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Abolition in Lowell.m4a
Anti-slavery and abolition were controversial subjects in the mill city of Lowell. While many leading citizens of Lowell, including many mill agents and investors, denounced the abolitionist cause, many mill workers supported abolition.
In the 1830s, mill workers in Lowell had access to the city's first anti-slavery newspaper, The Observer, and may have heard abolitionist speeches from William Lloyd Garrison and George Thompson. Women from Lowell formed the Lowell Female Anti-Slavery Society, raising money to promote the abolitionist cause and signing petitions to end slavery.
Primary Document
Primary Document
In 1835, the Lowell Female Anti-Slavery Society circulated a petition to Lowell residents that asked the United States' Congress to ban slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. One thousand six hundred and thirty-four female residents of Lowell signed it. The petitioners did not ask Congress to abolish slavery in the other states, only Washington, D.C. The petition read:
"YOUR PETITIONERS, Ladies of the town of Lowell, in the county of Middlesex, and state of Massachusetts . . . do not ask your honorable body to legislate for the abolition of slavery in the several states where it exists, but they . . . most respectfully but earnestly entreat your honorable body to pass without delay such laws, as to your wisdom may seem right and proper for the entire abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia."
The petition was unsuccessful. Congress did not ban the trade of enslaved people in the District of Columbia until 1850. In 1862, Congress passed a law abolishing slavery in the District.
Image: "The injustice and impolicy of the slave trade, and of the slavery of the Africans : illustrated in a sermon preached before the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom, and for the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage, at their annual meeting in New-Haven, Sept. 15, 1791," by Jonathan Edwards, D.D., published 1822, Library of Congress.
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