The abolitionist movement that radiated out from Black leadership in urban hubs in the 1830s had roots in rural New England, too. Black New Englanders from the countryside had signed up in large numbers to serve the American cause in the Revolutionary War. Enslaved people in rural Massachusetts, most notably Quock Walker and Elizabeth Freeman, held the state to its Revolutionary professions of liberty by suing for their freedom, winning it for themselves and all others enslaved in the state. The ideological makeup of rural Massachusetts towns in the early republic also created conditions favorable for the flowering of abolitionism. Small farming towns promoted personal independence, commitment to the prosperity of all in the community, and the notion that success should derive from the work of one’s own hands or enterprise. The way the system of slavery created dependent classes, funneled prosperity into the hands of few, and generated wealth from the forced labor of others were all antithetical to traditional rural New England values. While these professed values and the region’s Puritan disposition also paradoxically buttressed white supremacy, they nevertheless created a sizeable population amenable to abolitionist organizers who combed the state in the early 1830s, laying the groundwork for a robust movement.
Uxbridge was one such rural town that offered a sympathetic ear to the plight of the enslaved. There is no doubt that this was in large part because of its small Black population (30 people in 1830), which included refugees from slavery like Nancy Adams and entrepreneurs like Cato Willard. But Uxbridge’s churches also played a part. In rural New England, churches (especially Congregational churches) were often the only spaces in town that could hold large audiences, were located on town squares, and provided excellent venues for meetings at which to discuss the intersecting moral, spiritual, and secular matters of the day. The town in the early 1830s was dominated by two Congregational denominations located on opposite sides of the town square—the liberal and humanistic Unitarians, who were by nature inclined toward abolition, and the Evangelical group who, before 1842, had an anti-slavery pastor. Further, the southern part of the town was home to a Quaker meeting whose house was the only one in the region until the late 1830s. The Society of Friends had been the first predominantly white organization to embrace abolition, warming to the cause through its pacifist tenets and abhorrence of the violence that propped up slavery—and the Quakers counted among their adherents the town’s leading civic couple, Lydia and Effingham Capron, who would play an important role throughout the movement’s life.