Activists in Boston, Massachusetts have mixed success in two early challenges to the federal Fugitive Slave Act that galvanize the abolitionist movement.

In February, Shadrach Minkins is arrested in Boston, Massachusetts after escaping slavery in Virginia. He is working as a waiter at a downtown coffee house, when federal marshals posing as customers detain him.

During a hearing at the Boston federal courthouse to determine his fate, some 50 Black and White members of the anti-slavery Boston Vigilance Committee – formed to prevent fugitives who have been enslaved from being kidnapped and returned to their Southern “masters” – enter the courthouse, overcome armed guards, and force their way into the courtroom. They wrestle Minkins away from the custody of state marshals and hustle him out of the building.

Lewis Hayden, John J. Smith, and other activists hide Minkins in the attic of a house in the Black community on Beacon Hill before organizing his escape to Canada via the network of safe havens on the Underground Railroad. Minkins settles in Montreal, where he raises a family. Hayden and Robert Morris – one of the first African-American attorneys in the U.S. – are among nine activists prosecuted but acquitted for helping free Minkins.

In the case of Thomas Sims, who has escaped slavery in Georgia, abolitionists fail to prevent his return to bondage. Sims, a bricklayer, had stowed away in a Boston-bound ship. He is living in a boarding house for African American sailors in Boston when he is arrested by an agent of his Georgia “owner” who has learned of his whereabouts.

Abolitionists rally in protest at the courthouse during Sims’ three-day trial. Between 100 and 200 policemen are stationed outside and chains are placed around the perimeter to prevent the crowds from swarming the building. Unintentionally, the chains become a symbol of the influence of slavery in the North: judges, lawyers, and others have to crouch under them to enter the courthouse.

Activists with the Boston Vigilance Committee arrange for Sims to escape by leaping from a third-floor window of the courthouse onto a pile of mattresses, and making his getaway in a horse and carriage. But the plan is foiled when the local sheriff gets wind of it and installs bars on the windows. The court rules against Sims. His cause has gained national as well as local prominence, and 50,000 people throng Boston’s streets in the early hours of April 13, 1851 when, flanked by U.S. Marines, Sims is marched to the warship that will take him back to bondage in Georgia.

Charles Devens, the U.S. Marshal who supervises Sims’ return to his “owner,” has done his duty under the law faithfully but reluctantly. He sympathizes with Sims’ plight and tries unsuccessfully to buy his freedom. Sims is later sold to another enslaver in Mississippi but escapes again – this time while working on Confederate fortifications in Vicksburg, Mississippi during the Civil War. After reaching Union lines, Sims provides detailed information to the Union Army that helps in the siege of Vicksburg.

Devens, who becomes a Union general (Fort Devens, the former Massachusetts military base, was named after him) does not forget Sims. In 1877, after he is appointed U.S. Attorney General, Charles Devens hires Thomas Sims as a messenger for the U.S. Department of Justice.

1851 Sojourner Truth: Activist for abolition, women's rights, prison reform

Abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth delivers her famous “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech at an Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. She demands equal human rights for all women and Black people.

Born into slavery in Swartekill, New York as Isabella Baumfree, she escapes to freedom with her infant daughter, Sophia, in 1826. At the time, New York State is in the process of implementing a gradual emancipation law, and Truth believes that her son, Peter, whom she makes the difficult decision to leave behind, will gain his freedom at age 28 once he completes his required stint as a “bound servant” under the new law.

But she learns that five-year-old Peter has been sold illegally to an enslaver in Alabama, who has abused him. She goes to court and manages to get her son back. In doing so, Truth becomes the first Black woman to win such a case against a White man.

In 1843, she joins the Methodist church and names herself Sojourner Truth because of her belief that God has called her to become an itinerant preacher and speak the truth. Carrying just a few possessions in a pillowcase, she travels north, working her way up the Connecticut River Valley into Massachusetts, “exhorting people to embrace Jesus and refrain from sin.”

Sojourner Truth with a photograph on her lap of her grandson, James Caldwell, who served in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. Source: Library of Congress.

In 1844, she joins the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NEAI) in Florence, Massachusetts. Founded by abolitionists, the utopian community is dedicated to racial, gender, and economic equality and is organized around a communally-operated silk factory. Residents also raise livestock and vegetables, and run a sawmill and a gristmill. Truth lives and works in the community and oversees the laundry, supervising both men and women. While there, she meets nationally influential abolitionist leaders Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and David Ruggles.

Encouraged by the NEAI community, she delivers her first anti-slavery speech, and later lectures widely on abolition, equal rights, and prison reform in Massachusetts, Michigan, and Ohio. In 1850, Garrison privately publishes her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave, Emancipated From Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828: With a Portrait.

During the Civil War, Truth helps recruit Black troops for the Union Army. Her grandson, James Caldwell, enlists in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. In 1864, Truth is employed by the National Freedman's Relief Association in Washington, D.C. to help improve conditions for African-Americans impacted by the war. She also rides the city’s streetcars in a campaign to force their desegregation.

Truth continues her activism after the war. In 1870, she tries to secure land grants from the federal government for formerly enslaved people, a project she pursues for seven years without success. While in Washington, D.C., she meets with President Ulysses S. Grant in the White House, and two years later is active in Grant's presidential re-election campaign. She tries to vote on Election Day, but is turned away at the polling place. Her speaking engagements include an 1871 address to the Second Annual Convention of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Boston.

After her death in 1883, Frederick Douglass offers a eulogy: "Venerable for age, distinguished for insight into human nature, remarkable for independence and courageous self-assertion, devoted to the welfare of her race, she has been for the last forty years an object of respect and admiration to social reformers everywhere.”

Memorials that commemorate Sojourner Truth and her life and work can be found in at least five states and the District of Columbia. In 2009, a bust of Sojourner Truth was installed in the U.S. Capitol, the first Black woman to be so honored. Sojourner Truth Houses have been established in several U.S. towns and cities – including Florence, Massachusetts, Bronx, New York, Gary, Indiana, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin – to provide shelter and services to women facing homelessness or domestic abuse.

1851 Singer's undeniable talent defies racist beliefs

An ambrotype (photograph on glass) of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield taken in Buffalo, New York circa 1856. Source: Library and Archives Canada.

Concert soprano Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, dubbed the “Black Swan,” gives her first concert in Buffalo, New York.

Styling herself after lauded soprano Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” the formerly enslaved Greenfield tours concert halls throughout the northern U.S. and Canada. Reviews of her performances describe her as having a massive range and a “double voice” that rivals those of the best and most popular singers of the day.

Challenging racist ideas about what Black people are capable of – at a time when pseudo-scientific beliefs justifying slavery and White supremacy are very much in vogue among White people – she captures the public imagination with her extraordinary musical talent.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper describes the confusion that Greenfield causes for her audiences: “It was amusing to behold the utter surprise and intense pleasure which were depicted on the faces of her listeners; they seemed to express – ‘Why, we see the face of a black woman, but hear the voice of an angel, what does it mean?'”

Largely self-taught, Greenfield performs songs that most White music critics consider reserved for White artists because, they argue, African-American artists lack the refined cultivation of White, Eurocentric genius, and can create only simple music lacking artistic depth. But Greenfield shatters preexisting White beliefs about artistry and race.

At her New York City debut before an all-white audience of 4,000, Greenfield is met with some laughter when she takes the stage at Metropolitan Hall. But her talent, range, and power soon win over the audience. After the concert, Greenfield publicly apologizes to her own people for their exclusion from the performance and gives a concert to benefit the Home of Aged Colored Persons and the Colored Orphan Asylum.

Born into slavery in Mississippi and of African and possibly Native American descent, Greenfield moves to Philadelphia with her “owner,” who frees her and also nurtures her budding musical talent. Greenfield tours England and becomes a sensation there, including singing for Queen Victoria. After returning to the U.S., she performs on the lecture circuit with abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and Frances E.W. Harper, and raises funds for societies that support “colored” orphans and the aged. She dies in 1876. Her spirit, talent, and accomplishments continue to inspire generations of Black singers.

1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin is praised, vilified

Abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly in book form. It is destined to become one of the most influential novels about slavery in the U.S.

Initially serialized in the National Era, an anti-slavery paper in Washington, D.C., Uncle Tom’s Cabin depicts the horrific realities of slavery and its emotional impact on individuals – enslaved people, their enslavers, slave traders, and others – as well as on the broader society.

The novel is an immediate sensation. Three hundred thousand copies are sold in its first year of publication, a dramatization is performed in New York before packed audiences, and 300 newborn babies in Boston are named Eva after one of the characters in the book.

Image from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly” by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in Boston in 1852 by Jewett, Proctor, and Worthington. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin helps to solidify both pro- and anti-slavery sentiment in the country. Abolitionists praise and promote the book, while Southerners vehemently denounce it, depicting Stowe as out of touch, arrogant, and guilty of slander; some quickly respond with so-called “anti-Tom” novels, seeking to portray Southern society and slavery in a more positive light. In response to claims that her portrayal of slavery is inaccurate, Stowe publishes A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book of primary source historical documents that support her account.

Born Harriet Elisabeth Beecher in Litchfield, Connecticut, she is the sixth of the 11 children of an outspoken Calvinist preacher, Lyman Beecher, and his first wife, Roxana (Foote), a deeply religious woman who dies when Harriet is only five years old. After receiving a traditional formal education, Harriet moves to Ohio to join her father, who has become president of Lane Theological Seminary in Walnut Hills (now a neighborhood of Cincinnati.) There she meets her future husband, the Rev. Calvin Ellis Stowe, a Biblical Literature professor, with whom she has seven children.

At the Lane seminary, Harriet is among those attending a series of nationally publicized debates on slavery in 1834. During her 18 years living in Cincinnati, her perspectives and writings on slavery are also influenced by witnessing it at first-hand during trips to neighboring Kentucky, a slave state that is still in the Union, and by her personal encounters with African Americans, including those who have fled slavery or suffered from racist attacks by Irish immigrants in the city.

In 1850, she moves to Brunswick, Maine, where her husband teaches at Bowdoin College. As ardent critics of slavery and supporters of the Underground Railroad, the Stowes temporarily shelter in their home several escapees from slavery on their way to freedom in Canada.

Stowe tours nationally and internationally, speaking about her book – which is widely translated – and donating some of what she earns to the anti-slavery cause. She also writes extensively on behalf of abolition, most notably her Appeal to Women of the Free States of America, on the Present Crisis in Our Country. She hopes it will help fuel a public outcry to defeat the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that will allow slavery in those two new territories if a majority of residents agree. Stowe also campaigns for the expansion of married women's rights.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a runaway best-seller; in the 19th century, it is the only book to outsell the Christian Bible. But it also popularizes a number of disparaging stereotypes about African Americans – such as “Uncle Tom,” the dutiful, long-suffering servant faithful to his White master or mistress – that have tended to overshadow the book’s significance and impact as an anti-slavery educational tool.

After the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe moves to Florida, but later returns to her home state of Connecticut. She dies in Hartford shortly after her 85th birthday. Multiple landmarks are dedicated to her memory, including the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick, Maine, where she was living when she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

1853 Racist screeds promote "White Supremacy"

These illustrations are from the first of John H. Van Evrie’s racist books, “Negroes and Negro "Slavery": The First an Inferior Race; the Latter Its Normal Condition.”

Source: Published by Van Evrie, Horton, in 1861.

Writer and publisher John H. Van Evrie, who popularizes the terms “white supremacy” and “master race,” releases the first in his series of racist pamphlets and books that have far-reaching impacts across the country.

Historian Donald Yacovone calls Van Evrie “the nation’s first professional racist” and “a toxic combination of Joseph Goebbels, Steve Bannon, and Rupert Murdoch.” Van Evrie’s views, he writes, helped shape modern white supremacist ideology and “played an enormous role in assaulting the struggle for liberty and civil rights after the Civil War.”

Echoing Louis Agassiz and other prominent “race scientists” of the period, Van Evrie claims that Black people are inferior to White people and a separate, lower species of human. He defends slavery as practiced in the U.S. and attacks abolitionism.

Aiming his diatribes especially at the White working class – whom he perceives as most threatened by the notion of freedom for African Americans and by immigrants – Van Evrie crafts an image of himself as a super-patriotic defender of (White) democratic society.

Born in Canada, Van Evrie trains to be a doctor at Geneva Medical College (now Hobart and William Smith Colleges) in Geneva, New York, before moving to Rochester, New York, where he establishes a medical practice. After the untimely death of his wife, Sophia Elizabeth Colman in 1845, Van Evrie serves in the Mexican-American War as an assistant surgeon in the 15th U.S. Infantry.

He then relocates to New York City and builds a publishing empire that, ironically, is based only a block away from the offices of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the official weekly newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Van Evrie’s first poisonous offering in print is an 1853 pamphlet – that he later expands into a book – entitled Negroes and Negro "Slavery": The First an Inferior Race; the Latter Its Normal Condition. Equally repellent books that follow include Free Negroism (1862), Subgenation (1864), and White Supremacy and Negro Subordination (1867).

In 1857, Van Evrie takes over and edits a weekly New York newspaper called the Day-Book. According to Donald Yacovone in his book, Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity, Van Evrie quickly turns the Day-Book into the White supremacist equivalent of The Liberator, the flagship publication of the abolitionist movement published in Boston, Massachusetts. The rabidly racist Day-Book becomes “the North’s most vocal and persistent advocate of white supremacy and defender of the Southern labor system.”

Van Evrie – whom Yacovone credits as a marketing genius – boasts that more copies of his paper are sold in the South than all papers published in the North combined. Estimates at the time put the Day-Book’s circulation between 40,000 and 60,000, dwarfing that of The Liberator’s 3,000. Van Evrie uses the paper to advertise his own publications. And his reach and the support he generates for his ideas extend far beyond the South.

Van Evrie even receives “gushing praise” from a newspaper in Boston, a hotbed of abolitionism. As a physician, the Evening Transcript explains, Van Evrie is in an “excellent position” to detail how “negroes” are a distinct species, fit only for slavery. His writings are “entirely new, and distinct from that advanced by any other writer.” Van Evrie has “at last” provided Bostonians with “the true philosophy of this distracting question.”

A tireless advocate of the Democratic Party – which embraces him – Van Evrie bolsters the party’s White supremacist foundations and its appeal to the White working class. “He pushed the party’s agenda of states’ rights, limited government, and lower taxes with unrestrained fervor," writes Yacovone. "His defense of the Southern labor system was the core of his ideological campaign to the Northern worker.” Many newspapers approvingly report Van Evrie’s racial theories of Black inferiority as well as his claims that emancipation would cost the North millions of dollars, and that Black equality would be a direct threat to the equality of White men.

During the Civil War and beyond, Van Evrie continues to influence public debate and, according to Yacovone, takes “full advantage of the crisis to weld Democratic unity and attempt to reforge the nation’s white supremacist foundation.” Van Evrie asserts that White supremacy would “prove essential to maintaining the social structure….and subordinating the African as designed by God and intended by nature.”

In 1861, Abraham Lincoln’s administration temporarily shuts down the Day-Book for its treasonous rhetoric. Van Evrie promptly renames it the Weekly Caucasian and renews his campaign through his newspaper, books, and pamphlets and through the coverage he and his ideas receive in other publications. His marketing efforts are prodigious: In just one year, 1871, he runs advertisements in more than 1,500 American newspapers. “His work became central to how many white Americans would understand the political, social, and moral issues at stake,” writes Yacovone.

It appears that Van Evrie abandons his White supremacy campaign in 1879 and returns to the medical profession for a living. He dies in obscurity in Brooklyn, New York in 1896.

Donald Yacovone insists that Van Evrie’s impact has been undervalued. "….In so doing, we have completely underestimated the intensity of Northern white supremacy, both before and after the Civil War.”

1854 Court case boosts anti-slavery sentiment

The federal Fugitive Slave Act – that mandates the return of escapees from slavery to their "owners" – is again challenged in Boston, Massachusetts in the case of Anthony Burns, who had settled in the city after fleeing bondage in Virginia.

His enslaver learns of his whereabouts and has him arrested by a bounty hunter.

At Burns’ trial, a group of activists storms the courthouse to free Burns. In the ensuing melee, a U.S. marshal is fatally stabbed.

After Burns loses his case, he is escorted under heavy guard to the ship that would carry him back to enslavement in the South. Hundreds of federal troops line the route to the harbor to hold back the waves of protesters.

The abolitionist community agrees to purchase Burns’ freedom for $1,200 ($38,456 today), and the Rev. Leonard A. Grimes of Boston's Twelfth Baptist Church leads the successful effort to raise the necessary funds. Burns returns to Massachusetts a free man.

With proceeds from the publication of his biography, combined with a scholarship, Burns attends Oberlin College in Ohio. He subsequently becomes a Baptist preacher in Canada before his early death from tuberculosis at aged 28.

The story of Anthony Burns attracts national publicity, and further fuels anti-slavery sentiments all across the North.

Boston Vigilance Committee poster announcing a meeting to protest Anthony Burns' capture in Boston under the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

1854 Wisconsin activists help escapees, challenge Fugitive Slave Act

Caroline Quarlls and Joshua Glover who both fled slavery in Missouri and found refuge in Wisconsin.

The image of Glover is from an 1893 book, “Reminiscences of the busy life of Chauncey C. Olin.” Olin owned The Waukesha Freeman, a radical abolitionist newspaper published in Waukesha, Wisconsin before the Civil War.

The sources for the Quarlls picture are the Wisconsin Historical Society Library; Wisconsin Women Making History; the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee; and the Kenosha Civil War Museum.

Five thousand anti-slavery protesters in Wisconsin help to liberate Joshua Glover, an escapee from slavery, from jail. He later makes his way to Canada and permanent freedom.

Two years earlier, Glover had fled the Missouri plantation where he was enslaved and found work at a sawmill in Racine, Wisconsin. One night he is seized from his home by five men including his former Missouri enslaver, Bennami Garland, who had tracked him down, and a federal marshal. They take Glover by wagon to a Milwaukee jail with the expectation that a judge will grant Garland the right to take him back to Missouri under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

Word of Glover’s capture quickly spreads. Abolitionist leader Sherman Booth, editor of the Free Democrat, the Milwaukee abolitionist newspaper, is said to have mounted his horse and galloped through city streets shouting: “Freemen! To the rescue! Slave catchers are in our midst! Be at the courthouse at two o’clock!”

Some five thousand people respond to his call and surround the building. After the federal judge assigned to the case refuses their demands to release Glover, protesters take matters into their own hands. They batter down the jail doors with axes and set him free.

Activists then secretly escort Glover back to Racine, from where he travels by boat across Lake Michigan to Canada. He joins the vibrant abolitionist community in Toronto, and later settles in Etobicoke, Ontario.

The rescue of Glover and the federal government's subsequent prosecution of Sherman Booth galvanize the abolitionist movement in Wisconsin. Federal authorities charge Booth and fellow abolitionist John Rycraft, an alleged leader of the rescue squad, with assisting in Glover’s escape. Both are found guilty. Booth is fined $1,000 ($33,488 today) and Rycraft $200.

Booth uses his conviction to challenge the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, and a lengthy legal tussle ensues. The Wisconsin Supreme Court declares the federal law unconstitutional and orders his release, but the U.S. Supreme Court later reverses that decision.

In the end, both Booth and Rycraft are re-arrested, tried, and sentenced to short prison terms and fines of $1,000 each. Booth spends longer behind bars because he refuses to pay his fine.

In 1860, a group of armed men spring Booth from confinement but two months later – after speaking at several abolitionist meetings – he is recaptured by federal marshals and returned to prison.

On March 3, 1861, the day before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, outgoing U.S. president James Buchanan pardons Sherman Booth.

A Wisconsin Historical Marker in Milwaukee’s Cathedral Square Park marks the site of the original courthouse and jail where Joshua Glover was imprisoned by federal marshals. Efforts are underway to make it a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom site.

Joshua Glover is not the first enslaved person to reach freedom with the help of Wisconsin Underground Railroad activists. That distinction belongs to Caroline Quarlls, who is enslaved by a family member and works as a housemaid in St. Louis, Missouri. Even though she looks like her White half-brothers and half-sisters, Quarlls is denied the same freedoms.

On July 4, 1842, the 16-year-old Quarlls escapes, passing as a White girl as she first travels by steamboat to Alton, Illinois before taking a stagecoach to Milwaukee. In a harrowing five-week journey to freedom, she is pursued by slave hunters – her enslaver had offered a $300 bounty for her capture and return – and is escorted and sheltered along the way by abolitionists through Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. She finally reaches Detroit before crossing safely to Canada.

Quarlls later works as a domestic servant, attends school, and marries Alan [Allen] Watkins, also an escapee from slavery. Together, they raise six children in Sandwich (now Windsor), Ontario.

1854 New law fans flames of division over slavery

Congress passes the Kansas-Nebraska Act, marking a critical national policy change concerning the expansion of slavery.

The original bill is designed to open up lands in the west for development and facilitate the construction of a transcontinental railroad.

But Southern political leaders refuse to allow the creation of territories that ban slavery – and that ban would apply to these new lands because the Missouri Compromise of 1820 outlawed slavery anywhere north of the 36°30′ parallel.

Clash between pro-slavery and anti-slavery groups in Fort Scott, Kansas Territory, 1850s. Source: Library of Congress.

As part of a deal to win their support, Democratic lawmakers in Congress agree to back repeal of the Missouri Compromise if settlers in Nebraska (including much of what is now Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota) and Kansas (including much of today’s Colorado) are permitted to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery in their respective territories.

This “popular sovereignty” principle had already been used in the New Mexico and Utah territories as part of the Compromise of 1850.

Ironically, far from curbing the escalating controversy over the extension of slavery, the Kansas-Nebraska Act fans the flames of national division. Abolitionists deride it as a capitulation to the proponents of slavery. The act's passage leads to the establishment of the Republican Party as a viable political organization opposed to expanding slavery, while it turns the Democratic Party into a party of enslavers.

The Kansas Territory soon becomes an ideological and physical battleground over slavery.

1854 Families move to Kansas to help make it a free state

Sheet-metal trade sign most likely used at the Boston, Massachusetts headquarters of the New England Emigrant Aid Company.

The NEEAC was established to support the movement of anti-slavery families to Kansas and build a voting majority in favor of the territory joining the United States as a free state.

Source: National Historical Publications & Records Commission.

Anti-slavery activists in Massachusetts and other northeastern states organize emigrant aid companies to encourage families to move to Kansas and help secure its future as a free state.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in May 1854, gives the settlers of the two territories – previously the homelands of more than 20 now dispossessed Native American tribes – the right to choose whether or not to allow slavery within their respective borders.

Under this “popular sovereignty” provision, Nebraska appears likely to outlaw slavery (which it finally does in 1861); and anti-slavery activists focus on ensuring that contested Kansas does likewise. This would tip the balance of power in the U.S. Senate, now evenly split between free states and slave states, against slavery.

The crusade to boost the anti-slavery population in Kansas is spearheaded by Eli Thayer, a Massachusetts businessman and U.S. Congressman. He believes that if enough anti-slavery supporters settle in the territory, they will create a voting majority that will ensure Kansas joins the United States as a free state.

Thayer and his associates – including fellow "free-soil" advocates who want to limit slavery to states where it already exists rather than abolish the institution altogether – launch the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company to promote and support the movement of anti-slavery families to Kansas. Thayer hopes that these settlers will purchase land and build houses, shops, and mills; they will then sell the land at a significant profit and send the proceeds back to him and his investors.

However, after questions are raised about the morality of profiting from the anti-slavery cause, the company is re-organized as a benevolent society and renamed the New England Emigrant Aid Company (NEEAC). The Massachusetts state legislature signs off on NEEAC as a joint stock company with a capitalization of $1 million.

Assisted by activists who help recruit settlers and raise funds, NEEAC attracts would-be emigrants with offers of reduced travel rates for groups, temporary housing upon arrival in Kansas, and plans to construct sawmills and flour mills and provide communal farming equipment, among other resources.

The first emigrants from Massachusetts put down stakes in an area that becomes the city of Lawrence. Named after the NEEAC secretary and Massachusetts abolitionist Amos Adams Lawrence, the town soon becomes an abolitionist stronghold and a target of pro-slavery forces; it is attacked and plundered in the so-called Sack of Lawrence in 1856.

By the spring of 1855, 13 parties totaling some 1,250 people have arrived in Kansas with NEEAC’s support. The company helps to establish other new settlements, including Topeka, Manhattan, and Osawatomie, and builds mills in those communities as well as in Lawrence and eight other towns.

NEEAC also finances the publication of the Kansas Herald of Freedom, the first free-state newspaper in the territory. Smaller emigrant aid organizations are established – in Worcester, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., Ohio, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin and elsewhere – and follow NEEAC’s lead in helping anti-slavery supporters move to Kansas.

As the crisis in the territory grows, relief committees form in northern states to aid the new settlers. Women play a leadership role in the relief effort, organizing sewing bees, clothing collections, food fairs, and donation drives. In 1856, Massachusetts supporters donate more $35,000 ($338,136 today) in cash to the cause, and 63 communities in the state collect a total of 20 tons of relief supplies for shipment to Kansas.

NEEAC seeks to ensure that the new settlers can physically defend themselves against pro-slavery forces. It clandestinely sends them rifles in crates marked “Books” and “Tools” – and possibly “Bibles” – to skirt federal and state bans on shipping arms to the region. The guns are often referred to as “Beecher’s Bibles” in reference to Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent abolitionist minister and NEEAC leader, who is the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the popular anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Meanwhile, resistance by enslaved people in the region is increasing. Many escape from nearby Missouri plantations and head north to freedom with assistance from White abolitionists, including an emerging line of the Underground Railroad (UGRR). One pro-slavery Missouri newspaper complains that the “U.G.R.R. is doing a smashing business—to the owners of Negroes especially…. The whole country is lousy with abolitionists.”

Historians estimate that fewer than 2,000 people move to Kansas with NEACC’s assistance – a far cry from the 20,000 Eli Thayer had hoped for. But within two years, those families and the migrants recruited by other aid societies outnumber their pro-slavery counterparts in the territory. Eventually, in January 1861, Kansas joins the Union as a free state – but only after a five-year period of violent clashes between anti- and pro-slavery forces known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

1855 Pro-slavery men invade Kansas, steal election

One thousand pro-slavery men from neighboring Missouri invade the Kansas territory and steal the first election for the legislature, in an ongoing effort to make Kansas a slave state.

These “border ruffians,” armed with guns, rifles, pistols, Bowie knives, and two artillery pieces, cross the Kansas border unchallenged on the day of the election.

They threaten election judges with injury or even death, intimidate voters, and stuff ballot boxes. The territory only has 2,905 legal voters but 6,307 votes are cast – and pro-slavery delegates are elected to 37 of the 39 seats.

In the battle over the future of Kansas, pro-slavery “border ruffians” invaded the territory from neighboring Missouri and voted illegally in the first election for the territorial legislature. They helped fraudulently elect a majority of legislators who favored making Kansas a slave state.

Illustration published by James, Emmons & Co., 1868. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Anti-slavery supporters cry foul and appeal to territorial Governor Andrew Reeder to set the election aside. Instead, Reeder authorizes a re-run of only 11 races he deems tainted by fraud. While eight of these special elections result in victory for free-staters, the pro-slavery legislators easily maintain their majority.

They then set about adopting a slave code for Kansas, modeled largely on that of Missouri, and begin passing laws favorable to enslavers. These include draconian measures to intimidate free-staters: it becomes a crime to speak or write against slavery; assisting fugitives from slavery in punishable by 10 years’ hard labor or the death penalty; and instigating a rebellion by enslaved people is also a death penalty offense.

Free-staters quickly respond by electing delegates to a separate legislature, based in Topeka, which proclaims itself the legitimate government and denounces as “bogus” the pro-slavery government operating in the town of Lecompton 23 miles away. The Topeka body creates the first territorial constitution – that includes a ban on slavery – and elects Massachusetts native Charles L. Robinson as territorial governor.

The alternative legislature incurs the wrath of slavery supporters in Congress, who demand that President Franklin Pierce, a Northerner, disband it. Pierce does so: he declares the Topeka government "insurrectionist," and the 500 U.S. Army troops he sends to Topeka put an end to it at gunpoint.

But abolitionists help ensure that Congress takes its own action in response to the disputed vote and rising tensions. A special three-man Congressional committee makes a fact-finding visit to Kansas Territory in 1856. It concludes that the free-staters’ allegations of fraud are well-founded and that the pro-slavery Lecompton legislature is indeed bogus and illegal.

The presence of dual, competing governments in Kansas is symptomatic of the strife brewing in the territory and further provokes supporters on both sides of the conflict.

1855 New party backs armed resistance to slavery

John Brown (left) in the 1850s. Source: Library of Congress. Frederick Douglass. Source: New York Historical Society.

John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and other abolitionists form the Radical Political Abolition Party. It endorses armed resistance to slavery and calls for opposition to the federal Fugitive Slave Law and assistance for the cause of freedom in Kansas.

The party’s inaugural convention in Syracuse, New York is attended by nearly 300 delegates from 10 states. “This gathering exuded a radical, biblical militancy not yet seen in formal political abolitionism,” writes historian David Blight in Prophet of Freedom, his biography of Douglass.

According to Blight, Douglass and his comrades “were fed up with the idea of limiting slavery and hoping it ‘may die out.’” He (Douglass) now belonged to a party that would lay “the axe to the tree” with a single demand: That it was “the right, the power, and the duty of the federal government to abolish slavery in every state in the American Union.”

1855 Personal liberty laws protect escapees

The Massachusetts legislature passes the Massachusetts Personal Liberty Law, which lends legal weight to efforts to prevent formerly enslaved people in the state from being sent back to bondage.

The measure is a direct response to the capture and re-enslavement a year earlier of Anthony Burns who had been living in Boston after escaping slavery in the South. Despite massive protests, Burns had been returned to his "master" under the controversial federal Fugitive Slave Act (FSA) of 1850.

Massachusetts is the first of several Northern states – including Connecticut, Michigan, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Vermont – that enact a personal liberty law to effectively nullify the federal law and give African Americans greater protection from kidnapping by slave-catchers acting for Southern enslavers.

The FSA makes it a federal crime to harbor fugitives, requiring that any person identified as a fugitive slave must be returned to his or her “owner.” Local officials who fail to comply are subject to a $1,000 fine ($30,000 today), and private citizens can be jailed for helping escapees.

By contrast, a key provision of the Massachusetts law calls for the removal of any state official who helps to send freedom-seekers back to bondage.

When the slave states secede from the union in 1860 and 1861, they cite the personal liberty laws as evidence of the Northern states’ unwillingness to uphold the federal Fugitive Slave Act.

This print from a wood engraving features 24-year-old Anthony Burns, who escaped from slavery in Virginia, surrounded by scenes of his ordeals.

Burns was arrested in Boston under the federal Fugitive Slave Act and returned to bondage in 1854 despite massive local protests. Abolitionists later purchased his freedom and he returned to Massachusetts a free man.

Source: Print “drawn by Barry from a daguerreotype by Whipple & Black.” Library of Congress.

1855 Black abolitionists help ban segregated schools

Attorney Robert Morris, a leader in the successful school desegregation campaign in Boston.

Source: Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.

Segregated schools are banned in Massachusetts after a 10-year campaign spearheaded by Black abolitionists.

This latest civil rights victory – the first of its kind in the country – follows successful campaigns that 12 years before had ended racial segregation on public transportation and legalized interracial marriage in the state.

Black activists and their White allies had already succeeded in forcing an end to school segregation in several other Massachusetts communities, including Nantucket, Lowell, and Salem.

Abolitionists John Hilton, William Cooper Nell, and Robert Morris lead an effort to win a similar reform in Boston, where Black students can only attend the Abiel Smith School on Beacon Hill, the one public school designated for African Americans. Most parents of students there decide to boycott the school because of poor conditions, a severe lack of resources, and an abusive White teacher. They want it dismantled and their children to have equal educational opportunities.

During the boycott, some parents and activists set up temporary schools in their homes where Smith students are taught by volunteer teachers.

Women in the Black community on Beacon Hill are an organizing and sustaining force in the campaign, according to Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick in Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America, their book about the school desegregation struggle.

As an example, the authors cite Angeline Gardner, “who by day worked as a washerwoman, served on a committee of boycotting mothers that prepared refreshments for the hectic meetings, solicited money for the temporary schools, and distributed the money that was brought into the movement.” To William Cooper Nell, one of the campaign leaders, it was the women of the Beacon Hill community who kept "the flame alive in the dark hours of the struggle when some men despaired of victory.”

The Boston School Committee rejects the changes advocated by the campaign, and Robert Morris – one of the first accredited Black lawyers in the state – sues on behalf of one parent, activist Benjamin F. Roberts, for the right of his five-year-old daughter, Sarah, to attend her nearby neighborhood school instead of the Abiel Smith School a mile from her home.

The case of Sarah Roberts vs. City of Boston eventually comes before the state Supreme Court. While the court rules against Sarah Roberts, endorsing the principle of “separate but equal” schooling, her father, her legal team, and community allies successfully push for action by the state legislature.

In 1855, Massachusetts legally bans segregated schools in the state. Almost 100 years later, in 1954, the “separate but equal” standard is overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education, and segregated schools are outlawed throughout the United States.

1855 U.S. traders transport enslaved Chinese to Brazil

Boston sea captain Harry J. Sargent transports 800 captive Chinese men from Hong Kong to slavery in Brazil.

The voyage of Sargent’s ship, Winged Racer, is part of the Asian migrant-laborer trade that helps ensure a continued supply of enslaved workers to the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and South America. Few survive longer than seven years because of disease and brutal conditions.

With the international slave trade outlawed by the U.S. and European powers, slave traders in Maine and Massachusetts shift their focus from Africa to the Pacific world. They carry captive Chinese people to Cuba, Brazil, and other South American countries to work as indentured servants (although they are effectively enslaved).

Sargent describes the cruel and dehumanizing conditions aboard his ship, with naked Chinese men “stuffed” between the decks. “You cannot hear yourself think, as they say, throughout the day, & [at] night the effluvia arising from the ventilators & hatches is not to be sneezed at I can assure you.”

“Coolies Embarking,” an illustration from an 1864 edition of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Courtesy of Reed College Library in Portland, Oregon.

“Coolie” is a derogatory term and/or racial slur, derived from the Hindi word for porter or day laborer; it was, and still is, used to refer to Asian people.

He says that nothing would induce him to participate in this trade again. “If any distinction can be made between this species of slavery & the African Slave trade, I am yet to be convinced of it.”

Historian Lise Breen has found through her research that sea captains in Gloucester, Massachusetts were engaged in this trade. One captain, Purchase Jewett, kidnaps three free men from the Cape Verde islands off the west African coast and attempts to sell them in Cuba. Jewett later transports Chinese laborers to the "Guano Islands” – islands off the coast of Peru where huge deposits of seabird excrement (guano), rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, are being harvested for use as agricultural fertilizer.

Scholars estimate that over 250,000 Asian laborers are forcibly transported to the Caribbean and South America during the 1850s and 1860s. The trade begins to decline after Boston merchants George Sampson and Lewis Tappan – the latter well known for his abolitionist activism – learn of the abusive treatment suffered by those being transported. They renege on their contracts to carry more than 2,000 laborers to Brazil from Hong Kong.

1856 Anti-slavery champion beaten on Senate floor

South Carolina representative Preston Brooks beating Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. Illustration by John L. Magee.

Source: New York Public Library/Digital Collections.

Massachusetts Republican senator Charles Sumner, an anti-slavery champion, is beaten senseless on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Preston Brooks, the South Carolina Democratic congressman and enslaver.

Addressing the Senate, Sumner denounces the threat of slavery being instituted in Kansas, and unleashes a stream of vitriol against senators who have defended the idea. He castigates two in particular – one being South Carolina senator Andrew Butler, who is not present at the time.

Mocking Butler’s stance as a man of chivalry, the Massachusetts senator charges him with taking "a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery."

Two days later Brooks, Butler’s South Carolina colleague in the House of Representatives, violently retaliates. Approaching Sumner who is seated at his desk in the Senate chamber, Brooks says: “I have read your speech. [It] is a libel on South Carolina.”

As Sumner rises to his feet, Brooks starts to beat him with a gold-topped wooden cane, knocking him to the floor. Blinded by his own blood, Sumner staggers up the aisle and collapses, lapsing into unconsciousness. Brooks continues to beat the motionless Sumner until his cane breaks, and then with the remaining piece. Several other senators attempt to help Sumner, but are blocked by Laurence M. Keitt, a pro-slavery Democrat, who brandishes a pistol and shouts, "Let them be!"

The two men are hailed as heroes by their respective supporters.

Brooks is praised by Southern Democrats, and by many pro-slavery newspapers. The Richmond Enquirer editorializes that Sumner should be caned "every morning," praising the attack as "good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences." In language resonant of the plantation, it lambasts "these vulgar abolitionists in the Senate” who “have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission."

Hundreds of Southern Democrat lawmakers endorse the attack by sending Brooks new canes; one is inscribed with the words "Hit him again." In another gesture of solidarity, many wear neck chains with rings attached that are made from the remains of the cane Brooks used to assault Sumner. Brooks is honored by the towns of Melendez and Pierceville in Florida, which merge to become Brooksville; similarly, portions of Lowndes and Thomas counties in Georgia are combined as Brooks County.

Abolitionists and many Northerners are outraged. The Massachusetts legislature passes resolutions equating the assault with a blow against representative government and free speech. Thousands attend rallies in support of Sumner in Boston, Massachusetts; Albany, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; New Haven, Connecticut; New York City; and Providence, Rhode Island. More than a million copies of Sumner's speech are distributed.

Two weeks after the incident, the philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the divide it represents: "I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one state. I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom."

In addition to head trauma, Sumner suffers nightmares, severe headaches, and what is now understood to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He never fully recovers from his injuries but remains a member of the U.S. Senate for another 18 years.

Surviving a House censure resolution, Brooks resigns but is immediately reelected; he dies soon after at the age of 37.

1856 White supremacists ravage anti-slavery bastion

With its leaders carrying banners proclaiming “Supremacy of the White Race,” some 2,000 pro-slavery Missourians and “southern rights” men from South Carolina and Alabama invade and decimate the town of Lawrence, Kansas.

The town had been founded two years earlier by anti-slavery settlers from Massachusetts who came to Kansas to help make the territory a free state. Outnumbered and outgunned, the free staters offer no resistance and their leaders are arrested.

During the “Sacking of Lawrence,” the invaders burn the Free State Hotel, destroy two anti-slavery newspaper offices, and ransack homes and stores.

The assault – in which only one person is killed – fuels a brutal five-year conflict between free-state and pro-slavery supporters, dubbed “Bleeding Kansas.” As an anti-slavery stronghold, Lawrence is a major target of pro-slavery supporters and becomes the epicenter of violence in the territory.

Ruins of the Free State Hotel following the Sacking of Lawrence, Kansas in 1855. Source: The State Historical Society of Missouri.

At the heart of the struggle is the question of whether Kansas, when it achieves statehood, will allow slavery, like neighboring Missouri, or prohibit it. The issue is one of national importance because Kansas' two new senators will affect the balance of power in the U.S. Senate, which is bitterly divided over slavery.

The violence intensifies. Radical abolitionist leader John Brown is incensed by the attack on Lawrence, and the physical assault on Massachusetts’s anti-slavery U.S. senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina representative and enslaver Preston Brooks on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Deciding to fight fire with fire, Brown and a band of his guerrillas attack and kill five pro-slavery activists near Pottawatomie Creek, in Franklin County, Kansas. The “Pottawatomie Massacre'' triggers a series of retaliatory raids and battles in which 29 people die, making it the bloodiest episode of “Bleeding Kansas.”

In August, thousands of pro-slavery men form armies and invade Kansas from neighboring Missouri. One force of 300 heads to Osawatomie, intending to destroy the Free State settlements there and then march on the anti-slavery strongholds of Topeka and Lawrence.

In an attempt to defend Osawatomie, John Brown and 38 of his followers engage pro-slavery fighters but are forced to withdraw. Five free-staters are killed in the Battle of Osawatomie, including Brown’s 26-year-old son, Frederick, and the town is looted and burned by the pro-slavery partisans. Despite the defeat, Brown's bravery and military shrewdness in the face of overwhelming odds brings him national attention and makes him a hero to many Northern abolitionists.

In September, Lawrence is threatened by another invasion force of at least 2,700 pro-slavery Missourians, but serious violence is averted when the new governor of Kansas, John W. Geary, orders the warring parties to disarm and disband, and offers clemency to former fighters on both sides. John Brown, who had prepared to lead a defense of Lawrence, takes advantage of the fragile peace and leaves Kansas with three of his sons to raise money from supporters in the North.

Intermittent violence continues over the next four years. By the time it ends, “Bleeding Kansas” has claimed 56 lives.

Kansas finally becomes a free state in 1861. The Congressional legislative deadlock over the state is broken when, following the election of Abraham Lincoln as President, seven Southern states secede from the Union. Kansas's entry as a free state had already been approved by the House of Representatives but blocked by Southern senators. After the senators of the seceding states withdraw from Congress or are expelled, Kansas is immediately admitted to the Union as a free state.

1856 In book, Emerson espouses White Supremacy

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Source: Library of Congress.

Philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the foremost U.S. public intellectuals of his time, publishes English Traits.

The influential book lends further legitimacy to pseudo-scientific theories about race and White racial superiority that fuel racism and are used to justify pro-slavery arguments.

Emerson professes hatred of slavery, but not because he is egalitarian, according to historian Nell Irving Painter. In her book, The History of White People, she writes that Emerson "considered slavery a relic of barbarism that was bad for civilization, that is, bad for his kind of white people.”

Historian Donald Yacovone writes that “no one spoke with more authority or more intensity about America’s white identity” than Emerson. In his book, Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity, Yacovone opines that Emerson “embodied the ideal true American as a descendant only of the Anglo-Saxon.”

Like most other White New Englanders, Emerson “believed in a hierarchy of race that placed himself at the very top.” The “Saxon seed,” Emerson asserts, has “an instinct for liberty,” and only the “English race can be trusted with freedom.” The African would never “occupy a very high place in the human family. Their present condition is the strongest proof that they cannot.”

While he espouses White supremacy, Emerson is also a staunch opponent of slavery. He speaks, lectures, and writes on the subject, and provides financial support to abolitionists. He even entertains leading White abolitionists, including John Brown and Angelina and Sarah Grimké, in his home.

The renowned Black abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass, is not so favored. According to Yacovone, Emerson “went out of his way to prevent (Douglass) from becoming a member of the same private club he belonged to.”

Emerson does not join the abolitionist movement.

← Previous Page

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse