The Reform Trail: A Map Journey Across Massachusetts

Stop Notes: Reform in Massachusetts, 1830–1852

1Stop A, Boston. On January 1, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison printed the first issue of his newspaper, The Liberator, here, demanding an immediate end to slavery. Many Bostonians saw him as a dangerous troublemaker. In 1835 a mob seized him and led him through the streets with a rope, until the mayor had him locked in the jail for his own safety. In 1837 lawmakers at the State House created a Board of Education, and Horace Mann became its first secretary. Mann argued that free public schools paid for by taxes would turn children from every background into informed citizens. In 1843 Dorothea Dix gave the same lawmakers a written report, called a memorial, describing people with mental illness kept in cages, closets and cellars of jails and poorhouses, without care.

2Stop B, Lexington. In 1839 the nation's first state-run school for training teachers, called a normal school, opened here with three students, all young women. Mann believed good schools needed trained teachers. Before long, women made up most of the state's teachers, partly because towns could pay them less than men.

3Stop C, Worcester. After Dix's memorial, lawmakers voted money to enlarge the state hospital here for people with mental illness. In October 1850, Worcester also hosted the first National Woman's Rights Convention. Speakers, including Lucy Stone and Sojourner Truth, called for women's right to vote, to own property and to enter colleges and professions. About 1,000 people attended, and many newspapers reported on it.

4Stop D, New Bedford. In September 1838 Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in Maryland and settled in this whaling port with his wife, Anna Murray Douglass, a free Black woman who had helped him escape. He worked on the docks. He soon began reading The Liberator.

5Stop E, Nantucket. In August 1841, at an antislavery meeting on the island, Douglass rose and spoke about his life in slavery. Abolitionists were so impressed that they hired him to give lectures. In 1845 he published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which named the people who had enslaved him. Later that year he sailed to Britain, where he stayed for almost two years.

6The road ahead. In 1852 Massachusetts became the first state to require children from 8 to 14 to attend school for part of each year. Slavery lasted in the South until 1865, and women in Massachusetts could not vote in national elections until 1920.