Daniel F. Child

Quick Facts

Significance:

Businessman, abolitionist, 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee member

Place of Birth:

West Roxbury, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

May 10, 1803

Place of Death:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

October 18, 1876

Place of Burial:

Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts

Cemetery Name:

Forest Hills Cemetery

Boston businessman and reformer Daniel Francis Child served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad.

Born in West Roxbury in 1803, Daniel Franklin Child spent his life in Boston. He married Mary Davis Guild in 1839 and had five children. As a businessman, he served as the treasurer of the Boston Locomotive Works.¹

Influenced by Transcendentalism and Unitarianism, Daniel and Mary became involved in local reform movements. They joined two of the "most significant, controversial, and activist congregations in antebellum Boston:" the Hollis-Street Meeting House headed by John Pierpont as well as the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society led by fellow Vigilance Committee member Theodore Parker. Both congregations strongly advocated for social reforms, including temperance and abolition. 

In their joint diary, the Childs documented the numerous abolition and other reform writings they read and discussed together. These works included texts by Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Sumner, and fellow Vigilance Committee member William Lloyd Garrison.² Daniel also spoke out against capital punishment, donated to the American Anti-Slavery Society, and participated in the local Republican party, an emerging political party in the 1850s that sought to end the spread of slavery.³

When the new Fugitive Slave Law went into effect in 1850, Daniel joined the Boston Vigilance Committee. This committee assisted freedom seekers coming to and through Boston on the Underground Railroad. Throughout the 1850s, he donated funds several times to support the activities of the committee, including $5 in May 1851, $50 in June 1854, and $10 in June of 1855.⁴ His "activism peaked" with his participation in the meeting at Faneuil Hall, hastily called in response to the arrest of freedom seeker Anthony Burns in May 1854.⁵ This meeting ended abruptly when word reach the hall that a mob began attacking the courthouse in attempt to free Burns, held captive inside. It is unclear whether Child joined the mob, or simply bore witness to the event, as did many who attended the Faneuil Hall meeting. 

Daniel Child passed away on October 18, 1876. He outlived his beloved wife Mary by fifteen years. The couple's remains are buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Boston.⁶

Footnotes

1. Daniel Franklin Child papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 115, Boston Athenaeum.org. NPS maps geolocate Child at the approximate location of his 734 Washington Street address. 
2. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray,"Reading and Everyday Life in Antebellum Boston: The Diary of Daniel F. and Mary D. Child," Libraries & Culture, Summer, 1997, Vol. 32, No. , pp. 285-323 (University of Texas Press), 287 and 297.
3. Boston Evening Transcript, March 19, 1850, page 2; Liberator, December 1, 1854; Boston Herald, October 31, 1855, page 2.
4. Francis Jackson, Account Book of Francis Jackson, Treasurer The Vigilance Committee of Boston, Dr. Irving H. Bartlett collection, 1830-1880, W. B. Nickerson Cape Cod History Archives, Internet Archive, page unnumbered, 29, 45. 
5. Zboray and Zboray, 298
6. "Daniel F. Child," Find a Grave Memorial, accessed March, 2024.