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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 40, no. 3 (Fall 1992), p. 45-48

The Brotherhood of Thieves Riot of 1842
By Susan F. Beegel

To understand why the island experienced a riot, one must appreciate the temperaments and talents of the exceptional people who came together for the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1842.

"Mobs in Nantucket!!! I would as soon have thought of finding the Non-Resistance Society armed with clubs, as to see a mob in that retired spot. But let us know, let all know, that there is not a foot of soil protected by the American flag, whereon the cursed spirit of slavery doth not strive to kill free discussion: that omnipotent spirit dwelleth in all the land. And we should not be surprised at it. We must still expect to have mobs, while slavery lives."
The Liberator, 26 August 1842

Today, little remains to remind us of the riot that took place on Nantucket 150 years ago except a hand-painted sign outside a popular Broad Street pub—The Brotherhood of Thieves. The sign depicts a minister with devil's horns. In one hand he holds a weeping slave in chains; in the other, a bulging bag of money; behind him, a ship plies the ocean waters. She is probably a slaver, suggesting the furtive activities that some maritime historians believe made Massachusetts "the nursing mother of the horrors of the middle passage."

The occasion for the Brotherhood of Thieves riot was a six-day anti-slavery convention held in the island's Atheneum Hall in mid-August, 1842. The roster of individuals gathered for the convention reads like a veritable "Who's Who" of the abolitionist movement, both in the nation at large and on Nantucket. To understand why the island experienced a riot, one must first appreciate the temperaments and talents of the exceptional people involved.

Heading the speakers assembled on the platform was William Lloyd Garrison, president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and editor of The Liberator. Believing that the United States Constitution, which permitted slavery, was a "Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell," Garrison advocated dissolution of the Union, and secession of the free from the slaveholding states. A compelling orator known for his ability to whip anti-slavery crowds into impassioned demonstrations, Garrison had begun his calling as an abolitionist with these now-famous words: "I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch— and I will be heard."

African-American orator Charles Lenox Redmond was also on hand—a speaker, according to Garrison, "whose eloquent appeals have extorted the highest applause of multitudes on both sides of the Atlantic." A fiery man who did not subscribe to a doctrine of non resistance, Redmond believed that Sharps rifles from Kansas were the surest cure for slavery in South Carolina. At his side was Frederick Douglass, a fugitive slave who only the previous year had made on Nantucket a startling debut as an abolitionist lecturer. That island initiation marked the beginning of a distinguished career as an orator, editor, and statesman. In the opinion of his contemporaries, Douglass as a public speaker excelled "in pathos, wit, comparison, imitation, strength of reasoning, and fluency of language." Together, Redmond and Douglass "made color not only honorable but enviable. ... If they were politicians or divines, the press would stretch itself to speak of them, and magnify their eloquence."

As if this battery of rhetorical might were not sufficient, Stephen Symonds Foster also was present to speak in Atheneum Hall. One of thirteen children born to a New Hampshire farming family and a graduate of Dartmouth College, Foster had attended Union Theological Seminary to prepare himself for the ministry, but left when the seminary refused to accommodate a protest meeting. Convinced by his experience that American churches did not uphold genuine Christian principles, but instead connived with businessmen and politicians to maintain the lucrative institution of slavery, the embittered Foster became one of the most extreme and vitriolic of abolitionist orators. It's difficult to imagine that a more exciting slate of speakers was ever assembled on Nantucket. Yet it's equally important to remember that the audience of island abolitionists who gathered to hear them and debate the anti-slavery resolutions they proposed were themselves a group of exceptionally strongminded, committed, and articulate individuals. Nathaniel and Eliza Barney served, respectively, as vice president and business committeewoman for the convention. Nathaniel's letters, preserved in the Nantucket Historical Association's research center, reveal the strength of his devotion to the abolition of slavery and to civil rights for both African-Americans and women. A considerable portion of his public life was spent in laboring for these causes in letters and speeches made forceful by his gift for rhetoric and relentless logic. Eliza Barney was one of the earliest abolitionist women to take the stage and speak out to a "promiscuous audience" as assemblies including women as well as men were known to critics of outspoken females. Eliza spoke "with excellent propriety and great acceptance" to the 1839 annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, but difficulties in projecting her voice prevented her from duplicating the celebrated public-speaking career of an Abby Kelley or Angelina Grimke. Instead, Eliza directed her abolitionist efforts to fund-raising, instituting a successful anti-slavery fair on Nantucket, and assisting national organizations in identifying and approaching island donors. "Thou knowest that we must be as 'wise as serpents' as well as 'harmless as doves'" was Eliza Barney's political philosophy.

Thomas Macy, a prosperous refiner and exporter of sperm oil, served with Nathaniel Barney as a vice president. According to Eliza Barney, Macy's generous financial contributions constituted his chief importance to the movement: "He is far the most worthy of our abolitionists, as regards this world's goods," but she also thought him more arrogant than "conscientious" or "benevolent." Anna Gardner too was present, acting as one of the convention's secretaries. A poet and diarist who would become an important advocate of women's suffrage, Gardner put her abolitionist sentiments to work by serving for four years as teacher at the island's African School.

Although they did not serve as officers of the convention and hence are not mentioned in the published minutes of the 1842 meeting, it seems likely that the island's African-American abolitionists were present in force. Only a few weeks earlier, "a large number" and "vast assembly" of Nantucket's African-American population had assembled in the Friends' meeting-house to hear Lucretia Coffin Mott's "testimony against slavery." The Atheneum was now open to the island's African-American citizens, the Nantucket County Anti-Slavery Society was also integrated, and the anti-slavery convention held many attractions for those Nantucketers who, in the language of The Liberator, desired "equal participation in the blessings of mechanical, commercial, educational, and religious improvement." Certainly present were such African-American leader as Edward J. Pompey, prominent in local abolitionist activities, and Absalom Boston, prosperous sea captain.

On Wednesday afternoon, 10 August 1842, at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, this remarkable group of people, black and white, male and female together, convened at Atheneum Hall to begin their Anti-Slavery Convention. After electing officers, the convention adopted a slate of resolutions that would become the subject of set-piece orations by the invited speakers and lively impromptu debate by the audience. One resolution in particular would be responsible for setting off Nantucket's riot, and it read as follows:

"Resolved, That it is a dreadful libel on the Christian church to affirm that slaveholders, or the apologists of slavery, were ever members of it; and therefore, the real disciples of Christ, who is the Prince of Emancipators, will never give the right hand of Christian fellowship to any such persons, nor recognize them as among those who are born of God."

The convention adjourned for dinner, and reconvened in the evening in genuine harmony as the assembled abolitionists rose together and filled the Atheneum with the sound of anti-slavery hymns. Then the provocative anti-clerical resolution passed in the afternoon produced a number of stunning anti-slavery orations. One was of national historic significance— Stephen S. Foster's famous "Brotherhood of Thieves" address. Foster argued that the institution of slavery involved men in the commission of five particular crimes: theft, or the stealing of a man's labor; adultery, the disregard for the "requisitions of marriage" involved in holding women as "stock" and prostituting them; man-stealing or kidnapping, the act of claiming a man as property; piracy, the illegal taking of slaves from the coast of Africa; and murder, the firm intention of masters who could hold slaves only by the "threat of extermination." What's more, Foster continued, because members of the Southern clergy in the Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches held slaves, and Northern members of those denominations kept fellowship with slaveholders, they were all, by extension, guilty. The church, Foster proclaimed, was the "Bulwark of Slavery," its clergy "a designing priesthood," and its membership a "Brotherhood of Thieves."

Foster's language was deliberately inflammatory. Even the intrepid Douglass, while admiring Foster's "splendid vehemence," and believing him to be "one of the most impressive advocates the cause of the American slave ever had," believed that Foster was sometimes "extravagant and needlessly offensive in his manner of presenting his ideas." He never failed "to stir up mobocratic wrath" wherever he spoke, and told Douglass that his "theory was that he must make converts or mobs." Frequently mobbed, beaten, stoned, and arrested for inciting to riot, Foster was truly, as James Russell Lowell called him:

A kind of maddened John the Baptist,
To whom the harshest word comes aptest,
Who, struck by stone or brick ill starred,
Hurls back an epithet as hard,
Which, deadlier than stone or brick
Has a propensity to stick.
His oratory is like the scream
Of the iron horse's phrenzied steam
Which warns the world to leave wide space
For the black engine's swerveless race.

If Foster was capable of shocking confirmed abolitionists like Douglass and Lowell, it's easy to imagine how harsh his invective must have sounded to Nantucket's more conservative townspeople, many of them members of the very churches Foster denounced. Not all of the islanders assembled at the Atheneum to hear him were abolitionists. Some were undecided on the issues of slavery and civil rights and simply curious; others were political enemies of the Nantucket County Anti- Slavery Society, come to see what its members were up to. The moderate editor of the Inquirer, while deploring subsequent events, expressed his indignation this way:

"We have been told that our people were a set of thieves, pirates, robbers and man-stealers—that our clergymen were "pimps to Satan"—that there was not a drunkard or a rum-seller in town that was not nearer the Kingdom of Heaven than our clergymen. We have been told that one of our ministers of religion, eminent for his talents and piety, and warmly endeared to the hearts of his people, was an INFAMOUS WRETCH—and that the Methodist Church, here and elsewhere, was infinitely worse than any brothel in New York, and that the only conceivable motive for the adherence of its pastors to the church was that they wished to retain the black women as concubines!"

News of Foster's speech flashed around the island, and when it grew dark the following evening, a crowd assembled around the Atheneum, "hooting, screeching, [and] throwing brick-bats and other missiles." On Friday night, the mob grew fiercer, having rallied its forces during the day. The noise made by the stamping and whistling crowd was "hideous." Rotten eggs and stones were thrown, windows broken, and a woman in the audience injured when struck in the face by a brickbat. On Saturday morning, the proprietors of the Atheneum told convention organizers that they would have to leave unless they could assume financial responsibility for damage to the building.

For the next three days the hostile mob pursued the anti-slavery convention from site to site. The convention left the Atheneum, was refused use of the Town Hall, and moved to Franklin Hall, where, after dark, the mob arrived in force sufficient to break the meeting up entirely. On Sunday, the group tried to meet in the town square, but it began to rain. The town fathers reluctantly allowed them into the Town Hall, then revoked the privilege on "perceiving the rampant developments of the mobocratic spirit." The convention next moved to a "large boat-builder's shop, on the outskirts of the town." The mob was quieter, but when the abolitionists ventured a return to the Town Hall, rioting broke out afresh. On Monday evening, "fearing . . . from developments apparent, that the meeting would again be assailed by the mob, stimulated by their passions to deeds of lawless violence," it was "deemed expedient" to "give up the meeting."

There's little doubt that the "Brotherhood of Thieves" speech was responsible for firing the Nantucket riot. Stephen Foster admitted it: "The strong language of denunciation of the American church and clergy, which I employed at the late antislavery convention on your island . . . was the occasion of the disgraceful mob, which disturbed and broke up that meeting. ..." The minutes of the convention confess it: "Some hard truths had been uttered by individual members of the Convention, relative to the imbecility of the clergy, and the impious hypocrisy of the church in neglecting to labor for the slave ... at which the spirit of mobocracy had taken offence, and come up to the rescue of these hoary-headed institutions."

But if Stephen Foster's speech was fiery, Nantucket was, in 1842, uniquely flammable. Just two years before, a highly qualified African-American student, Eunice Ross, had applied for admission to the island's high school and been refused. Both African-American and white abolitionists began working vigorously to integrate the school, and would not abandon the struggle until, in 1847, they were ultimately successful. But in 1842, despite two years of explosive town and school committee meetings, the issue was still unresolved. What's more, efforts to secure secondary education for the island's African-American children focused attention on other civil rights issues—the segregation of the island steamer Massachusetts, for example, and particularly the segregation of some island churches, including the Methodist and the North Congregational.

Many of the Nantucket abolitionists present at the anti-slavery convention were vocal proponents of integrating the island's public institutions. Nathaniel Barney was the most outspoken integrationist on the town's school committee. Eliza Barney wrote to mainland activists about Eunice Ross, "an industrious and respectable girl," and advocated "constant and unwearied action" to end segregation on Nantucket. Thomas Macy and Edward J. Pompey ran (unsuccessfully) for school committee. Anna Gardner was the teacher who had groomed Eunice for the entrance exams she passed so handily. Captain Absalom Boston would, in three more years, hire a lawyer and sue the town to secure a high school education for his daughter Phebe Ann.

These local struggles had a great deal to do with the impact of Foster's oration, for Nantucket abolitionists supplied him with the names of local citizens obstructing the cause. When Foster denounced the clergy as a "Brotherhood of Thieves," he named specific Nantucket ministers whose denominations practiced segregation or kept fellowship with slave-holding Southerners. He singled out as "Pimps to Satan" those members of Town Meeting who had upheld segregation of the schools. Foster's speech was as personal as it was vituperative. Not only did he offend the followers of island ministers and town politicians, but he touched upon that ever-sensitive Nantucket nerve—insular dislike of mainlanders. The Inquirer summed it up:

"Under the cover of supporting a benevolent and philanthropic cause, these strangers have come into this quiet and isolated community and heaped the most insulting and opprobrious epithets upon its members, abused, by name, in the most personal, insulting and offensive manner, some of our most distinguished and highly-valued fellow-citizens, and spoken in the most ribald, aggravating, and Billingsgate terms, of some of our dearest and most venerated institutions."

As the anti-slavery convention and the riot progressed, events grew more and more personal. The mob hurled stones and rotten eggs and the assembled abolitionists hurled words. It's difficult to say which weapons were most effective. If Foster and other convention speakers denounced local segregationists, at least one island abolitionist had windows broken at his home and stones flung into a family group of women and children.

Many Nantucketers were scandalized that the police remained idle, and the selectmen did nothing to suppress the riot. "The conduct of our town authorities," cried the abolitionist Islander, "has been in an eminent degree everything the smallest contempt would be wasted upon." "We deeply deplore the want of prompt and efficient action on the part of our Town Authorities," concurred the more moderate Inquirer.

The acquiescence of police and selectmen in a riot dangerous to public safety and destructive of property suggests their tacit approval, and the strength of ugly proslavery and segregationist sentiments in the community. At least one island abolitionist, David Joy, was relieved to move to Northampton, where "there is less bitterness and determined pro-slavery . . . than at Nantucket." But if Nantucket was a house divided against itself, it was, of course, only a mirror of a nation moving inexorably toward a civil war that would leave 620,000 Americans dead on its blood- soaked battlefields.

The Nantucket riot left one constructive legacy. Nathaniel Barney, concerned that the mob violence had damaged the abolitionist cause, urged Stephen Foster to publish his speech, that the public might "hear both sides," and appreciate "the true position" of anti-slavery advocates. Foster responded, and the resulting publication, The Brotherhood of Thieves; or, A True Picture of the American Church and Clergy: A Letter to Nathaniel Barney of Nantucket, is one of the most remarkable literary efforts of the abolitionist era. Today, a rare and valuable first edition of Foster's pamphlet resides, appropriately enough, in the vault of the Atheneum. His words still ring from the page, in a cogent and powerful denunciation of the support given to slavery by Northern hypocrisy and greed.

In our own year of 1992, as Los Angeles neighborhoods lie in blackened ruin, and the graves of that city's riot victims are still fresh, it seems appropriate to conclude with the final prayer of the 1842 Anti-Slavery Convention—"God grant that the first mob at Nantucket may also be the last!"

Susan Beegel holds an appointment as Visiting Scholar at the University of West Florida. Editor of The Hemingway Review, she has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century American literature.

See text of the Brotherhood of Thieves at http://medicolegal.tripod.com/thieves.htm