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William A. Koelsch, “Grass-Roots Garrisonians in Central William A. Koelsch, “Grass-Roots Garrisonians in Central Massachusetts: The Case of Hubbardston’s Jonas and Susan Clark” Historical Journal of Massachusetts Volume 31, No. 1 (Winter 2003). Published by: Institute for Massachusetts Studies and Westfield State University You may use content in this archive for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the Historical Journal of Massachusetts regarding any further use of this work: [email protected] Funding for digitization of issues was provided through a generous grant from MassHumanities. Some digitized versions of the articles have been reformatted from their original, published appearance. When citing, please give the original print source (volume/ number/ date) but add "retrieved from HJM's online archive at http://www.westfield.ma.edu/mhj. Editor, Historical Journal of Massachusetts c/o Westfield State University 577 Western Ave. Westfield MA 01086 Grass-Roots Garrisonians in Central Massachusetts: The Case of Hubbardston’s Jonas and Susan Clark By William A. Koelsch Much of the enormous literature on American abolitionism has been centered on state and national leaders and prominent lecturers. Yet as Gary Nash reminds us, “without thousands of anonymous individuals, black and white, male and female, taking unpopular and often dangerous stands, it would have foundered.”1 Leaders must have followers; lecturers, hearers. A number of recent studies have attempted to strip away the anonymity of which Nash speaks by using various prosopographic methods to uncover the religious, economic and social affinities of those adhering to the movement.2 More research needs to be done along such lines, especially at the level of localities and local abolitionist societies. Little more has been done at the intermediate level, examining the commitment of local activists and the consequences for their later lives.3 Yet the participation 1 Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 80. 2 See, e.g., Edward Magdol, The Antislavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionists’ Constituency (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) and Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 3 See Andrew S. Barker, “Chauncey Langdon Knapp and Political Abolitionism in Vermont, 1833-1841,” New England Quarterly 73 (2000): 434-462. of persons who were active only at the regional level may serve as something of a key to the lived experience of many of the abolitionist rank and file who must, for lack of sufficient documentation, remain utterly anonymous. The question of motivation in such cases remains elusive. We do not often get as clear a statement as that of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who recalled in 1928 “in my youth I was an abolitionist and shuddered at a Negro Minstrel Show, as belittling a suffering race and I am glad I was and did.”4 Those former grass-roots abolitionists for whom documentation has been preserved are most often those who, like Holmes, had become important for something else in their later lives. Such was the case with Jonas and Susan Clark. As Holmes’ statement would be of little historical interest had he not become a distinguished jurist, so the grass-roots abolitionist activism of Jonas Clark would be of little or no interest had he not subsequently founded Clark University. Opened in 1889 in Worcester as an all-graduate and research institution,5 Clark University, unlike Oberlin or Howard, had no role in the education either of future abolitionists or former slaves. The abolitionist link occurs in the early lives of the founder of Clark University, Jonas Gilman Clark (1815-1900) of Hubbardston, Massachusetts, and his wife Susan (Wright) Clark (1816-1904) who, together with Clark’s older sister Caroline (1811-1896) and her husband, James Alson Waite (1807-1861), were grass-roots Garrisonian activists during the 1840’s and 1850’s. Most writers of biographical and memorial sketches of Jonas Clark in the 1890’s and early 1900’s, however, were unfamiliar with his early life, and make no reference to 6 his anti-slavery activity. 4 Oliver Wendell Holmes to John C. H. Wu, 21 June 1928. In Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: His Book Notices and Uncollected Letters and Papers, ed. Harry C. Shriver (New York: Central Book Company, 1936), 197. 5 William A. Koelsch, Clark University, 1887-1987: A Narrative History (Worcester: Clark University Press, 1987), ch. 1. 6 The fullest biographical sketch is Calvin Stebbins, “Address,” in “Founder’s Day, Clark University,” Publications of the Clark University Library I, no. 6 (April, 1906), 138-176. Koelsch, Clark University, pp. 1-6, summarizes Clark’s life and career before 1887. The importance of kinship networks in the abolitionist movement is stressed in Goodman, Of One Blood, passim, esp. p. 226. A single book kept by Susan Clark during anti-slavery days survives. Its entries, dated between 1845 and 1847, include long inscriptions or poems written out by Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Rev. Adin Ballou and Mrs. Abby H. Price of the utopian Hopedale Community, and others. A few scattered additional references exist in manuscript material, references and reports in The Liberator, the records of the Worcester County Anti Slavery Society, North Division, and local histories. From these, along with the facts of Jonas Clark’s business career, it is possible to reconstruct the moral commitments of a local abolitionist family confirming the general profile of grass-roots activists that historians of the movement have recently begun to identify.7 Jonas Gilman Clark was born on February 1, 1815 in Hubbardston, Massachusetts, which was a prosperous hill-country town about twenty miles northwest of Worcester. He was the fifth of eight children of William Smith Clark, a substantial Yankee farmer and stock-raiser, and his wife Elizabeth (Clark) Clark, her husband’s second cousin once removed. Both his grandfathers were Revolutionary War veterans and his paternal great-grandfather had been Hubbardston’s delegate to the Massachusetts Provincial Congresses of 1774 and 1775. His maternal grandfather’s first cousin, Rev. Jonas Clark of Lexington, had hosted John Hancock and Samuel Adams on the night before the battle of Lexington. Jonas Gilman Clark thus appears to share with other abolitionists of his generation a consciousness of their Revolutionary forbears and a sense that they were fulfilling a symbolic trust in their 8 attempts to purify the land of slavery. 7 For general background and recent approaches, I have relied most heavily on Ronald Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 8 For Clark’s Revolutionary War forbears, see John Clark, Records of the Descendants of Hugh Clark of Watertown, Mass., 1640-1866 (Boston: Privately Printed, 1866), pp. 48, 51; John M. Stowe, History of the Town of Hubbardston (Hubbardston, Mass.: Privately Printed, 1881), pp. 42-43; Stebbins, “Address,” p. 140. For abolitionist links to the Revolution and to the Union generally, see Walters, Antislavery Appeal, chap. 8; Louis S. Gertais, Morality and Utility in Hubbardston in Clark’s young manhood was a flourishing town of nearly 1,800 souls, with about fifty houses, two hotels and two churches in the village center. Hubbardston was increasingly tied to the metropolitan and regional economy of central and eastern New England.9 According to an 1837 Massachusetts survey of manufactures, the making of boots and shoes was the principal industry. As timber nearer the coast ran out, lumbering had become important as a winter occupation for Hubbardston farmers. Some younger farmers began to split and shave “chair stock” during the off-season, selling it in nearby Sterling. The next step was to manufacture wood-seated chairs locally, an industry that eventually put forty Hubbardston men to work, turning out 70,000 chairs annually.10 Young “Gilman” Clark’s maternal uncle, Simpson Clark, a prosperous Boston merchant, would sometimes take his energetic young nephew with him on business trips. At sixteen Gilman apprenticed himself to a wheelwright, and after five years set up his own carriage shop. Experienced in woods and paints from his carriage-making apprenticeship, he soon expanded into chair manufacturing, trading carriages in exchange for chair stock, and marketing both carriages and chairs for cash in Providence and Boston. American Antislavery Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), ch. 1, 2; and Goodman, Of One Blood, 142-143. 9 The broader economic transformation of rural life and the emergence of modern capitalism in central and western Massachusetts in the period of Jonas Clark’s early life is treated in, among other notable studies, John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), especially pt. 4, and Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy:
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