Lowell was a difficult place to advance the antislavery cause. Abolitionist Joshua Giddings described it in 1848 as “the hardest place in all New England to start the ball of freedom.”[i] At the same time that an antislavery movement was gaining ground in Lowell, some of the investors in the textile factories and the managers they employed worked against the movement because they wanted to protect their businesses against disruptions to their cotton supply. Manufacturers feared that emancipation would lead to a large decrease in cotton production (one source argued that production would decline by 5/6), and an increase in the cost of cotton cloth for consumers.[ii]

Driven by these fears, certain individuals organized anti-abolitionist activity in Lowell. In the fall of 1834, for example, a mob threatened the life of English abolitionist George Thompson, who was speaking to a large crowd in Lowell. The mob threw a brick-bat at Thompson’s head during his lecture, and someone made threats to “immerce (sic)” Thompson “in a vat of Indelable (sic) Ink [nitrate of silver].”[iii]

Lowellians who were angered by the idea of having an abolitionist from out of town come in to stir up strong feelings also organized an anti-abolitionist meeting. A handbill inviting citizens to attend the meeting encouraged them to “look well to your interests” and asked them to “convince your Southern brethren that we will not interfere with their rights.”[iv] The handbill’s plea to attend to financial interests is a reminder that without cotton grown by enslaved people, the city’s main industry would go idle. Such interests directed the people behind the handbill to reassure their southern connections that they would not bite the hand that fed them their cotton. The point about southerners’ “rights” was that the Constitution (as well as the Fugitive Slave Act) protected slavery, and that extending freedom to the enslaved would break with the law. Thus, anti-abolitionists focused on the legality rather than the morality of slavery. At the anti-Thompson meeting, a set of resolutions were passed condemning antislavery “agitation” for “creat[ing] suspicions and disaffection between the north and south.”[v] Keeping a strong working relationship with southerners was essential to people with this perspective. Indeed, even on the eve of Civil War, mill investor Nathan Appleton—trying to prevent disunion—reminded northerners and southerners that “the actual condition of the North and the South, in their natural productions, is most favorable to a trade and intercourse mutually advantageous and agreeable.”[vi]

As a place where residents disagreed strongly about slavery, Lowell was not unique. Indeed, taking a closer look at Lowell should help us understand how ordinary people in northern industrial cities more broadly came to care about slavery, and how they labored to advance the antislavery cause even in places where slavery had fierce and powerful support.