Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts, is grabbed off the street and flown to a prison in Louisiana. In Boston a man is nabbed while leaving the courthouse. In New Bedford, ICE agents smash the windows of a car to arrest someone with no criminal history. In Chelsea, Boston, Worcester, Medford, Wakefield and other cities, hundreds have gone missing, picked up by ICE in raids.
Meanwhile, immigrants, including those with temporary protected status (TPS), are afraid. Children don’t want to go to school for fear their parents won’t be there when they return home. Community leaders talk of a siege mentality.
Since a 2017 ruling by the state Supreme Judicial Court, Massachusetts has limited its cooperation with the federal government’s deportation efforts. As Stoneham Police Chief James O’Connor puts it: “Being in this country without legal documentation is a civil offense. Massachusetts police officers do not have the jurisdiction to enforce civil immigration law.” The only exceptions are in cases of criminal activity or threats to public safety.
In a policy statement, Chief O’Connor stated: “Stoneham Police will afford all residents all civil rights, due process, and equal protection safeguards available under the U. S. Constitution, the Massachusetts Constitution and Town laws, ‘irrespective of the person’s immigration and/or documentation status.’”
Regardless of state and local policies, our immigrant neighbors are increasingly threatened by a Trump administration that has shown no regard for rules or, for that matter, First Amendment rights.
For this reason, four bills are now at the State House that would increase protections for immigrants in Massachusetts. They are sponsored by various state reps and senators and supported by the ACLU, MIRA and numerous organizations.
The first is the Safe Communities Act. It would prohibit voluntary involvement of local police and courts in civil immigration matters and require “informed consent” before any ICE interview can take place.
The second bill is the Immigrant Legal Defense Act. Studies show that immigrants are five times more likely to win relief from deportation if they are represented by a lawyer. This act would provide funds for free legal defense for at-risk immigrants, especially those in federal detention.
A third bill at the State House, the Language Access and Inclusion Bill, would expand translation and interpretation for Massachusetts residents. This is especially important as the federal government is pulling back from communications except in English.
A fourth bill in Boston would prohibit contracts with the federal government for detention facilities in the Commonwealth, such as the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, which currently holds hundreds of immigrants awaiting deportation.Fact sheets on all four legislative proposals can be found online at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition at miracoalition.org.
This week, members of Stoneham for Social Justice, a network of concerned citizens, endorsed these four bills and called on state legislators to support and fast track them.
In Massachusetts there are an estimated 250,000 undocumented immigrants, individuals and families who have sought a safe place to work and live. Thousands more have fled oppression and disasters under programs that grant them protective status. For many, including Venezuelans and Haitians, this status is being revoked.
Immigrants among us, our families, our neighbors, those we work with, those who provide services to us, are part of our daily lives. They play an integral and productive role in our communities. At the very least, they deserve the rights guaranteed to all in our Constitution, including the right to fair hearings and due process. When these are threatened, they deserve our protection.
As we celebrate our town’s 300th birthday, reflecting on our founding in 1725, you may have wondered, who was our first employee?
Well, it seems we were rather selective, because the first person we hired was a graduate of Harvard. But before I tell you who it was, here’s some historical context.
In 1725, as we broke away from Charlestown, we were just a village ten miles north of Boston in a colony called Massachusetts Bay. Massachusetts Bay was founded in 1630 by English Puritans led by John Winthrop, who became its first governor.
The Puritans, who had separated from the Church of England, were a serious lot. They based their customs and laws on English Common Law and the Bible, especially the Old Testament.
They also believed that church and state should function as one, and that’s why, as stated in the founding document, the town was required to find, install and support a minister. That person would become the first paid employee of the Town of Stoneham.
That person was James Osgood and he came from Salem. When the words “Puritan” and “Salem” are mentioned in the same breath, it is not unnatural to think of witchcraft, and the trials and executions of the late 17th century. For the Osgood family, some of whom lived in Andover, the connection was personal. In 1692 James’ paternal grandmother, Mary Clements Osgood was accused of being a witch.
Mary Osgood’s story is too long to tell here. Suffice it to say, she confessed in 1692, under considerable pressure, of making a pact with the Devil and afflicting several other women and was subsequently imprisoned in Salem. But under examination by the Rev. Increase Mather, who had been sent to Salem to reign in the witchcraft hysteria, she recanted her confession and said she had made it all up. You can read about it in the report made by Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Meanwhile, over 50 citizens of Andover had petitioned for her release, and she was freed.
One of Mary’s sons was Peter Osgood, a tanner, who did so well that he sent two sons to Harvard, the younger one being James. One other thing I should mention is that the Osgood family owned slaves. Owning slaves was not common in colonial Massachusetts, but neither was it exceptional. For an enterprising farmer, seaman, merchant or tradesman, owning a slave could make the difference between just getting by and prospering. A 1754 inventory of enslaved persons age 16 and over in Salem listed 83. There were 989 in Boston. Eight in Stoneham.
Growing up in Salem, James Osgood followed his brother to Harvard. From what we know, he did well. At one point, however, he appears to have gotten into trouble. In a biographical sketch of Harvard graduates, we read that “James found himself caught up in the student riot of 1722 at Harvard, managing to break glass to the value of 11 shillings.” My guess is, he smashed a window.
But time can make a difference, as the parents of any college student know. By the time James graduated with a master’s degree, he was described as “one of the soberest and quietest members of his class.”
Looking for Employment
When James Osgood graduated from Harvard in 1727, he must have wondered what the future would hold. The youngest son of a Salem tanner and church deacon, he had earned a master’s degree, placing him into the upper echelon of Puritan society.
A few months before his graduation, there had been a turning point. An entry in his diary from this period stands out. It’s dated Jan. 1, 1727. It seems James had stopped taking Communion in church. Had he, a college don studying Greek and Latin, entertained doubts? Had he grown skeptical?
For whatever reason, as he now wrote, he repented his neglect of the sacrament and promised to “walk according to the Rules of the Gosple & the Discipline of the Church.” From now on, he covenanted, he would “walk as becomes a true Disciple & follower of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
After graduation, Osgood left Cambridge and returned to Salem, where he began looking for employment. One of his first jobs was teaching school in Salisbury, for which, records show, he received 30 pounds. He was also called on to fill the pulpit as a guest preacher in nearby parishes, giving him valuable experience.
In the fall of 1728 the young theologian received an invitation from the newly incorporated town of Stoneham, which was searching for its first minister. To audition for the job, Mr. Osgood would have to preach in front of the whole town, around 65 families, and get the approval of town voters, all 13 of them, men only. Other candidates would also be invited.
Meanwhile, in Stoneham “it was voted in town meeting assembled to set apart a day for prayer to ask God’s direction in the choice of a minister” (William B. Stevens, The History of Stoneham).
James Osgood was only 23 when he came down from Salem, probably on horseback, to audition for the job. What must have gone through his mind as he entered the simple structure of the Meeting House, erected by the townspeople just three years earlier, and stood before the small congregation. We can only imagine his looks and manner, and the sermon to follow. We can assume he made a powerful impression, because he got the job.
Was it a hard choice for him to make? I wonder when I read that it took him until April to formally accept. Nevertheless a few months later, on Sept. 10, 1729, he was ordained and installed in the Meeting House as Stoneham’s first minister.
All things considered, it was not a bad job. The town voted him an annual salary of 110 British pounds (about $22,000 today). It also gave him 172 pounds ($38,000) “for a settlement,” and agreed to supply him with ten cords of wood for heating and cooking.
At first boarding at the home of Peter Hay, a prominent town citizen, the young bachelor set about ministering to the families of the parish. Besides preaching two or more sermons a week, his duties included teaching, baptizing, counseling and consoling. He conducted weddings and funerals. And he began plans for a parsonage. As Stevens records: “Mr. Osgood purchased land and built him a house which was a fine one for those times.”
A photograph of the parsonage, taken in the 19th century, shows a large house in the traditional saltbox style. Nine windows face the street, and a storage shed is attached at the rear. Cord wood is stacked on the side, and children play in the yard.
We don’t know when the house was completed, but it may have been before 1735, when Osgood, now 30, returned from Killingly, Connecticut, with his new bride. Her name was Sarah Fiske and she was 17. In Stoneham, the couple would have two children, Abigail and John.
From William B. Stevens’ History of Stoneham, 1891.
The Reverend’s Account Books
On August 6, 1729, James Osgood started recording his expenses in two books, preserved in the Congregational Library in Boston. These daily accounts give us clues into the 24-year-old Harvard graduate from Salem, ordained in October as Stoneham’s first minister.
The entries, made in his own hand, are various and include lists, like what books he was reading, the founding of Puritan churches in Massachusetts Bay, and commentary on historical and theological matters. They also record payments received, like one of 56 pounds from Daniel Gould, town treasurer, half of his yearly salary.
Another shows Osgood paying 49 pounds, then another 50, to “Mr. Ebenezer Phillips, yeoman,” for the purchase of land. Below that is payment made to Francis Kittridge–12 pounds, 16 shillings and 6 pence—for 1,000 board feet of lumber for construction of his house.
Most of Osgood’s purchases, however, are for daily necessities, such as 16 shillings paid to David Gould for a bushel of corn. There are also payments for rye, sugar, molasses, tea, salt, beef, veal, and fish. Also, cotton, wool, linen and eiderdown, as well as kettles, tallow and other houseware items. And there are regular purchases of rum.
We also see a stream of payments for workmen building the parsonage. Others for plowing, hauling manure, planting and mowing. There are purchases of animals, including a pig. A payment is made to have Osgood’s horse shod.
Then there are payments for services rendered, like weaving and shoemaking. In one entry, the minister pays Simon Barjona, a cordwainer, one pound for a pair of shoes.
After his marriage to Sarah and the arrival of children, we see purchases that reflect his family, such as a handkerchief, silk, a looking glass and a pair of stockings for Sarah. Also a buckle and a new hat for Johnny, and a frock for his daughter, whom he calls Nabbe.
We find regular payments made to Abigail, the household maid. To employ a household maid must have made a huge difference to the family, especially for Sarah, whose duties as the minister’s wife would have gone beyond household management and raising children. She would have been called on to support her husband’s ministry in various ways, counseling the women and children, visiting the poor and the sick.
In October of 1743, however, payments to the maid cease. From November through January, no further payments are found. For whatever reason, Abigail is no longer employed. It appears the Osgood family is without household support.
In February that is about to change in a way that we, looking back three centuries later, find disturbing. On Feb. 21, 1744, Osgood writes: “Paid away for a Negro woman named (Fibbe) to Mr. Thomas Bancroft, 20 pounds.”
Osgood’s payment of 20 pounds was just a down payment. In March he will make a second payment of 12 pounds. Then in April, as he notes in his account book, “paid for my Negro woman in full, 43 pounds”—bringing the total to 75 pounds.
Reading this, I am stunned. Yes, I’ve known that many prominent families in colonial New England owned slaves. But this feels personal. It is my church, the First Congregational Church, founded in 1729, and in my town, which this year celebrates its 300th Birthday.
How could the minister of my church be a slave owner? Next week, I will conclude my story of the Rev. James Osgood. I’ll tell of his sudden demise and what happened to his family and his enslaved servant, Phebe.
Page 26 of James Osgood’s Account Book for the year 1744.
A Slave in the Parsonage
When James Osgood in 1744 brought home a Negro woman he had purchased, few in town would have questioned his actions or his ethics. Slavery had sprung up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony soon after its founding in 1630. English colonists had initially enslaved natives captured in battle, but found them too difficult to manage.
In 1637 the slave ship Desire, built in Marblehead, left for the Caribbean with 17 Pequot natives, including 15 children, to be sold to Caribbean plantations. Eight months later, the ship sailed into Boston with a cargo of cotton, tobacco and slaves from Africa.
In 1641 the Puritan community published The Body of Liberties, which spelled out rights and obligations of its members. Article 91 sanctioned the owning of slaves.
In Stoneham, as throughout New England, having slaves signaled a family’s success and status. Among owners were merchants, tradesmen, land owners and ship captains. There were also ministers, like the eminent Puritan minister, Cotton Mather, in Boston. Or like James Osgood.
The minister’s own family, his father, Peter Osgood, and uncles, owned slaves in Salem and Andover. When James Osgood arrived in Stoneham, he first boarded with Captain Peter Hays, who kept two slaves. At one time or another, at least eight Stoneham families owned slaves.
Osgood believed, as did Cotton Mather, that it was the duty of slave masters not only to treat their slaves kindly, but to Christianize them, thus to save their souls. In Stoneham, writes Stevens, “The colored people, though in a state of slavery, were admitted as brethren and sisters to the church.” Welcome in the Meeting House, they were restricted, however, to sitting in the balcony.
Church records show that Osgood “received” several slaves into full communion. Among them were “Amos, Negro servant of Deacon Green” and “Pomfrey, Negro servant of Mr. Sprague.” The minister also officiated at their weddings. In 1738 he blessed the marriage of Mingo and Moll, “servants” of Peter Hay, Jr.,” and in 1743 of “Obadiah How, Negro servant of Mr. Souther, married to Priscilla.”
The Puritans in Massachusetts had rejected the rigid hierarchy of the Church of England and instituted congregational reforms that gave the common person more say in church and society. Yet they continued to see themselves as part of the Great Chain of Being, which described their place in the natural order. At the bottom of this chain were natives and Africans.
So it was that Phebe, the woman Osgood had purchased for 75 pounds, was expected to serve the family in perpetuity. Regardless of the degree of kindness shown her, she must labor with no pay and no hope of freedom.
What would eventually happen to Phebe, however, the Stoneham minister would never know, because on March 2, 1745, a few months shy of his 40th birthday, the Rev. James Osgood suffered a fatal stroke.
James Osgood had served the people of Stoneham for 16 years, and his sudden demise must have shocked the town. William B. Stevens writes: “His body was carried to the Meeting House and there attended to grave by several ministers and a great Concourse of People.” He was laid to rest in the Old Burying Ground on Pleasant Street.
For the minister’s family, the loss was enormous. John, his son, was only 6, and his sister, Abigail, 9. Details about the family after his death are few. John Osgood grew up in Stoneham and married Lucy Torrey, and they had one daughter. He then married Jane Libby on January 2, 1781. He died in 1792 in Boston at the age of 53.
Abigail, their daughter, at age 15 married Joseph Bryant, Jr, in Stoneham. He would later fight in the Revolutionary War. They had five children. Abigail lived a long life, 89 years, and died in 1826 in Stoneham.
Sarah, town records show, remarried in 1752 to a Captain Ralph Hart of Boston. She, too, lived into the next century. When she died in 1801 at age 83, she was buried beside her first husband in the Old Burying Ground. In his Brief History of the Town of Stoneham, Silas Dean described her as “a very amiable and excellent person.”
As to what happened to Phebe, the Osgood’s household slave, I found two pieces of information. The first is her mention in the inventory of the Osgood’s belongings, made after his death. The inventory list is chilling, because tucked between items like “A looking Glass, 2 oval Tables, a Desk and Tankard board” and “A bed and furniture, a low Chest with Draws & a Table” is the entry: “A Negroe Woman, 70 pounds,” valued at five pounds less than her original purchase price.
The second is from Stoneham vital records for 1747, two years later. It noted the marriage of “Phebe, servant of Mrs. Sarah Osgood, and Quecoo, servant of Peter Hay, 3d, Mar. 12, 1747.” I could find no further information.
As we look back to our founding, we view it from afar. When Reverend Osgood arrived from Salem, Stoneham had just incorporated as a Puritan community in a British Colony. Yet it was in those times that our town was forged. What followed was earth shaking, the Revolutionary War and the creation of a republic inspired by the Declaration of Independence. Soon after, in 1780, came the Massachusetts Constitution. Authored by John Adams, it became the model for the U.S. Constitution. It was also the basis for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling in 1783 that ended slavery in the Commonwealth. In the first federal census of 1790, there were no enslaved persons in Stoneham.
For history to have value for us, we must do our best to tell it with honesty. We must acknowledge its complexity. This shouldn’t deter us, however, from paying tribute to the founders of Stoneham, including our first minister and first employee, the Rev. James Osgood. We also pay tribute to all those, enslaved or free, who helped build our town.
This is a story about Charles Cephas, a Black man who came to our town after the Civil War. On his gravestone in the soldiers’ lot at Lindenwood Cemetery, you’ll see he served in the U. S. Navy.
Charles was born in 1844 in Norfolk, Virginia. He may have been enslaved. One year after the Emancipation Proclamation, he joined the Union Navy and was inducted aboard the USS Ohio in Boston. He was then assigned to the USS Sacramento, which served to blockade Confederate ships off South Carolina and in Europe.
Discharged after the war, Cephas settled in Stoneham, Massachusetts. On August 13, 1867, as reported in the Stoneham Independent, he appeared before Silas Dean, justice of the peace, with his bride. Her name was Sarah Cecelia Hill, and she was from Brooklyn. He was 23, she was 18. In Stoneham they would raise five children, three sons and two daughters.
I don’t know what Charles Cephas looked like, but he must have been a man of considerable strength. I say that because he was a mason, a well digger, an earth mover. An ad in the Stoneham Independent reads: “The services of Charles Cephas stone mason can now be had. He tends to laying pipes, sinking wells, digging cesspools and blasting. ‘He thoroughly understands his business.’”
That same year the newspaper reported that “Charles Cephas is digging and stoning a well in Montvale, which he thinks will be the deepest in Woburn. It is 35 feet deep.”
In the 1870 federal census, Charles and Sarah are two of only 27 “non-whites” listed in a town of 3,444. Yet, from what I can find, they did all right, and by 1876 purchased their own home. In the Independent, we read: “Wm. Howell sold a house on Hancock Street to Charles Cephas, and the latter had had it successfully moved to Albion Ave in the north westerly part of the town. Ellis of Malden did the moving.”
But life for the Cephas family had its rough parts. And here the story gets complicated. It’s complicated, because if we are to know the tenor of Charles Cephas’s life, we must acknowledge the persistent prejudice African Americans faced, not only in the South, but in booming factory towns like Stoneham. His story raises questions that make us uneasy.
Most of what we know about Cephas comes from the Stoneham Independent. There are also census reports and vital records. We also have notices of court actions, arrests and fines. Sometimes, we have to read between the lines.
I don’t know if Charles was enslaved in Virginia. He may have been. Certainly, his desire for freedom, his enlistment in the Union Navy, and his insistence that he be respected as a free man played out in his daily life. He didn’t always get respect.
Cabinet card portraits of African Americans from the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography. Left: Man with Pipe, circa 1887. Right: Woman in Silk Dress, circa 1888. William L. Clements Library
Disturbing the Peace
Although Charles Cephas found Stoneham a good place to start a business, a place where hard work was rewarded, he was also learning that even in the North men who looked like him could become targets of abuse.
In 1878, as reported in the Independent, five men, aged 16-25, attacked and beat Cephas and Thomas Shanks, another Black man. Arraigned in court for assault and battery, the men were fined and released.
There were other times, however, when Cephas was the one being charged. For example, in 1891 at the P Cogan & Sons shoe factory on Main Street, where he was arrested for disturbing the peace.
According to the Independent, Charles Cephas was walking beside the Cogan plant when, from an upstairs window, someone dumped a bucket of whitewash onto him. Furious, he rushed into the mill in search of the culprits. Not surprisingly, no one admitted the racist prank. Cephas was “pretty well worked up,” wrote the reporter, “and may have talked pretty loud, for Officer Newton appeared on the scene.”
Rather than find the perpetrator, however, the officer “arrested Charles and started for the ‘lock-up.’” When Cephas resisted, the policeman enlisted “one or two outsiders for aid” and hauled him off to jail.
Another time, according to the papers, Cephas threatened to blow up the Stoneham police force. The Boston Globe, which picked up the story, told it like this:
Early this morning an officer saw a young man chasing a girl along a street. The latter was shouting for assistance. The officer hailed the man, who stopped and was informed that he was under arrest. The man, who proved to be Charles Cephas, refused to be taken into custody and opened a handbag he carried, and told the officer the contents were dynamite, and if he was molested he would explode the same.
The Independent gave more detail, alleging that Cephas, uttering profanity, had chased a “Miss Kelly” to the home of Officer Green, where she sought protection. Green and another officer confronted Cephas, who was standing in the street, and told him to go home or be arrested. Cephas started, but then stopped, warning the officers that he had dynamite in his bags and would blow “the whole —- police force up” if they came near.
On Monday Cephas showed up in court and paid a fine of $10 for disturbing the peace. He told the judge that he couldn’t remember threatening “to blow up the police force,” but if he did, “he was sorry.” No mention was made of the altercation between Cephas and the young woman.
Looking back at Charles Cephas, we see a puzzle with many pieces missing. We will never get a full picture. Still, what we have suggests the complexity of his life in our town. We also learn a little about his family, about their losses and achievements.
In 1869 the Independent listed the death of a son, age 1. Infant deaths were also recorded in 1874 and 1883. In the notes section of an 1885 edition, we read: “Mr. Charles Cephas has had the misfortune to lose one of his youngest children lately.”
In October of 1884 Sarah (also known as Cecilia or Celia) posted a card thanking family friends in Woburn, Wakefield and Stoneham “for their many kindnesses and sympathy in her late bereavement.”
But there were also good times, such as the wedding of their son, George, to Carrie H. Yancey. It was “a very pretty home wedding” reported the Independent, “performed in the presence of a large company of friends.”
In another story we learn about an ice-hockey game on Spot Pond in which the Stoneham team beat Salem 1-0. The ice was rough, the paper reported, due to the many ice yachts that had been racing on the pond. Playing with the Stoneham team was Ernest Cephas, George’s brother.
There is evidence that the Cephas boys learned shoemaking trades. Ernest, however, seems to have something else in mind.
In 1887 we find out that Ernest has gone to sea. Like his father, he enlisted in the Navy. Home on leave in 1896, wearing his sailor’s uniform, he was returning from Woburn late one night when he was accosted by several toughs, who berated him with racial slurs.
Getting off the trolley at the last stop, Ernest stepped up to the gang leader “and lit into him like a cyclone,” giving him “such a pummeling as he probably never had in all his life.”
Although Ernest was later charged in court, the Independent clearly took his side. The headline ran: “He Deserved It!—Ernest Cephas Teaches a Haverhill Tough a Wholesome Lesson.”
Two years later, during the Spanish-American War, Ernest was serving aboard the Navy cruiser USS Brooklyn. In a letter published by the newspaper, he described in dramatic detail a victorious battle between American and Spanish warships.
Of the Cephas’ third son, Louis, born in 1876, we know very little. His name does appear, however, in a news report of the 1904 trolley car disaster in Melrose. Lewis was riding in the car when dynamite carried by workmen exploded. Nine passengers were killed and 30 wounded. Blown into the street, Louis survived with cuts and bruises from flying glass and debris.
Of the two surviving daughters, Eva, born in 1883, and Sarah, born in 1887, there is also little information. Records show that Sarah married John Addison in Boston in 1912, and that Eva married a man with the last name of Carter in 1913.
Coming Home
Charles and Sarah Cephas were not the only African Americans to settle in Stoneham after the Civil War. There were also the Yanceys, Freemans, Reeds and others. In the Independent, we find mention of “a Mr. Curtis and a Mr. Turner, [who] owned adjoining lots on Albion St. in 1874.” Also noted was the Lewis family, “that married into the Yancey family.”
For the Black families, Stoneham was a good place to put down roots. But the soil could also be rocky, in more ways than one. For Charles Cephas, getting along in an overwhelmingly white community inevitably involved conflict.
On at least one occasion, reported in the press, he was assaulted. Other times, he was charged with disturbing the peace, including the time workers at a shoe mill dumped whitewash on him.
His marriage was another story. We can never know the complexities of any marital relationship. But the stresses of his life must have crossed over to his marriage. In the Independent on March 9, 1895, we learn that Sarah Celia Cephas, after 28 years, has petitioned the Middlesex Court for divorce and that “a decree of divorce was given.”
Sometime after this, Cephas moved out of Stoneham. In 1899 we find him living in Chelsea and working at the Charlestown Navy Yard, where he continued for another nine years. Until June 10, 1908.
What happened on that date is unclear. It was not reported on, as far as I can tell, by any Boston papers. Nor, does it seem, were the police involved. It was, however, reported on by the Independent. Here is what the Stoneham newspaper said on Saturday, June 20:
Charles Cephas, colored, passed away Wednesday evening of last week, at the Chelsea Marine hospital, as the result of injuries received by being assaulted as he was coming out of the Charlestown Navy Yard, where he has been employed as a stone mason. He was about 65 years of age.
The paper then speculated that “the object of the assault was robbery, his assailants evidently being after Mr. Cephas’ pension money.”
After listing the five names of his surviving children, the Independent continued:
The deceased was a Civil War veteran, having served four years in the Navy. Until about 15 years ago he was a resident of this town for thirty years. He was born in Virginia in ante-bellum days.
Funeral Services for Cephas were held in Chelsea. But for burial he was brought back to Stoneham, interned in the Civil War memorial lot at Lindenwood cemetery. Was there an honor guard present, as there often is for veterans? No mention is made.
Looking back at the demise of Charles Cephas, we are left with questions. Why did his brutal murder in Charlestown receive so little attention? Was there no police report? Was there no attempt to apprehend and prosecute his killers?
I was able to find the Chelsea coroner’s report, filed a week after his death. The cause of death was listed as “acute fibrinous pneumonia consequent on hemorrhage and laceration of the brain sustained under circumstances unknown, probably those of an accidental fall.” Accidental fall? Really?
Back in 1891, when Cephas was still living in Stoneham, the Independent reported that “People on the outskirts of town complain of dry wells. Will it ever rain in earnest?”
In that same issue was the news of Charles Cephas digging a 35-feet-deep well, “the deepest in Woburn.”
When I think of Charles Cephas, I like to think of this.
Charles Cephas came to Stoneham looking for a place he and his family could call home, and in doing so, he helped build our town. Although his story is complicated by factors we can only partially understand, it challenges us to look honestly at history and ourselves.
His story is part of our history. It is our story as well.
Gravestone of Charles Cephas in Lindenwood Cemetery
Thanks to Joan Quigley, historian and archivist at the Stoneham Historical Society & Museum, and Dee Morris, Medford historian, for their help in researching the Cephas family.
Ben Jacques is the author of In Graves Unmarked: Slavery & Abolition in Stoneham, Massachusetts, and If the Shoe Fits: Stories of Stoneham Then & Now. Both are available at the Book Oasis on Main Street. He also writes essays, poems and articles, many of them found on his blog at benjacquesstories.com.
A fugitive, he got off the boat in Newport and continued by coach to New Bedford. There, in the whaling seaport founded by Quakers, he found safety. He also found work.
“There was no work too hard—none too dirty,” he would write. “I was ready to saw wood, shovel coal, carry wood, sweep the chimney, or roll oil casks.”
His name was Frederick Douglass and for first time in his life, he was working for himself and his newly married wife, Anna. “It was the first work,” he wrote, “the reward of which was to be entirely my own. There was no Master Hugh standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it.”
The year was 1838. Dressed as a sailor and using false papers, the young man (he was just 20) had fled Baltimore. Having found a haven in New Bedford, he was amazed at its wealth and absence of poverty. “I had somehow imbibed the opinion that, in the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth, and very little refinement.”
He continued: “Everything looked clean, new, and beautiful. I saw few or no dilapidated houses, with poverty-stricken inmates; no half-naked children and barefooted women, such as I had been accustomed to see.”
Instead, Douglass found a city bustling with commerce and men and women eagerly engaged in their work. “I saw no whipping of men; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness….”
Most surprising was the condition of fellow fugitives and free Blacks. “I found many, who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland.”
His friends, Nathan and Polly Johnson, who had taken him and Anna into their home, “lived in a neater house; dined at a better table; took, paid for, and read, more newspapers; better understood the moral, religious, and political character of the nation,—than nine tenths of the slaveholders in Talbot county Maryland. Yet Mr. Johnson was a working man. His hands were hardened by toil, and not his alone, but those also of Mrs. Johnson.”
Even though New Bedford had become a refuge for escaped slaves, there was still racial prejudice. In Baltimore, Douglass had worked as a ship’s caulker, but was refused work with the white caulkers here, work which would have earned him twice his laborer’s wage.
Still, he and his wife made a living and found their own apartment. They attended church and socialized with others in the community. As a boy he had been taught to read by the sympathetic wife of his owner. Now he scoured the pages of The Liberator, published in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison.
Three years later, at an abolitionist meeting on Nantucket, he was asked to tell his own story, and the rest is history. He went on to become perhaps the most eloquent champion of the anti-slavery cause, lecturing, editing, writing and speaking throughout the Northern States, England and Ireland. A friend of all those yearning for freedom, he was an advocate for women’s rights as well.
Remembering Frederick Douglass is fitting as we celebrate Black History Month. But it’s also important given the threats to the human rights of millions of those in our nation today threatened with deportation. Like him, they have sought refuge among us. Like him, they will work at anything to provide for their families. Like him, they have stories to tell.
As the Trump administration carries out raids, as it dehumanizes men, women and children because of their immigration status or gender identity, I can’t help wondering what Frederick Douglass what would have to say.
It was a gray day in Moscow, and a 7-year-old girl was on the way to the train station. Her mother had gone to the hospital to deliver, and the girl was being sent to her aunt. In the streets, she remembers, were soldiers with rifles, and everywhere people in shock, some openly weeping.
Why are they crying,” she asked her father. It was March 5, 1953.
“Stalin has died,” her father said.
A friend and colleague told me this story. She also said that in a little bag her father took with him to work each day he packed a toothbrush, razor and extra underwear, in case he didn’t return.
I could relate. Also having Russian heritage, I knew of the Soviet dictator’s reign of terror. My relatives, German-Russian farmers on the Kuban steppe in Southern Russia, were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. One died in a gulag. Another was shot. My Tanta Anna as a teenager was forced to work in a logging camp.
Meanwhile, my friend grew up under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. In a famous speech, Khrushchev had shocked the party by condemning Stalin’s crimes, coining the phrase, “cult of personality.”
In the following years, she excelled at the university, earning a doctorate. and began a career teaching math. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, she, her husband and their parents left Moscow and settled in New England. We taught together in Massachusetts.
As I had tea with her one day between classes, we talked about Stalin and the power he had over people. I recalled a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago describing a Communist party meeting in the 1940s, where, after Stalin had spoken, the audience jumped to its feet to applause. The applause continued. It didn’t stop. Looking around, members were afraid to stop clapping. Would someone notice? Would they be on the slow train to Siberia?
Similar scenes occurred in Nazi Germany. In a 1936 photograph of a rally held at a shipyard, one German worker stands in a crowd with his arms folded. He is the only one not giving the Nazi salute. Once a loyal member of the Party, August Landmesser had fallen in love with a Jewish woman. After his engagement was discovered, he was expelled from the Party, and his marriage application denied. They had a daughter.
In 1937 Landmesser attempted to flee Germany with his family, but was arrested at the border. The Gestapo also arrested his wife, who delivered their second child in prison. Sent to the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, she was murdered along with 14,000 others.
After three years in a concentration camp, Landmesser was forced into the German Army. He went missing in Croatia.
Many are the lessons we can draw from history. One we cannot ignore, however, is that authoritarian, autocratic governments cause great harm, not only to democratic institutions, but to vulnerable people.
Deportation of Jews from Muenster, Germany, Dec. 13, 1941.
As we begin life under a second Trump administration, millions of our neighbors are threatened with deportation. These include hundreds of thousands of DACA students and millions under temporary protected status (TPS) or awaiting action on their requests for asylum.
In the coming days, how shall we respond. Will we clap? Will we fold our arms? Will we speak what we believe? Will we act to safeguard the lives and liberties of others?
This summer when our cousins, the Haegelens, arrived from Germany, east and west came together. Irina grew up in a village in Siberia, Manfred in Ufa on the slopes of the Ural Mountains. When they were 15, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, their families emigrated to Germany.
When their jet touched down at Logan, they brought their two children, Friedrich and Johanna. They also brought stories, not only about their busy lives near Dusseldorf, but about family history.
Their branch of the family connects to the same tree as my paternal ancestors. We share great grandparents, Mennonite farmers who settled in Southern Russia, along with other ethnic Germans invited to Russia in the 18th century by Catherine II.
In 1914, at the start of the Great War, my grandfather was arrested and exiled to Siberia. The next year, however, he escaped to China, then boarded a ship to San Francisco. The rest of the family remained in Russia.
Now, in our backyard, children and grandchildren were playing together. We made day trips to Walden Pond and Rockport, hiked in the Fells and visited Stone Zoo. In the evening we played dominoes and bingo, calling out numbers in two languages.
Arriving in Germany as teenagers, Manfred and Irina found opportunities unavailable in Russia. Excelling in their studies, they both earned doctorates, Manfred in engineering, Irina in pharmacology.
In the evening we shared old photos and stories. Irina remembered carrying milk in cans from their small farm to the depot. She also remembers her grandfather, who taught math in the village school. He saw her potential and encouraged her.
We also talk of our beloved Tanta Anna, who with two of her five children left their kolkhoz, a collective farm in Southern Russia, to find a new life in Cologne. I have a photo of her on a motorcycle.
When she was 17, during World War II, she was forced to work in the forests, cutting and hauling trees. It happened like this. After Hitler’s tanks crossed into Russia, Stalin, fearing that the nation’s ethnic minorities would rise up against him, ordered their removal and banishment. It was the Great Deportation of 1941.
On September 1, 1941, some 440,000 ethnic Germans living along the Volga were told to report for deportation. Treated as prisoners, they were herded into freight cars for the long trek east. The journey—the trains stopping only every three or four days for food and water—took weeks, sometimes months. On the way four of ten deportees died, their bodies left inside the cars or thrown out beside the tracks.
The mass deportations were also accompanied by summary executions. Manfred’s grandfather, who taught German in the village school, was taken out and shot.
Siberia was not the only destination. Thousands were deported to Kazakhstan and other eastern republics. Cousin Lena, who also emigrated to Germany, told me her grandmother’s account.
“When the soldiers came, they took everything. If a woman had two skirts on, she had to take one off and give it to them.”
They traveled in horse-drawn carts across Kazakhstan almost to the Chinese border. If someone died, they had to leave them lying there. There was no time for burial.
At their destination, there were no houses, so to survive the oncoming winter, they dug shelters in the earth. The next year they built crude houses. They could travel no more than three kilometers in any direction.
Russia’s Germans were not the only ones deported. In all, there were at least 1.5 million, including the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens and others.
As we sat on the couch sharing family photos, or watched the kids swinging in the hammock, I realized how lucky we are. How lucky the Haegelens are to have found good lives in Germany, and how lucky we are in America. Yet somewhere in my consciousness, as it is in theirs, is the shadow of history. A history of deportation, compulsion and violence. I pray it is something our children will never know.
In the fall of 1919, just three months after the Versailles Treaty marked Germany’s defeat in World War I, Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to a fellow army soldier. It is considered the first printed expression of his antisemitism. Composed most likely on an army typewriter, the letter lays out Hitler’s belief that Jews are not just people of a different religion. Rather, they are an “alien race,” intent on destroying society.
To counter their influence, Hitler proposed a “rational antisemitism,” a political movement to systematically take away their “privileges,” culminating in their “irrevocable removal” from Germany.
In time, their “irrevocable removal” became the “final solution,” the murder of six million Jews throughout Europe.
It’s not difficult to see in the candidacy of Donald J. Trump a similar convergence of nationalism and racism. Substitute the word “immigrant” for “Jew,” and you see the same calculated dehumanization of a sector of the population.
Trump’s targeting of immigrants is built on racism. In 2018 he complained about “having all these people from shithole countries come here,” that is, from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa. Then he added, “We should have more people from Norway.”
In following years, Trump has ramped up his attacks. In 2023 he said “illegal immigrants are poisoning the blood of our nation,” echoing Hitler’s statement that “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood.”
At the 2024 Republican Convention, Trump promised the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants—a figure he put at 18 million. In September he said the mass roundup would be a “bloody story.”
Since then, Trump’s attacks have intensified, including the assertion, repeated by his running mate and other followers, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets.
Targeting immigrants, legal or otherwise, is not new in America, nor is “white nationalism.” The nation that opened its doors to European immigrants also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, denying citizenship to Chinese workers who built our railroads.
During World War II we imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. In the 1950s we deported a million Mexicans, legal and undocumented, who had harvested our crops. From 2017-21 under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, 3,900 children were taken from their parents.
We are also the nation that in 1939 prevented the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, from docking in Miami. Anchored offshore, the ship waited. On deck that night, children joined parents to gaze at the city lights sparkling in the distance.
When permission was denied, the St. Louis returned to Europe. For many it was a death sentence. Two-hundred-fifty-four perished in Nazi concentration camps.
As November 5 approaches, we again see an unholy convergence of racism and nationalism. A nation of immigrants, we are told to fear immigrants. We are urged to accept slander and misinformation as truth.
How we vote this year will affect the safety and well-being of millions. It will also determine our character.
Note: In 2012, the United States Department of State apologized to the survivors of the St. Louis. In 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did the same.
As we celebrate our newest national holiday, the day enslaved folk in Texas finally learned of their freedom, we recall our own history of slavery and abolition:
1754—A census of enslaved people in Massachusetts that year shows there were eight slaves above the age of 16 in Stoneham. They were among at least three dozen slaves in our town during the Colonial period—men like Cato, belonging to Deacon Green, and women like Dinah, a slave of the teacher James Toler, “who waited upon him to the end of his days” (Silas Dean). And they were children, like the unnamed 8-year-old mulatto purchased by Captain Peter Hay in 1744, the same year the Rev. James Osgood paid £75 for a woman named Phebe.
1775—Six Black men from Stoneham, three enslaved and three free, fight in the Battle of Bunker Hill, joining white colonists in the struggle for freedom from Great Britain.
1780—Four years after the Declaration of Independence, Massachusetts voters ratify the Massachusetts Constitution, authored mainly by John Adams.
1781—A slave called Mumbet (Elizabeth Freeman) and another named Brom sue their Sheffield owner for their freedom and win. This and other court cases bring about the eventual freedom of all slaves in Massachusetts based on the Massachusetts Constitution.
1790—The first federal census lists no enslaved people living in Stoneham.
1823—A former slave from Virginia named Randolph is seized in New Bedford. The state Supreme Judicial Court upholds the property rights of his owner, and he is returned to slavery.
1837—After an abolitionist meeting in Stoneham, a fight breaks out in the street, and a Stoneham man, Timothy Wheeler, is knifed and killed. He leaves a wife and four children.
1838-9—Sarah Richardson Gerry leads 27 women in founding the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Stoneham. The men also create a chapter.
1839—Church deacons pass a resolution calling on all ministers of the Gospel to “bear faithful witness against the sin of slavery.”
1850—A thirty-year-old minister of First Congregational Church, the Rev. William Whitcomb, preaches a fiery sermon against the federal Fugitive Slave Act, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850. He calls on his parishioners to aid all fugitives, even at the expense of their property and lives.
1850—Deacon Abijah Bryant’s home on Main Street becomes a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering fugitive slaves and enabling their safe passage to Canada.
1854—Anthony Burns, a 20-year-old former slave from Virginia is arrested in Boston and brought to trial. Thousands of abolitionists attempt to free Burns from the courthouse, but fail. In a widely reported trial, Burns is convicted and ordered sent back to his owner. Thousands line the streets as Burns is led in shackles to the docks and shipped back to his owner.
1861—Hundreds of Stoneham men join Massachusetts regiments responding to President Lincoln’s call for a voluntary army to defend the Union.
1864—54 Stoneham men die in the War of Rebellion: 11 killed in battle, 9 from wounds, 9 while in Confederate prisons, 25 from disease. These include Col J. Parker Gould, with others buried in Lindenwood Cemetery.
1862—Rev. William Whitcomb, is commissioned as a chaplain in the Union Army. He serves in hospitals in North Carolina until his death from malaria.
Over time we have learned to extend the human rights we hold so dear, those spelled out so eloquently in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or gender. From our Constitution we read:
“All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”
Soldiers of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry
By Ben Jacques
When President Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1861, called for a voluntary army to protect the nation’s capital, the first to arrive in Washington were the Massachusetts Sixth Voluntary Infantry. Although the men came from all walks of life, most were mill workers and farmers.
One of them, Luther Crawford Ladd, was a 17-year-old worker in the Lowell Machine Shop. Another from Lowell, Addison Otis Whitney, 22, worked in the Number Three Spinning Room of the Middlesex Corporation.
Down river in Lawrence, Sumner Henry Needham, a 33-year-old lather, was also quick to enlist. Others came from Acton, Groton, Worcester, Boston and Stoneham. Of the 67 volunteers from Stoneham, 51 were shoemakers. One of them, 19-year-old Victor Lorendo, played in the regimental band.
Summoned to Boston by Governor John Andrews, the Sixth was a regiment of “patriot yeomen,” wrote Chaplain John W. Hanson, who chronicled the Sixth Massachusetts through three wartime campaigns.
What a sight they must have made as they mustered on the Common, each company in its own uniform. Privates Ladd and Whitney from Lowell wore grey dress coats, caps and pantaloons with buff epaulettes and trim, while Corporal Addison from Lawrence wore a dark blue frock and red pantaloons, “in the French style.” Company A volunteers sported blue frocks and black pantaloons with tall round hats and white pompoms.
Addison Whitney of Lowell
Unifying their appearance somewhat were the grey woolen greatcoats issued to all. Standard blue uniforms would come later, including the signature forage caps. The men were also issued Springfield rifles and pistols for the officers.
At the State House on April 17, Governor John Andrews addressed the recruits:
“Soldiers,” he said, “summoned suddenly, with but a moment for preparation…. We shall follow you with our benedictions, our benefactions, and prayers.” He then presented the regimental colors to Colonel Edward F. Jones, the regimental commander from Pepperell.
The next morning, April 17, to the ringing of bells, band music, gun salutes and the cheering of thousands, the 700-plus men of the Sixth Massachusetts boarded a train bound for the nation’s capital.
At each stop, Worcester, Springfield and Hartford, crowds cheered them on their way. Reaching New York that night, the men were feted with dinner and speeches. The next day they crossed by ferry to Jersey City, then by train to Trenton. Arriving that evening in Philadelphia, the troops received their most enthusiastic reception. Wrote Chaplain Hanson: “So dense were the crowds that the regiment could only move through the streets by the flank.”
That night in Philadelphia the officers “were entertained sumptuously” at the Continental Hotel, while the soldiers were quartered at the Girard House. Weary from travel and excitement, they were grateful for the chance to sleep. Their rest, however, was cut short when roll was called and they were ordered back to the train station. At 2 a.m, the Sixth Massachusetts left for Baltimore. It was Saturday, April 19, 1861, four score and six years to the day after Minutemen marched to Lexington and Concord to fight British Red Coats.
While the soldiers were sleeping, Colonel Jones had met with Brig. General P. S. Davis, sent ahead to arrange transport. Davis told him that pro-slavery agitators in Baltimore planned action against the Massachusetts infantry. Jones also met with the president of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Railroad, who sent a pilot engine ahead to scout for obstructions on the tracks. Insisting that they must push on to Washington, Davis hoped to arrive in Baltimore before a crowd could assemble.
In the spring of 1861, Maryland was still a slave state, although it had not joined the Confederacy. While the mayor of Baltimore had promised safe passage of the Sixth Massachusetts, many Maryland citizens viewed their passage as an intrusion, if not an invasion.
Because steam engines could not pass through Baltimore, trains from Philadelphia had to stop at the north depot and the cars uncoupled. They would then be pulled by horse teams along tracks to Camden Station, the south depot, where they would be hooked to another engine headed south.
Arriving in Baltimore about 10 a.m., the Sixth Massachusetts at first faced little trouble. Wrote Hanson: “As soon as the cars reached the station, the engine was unshackled, horses were hitched to the cars, and they were drawn rapidly away.” So far, they had caught protesters unaware.
By the time the seventh rail car began its course, however, a mob had gathered and begun hurling insults, bricks and stones. It got worse the further they went, and three times was car was knocked off the tracks, then set back.
Fearing violence, officers had earlier issued 20 cartridge balls to each soldier and ordered their rifles loaded and capped. But they were not to fire unless fired upon.
After the seventh company reached Camden Station, Mayor George Brown signaled that “it is not possible for more soldiers to pass through Baltimore unless they fight their way at every step.” Yet there were still four more companies, two from Lowell, one from Lawrence and one from Stoneham, waiting to cross. Included was the regimental band.
Thousands now blocked the streets, tore up paving stones, and dragged debris onto the tracks. Unable to move the last two cars, the four companies disembarked and began to march. Lt. Leander Lynde from Stoneham would later write:
Companies from Lowell, Lawrence and Stoneham are attached by a pro-slavery mob in Baltimore.
“What impressed me most at the time was the terrible fury of the mob…. Not content with hurling flagstones, bricks, hot water, flatirons and every conceivable thing, the mob hissed us, called us names and taunted us with monstrous vocabulary. Even the women hurled things at us from windows.”
Lynde himself was struck in the head by a brick. “I fell stunned for a moment. The boys picked me up, thinking that I was dead, but I soon recovered and marched on with them.”
Leading the four companies was Captain A. S. Follensbee of Lowell: “Before we had started, the mob was upon us, with a secession flag, attached to a pole, and told us we could never march through that city. They would kill every ‘white nigger’ of us, before we could reach the other depot.”
As he stepped down from the train, Corporal Sumner Needham of Lawrence told a fellow soldier: “We shall have trouble to-day, and I shall never get out of it alive. Promise me, if I fall, that my body shall be sent home.”
Falling in, the companies pressed forward through a sea of rioters. Showered with missiles, the men doubled their pace. “We had not gone more than 10 rods further before I saw a man discharge a revolver at us from the second story of a building, and at the same time a great many were fired from the street,” wrote Lynde.
One of the first to fall was Lynde’s company captain, John H. Dyke, shot in the thigh. Wrote Lynde, “I decided it was about time for me to take the responsibility and ordered my men to fire upon the mob. The men in the other companies at once joined in with us.”
Especially vulnerable was the color guard—Color Sergeant Timothy A. Crowley of Lowell—who carried the flag, and his aides, Ira Stickney and W. Marland. Another company chaplain, Charles Babbidge, remembered: “Paving stones flew thick and fast, some just grazing their heads and some hitting the standard itself. One stone, as large as a hat, struck Marland just between the shoulders, a terrible blow, and then rested on his knapsack. And yet he did not budge. With a firm step, he went on, carrying the rock on his knapsack for several yards, until one of the sergeants stepped up and knocked it off.”
When they reached the Pratt Street Bridge, they found a crowd had pulled up the planking, so “we were forced to creep over as best we could on the stringers,” wrote Lynde.
Arriving finally at Camden Station, the last four companies found the doors of the waiting cars locked, but used their rifle butts to gain access. Now in charge of Company L, Lieutenant Lynde saw his company and the color guard safely aboard. They were surrounded, however, by another huge crowd brandishing guns, knives and clubs. Running ahead, the mob placed telegraph poles, anchors and stones on the tracks.
Slowly, with rifle muzzles sticking out the windows, the train began to move. The engine stopped and men jumped out to clear the obstacles. The train started again and stopped. A rail had been removed. It was replaced, and again the train was in motion.
“The crowd went on for some miles out,” Chaplain Hanson wrote, “as far as Jackson Bridge, and the police followed removing obstructions; and at several places shots were exchanged.” At the Relay House, the train was held up until a train coming north had passed. Then it continued, unobstructed, to Washington.
On the train, the officers counted their casualties and the missing. Dozens had been wounded, and dozens more missing, including the regimental band.
Unarmed, the musicians had refused to march through the city. However, this did not stop the attackers. One musician, A. S. Young of Lowell, recalled: “We fought them off as long as we could; but coming thicker and faster . . . they forced their way in.” Fleeing the cars, one band member was urged by a policeman to “run like the Devil.”
Seventeen-year-old Victor Lorendo of Stoneham escaped by diving under the rail car, then racing off. Tearing the stripes off his pants so he wouldn’t be recognized, he somehow made it back to Philadelphia and eventually Boston. He then walked the last ten miles to his home town. He had been reported dead.
Not all citizens of Maryland were hostile. In several cases, shop owners and housewives sheltered and cared for wounded soldiers. Fleeing the mob, a number of the band members were rescued by “a party of women, partly Irish, partly German, and some American, who took us into their houses, removed the stripes from our pants and we were furnished with old clothes of every description for disguise,” wrote Young. Sheltered and fed, the musicians returned two days later to Philadelphia.
Meanwhile, the soldiers on the train wondered what kind of reception they would have in Washington. It was dark when, just four days after the President’s call, the locomotive steamed into the capital. To their relief, they found a crowd cheering their arrival. Among them was a Massachusetts woman who worked in the Patent Office. Her name was Clara Barton and she had come to the capital to organize nursing and relief services. As the injured left the train, she and her assistants dressed their wounds and arranged transport to area homes.
The rest of the regiment marched to the Capitol, where they bedded down in the Senate Chamber. It was a strange scene. “The colonel was accustomed to sleep in the Vice President’s chair, with sword and equipments on,” wrote Hanson. “The rest of the officers and men were prostrate all over the floor around him, each with sword or musket within reach ; the gas-lights turned down to sparks, and no sound but the heavy breathing of sleepers and the hollow tramp of sentinels on the lobby floors.”
On Sunday morning, April 20, the Sixth Massachusetts marched “in open order” up Pennsylvania Avenue, giving the appearance of a full brigade, so as to “intimidate the secessionists.” At the White House they were welcomed by a grateful President Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward.
Over the next few days the Sixth Massachusetts cheered the arrival of the Seventh and Eighth Massachusetts as well as regiments from New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Setting up defenses around Washington, they prepared for a Confederate attack.
Back at the Capitol, the soldiers had time to write letters, and the officers to submit reports. Describing the ambush in Baltimore and casualties to his company, Lieutenant Lynde wrote:
“Captain Dyke was shot in the thigh…. James Keenan was shot in the leg, and Andrew Robbins was shot and hit with a stone, hurt very bad. Horace Danforth was hit with a stone and injured very severely, but all were in good hands and well cared for.”
What happened to Capt. John Dyke after he was shot was told later by Chaplain Hanson. Hobbling into a tavern, he was met by a Union sympathizer, who carried him to a back room. “He had scarcely left the barroom . . . when it was filled with the ruffians, who, had they known his whereabouts, would have murdered him.” Nursed and cared for, Dyke remained there for a week before being sent, disabled, back home.
Of the 67 in the Stoneham company, 18 had been wounded by gunshot, bricks or paving stones. The volunteers “had been worked very hard for green soldiers,” Lynde wrote, “but the men have done well and have stood by each other like brothers.”
Also attacked were the companies from Lowell and Lawrence, which, like Stoneham, had been forced to cross Baltimore on foot. Lowell’s Company D, marching on the exposed left side of the column, was especially hard hit. Nine men were injured, including Sgt. William H. Lamson, wounded in the head and eye from paving stones, and Sergeant John E Eames. From Lawrence, Alonzo Joy had his fingers shot off, and George Durrell was injured in the head by a brick. Three others were wounded.
From the two mill cities, four were killed. The first was the 17-year-old mechanic from Lowell. Having grown up on a farm, Luther Ladd had followed three older sisters to work in the textile industry. “He was full of patriotic ardor,” Hanson wrote. “When the call was made for the first volunteers, the earnest solicitations of his friends could not induce him to remain behind.” Marching along Pratt Street, Ladd was struck in the head and shot, the bullet severing an artery in his thigh. He is considered the first Union soldier killed in the Civil War.
Also in Company D, Addison Otis Whitney, the Lowell spinner, was shot and killed. Born in Waldo, Maine, he was 22. Before enlisting in the Sixth Massachusetts, he had joined the City Guards.
The third soldier in Company D to perish was Charles A. Taylor, of whom little is known. Taylor enlisted at the last minute, wrote Chaplain Hanson, “and represented himself as a fancy painter by profession, about 25 years old, and was of light complexion and blue eyes.” A bystander later reported that Taylor, having fallen, was beaten to death by ruffians and his body thrown in a sewer. As Taylor wore no uniform but the regimental coat, his death was not confirmed until a bystander later returned the coat to a Union officer.
After the war, Col. Edward Jones made several trips to Baltimore to find Taylor’s body and return it to Massachusetts, but the burial site was never found.
Corporal Sumner Needham of Lawrence
The fourth fatality was Corporal Sumner Needham of Lawrence’s Company F, who had voiced a presentiment of his death in Baltimore. Struck by a paving stone, Needham fell to the ground, his skull fractured. A surgeon tried to drill a hole in his skull to relieve the pressure, but in vain. The 33-year-old corporal died a few days later. In December, eight months later to the day, his wife, Hannah, gave birth to a son.
On May 2, Needham’s body, along with Ladd and Whitney, were returned to Massachusetts, where they were viewed by thousands at King’s Chapel and eulogized at the State House. They were then conveyed by train to Lowell and Lawrence. Needham lay in state in Lawrence City Hall before burial in Lawrence’s Bellevue Cemetery. The inscription on the granite memorial reads, in part, “[Needham] fell victim to the passions of a Secessionist Mob, during the passage of the Regiment through the streets of Baltimore marching in Defense of the Nation’s Capital.”
Meanwhile in Lowell, throngs turned out to receive the bodies of Ladd and Whitney, who, like the others, were mourned as martyrs in the cause of freedom. For the funeral, residents crowded into City Hall to hear clergy from seven churches officiate.
On June 17, four years later, Governor John Andrew dedicated a 27-foot-high obelisk memorial, honoring “the first soldiers of the Union Army to die in the great rebellion.” On it are the names of Ladd and Whitney. Later a brass plate with the name of the Charles Taylor was added.
Although the Sixth Massachusetts volunteers were the first to arrive at the nation’s capital, they did not participate in the humiliation of Bull Run, which took place on July 12. By this time, they had been ordered back to Maryland, as the state was now put under martial law. Taking control of its forts, ports and rail lines, the Sixth would in three months complete its first campaign and return home. Most of the men would re-enlist, either in the Sixth or other Massachusetts regiments, engaging in conflicts through the end of the war.
In the April 19 ambush in Baltimore, sometimes called the Pratt Street Riot, the yeoman soldiers of the Sixth Massachusetts faced bullets, stones, and the hate of a pro-slavery mob. It was not Manassas, Antietam or Gettysburg, but it was the beginning. The volunteers from New England were attacked not by Confederate soldiers, but by fellow American citizens whose lust for insurrection would fuel a long and bloody war. The ambush was vicious and it took the lives of four Union soldiers and twelve civilians. It wounded, many severely, thirty-eight soldiers and dozens of rioters.
The battle in the streets was the “first blood” of the War of the Rebellion, a cataclysm that raged across our nation for four more years and took the lives of three quarters of a million. The scars are with us today.
Sources include:
Hanson, John W., Chaplain. A Historical Sketch of the old Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers during its Three Campaigns. Lee and Shepherd, Boston, 1866.
Hurd, D. Hamilton, History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts. J.W. Lewis & Co, Philadelphia, 1890.
Stevens, William B., History of Stoneham, Mass., F. L. & W. E. Whittier, Stoneham, Mass., 1891.
Stormtroopers holding German Christian propaganda during the Church Council elections on July 23, 1933, at St. Mary’s Church, Berlin.
By Ben Jacques
On a warm day in August, 1934, thousands of Baptists from around the world filed into the vast Tagungshalle in Berlin. From 70 countries, they were there for a week-long Congress of the Baptist World Alliance. Behind the podium was a portrait of three Baptist founders below a cross. To the right hung a red banner with a swastika.
At the conference the delegates were welcomed by the deputy mayor of Berlin, who stressed the good work the government was doing for children and the unemployed (Brown). They also received a greeting from Reichsbishof Ludwig Mueller, whom Hitler had appointed to head the consolidated Evangelical (Lutheran) Churches of Germany. An ardent supporter of Hitler’s “positive Christianity,” Mueller made no secret of his anti-Semitic stance.
The delegates also heard Paul Schmidt, director of the German Baptist Union, praise the good work of the new government, declaring that God had chosen Hitler to rescue the German nation (Norris).
On Tuesday the morning session was suspended so delegates could tune in to the funeral of German President von Hindenburg, whose death two days earlier had left Hitler in full control of the government. A wreathed portrait of von Hindenburg was placed on the stage. Wrote British delegate Eva Brown, “We listened to the chaplain of the German Army, to Hitler, to guns firing, and to a verse of ‘Ein feste Berg,’” Martin Luther’s famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress.”
In days to follow the international body debated and passed resolutions calling for separation of church and state and freedom of religion. Another resolution deplored “all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward colored people, or toward subject races in any part of the world” (Resolution 1934.7).
Despite these sentiments, however, a number of delegates sympathized with the Germans’ anti-Semitic policies. M. E. Dodd, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote that Jews, while only one percent of the population, were using their disproportionate influence in professions for “self-aggrandizement to the injury of the German people.”
Others expressed approval of the crackdown on immorality. John W. Bradbury, a Baptist pastor from Boston, wrote: “It was a great relief to be in a country where salacious sex literature cannot be sold; where putrid motion pictures and gangster films cannot be shown” Bradbury continued: “The new Germany has burned great masses of corrupting books and magazines along with its bonfires of Jewish and communistic libraries” (Allen, “How Baptists Assessed Hitler”).
Baptists weren’t the only ones to equate Nazi policies with Christian reforms. A year earlier, the president of the German Seventh-day Adventist Church, Adolph Minck, wrote: ‘A fresh, enlivening and renewing reformation spirit is blowing through our German lands…. The word of God and Christianity shall be restored to a place of honor” (Alomia).
Methodist Bishop Dr. Otto Melle, speaking at the Oxford World Conference in London in 1937, claimed that “God in his providence has sent a leader who was able to banish the danger of Bolshevism in Germany and rescue a nation of 67 million from the abyss of despair” (Manchester Guardian Weekly, July 30, 1937).
Although they comprised only a fraction of Germany’s Protestant population, Baptists, Methodists and Adventists came under enormous pressure to conform. Like the Lutherans and Catholics, they struggled with threats to their beliefs. With notable exceptions, however, most found it expedient to accommodate Nazi ideology. As Adventist minister and historian Harold Alomía would later write, “God’s bride danced with the Devil.”
What they got in return was the survival of their organizations, a chance to evangelize, and an opportunity to play a stronger role in society.
What they should have foreseen, however, was the moral stranglehold they would encounter. While allowed to operate, the churches were counted on to support Nazi ideology. They were also asked to become ambassadors abroad.
In March of 1933, within days after Hitler took control, Nazi Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurth and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels met with Bishop John L. Nuelsen, president of the Europe Central Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Because he had ties with the large Methodist population in America, he and fellow clergy could be of great help in influencing public opinion abroad at a time when Hitler needed international good will (Blaich, “A Tale of Two Leaders”).
In response, writes historian Roland Blaich, Bishop Nuelsen “joined General Superintendent Hans Dibelius of the Evangelical Church in a short-wave broadcast assuring the outside world that all was well in Germany.” Methodist leaders also sent telegrams to the press in England and the United States “protesting reports of alleged atrocities” (Blaich, “A Tale of Two Leaders”).
The Nazis also reached out to the Baptists and Adventists. What followed were numerous trips by church leaders to the United States. Speaking at church, academic and cultural associations, they praised the achievements of the Nazi government and countered criticism of its treatment of Jews.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Germany sent the director of its reputable social service agency, Hulda Jost. Although the Adventist Church had been declared illegal in 1933, it had appealed, stressing its support for the government and its upholding of family values and healthy living. Within weeks, it was reinstated (Blaich, “Selling Nazi Germany Abroad”).
In 1936, on her way to a church world conference in San Francisco, Jost spoke to organizations across the country. Quoted in a Chicago Daily News article, she claimed that “Hitler does not want war.” When asked about persecution of the Jews, she said “Hitler has merely wanted to take leadership away from the Jews, but he doesn’t want to hurt them.” (Schroder, “Seventh Day Adventists”).
Meanwhile, Christians in Germany were being tested. In April 1933, the Nazis introduced the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases Act. This law mandated forcible sterilization for nine disabilities and disorders. As a result, 400,000 Germans were sterilized in Nazi Germany.
In 1935 came the Nuremburg Laws, stripping Jews of citizenship and prohibiting racial intermarriage. Later came euthanasia, or “mercy killing,” which accounted for an estimated 250,000 deaths. “A curious path led from caritas, the caring for the less fortunate and weak, to elimination of the weak, as the work of God,” Blaich writes.
Churches were also told to purge their members of Jews. This spelled particular trouble for the Seventh-day Adventists. Because Adventists kept Saturday as Sabbath, and had similar dietary practices, they were sometimes associated with Judaism. Eager to show they were Christian, Adventists started calling Saturday “Rest Day,” rather than the Sabbath. Across Germany and occupied countries, signs appeared on church doors prohibiting Jews from entering.
There are several accounts of Christians with Jewish heritage being expelled and shunned. Some disappeared. Others died in concentration camps (Heinz, “Painful Rememberance”).
Not all churches in Germany made peace with the Third Reich. Some, like the Confessing Church, were outlawed, and many of their members persecuted or killed. Others fared even worse. Approximately 1,500 Jehovah’s Witnesses died or were killed in concentration camps.
While a majority of German Christians found a way to accommodate the Nazi agenda, there were also individuals, Protestants and Catholics, who risked or gave their lives to protect Jews and others. Their stories are a precious testament to the capacity of the human heart for courage and compassion.
From Christians who went along with the Nazis, however, we see how treacherous is the mix of religion and nationalism and how lethal when race hatred is added. From their tragic experience, we have much to learn.
Brown, Eva. “The Baptist World Conference in Berlin.” Baptist Quarterly, October 1934.
Brumley, Jeff. “What Happens When Church and State Merge? Look to Nazi Germany for Answers.” Baptist Press, Jan. 30, 2023.
“Church’s Relations with the State: The Oxford Conference and the German Delegates,” The Manchester Guardian Weekly, 30 July 1937. The official report on the Oxford Conference is found in J. H. Oldham, The Oxford Conference (New York: Clark, 1937.)
Dodd, M. E. “My Impressions of the Baptist World Congress.” Baptist and Reflector, Sept. 13, 1934.
Heinz, Daniel. “Painful Remembrance: Adventists and Jews in The Third Reich.” Shabbat Shalom Magazine, Viewpoint 28 December 2017. This article appeared originally in German in Adventecho, May 2001, pp. 12-14. Translation by Martin Pröbstle.
King, Christian Elizabeth. The Nazi State and the New Religions. E Mellon Press, London: 1982.
Norris, Kristopher. “Baptists under Nazism and Baptists amid America’s current political crisis: a call to ‘disruption’” Baptist News, Nov. 21, 2019.
Roach, David. “Baptists ‘humbled’ by failure to oppose Nazis.” Baptist Press, Sept. 18, 2014.
Schroder, Corrie. “Seventh Day Adventists,” Oral History Project, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2002.
Ben Jacques Stories 