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2/14/2020 Ending slavery through the courts, anti-slavery speeches and war - News - MetroWest Daily News, Framingham, MA - Framingham, MA Ending slavery through the courts, anti-slavery speeches and war By Scott Calzolaio Milford Daily News Posted Mar 5, 2018 at 5:45 AM Updated Mar 5, 2018 at 3:34 PM On July 4, 1854, famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison gave a fiery speech, condemning the United States as a slave supporting nation, before burning a copy of the Constitution in front of the crowd. Garrison’s famed speech was one example of the strong abolitionist movements in Massachusetts. “It made the headlines in papers across the country at the time,” Framingham City Historian Fred Wallace said. Garrison spoke on the east side of Farm Pond in Framingham, an area known as Harmony Grove. Harmony Grove, like Boston, was a center point and a “hot-bed” for the abolitionists movement, which included well-known people like Garrison, Sen. Charles Sumner, and former slaves like Frederick Douglass. “Prior to the (Civil) War, there was not a majority of people who were opposed to slavery,” Wallace said. “There was a segment of the community that were opposed to it.” In many cases preachers in the area would speak about the evils of slavery, and in one case, Wallace said, many of the congregants walked out on the sermon because they didn’t agree. “It was a mixed population at that time,” he said. “We carry with us this blot of slavery in our history. We make incremental improvements in our society’s attitude but we just don’t seem to be able to erase it completely.” Ending slavery “There’s a dispute about what state was the first state to abolish slavery,” Wallace said. “Massachusetts claims it was the first state, and we just leave it at that.” https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/20180305/ending-slavery-through-courts-anti-slavery-speeches-and-war 1/5 2/14/2020 Ending slavery through the courts, anti-slavery speeches and war - News - MetroWest Daily News, Framingham, MA - Framingham, MA In the 1780s, more than 140 years after the first enslaved Africans arrived in Massachusetts, a handful of slaves successfully sued their owners for their freedom on the grounds that slavery was against the Massachusetts Constitution. “They abolished slavery through the courts,” Wallace said. The breakthrough case in 1781 became known as Brom and Bett vs. John Ashley, where a life-long slave with the fitting name Elizabeth Freeman won her freedom in court. That case and others that followed “declared slavery a violation of human rights,” Wallace said. The enslaved people argued before the courts that they were not “born free and equal,” and they did not “have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights,” which are guaranteed in the state constitution. The argument worked. In 1783, the court used Freeman’s argument in the case Commonwealth v Jennison. In Commonwealth v Jennison, Quock Walker was a slave living in Worcester County, whose owner promised him his freedom when he reached 21. The owner died, his wife remarried and when she died, her new husband, Nathaniel Jennison, refused to honor the promise of freedom. Quock ran away but Jennison found him and severely beat him. Quock sued Jennison for battery. Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice William Cushing wrote in his notes on the case “there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature,” according to the Massachusetts Historical Society. “Although this case did not immediately emancipate every slave in the state, it did mark the end of slavery as a legal practice in Massachusetts,” according to the society’s web page. The 13th Amendment federally abolishing the institution wouldn’t be signed for another 81 years. Anti-slavery voices Each Fourth of July, starting in the 1840s and continuing through the Civil War, all of the anti-slavery societies in Massachusetts would gather at Harmony Grove to share their ideas, according to Wallace. Famous abolitionists would make speeches on a small platform in the mouth of the grassy amphitheater. https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/20180305/ending-slavery-through-courts-anti-slavery-speeches-and-war 2/5 2/14/2020 Ending slavery through the courts, anti-slavery speeches and war - News - MetroWest Daily News, Framingham, MA - Framingham, MA “It was a picnic, recreation area down near Farm Pond called Harmony Grove,” Wallace said of the space has long since been redesigned by development, including a house near the intersection of Beach and Franklin streets. “It was sort of like an amusement park for that time,” he said. The voices of escaped slaves, freed African-Americans and white abolitionist voices also held meetings in Boston, Concord and other communities. Some historical records show that Boston had the largest number of fugitive slaves. The anti-slavery advocates were powerful enough to have the Massachusetts legislators reacted to the federal Fugitive Slave law. The Fugitive Slave law, passed by Congress in September 1850, required people throughout the United States and territories to help recover and return runaway slaves. Massachusetts implemented the Personal Liberty Act of 1855, which allowed local authorities to ignore runaway slaves, leaving all the work up to federal agents. Dustin Santomenna, the Social Studies department head at the Milford High School, compared the action to that of sanctuary cities, where local authorities are trying to protect immigrants without documentation from being deported. “The time and the culture we live in now, with the social movements that have been happening, they’re not related to slavery directly, but there is that ever-looming question, ‘Who is an American?’ Are we all given the same opportunity?’” Creating an invisible railroad Residents throughout Massachusetts were members of the Boston Vigilance Committee of the Underground Railroad. Relics of the Underground Railroad have been found in many communities, including Worcester, Natick, Sudbury, Medfield and Newton. In Newton, the Jackson family offered their home as a safe haven. While the first Jacksons, who came in the 17th century to Newton, owned enslaved people, “Their descendants just completely changed their minds ... and [were] actively fighting against it,” said Roz Kreizenbeck, Historic Newton’s education manager. https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/20180305/ending-slavery-through-courts-anti-slavery-speeches-and-war 3/5 2/14/2020 Ending slavery through the courts, anti-slavery speeches and war - News - MetroWest Daily News, Framingham, MA - Framingham, MA Jackson Homestead and Museum on Washington Street is a part of the National Park Service’s Network to Freedom, which coordinates “preservation and education efforts nationwide and [integrates] local historical places, museums, and interpretive programs associated with the Underground Railroad into a mosaic of community, regional, and national stories.” A Framingham general The National Park Service reports that, “Although abolitionists represented a radical faction of Massachusetts politics, the state strongly supported Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. Subsequently, it was generous in its contribution of troops and supplies to the Union Army during the conflict.” One of those men who served was Gen. George H. Gordon. Wallace wrote about this Framingham native in his 2014 book, “A Most Rash but Magnificent Charge: The Story of General George H. Gordon and his Brigade at the Battle of Antietam.″ Gordon believed the war was a success for the Union and a vital step toward ending slavery, but that the scene on the battlefield was beyond comprehension. There were 22,717 men killed, wounded and missing after this Civil War battle in the middle of Maryland. “What a field of carnage lay about us. Neither time nor change can dim the remembrance of those fields, peopled with corpses; can shut out the sight too horrible to be real, yet too real to forget,” Gordon wrote. Wallace’s book compiles Gordon’s own accounts of the Battle of Antietam, with witness accounts and diagrams that show how vast, beautiful landscapes turned Sept. 17, 1862, into the single bloodiest day in American history to this day. Gordon wrote his book “A Diary of Events in the War of the Great Rebellion” in 1864. Gordon died in August 1886 at 63 from what Wallace blames on diseases and wounds brought on while serving in the Mexican-American and Civil wars. First-hand accounts from soldiers, abolitionists and slaves tell the stories to modern-day historians like Wallace. What’s left behind https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/20180305/ending-slavery-through-courts-anti-slavery-speeches-and-war 4/5 2/14/2020 Ending slavery through the courts, anti-slavery speeches and war - News - MetroWest Daily News, Framingham, MA - Framingham, MA There are also the war memorials as well as monuments to the enslaved Africans and abolitionists movement in Massachusetts and other small relics. In Framingham, the small engraved stone that commemorates Harmony Grove and can still be found in the area under overgrown with bushes. On any number of Rhode Island beaches, holes forming a loop can be found along the rock walls that span parts of the coast, where at one time they were attached to chains cuffed around the ankles of the enslaved. Santomenna said sometimes the nature of slavery in New England isn’t emphasized because there’s not enough time in a school semester to cover all the bases. In other cases, it seems it just isn’t emphasized in textbooks or in New England society generally. Santomenna said in many cases teachers have a base curriculum they need to teach. “It’s not something that’s in our high school curriculum,” he said. “But it’s something that any teacher could bring in.” He said the oppression happening today is not as overt as seeing enslaved Africans in chains, but by digging past the first layer, he said, the true about society’s deep-seated discrimination becomes apparent.

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