Resolve and Rescue: The True Story of Frances Drake and the Antislavery Movement - Softcover

Bodanza, Mark C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1491728957 ISBN 13: 9781491728956

Publisher: iUniverse, 2014

Synopsis

Where Frances Drake saw injustice, she tried to right it, and where freedom was denied, she fought to secure it. In Resolve and Rescue, author and historian Mark C. Bodanza explores the life of this Massachusetts woman who took up the cause of the slave early in the antislavery movement. He shows how, in an age dominated by men, Drake never allowed the disadvantages suffered by her gender to impede the great object of her work, the end of slavery in America. Resolve and Rescue narrates the story of this woman, born in 1814, who had an uncommon energy. She toiled for more than two decades to end slavery in ways great and small, including the promotion of some of the greatest speakers of the abolition movement. Her efforts were not limited to speeches or theory, but she publicly participated in the rescue of many fugitive slaves, including the first test case in New England under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; Bodanza also demonstrates that her fight wasn't limited to ending slavery, as she worked tirelessly for racial equality and women's rights. Resolve and Rescue shares the life story of Frances Drake, her conviction and courage displaying a timeless example of promoting justice and equality.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Resolve and Rescue

The True Story of Frances Drake and the Antislavery Movement

By Mark C. Bodanza

iUniverse LLC

Copyright © 2014 Mark C. Bodanza
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-2895-6

Contents

Preface, xi, 
Acknowledgments, xiii, 
Introduction, xv, 
1. The Gauntlet Is Thrown, 1, 
2. Leominster at the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution, 7, 
3. Family Life and Loss, 13, 
4. The Flame Is Fanned—The Boston Years, 19, 
5. Joining the Abolition Movement in Leominster, 24, 
6. Ladies of the "True Stamp", 30, 
7. The Clergy and Abolition, 36, 
8. America's Expansion and Party Politics, 42, 
9. The Union Is Threatened, 66, 
10. The New Fugitive Slave Law, 73, 
11. A Great Test, 79, 
12. The Rescue, 85, 
13. Everything Is Changed, 91, 
14. Abolition Gains New Allies, 94, 
15. The Rise of the Republican Party, 99, 
16. Compassion and Change, 106, 
Epilogue, 119, 
Bibliography, 123, 
Endnotes, 129, 
Index, 143, 

CHAPTER 1

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 and dangerous doctrine that "all men are created equal," and that all oppression is odious in the sight of God. "Hail, Columbia!" Cheers for the Autocrat of Russia and the Sultan of Turkey!

Reader, let this inscription remain till the last slave in this despotic land be loosed from his fetters.

With the greatest of irony, Garrison was released from the jail the next morning but not before being arraigned on a warrant that read Garrison "did disturb and break the peace of the Commonwealth, and a riot did cause and make, to the terror of the good people of the Commonwealth ..." Once freed, Garrison made his way out of the state to Rhode Island for a time, his safety in Boston being impossible.

The experience of William Lloyd Garrison in Boston was repeated in other communities throughout New England and New York State during the fall of 1835. For all the evils of slavery, most of America's political and business leadership were unwilling to disrupt a practice that was legally supported and sanctioned and ingrained as a vital part of the domestic economy.

Leominster did not experience the clamor of the Boston streets, but the town's leaders were not very impressed with the case for abolition during the 1830s. If the town's leaders opposed the practice of slavery to some extent, they certainly weren't willing to dissolve the union of states over the controversy. In 1837, the eighty-year-old Jonas Kendall, former congressman, tavern-keeper, businessman, and local official, summed up the sentiment in an address he made as the sole survivor of the Leominster Artillery Company:

A dissolution of the Union has often been threatened, I have heard it on the floor of Congress from members from the Southern States that a separation might take place between the North and the South; this cannot happen without civil war and bloodshed; the prejudice of the South against the North is at this time of sufficient magnitude; Why should we increase it by feeble attempt to interfere with their Constitutional rights to hold their black population in slavery; they hold this right by an agreement between the several members who formed the Constitution; without this compromise it could never have been adopted by the several States.

One early record of abolitionists residing in Leominster, and the only known listing to survive, counted 136 members of the town's antislavery society as of 1841, when the town's total population was just over two thousand. Leominster experienced a marked increase in population between 1840 and 1850. The number of inhabitants grew by more than fifty percent.

The antislavery debate in Leominster, like elsewhere in the Northern states, had evolved, too. The circumstances had changed significantly by 1850. There were still many whose chief objective was to prevent a dissolution of the states and those who recognized the constitutional protection and basis for slavery. Yet the ranks of the antislavery cause were growing both in numbers and zeal. If there was any inhabitant of Leominster that embodied this ardor for the antislavery cause, it was Frances Drake.

Mrs. Drake and her husband, Jonathan, lived in a small cottage just to the south of Leominster's center. They made their home on Franklin Street, a road no more than two hundred yards long. The street, dotted with other small cottages, sheltered the townspeople who plied a trade or worked in a manufacturing shop. In more than a century since its founding, Leominster's original center had relocated a half mile south of the town's first meeting house and had grown. The growth of the town's center reflected not merely an increase in residents, but also a shift away from agriculture and toward industrial pursuits as diverse as comb-making and the construction of piano cases.

In mid-February 1851, events would unfold at the Drakes' home that would impact the nation. The modest home on Franklin Street, which still stands today, would become a place of great importance belying its humble setting. It is a sturdy, unassuming structure that has stood quietly for nearly two centuries. Yet the house alone is only symbolic. It is merely a backdrop for a series of events that in many ways have passed into obscurity. The folks who lived there in 1851 are the protagonists who breathed life, vitality, and history into the homestead. It is their story that deserves to be told for all the ideals and values they lived so long ago. While generations have passed and memories faded, the magnitude of what they accomplished is no less important now than it was that February day more than 160 years ago.

CHAPTER 2

Leominster at the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution

Frances Drake was born Frances Hills Wilder in Leominster on October 25, 1814. She came into the world during a time of crisis in the United States. The new republic, scarcely more than a generation old, was embroiled in a war with Great Britain. The War of 1812 hit the New England states particularly hard. The war disrupted overseas trade, an integral part of a New England economy already experiencing a growing dependence on manufacturing.

The dominant political party of New England, the Federalists, almost universally opposed the war, its impact on their economy, and the severing of diplomatic relations with Great Britain. The Federalists distrusted the Democratic-Republican Party, their political adversaries. The Democratic-Republicans were inspired by a new sense of nationalism and courted the favor of Great Britain's traditional enemy, France. In the years before the war, debate echoed in congress over the nation's preparedness for war. The parties argued over the proper response to the disruption of overseas trade caused by war between France and Great Britain and which foreign power should find favor with the United States. The Democratic-Republican war hawks got their war. By the time Frances Drake was born, the more zealous Federalists, disillusioned by the course of the nation, convened in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss a number of radical reforms. One of the measures called for the elimination of the Constitution's three-fifths clause, which permitted the slave population of the Southern states to be counted at the rate of sixty percent in determining the number of representatives those states sent to congress. Some of the delegates even called for secession from the Union by the New England states. Slavery and the hypocrisy it embodied in the distribution of the nation's political power was creating early divisions in the fledgling nation.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and is necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." Later he said, relative to slavery, "We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go." The War of 1812 signaled the demise of the Federalist Party as a political force but did nothing to diminish the deeply seated problem of slavery. The war ended with the Treaty of Ghent, signed on Christmas Eve of 1814, two weeks before the Battle of New Orleans that raged before news of the pact reached American shores. The battle, won by the Americans, forever secured the reputation of General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the engagement. Ironically, President Madison and the Democratic-Republicans, the victors, went on to adopt a number of measures previously proposed by the Federalists to support American trade and manufacturing. The establishment of the second Bank of America, a uniform national currency, and protective tariffs, all previously championed by the Federalists, were established to foster American industry.

Comb-making was one of Leominster's earliest industries. The trade was brought to the central Massachusetts town by the Hills family, Frances Drake's maternal ancestors. The practice of using a comb to ornament one's hair or manage long, flowing tendrils is of ancient origin. The earliest combs, fashioned out of a variety of materials, including wood, ivory, and bone, were in many cases works of art and prized objects.

The first comb-maker in America, Enoch Noyes, was from West Newbury, Massachusetts. It was there that he first began the manufacturing of combs in about 1759. As legend has it, a Hessian soldier captured at the Battle of Bennington refined Noyes's simple craft of fashioning combs from horn. The German and nine other mercenaries with whom he served were quartered in West Newbury by Major Little under the orders of General Stark, who commanded their capture. The Hessians were given a liberal amount of freedom in their new town. Noyes's assistant in the comb trade, who took the anglicized name of William Cleland, was one of those Hessian soldiers. In his knapsack he had brought a set of German comb-making tools. Within a generation, Noyes's work in West Newbury would help spread the comb-making trade to a number of other towns throughout New England. Leominster was one of the earliest places to which the comb-makers of West Newbury migrated.

Smith Hills, a resident of West Newbury, came to Leominster in the autumn of 1774, just months before the historic battle of Lexington and Concord the following spring. His sons Obadiah, Silas, and Smith, utilizing their comb-making experience from West Newbury, commenced the production of combs in their father's kitchen in 1775. The brothers, who initially supplemented their manufacturing activity with small farms, were cooperative comb-makers.

Silas Hills was Frances Drake's maternal grandfather. Her mother, Mary Hills, was the oldest of ten children born of the union between Silas and Mary Vose. If Silas Hills fathered a large brood, he came from an even bigger one. One of Frances Drake's cousins reminisced about her grandfather when he wrote his own memoir. "He was old and querulous, and could certainly scold; but now that I know he was born in 1760, and had nineteen brothers and sisters, I think of him with compassion and wonder."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Resolve and Rescue by Mark C. Bodanza. Copyright © 2014 Mark C. Bodanza. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1491728957
• ISBN 13: 9781491728956
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168