III. SOME KEY CONCORD ABOLITIONISTS
III.K. The Hunts:
In 1926, near the end of his life, William Henry Hunt—a retired Monument Street farmer—prepared manuscript reminiscences for Allen French, his designated Social Circle biographer. Looking back on Concord as it had been during the 1840s and 1850s, he remembered that Punkatasset Hill neighbors visited one another for quilting parties, games, and (particularly during the winter months) conversation and companionship by the hearth. He wrote fondly of these informal fireside gatherings: "Of all the impressions received by my slowly unfolding mind in my childhood surroundings, there are none more firmly imprinted, clearly cut, or more free from all sorrowful suggestions."
But the issue of slavery sometimes disturbed the cordial atmosphere of these visits. Hunt wrote, "The troublesome question invaded our peaceful neighborhood and caused more division than anything that had arisen before Sometimes even by the fireside the subject could not be kept out altogether." He observed that his father, struggling farmer Daniel Hunt, an ardent abolitionist and "the first farmer in the neighborhood to become interested in [the cause]," could hold his own when the subject came up. He also suggested that the employment of his half-sister Clarissa Cutter in the antislavery household of Ebenezer Rockwood and Caroline Brooks Hoar influenced their father's attitude.
Hunt remembered that his father subscribed to the Washington antislavery journal the National Era, in which Uncle Tom's Cabin was first published serially in 1851 and 1852, and that one of his sisters recited verses from James Russell Lowell's The Biglow Papers for family and guests. Members of Daniel Hunt's immediate and extended family signed the 1849 petition in support of Washington Goode. Moreover, John Shepard Keyes noted in his Houses, & Owners or Occupants in Concord, 1885 that "Dr. Howe and F.B. Sanborn took refuge" in the Nehemiah Hunt House (which adjoined the Daniel Hunt place) "after the John Brown raids, when the U.S. Senator Mason was trying to get their evidence for his committee on that subject." If Keyes was correct in this, the Hunts were thus silently involved in one of Concord's most visible antislavery episodes.
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