Excerpts from "History of the Town of Brookline" by John Gould Curtis (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933)

CHAPTER X

BROOKLINE IN THE CIVIL WAR

If a difference of opinion on the justifiability of Negro slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War, it had also been, from very early times, in some degree a point of dissension in Brookline. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, slavery was not generally viewed with humanitarian horror, and New Englanders of high rectitude and commendable virtue owned both Negro and Indian servants, while indentured men and women were scarcely better off, until their time was up.

Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, who was at least a property owner in Brookline, published as early as 1700 a pamphlet called The Selling of Joseph. This was probably the first move against slavery in this country, developing as it did the thesis of a letter which Sewall wrote to judge Davenport, wherein he said:

The poorest boys and girls, in this province, such as are of the lowest condition, whether they be English, or Ethiopians, or Indians; they have the same right to religion and life, that the richest heirs have. And they who go about to deprive them of this right attempt the bombardment of Heaven; and the shells they throw will fall down on their own heads.

It is certainly open to speculation whether Sewall's forehandedness in opposing slavery may not have been expression of the remorse which he felt after his somewhat panicky enthusiasm for the conviction of witches. When the witchcraft excitement had died down, and the judge was able to view the matter more judicially, he concluded that his conduct had been rash. In fact he was very much ashamed of himself, and said so publicly.

It is curious, therefore, to learn that Henry Sewall, the judge's grandson, submitted a bill to the town for the services of his `slave Felix' as janitor of the First Church. The name cropped up again on the side of righteousness, however, when Samuel E. Sewall, great great grandson of the chief justice, in 1832 participated in the founding of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

BROOKLINE SLAVE-OWNERS

No complete picture of the extent of slave-holding in Brookline can be reconstructed in modern times, but the practice was undoubtedly common among the prosperous owners of large homes. In 1693 Thomas Nowell bought 'a neagroe Woman named Rose' from Mrs. Abigail Davis; and his stepson, Captain Robert Sharp, on his death in 1765, left to his wife a Negro slave named Jane.

Deacon Ebenezer Crafts seems to have been taken in on a slave trade by one Ebenezer Dorr, sometime around the beginning of January, 1735/6. The deacon had parted with £105 for a girl named Flora, and soon decided that he had bought a liability instead of an asset. He evidently voiced his disappointment pretty freely, for Dorr wrote him, explaining that he had sold the girl with the most honorable intentions and would gladly co-operate in arriving at some fair solution of the problem. He continued that 'it is all over town that your discurege and wold give ten pounds to have me take her agane. I apprehend I had better given you twenty pounds than ever you had been consarned with her I would not a thanked anybody to have given me an hundred pounds far her that morning befor you carried her away but seeing it as it is, we must do as well as we can..: They finally settled it by an arbitration, on terms which promised to cost the deacon some fifteen pounds.

In 1739 Ebenezer Crafts, described as a cordwainer of Roxbury, bought of Richard Champion, a Boston school-master, an eleven-year-old Negro girl named Dinah. She cost one hundred pounds, and was a faithful servant for sixty years. When she was very old and decrepit, she was tenderly cared for by those whom she had served, and 'Aunt' White, daughter of Deacon Crafts, wrote a lengthy poem about her when she died in 1803.

The Heath family, too, had slaves, and Cuff, Kate, and Primus are mentioned as belonging to John Heath. About them a number of anecdotes have become traditional, characteristic of Negro wit; and the same is true of Sambo, who belonged to Deacon Ebenezer Davis, and later to his son and grandson. When he died, at the age of ninety, he was buried in the Brookline Cemetery, near Deacon Davis.

There is evidence of deep mutual regard between these black servants and those whose chattels they nominally were, and if slavery had never taken a harsher form than it knew in Brookline homes, it might never have aroused the force of a mighty moral principle.

ANTI-SLAVERY AND ANTI-ABOLITION

Only an exceptionally acute conscience could have been troubled by this sort of slavery. Further, the social philosophy of the time was dominated by a tremendous respect for property rights. To the average, conservative, New England mind, it was no more unreasonable for a slave-owner to object to giving up his slaves, than for a manufacturer to object to giving up his machinery, or a merchant his goods. They were property, and were moreover necessary to the business of operating plantations.

But there were some acute consciences, and some of the duller ones were influenced by accounts of aspects of slave life that were distressing in the extreme. The anti-slavery movement was definitely under way in Boston in 1832, and five years later Samuel Philbrick was interested in organizing an anti-slavery society in Brookline. He had been a resident since 1830, and was known to have abolitionist sympathies, but his activities first attracted serious attention in 1837.

That winter Mr. Philbrick's guests were the Misses Sarah and Angelina Grimke, daughters of a South Carolina Supreme Court justice, and themselves former slave-owners, who had come to New England to lecture and work for the cause of abolition. Once, when they lectured to an audience of women in the Philbrick home, John Greenleaf Whittier sat in an adjoining room to listen. The beloved Dr. John Pierce, who served as minister of the First Church for more than fifty years, did not join the abolitionists, but his wife was one of the Grimke sisters' audience, and a sympathizer with the cause.

At that time, however, it was far from being a popular cause, even in New England. Conservative men of property were unready to lend support to a movement which threatened to destroy a generally satisfactory economic structure. Than disposition was not to meddle in matters so far removed from home that they offered no immediate offense, while to disturb them might be as disastrous as poking a hornets' nest. It was a case of `out of sight, out of mind,' and `let well enough alone'

But the essential difference in viewpoints was presently dramatized for the community. Wendell Phillips acquainted Mrs. Philbrick with the case of a free Negro woman who was struggling to support her family, and it was arranged for the Philbricks to take the woman's ten-year-old daughter into their home. If she had come as a slave, and if she had been sent to the `nigger pew,' high above the front gallery of the church, the community would doubtless have remained undisturbed. But Mr. Philbrick took the child into his pew with his family, and the congregation promptly became all excited.

The next week everybody was on edge, and one especially self-righteous parishioner, having arrived after the Philbricks, peered around to see if they had had the effrontery to bring the Negro wench with them. The pew was so high, however, that he could not see, and had to send one of his own children down to check up on the situation. Sure enough, the black girl was there, and the indignant gentleman gathered bb family and marched them from the church in high dudgeon and vigorous protest.

Then a committee proposed to Mr. Philbrick the importance of keeping peace in the church, and intimated that if the Negro child really needed religion, she could get it to the best convenience of all concerned by taking a seat in the gallery where she belonged. Dr. Pierce himself urged similar proposals, but Mr. Philbrick thought that if the church could not accept this member of his family, it could get along without him as well He never entered the church again.

Children reflected the arbitrary and uncharitable spirit of their elders, and the Negro child was made so uncomfortable that she could not remain long in Brookline. Likewise, William Philbrick suffered at school for the unpopular stand his father had taken, and was taunted as a `bobolitionist'

But the movement for abolition was gaining in strength and respectability. Ellis Gray Loring moved to Brookline in 1837, and became closely associated with Mr. Philbrick. The same year Mrs. Eliza Lee Follen opened a private school at Washington and Cypress Streets, and until she went to West Roxbury in 1841, she was active in the movement. William I. Bowditch and William P. Atkinson augmented the forces in Brookline. But when it was sought to hold an anti-slavery meeting in the Town Hall, a selectman, Abijah W. Goddard, denied permission. He felt fairly certain the meeting would mean a mob, and the mob would probably wreck the building. Abolition was gaining ground, but it was still not quite a thing which one could flaunt in public.

If the difficulties which beset him discouraged Mr. Philbrick, he did not show it. Rather he extended his activities to as wide a field as possible. From the inception of William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator in 1831, he was one of its principal financial backers. In 1840 he began a service of more than fifteen years at treasurer of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. His wife and daughter promoted a sewing society to make garments for the slaves, though the necessity for this remains a little obscure, and one suspects the judgment overcome by enthusiasm which led other New Englanders at a later date to provide Pacific island natives with costumes of the Mother Hubbard pattern.

Mrs. Philbrick and Mrs. Pierce and other Brookline women participated in the anti-slavery fairs which were held annually between 184o and 1855 in Boston. Year by year their measure of success mounted a little; the abolitionists were being shown a degree of tolerance, but were not encouraged to expect general approval or support.

When the question of the annexation of Texas arose, it was manifest to everyone that the admission of the new state must be the determining factor in the continuance of slavery in the United States. If it were admitted, it would confirm and enhance the slave-holders' power; excluded, it would mark the beginning of the end of slavery. In Brookline Edward Atkinson undertook the thankless task of getting signers for a petition against the annexation, but the prevailing lethargy of the public precluded any marked success.

RECAPTURE OF SLAVES

A crisis came in the slavery question in 1850, with the South demanding a more rigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, in return for agreeing to the admission of California as a free state, and certain provisions governing territories and the District of Columbia. Daniel Webster, with the conviction in his heart that some concession was at once fair, and essential to the maintenance of the Union, supported the Southern contention. He spoke on the assumption that slavery was an evil thing, but for the sake of amity, he advocated that enforcement which the South asked. This disturbed the Whig Party, and would probably have reacted upon Webster's career had not Fillmore, on becoming President, made Webster his Secretary of State. Then Governor Briggs of Massachusetts appointed Robert C. Winthrop, a Brookline man, at one time a student in Webster's law office, to Webster's seat in the Senate.

Winthrop agreed that a compromise was a reasonable solution of the problem, but the Fugitive Slave Bill as it was drawn was far too strong for him. `After trying in vain for Trial by Jury,' he said, `and Habeas Corpus, and Protection for Frees Colored Seamen, I voted against it.' That fall the Massachusetts Whig convention approved of Winthrop's views, and announced that certain amendments to the Fugitive Slave Bill were essential to its approval by Massachusetts people.

The bill, however, was passed on September 9, 1850, and the efforts of the New England abolitionists at once became lest fraught with difficulty. In many quarters there was a feeling that the national government had committed itself to an un- necessarily harsh piece of legislation, and as was the case with prohibition some seventy years later, a substantial portion of the citizenry prepared to resist the law and to do so with open pride.

Men who were law-abiding in every other respect tent themselves, their homes, and their resources eagerly to facilitating the escape of slaves to Canada and freedom. The machinery of the `Underground Railroad' functioned at its peak, and Mr. Philbrick's Brookline home was one of its `stations.'

On a Georgia plantation near Macon two slaves, though they were considerately treated and well cared for, found their bondage irksome. Ellen was a mulatto so light-skinned that she was able to disguise herself as a planter's wife, while William took the part of her personal servant. Ingeniously anticipating that she might be called upon to write at least her name, they bandaged her right hand as though it had been injured, and set out upon their adventure of escape.

At length they reached Boston, and were sheltered at Mr. Bowditch's house. They spoke at a public meeting in the Brookline Town Hall, and shortly afterward learned that their master was in Boston. Ellen was then concealed in the Loring house on Cypress Street, where she was joined by William, and both were removed to the Philbrick house at William's insistence. He had learned that Mr. Loring was absent from home, and in his absence William Craft was unwilling to subject him to the severe penalty of the Fugitive Slave Law for harboring a runaway.

For three days they hid in the hired man's room at the Philbrick house, and on the next morning were driven in to Boston by Theodore Parker, John Parkman, and Hannah Stevenson. They were concealed for the night, married the following day by Dr. Parker, and sent off to Halifax, whence they sailed for England.

The case of another fugitive, named Shadrach, arose also m 1851, but came to another end. He was seized in Boston by a slave-catcher and taken before the United States commissioner, George T. Curtis. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., appeared far him and presented a most persuasive petition to Chief Justice Shaw, to no avail whatever. Shadrach was rescued by some other Negroes, but Dana found the real import of the situation in Shaw's attitude:

"The conduct of the Chief justice, his evident disinclination to act, the frivolous nature of his objections, and his insulting manner to me, have troubled me more than any other manifestation. It shows me how deeply seated, so as to affect, unconsciously I doubt not, good men like him, is this selfish hunkerism of the property interest on the slave question."

Dana appeared also for Thomas Sims, similarly taken while he worked as waiter in a Boston hotel, but was unable to carry his point before the Massachusetts judge, the Federal judge, or the United States commissioner. An armed escort of a hundred city police conducted Sims to a ship a little before daybreak on April I z, 1851. As the vessel sailed, Sims shouted, `And is this Massachusetts liberty?'

Most moving of all, however, was the case of Anthony Burns, who was arrested in Boston on a trumped up charge, May 20, 1850, and dragged to a Federal courtroom, where his master identified him as a fugitive. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a leader of the crowd which, after speeches by Parker and Phillips, endeavored to rescue Burns, but succeeded only in killing one of his guards. Dana's brilliant legal efforts again failed, and a $1200-slave was conducted down State Street to the wharf by a 'marshal's guard' of r z¢ roughs and I 140 armed United States soldiers, aided by the ominous presence of 22 companies of Massachusetts militia and the whole Boston police force.

The cost of enforcement, estimated at more than $40,000 in this case, was some index to the degree of antagonism which the Fugitive Slave Law had aroused in Boston. And the spectacle which Burns presented went far to stir sympathy for him and for his fellows. It was becoming almost the thing to be an abolitionist.

FURTHER INCIDENTS IN BROOKLINE

Recruits to the cause were coming in more readily now. Martin Kennard moved to Brookline in I850 and became active on the Vigilance Committee, which included Mr. Bowditch and Mr. Loring among its members. These were only three of the growing number who were ever willing to respond to an emergency, and to make any effort to aid in an escape.

When a slave rescued from the brig Cameo and hid in Lewis Haydn's house in Boston was reported discovered, Mr. Bowditch drove in with his carryall, helped to disguise the fugitive in women's clothes, and with Austin Bearse drove the frightened Negro to Concord at night. There he was entrusted to judge Brooks, a sympathizer, and Mr. Bowditch returned to Brookline for breakfast.

Many another runaway passed through his hands, aided by friendly counsel, money, and heroic personal exertion. His efforts were, however, by no means confined to furthering escapes, for he was active in winning public support for the abolitionist cause. Frequent meetings were held between 1850 and 1860, announced by notices which Mr. Bowditch tacked up along Walnut Street and near Coolidge Comer in the hope that as many as half of them would survive the efforts of the vandals who sought to tear them down.

A different kind of service was rendered by Amos Adams Lawrence, a Brookline merchant and industrialist who was one of the founders and financial backers of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society. This organization was founded to promote the settlement of Kansas, and the setting up of a `squatter' government which would block the introduction of slavery there. A party of emigrants sent out in the summer of 1854 founded the town of Lawrence, Kansas, named in honor of this sponsor.

Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Edward Atkinson, in consequence of the importance which they attached to the situation in Kansas, aided John Brown to obtain the arms which he insisted were necessary to meet aggression by pro-slavery men there. When Brown's career culminated in the ill-considered raid at Harper's Ferry and his subsequent execution, conservative New Englanders were alienated from the abolitionist cause, which during the years between I85¢ and 1859 had been progressing most encouragingly.

Wild talk and uncontrolled imaginings resulted in an attempt to arrest all who had been associated with John Brown, and his hunted son sought and found refuge at the home of Mr. Bowditch in Brookline. It is said that his extensive armament frightened the maid servant, and that Mr. Bowditch assured Brown that such defenses were not needed. `Perhaps not,' he answered, `but it is safer. I am resolved never to be taken alive.' He was unmolested while he remained in Brookline.