It is not surprising that African Americans in Lowell were abolitionists. Some of them had been enslaved, and after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, even those who were not fugitives lived in danger of being kidnapped and sent into slavery themselves. What is more surprising is that white people without personal connections to enslavement came to care about the institution of slavery. Yet many residents of Lowell, first among them white mill workers, did care. These workers tended to take a moderate approach to opposing slavery. Even thus, it is noteworthy that they took steps against slavery in a city where everyone’s livelihood was somehow linked to slavery.

White Americans joined the antislavery movement starting in the 1780s, when ideas articulated in the Declaration of Independence sparked a debate about slavery, leading to the passage of gradual emancipation laws in several northern states (and, in Massachusetts, the declaration of William Cushing, the chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, that slavery was incompatible with the state’s constitution).[i] William Lloyd Garrison, based in Boston, re-energized the movement among white northerners in the 1830s, moving it away from gradualism and colonization and toward the goal of an immediate end to slavery.[ii] 

Inspired by British abolitionists’ effective use of petitions, American activists sent petition after petition calling for antislavery reform to Congress as well as state legislatures. Rather than demanding an end to the institution of slavery altogether, petitioners made more limited demands, such as the protection of fugitives from slavery or an end to slavery in the nation’s capital. Signatories were not necessarily radicals; some had to be persuaded through long conversation to support the narrow demands of the petitions.[iii] Unfortunately for the enslaved, a gag rule put in place in the House of Representatives in 1836 meant that antislavery petitions did not get discussed until the repeal of the resolution in 1844.[iv] Opponents of slavery continued to petition after the gag rule went into effect, among them large numbers of women. These women considered petitioning worth doing, even with their petitions unread in Congress. Some, like abolitionist Angelina Grimké, viewed “the right of petition [as] the only political right that women have.”[v] They also viewed petitioning—which entailed speaking with potential signers—as a way of “spreading knowledge.”[vi] 

Former mill worker Harriet Hanson Robinson described a “reformatory spirit” among Lowell’s female mill workers, who generally kept themselves apprised of what was going on locally and in the world through their reading. As Robinson explained it, “by reading the weekly newspapers the girls became interested in public events; they knew all about the Mexican war, and the anti-slavery cause had its adherents among them.”[vii] Mill workers also participated in movements for temperance, a ten-hour day, and other reforms.

Women in Lowell were active petitioners. Former mill worker Lucy Larcom described her sister, Emmeline, also a mill worker, as feeling “deeply the shame and wrong of American slavery, and tried to make her workmates see and feel it too.” No doubt, her attempts to “make her workmates see and feel it too” meant that Emmeline was discussing slavery while at work in the mills and canvassing for signatories. Women like Emmeline were responsible for “Petitions to Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia [circulating] nearly every year among the mill-girls, and receiv[ing] thousands of signatures,” according to Larcom.[viii]

One thousand four hundred nine “ladies in Lowell”—twenty percent of the population of women between the ages of fifteen and sixty in Lowell—signed a petition for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia in 1836.[ix] One scholar examined who these women were, finding a number of signatories employed at the Hamilton, Merrimack, Lawrence Manufacturing, Appleton Mills, and other textile companies.[x] Over seven hundred women in Lowell signed an 1839 petition calling upon the Massachusetts Senate and House “to declare that Congress ought immediately to exercise its constitutional power to abolish Slavery in the District of Columbia and the Territories of the Union where it exists, and to put an end to the interstate slave trade.”[xi] 

Petitioners in Lowell walked from house to house, canvassing; they also circulated petitions in the mills and at antislavery meetings.[xii] According to Lowell abolitionist Orange Scott, five hundred eighteen signatures were added to a petition at an antislavery meeting in Lowell in 1837. Scott declared that “there is a very strong anti-slavery influence in this Manchester of America.”[xiii]

Men in Lowell also petitioned. In 1855 they sent petitions calling for the removal from office of Edward G. Loring, a probate judge for Suffolk County whom they blamed for sending “an inhabitant of this Commonwealth to be sent into slavery” under the Fugitive Slave Act.[xiv] Loring had sent two Black men, Thomas Sims and Anthony Burns, back to slavery in high-profile cases. (Loring was removed from office in 1857.)

What motivated Lowell’s white residents to engage in antislavery work? For at least some of those who were mill workers, slavery was not an abstraction; they felt that they had some insight into slavery, as they considered themselves exploited laborers, too. Even while there were opportunities associated with working in the mills, there is no doubt that the work was grueling—and that it became more so starting in the early 1840s, when management sped up loom speeds, required longer cuts of cloth, and lowered pay—and that most women doing this work did so because they needed the money.[xv] The Voice of Industry, a self-declared “workingman’s paper” published in Fitchburg, Lowell, and Boston, went so far as to compare mill workers to the enslaved as a type of forced laborer (arguing that “the whip which brings laborers to Lowell is NECESSITY”). This belief that their experiences paralleled those of the enslaved inspired solidarity.[xvi] While racism certainly existed among white participants in the movement, it was still possible for mill workers to view themselves as connected to enslaved workers, feeling bonds of sympathy across racial lines.[xvii]

According to Lucy Larcom, some mill workers understood that their own livelihoods depended on the work of the enslaved. As she explained it, “[with] some of the older ones among us, the question now and then pressed close, whether it was right to be at work upon material so entirely the product of slave-labor as cotton, but…the question was allowed to pass as one too complicated to admit of an answer on our part.”[xviii] Larcom herself signed antislavery petitions as a mill worker, wrote several antislavery poems after leaving the mills, and moved to Kansas, from whence she encouraged opponents of slavery to populate the state.[xix] Larcom was an admirer of abolitionist Charles Sumner, whom she described as “one of our noblest,” and a close friend of the abolitionist poet and editor John Greenleaf Whittier.[xx] 

In many cases, their Protestant religious beliefs—which encouraged them to root out “sin”—also influenced mill workers’ interest in slavery. They were church goers, and a number of the churches they attended in Lowell stood against slavery. For example, Rev. Theodore Edson, the minister at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, was president of the Lowell Anti-Slavery Society, formed in 1834. With 168 members in 1838, this society had more members than those of any of the other towns in Middlesex County. Lowell also supported two additional antislavery societies, the Young Men’s and the Female Antislavery societies.[xxi] Edson helped at least one fugitive slave to escape. Eden B. Foster, pastor at John Street Congregational Church, was a leading antislavery voice in Lowell. In sermons such as “The Rights of the Pulpit” and “The Perils of Freedom,” Foster spoke about the obligation of ministers to preach against the extension of slavery westward.[xxii] Foster also cared about rights for local Black people; in 1855, he petitioned the state legislature to request legislation to protect “the colored children of Boston from being deprived of the equal privileges of the Common Schools of that city.”[xxiii]

A few of the mill workers’ employers also opposed slavery. For example, Linus Child, agent of the Boott Mills, allowed mill workers to circulate antislavery petitions in the mills—though not petitions for a 10-hour workday.[xxiv] Child helped Nathaniel Booth, a fugitive who between 1845 and 1850 ran a barbershop in Lowell, to gain his freedom. When news came out that slave catchers had arrived in the city to capture Booth, Booth fled to Montreal, but later returned to Lowell with the promise of help. Child negotiated with Booth’s enslaver, persuading him to accept $700 for Booth’s freedom, and he collected funds from residents of Lowell. It seems that Child’s support only went so far, however: as the newspaper reported, “The subscriptions are payable to Mr. Child, and they will not be called for unless the whole amount shall be raised.” Apparently, Child was not willing to cover any shortfall of funds himself.[xxv] 

Royal Southwick, the Quaker superintendent of the Lowell Manufacturing Company (which made “Negro cloth,” also called “Lowell cloth,” sold to enslavers to dress their enslaved workers), was a member of the Lowell Anti-Slavery Society, and his wife Direxa was a founder of the Lowell Female Anti-Slavery Society. The Southwicks invited abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, to their Lowell home. Troubled, perhaps, by the Lowell Manufacturing Company’s relationship to slavery, Royal invested his own money in a woolen mill.[xxvi]