Cornelius Cowing

Cornelius Cowing participated in the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

"Some recollections of the pastors and people of the Second Church of old Roxbury" Internet Archive

Quick Facts

Significance:

Merchant, farmer, abolitionist, Member of the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee

Place of Birth:

Weymouth, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

October 4, 1795

Place of Death:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

May 22, 1877

Place of Burial:

West Roxbury

Cemetery Name:

Westerly Cemetery

Merchant, farmer, and abolitionist Cornelius Cowing served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization established in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

Born in Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1795, Cornelius Cowing became a merchant and farmer in Boston. In 1814, he enlisted in Lieut. Col. D. Messinger's Regiment and served in the War of 1812.¹ In 1821, he married Ann Gordon and likely had two children with her.² Ann died in 1847 and two years later Cowing married Sarah Stranger. He joined the Masons, participated in the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and frequently contributed articles on farming to local papers including the New England Farmer.³

Cowing also participated in the abolition movement. He served as Vice-President and later as Treasurer of the Norfolk County Anti-Slavery Society.⁴ He frequently contributed funds to the New England Anti-Slavery Society and Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.⁵ He also donated to specific abolitionist projects, including an anti-slavery lecture series and an abolition tract commemorating the Boston Mob of 1835.⁶ A close friend and fishing buddy of fellow Vigilance Committee member Reverend Theodore Parker, Cowing worshiped at Parker's church.⁷ He shared his strong abolitionist beliefs with both of his wives. When his first wife Ann died in 1847, the Liberator reported her death and called her "an unwearied and faithful friend to the Slave."⁸ In an 1875 letter to Cowing’s second wife Sarah, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison affectionately wrote to her expressing his concern for her failing health as well as that of her "estimable husband."⁹ 

With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Cowing joined the third and final iteration of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization dedicated to helping freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. His name appeared both on the official broadside that listed members and their addresses, as well as Austin Bearse's list of members in his Reminiscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston.¹⁰ Cowling's contributions to the Vigilance Committee or the larger Underground Railroad, however, remain unknown.

Cowling died in 1877, and his remains are buried at Westerly Cemetery in West Roxbury.¹¹ Several newspapers briefly mentioned his death without any discussion of his life. A later account, however, remembered Cowling as:

A retired merchant, and intimate and staunch fiend of each of the pastors, a man of leisure, interested in all good works, a true friend to those in need, one who would always denounce wrong wherever found, one who lived a cheerful, happy life...He was one of the early abolitionists and lived to see his cause triumph.¹²

If you a descendent or researcher of Cornelius Cowing and can provide any further information about his involvement in the Boston Vigilance Committee or Underground Railroad, please contact us.

Footnotes

1. United States, Adjutant General Military Records, 1631-1976, pg 82, Fold3.
2. Ancestry.com. Massachusetts, U.S., Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011. Census records from 1850 list Anna Cowling and a Walter H. Cowling, 26 and 20 years old respectively, living with Cornelius and his wife Sarah, which we can infer may likely be two of his children with his first wife Ann. The National Archives in Washington D.C.; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census; Record Group Number: 29; Series Number: M432; Residence Date: 1850; Home in 1850: Roxbury, Norfolk, Massachusetts; Roll: 330; Page: 185a.
3. Boston Post, December 31, 1839, page 1; New England Farmer, September 3, 1834, 3.
4. Liberator, May 2 1845, 3; Liberator, May 5, 1848, 1; Liberator, May 11, 1849; Liberator, April 26, 1850, 3.
5. Liberator, June 3, 1842, 3; Liberator, June 7 1850, 3; Liberator, February 1, 1850, 3.
6. Liberator, February 6, 1846, 3; Liberator, November 16, 1855, 3.
7. Dean Grodzins, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism, (University of North Carolina, 2003) page 171, Google Books, accessed March 13, 2024.
8. Liberator, October 8, 1847, 3.
9. Cowing, C., & William Lloyd Garrison. (September 28, 1875). Letter from William Lloyd Garrison, Roxbury, [Mass.], to Mrs. Cornelius Cowing, Sept. 28, 1875 [Correspondence]. Retrieved from https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/cv43r998z.
10. "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society; Austin Bearse, Reminisces of the Fugitive Slave Law Days (Warren Richardson, 1880), Internet Archive.
11. "Cornelius Cowing," Find a Grave, accessed May 2024, Find a Grave Memorial.
12. Charles Mackintosh, Some Recollections of the Pastors and People of the Second Church of Old Roxbury, afterwards First Church, West Roxbury, (Salem: Newcomb and Gauss, 1901), 43, Internet Archive.