Abolitionism In Lynn
And Essex County

BY DR. RENJAMIN PERCIVAL
November 12, 1908

To help transcribe or submit information, please e-mail Shaun Cook.

On account of the length of this paper, and the limit of space in this Register, the committee on publication have been obliged to omit much which, although interesting, did not apply to occurrences in Lynn and vicinity. The complete manuscript is deposited in the archives of this Society.

     The word slave comes from the term Slaves (slahves) that great race of eastern Europe. So many were captured and held to servitude, that the term came to hold its present meaning. Curiously enough, it really means glory.
     In the ancient world slavery was universal. All working people were slaves. If a Roman father turned his back on his new born babe it was either exposed or sold. He had the power of life or death over his children.
     After the landing of Columbus in 1492 the natives were to be made Christians by the Spaniards and a good priest, Las Casas, was sent to help in this. But the Spanish so overworked and so tortured their victims that they made the most of them die, turned them into premature angels, and sent them on to Heaven inside of two years. To check this too rapid triumph of holy zeal, the good priest persuaded Queen Isabella to permit the introduction of Africans.
     Negroes were first enslaved by the Portuguese in the year 1442. In 1502 they began to come in numbers to the West Indies. In 1620, they came to Jamestown, Va. In 1790, Virginia alone held 200,000.
     In 1727, the Quakers were the first to condemn the trade. In 1761, they excluded from their membership all concerned in it. In 1774, in this country, they formed the first anti-slavery society.
     England resolved to end the trade, January 1, 1796. In 1806, the bill was passed. In 1811, it was made effectual. The United States was in the same position three years earlier in 1808.
     Slavery fought back. Louisiana, Kansas, and Arkansas, with Missouri, 1803, and Texas, 1845, made vast accessions, the Fugitive Slave Law supported by Webster, 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 1854, the Dred Scott decision "That a negro has no rights which a white man is bound to respect" was delivered March 6, 1857. Cuban Filibusters, 1854, and a determined effort to reopen the foreign slave trade right up to 1859 and 1860 shows how impossible it was to avoid conflict. Uncle Tom's Cabin was first published 1852. On the twenty-second day of September, 1862, Lincoln gave the Emancipation Proclamation to the world. The civil war closed the ninth of April, 1865.
     Slavery has not been wholly without excuse. This, no student of history can deny. War and conquest has been the normal condition of man in the past. Slavery was simply the offer of life to the vanquished, and has been often gratefully accepted by the victims.
     Africans brought to our land were fully under this primal and remorseless law. The negro, in his fortunes as citizens of these United States, is higher today, has a better chance, than he could have had as a native of the dark continent. But no law primal or otherwise can ever justify injustice and cruelty to the enlightened heart of man. Nature has her laws but God guides the good man's heart and its throbs are controlled by a higher impulse.
     There is at all times as much God for man as there is God in man. No grander thought was ever uttered on this point than by Frederick Douglass, the mulatto, who fled first to this city as his altar of refuge from slavery, when he cried: "One with God is a majority."
     Among the earliest words of Garrison you will find these words: "I am aware that many object to the severity of my language. But is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm, tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher, tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen, but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest, I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every stattue leap from its pedestal and to hasten the resurrection of the dead."
     This was his opening into the Liberator, the first number Saturday, January 1, 1831. Oh, the unlimited cheek of this very young man.
     There was Daniel Webster, the God-like Daniel, and Rufus Choate and Edward Everett and how many, many others, wise men all, inoculated by Harvard with utmost respectability, buttered all over till they shown with the oil or sanctimony from the churches, and - Garrison and Whittier. More daring than any in the whole broad land at that time. Yes, more than most men at any time; for they dared to believe that their souls were their own.
     John L. Sullivan of eminent physical memory never dealt such blows as this mild mannered Quaker can give. I have read you Garrison, but if I call him a slugger I may be vulgar but I am surely mild. Why, even the entirely dignified British Encyclopedia says of this man "fire and steel could not have kindled fiercer resentment or left deeper wounds."
     Every week Garrison placed at the head of his paper, The Liberator, the unpatriotic assertion: "The constitution is an agreement with death and a covenant with hell." Flat treason! and it tickled him to make the most of it, so he printed it over and over again, year after year.
     Hard hitter though he was, that mighty phrase was borrowed from the greatest of Bible prophets, Isaiah. So you have it: Cape Ann Garrison, Whittier, Isaiah, all in line working in body blows on Goliath.
     Parker Pillsbury, one of the very best of all these men, will tell you that George Washington himself pursued a slave mother and her child from the Potomac to the Piscataqua, as remorselessly as if they had been a sheep and a lamb. Fortunately they escaped him and lived and died in the old Granite State.
     Sturdy old John Adams, in his report of the great speech of John Otis, before the Superior Court writes: "Nor were the poor negroes forgotten."
     Not a Quaker in Philadelphia, or Mr. Jefferson in Virginia ever asserted the rights of man in stronger terms. Young as I was and ignorant as I was, I shuddered at the doctrine he taught and I have all my life shuddered and still shudder at the consequences that may be drawn from such premises.
     Yet, these are historical facts, and this is an historical society. Political leaders thus bowed to the dust before the demon of slavery which has been described by John Wesley as the sum of all villanies.
     Shall we blame them? Not so. Let us love and reverence them for they bore burdens of which we know nothing.
     Nobly were concessions to slavery revoked in later days. Sumner and Lincoln remembered their country and would save it. Our two Essex boys forgot it, and remembered only God and their oppressed fellow man.
     I was born in Philadelphia. My father went about that city in those early times, getting names on abolition petitions. He had his troubles in so doing, which he enjoyed very much indeed, for men of his kind glory in tribulation, like the ones of old. Only once was he ashamed of his position. He borrowed a cane (not knowing its quality) from his brother, who was a man of sporting proclivities, and mingling with a mob drew attention to himself as an orator advocating peace, when an energetic gesture of his cane, which, wholly unknown to him, was a sword cane, drew from its concealment a bright and deadly blade. He promptly vanished of course, followed by the laughter of the crowd.
     About these times, in May, 1838, the new Pennsylvania Hall was burned by rioters. The mayor made his appearance, and addressing the mob, told them that he was going home and going to bed, and he advised them to do the same. The burning and destruction followed as a matter of course, and the flames drove out the abolitionists there assembled with Lucretia Mott and her friends, my own mother among them. Women were freely assaulted, Lucy Stone being very much struck at one time by a large prayer book hurled upon her head. The office of the faithful Whittier was in this building, and here he stood publishing the Pennsylvania Freeman until the other Pensylvania Freemen roasted him out.
     My earliest knowledge of slavery was, however in this city. Lynn has a proud record. For some days the railroad train would not stop here. James N. Buffum and a friend of his who had a dark skin, got into an argument with the train officials as to the rights of man and when they were torn from the train and ejected, were so inconsiderate as to take their seats with them. So, the company was mad at Lynn as a nest of abolitionists. I will not repeat the whole story as it has been told and the trains stop now.
     Garrison, Thompson, Douglass, Sojurner Truth, and others, I have seen in my father's humble home on Silsbee Street. Opposite stood the much finer house of so-called "Aunt Miriam Johnson." No cotton or sugar to be found here. It was gained by oppressed labor and could find no entrance. Their cellar was a station of the underground railway.
     One day a tall negro stood in our low sitting room. He was selling photographs of his lacerated back. Twice he had escaped, twice caught and sent back, and his master had his will upon him. This was his third wild dash for freedom. Names were given him, from one friend to another, where he might safely apply for aid to Canada. And we were his friends. Horror struck at the picture, my father cried: "But, my man your back can't look like this?" The negro answered, with a pleasant smile: "It looks fine now, suh, it is all healed up, but its jes like the picture, shuh enuff. Ef dey is no ladies roun I'd like to take off my shirt an show you, suh." He did so. Great incredible flaps of mangled flesh stretched in long furrows across the broad frame. As he bent and rose, all I could compare it to was the opening and shutting of a great accordion. And he was healed and well and smiling with his hope of freedom. It was my first view of American Slavery. The sight was too painful, his story too terrible to dwell upon at this late day.
     Fred Douglass, as I have said, came to Lynn, lived on Newhall Street, and found many friends here. I always thought him a handsome man, and when he married his white wife, in his later and most prosperous years, I said to my barber. who was a fine Nubian black man: What do you think of the marriage of Mr. Douglass? He answered: "I think Mr. Douglass will no longer be received in good society." At first I could not understand this, educated even as I had been, but I soon found that the self-respecting black society of Boston was what was meant and that Mr. Douglass had lost caste in this direction. That negroes possessed pride of race, strange as it may seem to our conceited minds and my feeble excuse for Mr. Douglass, that he was at least as much white as black, found no weight with the barber's indignant manhood. Mr. Douglass had surely lowered himself.
     I heard Douglass speak after the death of John Brown. Wonderful orator as he was, after telling the story, he folded his hands penitently before him, hung his head humbly, and in the saddest of voices, said: "and I, my friends, was not there." It was a confession that he had not been courageous enough to join Brown's daring band, that he failed to, meet the occasion. He was doing penance as best he might for his weakness. He thrilled us all and it was impossible not to grant him absolution.
     This was not the only time of depression for Douglass. Once when another dark day shrouded his soul, and his gloomy words were addressed to his friends, and all hearts were sinking lower and lower under his magic spell, gaunt old Sojourner Truth, a self-named negro woman, very old and very tall, rose to her height and earnestly asked: "Frederick, is God dead?" And the clouds lifted and the bright sun of righteousness once more broke through .
     Another notable negro was Box Brown, often in Lynn resident for a time as Garrison also was, so-called because he was nailed in a box and shipped to Boston as merchandise. He got along fairly well, save when some careless handler stood him on his head when his situation became most trying. Brown was I think a Charleston man. He had a good kind master, was well respected, and some of his master's white friends sought an interview with him filled with curiosity to learn why he ran away from so desirable a situation, promising not to betray him. The interview took place. Brown was delighted to meet them, and to hear from his old associates. They expressed their amazement at his flight and asked what could be the reason for his conduct. Brown hung his head and said: "what you kind gentlemen has said is all true, but sahs, ef you knows of ennybody thet wants my place down there will you please tell 'em I'se willing they should have it, the position is vacant."
     When I was about twelve years of age, I was told by my father to go to the house of Mr. George F. Lord, on Essex Street, and there I would find a young man dressed as an old woman with the large hoop skirts of those days, and that I must take her on my arm and escort her down to our cellar until she should be shipped to Maine. I was told the police were stationed in the neighborhood and were watchful, as a complaint had been made to the authorities. All good citizens, just before the war, were very anxious not to offend in any way the southern people, and the police were much more active in consequence. My charge, veiled and bonneted, was safely delivered according to orders, but when we neared the policeman towards whom I walked her, I had great difficulty in keeping her coarse brogan shoes out of sight, even under the immense skirts, as her strides from utter fear, were much too long and vigorous for an old woman. I, however, never had forgotten the accordion back of the slave and felt mighty glad in my boy heart that my father was one of the bad citizens.
     Those of you who come of Quaker stock or know of Quaker history are more or less familiar with the, at times, movings of the untrammeled spirit.
     Mary Dyer was hung (not burnt) on Boston Common. The dreadful fact is bad enough as it was for those horrible Puritans, without lying about it. But it gives pause when we realize that Mary Dyer, the Quakeress, was determined to be sacrificed, and got what she sought. Most anybody could get those kind of things in those kind of days with as a rule but little effort. It does seem brutal to say Mary got what she wanted but read the full history and you will be inclined to agree with me.
     Now some of these reformers thought somewhat along these lines. The women would go into a church and take their knitting with them, as a hint, I suppose to the preacher, that they did not consider his words worth wasting time upon. But they did not do this with impunity. Mrs. Swett of Georgetown was arrested for contempt of worship, and they sent her down to Ipswich where the jailer told the officers to take her back for he just wouldn't confine her and what do you think he said to them? He said "those who sent her there deserved jailing far more than she did."
     Stephen Foster and Thomas Beach were sure they were right in going to church meetings and interrupting the services by telling parson and people what very poor Christians they were. The poor church goers knew this already, and they did not enjoy being twitted with the facts. They asked Parsons Cook for the use of his church, and he said, "No!" They asked the same of Nathan Breed, the greatest Quaker of all, and he said, "No!" They told him he would hear them nevertheless speaking out in his meeting. Upon which Nathan answered mildly, "Thee will find us a peaceable people."
     So Stephen Foster and Thomas Parnell Beach (who was no ignoramus, but a graduate of Bowdoin College), went church-going in Lynn. Stephen to Cook's Congregational, where they turned him face down, a little man got hold of his legs like a wheelbarrow and they ran him out belly bunk. Then he got up on his feet again and started off to see the Quakers, the peaceable people, and he came away with a portion of his coat collar gone. Why they wanted it, who can tell? Then, the undaunted man went to see the Baptists, and they wanted one of his cuffs and so took it. While he was thus enjoying tribulation, Thomas Beach, who, of course, was equally sandy, called on the Methodists, and in the frolicsome welcome he met, received what they called at the time a "Methodist's dislocation of the thumb."
     As both these men were non-resistant, passive in the presence of physical force, a carnal minded man, like myself can but wonder what would have happened if such a good chance for a "shindy" had been fully honored. If, however, the reformers were satisfied, the Baptists and " the peaceable people," the Quakers of Lynn were not. Thomas Beach went to Newburyport jail on indictments from these two societies.
     Our James N. Buffum was disgusted by such action and came out from the Quaker society in consequence. When he did so, it pleased some of the reformers, and one of them wrote: "I can gladden friend Harriman's heart by the fact that James Buffum has already or is about doing it, renounced the broad-hatted type of sectarianism and given it over to Satan." So those of you who pass through Silsbee Street in the future will look out sharply for the devil, for he must be lurking about Friends Meeting House ever since this time.
     Wouldn't you all like to go into Lynn Quaker meeting with me in these times of 1841 and I842? It won't be dull. It won't be as it often was, a wholly silent meeting. There will be something doing.
     Parker Pillsbury says: "At noon we decided to hold a meeting in Lyceum hall at six o'clock, and issued notices to that effect."
     Mr. Rogers, never having seen a Friends meeting, in the afternoon attended their regular service, at three o'clock. He found there both Beach and Foster. I did not go near. All was still for a considerable time. Beach was the first to break the silence. He said he had a testimony to bear, and proceeded in his usual serious and moderate manner, ten or fifteen minutes, and gradually drew into the then inactive and very indifferent course of the Friends societies towards the anti-slavery enterprise in particular, but also on the great evils of war, intemperance, and their like, when a high seat Friend rose and said to him: "Thy speaking is an interruption of our worship."
     Beach responded that he thought speech was free in Friends meetings, and proceeded. Then another voice came down from the high seat, desiring the friend to be quiet. But Beach kept on, till a third elder rose and asked to be heard. Beach then said, "If anything is revealed to thee, I will hold my peace." "I have" said the high seat voice, and Beach sat down. Then the revealed was uttered thus: "We request thee not to disturb our meeting any longer by thy speaking." Beach then resumed, upon which high-seat members began shaking hands, the sign for closing meeting.
     As the elders and some others passed down the aisles, William Basset, then an esteemed and much respected young member, called to them to remain and hear the truth, and not run away from it. Just then, his mother, a venerable and highly honored member of the society, rushed forward, and in great and apparent grief besought him, in piteous and pleading tones, to desist and be quiet. But he answered her tenderly and affectionately, though firmly, "Mother, I am about my heavenly Father's business, and cannot hear thee now."
     When I was quite young I discovered what was meant by Lynn "New Lighters" but who and what were the "Come Outers" took me much longer to understand. This was it: The churches did not help the Abolitionists as they thought they should. So, many earnest ones "came out."
     They formed congregations, and we had a remarkable one in Lynn led by that fine and learned man, Rev. Samuel Johnson of Salem, and whose place of meeting was, before a church was built on Oxford Street, in Sagamore Hall, on the site of the Fabens building, Central Square.
     I doubt if many of you know the honor due to James N. Buffum, in these matters. Of course, there are many others of our Lynn men who did their best in opposing this great evil, but to name them all would turn this paper into a rather lengthy record of names.
   He was the man, as I have told you, who bestowed upon Lynn the honor of the train stopping. But he did very much more. He dropped his business and all his home interests, and sailed away to far off Scotland in 1845, to tell them things there, hoping, somehow, in this way to help the cause of freedom. Now, a little before this time, Scotch Christians had come over here begging and they had gathered about fifteen thousand dollars, and some of the money came from the South, and some of the money came from southern Christians, who were slaves, who were persuaded to give their scanty mites.
     Now, of course, the men who collected those dollars did not see the blood on them. It takes the man who has no interest in the money to see that. And so it happened that Mr. Buffum showed the Scotchmen that the money dripped blood. Robert Burns never got so drunk as not to be able to plainly see that, "A man's a man for a that, and a that." And Scotchmen all see as Burns saw, when it comes to questions of manhood and freedom.
     James N. Buffum gained great influence in Scotland; he set it in a blaze of moral indignation. Pillsbury says that when he visited Scotland, although many years had passed, that Mr. Buffum was greatly inquired after by the people. As Beecher turned the popular tide of feeling of England in our favor during the Civil War, so Mr. Buffum won sympathy for Abolitionism, from this brave and gallant race. It should not be forgotten.
     Mr. Buffum was as I have said a "Come Outer." Now, opinions differ in religious matters as, perhaps some of you may have noticed, and is a bit difficult for me, although brought up in the midst of them, to give you their central idea. I have noted the noble thought on the power of God voiced by Frederick Douglass, and yet perhaps, other words of his, apparently far from reverent, best described the attitude of the "Come Outers." Douglass said: "I prayed to heaven over and over to save me, till I had to give up. At last the thought came, pray to your legs. And I prayed: 'O legs, O my good legs. I do pray you to save me from slavery!' So, at last, I prayed rightly, my legs ran with me and here I am." "Come Outers" would see nothing irreverent in this. They would heartily endorse it. To use all your means at all times, with full strength, for good, was righteousness.
     It was in the Sagamore Hall, on one dark and stormy night that I saw John Brown. I remember little, but that little with great plainness. I knew something of bleeding Kansas. I had been told of relatives toiling peacefully on their prairie farms, being ambushed and shot to death, by proslavery scoundrels. I had heard too, of men, much dearer to my boy soul, than the flabby non-resistant Foster and his like. I saw here a man who wore no sweet smile of serenity such as lit the faces of Garrison and Emerson. There was something there which later I saw in the face of General Grant. Was it the face of those who accept the responsibility for many deaths? Who have deeply thought of the gravest burdens that heart and conscience know, and calmy shouldered them all?
     I cannot say, but, the audience gone, three men stood close together in a corner of the dark hall, around a hot stove, one small light burning overhead, and one small unoticed boy, with them, paying rapt attention to talk he did not understand, and of which he does not remember a single word. What he did understand was, "that this rough looking man had killed 'em, Yes, Sir. He was no chump. He was Ossawotamie Brown." "He don't do any laying down while they cut him up into little bits. There's clubs, and swords and rifles and hangmen's ropes, for them devils, and this one ain't a mite scared to use em all." Yes, the small boy did understand, after all. He did not know, but he now thinks that the two "Come Outers" with Brown that night had come out far enough to reach the guns that cracked later in the insanity at Harper's Ferry. And he, also, did not know, that the gloom, and the wild winter storm raging outside was fitting forerunner of the woeful clouds soon to lower over the devoted head of the grim, fanatic warrior. Not long after this the country was aroused as never before.
     I wrote, many years ago, the following lines for my little boy. It relates to the church standing on Union Street near Silsbee, now in the possession of, I think, the Baptists.

GRANDFATHER BUFFUM

A story my boy? Yes, I'll tell you the way
That a bell was rung in our Grandpa's day.
Those days 'ere the south had learned to feel
The fatal thrust of the northern steel,
And before her gallant sons grew pale
In the arms of Death 'neath the leaden hail.
Cowards and mud-sills they deemed us then,
Soon, they were willing to call us men.
Those times to you far away must seem,
And the tale I tell like an idle dream.
Twas in '59, on a winter's day
That far to the south, a convict lay
Wounded and chained and doomed to die
, Ere another sun should mount the sky.
Such felons are rare since the world began,
For his crime was loving his fellow man,
And the wrongs of the slaves so stung his soul
That his brain was maddened beyond control,
And murder seemed right, and treason red
Left law no ruth for his stricken head.
Now the day was come and the hour was nigh,
By the might of the law, John Brown must die,
With never a protest of voice or hand
From the watching people throughout the land.
Some kind hearts whispered; - "God rest his soul."
Our Grandfather thought that the bells should toll.
So, away he sped to the old church door,
(Seldom, indeed, was he there before
For Quaker blood fi1led the veins alone,
And no steepled house would his fathers own.)
Closed was its porch. Not a bolt must draw,
And the sexton, firm in his rights of law,
(With a small soul's care for the outward peace),
Bade him begone, and his clamor cease.
Free and wild blew the wintry air,
Tossing the locks of his thin white hair,
But his eye flashed bright with the spirits rage,
And the blood ran hot in the veins of age
As over and over, again and again,
He strove at the locks, but all in vain.
How well I remember the jeering crowd,
How ashamed I was then, but now how proud
Of the dear old man, who at least gave way
And fell back baffled, so pale and gray.
" I helped buy that bell, its a shameful thing,"
He cried aloud, "that it cannot ring."
And he stood alone in his weak despair
While the crowd was silenced around him there.
Then the Sexton spoke in a milder way,
" 'Tis only Justice that's done to-day,
We know but little, God knows the whole."
Said Grandfather: "Yes, but the bell should toll,
Little enough is that," cried he,
" For a man who dies to make man free."
Are there not some in our town of Lynn
Will help me to break this church door in?"
Thank God for the brave word, fitly spoken.
The bonds of the unjust law was broken,
And help was eager, and hearts were kind,
And eyes saw truth that late were blind.
"Mine be the blame and mine the deed,
Smash in that door." Like a rotten reed
The bolt gave way, and with clattering crash
The bars went down 'neath the rapid dash
Of Youth's strong limbs, and hearts not cold
Under weight of years, or of sordid gold.
Men who, thereafter, on many a field
Forced the proud Southern to flee or yield,
Swift to the idle bell rope win
To save from shame the name of Lynn.
An instant more and the great bell swings,
An instant more and the bell, - it rings,
Slowly - solemnly - steadily toll,
God in Heaven, receive his soul.
Far and wide its music swells,
From the sounding sea to the woodland dells,
You shall suffer for this cried the sexton grim,
But the bell's deep tones were answering him.
"Boy, when old tales to your boy you tell,
Our Grandfather Buffum remembers well."

     Some years ago there lived in Hamilton a very bright woman named Abigail Dodge. And she took the pen name of Gail Hamilton, and among many other bright things she said was: "When you are telling the truth you don't have to bother, the thing-is." On looking over my paper I noticed the name Buffum seems unduly prominent. But I can't help it, the thing-is.
     Arnold Buffum was one of the earliest presidents of the National Anti-Slavery Society. Jonathan Buffum, the father of Charles Buffum, one of your honored members, was the first president of the Lynn Society.
     James N. and Jonathan lived opposite each other on lower Union Street, but were not related and I think that Arnold was not related to either of these. I have a copy of the Liberator of 1860. In it appears the name of James N. Buffum as vice-president, so you see he was at the front to the last. His mental attitude of necessity kept him there. It is said of him that, being asked by an orthodox friend, "What if he should be mistaken in his liberal belief, and wake at last in Hell?" He answered, seriously: "He thought he shouldn't mind, there would be such splendid chances for reform." He possessed the same mental poise as the good deacon, who said if that happened to him "He should try to start a prayer meeting, right off."
     But Jonathan Buffum was by no means second in these matters. His latch string was out for all progress: Temperance, Spiritualism, Anti-slavery, Anti-masonry and so on. He printed the Lynn Record from 1830 to 1836. His son says, the office, which was on the third floor of the Rail Road House, at the head of Market street, was mobbed and the two flights of stairs torn away. Armed men stayed in his house nights to protect his family. Bottles of tar were thrown through his windows and ruined his parlor. Henry B. Sprague read to you a fine paper on the "New Lights". In this movement Jonathan Buffum was prominent. He was a moral dynamiter, and nothing delighted him more than the blowing up of an ossified mind.
     The Lynn Anti-slavery Society held many young men. William Basset, James P. Boyce, Wendell Newhall, George W. Keene, Daniel and Ezra Baker, Oliver Mudge, Perry Newhall, and I must leave out many others. The women, also, had their society, and bound shoes to help the cause, getting together evenings, but, altogether, earning less than a dollar a night. "They got only three cents for binding a woman's kid buskin, with three seams on one shoe, closed with a double linen thread, well waxed, and the top was leather bound," so says one who knows.
     I wonder if anyone present remembers with me the solid, sturdy form of Sam Silsbee?
     The story is told of him, that after the passage of the fugitive slave law, when the slave hunters scoured the country, they found one had come to Lynn.
     In the words of my informant, Mr. Buffam: "They were so keen on the scent that they found Sam was to take a load of hay to Salem, with the man buried in the hay. They watched for him and came up with him on his way. They told him he had a nigger under the hay. Sam, in his slow, matter of fact way, parleyed with them for a while, when he said to them: ' Well, if you think I have a man in the hay, the only way you can know about it is to unload; but, as sure as you are alive, you shall load it again, as it is now.' They looked at the height. It was too much. They concluded there was 'no nigger in that wood-pile,' and so he bluffed them and the man got safely to Salem."
     Sometimes the Abolitionists did get a church to speak in. Once they got the Baptist Church on North Common Street. One indignant pro-slavery member was so mad, that with all the strength of a protesting right arm, a big hammer and stout nails, he fastened up his pew, that the ungodly should not desecrate it by their presence.
     But it cost the young reformers only a hop, skip and a jump to pack the pew full, squeeze all the sanctity out of it, and leave the dull owner an object of laughter down to the present day.
     In 1835, the English lecturer, George Thompson, invited to this country by Garrison, tried to speak in the First Methodist Church at the head of the Common.
     A mob gathered, smashed the windows and demanded Thompson. They really meant business. Lynn Antis did not have it all their own way, by any means. So Isaiah Parrot of Gravesend, swapped coat and hat with him and they crossed over to Daniel Henshaw's, who was then editor of the Record. They got him away to the Erastus Ware farm at Marblehead. Horace and Benjamin Ware some of you must remember. The section is now called Beach Bluff.
     But even there was not safe, and so they sent the poor man to row himself all alone, with provisions, over to Ram Island, to stay there until they should signal to him.
     So turbulent were the times, that in 1835, William Chadwell, Deputy Sheriff, read the riot act to a Lynn crowd commanding them to disperse.
     When Henry Clay, on his visit to Lynn, passed with a procession up Union Street, "we boys," as one good old man tells me, bought fifteen yards of heavy white drill, a yard wide, and got Thomas J. Bowler to cover it with the words: "Tariff or no tariff, no union with slave holders." These children were "Black Mashers" as Ward Four boys were called in my school days, and the sentiment was a good secession sentiment from the northern side. It was, indeed, a common phrase from the Abolition camp: "Let the erring sisters depart in peace." Fortunately the Nation never agreed with them on this point.
     England freed all her slaves by purchase; using for this purpose twenty million pounds, one hundred million dollars. A big sum but a trifle compared with our own bills in this matter.
     The first of August, 1838, entire English Emancipation was effected, and Lynn, of course, celebrated the event by a procession and jubilee up to Shadrach Ramsdell's grove, which was where the Isaac Newhall house now stands on Chatham Street.
     Whittier was well acquainted here in Lynn. It will pay you to look up, when you go home, a lovely gem of his, addressed to A. K. This meant Avis Keene, who lived in Central Square, where the Bergengren Building now stands. A garden was there and a fine willow tree, from which Willow street took its name. As to the poem, they used to press sea mosses in those old days and make beautiful work of them and she had sent him a basket of them. Had he sent me such a gift in return, I fear I should have sent him a two horse load of sea weed as soon as possible.
     Avis Keene was an accepted preacher of the Friends Society and bore faithful testimony against slackened protest of Friends against Slavery. She was a great aunt of mine, and most worthy in all things, and I beg you to notice this name is not Buffum.
     Sumner and Phillips kept on. Sumner's last words were: "Take Care of my civil rights Bill." A measure of doubtful utility; kept on and proposed the return of captured war banners, disgusting the true warriors of both North and South, with such cheap sentimentalism. And Phillips went on into the mire of Butlerism and Greenbackery. The last I saw of this great orator was in Lynn in the old Music Hall on Central Avenue. It was a drizzling, miserable night, but I said I must go, as there could be but few more opportunities of hearing him. But it was all rather sad. The man was there, the same fine gladiator as of old. But the crowded audience was not there; the occasion was not there; and the subject of the lecture so trivial that I cannot recall what it was. The musical voice, the balanced periods, the flowing thought ;-all there, in the same delightful way; but it was Hercules tossing straws.
     I was taught to despise Webster, as I have shown you. But the mists of conflict are clearing. Out of them looms a gigantic form, with large, sad eyes; and a voice sounds: "The Federal Union, - it must and shall be preserved - now and forever - one and inseparable!" and the voice is the voice of Webster. Not love of God or man, but love of country, did the work, and here we find Webster appearing once more as the God-like Daniel. Webster had more to do with the practical freeing of the slaves than the Abolitionists. They, truly, were always ready to brandish the torch of Freedom, but Webster furnished the fuel; the steady, unquenchable fire of the Union men of all parties.
     To whom shall we give the highest and final honors? To none of whom I have been speaking. To the writers, to the orators, to the generals? Oh no! To our country's common working man. To him who starved on the long marches; who saw his own mangled flesh blown afar from his tortured body; who roasted alive in the burning forests of the Wilderness; who died unnoticed and alone on countless stricken fields; to the common working man, to the true hearts who subsist on a few hundred dollars a year, bring up their families nobly on that, and are thankful to get it; To these be the highest - and may God, forever bless them!

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