National Events That Influenced Lowellians' Views on Slavery and Abolition

By Gray Fitzsimons, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Lowell’s position in the weighty debate over slavery assumed a growing importance in Massachusetts. Incorporated as a town in 1826 and then as a city in 1836, Lowell was not only the state’s second largest population center next to Boston, but it was also the nation’s major center for manufacturing textiles from southern cotton grown by enslaved people. Its industrial prominence captured the attention of many Americans, including leading politicians in the North and South, as well as such internationally well-known figures as the English writer Charles Dickens. One result, as the city’s anti-slavery sentiment became increasingly widespread (although its intensity, as elsewhere in the North, ebbed and flowed), was even greater attention to Lowell’s precarious and conflicting role as a beneficiary of the slave economy while voicing opposition to the “peculiar institution.”  In some circles, particularly in the South, Lowell was viewed as a hotbed of abolitionism. It is important to note, however, that despite the rising number of Lowellians who joined the antislavery cause, only an extremely small minority supported the immediate abolition of slavery.

Major investors in Lowell’s mills, notably several who headed the textile corporations, maintained strong economic ties to the South and were important political figures in Massachusetts. Yet the system of enslavement and the political power of the Southern enslaving states increasingly conflicted with their ideology of free markets, free labor, and free soil. And, in turn, citizens in Lowell and in other industrializing cities confronted not just the meaning of slavery in the South, but the changing nature of an increasingly capitalistic, market-driven society in the North. The Market Revolution that helped fuel factory development like that in Lowell fostered what many clergy and reformers believed was an increasingly materialistic, individualistic, and injuriously competitive society. Indeed, Southern enslavers and their allies pointed to the growing misery and poverty of the working class in Northern cities to counter criticisms that African bonded labor was cruel and inhuman. These widening sectional divisions between North and South, and the growing social and economic divisions within industrializing cities in the North, posed the greatest challenges to the young Republic. Lowell residents and other urban dwellers in the North struggled with these important issues. Their responses raised many questions over the meaning of a free and democratic society, as well as just what kind of a nation America was to become.