III. SOME KEY CONCORD ABOLITIONISTS
III.A. Mary Merrick Brooks:
Mary Merrick Brooks—daughter of Concord storekeeper Tilly Merrick and wife of lawyer Nathan Brooks—was recognized during her life and has since been celebrated as a leader of the radical Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society. A founding member of the society in 1837 and also a member of the Middlesex County Antislavery Society, Mrs. Brooks served as an officer for both organizations. A respected associate of abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, she uncompromisingly championed Garrisonian immediatism—that is, insistence on immediate abolition rather than gradual change through the political process. Her moral indignation over slavery was likely informed at least in part by the fact that, while living in South Carolina, her father had once been a plantation- and slave-owner.
Born in 1801 to Tilly and Sally (Minot) Merrick, Mary Merrick developed into "the most beautiful young lady in town" in the opinion of Edward Jarvis, who so described her in a manuscript annotation in his personal copy of Shattuck's History of the Town of Concord. In 1823, she married Nathan Brooks, a widower with a young daughter, Caroline (later Mrs. Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar). Nathan and Mary Brooks had two sons, George Merrick (eventually a lawyer and a judge) and Charles Augustus (who died before he was a year old). The Brooks family lived in the house then standing at the intersection of Main Street and Sudbury Road, later the site of the Concord Free Public Library.
As a public official and an office-seeker, Nathan Brooks felt himself unable to take the kind of strong antislavery stand that his wife maintained. Nevertheless, he did not interfere, and sometimes silently lent his support, as his wife raised money for controversial antislavery organizers and actively aided fugitive slaves.
16. Nathan Brooks House, ca. 1865, at the intersection of Main Street and Sudbury Road (now located at 45 Hubbard Street).Early photographic print, CFPL Photofile.
17. Newspaper clipping: recipe for Brooks Cake, from the Portland Transcript (copied from Harriet Robinson's "Warrington" Pen-Portraits, 1877). From Scrapbook of Miscellaneous Concord-related Materials, CFPL Vault Collection.
III.A. Mary Merrick Brooks: Mary and Caroline Brooks Witness the Burning of Pennsylvania Hall, 1838:
19. Mary Merrick Brooks. Letter to Nathan Brooks ("My dearest Hussey"), Philadelphia, May 13, 1838, referring to Mrs. Brooks's planned attendance at a speech at the Antislavery Convention of American Women in Pennsylvania Hall with her step-daughter Caroline (the hall was destroyed by rioters four days later). From Nathan Brooks Papers, CFPL Vault Collection.
22. William Lloyd Garrison. Letter to Mary Merrick Brooks, Boston, July 30, 1863.
From Nathan Brooks Papers, CFPL Vault Collection.
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