Anti-Abolitionists in Lowell
Document 40

Document 40: “Citizens of Lowell” [Anti-Thompson Handbill], Lowell, December 2, 1834

George Thompson was a British abolitionist who traveled to the United States in 1834 to deliver lectures on abolition. In Lowell, an anti-abolitionist mob attempted to silence him and “suppress the liberty of speech on the subject of slavery.” Little is known about the anti-Thompson demonstrators who threatened violence and hurled a brick-bat through the window of Lowell’s Town Hall where Thompson was speaking during his second visit to the city in the late fall of 1834. (See Document 25.) William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator charged that at the December 2nd protest, “many of the rabble were foreigners of the lowest grade,” suggesting that the mob was composed of Irish men. This mob, however, was led by several of Lowell’s business and political leaders, some of whom were prominent in the city’s Whig Party. In the mid-1830s, many Whigs and Democrats alike opposed Garrisonian abolition, and few party leaders in Lowell would have fully welcomed Thompson or Garrison.

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