Edward Edmunds

Reverend, Temperance Advocate, Boston Vigilance Committee member

The Boston Globe

Quick Facts

Significance:

Reverend, Temperance Advocate, Boston Vigilance Committee member

Place of Birth:

Sennett, New York

Date of Birth:

circa 1815

Place of Death:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

June 2, 1900

Boston reverend and temperance advocate Edward Edmunds joined the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad.

Born in Sennett, New York, around 1815, Edward Edmunds grew up in a deeply religious household. Following his schooling, he became a preacher in the Baptist Church. He served as a pastor in New Bedford, Massachusetts and in Rhode Island before moving to Boston in 1843. In the city, he headed the First Christian Church. He married his wife Mary Slade in 1839 and had a daughter with her.¹

In addition to tending to the spiritual needs of those in his community, Reverend Edmunds also saw to their worldly needs. As one obituary recounted:

How often he has assisted poor people in paying their rent, protected them from landlords’ eviction process, attended to their law questions, saved them from imprisonment, labored with intemperate persons, persuaded them to reform.

Edmunds became a vocal leader in the temperance movement, and for nearly 50 years held a “weekly service in his church in the interest of temperance.”²

Like many temperance reformers, Edmunds also served “at the fore with the anti-slavery army.” With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, he joined the Boston Vigilance Committee. Though no records have been discovered so far of his specific contributions to the Vigilance Committee, a later account stated Edmund’s readiness:

to co-operate in the delivery of an individual victim of the slave hunter, as in the case of Anthony Burns, or to assist the escaping bondman, or the frequent subject of our country’s shame who was soliciting aid in the purchase of his own body and the flesh and blood of his wife and children.³

In addition to his work in the temperance and abolition movements, Edmunds also helped to establish the Five Cents Savings Bank, as well as the Children’s Mission to the Children of the Destitute. He later engaged in missionary work before returning to First Christian Church, to which he gave “his young manhood, his middle life and his old age.”⁴

Reverend Edmunds resigned from the church in 1894 “on account of his advanced age.” However, his congregation voted that he should remain connected to his church as “pastor emeritus,” a position he held until his death in 1900.⁵
 

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Footnotes

1. Edmunds is located at 14 Oxford Street in 1850. “67 Years a Clergyman,” Boston Globe, June 2, 1900, 12, Year: 1870; Census Place: Boston Ward 10, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: M593_646; Page: 346B, Source Information, Ancestry.com. 1870 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009. Images reproduced by FamilySearch, George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 148, Boston Athenaeum 
2. “In Memory of a Dead Pastor,” Boston Herald, June 18, 1900, 6
3. “In Memory of a Dead Pastor,” Boston Herald, June 18, 1900, 6, "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society
4. “In Memory of a Dead Pastor,” Boston Herald, June 18, 1900, 6, “67 Years a Clergyman,” Boston Globe, June 2, 1900, 12
5. “67 Years a Clergyman,” Boston Globe, June 2, 1900, 12