Remembering Nancy Gardner Prince

Many abolitionists of color get short shrift in the history books – if they are mentioned at all. BHS was pleased to collaborate in the creation of a memorial marker at the gravesite of Nancy Gardner Prince in Everett, Massachusetts.

Gardner Prince was an abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and writer who published the first edition of her autobiography in 1850. In A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, she chronicles her life experiences, from her impoverished childhood in Massachusetts, through her teenage years as a domestic servant, to her marriage and her travels to Russia and newly emancipated Jamaica.

Born a free woman in 1799 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Gardner Prince is of Native American and African heritage and the second of her mother's eight children. Her father, Thomas Gardner, a free Black man and Nantucket whaler and the second of her mother's four husbands, dies when Nancy is just three months old. 

To help support her family, Nancy, who has little formal education, goes to work as soon as she is old enough to do so, first as a berry picker and then as a domestic servant for White families. Baptized in 1817, she later writes that only her religious faith sustained her during these years of "anxiety and toil.”

After moving to Boston, she meets and marries Nero Prince, a former sailor and co-founder of the Prince Hall Freemasons, which is part of a growing network of free Black activist and mutual aid groups. By the time they wed, Nero Prince has already spent more than 10 years as a footman in the court of the Russian Czar – Russian and European royals commonly employ “Moors” as servants at this time – and the couple soon relocate to St. Petersburg. 

Nancy Gardner Prince learns French and Russian, helps establish an orphanage, and runs her own business making clothes for infants and toddlers. Her customers include the Czarina. Ten years later, she returns to Boston in advance of her husband, who dies in Russia.

A devoutly religious woman, Gardner Prince makes an unsuccessful attempt to start a home for orphans in Boston. Active in the New England Anti-Slavery Society, she is impressed by the possibilities for Black self-determination in the West Indies following the end of slavery there, and she undertakes two missions to Jamaica. Supported in part by Nantucket-born abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucretia Coffin Mott, Prince plans to establish a Free Labor School for destitute girls, among other projects. But her efforts largely fail – as does her health – and she heads home in 1843. 

On the return voyage, the ship on which she is traveling is blown off-course by a hurricane, and Prince finds herself aboard a leaking hulk being towed into the port of New Orleans. As a Black woman, she cannot safely go ashore, and spends days watching enslaved men, women, and children in chains being loaded onto other vessels for transportation to Texas plantations. 

Asked from the shore to whom she belongs, she asserts her status as “a free-born child of God” and invokes the name of her father, Thomas Gardner. Miraculously, his name is known in New Orleans, and her status as free, supported by her Russian travel documents, gets her off the wrecked ship and on her way to New York. 

Back in Boston, Prince starts her own seamstress business and gives lectures about her travels to Russia and Jamaica. At the same time, she continues to work for emancipation as a member of the interracial Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. At one point, she leads a group of Black women who stop a slave catcher from kidnapping an escapee from slavery and returning the person to bondage under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. She also speaks out for women's rights; at the Fifth National Women’s Rights Convention in Philadelphia in 1854, she protests the mistreatment of enslaved women. 

Struggling financially and beset by ill-health, Nancy Gardner Prince sees the second and third editions of her book published. But there is no information about her from 1856 until her death in 1859. 

The place of her burial was unknown until 2021, when researcher Ali Tal-mason located Gardner Prince’s unmarked gravesite in Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett, Massachusetts. 

Images: Narrative of Nancy Prince book cover, source: Project Gutenberg; The West Indies: Being A Description Of The Islands, Progress Of Christianity, Education, And Liberty Among The Colored Population Generally by Nancy Prince, source: Library of Congress; Nancy Prince Narrative advertisement, source: The Liberator, May 24, 1850, Page 3. In background, lecture advertisement, source: The Liberator, Mar 15, 1839, Page 3.