Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross draws up a will that will free his enslaved African American workers and pay for their transportation to a new U.S. colony in West Africa.

Ross, who owns 5,000 acres of land and whose estimated wealth is $100,000 (about $3.28 million today) when he dies the following year, actively promotes colonization – the controversial scheme to send free African Americans “back to Africa.”

He is one of four Mississippi planters and enslavers who co-found the Mississippi Colonization Society, a state auxiliary of the American Colonization Society (ACS), and purchase land for a colony on the West African coast. The settlement, that comes to be known as Mississippi-in-Africa, is later incorporated into the larger U.S. colony of Liberia that declares its independence in 1847.

Some advocates view colonization as a humanitarian vehicle for educating and Christianizing native Africans; many enslavers support it because removing free Black people from their states will theoretically reduce the threat of slave uprisings (enslaved people in Mississippi outnumber Whites three-to-one).

But the vast majority of Black Americans, along with most abolitionists, regard colonization as part of a larger effort by enslavers and their political allies to protect and maintain slavery and the South’s economic system that depends on it. They argue that African Americans have earned a stake in the United States, that they deserve equal rights, and that “repatriation” to Africa is tantamount to deportation.

Ross declares in his will that his Prospect Hill Plantation should be sold to cover the costs of transporting those he has emancipated to Africa along with necessary supplies to get them started in their new lives. In addition, he stipulates that those who choose to stay should be sold to the highest bidder, with the proceeds going to the American Colonization Society to build and support a university in the new colony. Ross adds the caveat that families he has enslaved cannot be separated.

Why does Isaac Ross do this? In his book, Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today, journalist Alan Huffman writes that “the closest to a consensus” among Ross’s descendants is that he cared about those he enslaved but freeing them outright was not a viable option. It would have required the approval of the state legislature, which was not likely to grant it. “Ultimately, Ross wanted his slaves to have an opportunity to make their own way, and for whatever reasons, he decided that their best chance was in Africa.”

Of the 160 people registered as enslaved at the Prospect Hill Plantation in 1835, 123 opt for freedom and emigration to the new Mississippi-in-Africa colony. With the addition of workers from other Ross family plantations, a group of nearly 300 are poised to begin their journey to Africa.

But after Isaac Ross dies in 1836, his plan stalls because of a rift between two family members whom he had entrusted to carry out his wishes: his daughter, Margaret Reed, and his grandson, Isaac Ross Wade. According to Huffman, Reed spent “the remaining two years of her life doing everything in her power to see that [her father’s] plan was carried out. Wade would spend the next decade, and most of the funds of the estate, doing everything he could to prevent it.”

The 10-year legal wrangle that follows involves not only the courts but the state legislature. In 1841, concerned about the “dangerous example” that the Ross plan would set, Mississippi lawmakers propose making it illegal to free enslaved people by means of a will for any purpose – including emigration – without legislative authorization. Some push to apply the ban retroactively to prevent the 300 Prospect Hill workers from being freed and moving to Liberia. The bill – without the retroactive clause – ultimately passes. But most of the would-be emigrants at the Prospect Hill Plantation remain in limbo there because Isaac Ross Wade continues his legal fight to keep them enslaved and prevent them from leaving.

The saga takes another turn in 1845 when the Ross mansion at Prospect Hill burns to the ground – allegedly during an uprising by enslaved workers in the Mississippi-in-Africa emigrant group who had lost patience with the continual delays. A six-year-old niece of Ross Wade dies in the blaze. At least seven or eight leaders of the failed plot are said to have been lynched or burned to death by overseers or angry neighbors.

Finally, two years later – and 12 years after Isaac Ross’s death – the frustrated emigrants get the green light to leave for West Africa when the Mississippi High Court rules that the will can stand. But scores of them never leave American shores: they die from cholera in squalid New Orleans refugee camps while waiting for the ship that would carry them across the Atlantic. Among the casualties are Frederick and Sillah Ross, whose five suddenly orphaned children make the harrowing two-month passage without them. The oldest passenger is Mechia Ross, aged 65; the youngest is an infant born at sea during the voyage.

In Liberia, the new arrivals face major challenges, ranging from fever epidemics to conflicts with Indigenous peoples to lack of support from the underfunded Mississippi Colonization Society and American Colonization Society. As many as half the settlers succumb to fever and disease.

The survivors mostly eke out a living from the land, growing cocoa, coffee, rice, cotton, and various vegetables. But despite ongoing setbacks, they help fuel the growth of the struggling Mississippi-in-Africa settlement. In 1843, its capital, Greenville, had just 79 residents; boosted by the establishment of Liberia as an independent republic in 1847, Mississippi-in-Africa welcomes another 1,402 African American settlers over the next seven years.

By 1867, the ACS and its state-related chapters had assisted in the migration to Liberia of more than 13,000 people of color from the U.S. and the Caribbean. These free African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans and their descendants mostly marry within their communities and come to identify as Americo-Liberians.

Liberian teacher and diplomat Joseph Guannu, quoted by Alan Huffman, says that the history of the Mississippi colony and of Liberia as a whole is both a transplanted African American story and an African experiment with Western culture. “Since they came from the Deep South, [the settlers] brought with them the dominant culture of that region. And that culture very much influenced their relationship with the indigenous tribes. The settlers ... sought to build a society that melded certain African traditions with aspects of the culture they had known as slaves.” For some settlers who prosper, that will later include establishing plantations and building large Greek Revival-style mansions, staffed with servants from local tribes.

Historians cite the dominating power of a ruling Americo-Liberian elite in Liberia as a root cause of two civil wars that devastated the country over a period of more than 40 years, beginning in 1989. 2017 saw the country’s first peaceful transfer of power from one democratically elected leader to another in 73 years.

1835 Activists foil kidnappers, help fugitives to freedom

Abolitionists establish the New York Committee of Vigilance (NYCV) to assist escapees from slavery and prevent other African Americans from being kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. Over a three-year period, the organization helps an estimated 600 Black people gain and preserve their freedom.

New York City is a hostile place for Black people at this time. The state had abolished slavery within its borders in 1827, but anti-Black racism denies African Americans access to many of the city’s jobs and labor unions and to equal treatment aboard streetcars and steamboats, and in most boarding houses, hotels, and restaurants. Black children are limited to a small number of segregated schools.

And legal freedom does not bring political rights. New York State’s 1821 Constitution requires Black men to own at least $250 in property in order to vote, and very few Black New Yorkers have enough money to qualify; Black women, like White women, are barred from voting completely.

In 1838, an angry Virginian enslaver has New York Committee of Vigilance co-founder David Ruggles (center, left) jailed and charged with complicity in theft after Ruggles tries to negotiate freedom for the man’s enslaved servant. Ruggles and other NYCV activists in New York City regularly confront visiting enslavers face-to-face to force emancipations.

The lithograph cartoon is by Edward Williams Clay (1799-1857). Source: Library of Congress.

Moreover, thousands of White New Yorkers are ardent defenders of Southern slavery. By the early 19th century, New York bankers are financing every facet of the slave trade – from building ships to shipping cotton to producing the clothes that enslaved people wear. The local economy rests heavily on trade with the South.

By 1822, cotton accounts for more than 40 percent of the city’s exported goods. Dozens of New York boat companies bring cotton from Southern ports to New York City for shipment to Europe, and New York merchants dominate the transatlantic cotton trade. Such is the economic importance of slavery to New York that in 1861 the city’s mayor, Fernando Wood, proposes that New York City declare itself an independent city-state in order to protect its profitable, cotton-trading relationship with the Confederacy.

In these bleak circumstances, the NYCV engages in what the Black abolitionist David Ruggles, a co-founder and its general organizer, calls “practical abolition.” The group provides shelter and organized support to fugitives from slavery on their way north to greater security in the northern free states and Canada. It petitions the state legislature to expand the rights of free Black residents. And it employs lawyers to go to court to block kidnappers, prevent the return to slavery of escapees, suppress the illegal slave trade, and secure the freedom of enslaved people brought to the city by Southern or foreign enslavers.

These activities are funded in part by an “effective committee” of 100 NYCV supporters who make regular donations – as little as a penny per month – and tap 10 or more of their friends to do likewise. Black women, drawn primarily from Black church congregations and self-help groups, are in the forefront of this grassroots fundraising effort.

Although slavery is illegal in the state, the Port of New York – the nation’s major seaport – allows slave ships to anchor and restock. Ruggles himself fearlessly boards ships in the New York harbor in search of Black captives or for signs of participants in the illegal slave trade.

In one instance, several Black associates of Ruggles board a Portuguese slave ship and liberate two of the five enslaved Africans on board. When a sailor tries to stop them, “one of the gang cocked a pistol at him, and threatened to blow his brains out,” according to one newspaper account. The activists return two hours later to free the remaining three enslaved men on the ship but are repulsed.

The NYCV takes a number of illegal slave traders to court, including Nathaniel Gordon, a Maine sea captain, who later becomes the only American executed for participating in the African slave trade.

The organization also challenges enslavers who bring their human “property” with them when visiting the city and openly ignore the state law that limits their temporary stay to nine months; after that period any enslaved person is automatically free. Enslaved servants, both men and women, strive to use the law to escape or argue for their own freedom. Ruggles and his allies confront enslavers face-to-face to try to force emancipations. “The meetings sometimes became shouting or shoving matches,” writes historian Steven H. Jaffe in his article, “David Ruggles’ Committee of Vigilance,'' for Lapham’s Quarterly magazine.

In one 1838 case, an enraged Virginian enslaver, John P. Darg, has Ruggles thrown into jail and charged with complicity in theft after Ruggles tries to negotiate freedom for Thomas Hughes, an enslaved servant of Darg’s who had stolen approximately $7,000 from his “master” and sought refuge at the home of a Quaker abolitionist. The abolitionist and a colleague help recover the funds, and Hughes, after serving two years in prison for robbery, agrees to return with Darg to New Orleans as a free man. The case against Ruggles never goes to trial.

The NYCV’s most important campaign is against the kidnappers who pose a threat to every Black resident of New York City, free or enslaved. Paid agents and bounty hunters roam the city, ostensibly looking only for fugitives from slavery. “They were hunted like a partridge on the mountain,” writes the White abolitionist Sarah Grimke in 1837.

The kidnappers are aided by city officials, including police officers, who allow Black men, women, and children to be jailed and transported south with few questions asked, even though state law requires that fugitives from slavery be granted trial by jury. But the city’s “kidnapping clubs,” as Ruggles calls them, also grab legally free Black New Yorkers off the street and take them south for sale by simply asserting without proof that they are runaways.

The NYCV’s lawyers represent captives held in city jails or already deported to the South. Although the city’s judges – many of them well-connected, pro-slavery Democrats – sometimes refuse to cooperate, the NYCV saves hundreds of individuals from slavery. The Committee counts on the influence and support of its White members, but Black men and women are its ground troops, keeping an eye on potential kidnappers and mobilizing the city’s African American community to assist Ruggles. Ruggles and the NYCV also put together a network of safe houses and churches across the northeast that become stops on the Underground Railroad.

By the 1840s, New York City’s Committee of Vigilance has inspired the creation of similar groups in Philadelphia, Albany, Boston, Rochester, Cleveland, Detroit, and elsewhere, all dedicated to helping African Americans to flee from and resist enslavement.

1835 Abolitionist women run gauntlet of Boston mob

Black and White members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society defy a pro-slavery mob in Boston, Massachusetts in what comes to be called “The Women’s March of Courage.”

The mob, several thousand strong, gathers in the street outside BFASS’s downtown meeting place, apparently incensed by rumors that the fiery British abolitionist George Thompson will be speaking there. Among the protestors – referred to in newspaper accounts as "gentlemen of property and standing" – are many wealthy Bostonians who are investors or own businesses in the textile industry, and profit from the cheap cotton produced by enslaved labor in the South.

Amid the mounting threat of violence, BFASS members decide to suspend their meeting. One of their leaders, Maria Weston Chapman, tells officials who implore them to leave: "If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here, as any where."

After departing the building, the women run the gauntlet of the angry mob as they march arm-in-arm to Chapman's house nearby to reconvene and continue their discussions. Beacon Hill Scholars founder Horace Seldon dubbed this defiant action “The Women’s March of Courage.”

At the time, the White abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison is working in the office of his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, located in the same building. Concerned for his safety, he leaves through a back window, but the mob captures him, drags him through the streets with a rope around his neck, and threatens to kill him before the sheriff places him in jail overnight for his own protection.

The incident converts a number of prominent White Bostonians to the abolitionist cause, including Henry I. Bowditch, a renowned physician and social reformer, and Francis Jackson, a politician and a land developer for the city.

Meanwhile, the abolitionist movement as a whole faces a growing racist backlash. It is exemplified by a Gloucester, Massachusetts newspaper which in 1836 characterizes abolitionists as “utterly subversive of all law, order or right” and warns that the White race will “degenerate into a yellow mongrel breed.”

1835 Seminoles resist U.S. efforts to take their lands

The Seminole people refuse to move west from their ancestral lands, and the Second Seminole War begins in Florida.

Other forced exiles of Native peoples from their territories under the U.S. government’s Indian removal policy are influenced by enslavers’ desire for more land to enrich themselves.

In the case of the Seminoles, the motivation for the government’s planned expulsion has less to do with agricultural potential than the fact that the tropical wilderness, swamps, and jungles on Seminole lands provide effective refuge for fugitives from slavery. Because slavery was abolished in Florida by the occupying Spanish in 1693, Florida has long been a sanctuary for those fleeing bondage, and enslavers want to recover their “property."

But U.S. forces face fierce and sustained resistance. A group of free and formerly enslaved Black people known as Black Seminoles, Seminole Maroons, or Seminole Freedmen – and including Gullah people of West African origin who had escaped from rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia – join forces with the Seminole Indians from about 1700 through the 1850s to prevent European settlers from encroaching on their homelands. (The Seminoles are a multi-tribal group and the word they use to describe themselves – Seminole – is derived from a Creek word meaning “separatist” or “runaway.”)

After seven years of fighting in this second war – which is estimated to cost the U.S. a staggering $20 million ($529 million today) – many Seminoles are forcibly exiled to Creek lands west of the Mississippi; others retreat to remote havens in the Florida Everglades. In the end, the federal government gives up trying to subjugate the Seminoles in their Everglades redoubts and leaves several hundred of them in peace.

Abolitionists soon begin using the term “Slave Power” to describe the pervasive economic, social, and political influence wielded by enslavers, and exemplified by the policy of forced removals of Native Americans from their lands. In discussing the origin and purpose of the Second Seminole War, abolitionist newspapers refer to the war as “The Florida Slave Hunt” and a “National Negro Hunt.”

Black Seminole leader and diplomat John Horse (c. 1812–1882) was of African and Seminole ancestry. He fought in the Second Seminole War in Florida and rose to prominence in the third year of what became a seven-year war when the first generation of Black Seminole leaders was largely dispersed.

John Horse was imprisoned along with Seminole chief Osceola and other members of his band at Fort Marion, the old Spanish fort that formerly defended St. Augustine, Florida during the Spanish occupation of Florida.

Source: Florida State Library and Archives.

1835 Enslaved workers lay foundation for modern rail network

Thousands of enslaved workers toiled in often brutal conditions to lay railroad tracks in the slave states before and during the Civil War.

Black railroad workers were paid in areas under Union control, as in this picture of military railroad operations in northern Virginia in 1863 or 1864.

Source: Library of Congress.

Civil engineer Frederick Nims of Conway, Massachusetts travels south to work on the Georgia Railroad – one of many contractors who profit from using enslaved labor to construct railroads in the South prior to the Civil War.

On the eve of the conflict, an estimated 14,600 enslaved workers have laid most of the track for the 60-plus railroad companies operating in the slave states.

Nims’ lucrative projects include a section of the 115-mile Charleston & Savannah Railroad, and a bridge over the Catawba River in South Carolina that provides a critical rail corridor for the Confederacy, allowing for the movement of troops, information, and supplies.

Contractors like Nims are also speculators who receive partial payment in stocks and bonds from the railroad companies that hire them. With a stake in the potential profits of the new rail line, they have an incentive to keep construction costs as low as possible. And compared to free Irish, German, and other White immigrants, enslaved Black workers are significantly cheaper and considered more reliable. Most are hired from local planters who have a surplus of enslaved labor on their land.

Conditions for the railroad construction and maintenance crews are often brutal, as detailed by historian Theodore Kornweibel, Jr. in his article “Railroads and Slavery” in Railroad History magazine. Workers are “ruled by the whip,” and governed by overseers with quotas to meet. In the Gulf states especially, they also suffer from poorer health than plantation laborers because of exposure to diseases like malaria and cholera, and from working in the “trembling prairies” – miles of swamps and floating marshes inhabited by insects, alligators, and snakes. In addition, many enslaved workers on the railroads are separated from their families for months at a time.

Kornweibel recounts the story of Rose, an enslaved domestic servant of the Nims family in South Carolina. In March 1857, she is dispatched to a railroad construction camp near the Ashepoo River to cook for the laborers there who are building a long trestle as part of Frederick Nims’ contract with the Charleston & Savannah Railroad.

Living first in a tent and then in a shanty, she prepares meals out of stock provisions – bacon, flour, coffee, sugar, corn meal – that are “typical of a slave diet deficient in protein and vitamins.” After five grueling months, Rose and the other “upcountry black hands” are taken off the job and sent to a healthier inland region to cut cross ties and timber needed for trestles. By June the following year, work at the Ashepoo River site has come to a standstill because nearly all the workers who had remained there are sick with malaria.

Tragically and ironically, the hundreds of miles of railroads built by enslaved Africans and African Americans in the South are used to transport thousands of their sisters and brothers into slavery as part of the interstate slave trade.

Since Congress ended the legal importation of enslaved people from overseas in 1808, the growth of cotton and sugar plantations in Lower South states – Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana – has fueled a rapacious demand for more enslaved labor. And slave traders prefer transporting their human merchandise by train to slave-trading centers in the South because it is faster and cheaper than force-marching them overland or transporting them by boat along the coast. Some railroads promote their service by offering to carry enslaved children for free.

Scenes of enslaved people at railroad depots weeping as they bid farewell to loved ones they will likely never see again – as described by the formerly enslaved preacher and writer Jacob Stroyer – “are repeated all over the South,” writes Theodore Kornweibel. “By facilitating the interstate slave trade the railroads wreaked more havoc on African American families.”

By 1860, the South contains a third of the nation's railroad mileage, according to Railroads and the Making of Modern America, a digital history project of the University of Nebraska. As early as 1841, Southern railroad companies begin buying or renting hundreds of enslaved men between the ages of 16 and 35 to build and maintain their tracks.

A president of the Mississippi Central Railroad explains to his stockholders in 1855: "I am led to the irresistible conclusion, that in ease of management, in economy of maintenance, in certainty of execution of work & in amount of labor performed & in absence of disturbance of riotous outbreaks, the slave is preferable to free labor, and far better adapted to the construction of railways in the south."

Kornweibel concludes that “looking at the available evidence, the use of slaves by antebellum railroads was one of the harshest forms of human bondage endured by persons of African descent in the United States.”

Chattel slavery was not only “essential to the development of the South’s early railway network,” according to Kornweibel. It literally laid the foundation for today’s commercial railroad infrastructure. Four of the five megasystems that now dominate the transportation of goods by rail in the U.S. – CSX, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, and Canadian National – operate lines that use rights of way built by, and for some years maintained by, enslaved laborers before the Civil War.

1835 Six hundred sold in largest single sale of enslaved people

In Charleston, South Carolina, 600 enslaved men, women, and children are sold at auction in the largest known single sale of human beings in U.S. history.

The sale is part of the estate auction for John Ball Jr., a Harvard University-educated enslaver who had died from malaria the previous year. Five of his plantations are listed for sale – along with the enslaved people who worked on them.

Ball's family is one of the oldest plantation operators in the South. From 1698 to 1865, a period of 167 years, the Ball dynasty owns more than 20 rice plantations in South Carolina’s Lowcountry and enslaves an estimated 4,000 Africans and African-Americans.

The auction of the 600 “very valuable GANG OF NEGROES, accustomed to the culture of rice” starts on February 24 near the Custom House in downtown Charleston and runs for more than two weeks. The city is one of the largest slave-trading centers in the U.S., and the entry point for about 40% of the kidnapped and enslaved Africans arriving aboard slave ships.

"A Slave Sale in Charleston, South Carolina" (1854). Painting by Eyre Crowe. Source: Public Domain; Wikimedia Commons.

Ball, Jr.’s widow, Ann, had been urged by a friend and business adviser to sell all her late husband’s properties and free herself of their burden. But Ann Ball ignores his advice. Of the 600 people on the auction block – who include drivers, carpenters, coopers, boatmen, and others with specialist skills and expertise – she buys back 219. She also buys back two plantations, Comingtee and Midway (3,517 acres in all), to run herself.

It appears that her purchases keep some enslaved families together, sparing them immediate traumatic separations: Some of the names on her bills of sale mirror those in an inventory of her husband’s plantations. They include: Humphrey, Hannah, Celia, Charles, Esther, Daniel, Dorcas, Dye, London, Friday, Jewel, Jacob, Daphne, Cuffee, Carolina, Peggy, and Violet.

But hundreds of others in the Ball auction whose names are lost to history likely “ended up in the transnational traffic to Mississippi and Louisiana,” according to Edward Ball, a Ball descendant and author of the best-selling book, Slaves in the Family, that lays bare his family’s skeletons.

Edward Ball only learns about the 1835 auction in 2022 after a history graduate student, Lauren Davila, discovers a newspaper advertisement for it during research for her master’s thesis. Ball tells the Pro Public investigative news service that he knew an “enormous auction” had taken place following John Ball Jr.’s death, “and yet I don’t think I contemplated it enough in its specific horror.” It is “a kind of summit in its cruelty. Families were broken apart, and children were sold from their parents, wives sold from their husbands. It breaks my heart to envision it.” He saw the sale in the context of the many large slave auctions his ancestors orchestrated. Only a generation earlier, the estate of Ball Jr.’s father had sold 367 people.

In his book, Edward Ball describes how Ann Ball “approached plantation management like a soldier, giving lie to the view that only men had the stomach for the violence of the business.” She once whips an enslaved woman, whose name is given only as Betty, for not laundering towels to her liking. She then sends the woman to the Charleston Work House, a city-owned jail where Black people are “disciplined” with whippings and other forms of torture.

Pro Publica reporter Jennifer Berry Hawes notes that, although no evidence has yet surfaced about how much the auction of 600 people enriches the Ball family, the bills of sale show that Ann Ball paid $79,855 (about $2.8 million today) to purchase 215 people. The entire auction could have netted in the range of $222,800 – or about $7.7 million today – that is then distributed among John Ball Jr.’s heirs, including Ann.

But, as Hawes explains, the Balls are not alone in profiting from this sale. Enslaved people can be bought on credit, so banks that mortgage the sales also make money. Firms insure slaves for a fee. Newspapers sell slave auction ads. The city of Charleston makes money, too, by taxing public auctions. “These kinds of profits helped build the foundation of the generational wealth gap that persists even today between Black and white Americans.”

In October 2024, an historical marker about the 1835 auction was unveiled in Charleston. It is located on the wall of a downtown building that once housed the offices of the law firm, Jervey, Waring & White, that conducted the sale. One of the speakers at the ceremony was Harold Singletary, a Black businessman whose ancestors were among the 600 people put up for sale. He told the assembled crowd: “America has to face some hard facts. And those facts change stories that change narratives.” He thanked those “who helped change the narrative.”

The marker bears the headline “SLAVE AUCTIONS OF THE DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE," referencing the fact that the law firm was “part of a network of similar enterprises” including banks and insurance companies, that profited from the sale of enslaved people across Southern states. Between 1800 and 1860, U.S. enslavers and slave traders sent an estimated one million enslaved Black people from the upper to the lower South – a forced migration fueled by burgeoning demand for more enslaved labor on cotton and sugar plantations in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

1835-1836 Colonists win Texas independence, protect right to enslave

In popular culture, The Battle of the Alamo has been glamorized as a courageous fight by American patriots to defend freedom and democracy in the U.S.

The real story belies the propaganda: 200 Americans died defending the former mission station in San Antonio (above) to help maintain slavery in eastern Texas – then Mexican territory – that they and other U.S. settlers had colonized.

The settlers included Davy Crockett and James Bowie, later mythologized as folk heroes in films and stories, most notably in the 1960 movie The Alamo, in which Crockett is played by actor John Wayne, a symbol of White American independence and rugged masculinity.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the so-called Texas Revolution, Anglo-American colonists in Mexico, who have long been at odds with the Mexican government over their assumed right to hold enslaved people, defeat government forces with the aid of the U.S., and declare an independent republic in Tejas (Texas).

In the 1820s, Mexican authorities grant permission to 300 families from the southern U.S. to settle in the northern province of Tejas. They are the first of what will become a steady influx of immigrants from across the border seeking cheap land on which to grow cotton amid the cotton boom in the Southern U.S.

Many of the settlers are enslavers who bring their enslaved workers with them. Although wary of the norteamericanos, Mexican officials secure the settlers’ commitment to take up arms if necessary in defense of Mexico against hostile Native Americans and other potential enemies on both sides of the border. In addition to being a security bulwark, the officials also believe that the newcomers will provide an economic stimulus for the region.

But the differences over slavery are contentious and continuous – ultimately leading to armed conflict. As historian Alice Baumgartner describes in her book, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, human bondage drives the economy of New Spain – which Mexico is called before winning its independence from its Spanish occupiers in 1821 – from as early as the 16th century. Enslaved Africans work long hours in silver mines, textile workshops, cotton fields, and sugar mills. They can be whipped, branded, or put in chains for even minor infractions.

But, according to Baumgartner, the enslaved in Mexico have a number of important legal protections “because Spanish law recognized people of African descent as human beings, not simply as property.” Perhaps the most significant of these protections is the right for enslaved people to seek their freedom. They can purchase their freedom, and they can file claims against their “masters” in cases of abuse.

However, like their counterparts in the U.S., Mexican enslavers oppose any interference with their operations, and Mexico’s political leaders become convinced that the only way to ensure political stability is to end slavery gradually. Between 1824 and 1827, more than half of the country’s states pledge that children born to enslaved people will be free – potentially ending slavery within a generation. Efforts to abolish slavery outright fail in the face of resistance from cotton growers, mine operators, hacienda owners, and sugar refiners. But many of Mexico’s political leaders remain committed to its ultimate extinction.

Naturally, this poses a threat to the Anglo-American settlers in Tejas, as well as the future of slavery in the region and beyond. The settlers lobby for exceptions to any restrictions on enslavement, find legal loopholes, or simply flout the law. For example, they force hundreds if not thousands of enslaved people to sign lifelong contracts as indentured servants before they are brought to Tejas, thereby skirting the Mexican government’s ban on importing enslaved people.

Matters come to a head in 1832 when a new centralized government under Antonio López de Santa Anna takes power in a coup. The 1824 Constitution is revoked, state legislatures are dismissed, and militias disbanded. Local leaders in Tejas – which is now home to 30,000 norteamericanos, 5,000 enslaved people, and 4,000 Mexicans – call a public meeting to determine whether most residents favor independence, a return to federalism, or the status quo.

Although they stop short of declaring independence, the “Texians,” as they now call themselves, express support for the recently overturned constitution of 1824, which established a federalist system in Mexico of “free and independent states,” similar to that of the U.S., that has helped enslavers there protect and sustain slavery. The Texians also start to organize a volunteer army.

Fearful of a widespread rebellion and the loss of a large portion of Mexican territory to U.S. encroachment, Santa Anna sends 500 soldiers to Tejas to quell any potential revolt.

One of the early events of the ensuing conflict is the Mexican army’s attack on the Alamo, a former mission in San Antonio, in which nearly all 200 Texian defenders lose their lives. Although the Texians claim they are fighting for freedom and democracy, says Baumgartner, they choose to make a strategic stand at the Alamo “to keep the Mexican Army far from the plantations of eastern Texas – and the enslaved people who worked on them.”

The Mexican Army is ultimately defeated by a combination of Texian and U.S. forces. Tejas becomes the independent Republic of Texas in 1836, is annexed by the U.S. in 1845, and joins the Union the following year as a slave state.

1836 Abolitionist women gain freedom for enslaved girl

The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) successfully sues in state court to free a six-year-old enslaved girl, Med, who has been brought to Boston, Massachusetts by a Louisiana woman. It is the first time anyone has legally questioned the status of an enslaved person who temporarily left a slave state for a free state.

The judge rules that Med is free under the Massachusetts constitution and makes her a ward of the court. Most other free states adopt the same position, and hundreds of freedom suits follow.

After learning of Med’s presence at a house on Boston’s Beacon Hill, White abolitionists Lydia Maria Child, Maria Weston Chapman, and another BFASS colleague go “undercover” to investigate Med’s situation.

Pretending to recruit children for Sunday school, they visit the Pinckney Street home of Thomas Aves. They confirm that Med is indeed staying there with Aves and his daughter, Mary Aves Slater, who, with her husband, Samuel Slater, are Med’s enslavers in New Orleans.

The BFASS women, lambasted as “spies for the Abolitionists” by Samuel Slater, conclude that Med’s unique circumstances – an enslaved child brought to the free soil of Massachusetts – present them with an important test case. They decide to file suit on her behalf. It is submitted by Levin H. Harris, an African American described as a “Mariner of Boston.” It is unclear how he becomes involved in the case. He may have brought the case to BFASS or been recruited to petition the court, according to Karen Woods Weierman, a professor of English, in her book, The Case of the Slave-Child, Med.

In some respects, Med's visit to Boston as an enslaved person accompanying her enslaver is far from unusual. Other enslavers based in slave states travel with their human “property” when they travel to free states. For example, politician and writer Winthrop Sargent, originally from Gloucester, Massachusetts and the first governor of the Mississippi Territory, brings "a retinue of enslaved people” with him to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1817 “to attend to his sons” who are “misbehaving at Harvard.” Sargent's stepson, David Williams, brings his own enslaved young woman, Mary, to Boston in 1819, and later transports her back to New Orleans.

But Med’s status as a child deemed too young to make her own decisions about her future makes her case different. And it is complicated by the fact that her mother – an enslaved woman whose name is never mentioned during the court proceedings – is apparently expecting Med to return to New Orleans.

From an 1832 issue of the anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, published in Boston, Massachusetts.

In that regard, BFASS had anticipated the strongest objection to its case: that a ruling in their favor might permanently separate a mother and her child. Their lawyer counters that it is Slater – their enslaver who claims the right to sell Med away from her mother at any time – who is keeping the pair apart. If he is so concerned to avoid their separation, the lawyer argues, Slater should free them both.

After the case is won, the women of the BFASS rename Med “Maria Sommersett” – after James Sommersett, an enslaved African, who won a similar freedom suit in England in 1772. Workbags to commemorate Med’s case are sold at BFASS’s annual anti-slavery bazaar to help raise funds for the Society’s abolitionist work.

As for Med herself, she tragically dies of unknown causes two years later at the Samaritan Asylum for Colored Orphans in Boston, where she had been taken after the court’s ruling. Weierman writes: “For twenty-first-century observers, it is very difficult to understand this turn of events: how could the abolitionists have left Med at the asylum? Despite her celebrity, Med was not treated any differently than other poor children, whether orphans or with parents deemed unable to support them.”

In Weierman’s opinion, the neglect of Med’s needs as a newly emancipated child was “surely a factor in her early death. While Med’s case was initially framed as a milestone in antislavery history, her death in the Samaritan Asylum … brought an immediate end to the celebrations. Med’s death disrupted the triumphant narrative: free soil did not live up to its promise; her death had no heroic meaning; and the protectors of children had failed miserably.”

In the concluding chapter of her book, Weierman argues that “all parties failed to see Med as a child: enslavers wanted her for her market value, while abolitionists wanted her for her legal precedent and iconic value. What happened to Med might best be explained through contradiction: the abolitionists did not see her as a child, and yet, it was as a child that she disrupted the freedom suit scenario, leading to her vulnerable, short life in freedom.”

1836 Black women free two who fled bondage

A sample of the exchanges in a Boston courtroom during the hearing to determine whether Anna Patten and Mary Pickney should be returned to their enslaver in Baltimore. As recorded in the minutes of the 1836 Annual Report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.

Source: Boston Public Library; Archive.org

In the so-called “Abolition Riot” in a Boston, Massachusetts courtroom, a group of Black women free two other women who had fled slavery and are at risk of being sent back to their enslaver.

The two women, Anna Patten and Mary Pickney, have arrived in Boston on a ship from Baltimore under the assumed names of Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates. After the ship docks, it is boarded by Matthew Turner, a bounty hunter who had been hired by a wealthy Baltimore enslaver, John B. Morris, to return the two women to him. Turner secures a commitment from the ship’s captain to confine the fugitives on the ship while he goes ashore to seek a warrant for their arrest.

At a Supreme Judicial Court hearing, many of the spectators in the packed courtroom are Black women, including members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS.) Hundreds of protesters are gathered outside.

After hearing arguments from both sides, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw rules that Patten and Pickney had been illegally detained because the ship had served as a prison and Massachusetts is a free state. He orders their release. But when Turner asks the judge if he will need a warrant to arrest the two women again under the provisions of the 1793 federal Fugitive Slave Act – that mandates the return of escapees – it appears to spectators that the women will be detained once more.

Amid shouts of “Go! Go!” a group of six Black members of the BFASS rush into the courtroom. One wraps her arms around the one police officer present, immobilizing him, while the others hustle Patten and Pickney out of the courthouse and into a waiting carriage, which speeds away.

Aided by the Black community and abolitionist allies, Anna Patten and Mary Pickney elude recapture. They eventually make it to Canada and permanent freedom. None of the “rioters” are ever brought to trial.

In 1850, Congress strengthens the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, galvanizing Northern sentiments against slavery. Boston abolitionists have mixed success in other attempts to defy the law and prevent escapees, who have found refuge in the city, from being returned to bondage.

1836-1837 Pro-slavery mobs kill abolitionist publishers

Pastor and anti-slavery publisher Elijah Lovejoy was a martyr for abolition and press freedom. Source: Missouri History Museum.

Abolition becomes interwoven with freedom of the press, as abolitionist editors and publishers come under sustained attack.

In 1836, in Cincinnati, Ohio, a pro-slavery mob led by the city’s mayor destroys the printing press owned by a White lawyer, James G. Birney. He is the publisher of The Philanthropist, the official organ of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society.

The following year sees the murder of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, a White Presbyterian pastor who publishes The St. Louis Observer, an evangelical anti-slavery newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri.

Missouri is a border state – a slave state with free states as neighbors – and St. Louis is a center of abolitionist activity. Lovejoy condemns the lynching of a local Black man, Floyd McIntosh, who is burned to death alive over a fire by a White mob.

After the murderers are not indicted, Lovejoy criticizes the judge and a mob wrecks his printing equipment.

Lovejoy decides to move across the Mississippi River to the town of Alton in the free state of Illinois, where he starts another abolitionist newspaper, The Alton Observer. But his press there is repeatedly destroyed and political leaders demand that he stop publishing the paper. During a fourth mob attack on his press, Lovejoy and his supporters resist and Lovejoy is killed in an exchange of gunfire. No one is convicted of his murder.

After his death, his brother, Owen Lovejoy, a lawyer and Congregationalist minister, enters politics and becomes an abolitionist leader in Illinois.

1837 Wendell Phillips: Powerful voice for abolition

The murder of abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois inspires wealthy Boston, Massachusetts lawyer Wendell Phillips to embrace the abolitionist cause. He becomes one of its most powerful White orators and radical voices.

Phillips’ first public speech on the subject takes place one month later in Boston’s Faneuil Hall at an overflow meeting to protest the killing of Lovejoy.

With passionate eloquence, Phillips excoriates Massachusetts attorney general James T. Austin, who has angrily asserted that the Alton, Illinois mob had been right to kill Lovejoy because he had persisted in publishing his incendiary anti-slavery newspaper, thereby inciting violence.

Pointing to the portraits of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and James Otis that adorn the walls of the hall, Phillips speaks of his own reaction upon hearing Austin compare Lovejoy’s killers to these revered Revolutionary leaders: “I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American – the slanderer of the dead.… In the sentiment he (Austin) has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up.”

The audience “exploded with cheers and angry cries,” according to historian James Brewer Stewart in Wendell Phillips, Liberty’s Hero, his biography of the abolitionist.

From left: Abolitionists Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and George Thompson, a British activist. Source: Boston Public Library, Gift of the family of William L. Garrison, August 31, 1899.

Born in Boston in 1811, Phillips grows up within the circles of Boston’s social and political elite. He is the son of Sarah Walley and John Phillips, a wealthy lawyer, politician, and philanthropist, and the first mayor of Boston. Wendell Phillips graduates from Harvard College in 1831, and Harvard Law School in 1833, before opening a law practice in Boston the following year.

Phillips’ development as an abolitionist owes a lot to the woman who becomes his wife. Ann Terry Greene, also from a prominent Boston family, is a women’s rights activist and a dedicated member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Despite bouts of debilitating illness throughout her life, she provides critical support, guidance, and strategic advice to Phillips in his abolitionist work. Phillips is an early advocate for women’s rights – he assists with the first woman suffrage petition campaign in Massachusetts – and later for Native American rights.

Phillips soon gives up his law practice to dedicate himself full-time to abolition. A close friend and associate of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, he lectures to anti-slavery societies, writes pamphlets and editorials for Garrison’s Boston-based abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and contributes financially to the movement.

He and Garrison share a commitment to the immediate abolition of slavery, condemn the federal Constitution for its compromises over slavery, and advocate national “disunion” rather than continued association with the slave states. By 1839, Phillips is in the forefront of Boston’s White abolitionist leadership as president of the Boston Anti-Slavery Society.

Phillips defends in court several escapees from slavery who are in danger of being sent back to bondage in the South under the federal Fugitive Slave Law. (In the case of Anthony Burns, he is unsuccessful but later helps to purchase Burns’ freedom.) As a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, he helps to aid and protect hundreds of fugitives from slavery. At the same time, he is active in campaigns to repeal Massachusetts laws upholding racial discrimination and banning interracial marriage, and he participates in interracial sit-ins aboard trains in an ultimately successful effort to de-segregate public transportation in the state.

In the years immediately before the Civil War, Phillips is among those who provide financial support and advice to John Brown, the radical abolitionist executed after leading a failed raid on a federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia aimed at igniting a mass insurrection among the enslaved.

After the war begins, Phillips – dubbed “the golden trumpet” of abolition for his compelling oratory – undertakes an extensive speaking tour of New England to help “goad Abraham Lincoln into emancipation,” in the words of James Brewer Stewart. In 1861-62, Phillips’ audiences total some 50,000 people with an estimated five million more reading his speeches in Republican party newspapers.

Unlike other White abolitionist leaders, including Garrison, Phillips believes that securing civil and political rights for freedmen is an essential component of the abolitionist cause, even after slavery has legally ended. He champions a more radical reconstruction of the South than President Lincoln proposes, including federal laws to assure Black political equality – with the cornerstone being equal access to the vote – and land and public education for every formerly enslaved person. “Freedom is only the installment on the debt we owe the Negro,” he says. “Six sevenths of this Nation has robbed the other seventh for 200 years.”

A monument erected in the Boston Public Garden in 1915 commemorates Phillips. It is inscribed with the words: "Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories."

1837 Planter's daughters campaign for abolition, women's rights

Carte de visite (calling card) photos of Angelina (left) and Sarah Grimké. The photos were taken in Hyde Park, Massachusetts by photographer J.D. Crane in about 1870.

Source: Courtesy of The Lane Memorial Library and Robert M. Jackson of Hampton, New Hampshire.

White abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké address over 40,000 people in a five-month tour of the northern states that includes 80 speaking engagements.

They are the first nationally known White American women to advocate for both the abolition of slavery and women's rights. Together with other female abolitionists, the Grimké sisters launch the 19th century movement for women’s equality.

The Grimké sisters grow up in Charleston, South Carolina, where their parents are wealthy plantation owners and enslavers. Their father, John, is a well-known attorney who becomes the chief judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina.

As a child, Sarah Grimké unsettles her parents by the extent of the connection she develops with her family's enslaved workers. At the age of 12, she begins teaching Bible classes to enslaved young people on the plantation. She desperately wants to teach them to read the Scripture for themselves, but her parents prohibit this because such activity is illegal under state law. They also insist that literacy will only make the slaves unhappy and rebellious, and therefore unfit for manual labor.

Sarah secretly teaches Hetty, her personal enslaved girl, to read and write, but when her father finds out, he is furious and threatens to have Hetty whipped.

In 1819, Sarah accompanies her seriously ill father on a trip to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for treatment. He dies within a few weeks. Sarah remains in Philadelphia where she abandons her Episcopalian upbringing and embraces anti-slavery Quakerism. “As I left my native state on account of slavery, and deserted the home of my fathers to escape the sound of the lash and the shriek of tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollection of those scenes with which I have been familiar.”

Sarah decides to “save” her younger sister, Angelina – who is 12 years her junior and with whom she is close – from the limitations of the South. Angelina joins Sarah in Philadelphia and she, too, becomes committed to the Quaker faith and abolition. But the sisters’ belief that the fight for women’s rights is as important as the fight to abolish slavery does not go down well in the Quaker community, and some abolitionists attack them for being extreme.

Moreover, their public speeches are seen by many as “unwomanly” because the sisters speak to mixed-gender – so-called "promiscuous” – audiences. Indeed, they are condemned for doing so in a statement issued by the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts. The Grimké sisters also publicly debate men who disagree with them, prompting sexist and misogynist attacks that include the suggestion that the sisters are just two poor spinsters displaying themselves to find men.

Beginning in 1836, the sisters’ publications bring their controversial views to a wider audience. In her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, Angelina argues that Southern women are morally obligated to eradicate slavery. And Sarah’s Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States debunks the Biblical justification for slavery.

Southern leaders are so offended by the sisters' ideas that they burn their booklets and warn them that they will be arrested if they ever return to South Carolina. In 1837, Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women is serialized in a Massachusetts newspaper, The Spectator, and immediately reprinted in The Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison, the White abolitionist leader and women's rights champion. The treatise appears in book form the following year.

Self-educated women who have witnessed the evils of the “peculiar institution” firsthand, the Grimké sisters become the first female agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), lecturing to large crowds of men and women. Angelina—derided as “Devilina” by opponents—proves to be an especially powerful orator.

In 1838, Angelina Grimké makes history by becoming the first woman to address the Massachusetts House of Representatives. She calls for an immediate end to slavery, defends women’s activism and the right to petition, and makes a passionate case for women’s rights. She insists that women belong at the center of major political debates. “Are we aliens because we are women?” she asks. “Are we bereft of citizenship because we are the mothers, wives and daughters of a mighty people?” Her first speech – to a legislative committee – attracts such a large crowd, in part because of the novelty of a woman speaking, that her presentation is moved to the larger House chamber.

In 1838, Angelina marries Theodore Dwight Weld, a leading White abolitionist with the AASS and a women's rights advocate. After Weld retires, the three of them move to a farm in New Jersey, where together they write their influential best-seller American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. The sisters make a living as teachers, and Angelina gives birth to three children. Sarah – who never marries – remains with her younger sister and her sister's husband for the rest of her life.

In 1864, the family moves to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, where the sisters become vice-presidents of the newly formed Massachusetts Women's Suffrage Association. They are among some 50 women who symbolically cast their ballots on Election Day in 1870. The votes are placed in a separate box and not counted, but the women’s collective action brings widespread attention to their demands for political rights and inspires other women to continue campaigning for the vote.

Sarah and Angelina Grimké have long been lauded for rejecting their privileged upbringing to devote themselves to the causes of abolition and women’s rights. Their high-profile success in that work has tended to obscure their attitudes towards, and treatment of, their Black relatives. Their older brother, Henry, is notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the enslaved women he “owns,” Nancy Weston, bears him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John.

According to historian Kerri K. Greenidge, the sisters “responded to their Black nephews in the same way that many well-intentioned, yet racially condescending white reformers responded to Black people once they were no longer objects of noblesse oblige but, rather, legally free and autonomous human beings with feelings, thoughts, and ideas wholly independent of white benevolence. When their Black nephews did not adhere to their image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, the Grimké sisters were alternately cruel and relentlessly judgmental.”

Greenidge, who explores the complexities of the relationships among the White and Black Grimkés in her book The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, writes: “The tragedy of the Grimké sisters’ lives was the fact that they never acknowledged their complicity in the slave system they so eloquently spoke against.”

1837 First college for Black students founded

Students at Cheyney University, formerly the Institute for Colored Youth, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Source: Courtesy of Cheyney University.

The Institute for Colored Youth, the first college for African Americans in the U.S., is founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It will eventually become Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, the oldest of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

The Institute is made possible by silversmith Richard Humphreys, a devout Quaker, abolitionist, and wealthy philanthropist who bequeaths $10,000 – one-tenth of his estate and worth about $312,000 today – to design and establish a school to educate people of African descent. He dies five years before the school, first named the African Institute, opens.

Humphreys is born and raised on Tortola, the largest of the British-ruled Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. His parents and other Quaker settlers amass fortunes from sugar plantations using enslaved African workers, in contrast to other leading Quakers on the island – and in the broader Quaker community – who are fundamentally opposed to slavery.

In 1829, Humphreys is moved to change his will and include the gift for the Institute after race riots in Philadelphia and Cincinnati, stemming primarily from anti-Black racism and White resentment over competition for jobs. White pro-slavery mobs attack Black residents, and burn Black homes, businesses, churches, and schools.

In its early years, the Institute for Colored Youth provides training in the trades and agriculture – the areas in which Black people are most likely to find employment, given the widespread discrimination at the time. In 1902, the Institute relocates to businessman George Cheyney’s farm, a 275-acre property 25 miles west of Philadelphia. The name “Cheyney” becomes associated with the school in 1913, although the school’s official name changes several times during the 20th century.

Well-known alumni of Cheyney University include Bayard Rustin, the prominent civil rights activist, and journalist Ed Bradley, a long-time correspondent for the CBS news program “60 Minutes.”

1837 Women's anti-slavery efforts transform town

Fourteen women in Stoneham, Massachusetts defy their church and their town leaders to openly decry the evils of slavery.

The women say they can no longer be silent about the widely held belief – in the North as well as the South – that Black people are inferior, even subhuman, and can be justifiably enslaved.

The women’s bold and persistent stance starts a process of transformation in their church and their community.

Earlier that year, a pastoral letter from the General Association of Congregational Churches had been read from the pulpit in churches throughout Massachusetts. The letter had called on women to refrain from public discourse.

It is a response to growing concern among ministers and church leaders over White abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké who had been drawing huge crowds during a five-month speaking tour of New England. The Grimké sisters, from a wealthy family of enslavers in South Carolina, also advocate for women’s rights.

The ministers upbraid their female congregants as unqualified and ill-equipped to oppose slavery because of their gender. Women, they write, should not try to displace men as the appointed teachers of morality. When “a woman assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer... her character becomes unnatural.”

The clergymen also assert that the Grimké sisters’ accounts of cruelties witnessed on their father’s plantation are too harsh for the delicate sensibilities of women.

A portrait of Paulina Gerry (Mrs. Ira Gerry). She and her mother, Sarah Gerry, and 25 other women formed the Stoneham Female Anti-Slavery Society.

Paulina Gerry built on her mother’s abolitionist activism as secretary of the society, and was an early advocate for women’s suffrage. Source: National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The message to women across Massachusetts is clear: keep quiet about slavery.

For Sarah Gerry, a widow who has raised three children in Stoneham, silence is not an option, according to Ben Jacques, author of In Graves Unmarked: Slavery & Abolition in Stoneham, Massachusetts.

As Gerry meets with other churchwomen, her town is in turmoil. Abolitionists speaking at the town hall are shouted down and, after another raucous meeting, a fight breaks out and a man is fatally stabbed. Citizens then vote 62-35 to ban all discussion of slavery in the town hall. “The question of African slavery was cleaving asunder the community,” historian William B. Stevens writes in his History of Stoneham, published in 1891. “Political fervor was red hot.”

But Sarah Gerry and her companions persevere. In a letter to the leaders of the Stoneham Congregational Church, they write that “slavery is an evil of immense magnitude in the sight of Heaven and is now sustained and defended by almost the entire Christian church in the South with whom we are in fellowship.” They urge their church to “show plainly that our influence is on the side of justice and humanity.”

Their appeal has an effect. The following October, church members meet in a deacon’s home and pass a resolution calling on their minister “to bear faithful pulpit testimony against the sin of slavery.”

In 1838, Sarah Gerry, together with 26 other women, including her daughter-in-law Paulina Gerry, form the Stoneham Female Anti-Slavery Society. Sarah Gerry is elected president, but sadly dies soon after. One year later, the men of the church establish an anti-slavery group of their own. In 1850, following passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act – that mandates the return to bondage of escapees from slavery – several families in Stoneham make their homes stations on the Underground Railroad, sheltering escapees on their way to freedom and greater security in Canada, where slavery is illegal.

Also in 1850, Paulina Gerry travels to Worcester, Massachusetts to attend the first national Women’s Rights Convention. “Organizing, rallying, speaking, and petitioning,” writes Ben Jacques, “she and others became foot soldiers in the decades-long struggle for women’s suffrage.”

1837-1838 Black activists organize for voting rights

“Freedmen Voting in 1867 New Orleans,” 19th century illustration. Source: New York Public Library Digital Collection.

Black leaders condemn the decision of a state constitutional convention in Pennsylvania to limit the right to vote to “white freemen.”

Arguing for the restriction, a White lawyer who also supports colonization – transporting free Black people to a new U.S. colony overseas – asserts that Pennsylvania’s laws are too mild when it comes to the treatment of “black aliens” who are “polluting the body politic” of the state.

Throughout the free states, authorities move to deny or continue to impede the right to vote of African Americans, while Black activists strive to stem the tide of disenfranchisement.

In New York, leading Black abolitionists form the New York Political Association and convene a state convention to fight for equal suffrage. Similar Black conventions are held in other states.

In the anti-slavery upper Northwest, Black abolitionists and their political allies manage to initiate state referendums on Black voting. In Michigan, a new state constitution in 1850 extends voting to immigrants and Native Americans, but not to African Americans. Neighboring Wisconsin and Iowa also reject Black suffrage.

By the end of the Civil War, 18 of 25 Union states do not permit African Americans to vote. Even in 1870 with passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the constitution – that effectively enfranchises African American men while denying the right to vote to all women – 13 of 26 Northern states still deny suffrage to Black men. “During the postwar era, as at the time of independence,” writes historian Donald Yacovone in his book, Teaching White Supremacy, America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity, “the more freedom Blacks attained, the more whites insisted on control and domination.”

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