The Garrison Mob

On the afternoon of 21 October 1835 a crowd that the Boston Commercial Gazette put at fifteen hundred or two thousand broke up a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, called for 3 o'clock in the hall adjoining the Anti-Slavery Office at 46 Washington Street. The office stood on the east side of Washington Street a short way north of the Old State House, which was then Boston's City Hall, with its rear on a narrow alley called Wilson's Lane. Newspapers had wrongly reported that the British abolitionist George Thompson would speak. Mayor Theodore Lyman ordered the women home, and Maria Weston Chapman told him that they might as well die there as anywhere. The rioters tore down the Anti-Slavery sign and went after William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator. Garrison climbed from a back window onto a shed and hid in the loft of a carpenter's shop on Wilson's Lane, where rioters found him behind a pile of boards, coiled a rope around his body and brought him down a ladder. Two truckmen, Daniel and Aaron Cooley, kept him from harm as he was led bareheaded through Wilson's Lane into State Street, and Lyman took him into City Hall. To protect him he was committed to the Leverett Street jail as a rioter, and the carriage taking him there was mobbed on the way. Next morning he wrote on his cell wall that he had been put there to save him from a "respectable and influential" mob. He was released after a hearing at the jail and left the city that day.