WILLIAM C. NELL OF SMITH COURT AND 20 GROVE STREET “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project William C. Nell HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM C. NELL WILLIAM C. NELL 1812 John Caldwell Calhoun of South Carolina and Henry Clay of Virginia persuaded the federal Congress to declare war upon Great Britain. During this US/Britain dispute about territorial and shipping rights (and, it must be confessed, about whether the American Revolutionary War, which had ended merely with a truce, was already over, or not), William Guion Nell was a steward on board the General Gadsden. HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM C. NELL WILLIAM C. NELL 1816 December 22, Sunday: William Cooper Nell was born at 64 Kendall Street on Beacon Hill in Boston. On this day and the following one, a Treaty of Peace and Amity was being signed between the United States of America and Algeria. READ THE FULL TEXT Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 22nd of 12th M 1816 / Our Meetings were both well attended, in the Afternoon I thought it was larger than common —both were silent - rather lifeless seasons to me, tho’ I trust to some others were more favored. - Joseph Wilbour took tea & set the evening with us. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT William C. Nell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM C. NELL WILLIAM C. NELL 1820 In 1827 William C. Nell became a student in the public school system of Boston and in 1829 he graduated and received THE LIFE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN in recognition of academic achievement. He was, however, excluded from the awards banquet for the honors winners. An enterprising young man, he arranged to be present at his own awards banquet — by serving at table. You guessed it, young Will was a student of color, attending the first separate colored grammar school in America, the African Meeting-house School or Smith School on the back slope of Beacon Hill. In adult life, he would become the major leader of the campaign to integrate Boston’s schools, along with the barber John T. Hilton. (Notice that although white men of this period generally feared social contamination by inferior blacks, even an intimate touching, as by a barber, could be permissible, as depicted here in a Virginia barbershop — so long as the relationship was one clearly marked as an intransitive one, between a superior or customer and an inferior or servant.) HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM C. NELL WILLIAM C. NELL 1830 Both Nells, father and son, probably attended William Lloyd Garrison’s 4th Anti-Slavery lecture after he got out of prison, at the old Athenaeum Hall on Pearl Street in Boston. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. William C. Nell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM C. NELL WILLIAM C. NELL 1832 William Cooper Nell became the manager of Boston Minor’s Exhibition Society and the secretary of the Garrison Independent Society (a society for young people). HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM C. NELL WILLIAM C. NELL 1835 October 21, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson made a note in his journal about an initial visit to his home in Concord by Bronson Alcott: Last Saturday night came hither Mr Alcott & spent the Sabbath with me. A wise man, simple, superior to display. & drops the best things as quietly as the least. Every man, he said, is a Revelation, & ought to write his Record. But few with the pen. That night, just back in Boston from his visit to Emerson in Concord, Alcott would be visiting William Lloyd Garrison in the jail on Leverett Street. (What was Garrison doing in the Boston lockup? –Read on.) Having met with brickbats in Concord, New Hampshire and garbage, raw eggs, and rocks in Lowell MA, and having been seriously injured by being hit in the face with a rock in Ohio, and having been denounced by President Andrew Jackson in a message to Congress, the English anti-slavery reformer George Thompson had been reduced to making his return plans in secret because of concern that pro-slavery activists would attempt to kidnap him (presumably to tar and feather him).1 He had fled Boston Harbor in a rowboat in order to board a British ship leaving for New Brunswick. 1. Safely back in England, George Thompson would be elected to Parliament. HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM C. NELL WILLIAM C. NELL Back ashore, in what would come to be known as the “Gentlemen’s Riot” carried out by a downtown Boston group of swells associated with State Street and Milk Street which sometimes referred to itself as “the broadcloth mob,” what had been planned as a protest against a scheduled lecture by Thompson on behalf of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society transformed itself into a mob of several thousand persons which stormed the meeting while the women prayed for the protection of God. They came uncomfortably close to tarring and feathering the substitute speaker.2 STATE STREET, BOSTON This substitute, Garrison, was saved only by the intervention of Boston’s mayor, who –despite the fact that there was a mayoral election coming up in December– dealt personally with this proslavery mob. To the people who were engaging in the antislavery struggle, this year of 1835 would become known as “the mob year.” The riot against Garrison in Boston was far from the only one. The North was having what Grimsted refers to as a “riot conversation” with the South, in an attempt to reassure it that its institution of human enslavement would be tolerated, and that opposition to this institution would not be allowed to interfere with the flow of business. There was therefore also an assault on this day upon Henry B. Stanton in Newport, and an assault upon Samuel May in Montpelier. No great personal injury or property damage resulted, as that was not the point: PAGE 27 GRIMSTED: The day’s riotous work was the North’s final offering of works to prove the sincerity of its stream of words against abolition ... few in the South noted how little damage to property and none to people these careful mobs perpetrated. Friend Stephen Wanton Gould recorded in his journal: 4th day 21 of 10 M / We rode to Portsmouth to attend the Select Meeting - After which we went to Aunt Stantons & spent the Afternoon with her in sympathy with her lonely situation 2. This mob was witnessed by William Cooper Nell, who, being himself a person of color, of course was unable to interfere. HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM C. NELL WILLIAM C. NELL At this annual meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society at the Anti-Slavery Hall, the women were trapped in rooms on the 3d floor as the mob roamed the corridors of the building. The mayor of Boston belatedly arrived with a group of policemen and got the women to disperse, but William Lloyd Garrison was in his office and was left alone in the building with the mob. When he crawled through the back window and jumped down into the street, someone saw him and the mob gave chase. He was cornered in a 2d-floor room above a carpenter’s shop into which he had dodged, whereupon there was a wrestling match to see whether he would be flung from the window, or into a tar kettle that had been prepared. The police jailed for the night for his own safety, in the jail on Leverett Street, and he inscribed on the wall there that his offense was “preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine that all men have been created equal.” Here is a fuller account of the action: It was in the midst of such intense and widespread excitement that Boston called its meeting to abolish the Abolitionists. It was the month of August, and the heat of men’s passions was as great as the heat of the August sun. The moral atmosphere of the city was so charged with inflammable gases that the slightest spark would have sufficed to produce an explosion. The Abolitionists felt this and carried themselves the while with unusual circumspection. They deemed it prudent to publish an address to neutralize the falsehoods with which they were assailed by their enemies. The address drawn up by Garrison for the purpose was thought “too fiery for the present time,” by his more cautious followers and was rejected. The Liberator office had already been threatened in consequence of a fiery article by the editor, denouncing the use of Faneuil Hall for the approaching pro-slavery meeting. It seemed to the unawed and indignant champion of liberty that it were “better that the winds should scatter it in fragments over the whole earth — better that an earthquake should engulf it — than that it should be used for so unhallowed and detestable a purpose!” The anti- abolition feeling of the town had become so bitter and intense that Henry E. Benson, then clerk in the anti-slavery office, writing on the 19th of the month, believed that there were persons in Boston, who would assassinate George Thompson in broad daylight, and doubted whether Garrison or Samuel J. May would be safe in Faneuil Hall on the day of the meeting, and what seemed still more significant of the inflamed state of the public mind, was the confidence with which he predicted that a mob would follow the meeting. The wild-cat-like spirit was in the air — in the seething heart of the populace.