On Sunday, February 23, 2025, St. Anne’s Episcopal Church presented “Freedom Seekers: The Underground Railroad and St. Anne’s Lowell” a speaking program that featured UMass Lowell History Professor Robert Forrant and Jacquelynn Coles of the Black Lowell Coalition. The event was part of St. Anne’s year-long bicentennial celebration and was attended by 75 people.

According to a self-guided tour brochure available at the church:

“St. Anne’s was designed by Kirk Boott, an agent of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, and was built in 1824 at a cost of $12,000. During the consecration service on March 16, 1825, the first rector, Theodore Edson, was ordained to the priesthood. Dr. Edsson remained here until his death in 1883, a few months short of his 90th birthday, with 60 years of service to the people of St. Anne’s.”

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Jacquelynn Coles (left) and Robert Forrant (right) in the chapel of St. Anne’s Church.

Jacquelynn Coles led off the speaking program, sharing that she was born and raised in upstate New York but that four of her second great grandparents had been enslaved, mostly in Mississippi. She has been unable to find genealogical records for the other members of that ancestral cohort, so others may also have been enslaved.

She then gave a sweeping but concise account of slavery in Massachusetts. Originally, English colonists enslaved native people but eventually replaced them with Black people from Africa. Slavery was never expressly abolished in Massachusetts, although a series of court decisions based on the post-Revolutionary War state constitution held that slavery was inconsistent with the freedoms ensured by that document which caused slavery to fade away. An important litigant in these court cases was an enslaved person named Quock Walker (some of whose descendants settled in Lowell).

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required people in northern states where slavery had been eliminated to assist in capturing and returning escaped “freedom seekers” to their “owners.” This significantly increased the presence and activity of “slave catchers” in Northern states which caused significant tension and resistance among residents of those states, including in Massachusetts. This motivated more people in the north to support abolitionism.

During the Civil War, slavery was not entirely outlawed. The Emancipation Proclamation only abolished slavery in states that were in rebellion and even then, only in the parts of those states not already under US government control. It was only the post-Civil War amendments to the US Constitution – the 13th, 14th, and 15th – that legally ended slavery in the United Sates.

But discrimination based on race did not end. Segregation continued well into the 1900s and, as Ms. Coles observed, many acts today emanating from Washington have the intent to reverse or undermine those post-Civil War amendments.

Ms. Coles concluded her remarks with a Lowell focus, explaining that the primary business of the Lowell Manufacturing Company (today’s Market Mills) was the making of cheap cotton cloth that was sold to Southern plantation owners where it was used for clothing for enslaved people. Although the Lowell business’s profits were closely tied to slavery, one of the senior managers of that mill was Royal Southwick, a Quaker who was staunchly opposed to slavery. The philosophical conflict represented by Southwick and Lowell Manufacturing was reproduced in other places in Lowell and indeed throughout the northern states in the years before the Civil War.

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Professor Bob Forrant spoke next, observing that today we are challenged by the question of what our responsibilities as members of a free society are. He said that was a question that people in Lowell in the 1800s had to answer every day.

Forrant gave high praise to Rev. Theodore Edson, saying he vociferously advocated the immediate end of slavery, a view that was unpopular in Lowell. While many may have opposed slavery in principle, few supported its outright abolition. Many preferred gradual abolition, for instance, picking a date and saying anyone born after that date would be free but anyone already enslaved would remain so for the rest of their lives; others supported compensating “slave owners” for the loss of value of their “property” if slavery ended; still others wanted to deport enslaved individuals to Africa (which is how the country of Liberia came to be founded). Add to this the many in Lowell who chose to ignore slavery and those who supported its continuation, either overtly or by implication, and the true courage of Edson’s vocal and public position becomes clearer.

Speaking of St. Anne’s, Professor Forrant explained that geographically it was amid other places notable in Lowell’s struggles over slavery. Across the street from the church, today’s Enterprise Bank building was then Lowell City Hall with a function room on the upper floor the was the frequent site of speeches by such fierce abolitionists as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Around the corner on Dutton Street was/is Mechanic’s Hall which was a facility supported by and for the benefit of the highly skilled artisans – then called “mechanics” – who worked in Lowell. The upper floors had a lending library and meeting rooms, but the ground floor was made available to private businesses, all of which were operated by formerly enslaved individuals. Further down Kirk Street, today’s National Park headquarters, was the Mill Agent’s House which, for many years, was the home of Linus Childs, another mill manager who was a steadfast abolitionist.

When the Fugitive Slave Act became law in 1850, many of Lowell’s formerly enslaved people fled to Canada. However, Linus Childs and others in Lowell came together in a mass meeting at City Hall and vowed to protect all of them if they would return to the city. This was communicated to the refugees in Canada, and many did return to Lowell. According to Professor Forrant, no slave catcher ever came to the city due to this public and vocal resistance.

As a good historian, Forrant closed by observing that none of this was simple or straightforward. Some of the most active abolitionists in Massachusetts owed their family fortunes to the slave trade of earlier generations. Contemporaries made money by selling manufactured goods to southern plantation owners, or by lending them money, or in many other ways.

Myth is straightforward. History is complicated.

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I’ve often said that one of my favorite quotes is this, from President Harry Truman: “The only thing new in the world is the history you’ve not yet read.” I was reminded of that by the St. Anne’s Underground Railroad program. The crisis we face today echoes the challenges that our predecessors faced in Lowell 200 years ago. By studying the issues they confronted and how they responded, we will be better informed of how we should act today.