Businessman Frederick S. Cabot served in the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization dedicated to helping those escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad.
Born in 1822, Frederick S. Cabot grew up in an upper class Boston family. He worked as an agent for the Union Mutual Life Insurance Company.[1] He also supported the abolition movement, donating to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He advertised his services in the Liberator which provide the paper with a revenue source as well as bought advertisements in the Liberator for his company which gave the paper a revenue source.[2] In 1850, he joined the Boston Vigilance Committee.
Though little is known of his contributions to the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee, Cabot's assistance to freedom seekers in the years prior is well documented. He gave funds to help James Burgess, a freedom seeker from Maryland in 1846. [3] More importantly, however, he served on the Latimer Committee in 1842.
When authorities arrested George Latimer, a freedom seeker from Virginia in 1842, many Bostonians responded in protest, including Cabot. Along with Henry. I. Bowditch and William F. Channing, Cabot created the Latimer Committee. This committee published six editions of The Latimer Journal and North Star, to give “voice to the ‘moral feeling and strength of the community.’" Twenty thousand copies of this journal circulated throughout Massachusetts during the Latimer case and beyond. [4]
Though Bostonians quickly purchased Latimer’s freedom, Cabot and others kept their campaign alive to “oppose the inroads of slavery on our own State."[5] The Latimer Committee’s published goals included:
providing the additional safeguards for the protection of liberty of the citizens against the alarming encroachments of the slaveholding power of this country...Let those who wish to preserve the RIGHT OF PETITION, the FREEDOM OF SPEECH, and their own PERSONAL LIBERTY, come to the rescue. Massachusetts “is no place for slavish hearts."[6]
The Latimer Committee also called for citizens to sign the “Great Massachusetts Petition" that would bar the use of state officials and facilities in the rendition of escaped freedom seekers. Ultimately, the committee garnered more that 65,000 signatures and Massachusetts passed the Personal Liberty Act, also known as the “Latimer Law," in 1843. This became a model for similar laws in other states.[7] Despite this state law, when the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 went into effect, Boston, once again became a battleground. This hated law prompted Bostonians, including Cabot, to form the third and final iteration of the Vigilance Committee to assist those escaping slavery. Cabot continued to live in Boston until his death in 1888. His remains are buried in HIngham Cemetery.
[1] Boston City Directory 1850-1851, 107, Merchant’s Exchange Building on State Street, See also, "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society
[2] Liberator, May 31, 1850, page 4, Liberator, July 17 1864
[3] Irving H. Bartlett, Abolitionists, Fugitives, and Imposters in Boston, 1846-1847, New England Quarterly, Mar., 1982, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Mar., 1982), pp. 97-110 Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.
[4] Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, (New Haven: Yale, 2016), 391-392
[5] Liberator, December 23 1842, page 3
[6] “Grand Convention," Emancipator and Republican, Nov. 24, 1842.
[7] Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889, (New York: Penquin, 2012), 73-74
Boston National Historical Park, Boston African American National Historic Site
Source: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service