Ancestors & Family

Parker Pillsbury

1809-1898 Anti-Slavery Crusader
image of book cover for 'Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionist, Male Feminist by Stacey M. Robertson'

I first “met” Parker in my grandmother’s house. While looking for a book to read, I came across a volume by Parker Pillsbury called The Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles. As I leafed through it, I noticed a bill of sale from a slave auction was attached to the inside front cover - his exclamation point on the evils of selling a person as property.

Of all the Pillsburys in the family genealogy, Parker Pillsbury was the most well-known in his time. Starting in the 1840s, he spent decades crisscrossing the Northeast and Midwest as an antislavery crusader and later outspoken supporter of women’s rights. Raised in small town New Hampshire, he spent his adult life in the company of abolitionist and feminist leaders like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth.

Parker Pillsbury was born in Hamilton on Boston’s north shore, a seventh-generation descendant of William Pillsbury. He grew up the son of a blacksmith and farmer.

Economic problems during the War of 1812 drove his family to relocate to New Hampshire in the rural town of Henniker, not far from Concord.

As he got older, he took pride in what he called his commoner, country roots, growing up on a small farm and enduring bitter winters amidst a rugged mountain homestead. All of which contributed to his reputation for endurance and ability to live his life on the road.

The acclaimed 19th century poet and of the Atlantic Monthly editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote this tribute to Parker in a poem:

“Beyond, a crater in each eye,
Sways brown, broad-shouldered Pillsbury;
Who tears up words, like trees, by the roots,—
A Theseus in stout cowhide boots;
The wager of eternal war, Against that loathsome Minotaur…”

Early Life

As a boy, Parker acquired what education was afforded by the district schools of Henniker, while at the same time helping with the family farm. At 20, looking to expand his horizons, he moved out of state to the factory town of Lynn, Massachusetts, to work for more than a year as a wagon driver and soap boiler.

At 23, he felt pressure to further his education and have a career. He looked to his father, a deacon at a local church. There were ministerial openings in towns nearby, positions that appeared to reflect his moral approach to the issues of the day.

Religious Education

In preparation, Parker entered the nearby Gilmanton Theological Seminary. He then extended his education at the Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, while agreeing to preach at a congregational church near his New Hampshire home.

Parker was soon disturbed by how churches and religions avoided taking a public stand to end slavery so as not to alienate their  members in the South and elsewhere. He publicly rebuked all churches that demonstrated complicity with slavery, including when slaveholders were welcomed to pulpits and sacramental suppers. In his view, only a religion that saw all persons as equal could offer a virtuous spiritual foundation for a democratic and humanistic nation.

In response to his anti-church rhetoric, the faculty of Andover Theological Seminary threatened that they would never recommend him to a parish unless he gave up speaking in antislavery meetings. Parker’s response was to ask to be unenrolled. They denied his request.

However, his license to preach was revoked after a year in the congregational church he preached at, as he continued his sharp criticism of churches' complicity with slavery. In search of a new career and spiritual home, he found one as a full-time activist, field speaker, and editor of publications such as the Liberator—the first antislavery newspaper—and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, weekly newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Family

Through his work as an activist, he met Sarah H. Sargent, who shared his radical views. Parker and Sarah would move to Concord, New Hampshire, soon after they were married in 1840. They remained married until they died within four months of each other in 1898.

In the early years, Sarah traveled with Parker while she developed her leadership role within the women’s antislavery movement, organizing her own antislavery meetings in and around Concord.

They had one daughter, Helen. She married the publisher of the Concord Monitor, Brainard Cogswell. Together Helen, Brainard, and Sarah centered the family during Parker’s long travels.

His Start as an Activist

Upon joining the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1831, Parker was invited by its founder, William Lloyd Garrison, to its business session on West Street off the Boston Common (the same location where my organization MassVOTE would have its office a century and a half later).

After the meeting, Garrison invited Parker to dine and spend the night at his home close by. The next morning, Garrison asked Parker to deliver his first public address on slavery as a field agent for the abolitionist cause in Fitchburg, fifty miles west of Boston. He then continued his trip across the state, where he honed his public lectures on behalf of the movement.

Life on the Road

For the next 25 years, Parker was field agent and lecturer for the New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and the American antislavery societies. Starting in the Northeast, he helped build hundreds of antislavery organizations. These local gatherings were seen as the most effective means for antislavery radicals to carry their abolitionist message directly to the people.

As his notoriety as a field lecturer grew beyond New England, he was called on to speak at events in New York, Michigan, and Ohio. There he had the opportunity to work with the formerly enslaved Sojourner Truth. Some events drew audiences of more than a thousand people.

For an antislavery field agent, life on the road was not without heckling and even attacks—especially for someone as opinionated as Parker, always ready with a sharp answer to any challenge to the full emancipation of all slaves in every state or territory.

His size, strength, and endurance served him well to quell a crowd and survive the punishing strain of traveling from one state to another. After attending one of his lectures, the poet philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called him “the very gift from New Hampshire we have long expected, a tough oak stick of a man not to be silenced or insulted or intimidated by a mob, because he is more mob than they, he mobs the mob.”

Meeting a Young Frederick Douglass

In the early 1800s, traveling as a field agent came with its share of the unexpected. One of his most memorable trips started as a visit to a black church in the whaling community of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the recently freed Douglass had traveled looking for a job using seamen's papers borrowed from a friend. The church had invited Douglass to tell his story as a slave who had escaped to freedom. It was electrifying. In its wake, Parker encouraged the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to invite Douglass to address an antislavery convention on the nearby island of Nantucket. Again, he brought down the house. It was after this that Douglass accepted a position as a paid lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, which would open a door to his national prominence as an abolitionist leader and speech maker.

Taking a Break

When constant travel and winter weather compromised his health, his idea of a break was to accept an invitation to cross the Atlantic and take on less stressful engagements with his two abolitionist friends in England. Once there, he drew from his field experience to help local activists expand antislavery chapters in Liverpool, Nottingham, and other cities.

Parker the Feminist

With the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, demand dropped for abolitionist field agents, and Parker devoted more time to the cause of women’s rights. Driven by his working relationships with feminist leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth, he put this cause on par with ending slavery. He had spent weeks with Truth around the time of her famous "Ain’t I a Woman?" speech at the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention.

Already active in feminist causes, Parker was called on to help draft the Constitution of the feminist American Equal Rights Association, an association formed by prominent leaders in the antislavery and women’s rights movements with the goal of bringing together abolitionists and women’s rights advocates in the fight for universal suffrage.

He was also asked to serve as co-editor with Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the women's rights newsletter The Revolution, which she founded with Anthony in 1868. It focused on women's rights and suffrage, yet also took aim at the exploitation of working women and their exclusion from professions, along with advocating for women’s rights within the home.

Parker gained recognition for his feminist activism. The National Women’s History Alliance<, started in 1980 to broadcast women’s historical achievements, featured Parker on their list of “Suffragents,” men who worked alongside their partners and friends for women’s right to vote.

Later in Life

As Parker moved into his 80s, he spent more time writing about the abolitionist movement at his home in Concord. His longest book, The Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles, told the story of the educational work of field speakers like himself and the state of slavery before the Civil War began.

He remained active in the fight against Jim Crow laws and ongoing racial prejudice, pressing his abolitionist friends and political leaders to “stump the nation demanding equal rights, land redistribution, and the disempowerment of the Southern Planter aristocracy”.

After a career of addressing injustice through speech making and writing, Parker came to believe, as historian David Blight wrote in his biography of Frederick Douglass, “words alone were not enough. The path to real change took politics and power.”

Legacy

In the end, Parker Pillsbury’s strong positions and unswerving dedication to the cause brought the respect of his peers and his audiences as the Civil War drew near. While not always popular, the constant pressure on Lincoln and Congress by black and white abolitionists helped make the Emancipation Proclamation and passage of the Civil War constitutional amendments more palatable and possible.

In a letter, Douglass expressed his admiration for Parker’s contributions to the antislavery movement, saying, “No man ever wrote and spoke mightier words in those earlier days than you.” (Frederick Douglass, A Life in Documents)

William Lloyd Garrison extended similar praise. “The abolitionists of the country ought to know Parker Pillsbury better than they do. I know him for all that is noble in soul and powerful in talent and eloquence. He is one of the strong men of our age.” (The Life of William Lloyd Garrison volume 3)

Parker found a soulmate in his nephew Albert Pillsbury. As an early member of the NAACP and skilled lawyer, Albert helped draft its starting constitution and by-laws, and authored one of the first federal bills to ban lynching.

Sources