Elizur Wright

Journalist and abolitionist Elizur Wright

Massachusetts Historical Society

Quick Facts

Significance:

Journalist, Reformer

Place of Birth:

South Canaan, Connecticut

Date of Birth:

February 12, 1885

Place of Death:

Medford, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

November 22, 1885

Place of Burial:

Boston, Massachusetts

Cemetery Name:

Mt. Hope Cemetery

Arrested for his alleged role in the rescue of Shadrach Minkins, abolitionist editor Elizur Wright served in several anti-slavery societies as well as the Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in 1804, Elizur Wright spent his early childhood in Connecticut. He soon moved with his family to the Western Reserve, which is now part of Ohio. After graduating from Yale, he became a professor at Western Reserve College. Influenced by the abolitionism of William Lloyd Garrison and others, Wright followed his convictions and resigned his professorship to join the New York Anti-Slavery Society. He soon helped form the American Anti-Slavery Society and served as its corresponding secretary for several years. In this role, he edited the Anti-Slavery Record and the Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine while performing other administrative duties in the organization.

Wright moved to Boston and continued his work as an abolitionist and editor. However, he split with the Garrisonians and worked on the Massachusetts Abolitionist, a rival paper to Garrison's Liberator. In the 1840s, he established and edited the Weekly Chronotype, which promoted abolition and other reforms. By 1850, the Weekly Commonwealth, which aligned itself with the Free Soil movement, purchased the Chronotype and kept Wright on as editor for several years.¹

The same year Wright began working for the Commonwealth, he joined the third and final Boston Vigilance Committee, which formed in response to the new Fugitive Slave Law. This law empowered slave catchers to arrest and return suspected freedom seekers without due process and with the support of the federal government and other authorities.

In February 1851, slave catchers arrested freedom seeker Shadrach Minkins and brought him to the courthouse to await his hearing. As a member of the press, Wright insisted on being admitted to the courtroom. Soon after, a crowd of Black Bostonians charged into the courtroom and rescued Minkins from his captors. Some witnesses reported that Wright gave the signal that prompted the rescue.² According to a local newspaper:

Having lost their bird thus unexpectedly, the agents of Debree [Minkin’s enslaver] turned their attention to those who aided in his escape, and on Monday they arrested Elizur Wright, one of the editors of the Commonwealth newspaper...on complaint of aiding and abetting the rescue of Shadrack [sic]...F.D. Byrnes, Deputy Marshal, testified that Mr. Wright, in passing out of the Court Room, after having been in consultation with "Shadrach," pushed open the door wider than was necessary, and then raised his hand, crying to the crowd outside, "Now come in -come in!"³

Likely to silence the longtime abolitionist, Secretary of State Daniel Webster wrote to President Fillmore, "It is of great importance to convict [Elizur] Wright." Wright claimed innocence, however, stating: "I have actually done nothing and said nothing so far as the rescue of Shadrach is concerned...I merely witnessed the rescue of Shadrach without lifting a finger or uttering a word to aid it."⁴

Though arrested for his alleged role in the rescue, Wright did not get convicted. The jury, which ironically included Francis Bigelow, the abolitionist who hid Minkins in his Concord home following the rescue, acquitted him.⁵

In an 1855 editorial reflecting on the rescue, his arrest, and ultimate acquittal, Wright wrote:

I regard the ‘Fugitive Slave Law” as a crime, and knowing that there is no authority for it, or anything like it, in the Constitution. I have never had any feeling for the court that enforces it but contempt. I never expected from that court anything like fairness or impartiality, or any gentleness, but that of the soulless hypocrite, and I never was disappointed.⁶

Wright continued to support abolition and other movements, including reforming the insurance industry. He became a state commissioner for insurance in the late 1850s. In his later years, prior to his death in 1885, he dedicated much of his time to conservation efforts and creating open space for parks around the Boston area.⁷

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Footnotes:

1. American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary (New York : H.W. Wilson Co., 1985) 907-908. Accessed June 2021, American reformers : an H.W. Wilson biographical dictionary.
2. Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) 122-124.
3. “Arrest and Rescue of a Fugitive Slave,” New England Farmer and Boston Rambler, February 22, 1851.
4. Collison, Shadrach Minkins, 193-195.
5. Ibid.
6. “Mr. Editor” The Liberator, February 09, 1855.
7. “Elizur Wright Dead,” Boston Globe, November 23, 1885.