The women who wouldn't keep quiet

They were fourteen women in Stoneham, a town of farmers and shoemakers ten miles north of Boston. The year was 1837. All were members of the steepled Congregational church by the Common.

Earlier that year Congregational ministers in Massachusetts had convened and issued a pastoral letter to be read in all affiliated churches. The letter was a response to Sarah and Angelina Grimké, two abolitionist sisters from South Carolina, who were lecturing on the evils of slavery in churches throughout New England.

The ministers opposed the Grimké sisters primarily for one reason. They were women, and as such should not seek to displace men as the appointed teachers of morality. When woman “assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer,” they stated, “her character becomes unnatural.”

In thinly veiled statements, the clergy also opposed the subject of the Grimkés lectures, slavery. When recounting the cruelties acted out on slaves, which Sarah and Angelina Grimké had witnessed firsthand on their father’s plantation, they had broached topics too harsh for the delicate sensibilities of women in their audiences.

It would be nice to think that in 1837 churches throughout New England welcomed the Grimkés and the growing abolitionist movement. By then William Lloyd Garrison and his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, founded in 1831, were reaching a broad audience. On Beacon Hill in Boston free blacks and white allies were harboring and resettling fugitive slaves.

But the reality was that churches in the North were slow to take up the abolitionist cause. Most opposed the anti-slavery movement. A leading abolitionist, the Unitarian minister Samuel May, wrote that “the most serious obstacle to the progress of the anti-slavery cause was the conduct of the clergy and churches in our country. . . . The most violent conflicts we had and the most outrageous mobs we encountered were led by or were instigated by persons professing to be religious.”

Meanwhile in Stoneham, a community of just under a thousand, the citizenry was in turmoil. “The question of African slavery was cleaving asunder the community,” Judge William B. Stevens wrote in his 1891 History of Stoneham. “One element was aggressive, the other intolerant. Political fervor was red hot.”

Hearing that Henry and Abigail Green would hold an abolitionist meeting in their home, ruffians threatened to burn the house down. At the meeting, attended by William Lloyd Garrison, Henry kept his shotgun nearby.

Subsequent meetings in Town Hall were disrupted, as abolitionists rose to speak and their opponents shouted them down. One such meeting occurred on Saturday, March 30, when a pro-slavery faction shut down all attempts to proceed. A few days before, they had burned an effigy of a local abolitionist.

After the meeting on Saturday, a fight broke out and Timothy Wheeler, a 29-year-old husband and father of four was stabbed. He died a week later. At a town meeting in May, citizens voted 62-35 to ban all lectures or discussion of slavery in Town Hall.

Meanwhile, Sarah Richardson Gerry, a 67-year-old widow and thirteen other women, some married, some single, were carefully following town events. It’s likely that several of them had been in church when the Congregational letter was read, calling on them to refrain from public speaking. Now, silenced in town and church, they met to compose a letter, an appeal to the male leaders of the Stoneham Congregational Church.

Little has been written about Mrs. Gerry, other than notices of birth, marriage and death. In his history of the town, Stevens wrote numerous profiles of men, but none of women. Married in 1791, Sarah had merged two of the earliest families in the small town, the Richardsons and the Gerrys. Farmers and tradesmen, the men had fought in the Indian wars and on Battle Road and Bunker Hill. Sarah had brought up three children largely alone, after her husband, Captain David Gerry died in in 1806.

The other thirteen women were also from families well known in church and village. What they had in common was an abhorrence of slavery. Two of them were from families that harbored fugitive slaves in their homes, becoming stations on the Underground Railroad. Another is thought to have hosted the first abolitionist meeting in Stoneham.

In drafting a letter to the Congregational Church, the women wanted to do more than speak out against slavery. Here’s what they wrote:

"We the undersigned have been convinced that slavery is an evil of immense magnitude and being deeply aggrieved that such an utter abomination in the sight of Heaven and is now sustained and defended by almost the entire Christian church at the South, with whom we are in fellowship; and, believing, moreover, that while we refuse to rebuke and remonstrate, we do in fact participate in their guilt, we ask, we entreat you to take such action on this important subject as will show plainly that our influence is on the side of justice and humanity."

They signed their names: Sarah Gerry, Sarah Buck, Mary Bryant, Abigail Green, Sally Richardson, Nabby Richardson, Mary Newhall, Bridgett Richardson, Hepzibeth Richardson, Susanna Rowe, Prudence Lynde, Polly Willey, Eliza W. Green, and Philenia Stevens.

Beyond stating the women’s beliefs, the letter was a bold call for action on the part of their church. To remain silent, they said, is to be complicit, to “participate” in the guilt of churches that have upheld an evil institution.

Written most likely in the fall of 1837, the letter seems to have had an effect, although not right away. Two years later, church members met in the home of Deacon Ruben Richardson. Here they passed a resolution calling on their pastor “to bear faithful pulpit testimony against the sin of slavery.”

Further, they stated “that as Christians, as a Church, as lovers of universal freedom, we cannot discharge faithfully our duty to God and ourselves and our fellow men unless we put forth our efforts for the total abolition of slavery throughout the world.”

Sarah Gerry and her companions didn’t stop with an appeal to their church. In 1838 they formed the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Stoneham. It numbered twenty-seven women.

They announced their organization in the Liberator, writing, “Dear Friend Garrison, a female anti-slavery society was organized in Stoneham on June 20th, 1838.” Their names were familiar: Mrs. Sarah Gerry, president; Miss Sally Richardson, vice president; Miss Mary Newhall, corresponding secretary; Paulina Gerry, recording secretary, Mrs. Hannah Smith, treasurer. Five other women appeared as “counsellors”: Mrs. Nancy Hill, Mrs. Rhoda F. Richardson, Mrs. Polly Willey, Mrs. Prudence Lynde, and Mrs. Levina Bryant.

The Stoneham chapter also had sad news to announce, the recent death of their leader, Sarah Gerry, age 69. Paulina Gerry, Sarah’s daughter-in-law and Ira Gerry’s wife, offered these words:

When the [slavery] subject was first presented, and [Sarah Gerry] saw her society and church tempest tossed, reeling to and fro, she paused and hesitated. But then she looked again and saw it was the cause of God and liberty. . . . and she resolved to make the cause of the slave her own.

A year after the women formed the Stoneham Anti-Slavery Society, the men also formed a chapter.

The conflict over abolition came to a head in 1850 with passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, a federal law that threatened to imprison anyone who aided or abetted slaves escaping from the South. Most religious and civic authorities in the Commonwealth called for the new law to be enforced. Even the esteemed Massachusetts senator, Daniel Webster, who had spoken eloquently against slavery, now argued that this “compromise” law was needed to contain slavery and prevent its spread. But for the new minister in Stoneham’s Congregational Church, the Rev. William C. Whitcomb, the Fugitive Slave Act was a challenge to the very core of Christianity.

On a chilly Sunday in November, 1850, Rev. Whitcomb delivered a fiery sermon against the Fugitive Slave Act. “I make no apology” for speaking on this subject, the 30-year-old minister said. He only regretted that he had not spoken out sooner.

Whitcomb said humans are required to be law-abiding citizens. But when a civil law causes us to break a Divine Law, we must ignore it. When to follow the simple precepts of Christ is to commit a crime—that is, to shelter a fugitive slave—we must, when called on, commit that crime and be prepared to pay the penalty.

“Fellow-citizens and Christian friends,” Rev. Whitcomb stated, “the new Fugitive Law . . . will enslave you and me as well as the black man—it will make slaves of us all.”

The Stoneham pastor called on his congregation to join him in his resolve to pay the price, whatever it may be, for following his conscience.

“Hide the outcast or help him on his journey to a safer place,” the reverend said, “even though you may risk personal security, property and life.”

In the decade before the War of the Rebellion, as the Civil War was then called, Stoneham became known as a town friendly to the abolitionist cause. Then, after Confederate cannons fired on Fort Sumter, Stoneham men quickly responded to Abraham Lincoln’s call. Two days after the president’s appeal, a company of Stoneham men left on the train, becoming part of the Massachusetts Sixth Regiment, the first to arrive at the nation’s capital.

“No town was more patriotic,” Stevens wrote, “none more prompt in hurrying to the front, or furnished more men in proportion to her population.” Over 400 men from Stoneham enlisted in the armed forces, and one woman, who served as a nurse.

Rev. Whitcomb would himself join and serve as chaplain in two Army hospitals in North Carolina, before succumbing in the fall of 1864 to malarial fever, one of many diseases decimating the armies of both sides.

Twenty-seven years earlier, as society was being torn apart over slavery and the abolition movement, Sarah Gerry and her cohorts started a process of transformation in their church and town. Their refusal to remain silent and their persistence changed hearts and minds. Some of them would continue after the Civil War in another great cause. Organizing, speaking, and marching in parades, they would become the foot soldiers in the decades-long struggle for women’s suffrage.

© 2021 Ben Jacques