Doctor Palfrey Frees His Slaves

Abstract

F1 REE the bondsman! With this cry American abolitionists threw themselves at the beast Slavery. Yet despite the moral fervor of the antislavery men and women, slavery remained for nearly all of them a pernicious abstraction. Few experienced the joy of being a personal instrument of emancipation, and such Southern slaveholders turned abolitionist as James G. Birney, or the Grimke sisters were very much in the minority. Among the few, was John Gorham Palfrey,l a New Englander who was able to put his antislavery principles into practice twenty years before Lincoln's Proclamation of Emancipation. Palfrey, best known for his massive and loving history of colonial New England,2 was born in Boston in 1796. His student years were a preparation for his later professional interest; an education at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College made the New England Federalist-Unitarian point of view an integral part of his own political conservatism and religious liberalism. Palfrey drank deeply at these wellsprings of New England culture. Like many bright young Harvard men of his time, he entered the Unitarian ministry, and became pastor of the prosperous Brattle Street Church in Boston. He later returned to Cambridge as Dean of the Harvard Divinity School and editor of the influential North American Review. Palfrey was not a radical abolitionist; he thought Garrison and his followers were dangerous fanatics doing more evil than good by their attacks on the Union and the Constitution. He clearly indicated his antislavery feelings during the 1830's by joining an antislavery society in Cambridge. But the pressure of public opinion against any form of abolitionism caused him to backtrack on this commitment. Until the great emancipa-