One of the paving stones laid on the path to Harpers Ferry but largely ignored by historians was an unusual gathering in the old city hall in Worcester, Massachusetts on January 15, 1857.[1] The event was organized by Harvard-trained Transcendentalist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, minister of the Worcester Free Church and a staunch abolitionist. He encouraged friends and neighbors to defy the Fugitive Slave Act and personally helped enslaved people escape to Canada. He was wounded in his cheek by a saber while manning a battering ram at the door of the Court House in Boston during an unsuccessful attempt to free fugitive slave Anthony Burns. Higginson had visited Kansas in 1856 as part of his involvement in the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee.[2]
In early January, 1857, John Brown arrived in Boston on the first stop of a fundraising tour that would eventually garner enough money and for his long-planned attack in Virginia. He met with Franklin Sanborn, secretary of the Kansas Committee, who introduced him to several associates who would become known as the “Secret Six.”[3] Higginson was too busy with convention preparation to spend time with Brown. He had invited key abolition luminaries to a political meeting to rally support for dismembering a Constitutional Union that William Lloyd Garrison called a “covenant with death and agreement with hell.”[4] The three-day meeting was extraordinary in tone and resolutions and should give pause to anyone who lays blame for the dissolution of the Union exclusively upon the slaveholding states.
Higginson’s invitation did not equivocate in setting the tone for the convention. The election of James Buchanan as president promised four more years of pro-slavery governance. This existential crisis was not due to partisan politics, Higginson declared, but the result of fundamental social, legal, and moral differences between the two sections. The Union was a failure; “a hopeless attempt to unite under one government two antagonistic systems of society, which diverge more widely with every year.” It was time to face hard truths, he argued, and consider a separation between slave and free states and “to take other measures as the condition of the times may require.”[5] It was a startling manifesto signed by 89 prominent community leaders in a state that prided itself as the cradle of the American Revolution.