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Establishing Basic American Rights
The very cornerstone of democracy—the American Town Meeting—was
invented in Boston on October 8th of 1633 when an order was passed
calling on all inhabitants of Dorchester to assemble in front of
the local courthouse. This first Town Meeting was the earliest instance
of a regularized system of gatherings in America. Some 150 years
later, in 1780, it was at a Town Meeting that the Massachusetts
Constitution was ratified. Today the Massachusetts Constitution—a
model for the Federal Constitution with its Bill of Rights—is
widely recognized as the oldest functioning constitution in the
world. It is not surprising, then, that Boston would become the
setting for two of the most important human rights movements in
American history.
The Founding of
the Abolitionist Movement
In 1829, the abolitionist movement was founded and nurtured in Boston,
when David Walker’s antislavery pamphlet, the Walker’s
Appeal was printed. His historic words were the first successful
public articulation of abolitionism—and, as such, became the
voice of a national movement.
The son of a slave father and a free black mother, David Walker
was born in the south, but then traveled throughout the country,
eventually settling in Boston and associating with prominent black
activists. By 1828, he had become Boston’s leading anti-slavery
spokesperson. Walker’s Appeal was arguably the most radical
of all antislavery documents, since it called for slaves to revolt.
The pamphlet further defied convention by opposing the Colonization
movement—then the leading strain of white abolitionism—that
sought black repatriation to Africa. Instead, it argued for blacks
to identify the United States as a land to which they had a significant
right as contributors. The Appeal ran for three editions, ending
with Walker’s death in 1830. One year later, also in Boston,
white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison began publishing what
became the nation’s most influential abolitionist newspaper,
The Liberator.
The First Free Black Regiment
in the Union Army
Boston also became the point of origin for the first free black
regiment in the Union Army, another important step in the struggle
for racial equality. The
54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was founded
in 1863 and led by the young white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw. Among
its recruits were dozens of men from Boston’s free African-American
population, and hundreds from as far afield as Canada and the Caribbean.
The regiment earned its greatest fame on July 18, 1863, when Colonel
Shaw led the bold, brave charge on the Confederate stronghold at
Battery Wagner, South Carolina. In this desperate attack on an impenetrable
seaside fortress, Shaw was killed and hundreds of his men were slaughtered,
wounded, or lost in action. That heroic charge brought the regiment
accolades and boosted black recruiting. The 54th remains the most
famous black regiment of the war, due in part to the popularity
of the movie “Glory” and the bronze bas-relief located
opposite the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill.
Women Shall Vote: Lucy Stone and her Pioneering
Woman’s Journal
Like
Walker’s Appeal, the Woman’s Journal, run by the
noted suffragist Lucy Stone, was a singularly influential document
in another seminal human rights movement. Born in West Brookfield,
Massachusetts, in 1818, Lucy Stone was one of the first Massachusetts
women to earn a college degree. After college, she moved to
Boston and became a lecturer for the Anti-Slavery Society, but
when she was not speaking out against the evils of slavery,
she was actively advocating for women’s suffrage and recruiting
women like Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe to the movement.
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A
bronze statue on the Commonwealth Avenue mall, by artist Meredith
Bergmann, honors Lucy Stone. |
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