III. SOME KEY CONCORD ABOLITIONISTS
III.F. The Robinsons:
Antislavery was an abiding preoccupation in the household of journalist William Stevens Robinson and his wife Harriet Hanson Robinson.
Robinson was born in Concord in 1818 to William and Martha Cogswell Robinson. He attended public school before entering the workforce in 1835 as apprentice to George Bemis, editor of the Yeoman's Gazette. Robinson took over the Gazette—a Whig paper—in 1839, changed its name to the Republican, and sold it in 1842, when he became assistant editor of the Lowell Courier and Journal.
An increasingly uncompromising abolitionist of Whig, Free Soil, and ultimately Republican persuasion, Robinson both influenced public opinion and made political enemies. He left Lowell in June 1848 to assume the editorship of the Boston Daily Whig (later the Daily Republican). He returned in 1849 and edited the Lowell American, an antislavery paper. When the American folded in 1854, he worked again in Boston, at the Commonwealth, which became the Telegraph. Robinson was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1852 and 1853. Beginning in 1856, he wrote politically charged letters to the Springfield Republican under the pen-name Warrington.
Harriet Jane Hanson was born in Boston in 1825 to William and Harriet Browne Hanson. After William's death in 1831, his widow and four children moved to Lowell, where Mrs. Hanson supported her family by boarding mill workers for the Tremont Corporation. At the age of ten, young Harriet became a mill operative and a contributor to the family income. A contributor to the Lowell Offering, she married William Stevens Robinson in 1848.
The couple lived in Boston for a short time, then in Lowell from 1849 to 1854, when they moved to Concord, where they remained until 1857. They rented John Thoreau's "Texas House" on Belknap Street.
While living in Concord, William Robinson traveled by train back and forth to his work at the Telegraph in Boston. Harriet Robinson belonged to the Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society, took advantage of the Lyceum and the Town Library, and socialized with the people of the town, including Mary Merrick Brooks, who remained a friend after the Robinsons moved away.
After the Civil War, the Robinsons threw themselves into the cause of woman's suffrage.
From William Robinson's point of view, Concord was not nearly as much of an antislavery town as it might have been. He was willing to admit that "some events of antislavery history have occurred there: for example, the capture and rescue of Mr. Sanborn (in the John Brown case) on a warrant from the United-States Senate, and the rescue of Shadrach." Nevertheless, he characterized the town's leadership as tardy in its commitment to antislavery: "Old Dr. Ripley was as slow as any of the Unitarian clergy to accept antislavery doctrines, and his colleagues were 'conservative' men. It was more difficult to get the meeting-house for George Thompson than for the 'Washingtonian' Hawkins; and there was much opposition to both. Mr. Emerson, who never troubles himself about organizations, was not, I think, an original abolitionist, any more than Hon. Samuel Hoar (father of E.R. and G.F. Hoar), who had the name of being a conservative when George Thompson came up to disturb Dr. Ripley and the Concord pews. I may seem to have underrated Mr. Emerson's antislavery position. His first demonstration that way was his address on West-India emancipation (1843 [i.e. 1844]), which was pretty early; but before this, I think, his early essays, and his philosophy generally, were thought to tend to indifferentism on the subject."
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