The Gauntlet Is Thrown

A gentle rain gathered in rivulets that drained the streets of a week of showers. It was not the sort of weather that was usually experienced during February in north central Massachusetts. If the winter of 1851 witnessed mild temperatures, the political climate was anything but temperate. Sectional differences between the Northern and Southern states generated a gathering storm, principally fueled by the slavery debate. The discourse was not an academic exercise, nor was it a wrangle over racial prejudice, segregated public facilities, or the integration of schools. Slavery was a system of sheer brutality. Slaves were tortured, whipped, and mutilated. Women held as slaves were raped without recourse, and their children were torn away from them by owners who traded them as a commodity. Slaves were not persons. They were property.

The "slavery question," as contemporaries labeled the deep-seated emotions on both sides of the issue, reverberated throughout the nation. Cities and towns, villages and hamlets, from Maine to California and Boston to Savannah, all served as venues for the war of words. Leominster, Massachusetts, was no different. Located forty miles west of Boston and ten miles south of the New Hampshire border, Leominster was a small manufacturing town inhabited by some 3,121 souls, according to the 1850 US census. Leominster, like a number of communities throughout New England, had an active group of abolitionists who had been organized and operating since the early 1840s.

The abolition movement was scarcely a decade old when the first recorded references of its presence in Leominster appeared in 1841. If there was a single point marking the commencement of the antislavery reform movement, it surely coincided with William Lloyd Garrison's publication of the Liberator. In his inaugural edition of the newspaper, Garrison wrote

Let Southern oppressors tremble—let their secret abettors tremble—let their Northern apologist tremble—let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble. ***I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm ... I am in earnest. —I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.

Garrison's crusade to end slavery in America was not welcomed, not even in Boston, Massachusetts. Too many of Boston's elite made their living as bankers, shippers, insurers, or mill owners and were therefore inextricably linked to Southern cotton plantations that supplied the raw material which helped fuel their businesses.

In October of 1835, Garrison sponsored a trip to America by British abolitionist George Thompson, one of the major proponents of Parliament's Emancipation Act of 1833, which freed the slaves of the British West Indies. Thompson was scheduled to address the ladies of the Boston Female Antislavery Society at their regular monthly meeting on the twenty-first of the month. Before Thompson could make his way to No. 46 Washington Street, the Society's office, opposers circulated a handbill throughout the streets of Boston. Prepared at the direction of two well-established merchants, the handbill promised a reward of one hundred dollars to "the individual who shall first lay violent hands on Thompson so he can be brought to the tar kettle before dark."

The handbill and a gathering mob had a chilling effect. Thompson, already the target of protests and brickbats in Lowell, Lynn, and Abington, Massachusetts, and Concord, New Hampshire, was dissuaded from attending the meeting; Garrison was not. The Boston mob was anything but a rabble of commoners. The riotous citizenry comprised merchants, bankers, insurers, mill owners, and shippers, all an integral part of an alliance with Southern plantation owners who supplied the raw material supporting their business.

Garrison was no less despised by the mob than Thompson. When thousands showed up at the ladies' meeting looking for Thompson, only to learn he was out of the city, their rage was directed toward Garrison, who had arrived at the ladies' meeting hall at 2:00 p.m. About a hundred women were prevented from attending their own meeting, scheduled to commence at 3:00 p.m. Mrs. Maria Chapman Weston, who would become a frequent correspondent with a particular Leominster abolitionist, had requested protection for the ladies prior to the meeting. Her request went unheeded, and there were no peace officers present to escort the ladies upstairs to the hall.

A group of ladies, numbering approximately twenty-five, arrived early enough to make it to the meeting room before the hostile crowd gathered. Miss Mary Parker called the small assembly to order, as scheduled, with a prayer of forgiveness for their enemies. The meeting was interrupted by Mayor Theodore Lyman soon after it began. The mayor suggested the ladies disband rather than witness "a scene of bloodshed and confusion." Mrs. Chapman asked the mayor to appeal to his friends and use his "personal influence with them." Boston's chief executive told Mrs. Chapman, "I know no personal friends; I am merely an official." Mrs. Chapman courageously replied, "If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere." Despite her brave pronouncement, Mrs. Chapman and the other ladies, some of them black, were persuaded to leave, suffering taunts and insults as they made their way through the angry crowd. Each of the Negro members was escorted by two other ladies, their safety being of heightened concern. Garrison, who left the meeting hall early and secured himself behind a partition in his office, did not leave the building with the ladies.

Garrison's afternoon was one of sheer terror. The mob's intent ranged from hanging him to a plan to strip, tar, and feather the abolitionist and finish the job by dyeing his "face and hands black in a manner that would never change from a night Negro color." That Garrison survived the day was a near miracle. He was chased, harried, and captured. Through the efforts of Lyman and others, he was finally deposited in the Leverett Street jail for his own protection. On the wall of his cell he recorded the following:

Wm. Lloyd Garrison was put into this cell on Wednesday afternoon, Oct. 21, 1835, to save him from the violence of a "respectable and influential" mob, who sought to destroy him for preaching the abominable...