Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,058

This is the grave of Elizabeth Buffum Chace.

Born in 1806 in Smithfield, Rhode Island, Elizabeth Buffum grew up in the Quaker world there. Quakerism wasn’t as big in Rhode Island as in Pennsylvania, but it was a sizable thing. Now, the idea that Quakers were inherently anti-slavery wasn’t true. There were plenty of Quakers involved in the slave trade. But around the time of the American Revolution, thanks to the direct action organizing of Benjamin Lay and his followers, the Quakers started turning sharply against slavery and by the early nineteenth century, were pretty universally against it. This is the world in which Buffum grew up and she felt that very strongly.

In 1828, Buffum married Samuel Chace. Like her, he was an old Quaker family. They both found slavery detestable, but she was the louder one about it. Since Quakers had at least some tradition of women speaking publicly when the spirit carried them, he supported her in this. She became one of the most important anti-slavery activists in southern New England. Their home was on the Underground Railroad, which became a lot more relevant after 1850 with the horrors of the Fugitive Slave Act meaning that no escaped slave was ever safe until they crossed out of the United States.

But long before this, Chace was a big player in anti-slavery activism. Another real center of anti-slavery work was Fall River, Massachusetts. These sea towns had a lot of escaped slaves in them and free Black communities developed. This was because working on the sea was hard, miserable labor, which meant it was the kind of work that a Black man could get in the North. Anti-slavery societies began. But just because you were anti-slavery did not mean you really wanted to interact with Black people. So it was a struggle in these early societies–would they be equal? Chace was very much on the side of yes. An early anti-slavery society formed in Fall River, but it struggled over this issue. Chace came over and reorganized it on integrated grounds as the Fall River Female Anti Slavery Society. As Chace described these segregationist anti-slavery women, “they were willing to help and encourage them [the black women] in every way, but they did not think it was at all proper to invite them to join the society.” Once again, we need to not read into the past heroes who held our values today just because they were involved in this or that social movement. They didn’t. And in the future, probably plenty of people will look back at us and think liberals and leftists held compromised awful values in the early 21st century. It’s how things go. Now, of course, the anti-slavery societies were gender segregated, which is why this is “female.” Because for a lot of abolitionist men, the only thing more radical than abolition was gender equality, something they could not abide at all.

Chace then used the example of what she had done in Fall River to work with other activists around New England, in cities such as Boston and Fall River, to promote female anti-slavery societies in their cities. So she’s a really important figure in developing organized grassroots anti-slavery work. Chace was disappointed in Abraham Lincoln, as were most abolitionists. They wanted him to abolish slavery immediately upon the secession of the South. Politically, this was not a good idea, but then people like Chace were unconcerned with the politics of the matter. This was a moral question, pure and simple. Of course, opinion of Lincoln among Chace and her friends grew considerably as the war went on.

Also, they had a lot of kids. But of the ten, only five survived to adulthood. Hard being a 19th century parent and for that matter especially a 19th century mother, with your body having child after child. The family support came through the factory system. Samuel managed a big factory, which of course meant hiring a lot of labor. There were a lot of attempts in these years at a more humane form of factory labor, most notably at Lowell, but really throughout New England. It was very hard to make them work because the economics of the apparel industry and the constant flood of cheap labor from Ireland meant that you could be undercut so easily. I am not entirely sure to what extent Chace was engaged on these issues, but my guess is that they generally supported trying to have a better class of labor under better conditions. What I do know is that their home in the town of Valley Falls, Rhode Island became a place where Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists would come give public talks.

Now, with slavery over in 1865, what did the future hold for an activist such as Chace? Well, there were plenty of other problems in the United States that needed lifelong reformers to fight for. She became a suffragist, though women’s suffrage was a long ways off yet. She had gotten involved in women’s suffrage by the late 1840s. She attended the big women’s rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850, probably the second most important of them after the famed Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. She became president of the Rhode Island Woman’s Suffrage Association. She also did a lot of work on prison reform and for orphans. She and her activist friends lobbied the state to form the Rhode Island State Home and School for Dependent and Neglected Children, which opened in 1885. Now, a lot of these institutions would become nightmares for the children in them, but the intentions were good.

Chace died in in 1899, at the age of 93.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace is buried in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, Rhode Island.

If you would like this series to visit other abolitionists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. David Einhorn is in New York City and Benjamin Wade is in Jefferson, Ohio. Previous posts are archived here and here.