Sometimes I overdo things. When I visited Boston on Wednesday for the next part of my abolitionism tour, I walked to exhaustion and had to skip one destination. It was worth the effort anyway. Here’s the start of a Flickr album for the tour, which is incomplete as I’m writing this.
The first post about the tour is here.
The first stop was Faneuil Hall, which was a center for anti-slavery activity in the 19th century. Frequent meetings were held there. They pressured the state and local governments to resist the fugitive slave laws and worked with the Underground Railroad to get slaves to safety. An 1842 meeting declared: “If the soul-traders and slave-drivers of the South imagine that Massachusetts is slave-hunting ground, on which they may run down their prey with impunity … they will find themselves mistaken.” The petitions led to the passage of the Personal Liberty Act in 1843, making Massachusetts what we would call a “sanctuary state” today.
Some people have tried to get Faneuil Hall’s name changed. It was named after Peter Faneuil, who financed the building but also engaged in the slave trade. But when people think of the name today, they think of the statue of Samuel Adams and the building’s role in the American Revolution. Fewer people know about its role in fighting slavery, but that’s also important. Faneuil Hall has redeemed its name many times over and should keep it.
From there I walked to the Park Street Church. On July 4, 1829, William Lloyd Garrison gave his first major anti-slavery speech.
Every Fourth of July, our Declaration of Independence is produced, with a sublime indignation, to set forth the tyranny of the mother country and to challenge the admiration of the world. But what a pitiful detail of grievances does this document present in comparison with the wrongs which our slaves endure!
Next came the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill. This is where the walking started to get serious. Beacon Hill isn’t as tall as it once was; a large part of its mass went to fill in the Back Bay area. Going up Joy Street still isn’t much of a joy. This building, built in 1805 and 1806, was originally a church for free black people. (Black people were generally admitted to other churches, but with serious restrictions.) Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society here in 1832.
From here I wandered uphill and downhill to 13 Chestnut Street, where multiple sources say Julia Ward Howe lived. According to these sources, it’s a National Historic Landmark, but I didn’t see any plaque at the address. It’s just one of the densely packed houses in the Beacon Hill residential area. Obviously I wasn’t going to knock at a private home and ask.
After sitting in Boston Common to rest, I took the subway to Harvard Square. The Longfellow House is on Brattle Street, about half a mile from the T station. Here it was level ground. This impressive building was George Washington’s headquarters from 1775 to 1776. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow rented rooms in the building in 1819 and became its owner in 1843, living there till his death in 1882. He despised slavery and wrote a volume called Poems on Slavery, but he wasn’t much involved in the abolitionist movement and seems not to have gotten along well with Garrison. Longfellow financially supported the Underground Railroad and wrote in his journal of October 26, 1850: “The slave-hunters are in Boston. I hope they will be imprisoned, as they deserve. What a disgrace this is to a republic of the nineteenth century!”
My final stop was going to be Harriet Tubman Park in Boston, but by the time I got back to the Harvard subway station, I decided I’d had enough walking and headed home with my photographs and memories.
A few days later I went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for a concert by Itzhak Perlman and the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra. Before the concert I got a picture of the memorial of the 1779 petition by 19 slaves for the state to grant their freedom and put an end to slavery. Part of the text is engraved in a walkway near the African Burying Ground. It’s stretched out for a block, but I got a picture of part of it. The full sentence is:
Therefore, your humble Slaves most devoutly Pray, for the Sake of injured Liberty, for the Sake of Justice, Humanity, and the Rights of Mankind; for the Honour of Religion, and by all that is dear, that your Honours would graciously interpose in our Behalf, and enact such Laws and Regulations as in your Wisdom you may think proper, whereby we may regain our Liberty and be rank’d in the Class of free agents, and that the Name of Slave may not more be heard in a Land gloriously contending for the Sweets of Freedom; And your humble Slaves as in Duty bound will ever Pray.
New Bedford will be a longer trip, but I’m hoping to add it to the tour.