The Most Famous Quincyans You Never Knew 

Thompson, Work, and Burr are
three of the most important abolitionists to have lived in Quincy before the
Civil War. Thanks largely to the effort of the late George Irwin, we have
preserved the house of Dr. Richard and Jane Eells. We have historical markers
about the Mission Institute at Madison Park, but no memorial to these three men.
It surprising that there is no memorial to them. They changed the landscape of
anti-slavery activity regionally and nationally, but not as they intended.

If you were an active abolitionist
in the two decades before the Civil War, Thompson, Work, and Burr were living
legends. Long before Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and
John Brown, these three men were celebrities. The story of their adventure,

, written by Thompson, was a best seller.

The oldest of the group was Alanson
Work, a forty-year-old maintenance man at the Mission Institute with a wife and
four children. James Burr and George Thompson were students at the Presbyterian
school. The purpose of the Mission Institute was to train home missionaries who
would work in the United States. It was part of an enthusiastic socio-religious
movement sweeping the United States called the Second Great Awakening.
Adherents sought to improve the world through universal public education,
prison reform, labor reform, women’s rights, and — largely through the
national efforts of Theodore Weld — the abolition of slavery.

David Nelson was one of Weld’s
early converts to abolitionism. Nelson in turn converted Elijah Lovejoy,
Richard Eells, and others in the region to a visceral hatred of slavery as an
anti-Christian institution. This was a new idea. Though there had been people
who opposed slavery from the earliest days of the United States, the focus of
that opposition had been on the harm that slavery did to white people. You read
that correctly. Many people opposed slavery because it undermined free labor.
It made people lazy. It turned children into martinets. African Americans were
viewed as dangerous and undesirable. The American Colonization Society
advocated sending emancipated slaves to Africa.

But the new abolitionism of this
evangelical protestant movement taught that slaves were humans and entitled to
the same rights as everyone under the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution. They perceived the institution of slavery itself as sinful.
Slaveholders were viewed as sinners. This was a radically new idea and one that
did not sit well with slaveholders in Missouri nor with the conservative
population of Illinois.

Prior to 1841 abolitionist activity
in Quincy was largely restricted to speechmaking and meetings. There is little
evidence of runaway slaves coming to Quincy prior to 1841. It is possible that
a few slaves might have been assisted. However, they would have been very few,
if any. The reason for this is simple. Slaves had no idea that abolitionists
existed or that there was a place they could go and live free. Slavery had been
abolished in Canada in 1833. No one knows when the first U.S. slave fled to our
neighbor to the north, but in 1841, what we would come to call the Underground
Railroad was still in its infancy.

Thompson, Work, and Burr tired of
simply talking at meetings and hoping that runaways might show up and ask for
help. Abolitionists had agreed among themselves to help runaways and to
transport them to the next group of abolitionists on the road to Canada beyond
the reach of the fugitive slave laws. It was frustrating to wait for people who
didn’t know you existed. After copious prayer, these three men decided upon a
course of action. They would go into Missouri, locate slaves, and invite them
to run away with them to freedom.

We do not know what the weather was
like in the first part of July 1841 when they made the first voyage into
Missouri to try to lure slaves on their first steps toward freedom. It would be
eight years before the Smithsonian Institute began supplying weather
observation data to telegraph companies and begin collecting weather information.
We can presume it was hot. We also don’t know the exact date when James Burr
and one of the other two, probably Alanson Work, went on the first mission into
Missouri. They procured a boat and rowed across the river to Taylor.

It seems surprising today but in
1841 there was no one in Missouri to stop them. There were no slave patrols in
Marion or Lewis County. No one checked the banks of the rivers for unattended
boats. Slaves frequently worked unsupervised by whites. The flow of people back
and forth across the Mississippi river was unimpeded. The United States was
still largely a seamless, united country.

We know
about the first trip from testimony in Marion County Court. Burr and his
associate pretended to be travelers. They inquired of white people they
encountered in the countryside around Taylor as to whether anyone was looking
for laborers. They asked for directions. When they encountered slaves, they
introduced themselves and invited the slaves to run off with them. Burr was
observed by a white man speaking with some slaves on the farm of Mordicai
Boulware and was also seen coming from Richard Woolfolk’s farm. Woolfolk owned
a number of slaves and had leased several to his neighbor, William Brown. At
the Woolfork farm, Burr met a slave named Anthony. He told Anthony that if he
wished to go to freedom, Burr and his friend would take him. The slave refused.
That meeting set Anthony to thinking, but not in the manner intended by the
abolitionists.

Burr and companion returned to
Quincy empty handed. They determined, however, not to give up. They prayed and
planned another foray into Missouri. Surely they could persuade slaves to come
with them. Little did they know that instead of freeing slaves, they would
sacrifice their own freedom.

Continues with Part 2:

Sources

Dempsey, Terrell.

Searching
for Jim, Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World.

Columbia, MO:

University of Missouri Press, 2003.

Palmyra Missouri Whig

, July 17, 1841.

Palmyra Missouri Whig

, September 25, 1841.

Circuit Court records of Marion County, Missouri.

Liberator

, August 27, 1841.

Liberator

, October 8, 1841.

Liberator

, November 5, 1841.

Liberator

, December 10, 1841.

Thompson, George.

Prison Life and Reflections

.
Hartford, Conn.: A. Work, 1853.