Pages

Showing posts with label Stone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stone. Show all posts

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Charles Lenox Remond and others who heard the call of Garrison


Charles Lenox Remond   (February 1, 1810 – December 22, 1873) was an American orator, activist and abolitionist based in Massachusetts. From my column They answered Garrison's anti slavery call


Pioneer abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison attracted a legion of revolutionaries who pressed total reform to “break the yoke of oppression.” Garrisonian satellite groups rose all over, crusading for social equality. The opposing public filled the editorial pages, calling Garrisonians “a farce,” not short of “Bedlam let loose,” subscribing to “hot headed ravings of an insane man.”
Andover Theology School and Phillips Academy ordered Abolition Society (A.S.) meetings to cease “as they did not wish to identify with Garrison’s imprudence.” On the issue of slavery, the order was “not to pray about it publicly.” Nevertheless, over 50 of the firebrand fellows joined an A.S. off campus and were expelled. Two of the Andover “defiers,” Richard Rust and Gilbert Pillsbury, enrolled in the progressive Noyes Academy in N.H.

Both men would play an instrumental role in the abolitionist movement. Rust helped set up Wilberforce University, the first college to be owned and operated by African Americans. He established Rust College, offering teacher training for freed slaves, and went on to organize 14 others. 
 

Francis and Archibald Grimké From The Earnest Protest of Francis Grimké

Pillsbury was elected commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau of South Carolina. His wife, Ann Francis Ray, opened a school for black students that included the Grimké brothers. The Pillsbury family also sponsored them, sending Archibald to Harvard and Francis to Princeton. Both became co-founders of the NAACP. 
Charles Lenox. Remond, a black lawyer from Salem, won the favor of those “generally dark on the issue of slavery and prejudice” with his compelling speeches. He was a global reformer, and society ladies from Bangor to Newport financed his travels. On one mission, Redmond brought back 60,000 signatures endorsed by the lord mayor of Dublin encouraging Irishmen in America to oppose slavery and “insist on liberty for all regardless of color, creed, or country.”
During the Civil War, Remond recruited soldiers for the black regiments while Garrison and his associates raised funds to support them.
His sister, Sarah Parker Remond, a brilliant orator and gutsy woman, challenged discrimination on all levels. In 1853, Remond made national headlines when she filed suit against Boston Howard Athenaeum. The opera house forcibly evicted her when she declined her seat in the segregated area. She won and was awarded $500.

Sarah Parker Remond (1826-1894) From ‘Bury Me Not in a Land of Slaves’: Unsung Legacy of Frances Harper & Sara Remond

While overseas, Sarah Remond sparred with the American Embassy in London when denied a passport to France due to her color. She remedied the matter by contacting the press. When the buzz circulated, the British foreign secretary approved her visa. She got her medical degree and established a successful practice in Italy.


Charles C. Burleigh (Photo) met Mary Moody Emerson at a lecture and aroused her with Garrison’s valiant deeds, and by the end of the evening she declared: “he out be canonized!”
Some sources suggest Burleigh’s long flowing beard and sandy ringlets may have sealed the deal.
Mary Emerson rallied her Concord friends like Lousia Alcott and Lidian Emerson to raise a handsome sum to aid fugitive slaves.
The Anthony Burns case, where a fugitive slave was recaptured in Boston, tried and sent back to slavery, fueled anti-slavery sentiment and Garrison publicly burned a copy of the Fugitive Slave Act. 

Amos A. Lawrence was one of the many who redeemed his “old fashioned, Whig conservative” ways and “woke up a stark mad Abolitionist.” J. B. Swasey was “a new convert and a very zealous one” (Charlotte Forten Grimke). Many noted he lit up the Port during his speeches.
Caleb Cushing’s “zeal and ability” to defend the abolitionist cause was not above board, as he “failed to remember the pledges” he promised. Cushing’s attempt to suppress his antislavery record and gain power with the Whig party was quickly diminished by John Greenleaf Whittier, who reprinted a telling letter from Cushing with a witty preface, sinking his ambitions.
The petition to boot Judge Edward G. Loring from the bench over the Anthony Burns tragedy put Cushing back in the arena. The newspapers printed his performance, praising him as he brought down the house with his attacks on Garrison, “a half insane colored man,” and a few “possessed with monomania” as representative of the true commonwealth. Cushing was wrong, as Loring was disrobed and had lost the confidence of the people.
In the first edition of The Liberator Garrison wrote: “I WILL BE HEARD!” Well, he was heard and so were his soul sparkers. They spoke “in a slumbering nation’s ear,” and “the fetter’s link” was broken!
HBCU RESEARCH Magazine



Soldiers of the 54th From Detour to Liberty: Black Troops in Florida during the Civil War




In 1840, Charles Lenox Redman was an American delegate to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, but he refused to take his seat when women delegates were segregated from the main floor into the gallery. He remained in England and Ireland lecturing against slavery and returned to the United States in 1841 with an "Address from the People of Ireland," with 60,000 signatures, that called on Irish Americans to oppose slavery and all discrimination. He became a close friend and associate of Frederick Douglass, initially advocating peaceful means to end slavery, but became increasingly militant. He broke with Douglass in 1852 when the latter refused to adopt the view that the U.S. Constitution was an instrument of slaveholders. Remond increasingly advocated violent means if necessary to overthrow slavery, declaring "slaves were bound by their love of justice to rise at once, en masse, and throw off their fetters." At the outbreak of the Civil War, Remond joined Douglass in recruiting black soldiers for the Massachusetts 54th and 55th regiments. After the war he continued to lecture for the freedman and worked as an official of the customs house in Boston. (bio by: Bob on Gallows Hill)



PHOTO: Abolitionist group at Lucy Stone's house, undated. Picture includes: Samuel May, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth B. Chase, Francis Garrison, Sarah Stone, Samuel E. Sewall, George T. Garrison, Zilpha H. Spooner, Wendell P. Garrison, Henry B. Blackwell and Theodore D. Weld. By Notman Photograph Company, Boston, Massachusetts. Photograph courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Author's note: The reference to William Lloyd Garrison in this citation is probably to his son William Lloyd Garrison Jr.   From Common Place

  • African-American Orators: A Bio-critical Source book edited by Richard W. Leeman 
  • The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: National protection for national citizens, 1873 to 1880
  • Charles Lenox Remond: Black Abolitionist, 1838-1873 William Edward Ward
  • The Frederick Douglass Papers: 1842-1852 By Frederick Douglass
  • The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké By Charlotte L. Forten
  • Picture From Find a Grave
  • Hidden History of Salem By Susanne Saville
  • The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne By Margaret B. Moore
  • Charles Benson: Mariner of Color in the Age of Sail By Michael Sokolow
  • Black Past.org
  • See Salem Women's History

Friday, March 14, 2014

George Peabody roots of success started in Newburyport



George Peabody was an American-British entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded the Peabody Trust in Britain and the Peabody Institute and George Peabody Library in Baltimore, and was responsible for many other charitable initiatives.  
History of Essex County, Massachusetts: With Biographical Sketches of Many of Its Pioneers and Prominent Men, Volume 2 George Peabody, of London began his business career in Newburyport. He was born February 18, 1795, in that part of Danvers which in 1855 was incorporated as South Danvers and in 1868 named Peabody. He there received his early education, and in 1811, at the age of sixteen, left school and entered as clerk the store of his uncle, David Peabody, in Newburyport. His companions there in social life were Charles Storey, Abner Caldwell and Francis B. Somerby, and it was on the evening of the last of May, 1811, that these young men started for home from Hart’s tavern, where they had been bowling, and young Peabody, leaving Storey and Caldwell near the foot of Kent Street and Somerby at Market Street, proceeded on alone. On reaching Inn Street he saw flames bursting out from Lawrence’s stable and gave the alarm. This was the beginning of the great fire, as it is always called, which swept over sixteen and a. half acres of the most compactly built and the busiest part of the town. More than two hundred buildings were consumed between half-past nine o’clock in the evening and sunrise the next morning. Nearly all the shops for the sale of dry-goods, four printing-ofiices, the custom-house, the post-oilice, two insurance ofiices, four book-stores, one meeting-house and a hundred dwellings were consumed, and suffering and privation ensued which the warm-hearted liberality of Boston and other towns only partially alleviated.
From Mr. Peabody at the Essex County Fair
Date: Saturday, October 4, 1856
Paper: Daily Atlas (Boston, MA) Volume: XXV Issue: 81 Page: 2


Mr. Peabody remained with his uncle until some time after the fire, when he made arrangements to go into business in Baltimore. So well had he performed his duties as clerk, that he obtained from his uncle and Prescott Spalding and others a joint letter to James Reed, a large wholesale dry-goods dealer in Boston, offering to be security for Peabody in the aggregate sum of $2500 for goods which Mr. Reed might furnish to establish his store. The signers of the letter were all customers of Mr. Reed, who believing that he could trust the person in whom they put their faith, told him that $2500 would be rather a small amount to start a dry-goods store in Baltimore, and offered him goods to the amount of $2500 more to sell on commission for him, so that not only did Mr. Peabody learn his first business lessons in Newburyport, but to the merchants of that town he owed also that timely aid without which that career of prosperity and wealth upon which he afterwards entered may never have been begun.

Not long after he became a partner of Elisha Riggs in the dry-goods trade in New York, and afterwards ‘ again in Baltimore. During all this period he made occasional visits to Newburyport, and always remembered with pleasure his old friends in that town. A writer in the Newburyport Herald remembers hearing Frank Somerby on a morning in the summer of 1826 shout to Spalding, “ Here comes George Peabody.” “I looked,” says the writer, “and saw coming down the street a tall, fresh-looking, well-dressed man of about thirty years of age. He was swinging his right arm and shouting, ‘Hello! Frank.’ In a few moments there were a. dozen old friends gathered about him, and the warmth of the greeting gave ample evidence of the estimation in which he was held." This was his first visit to Newburyport since he left it twelve or thirteen years before.


In 1843, Riggs and Peabody separated, and their business, which had expanded and largely changed its character, was divided. Riggs took the Baltimore business, Peabody the London and Mr. Corcoran, who had been some time also a partner, took the Washington. His career in London is too well known to be restated. Out of his abundant wealth, without waiting for that separation from his riches which death must eventually cause, he preferred the bestowment of benefactions during his life. In 1852 he gave to his native town $20,000 for the foundation of an institute, and afterwards increased the amount to $200,000. He contributed $10,000 to the first Grinnell Arctic Expedition, and in 1857 gave $300,000 to found an institute of science, literature and the fine arts in Baltimore, afterwards increasing it to $1,400,000. For the benefit of the poor of London he gave in 1862 £500,000, in recognition of which the Queen presented him with her portrait, and the city of London presented him with the freedom of the city in a gold box, and after his death the citizens erected a statue to his memory. In 1866 he gave to Harvard College $150,000 to establish a museum and professorship of American Archaeology and Ethnology, and afterwards $150,000 to found a geological professorship in Yale College, and $2,000,000 to the Southern Educational Fund.

On the 20th of February, 1867, two years before his death, he gave to “ Edward Mosely, Caleb Cushing, Henry C. Perkins, Eben F. Stone and Joshua Hale, and their successors, the sum of $15,000 to be held by them in trust and kept permanently invested, and the income thereof used and applied in their discretion to the enlargement of the public library of the city of Newburyport."

Ebenezer Moseley From Clipper Heritage Trail

Moses Davenport
During the mayoralty of Moses Davenport he again visited Newburyport and-was introduced by him to the people. Among the crowd was a gray-haired veteran who, on taking him by the hand, said : “You do not remember me, Mr. Peabody." He at once replied : “You are Prescott Spaulding, and were a clerk in the store next to ours at the time of the fire in 1811, which drove me away from this good old town.” An old lady said: “Let me shake hands with you, Mr. Peabody ; you do not certainly remember me.” “Yes, I do,” said be, after a moment; “ I think you are Rebecca Tracy, and I am glad to see you. We will not tell these gentlemen about our playing whist forty years ago.”

Mr. Peabody was said to have had a love-affair in Newburyport, and it was further said that the father of the lady said: “ George is a very good young man, but he has no money and can never support you in the style you must live in." He died in London, November 4, l869.

Read a great tidbit about Peabody paying his tab at a tavern in Concord NH 




From  Monday, July 28, 1851 Paper: Salem Register (Salem, MA) Page: 2


 Dedication of the Danvers Archival Center at Memorial Hall, Spring of 1973.

From  Wednesday, January 7, 1857 Paper: Boston Evening Transcript (Boston, MA)