Charles Mayo Ellis

Quick Facts

Significance:

Attorney, Abolitionist, 1850Boston Vigilance Committee

Place of Birth:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

December 23, 1818

Place of Death:

Brookline, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

January 23, 1878

Place of Burial:

Walpole, Massachusetts

Cemetery Name:

Rural Cemetery

Boston abolitionist and lawyer Charles Mayo Ellis served in the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee, a group that assisted freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad.

Born in 1818, Charles Mayo Ellis grew up in Boston. He graduated from Harvard in 1839 and became a lawyer in the city, with his office on State Street. In 1844, he married Harriet Lewis and began a family. Following the death of his first wife, Ellis married Helen Thomas in 1862 and had a daughter with her.¹

In the early 1840s, Ellis also became involved in the antislavery movement, considered "one of the few prominent lawyers of that day who took a stand in open opposition to the aggressions of the slave power." In 1843, he addressed a meeting in Braintree, just south of Boston, called in protest of the arrest and detention of freedom seeker George Latimer. He later ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a member of the Free Soil party, which dedicated itself to stopping slavery's expansion. He also served as Secretary at the "Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Convention" held at Tremont Temple in 1851.²

Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Ellis, along with his father, Charles, joined the Boston Vigilance Committee. This organization provided valuable assistance to freedom seekers coming to and through Boston on the Underground Railroad. Ellis served on the Executive Committee of this group alongside others key leaders including Lewis Hayden, Joshua B. Smith, and Samuel Gridley Howe among others.³

In perhaps his greatest role as a member of the Vigilance Committee, Ellis served as legal counsel during the Anthony Burns case. Burns escaped slavery in Virginia and came to Boston in 1854. Soon after Burns' arrival, authorities arrested him and brought him to the courthouse. Ellis, along with fellow lawyer and Vigilance Committee member Richard Henry Dana, Jr., volunteered his legal services to defend Burns. Despite their best efforts, however, the judge ordered that Burns be sent back to slavery. Though Ellis and Dana lost the court battle, abolitionists publicly expressed their gratitude to the legal team for their valiant work. They said that that Ellis and Dana:

will find their reward in the approbation of their own consciences, the grateful applauses of the lovers of liberty throughout the world, and the honorable place they have won for themselves on the pages of their country's history.⁴

Ellis's work on the case did not end with the rendition of Burns in 1854, however. He later defended fellow Vigilance Committee member and close friend Reverend Theodore Parker in the case against him for his role in the Burns affair.⁵

An honored abolitionist and gifted speaker, Ellis eulogized Parker at the Boston Music Hall following the reverend's death in 1860. Similarly, he gave and published a memorial address for President Abraham Lincoln, following his assassination in 1865.⁶ 

Ellis died at age 59 in his home in 1878. His remains are interred in Rural Cemetery in Walpole, Massachusetts.⁷

Footnotes

1. "Mortuary Notice," Boston Evening Journal, January 24, 1878, 3; Ancestry.com. Geneanet Community Trees Index [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2022.; "Died," New England Farmer, January 5, 1861, 3; George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 149, Boston Athenaeum. Records indicate he worked at 21 Old State House. NPS map geolocate Ellis at this approximate location.
2. "Mortuary Notice," Boston Evening Journal, January 24, 1878, 3; "A Voice From Old Braintree!," Liberator, January 13, 1843, 1; "The Free Soil Convention," Liberator, October 8, 1852, 3; "Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Convention," Boston Evening Transcript, April 8, 1851, 2.
3. "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), 6.
4. "New England Anti-Slavery Convention," Liberator June 9, 1854, 2.
5. "Trial for Resisting the U.S. Marhal in the Burns Slave Case," Boston Evening Transcript, April 3, 1855, 2.
6. "Death of Theodore Parker," Liberator, June 22, 1860, 2; Liberator, June 30, 1865, 2; For Ellis’ memorial address on Lincoln, see Memorial address on Abraham Lincoln: Internet Archive.
7. "Charles Mayo Ellis, Find a Grave, Accessed July, 2024.