Starting in the 1830s, a movement to bring about an end to slavery developed in a number of cities and towns in New England. Lowell, Massachusetts, was one of them, emerging in the antebellum years as a site of abolitionist and antislavery activism. Abolitionists white and Black—some of them fugitives from slavery—took a strong stance against the South’s “peculiar institution,” demanding an immediate end to slavery. Others were less forceful, participating in the antislavery movement by, for example, signing petitions with narrower goals, such as the end of slavery in the nation’s capital. But not everyone in Lowell opposed slavery. Because its mills used cotton grown by enslaved laborers in the South to make textiles, the city had strong economic ties to the plantation South—and powerful men in the city sought to nurture these ties and eradicate any movements that threatened their economic connections. Thus, Lowell was also home to an active anti-abolitionist movement.

Despite their small numbers, African Americans were the heart of antislavery activism in the Spindle City.[i] Some, like Walker Lewis, came from northern families that had been fighting for Black people’s rights for years, while others were new to activism or to the North. Some of them had first-hand experience of southern slavery themselves; Nathaniel Booth, for example, fled bondage in Virginia and put down roots in Lowell. More than any other group in Lowell, Black people were unwilling to compromise with enslavement: they demanded immediate abolition, donated money to the cause, opened their homes to formerly enslaved people, and engaged in conversation about slavery with white residents of Lowell.

John Levy, born in the Caribbean, was one of Lowell’s most important Black leaders, and—like other Black abolitionists—a barber. Barbering employed many of Lowell’s Black residents, as it offered them autonomy as well as the possibility of owning their own business. Lowell’s Black barbers served as leaders in the local movement against slavery, and the barbershop became an important site for the formation of antislavery networks in the city.

Driven by a passion for abolitionism, Levy discussed and debated slavery with the customers in his barbershop—even those who were reluctant to engage in such conversation. Levy kept The Liberator in his shop and engaged his clients in discussions about antislavery, in doing so making himself, as he put it, “obnoxious to the people to whom the question was distasteful.” He also invited abolitionists to his shop, he recalled, “where they remained till ten o’clock, conversing with me and with my customers upon the question of slavery.”[ii]

Levy hosted abolitionist speakers who came through Lowell, provided a place for fugitives from slavery to stay, and aided free Blacks who were raising money to purchase family members out of slavery. In all of these ways—but especially by helping Black people with first-hand experience of bondage to tell their story in Lowell—Levy confronted white residents of the city with information about the institution of slavery and pushed them to consider their own stance on the issue. Abolitionist ideas such as those published in The Liberator entered public discourse when activists like Levy brought them to the men and women whose paths crossed their own.[iii] 

Levy also played a role in the abolitionist movement beyond Lowell. He served on a committee that defended William Lloyd Garrison when Garrison was criticized from within the movement in 1839.[iv] Levy helped provide financial support to the movement by selling subscriptions to The Liberator as an agent of the paper and by donating funds to local antislavery societies.[v] And when the Civil War began—though in his sixties—Levy, eager to fight, joined the 136th New York Infantry Regiment as a barber.[vi]

Also deeply ensconced in Lowell’s network of Black abolitionist barbers was Horatio Foster. Foster, like Levy, had ties to the broader abolitionist movement. He helped organize the 1839 Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society’s Anti-Slavery Fair, held in Lowell’s City Hall. In 1843, he wrote to Boston abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman to request that Chapman share with him a copy of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society’s Constitution, as “there are some very worthy and intelligent ladies [in Lowell] who are desirous of forming themselves into an Anti Slavery Society.” Foster emphasized the importance of encouraging this group of white women in Lowell, with Lowell being “a large field for antislavery operations.”[vii] Foster also wrote detailed articles for The Liberator reporting on antislavery meetings in Lowell.

Lowell’s Black abolitionists hosted visitors such as John N. H. Fountain, a free Black man who came through Lowell in 1844 to raise funds to purchase his enslaved wife. According to Fountain, the people of Lowell had responded to his appeal for funding with “sympathies and most liberal contributions,” which put him on the path to “enjoy[ing] the blessings of…life with my wife.” Fountain was grateful especially to John Levy and his wife for their “kind attention and hospitality” in Lowell. While Fountain did find success in the “redemption” of his wife, he found that the traumas of slavery came with her—“notwithstanding she is much broken by labor and distress the last year, since she began to breathe the air of the free States, she has sensibly revived, and in a short time will, it is thought, be perfectly restored.”[viii] While we do not know what happened to Fountain’s wife to make her “much broken,” she may have been one of the many enslaved women who experienced rape and other forms of physical and psychological abuse in addition to back-breaking labor under slavery.[ix]