Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,623

This is the grave of George Luther Stearns.

Born in 1809 in Medford, Massachusetts, Stearns came from old (or olde) Puritan stock that went back to the early days of the colony. But he grew up in downwardly mobile circumstances. His father ran a private school, mostly for kids from the South. But then he died in 1820. Stearns was the oldest son. So he started working. He stayed in school while working at night for a few years, but by the time he was 15, he had dropped out entirely to support his mother and his sisters.

But Stearns managed to be quite successful in shipping materials. He started a business making sheet and pipe-lead and that did well. The business was based in Boston, but he mostly lived back home with his family in Medford. As he began to do well financially, he also became involved in the reform causes that were so prominent at that time. He got to know Lydia Maria Child, the pioneering abolitionist, and married her niece. In fact, when he met his future wife Mary Preston, he was nearly dead. He was riding a horse back from Boston. It slipped and fell on his leg. He came very close to losing the leg and given the medicine of the time, that would probably have meant his life too. But he did survive and of course things worked out for him.

Like Child, Stearns became a major supporter of abolitionist causes and put his growing fortune where his mouth was. He became close friends with Charles Sumner, who influenced him to do more to fight slavery. It seems to have been Preston Brooks nearly beating Sumner to death on the Senate floor in 1856. combined with outrage over the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s aftermath, that really turned Stearns toward action. He joined the Emigrant Aid Company, which funded radicals to move to Kansas to fight the pro-slavery lunatics trying to force that territory to become a slave state. This was Eli Thayer’s baby, but Stearns gave plenty of money to it. It didn’t really accomplish its goal of sending 20,000 anti-slavery settlers to the state, but it did raise the stakes, infuriated slaveholders, and contributed to the growing violence of the time and place, which gave space for people such as John Brown to act more decisively against slaveholders by murdering them.

Speaking of Brown, Stearns was one of the Secret Six, the funders of Brown’s schemes. In fact, the rifles and pikes Brown had collected over the past couple of years before Harpers’ Ferry were technically owned by Stearns. Like most of these guys, Stearns fled when he realized what Brown had done at Harpers Ferry, but unlike someone like Gerrit Smith, he didn’t turn his back on his principles when faced with real violence. He was mostly just afraid of prosecution, so he fled to Canada for a bit. There was a bit of an investigation but honestly, given how the South massively overplayed its hand in the prosecution of Brown, the desire to prosecute his funders, who were all rich northern guys, disappeared pretty quickly. He also tried to bring the bodies of two of Brown’s martyred Black followers, John Anthony Copeland Jr. and Shields Green, up to Pennsylvania so they could get a proper burial Virginia would not allow them. Didn’t happen though. Virginia had a better use for them–let medical students carve them up. He also helped support Brown’s family after this.

When the South committed treason in defense of slavery in 1861, Stearns was a major proponent of arming Black Americans. When Lincoln finally allowed that, Stearns became a major recruiter for the 54th Massachusetts. He even got a commission as a major thanks to Edwin Stanton, but this was more honorific than anything else. Stearns certainly wasn’t going to lead troops in the field. Instead, he was named Recruiting Commissioner for the U.S. Colored Troops. There are claims that he recruited more than 13,000 Black troops. I am not quite sure what that means because it’s not like most of these people needed a lot of convincing. That’s not to play down his very real contribution on the issue, but as these things go, the richest or most famous guy does tend to get the most credit for things that probably happened underneath him. In any case, one of his duties was to go to areas the Union army controlled in Tennessee and gather up potential troops. He resigned in 1864 though, frustrated by a government bureaucracy he felt got in the way of effective recruitment and his constant arguing with Stanton.

Well, whatever, because Stearns was a good man. He did so much work on civil rights during the war and during the early years of Reconstruction as well. That included founding schools and helping families left behind when men went to war find work to keep them afloat. One of the things he did for the families of these soldiers in Tennessee was to use his fortune to buy a couple of big cotton plantations in central Tennessee and then employ the families growing that cotton. It’s probably unlikely that the families actually wanted to pick cotton–we know from post-war demands by the Black community in the South that they really wanted to avoid that kind of work. But Stearns was a man of his time. He was also a major merchant and the New England community desperately wanted to bring southern cotton back on the market. In any case, the key here is that he paid the workers and paid them enough to live too. He was also a major figure in the founding of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was deeply flawed and massively underfunded, but was still a big extension of government power for the mid-19th century.

All of this did begin to undermine Stearns’ fortune. In fact, his son dropped out of Harvard for awhile to help the family. And yet, he was a man addicted to social causes. When his friend Samuel Gridley Howe asked him to help fundraise to help the Cretan revolt against the Ottoman Empir, he readily agreed. They planned to travel to Crete in the spring of 1867.

Unfortunately, in February 1867, Stearns came down with pneumonia and it killed him in April. He was 58 years old. His death was a big deal in the abolitionist and reformist communities. Ralph Waldo Emerson gave the eulogy. John Greenleaf Whittier published a poem about him in the Atlantic. As late as 1897, Booker T. Washington gave speeches about what the greatness of Stearns.

We also need a side conversation about Stearns’ beard.

George Luther Stearns is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other abolitionists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Joshua Bowen Smith is also at Mount Auburn (it’s a cemetery that keeps on giving) and Austin Bearse is in Centerville, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.