Little-known History ~ Abolitionist voters in Massachusetts, 17 years before the 13th amendment, proposed a bill: denounce slavery or secede from the Union.
When I found this document accidentally during a family ancestry search, I felt heartened. In these days of racial discord, it’s nice to see evidence of people who always thought slavery a horror and fought hard to destroy it. I’d never heard before of any bills proposing a state secede unless slavery was abolished, have you?
Sadly, the bill did not pass. Yet it inspires me to see seven names connected with my family tree (Nickerson, Doane, and Robbins). Grandpa’s middle name was Robbins; his mother’s parents were Robbins and Nickerson. Perhaps some of your own ancestors are in this list of signers.
I know we can just as easily find dark histories buried in our family trees, but we can at least be proud of these brave people who signed this in 1848. And surely to get to the point of creating a bill, they must have been fighting slavery long before.
Taking a closer look in the document itself, with eight parts, I-VIII, we see slavery declared:
“a covenant with the death, and an agreement with hell”.
The proposed bill decried that as long as the Commonwealth consented to slavery, the government would be “morally and politically responsible for all the cruelties and horrors of the slave system.” The bill also requested, in near-poetic and faith-filled words:
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