From the 1830s into the Civil War, slavery increasingly absorbed Concord's attention. Through the collective efforts of dedicated local people -- among them carriage-maker William Whiting and his daughters, Dr. Josiah Bartlett, Mary Merrick Brooks (leader of the Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society), Monument Street residents Timothy and Maria King Prescott, journalist William Stevens Robinson and his wife Harriet, the Emersons, the Thoreaus, the Alcotts, the Hoars, and the Bigelows (whose home near the intersection of Main Street and Sudbury Road formed a stop on the Underground Railroad) -- the town earned a reputation as an antislavery stronghold.
Well-known abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, and others spoke here repeatedly. The local female antislavery society provided financial support for state and national antislavery organizations. The Middlesex County Antislavery Society (to which a number of Concord people belonged) held spirited meetings here. In the 1850s, Concord residents responded to requests for aid in establishing Kansas as a free state. Schoolmaster Frank Sanborn -- one of the "Secret Six" -- raised money for John Brown to buy arms for his 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. When Brown was executed, Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott participated in a December, 1859 memorial service held in the Town Hall, and promoted the perception of Brown as a martyr to a righteous cause rather than as a crazed radical. (Illustration at right is of Sanborn being arrested by Federal agents because of involvement in the Harpers Ferry affair.)
At the same time, the missionary zeal of antislavery activists created considerable tension within the community. Some local people were not convinced that slavery had anything to do with Concord. Others resented the intrusion of the antislavery agenda into lyceum lectures and other aspects of town life or were appalled by the attacks of prominent abolitionists on church and state.
This fall and winter, the Concord Free Public Library will explore the local roots and expressions of and responses to nineteenth-century antislavery activism here through a gallery exhibition and a three-part lecture series.
The display "Antislavery in Concord," drawn primarily from the holdings of the William Munroe Special Collections, will be on view in the library gallery from November 6, 2006 through January 27, 2007 during library hours. Its opening has been planned to coincide with the publication by Cornell University Press of the book To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord, by Sandra Harbert Petrulionis of Penn State (Altoona).
The lecture series will open on Sunday, November 19, 2006, with Dr. Petrulionis speaking on "Radicals in Our Town: Antislavery Activism in Thoreau's Concord." On Saturday, December 2, 2006, Roosevelt Montás of Columbia University (whose dissertation "Rethinking America: Abolitionism and the Antebellum Transformation of the Discourse of National Identity" won the Bancroft Dissertation Award in 2004) will speak on "The Slaves of Concord: Home Roots of Thoreau's Antislavery Impulse." On Sunday, January 14, 2007, Elise Lemire of Purchase College, SUNY (author of Miscegenation: Making Race in America and of a book-in-progress on the history of slavery and its aftermath in Concord) will lecture on "Slavery in Concord."
All three lectures will be held in the rotunda of the main library building (129 Main Street) and will begin at 5:00 p.m. The exhibition and lectures are free and open to the public. All interested in this important and complex part of Concord history are welcome.
Image: "Arrest and
Rescue of Frank B. Sanborn, Esq., at Concord, Massachusetts, on the Night
of April 3, 1860." Courtesy of the William Munroe Special Collections,
the Concord Free Public Library.
Backgrounds: Word of Mouth Web Design
