Grass-roots Garrisonians in central Massachusetts: The case of Hubbardston's Jonas and Susan Clark

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter 2003 by Koelsch, William A

Perhaps the clearest expression of Jonas Clark's moral stance, however, came after the outbreak of the war with Mexico in May, 1846. Following hard upon the annexation of Texas, the events of that year seemed to a number of Massachusetts anti-slavery folk to confirm the Garrisonian argument that southwestern expansion was a slaveholders' conspiracy. In Cambridge in June, James Russell Lowell wrote the first of his "Biglow Papers," a stinging critique of the war and of attempts to recruit Massachusetts men to fight on behalf of what Lowell regarded, in his biographer's words, as "a squalid attempt to extend the boundaries of slavery." In Concord, late in July, the local constable and tax collector arrested and jailed Henry David Thoreau for failure to pay his poll tax. Thoreau regarded his refusal as an act of resistance to the war, and signifying his commitment to the abolitionist cause. He was thus chagrined when one of his abolitionist aunts bailed him out the following morning. The experience of a night in jail, however, eventually bore fruit in his celebrated essay on civil disobedience.20

In Hubbardston, in December, the Worcester County North Division once again held its annual meeting in the vestry of the Unitarian Church. A "business committee" of five (Loring Moody, Abby Kelley Foster, H. W. Carter, Jonas Clark, and Samuel Gay) drafted and introduced resolutions even more fiery than those the Clarks had endorsed the previous year. The resolutions decried the annexation of Texas, denounced the country's "murderous expedition against Mexico," asserted that the American government was "wholly in the wrong," and described the war itself as "unparalleled in atrocity." Accordingly, it was resolved, "the time has come for the formal seperation [sic] of Massachusetts from this slaveholding confederacy." A second resolution called upon women, "as wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, abolitionists," to make every effort to prevent participation in the war by their male relatives. The Liberator described those present as having been "much revived, cheered, animated, and edified" by these seditious proceedings, with the anticipated result being "substantial evidence of a growth in anti-slavery grace" during 1847.(21)

In May, 1847 Henry Watson, a recently escaped slave from Mississippi, came to speak in Hubbardston. The Liberator had requested volunteers to make local arrangements for him and his white companion, though did not record the response. But in August William Wells Brown, who had published his own slave narrative the previous month, was sent on a speaking tour as the recently hired agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Brown was scheduled for Hubbardston on Tuesday evening, August 17th, and for Barre two nights later. The Treasurer's report for Brown's lecture tour reports the sum of $3.19 collected at the Hubbardston meeting, but also notes an additional $5.00 from Jonas Clark.

More importantly, one of Brown's two entries in Susan Clark's book is dated "Hubbardston, August 19, 1847," the date of the Barre meeting. It cannot, then, have been scribbled in simply as a post-lecture inscription. It is more reasonable to infer that Brown's two lengthy 1847 entries in Mrs. Clark's book, one a poem, "Get Up Early," and the other a plea for recognition as a man and a brother, beginning "Reader! The writer of this is a slave!," were written as a kind of "hostess gift" in return for two nights of hospitality, and perhaps also transportation, from the Clarks. If so, the Clarks were hosting lecturers regardless of race or status. It is likely, then, that either the Clarks or the Waites had also hosted Watson in May, and that Frederick Douglass's lengthy entry of July, 1845 was, like Brown's, a gesture of thanks to a hospitable couple. The Clarks' hospitality to Brown and Douglass is a practical demonstration of the ideal of racial equality and friendship recent scholars have identified as a core value of Garrisonian abolitionism.22