Emery Brigham Fay

Quick Facts

Significance:

Boston merchant, Free Soil Party, Anti-slavery advocate, Member of Boston Vigilance Committee

Place of Birth:

Southborough, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

October 27, 1814

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Date of Death:

November 22, 1886

Place of Burial:

Tenafly, New Jersey

Cemetery Name:

Brookside Cemetery

Boston merchant Emery Brigham Fay served on the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad.

Born in 1814, Emery Brigham Fay grew up in Southborough, Massachusetts. He married Almira Alton Adams in 1838 there and began a family with her. By the late 1840s, Emery moved to Boston and joined with his father and brothers to form Dexter Fay & Sons, a firm dealing in West Indian goods, flour, and seeds.¹

In Boston, Fay immersed himself in the local antislavery movement. He donated to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and contributed to various abolitionist projects. He also ran for state representative as a member of the Free Soil Party, which sought to halt the expansion of slavery.²

Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Fay joined with other Bostonians in calling a public meeting at Faneuil Hall to plan their response. At this meeting, they formed the Boston Vigilance Committee to assist those escaping slavery to Boston on the Underground Railroad. Fay joined this group and records indicate multiple donations to the organization to support its work. For example, he helped pay for an artificial leg for a freedom seeker whose foot had been crushed by a railroad car while making his way to Boston. He also donated a sizable sum of $50 dollars in June 1854, which may have been used to offset costs associated with the Anthony Burns case that month.³

Fay did not limit his work with the committee by simply making donations, however. In October 1854, he assisted a freedom seeker in making his escape. The freedom seeker stowed himself onboard the Cameo as it made its way to Boston from Jacksonville, Florida. Word reached the Vigilance Committee of the freedom seeker’s arrival. Fay joined with other committee members, including Austin Bearse and Wendell Phillips, as they tracked down the ship to where it lay docked at Boston Wharf. 

While searching the Cameo, Fay said, “Look at that vessel on the opposite side of the dock; I think the slave we want is there.” Bearse went onboard the other ship and convinced the freedom seeker to come with him. The freedom seeker stayed in the home of Lewis Hayden, another committee member, for two weeks. When authorities began closely watching Hayden’s house, the freedom seeker, disguised in women’s clothing, walked out of the door to a waiting carriage driven by yet another committee member, William Ingersoll Bowditch, to spirit him out of the city.⁴

The freedom seeker ultimately made his way to Canada. However, he returned to Boston during the Civil War, joined one of the Black regiments, and died in battle, “a true patriot by sacrificing his life for his country.”⁵

In the early 1860s, Fay left Boston and moved to New York. He died there in 1886 and is buried at Brookside Cemetery in Tenafly, New Jersey. One obituary stated, “Of him it can be truly said the world has been made better because he lived in it.”⁶

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Footnotes

1. The National Archives in Washington, DC; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census; Record Group Number: 29; Series Number: M432; Residence Date: 1850; Home in 1850: Boston Ward 10, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: 337; Page: 333b, Family History Library; Salt Lake City, UT; Film # 0872751 item 6, Ancestry.com. Massachusetts, U.S., Compiled Marriages, 1633-1850 [database on-line]. Boston City Directory, 1846, 215, George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 153, Boston Athenaeum; “Emory Brigham Fay,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 23, 1886, 1
2. Donations,” Liberator, February 11, 1853, 3, “Subscription List,” Liberator, February 18, 1859, 2, “Special Contributions,” Liberator, June 20 1856, Free Soil Candidates,” Emancipator & Republican, November 7, 1850, 3
3. “Rocking the Old Cradle of Liberty,” Liberator, October 18, 1850, "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society, 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, Archive.org;, pages 9, 29, 61, 63, 73
4. Austin Bearse, Reminiscences of Fugitive-slave Law Days in Boston. (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1886), 38-39, Archive.org
5. Austin Bearse, 38-39
6. Died,” New-York Tribune, November 23, 1886, 5, “Emory Brigham Fay,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 23, 1886, 1