Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,870

This is the grave of Joshua Bowen Smith.

Probably born in 1813 in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Smith was a mixed race man. His mother was part Black and part Native and his father was white. He grew up in Philadelphia and educated in Quaker schools. He moved to Boston in 1836 and got a job as a headwaiter in a hotel. This hotel, the Mount Washington House, happened to be the favorite hangout of Charles Sumner and his allies, such as John Fatal. It was a place where you could be in mixed race company fairly openly, as it was when the Black Fatal was with the white Sumner. They started talking to Smith and he was interested in everything going on and he became a quick convert to the abolitionist cause.

Smith made his own small fortune with a very successful catering company, often working Harvard events. He became a pretty important figure in the Boston abolitionist community. It’s always worth noting that Boston wasn’t nearly as much of an abolitionist city as it gets made out to be in popular memory. It’s true that it was the home of American abolitionism, along with places such as New Bedford and Rochester, but these people were still a small minority of the population. After all, William Lloyd Garrison, who was also a friend of Smith, had to be jailed on night in Boston–to prevent his lynching by other Boston residents sick of hearing his rants against slavery. So it might have been safer to be an abolitionist in Boston than other places, but that’s not the same as it being a comfortable place.

Anyway, Smith was involved in all the Boston anti-slavery activities. That included his home being an active stop on the Underground Railroad, which was necessary after 1850 due to the Fugitive Slave Act meaning that just being in the North was no longer safe for escaped slaves. If they needed to earn money, he would employ them in the catering business. If they needed money for a fast escape, he would give it to them. He very much believed in the use of violence in opposing slavery and carried around a gun and knife that he would brandish during speeches to prove the point. I am sure liberal nonviolence fetishists would condemn him today for such actions. But no one was taking a slave back to slavery if he could help it and that included killing to prevent it. Slaveowners knew this too and that’s why Boston became a no-go zone for slave catchers after the first mass resistance to them appeared, which Smith was involved in. Smith for instance was asked to provide catering for the soldiers there to bring the captured slave Anthony Burns back to the South. He flat out refused to feed slavers.

Smith stated in one speech:

If liberty is not worth fighting for, it is not worth having. He advised every fugitive to arm himself with a revolver – if he could not buy one otherwise, to sell his coat for that purpose. As for himself, and he thus exhorted others, he should be kind and courteous to all, even the slave-dealer, until the moment of an attack upon his liberty. He would not be taken ALIVE, but upon the slave-catcher’s head be the consequences. When he could not live here in Boston, a FREEMAN, in the language of Socrates, ‘He had lived long enough.’ Mr. Smith, in conclusion, made a demonstration of one mode of defence, which those who best know him say would be exemplified to the hilt.

Now, Smith’s catering business plunged at the beginning of the Civil War when, for reasons that are unclear to me, Governor John Andrew refused to reimburse him for his services to the 12th Massachusetts Regiment, who he had cooked for over a three month period. I don’t know if there was an issue of preapproval here or what. But the state did not reimburse, Smith took on massive debt, and he never got out of poverty again. That’s sad. He still had some relations with Andrew too. Andrew was still governor at the end of the war and Smith was part of the group leading the call to create a memorial for Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts. It took a long time to make this happen but of course Augustus Saint-Gaudens finally got the commission and completed one of the great iconic pieces of American public art in 1897. If you’ve never seen it on Boston Common, make sure you do so the next time you are in Boston.

Smith also became the rare Black lawmaker, even in Massachusetts, serving one term in the state legislature in the mid-1870s. He got sick pretty quick after that though. He did play an advisory role on the issues that created the Civil Rights Act of 1875, working with Sumner on it. But of course the Supreme Court would soon eviscerate that superb law. However, Smith did not live to see that. He died in 1879, at the age of 66.

Joshua Bowen Smith is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series visit other abolitionists, you can donate to covered the required expenses here. James Sheppard Pike is in Philadelphia and William Still is in Collingdale, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.