Upstate’s forgotten abolitionists: Theodore Weld was the ‘most mobbed man in America’
Updated Feb 24, 2021;
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Upstate New York was a hotbed in the 19th century for the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. Names like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith are familiar. But there were also valiant figures from the region, white and Black, who fought for the end of slavery whose names have faded into history.
During this Black History Month, after searching through old newspapers and websites, we take a look back at some of Upstate New York’s forgotten abolitionists.
When he died on Feb. 3, 1895 at Hyde Park, Massachusetts, the life of abolitionist Theodore Weld was remembered beautifully by the “Brooklyn Sun.”
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On Dec. 30, 1840, John M. Hopkins, bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Vermont, penned a letter to Bishop Benedict J. Fenwick of the Diocese of Boston. The subject of the letter was the proposed construction of a new Catholic church in Burlington, Vermont. I call your attention, he wrote, to a matter which I think important to the comfort and satisfaction of the Roman Catholic Church in this village, as well as the Church which is under my own pastoral care.
At the time the letter was written, the Catholic Diocese of Boston was expansive, encompassing all New England, yet it was also small in terms of the number of its parishes, priests, and laypeople. It was not unusual for Bishop Fenwick to deal personally with administrative issues as they arose. The letter from Bishop Hopkins merited his careful attention, since it concerned the only extant Catholic parish in Vermont, St. Mary in Burlington.