Benjamin H. Greene

Quick Facts

Significance:

Bookseller and publisher, reformer, Boston Vigilance Committee

Place of Birth:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

February 4, 1802

Place of Death:

Pepperell, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

March 12, 1889

Place of Burial:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cemetery Name:

Mount Auburn Cemetery

Boston bookseller and publisher Benjamin Henderson Greene served in the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in 1802, Benjamin H. Greene grew up in Boston. He married Elizabeth Darracott in 1829 and had two children. A bookseller and publisher in Boston, he operated his business at 124 Washington Street.¹

Greene also became involved in several reform movements. He served as Treasurer of the Children’s Mission to the Children of the Destitute in Boston. He also supported criminal justice reform and opposed capital punishment. He even hosted the office of the Prisoner's Friend, a monthly publication devoted to criminal reform and other issues, for a time at his store. Greene also allowed his store to be used as a venue to sell tickets to numerous abolitionist and other reform movement lectures and events.²

Greene merged his activism and profession by publishing various abolitionist and reform pamphlets and journals. For example, he published the Boston Quarterly Review which included writings on religion, politics, philosophy, and literature. William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator welcomed this journal as "an indication of the upward tendencies of the popular mind to universal freedom and equality." Additionally, he published numerous speeches and sermons by fellow abolitionists including Reverend Theodore Parker's The Great Battle Between Slavery and Freedom and James Freeman Clarke's Slavery in the United States.³

With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Greene and others met at Faneuil Hall to plan their collective response to the hated new law. At this meeting, they created the third and final Boston Vigilance Committee to "secure the fugitives and colored inhabitants of Boston and vicinity from any invasion of their rights by persons acting under the law." Though appointed to the committee at this meeting, Green’s specific contributions remain unknown.⁴

After a long life of quiet service, Greene passed away in 1889. Upon Greene's death, the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization of descendants of the American Revolutionary War, paid tribute to their late member:

He was well known in this city, and was connected with several philanthropic and charitable institutions, to whose interests he devoted himself with great assiduity and faithfulness. He was an excellent man in all the relations of life.⁵

Greene's remains are interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.⁶
 

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Footnotes

1. Greene is mapped at his business address from 1850, 124 Washington Street. His home address in 1850 is 77 Dover St. "Benjamin Henderson Greene," Find a Grave, Benjamin Henderson Greene (1802-1889) - Find a Grave Memorial; Ancestry.com. Massachusetts, U.S., Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011; George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 173.
2. Juvenile Movement,” Boston Evening Transcript, April 19, 1856, 2; Request for Information,” Liberator, November 18, 1851, 3; “Adelphic Library Association,” Liberator, November 8, 1844, 3; “Anti-Slavery Festival,” Liberator, January 2, 1857, 2.
3. “Boston Quarterly Review,” Liberator, December 29, 1837, 3; See Theodore Parker, The Great Battle Between Slavery and Freedom: Considered in Two Speeches Delivered Before the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1856), Archive.org and James Freeman Clarke, Slavery in the United States: A Sermon Delivered in Armory Hall, on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1842, (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1842),Archive.org, Accessed 9/10/2024.
4. “The Fugitive Slave Law Meeting,” Boston Statesman, October 19, 1850, 4; "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society; Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 4.
5. “Deaths,” Boston Evening Transcript, March 13, 1889, 4; “Society of the Cincinnati,” Boston Post, August, 22, 1889, 6.
6. "Benjamin Henderson Greene," Find a Grave, Benjamin Henderson Greene (1802-1889) - Find a Grave Memorial.