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, RI, 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.

Charles Burleigh discusses the Life of an Anti-Slavery Agent

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.)

Cradle Quilt (1836) sold at Anti-Slavery Fair in Boston

Cradle Quilt from 1836 Anti-Slavery Fair

This cradle quilt was mentioned in The Liberator. It was sold at the 1836 Boston Anti-Slavery Fair.

The journals kept by Cyrus Moses Burleigh provide the daily struggles, achievements, joys, and networks in the life of an agent.

Floor Plan for 1839 Boston Anti-Slavery Fair

Floor Plan for the 1839 Boston Anti-Slavery Fair. Cyrus Burleigh helped out at many regional fairs when he served as an Anti-Slavery agent, and participated in the set up and strike down of the premises.

In a letter to The Pennsylvania Freeman just prior to when he assumed its editorship, Charles C. Burleigh provided a remarkable compendium of his debates and presentations between December of 1839 and March of 1840. This single paragraph dealing with his time in central Pennsylvania that winter gives abundant testimony to his energy!

On the 7th [of Janaury 1840] I came within the limits of my intended field of operation for the remainder of the winter, by reaching Harrisburg, which has been a sort of central point to my subsequent movements. I have since lectured seventy-one times, including two addresses particularly to the colored people, three on the subject of Peace, and four on that of Temperance. My labors have been distributed over five counties. I have spoken eighteen times in Dauphin, at four different places; in Adams twelve times, at five places; twenty-four times in York, at eight places, and at two places in Perry, six times. In some I have lectured but once, in others, two, three or four times, going over as much of the ground as the time would allow, and circumstances seemed to demand—while in yet others I have given a protracted course. In the borough of York for instance, I presented in twelve lectures, a pretty full view of the prominent points of the subject;—the character and tendency of slavery; (with a refutation of the attempted scripture argument in its defence,) the duty and expediency of immediate emancipation; the inadequacy of all schemes of gradualism, (including colonization,) to do justice to the slave or promote the real interest of the master or the country; the plan and measures by which we seek to effect our object; and our reasons for anticipating ultimate success. In Harrisburg I gave a similar course of the same number of letures—varying, however, in some aspects, in the manner of treating the subject, and in some of the topics discussed. In Gettysburg I gave five, covering only a part of the ground. I may visit that place again, but it is uncertain.

References

Charles Calistus Burleigh. "Letter to the Pennsylvania Freeman." Pennsylvania Freeman 6:30:3 (April 2, 1840).

Map of Counties and area mentioned by Charles C. Burleigh in 1840 letter

Map of Counties visited by Charles C. Burleigh winter 1840

From the Agency Committee minutes of January 14, 1834 - "Voted that these agent by specially directed to report at short intervals, their labor, success, and expenses."