Tag Archives: Quakers

May 21, 2021

Slavery Siege in Salem

By daseger

The occupants of a house on Bryant Street in North Salem, British emigre Thomas Spencer, his wife and mother, both named Mary, and their houseguests, experienced a very scary night in late October of 1835, and I am not referencing Halloween. For this Preservation Month, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has selected the theme (or charge) of telling the full story, encouraging people across the country to dig deeper as they explore the histories of their built environment. I try to do that all the time here, as there are so many layers to Salem’s history, and this particular house is a perfect case in point: all at the same time it represents triumph over adversity, triumph over inequality, triumph over discrimination, triumph over terror, and candy.

First the house, 17 Bryant Street, then the backstory, then the terrible night: Halloween Eve, 1835.

17 Bryant Street, the Thomas Spencer Homestead, built c. 1800. Here pictured in 1904 (Essex Institute Historical Collections), 1979, 1986 and yesterday. As the Macris inventory indicates, this Federal house has been “altered beyond recognition”.

The backstory: much as been written about the Spencers, yet there is still quite a bit of confusion about the essential facts of their lives, both in Britain and in Salem. I used some genealogical and British records to come up with my summary, but I still have questions. I think I can do better than the standard Salem tale, however, which is basically “poor shipwrecked soul (Mary Sr.) is washed up on the North Shore penniless and gifted a barrel of sugar which she transforms into a miraculous hard candy called Gibralters and sells on the front steps of the First Church and the streets of Salem from her ever-recognizable buggy (make sure to add one or more exclamation marks to the closing phrase:) which is in the collection of the PEM!!! This candy is still being made and sold in Salem, at the Ye Olde Pepper Candy Company on Derby Street near the House of the Seven Gables.

I really don’t have much to add about the candy: that seems covered. But there’s a lot more to say about the Spencers. Mary Smith (Spencer) was born in Nottinghamshire in 1759: I really don’t know how she became a Spencer. Nearly every record I tracked down seemed to confuse the “Thomas Spencer” who was supposedly her husband with the “Thomas Spencer” who actually was her son, who was born in 1792 or 1793 in Coventry. She booked passage on the New York ship Jupiter which left London in March of 1805: it hit an iceberg off Newfoundland and was shipwrecked. There were many reports in the eastern newspapers, including the Salem Register, identifying the 27 passengers who drowned, along with the captain and most of the crew, but the survivors are not named. These “persons preserved” in the Jupiter’s longboat ended up in Marblehead, and later, Salem, Mary Spencer among them. There are also newspaper reports of the charity extended to these survivors, including, the sugar that was reportedly granted to Mary Spencer by the benevolent ladies of Salem, enabling her to become the enterprising confectioner of lore and legend.

Salem Register; the iconic image of Mrs. Spencer, from Early Personal Reminiscences in the old George Peabody mansion in Salem, Massachusetts by Clara Endicott Sears.

I don’t think Thomas was with Mary; I believe he came over in the 1820s and eventually took over his mother’s business. He was married to Mary Robinson in England in 1817: their two sons, Franklin and John Kirby, were both born in Salem. Thomas remained in Salem, very much part of the community, until 1837, when he was bequeathed a considerable amount of property in the villages of Sturton and Bransby in Lincolnshire by the Reverend John Kirby, the namesake of his younger son. There was no “title,” as some of the Salem accounts suggest, but some very nice properties nonetheless. In various letters sent back to some of his friends in Salem, Thomas writes that he is finally doing what he always wanted to do: farming. He left his mark in Salem, however: as an entrepreneur, as part of the Quaker community, as a naturalist (a topic he spoke on regularly at the Salem Lyceum), and above all, as a abolitionist. Both Thomas and Mary R. Spencer were devoted Quakers, and a big part of the expression of their faith was an equally strong commitment to the transatlantic abolitionist cause. Thomas was one of the founders of Salem’s Anti-Slavery Society in 1834, and he and Mary attended a series of abolitionist conventions over the next few years, but the peak of their commitment to the cause was clearly their shelter and protection of their fellow English abolitionist George Thompson and his family in late October of 1835.

Salem Gazette; George Thompson in the 1830s, National Portrait Gallery.

Following the passage of the Slave Emancipation Act in 1833, which granted enslaved persons in many (but not all) of the colonies of the British Empire their freedom after a five-year period of “transition” and compensation to the slave-owners rather than those who were enslaved, British abolitionists focused on the immediate abolition of slavery in the empire—and the world. One of their most effective missionaries, George Thompson, was commissioned to undertake a series of lectures in the United States in 1834-1835 in collaboration with the American Anti-Slavery Society. It’s very clear that Thompson’s tour, or Thompson himself, was a lightening rod: while he was instrumental in inspiring the formation of more than 300 local abolitionist societies, he faced constant criticism (even in Northern newspapers) as well as threats of mob violence in all the major cities he visited, including Boston and Salem. The general criticism was along the lines of “who is this infamous foreign scoundrel who deigns to lecture the citizens of the United States on their domestic duties?” It was nativist, xenophobic, and nationalistic, with slight variations in each locale. When Thompson came to Salem on the last leg of his tour, he quite naturally stayed at the large Federal home of his countryman and fellow abolitionist Thomas Spencer, a bit removed from the city center. On the morning of October 30, this is the handbill that circulated around town: The Citizens of Salem, the friends of order, who are desirous to preserve the quiet of families, and the peace of town by driving from our society the foreign pest, who is endeavoring to agitate the country with his doctrines and to destroy the Union of State by his fanaticism, are earnestly requested to meet at the Town Hall, this afternoon, at 3 o’clock to adopt measures to effect this object. Salem, October 30, 1835. The main “measure” implemented was essentially the formation of a large mob, which surrounded Spencer’s North Salem house that very night, even though Thompson had fled. The Boston papers reported on “symptoms of violence” the next day, but Spencer was more forthcoming in a letter he wrote to one of Thompson’s sponsors, the Glasgow Ladies Auxiliary Emancipation Society.

Boston Morning Post; Thomas Spencer reports to the Glasgow Ladies Auxiliary Emancipation Society, 1835, in Three Years’ Female Anti-Slavery Effort, in Britain and America: Being a Report of the Proceedings of the Glasgow Ladies’ Auxiliary Emancipation Society.

Well obviously there’s a lot here: a mob of 400 men! The xenophobia (“one Englishman is as good as another” ) and the anti-Quaker expressions as well: shades of seventeenth-century Salem. Because of some notable abolitionist individuals and institutions like the Remonds and the Female Anti-Slavery Society, we are accustomed to thinking about Salem as a center of progressive abolitionism, but my Americanist colleagues remind me that only a small percentage (1-3%) of urban dwellers in antebellum cities identified as Abolitionists. Spencer writes about “Southerners from Boston” (which is a funny expression–do you think he means actual Southerners or did Salem people look upon Bostonians as “Southerners”?) as well as pro-Slavery men of Salem. His mother, the famous Mary Spencer, is obviously still alive, but I think she died that very year. His wife, the other Mary Spencer, has a “new-born babe” in her arms, but I can’t find any record of that child. Is it any wonder that Thomas Spencer sold everything in Salem and departed for England two years later after coming into his inheritance from the Reverend Kirby? And shouldn’t we be talking about a bit more than candy when we consider Mary and Thomas Spencer and the Salem in which they lived?

Home in England: a special photograph of Thomas and Mary Spencer in front of their home in Bransby, Lincolnshire, in 1867 from the Sturton & Stow History Society. They both died in 1876.

13 Comments | tags: abolitionism, Historic Preservation, Houses, Northfields, Quakers, Salem Shops, Slavery, The National Trust | posted in History, Salem

October 13, 2019

Witches are Sexier than Quakers

By daseger

I would really love to buy the toleration rationale that is used almost universally to justify Salem’s exploitation of the 1692 Witch Trials for commercial gain, but I have several issues. The argument goes like this: yes, we had a terrible tragedy here in 1692, but now we owe it to civilization to spread awareness of the intolerance of that community in order to raise awareness of intolerance in our own time. If we can make money at the same time, so be it, but it’s really all about teaching tolerance. I’ve written about this before, several times, so I’m not going to belabor the point, but I think this rationale reinforces a notion among some—actually many—that the victims of 1692 were doing something that was in some way aberrant or diverse, when in fact they were just plain old pious Protestants like their neighbors and accusers. The focus on toleration is supposed to connect the past to the present, but more than anything, it privileges the present over the past. My other problem with the toleration rationale is the exclusivity of its application: only to the Witch Trials, the intolerant episode with the most income-generating potential. We seldom hear of any other moments of intense intolerance in Salem’s history: the fining, whipping, and banishment of separatists, Baptists and Quakers in the seventeenth century, the anti-Catholicism and nativism of two centuries later. Certainly the Witch Trials were dramatic, but so too was the intense persecution in Massachusetts in general and Salem in particular over a slightly longer period, from 1656-1661: just read the title pages of these two incredibly influential texts which documented it.

Edward Burrough, A Declaration of the Sad and Great Persecution and Martyrdom of the People of God, called Quakers, in New England, for the Worshiping of God (1661; Christie’s —-the whole text can be found here); George Bishop, New England judged, not by man’s, but the spirit of the Lord: and the sum sealed up of New-England’s persecutions being a brief relation of the sufferings of the people called Quakers in those parts of America from the beginning of the fifth month 1656 (the time of their first arrival at Boston from England) to the later end of the tenth month, 1660 (1661; Doyle’s—the whole text is here).

The whipping, scourging, ear-cutting, hand-burning, tongue-boring, fining, imprisonment, starvation, banishment, execution, and attempted sale into slavery of Massachusetts Quakers by the colonial authorities is documented in almost-journalistic style by Edward Burrough and George Bishop and the former’s audience with a newly-restored King Charles II in 1661 resulted in a royal cease and desist missive carried straight to Governor Endicott by Salem’s own Samuel Shattuck, exiled Quaker and father of the Samuel Shattuck who would testify against Bridget Bishop in 1692. So yes, the Quakers accused the Puritans of intolerance far ahead of anyone else, and their detailed testimony offers many opportunities to explore an emerging conception of toleration in historical perspective: we don’t have to judge because they do. Every once in a while, an historical or genealogical initiative sheds some light on Salem’s Quakers—indeed, the Quaker Burying Ground on Essex Street was adorned by a lovely sign this very summer by the City, capping off some important restoration work on some of the stones—but their story is not the official/public/commercial Salem story: that’s all about “witches”.

Much of Salem’s Quaker history is still around us: the Essex Institute reconstructed the first Quaker Meeting House in 1865 and it is still on the grounds of the PEM’s Essex Street campus (Boston Public Library photograph via Digital Commonwealth); the c. 1832 meeting house formerly at the corner of Warren and South Pine Streets, Frank Cousins photograph from the Phillips Library Collection at Digital Commonwealth; the c. 1847 meeting house–now a dentist’s office overlooking the Friends’ Cemetery on upper Essex Street; Samuel Shattuck’s grave in the Charter Street Cemetery, Frank Cousins, c. 1890s, Phillips Library Collection at Digital Commonwealth.

Quakers can’t compete with “witches”, any more than factory workers, soldiers, inventors, poets, suffragists, educators, or statesmen or -women can: they’re just not sexy enough for a city whose “history” is primarily for sale. There was a time when I thought we could get the Bewitched statue out of Town House Square, but no more: it will certainly not be replaced by a Salem equivalent of the Boston memorial to Mary Dyer, one of the Boston Quaker “Martyrs”. The placement of a fictional television character in such a central place—just across from Salem’s original meeting house–and not, say, a memorial to Provided Southwick, whose parents were banished to Long Island, dying there in “privation and misery”, whose brother was whipped from town to town, and who would have been sold into slavery (along with another brother) near this same square if not for several tolerant Salem ship captains*, is a bit unbearable, but that’s Witch City. Apparently grass just won’t grow in this little sad space, so soon we will see the installation of artificial turf , which strikes me as completely appropriate.

“The Attempted Sale into Slavery of Daniel and Provided Southwick, son [children] of Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick, by Governor Endicott and his Minions, for being Quakers”, from the Genealogy of the descendants of Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick of Salem, Mass. : the original emigrants, and the ancestors of the families who have since borne his name (1881); *John Greenleaf Whittier tells Provided’s tale under Cassandra’s (more romantic?) name, and adds the “tolerant ship captains”: we only know that the sale did not go through. The Mary Dyer Memorial in front of the statehouse, Boston, Massachusetts.

Appendix: There was a very public attempt to place a memorial statue to the Quaker persecution in Salem by millionaire Fred. C. Ayer, a Southwick descendant, in the early twentieth century which you can read about here and here: the Salem City Council (or Board of Aldermen, as it was then called) objected to the representation of Governor Endicott as a tiger devouring the Quakers, so the proposed installation on Salem Common was denied. If the aldermen had read Burrough’s and Bishop’s accounts, I bet they would have been a bit more approving.