From the 1830s through the 1850s, Concord provided audiences for debates about race, slavery, and related political issues, and for antislavery lecturers seeking to influence public opinion and to convert potential supporters to the cause. Some who spoke here—Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau among them—also lived here. Others came from all over—the south as well as the north—to share their points of view or their personal stories, and to represent antislavery organizations beyond the local level. Concord hosted both men and women abolitionists, both white and black, both American and British.
The manuscript records of the Concord Lyceum for the 1830s list public debates on such subjects as the relative intellectual capacities of whites and blacks (April 10, 1833), the immediate emancipation of slaves in the United States (May 8, 1833, February 18 and 25 and March 4, 1835), whether antislavery should be encouraged (October 23, 1833), and the cause of varying skin color between Africans and Europeans (February 12 and 19, 1834). The Lyceum also sponsored lectures on subjects relating to slavery—Charles Emerson (who preceded his brother Ralph Waldo in speaking publicly against slavery) on one of the West Indies islands on January 9, 1833; a Mr. Richardson on the philosophy of slavery on December 7, 1842; Wendell Phillips several times; James Freeman Clarke on the annexation of Texas on March 13, 1844; Henry David Thoreau on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government"—a forerunner of his later essay "Resistance to Civil Government," now known as Civil Disobedience—on January 26 and February 16, 1848; Thomas Starr King, who spoke of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in a lecture on March 1, 1854; Barzillai Frost urging support for a free Kansas through the Emigrant Aid Society on March 7, 1855; Theodore Parker on March 4, 1857.
Lecturers also came at the request of the Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society and to speak at meetings of the Middlesex County Antislavery Society. Mary Merrick Brooks, leader of the local society, kept unremitting pressure on her high-profile associates William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to speak here. The society's 1844 celebration of the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies featured not only Emerson, but also the powerful abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass (born a slave), Lewis Hayden (who escaped from slavery in 1844), and Samuel Joseph May (a Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and Abba Alcott's brother), among others. Speakers at meetings of the county society included Emerson, Garrison, Phillips, Charles Burleigh, Parker Pillsbury, George Thompson, and Douglass. Some of these same speakers also lectured here independently of their antislavery society commitments.
Through the agency of local people, many other abolitionists spoke in Concord—the Reverend James Woodbury on July 4, 1836; former slave Amos Dryser in January of 1837 at the Old Manse; Henry Stanton on April 18, 1837 and July 27, 1838; Sarah and Angelina Grimké in September of 1837; J.N. Browne on October 17, 1838; John O. Wattles of Ohio in June of 1841; Joshua Leavitt in December of 1842; black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond in May of 1843; Stephen and Abby Foster on December 14, 1846; recently escaped slaves William and Ellen Craft on March 16, 1849; Sallie Holley on August 9, 1852; Henry C. Wright on May 1, 1853; John Brown—who became a martyr to the cause in the eyes of Emerson, Thoreau, and others in Concord—in 1857 and 1859; Harriet Tubman in June of 1859.
While Concord was a receptive venue for the antislavery lecturer, its population was far from uniformly sympathetic to what was, after all, a controversial topic, particularly in the 1830s and 1840s. As demonstrated by the fiasco surrounding the spring 1845 invitation to Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips to speak before the Concord Lyceum, public expressions of antislavery sentiment had the power to disrupt and divide a small town whose residents valued the even tenor of community life.