Black History Month - February 12, 2021

In 1845 the railroad came to Melrose, and it brought new people with new ideas to this sleepy hamlet. No one exemplified that movement more than Boston attorney Samuel Sewall (image 2), who in 1847 bought a huge tract of land north of what is today the Lynn Fells Parkway and built the house you see in the first image, which is now 216 Lynn Fells Parkway.

 

Sewall was a radical abolitionist. In 1832, he was a founding member of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He was also a founder of the Boston Vigilance Committee, serving as defense attorney in the high-profile cases of fugitive slaves George Latimer (1842), Shadrach Minkins (1850), and Thomas Sims (1851). In 1852, Frederick Douglass would cite the “masterly power” of Sewall’s legal arguments in his famous address, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

 

Yet Sewall was not just an eloquent writer. This was an era when pro- and anti-slavery mobs fought on the streets of Boston, and Sewall believed that the extraordinary evil of slavery justified breaking the law and even violence in the struggle to destroy it.

 

In 1836, while defending the freedom of two enslaved women, Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates, Sewall conspired with a group of Black women to storm the Boston courthouse and physically remove them, an event that came to be called the “Abolition Riot.” Two weeks later, after receiving numerous death threats for his role in the affair, a US Navy sailor from Baltimore assaulted Sewall in his Boston law office, beating him with a horsewhip (image 3).

In 1851, while trying to get access to his client, Thomas Sims (image 4), at the Boston courthouse, Sewall was arrested for assaulting a police officer; the courthouse was thereafter encircled in massive chains to prevent access, with anyone trying to get inside being forced to crawl under them.

 

In 1855, Sewall presided over a meeting at Faneuil Hall on the fate of the imprisoned fugitive slave Anthony Burns (images 5 & 6). At the end of the meeting, some in the crowd broke off and stormed the courthouse; a police officer was stabbed to death, and Sewall’s cousin, Bronson Alcott, was injured.  

 

Following John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, which had resulted in the deaths of two US Marines, Sewall acted as treasurer for the Massachusetts defense fund for the imprisoned insurrectionists, and he provided legal counsel to one of them, Thaddeus Hyatt.

 

In addition to Sewall’s home on the Parkway, there is another place in Melrose central to his abolitionist work which you can visit. In 1909, the Boston courthouse, scene to so much eloquence and violence, was torn down, but its Quincy granite was salvaged. In 1915, it was repurposed, and became Melrose’s Memorial Hall.