The Life of an Anti-Slavery Agent
Charles, William, and Cyrus were all employed as Anti-Slavery Agents - a job filled with travel, adventure, debates, and the ever-present danger of mobbing and violence. An agent was assigned an area - either a small state, or a county - and visited as many towns as possible where they could lecture. Starting around 1836 (check) these Anti-Slavery Agents included women (all white women at this time), such as Abby Kelley (check name) and the Grimké sisters.
William and Charles were part of the famed Band of Seventy trained in New York City by Theodore Dwight Weld.
The assignments of the Burleigh brothers as agents are not yet fully reconstructed, but correspond to these rough dates and places.
Charles - PA, CT, VT, RI, Middlesex county MA
William - CT
Cyrus - MA, PA
Notice of an Anti-Slavery Meeting in Worcester county, Massachusetts
This announcement (year to be determined) illustrates the diversity of agents nad speakers - A.K. Foster is Abbey Kelly Foster, famed woman speaker. Charles Lenox Remond was a Black man, and Samuel May, Jr. was a second-generation white Abolitionist. Mr. Abbey Kelly, Stephen Symonds Foster, was a leader in the Come-Outer movement from churches, and one of the most radical of the Garrisonian abolitionists.
The travel demands on an agent included keeping expenses low (being an anti-slavery agent was not a road to riches), staying with friends, allies and family along the way. Finding a place to speak was often fraught with partisan gamesmanship - it was not at all unusual to be locked out of a civic center, church, or meeting place that had been legally secured beforehand. Civil authorities were often worried about civil disturbances erupting at anti-slavery meetings - while one can well understand their concern, it was a case of displaced anxiety, since slavery and racism together constituted the greater evil that needed to be confronted.
Difficulties in the Life of an Agent
This moving article by Charles Calistus Burleigh summarizes the difficulties and the rationale that accompanied the life of an Anti-Slavery agent.
The agents - especially in the decade of the 1830s, as the movement for Immediate Abolition was gaining traction - were especially valuable in setting up active networks. This included gaining subscribers to anti-slavery publications, seeding town and county anti-slavery societies, and inviting people of all walks of life - including farmers, merchants, apprentices, and women - to contribute. In this manner, the model based on the early Christian disciples fit well - the agents were eager to include everyone, while the rival American Colonization Society based its appeal primarily to those who were educated and wealthy (due to the daunting logisitics of transporting free blacks out of the country). One can see how the notion of living out both Christian ideals and Christian history could have been used metaphorically. The suffering and miniature martyrdoms only added to the luster.
The risks to the Anti-Slavery agents were quite real, but nothing that would have surprised the Burleighs, having endured the persecution they had in Canterbury.
One such incident happened very early in William's time as an agent. This occured in North Stonington, in the far southeastern corner of Connecticut. North Stonington was the home of William's wife Harriet's family, and the very church where his father-in-law was a Deacon was at the epicenter. The event is described in a letter from Latham Hull to Elisha Haley, a well-known Jacksonian politician. Both Hull and Haley were anti-Abolitionist:
"All the news I have to give you is there has been a man at Milltown by the name of Burleigh to deliver abolition lectures. He gave (?) one and appointed another and they shut the door on him and the poor fellow took his flight. They blew the horn and gave him a gun, & he took his flight and has not been seen here since."
To a pacifist like William, the presence of the gun was likely terrifying. One wonders, though, how this incident affected his relation to his father-in-law. Throughout his life, William was chronically short of money to support his growing family. The low pay and high risk of being an Anti-Slavery agent is not the sort of vocation likely to induce the affection of a stern father-in-law watching out for his youngest child!
(Letter, 1836 December 29, North Stonington, Conn., from Latham Hull to Elisha Haley, Washington, D.C., held in the collection of Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. See also Myers, John. 1983. Antislavery Agents in Connecticut, 1833-1838. Connecticut History (March 1983), no. 24 p, 1-28.)