Stephen Symonds Foster
Stephen Symonds Foster (November 17, 1809 – September 13, 1881) was a radical American
Foster helped establish the
Early life
Foster was born in
Foster apprenticed to a carpenter but left at age 22 to study to become a missionary. He went to Dartmouth College where his brother Asa had graduated and studied the classics, including Greek and Latin. Foster embraced abolitionism at this time, and in his third year invited Angelina Grimké to speak to the Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society.[2] During his senior year, Foster was arrested and put in prison for not paying a debt of $12.14 (~$359.00 in 2023) to a local clockmaker; Foster was shocked to find that debtors were locked up with violent criminals and thieves, in common cells swarming with rats, lice, and fleas. From prison, Foster wrote a letter of protest which was published in a local paper. His friends raised bail after two weeks, but Foster's letter aroused indignation among citizens who later cleaned out the jail and then passed a law which banned imprisonment for debt.[3] Foster redoubled his efforts in school, especially his rhetoric and public speaking courses, and graduated in 1838 third in his class.[1]
Foster subsequently enrolled at
Abolition
Foster was known to interrupt church services to denounce organized religion's complicity in slavery. In 1841, he was expelled from his Congregationalist church in Hanover, New Hampshire.
In Portland, Maine in 1842, Foster was wounded in a riot outside a meetinghouse. Pro-slavery supporters wished to prevent Foster and the radical abolitionist John Murray Spear from speaking. When the mob attacked, Foster took twenty blows to the head and had his coat torn in half. He was pulled from the crowd by women of the Portland Anti-Slavery Society who helped him escape through a back window. Spear was beaten nearly to death on the front steps of the meeting house. Local abolitionists took the men in and tended to their recuperation.[4]
In 1843, he wrote the book The Brotherhood of Thieves; or A True Picture of the American Church and Clergy: A Letter to Nathaniel Barney, of Nantucket and in 1844 Foster's fellow abolitionist Parker Pillsbury published it through the Boston Anti-Slavery Office. The book went through twenty editions.
In 1844, Foster appeared in front of the New England Antislavery Convention holding an iron collar in one hand and iron
Foster and Abby Kelley Foster—along with Sojourner Truth, Jonathan Walker, Marius Robinson, and Sallie Holley—reorganized the Michigan Anti-Slavery Society in 1853 in Adrian, Michigan.[6] The state society had been founded in 1836 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.[7]
Foster was called a "
At the eclectic Free Convention in Rutland, Vermont, in June 1858, Foster spoke after Pillsbury to say "any law, constitution, court, or government, any church, priesthood, creed, or Bible, any Christ, or any God, that, by silence or otherwise, authorizes man to enslave man, merits the scorn and contempt of mankind."[10]
Marriage and fatherhood
In 1845, after a four-year courtship, Foster married
On May 19, 1847, Paulina Wright "Alla" Foster was born at Liberty Farm, the only child that the couple would have. To care for the infant, Abby Kelley Foster stayed home at first, helped occasionally by her sister-in-law Caroline Foster. The young girl's parents soon found that they could lecture separately or together as long as Alla was being looked after; more often it was Abby Kelley Foster who left her husband watching the girl. Once when Alla was three, and her mother was out on a speaking tour, Stephen Symonds Foster was asked by Alla to buy her a harmonica and a churn, and Foster responded that he had little money, and could only buy her the necessities. Foster himself was about to leave on a speaking engagement and intended to send the girl to be cared for by her grandparents. Foster anticipated that she would be lonely and might need a toy wagon. Foster wrote to his wife, saying "I got the harmonica & wagon, & received for them a whole wagon load of kisses. She was careful, however, as she always is, to save some "for mother". I am struck with the fact that she always insists on your right to an equal part of every thing which I possess, if she attaches any value to it. One would almost think her specially commissioned to look after your rights, in your absence."[12]
Women's rights
In May 1850, Abby Kelley Foster went to Boston to take part in an annual
In 1869, amid tensions building up between factions of women's rights activists, Foster spoke out at a national meeting of the
Later life
In 1874, Worcester city officials put Liberty Farm up for auction to pay back taxes. In a manner similar to prior protests made by women's rights activists such as Lucy Stone, the Fosters refused to pay taxes on the 65-acre (260,000 m2) farm because Abby Kelley Foster was not given the right to vote and was thus subject to "taxation without representation". A sympathetic neighbor bid on the property and then allowed Foster to buy it back from him. This became a yearly event, as the Fosters never paid their taxes directly.[11]
Foster died at Liberty Farm on September 12, 1881.[17] A memorial service was held at the Worcester Horticultural Hall on September 24, with Reverend Samuel May, Jr., of Leicester, Massachusetts, presiding. Tributes to Foster's life and works were presented by Lucy Stone, Wendell Phillips, Reverend Henry T. Cheever, and Parker Pillsbury.[18]
References
Notes
- ^ a b Sterling, 1991, p. 130.
- ^ Sterling, 1991, p. 131
- ^ a b c Sterling, 1991, pp. 130–131.
- ^ The First Parish in Portland, Maine; Unitarian Universalist. History, page 3. Anti-Slavery. Archived 2008-05-13 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved on April 6, 2009.
- ^ McKenna, 2007, p. 136.
- JSTOR 44174961– via Jstor.
- ^ Mull, Carol E. "Signal of Liberty". Ann Arbor District Library. Retrieved 2022-03-30.
- ^ McKivigan, John R. Abolitionism and American Religion, p. 153. Retrieved on April 6, 2009.
- ^ Von Frank, Albert J. The trials of Anthony Burns, p. 338. Retrieved on April 6, 2009.
- ^ Vermont History Journal. “A Convention of ‘Moral Lunatics’”: The Rutland, Vermont, Free Convention of 1858, Thomas L. Altherr. Retrieved on April 6, 2009.
- ^ a b National Park Service. Liberty Farm Archived 2015-01-13 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved on April 6, 2009.
- ^ Worcester Women's History Project. Alla Paulina Wright Foster. Letter from Stephen S. Foster to Abby Kelley Foster, written on August 15, 1850. Retrieved on April 6, 2009.
- ^ McMillen, 2008, p. 106.
- ^ Stanton, 1881, pp. 140, 224.
- ^ a b c Buhle, 1978, p. 258.
- ^ DuBois, 1978, p. 114.
- ^ New York Times. September 13, 1881. The Late Stephen S. Foster; Sketch of the Veteran Anti-Slavery Worker and Temperance Orator. Retrieved on April 6, 2009.
- ^ Franklin P. Rice, Worcester Society of Antiquity. The Worcester Book of Noteworthy Events: From 1657 to 1883. Putnam, Davis and Co., 1884.
Bibliography
- ISBN 0-252-00669-0
- Cirillo, Frank J. "Waiting for the Perfect Moment: Abby Kelley Foster and Stephen Foster’s Union War" in New Perspectives on the Union War edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon (Fordham UP, 2019) pp. 9-38 online
- DuBois, Ellen Carol. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
- Duncan, Troy, and Chris Dixon. ""Denouncing the Brotherhood of Thieves: Stephen Symonds Foster and the Abolitionist Critique of the Anti-abolitionist Clergy," Civil War History, 47 (2001): 97–117.
- Foster, Stephen Symonds (1855). Revolution the Only Remedy for Slavery. American Anti-Slavery Society. Archived from the original on October 6, 2009. Retrieved April 6, 2009.
- Foster, Stephen Symonds (1843). The Brotherhood of Thieves; or A True Picture of the American Church and Clergy: A Letter to Nathaniel Barney, of Nantucket. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office.
- Mayer, Henry (1998). All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. ISBN 0-312-18740-8.
- McKenna, George (2007). The Puritan origins of American patriotism. Yale University. ISBN 978-0-300-10099-0.
- McMillen, Sally Gregory (2008). Seneca Falls and the origins of the women's rights movement. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-518265-1.
- Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Susan B. Anthony; Matilda Joslyn Gage; Ida Husted Harper (1881). History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I. Susan B. Anthony.
- ISBN 0-393-03026-1.
External links
- Worcester Women's History Project. Sample of love letters between Stephen Symonds Foster and Abby Kelley
- The Brotherhood of Thieves, or, A True Picture of the American Church and Clergy (1843), by Stephen S. Foster