the mob\u2019s action against Garrison. He vowed himself an abolitioinst from that moment, and shortly after subscribed to Garrison’s Liberator. Edmund Quincy, son of the second Mayor, was alerted toward the rights of abolition.\u00a0 His father, Josiah Quincy, then President of the City Council, saw the mob from his office at 27 State Street, rushed to Garrison\u2019s side until he was placed in the carriage and driven off, .\u00a0 Rev. James E. Crawford, later of Nantucket, was walking on State Street and encountered the riotous mob, and “his heart and soul became fully dediacted to the cause of immediate emancipation. Thirty years later, William H. Logan told of how, soon after the mob had left, he had received from Sheriff Parkman, remnants of a pair of pantaloons which had been torn from Garrison. At that same 1855 remembrance of the occasion, William C. Nell reported that a Boston merchant, David Tilden, Esq., “immediately became a subscriber to the Liberator<\/em> and continued a reader until his death. Reports of several others of the affect of being witness may be suspect, but the affect on Harriett Martineau was widely reported. Martineau, an English teacher, professor, liberator, had been in the country for months, conducting what might be termed a sociological study of slavery. She had interviewed slave owners and abolitionists alike, adhering to her academic style for the most part.\u00a0 On the historic day, she was on her way from Salem to Providence, passing through Boston as the crowd was gathering.\u00a0 Friends, seeing the well-dressed crowd, and knowing it was close to a Post Office, informed her that the crowd was assembled because it was a \u201cbusy foreign-post day\u201d.\u00a0 In Providence she heard the factual account.\u00a0 She volunteered her interest and within a few weeks she was a speaker at the Society. In December she visited Garrison in Boston, and became a worthy supporter.<\/p>\n

This date, October 21, 1835 is worthy of celebration as a \u201cmoment\u201d of gathering strength for the Abolition Movement in the United States. Five years later, in London, came a similarly significant \u201cmoment\u201d of strength for abolitionists in the United Kingdom.\u00a0 In that \u201cmoment\u201d, a major issue revolved around what some have called the \u201cwoman\u201d question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A view by Horace Seldon Often history records an event which later is seen as a crucial \u201cmoment\u201d, filled with meaning beyond the specific time, place and personalities involved.\u00a0 Such…<\/p>\n

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