As with all of the original 13 colonies/states, the evils of slavery and segregation were part of Massachusetts history. Although slavery officially existed in Massachusetts until 1788 when a state law was enacted that banned slavery and the slave trade in the Commonwealth, institutional racial segregation was allowed to carry on until the middle of the nineteenth century.
In 1705 the Massachusetts Colonial Legislature enacted a law that “prohibited marriage and fornification” between negroes or mulattoes and whites. In 1786, the prohibition against fornification was eliminated but the ban against intermarriage was now expanded to include Indians. These state laws against inter-racial marriage were enforced until legislative repeal in the 1840’s.
Racial segregation was evident in railroad accommodations in the Commonwealth. On a number of railroad lines in Massachusetts, black citizens were placed either in a separate car by themselves or in railroad cars often neither “decent nor comfortable”. A Massachusetts law prohibiting the practice of racial segregation in mass transportation was finally enacted in 1842.
Public schools in the Massachusetts communities of Salem, Nantucket, and Boston were racially segregated into the 1840’s and 1850’s. All Massachusetts public schools finally became integrated in 1855 with the enactment of a law “prohibiting all distinctions of color and religion in Massachusetts public school admissions.”
Slavery
History of Slavery in Massachusetts
Excerpts from The Massachusetts House of Representatives Committee Report for a Bill concerning the Admission of “Free Negroes and Mulattoes” into the State of Massachusetts, January 16, 1822.
1754 Massachusetts Slave Census
Searchable enumeration for 119 towns and 2,720 slaves.
1787 Salem, Massachusetts Slave Ship Revolt
Documentation of a slave ship revolt.
Further Reading:
Rantoul, Robert Sr. Negro Slavery in Massachusetts. Salem, MA: Essex Institute, 1887
Segregation
Massachusetts Railroad Segregation: Introduction
Racial segregation was evident in railroad accommodations in the Commonwealth. On a number of railroad lines in Massachusetts, black citizens were placed either in a separate car by themselves or in railroad cars often neither “decent nor comfortable”
Intermarriage. In The House Of Representatives, March 6th, 1840. No. 46
The joint special committee to whom were referred the petition of James P. Boyce and 242 other legal voters of Lynn, and many other petitions similar in tenor.
Massachusetts Segregated Public Schools: Salem, Nantucket & Boston
Racial segregation in the admission of students to Massachusetts Public Schools was evident in these three municipalities until the mid-1850′s.
Further Reading:
Fugitive Slave Law
Recovery of Citizens of Massachusetts Unlawfully Imprisoned in Southern States. House No. 35
All ‘the papers now on file in the Executive Department, written since the year 1834, touching on the recovery of citizens of Massachusetts unlawfully imprisoned in any of the Southern States.”
Correspondence with Virginia in the Case of George Lattimer. House No. 9
All correspondence between ‘the Governor, or authorities of the State of Virginia,’ and the Executive Department of this Commonwealth, touching the case of George Lattimer.
Slavery, and the Admission of New States. House No. 44
The joint special committee, to whom were referred the petition of Spencer Vining, and 272 others, of Abington, and many other petitions of the same tenor, relating to the power and duty of Congress to abolish slavery.
Imprisonment of Colored Seamen. House No. 48
The petition of J. Ingersoll Bowditch and others, merchants of Boston; also the report and resolutions of the State of Georgia, transmitted by His Excellency the Governor; also orders an order of the House of the 11th inst.; and lastly, the Message of His Excellency the Governor , communicating copies of papers in the executive department since 1834, —all of which orders and papers have reference to the imprisonment of colored seamen, citizens of Massachusetts, in the southern ports of the United States.
Further Reading:
Abolition
The weekly abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, edited by William Lloyd Garrison, began publication in 1831. Throughout the 1830’s to the 1850’s, a number of Boston-based abolition and anti-slavery organizations played an important role in the movement.
Selections from The Liberator
A searchable collection of 500 selected articles from William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, documenting notable figures in the movement and anti-slavery societies:
- Abolition Societies
- Boston Vigilance Committee
- Anti-Slavery Societies
- Temperance Societies
- Colonization Society
- Emancipation Society
- N.E. Freedom Association
- Young Men’s Literary Society
- Prison Discipline Society
- Adephic Union Library Association
- Moral Reform Society
- Free Produce Association
Petition of William C. Nell to Erect a Statue of Crispus Attucks. House No. 100
The Committee on the Militia, to whom was referred the petition of William C. Nell and others, for the appropriation of fifteen hundred dollars, to erect a monument of Crispus Attucks.
Further Reading:
Anti-Abolition Societies
Not all Bostonians were in favor of abolition. This was for a variety of reasons, mostly economic. This anti-abolition faction in Boston occasionally resorted to violence, as was the case on October 21, 1835 when an angry pro-slavery group seized William Lloyd Garrison and dragged his through the streets with a rope around his waist, threatening to kill him.
Papers Relating to the Garrison Mob.
Edited by Theodore Lyman. Cambridge: Welch, Bigelow, and Co., 1870.
For more infomation on anti-abolitionist violence, we recommend Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolitionist Mobs in Jacksonian America by Leonard L. Richards.
Antebellum Race Riots
1843 Riot on Ann Street (Boston’s North End)
A combination of contemporary Boston newspaper accounts of a racial riot in 1843 from The Emancipator and Free American and the Boston Semi-Weekly Atlas published August 31, 1834.
The Underground Railroad in Massachusetts
An important source of information on this topic is Wilbur Siebert’s Underground Railroad in Massachusetts. Several pages of his extensive 1935 study describe “Black North” and “The Out-bound Underground Traffic Lines of Boston.”
Boston’s Reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law Through the Boston Vigilance Committee
Student Allison Woitunski’s research paper tracks the influence of this group from the account book of Francis Jackson of the Boston Vigilance Committee.
Selected Bibliography:
Abzug, Robert H. “The Influence of Garrisonian Abolitionists’ Fears of Slave Violence on the Antislavery Argument, 1829-40,” The Journal of Negro History 55: 1 (Jan.
1970): 15-26.
Andrews, Dee E. “Imagining Emancipation: Recent Writings on American Antislavery,” The Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 117-130.
Aptheker, Herbert T. Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement. Boston: Twanye Publishers, 1989
Aptheker, Herbert T. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: From Colonial Times to the Founding of the NAACP in 1910. New York: The Citadel
Press, 1969.
Aptheker , Herbert T. To Be Free: Pioneering Studies in Afro-American History. Carol Publishing Group, 1991
Bell, Howard H. “Free Negroes of the North 1830-1835: A Study in National Cooperation,” The Journal of Negro Education 26: 4 (Autumn 1957): 447-455.
Bell, Howard H. Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions 1830-1864. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969.
Bial, Raymond. The Underground Railroad.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995.
Blackett, R. J. M., Building and Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Bolt, Christine, The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Reconstruction: A Study in Anglo-American Co-operation 1833-1877. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Bolster, Jeffery W. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1997
Bolster, W. Jeffrey. “‘To Feel Like a Man’: Black Seamen in the Northern States, 1800-1860,” The Journal of American History 76: 4 (March 1990): 1173-1199.
Brooks, Elaine. “Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society,” The Journal of Negro History 30: 3 (July 1945): 311-330.
Brooks, Joanna. “Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy,” African American Review 34: 2 (Summer 2000): 197-216.
Browne, Patrick T. J. “‘To Defend Mr. Garrison’: William Cooper Nell and the Personal Politics of Antislavery’,” The New England Quarterly 70: 3 (Sep., 1997): 415-442.
Cromwell, Adelaide M. The Other Brahmins : Boston’s Black Upper Class 1750-1950. Fayetteville: The University Of Arkansas Press. 2002
Curry, Leonard. The Free Black in Urban America 1800-1850: The Shadow of a Dream. Chicago. University of Chicago Press 1989
Daniels, John. In Freedom’s Birthplace: A Study of Boston’s Negros. Boston: Houghton Millian Company, 1914.
Demos, John. “The Antislavery Movement and the Problem of Violent ‘Means’,” The New England Quarterly 37: 4. (Dec. 1964): 501-526.
Dumond, Dwight Lowell. A Bibliography of Anti-Slavery in America. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1961.
Earle, Jonathan. “Marcus Morton and the Dilemma of Jacksonian Antislavery in Massachusetts, 1817-1849,” The Massachusetts Review 4 (2002): 61-88.
Gara, Larry: The Liberty Line: the Legend of the Underground Rail Road. Lexington. University of Kentucky Press. 1967
Gardner, Eric. “‘This Attempt of Their Sister’: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig from Printer to Readers,”
The New England Quarterly 66: 2 (June 1993): 226-246.
Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work Benevolence. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990.
Grover, Kathryn and Janine V. da Silva. Historic Resource Study, Boston African American National Historic Site.
31 December 2002.
Hammett, Theodore M. “Two Mobs of Jacksonian Boston: Ideology and Interest,” The Journal of American
History 62: 4 (March 1976): 845-868.
Hancock, Scott. “The Elusive Boundaries of Blackness: Identity Formation in Antebellum Boston,”
The Journal of Negro History 84: 2 (Spring,
1999): 115-129.
Handlin, Oscar. Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation. New York: Athenaeum, 1872.
Hayden, Robert C. The African Meeting House in Boston: A Celebration of History. Boston: Companion
Press Book, 1987.
Horton, James Oliver. “Generations of Protest: Black Families and Social Reform in Ante-Bellum Boston,”
The New England Quarterly 49: 2 (June 1976): 242-256.
Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum
North. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979.
Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern
Free Blacks, 1700-1800. New York: Oxford University Press,
1997
Housley, Kathleen. “‘Yours for the Oppressed’: The Life of Jehiel C. Beman,” The Journal of Negro History
77: 1 (Winter 1992): 17-29.
Huston, James L. “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse,” The Journal of
Southern History 56: 4 (Nov. 1990): 609-640.
Jacobs, Donald M. “The Nineteenth Century Struggle Over Segregated Education in the Boston Schools,”
The Journal of Negro Education 39: 1 (Winter 1970): 76-85.
James, Jennifer Lee. “Jehiel C. Beman: A Leader of the Northern Free Black Community” (in “Proceedings of the 79th and 80th Meetings of ASALH – Student Essay Contest Winners”) The Journal of Negro History 82: 1 (Winter
1997): 133-157.
Kaplan, Sidney. “The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864,” The Journal of Negro History 34: 3 (July 1949): 274-343.
Kennicott, Patrick C. “Black Persuaders in the Antislavery Movement,” Journal of Black Studies 1: 1 (Sep. 1970): 5-20.
Kraditor, Aileen. Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks 1989
Levesque, George A. “Inherent Reformers-Inherited Orthodoxy: Black Baptists in Boston, 1800-1873,” The Journal of Negro History 60: 4 (Oct. 1975): 491-525.
Lewis, Earl. “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” The American Historical Review 100: 3 (June 1995): 765-787.
Lincoln, C. Eric. The Negro Church in America: The Black Church Since Frazier. New York: Schocken Books, 1974.
Litwack, Leon: North of South: The Negro in the Free States 1790-1860. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1961
Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Non-Violent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. Toronto: The Macmillan Company, 1970.
Mayer, Henry. “William Lloyd Garrison: The Undisputed Master of the Cause of Negro Liberation,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 23 (Spring 1999): 105-109.
McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
McCaskill, Barbara. “‘Yours Very Truly’: Ellen Craft–The Fugitive as Text and Artifact,” African American Review 28: 4 (Winter 1994): 509-529.
Melish, Joanne Pope. “The ‘Condition’Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic 19: 4, Special Issue on Racial Consciousness and Nation-Building in the Early Republic. (Winter 1999): 651-672.
Miller, Elizabeth W. The Negro in America: A Bibliography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Minkema, Kenneth P. “Jonathan Edward’s Defense of Slavery,” The Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 23-60.
Nell, William C. The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution. Salem, NH: Ayer Co. Publishers, 1986.
Nuermberger, Ruth Ketring. The Free Produce Movement: a Quaker Protest Against Slavery. Durham: Duke University Press, 1942.
Pease, Jane H. and William H. Pease. “Confrontation and Abolition in the 1850s,” The Journal of American History 58: 4 (Mar. 1972): 923-937.
Peterson, Mark A. “The Selling of Joseph: Bostonians, Antislavery and the Protestant International, 1689-1733,” The Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002):1-22.
Piersen, William D. Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth- Century New England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Porter, Dorothy B. “The Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary Societies, 1828-1846,” The Journal of Negro Education 5: 4 (Oct. 1936): 555-576.
Potter, Vilma Raskin. A Reference Guide to Afro-American Publications and Editors: 1827-1946. Iowa: Iowa State University Press/Ames.
Price, George R. and James Brewer Stewart. “The Roberts Case, the Easton Family, and the Dynamics of the Abolitionist Movement in Massachusetts, 1776-1870,” The Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 89-116.
Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Rael, Patrick. Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Reiss, Oscar. Blacks in Colonial America. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers, 1999.
Richards, Leonard L. Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Robboy, Stanley J. and Anita W. Robboy. “Lewis Hayden: From Fugitive Slave to Statesman,” The New England
Quarterly 46: 4 (Dec. 1973): 591-613.
Robertson, Stacy M. “‘A Hard, Cold, Stern Life’: Parker Pillsbury and Grassroots Abolitionism, 1840-1865,” The New England Quarterly 70: 2 (June 1997): 179-210.
Robinson, William H. Black New England Letters: The Uses of Writings in Black New England. Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1977.
Rosen, Bruce. “Abolition and Colonization, the Years of Conflict: 1829-1834,” Phylon (1960-) 33: 2 (2nd Qtr. 1972): 177-192.
Rubin, Jay. “Black Nativism: The European Immigrant in Negro Thought, 1830-1860,” Phylon (1960-) 39: 3 (3rd Qtr. 1978): 193-202.
Ruchames, Louis. “Jim Crow Railroads in Massachusetts,” American Quarterly 8: 1 (Spring, 1956): 61-75.
Ruchames, Louis. “William Lloyd Garrison and the Negro Franchise,” The Journal of Negro History 50: 1 (Jan. 1965): 37-49.
Small, Miriam R. and Edwin W. Small. “Prudence Crandall Champion of Negro Education,” The New England Quarterly 17: 4 (Dec. 1944): 506-529.
Smith, Earl. “‘William Cooper Nell on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850’,” The Journal of Negro History 66: 1. (Spring 1981): 37-40.
Smith, Robert P. “William Cooper Nell: Crusading Black Abolitionist,” The Journal of Negro History 55: 3 (July 1970): 182-199.
Stapp, Carol Buchalter. Afro-American in Antebellum Boston: An Analysis of Probate Records. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1993.
Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionist and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Stewart, James Brewer. Holy Warriors: the Abolitionists and American Slavery. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.
Tate, Gayle T. “Free Black Resistance in the Antebellum Era, 1830 to 1860,” Journal of Black Studies 28: 6 (July 1998): 764-782.
Thistlethwaite, Frank. The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959.
Von Frank, Albert J. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Walker, Juliet E. K. “Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States before the Civil War,” The Business History Review 60: 3 (Autumn 1986): 343-382.
Wesley, Charles H. “The Negro in the Organization of Abolition,” Phylon (1940-1956) 2: 3 (3rd Qtr. 1941): 223-235.
Wesley, Charles H. “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” The Journal of Negro History 29: 1 (Jan. 1944): 32-74.
White, Arthur O. “Antebellum School Reform in Boston: Integrationists and Separatists,” Phylon (1960-) 34: 2 (2nd Qtr. 1973): 203-217.
White, Arthur O. “The Black Leadership Class and Education in Antebellum Boston,” The Journal of Negro Education 42: 4 (Autumn 1973): 504-515.
Wright, Conrad Edick. Massachusetts and the New Nation. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.
Yacovone, Donald. “The Transformation of the Black Temperance Movement, 1827-1854: An Interpretation,” Journal of the Early Republic 8: 3 (Autumn 1988): 281-297.
Yee, Shirley N. Black Women Abolitionist: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992.
Young, R.J. Antebellum Black Activists: Race, Gender, and Self. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996.
Zorn, Roman J. “The New England Anti-Slavery Society: Pioneer Abolition Organization,” The Journal of Negro History 42: 3 (July 1957): 157-176.
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