George Adams

George Adams published the Boston City Directory for nearly two decades.

Boston Atheneaum

Quick Facts

Significance:

Publisher, Abolitionist

Place of Birth:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

January 10, 1807

Place of Death:

West Newton, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

October 4, 1865

Boston publisher George Adams dedicated himself to numerous reform causes and served in the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.¹

Born in 1807, George Adams spent his early years in Boston before moving with his family to Carver, Massachusetts in 1811. He returned to the city in 1823, then relocated to Plymouth for some time where he established a hat store. By 1835, he moved back to Boston and operated a hat store in the city for much of the next eleven years.²

In 1846, Adams changed professions and began publication of the Boston City Directory, which he continued to produce annually until his death nearly two decades later. According to his obituary, "[Adams] may be said to have created the system of directories, which he extended over this whole section of the Union, with rare enterprise and consummate skill by systematizing the whole business."³ Adams' directories provide valuable insight into the residents as well as the businesses, schools, churches, and other institutions of Boston. He also produced numerous other directories for cities and states throughout the North.

In addition to his work as a publisher, Adams committed himself to abolition and other reform movements. For example, his colleague William Cooper Nell reported that Adams served on the nominating committee of the first Vigilance Committee, a short lived association dedicated to providing assistance to freedom seekers in 1841.⁴ In 1842, he participated in the 10^th Annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.⁵ He also signed a petition calling for the abolition of the death penalty in 1844.⁶ In his Reminiscences of the Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, Austin Bearse lists Adams as a member of the third and final Vigilance Committee that formed in response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.

The radical abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison printed Adams' obituary in his newspaper, the Liberator, in October 1865, shortly following Adams' death.⁷ The obituary referred to Adams as a "marked character and striking instance of New England energy, intelligence, and public spirit."

It continued:

In times when the assertion of unpopular opinions cost everything, he was the outspoken supporter and close personal friend of Theodore Parker, and one of the earliest and most unflinching of Mr. Garrison’s adherents. The quiet energy of his business character became, in these moments, a calm, unostentatious fidelity to principle and to the immediate duty of the hour...we may point to him as one of those characters that do honor to our civilization and institutions – a self-made, high-toned, unselfish, useful and thoroughly honest man, earnestly striving to improve his age and to live for his fellow-men.⁸

Footnotes

1. Historical documentation confirm Boston publisher George Adams served in the Boston Vigilance Committee: Austin Bearse, Reminisces of the Fugitive Slave Law Days (Warren Richardson, 1880), 3, Archive.org; "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society. This broadside lists George Adams as living at 91, Washington Street. The approximate location of this address is used for National Park Service maps. Additional newspaper records demonstrate his close ties with abolitionists, including fellow Vigilance Committee members William Cooper Nell, William Lloyd Garrison, and Theodore Parker. See Liberator, March 3, 1854 for him listed as a reference for Nell, and his obituary published in the Liberator, October 27, 1865 for his connections to Garrison and Parker.
2. New England Historic Genealogical Society, New England Historical and Genealogical Register and Antiquarian Journal (S.G. Drake, 1866), 87-88, Google Books.
3. Liberator, October 27, 1865.
4. Found in William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings 1832-1874, edited by Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002), 100.
5. Liberator, February 4, 1842.
6. Liberator, February 9, 1844.
7. New England Historic Genealogical Society, New England Historical and Genealogical Register and Antiquarian Journal, 1866, 87-88.
8. Liberator, October 27, 1865.