Crisis in Black and White: William Lloyd Garrison, William Cooper Nell, and the Battle Against Slavery, January 1832
Jamaica Plain’s Forest Hills Cemetery contains many Bostonians who played important roles in history, including leading abolitionists. Among them were William Lloyd Garrison and William Cooper Nell.
It was a snowy January night in 1832, in many ways a typically cold, quiet mid-winter eve. In some corners of Boston folks were surely discussing the great issues of the day: Delmonico’s Restaurant had just opened in New York, and Giuseppe Mazzini had founded a radical group that intended to unify and liberate Italy. Newfangled inventions like the locomotive cowcatcher and Joseph Henry’s electro-magnetic motor were as exciting as the publication of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Legends of New England.
On the northern slope of Beacon Hill that night, a less-heralded event was taking place—an event that would ultimately help hurl the entire country towards Civil War.
William Lloyd Garrison, image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Huddled inside a modest meeting house just off modern-day Joy Street, a dozen men were signing into existence the New England Anti-Slavery Society. They were led by a 26-year-old reformer from Newburyport named William Lloyd Garrison. One by one, the group’s “radical” goals were read, calling for the immediate emancipation of all slaves, and insisting that “a mere difference of complexion is no reason why any man should be deprived of any of his natural rights, or subjected to any political disability.”
The evening’s most oft-quoted words came from Garrison himself as the group departed. “We have met to-night in this obscure school-house; our numbers are few and our influence limited; but, mark my prediction, Faneuil Hall shall ere long echo with the principles we have set forth. We shall shake the Nation by their mighty power.”
Fifty years later, in his biography of Garrison, abolitionist Oliver Johnson vividly recalled that historic night. “A fierce northeast storm, combining snow, rain and hail, was raging, and the streets were full of slush. They were dark, too, for the city of Boston was very economical of light on [that side of Beacon Hill] ... It almost seemed as if Nature was frowning upon the new effort to abolish slavery. But the spirits of the little company rose superior to all external circumstances.”
It was indeed a pivotal moment in America’s past. Still, something was clearly wrong with this picture.
The setting was fine. What better place to found the New England Anti-Slavery Society than the back side of Beacon Hill, which housed a thriving free Black community throughout the 19th century? The simple brick building in which these abolitionists met was appropriate as well. It was the African Meeting House, which had been built by free Black labor in 1806, and actively used as an African-American church, school, political pulpit, and community center ever since.
But Garrison, Johnson, and the other abolitionists who formed that ground-breaking radical group were all men—and all white. Local African-American abolitionists like Maria Miller Stewart, William Guion Nell, and members of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, a local anti-slavery group founded in 1826, did not take part in the segregated meeting. And though Nell’s son, 15-year-old William Cooper Nell, watched the evening’s proceedings with great interest, he did so from afar —standing firmly in the snowstorm outside the walls of the African Meeting House.
It was a simple, sad fact: Boston, like the rest of America, was racist and sexist, even amongst its many and diverse groups of liberal reformers. Though slavery had been abolished in the Bay State back in 1783, freedom for Blacks in no way meant equality. In the 1830s, Boston’s schools, churches, neighborhoods, theaters, trains, clubs, and societies were virtually all still segregated. But two young abolitionists—the white William Lloyd Garrison and the Black William Cooper Nell—were about to buck that tide, toiling to end slavery and racial inequality while forging a close, working friendship that lasted through their deaths, half a century later.
Under Garrison’s guidance the New England Anti-Slavery Society immediately became integrated. Though twelve white men formally inaugurated the group on that snowy night of January 6, 1832, an estimated one-quarter of the 72 who signed its constitution a few weeks later were African-American. Garrison’s Boston-based anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, was rapidly becoming a forum for many voices, Black and white, female and male.
William Cooper Nell, image courtesy of the National Park Service
Not surprisingly, William Cooper Nell was one of those voices. Beginning as The Liberator ’s errand boy, Nell worked his way up through its interracial ranks, from promising shop apprentice to talented journalist. At various times over the years, he served as the radical paper’s office manager, worked in its Negro Employment Office, and helped operate its Committee of Vigilance. Nell traveled and spoke out with Garrison on numerous occasions, serving on endless committees, circulating countless petitions, and observing first-hand the abuse his friend took for espousing Black equality. “Mr. Garrison has at times been supposed to be a colored man,” Nell once noted,” because of his long, patient and persevering devotion to our cause.”
Despite the complaints of some of his detractors, Nell never sold out to his white colleagues. He simply believed wholeheartedly that the lives of African Americans would truly improve only if they worked, played, and lived in a fully integrated world, rather than one divided into Black and white. Hence, it was Nell who received overwhelming credit for achieving the legal integration of Boston’s public schools, in 1855. It was Nell who was appointed U.S. postal clerk in 1860, becoming the first African American to hold a federal civilian job in Boston. And it was Nell who chronicled his brethren’s historic achievements, in volumes like his groundbreaking 1855 book, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution.
There were times, naturally, when Garrison and Nell parted ways. Though Garrison despised politics and political parties, Nell ran for office. Though Garrison decried war and violence, Nell and his African-American colleagues felt compelled to use whatever means necessary to aid fugitive slaves, and helped enlist Black soldiers for the Union cause during the Civil War. When famed Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass split from Garrison’s fold in the late 1840s and began his own anti-slavery newspaper in Rochester, N.Y., Nell joined on as a journalist for Douglass’ North Star. Yet it was not long before Nell returned to his Boston home, to his trusted friend Garrison, and to the principles he most believed in.
William Cooper Nell died on May 25, 1874. William Lloyd Garrison died on May 24, five years later. Both were interred at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. Though Garrison presented a heartfelt eulogy at Nell’s funeral service, the latter’s gravesite remained unmarked for more than a century. Thanks to the hard work of visiting scholar Dorothy Porter Wesley and Boston community activists, a monument was finally placed on William Cooper Nell’s grave on September 18, 1989. A bit late, to be sure—but a fitting tribute to, and reminder of, one of Boston’s greatest heroes.
This article originally appeared in Susan Wilson’s history column for the Boston Globe. It is reprinted here with permission of the author and copyright owner.
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Note from Beacon Hill Scholars on Black Abolitionists and the NEASS:
The following information comes from “Making Freedom: Resisting and Abolishing Slavery in New England and Beyond,” an online timeline produced by Beacon Hill Scholars (BHS). BHS draws from multiple sources for its timeline entries. A nonprofit educational organization based in Boston, MA, BHS focuses on illuminating the history of the vibrant free Black community on Boston’s Beacon Hill that played a leadership role in the abolitionist movement and in early civil rights struggles in Massachusetts.
1832 – The New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) is launched in the basement of the historic Black Baptist church on Belknap Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill in the heart of the Black community. The 12 charter members who sign the new organization’s constitution are abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison and 11 other White men. In a gesture of collective solidarity, four prominent Black activists – John T. Hilton, James C. Barbadoes, Rev. Hosea Easton, and Rev. Thomas Paul – also sign their names to the founding document. Hilton and Barbadoes are among the co-founders of the Massachusetts General Colored Association (MGCA), the country’s first Black abolitionist organization. It merges with the NEASS the following year, and the latter becomes increasingly interracial.
Garrison, a devout reader of the Bible, is the initiator and driving force of the NEASS. In “All on Fire,” his biography of the abolitionist, historian Henry Mayer notes that, from Garrison’s perspective, “the twelve founders constituted not only an apostolic number for preaching … but a proper-sized jury to ‘sit in judgment on the guilt of the country.’ ”
Sources from Beacon Hill Scholars:
"All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery" by Henry Mayer
"The Slave's Cause A History Of Abolition" by Manisha Sinha
"To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Anti-Slavery Movement," by Christopher Cameron