The Boston Gentlemen's Mob

Book excerpt: Violent mobs, racial unrest, attacks on the press--it's the fall of 1835 and the streets of Boston are filled with bankers, merchants and other "gentlemen of property and standing" angered by an emergent antislavery movement. They break up a women's abolitionist meeting and seize newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison. While city leaders stand by silently, a small group of women had the courage to speak out. Author Josh Cutler tells the story of the Gentlemen's Mob through the eyes of four key participants: antislavery reformer Maria Chapman; pioneering schoolteacher Susan Paul; the city's establishment mayor, Theodore Lyman; and Wendell Phillips, a young attorney who wanders out of his office to watch the spectacle. The day's events forever changed the course of the abolitionist movement.