Lewis and Harriet Hayden

Lewis and Harriet Hayden were influential and acclaimed abolitionists whose home on the North Slope of  Beacon Hill in Boston, Massachusetts was an important station on the Underground Railroad (UGRR). 

Lewis Hayden (1811-1889) was born into slavery in Kentucky. His first wife and their son were sold to U.S. Senator Henry Clay and later to another enslaver in the Deep South. Hayden and his second wife, Harriet Bell Hayden (1811-1889), and their son, Joseph, escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad. They eventually made their way to Detroit and founded a school for Black children there. 

Determined to be at the center of anti-slavery activity, the Haydens moved to Boston in 1846 where they soon became respected community leaders. Harriet Hayden managed and operated Boston's main UGRR operations. She ran a boarding house where she fed, clothed, cared for, and protected hundreds of African Americans who had escaped slavery in the South. By some estimates, the Haydens harbored 75 percent of all fugitives from slavery passing through Boston on their way north to more secure freedom in Canada, where slavery had been abolished in 1834.  

In one notable incident, bounty hunters came to the Haydens’ home to reclaim Ellen and William Craft, who had fled slavery in Georgia, and bring them back to bondage under the federal Fugitive Slave Act. The Crafts had made the perilous journey north in daring disguise; she, light-skinned, had posed as a White male planter while her husband played the role of “his” enslaved servant. Lewis Hayden answered the door carrying a loaded shotgun. He threatened to ignite a keg of gunpowder he kept under the porch if the bounty hunters took another step. They backed off and the kidnap attempt was thwarted.  

An independent businessman, Lewis Hayden was a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, a multi-racial group, and the Massasoit Guards, an independent Black volunteer militia; both organizations aided and protected escapees from slavery. Hayden was a traveling speaker and organizer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1873, he was elected as a Republican representative for Boston in the Massachusetts state legislature.    

Photo collage above: Lewis Hayden photograph taken between 1860-1869. Source: Wilbur H. Siebert Collection, Ohio History Connection; Harriet Hayden photograph c. 1864. Source: National Museum of African American History and Culture.