Henry Kemp

Quick Facts

Significance:

Chair Painter, Abolitionist, Boston Vigilance Committee

Place of Birth:

Ireland

Date of Birth:

Unknown

Place of Death:

Unknown

Date of Death:

Unknown

Place of Burial:

Unknown

Cemetery Name:

Unknown

An Irish immigrant and chair painter by profession, Henry Kemp joined the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee and became a key player in the city's Underground Railroad network.

Born in Ireland, Henry Kemp stated that "poverty compelled" him to leave his native country and seek opportunity in the United States. Though it is unclear when Kemp arrived in Boston, he became a chair painter in the city. He married Helena Allen in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1844.¹

Unlike many Irish immigrants, Kemp embraced the city's abolition movement and became an outspoken participant in the fight against slavery. He said:

I am an Irish abolitionist. I do not hold to freedom for myself and my countrymen, and go for the slavery of the colored man, or any man. And I do not believe, either, that there is anything in the nature of Irishmen to make them love slavery, and hate liberty. They are mis-taught; they are deceived and prejudiced, by selfish and designing men, against the abolitionists and their cause, and are kept away carefully from the anti-slavery meetings; and they are ignorant of the nature and character of the cause.²

A staunch Catholic, Kemp criticized the pro-slavery attitudes of "all the professed Catholics of America who sympathize with and aid the Slave Power," considering them "excommunicated heretics." He believed the Catholic Church to be "thoroughly anti-slavery" at its core, despite its actions in the United States, and thought "himself about the only representative of the true Catholic Church in this country."³

In 1850, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, Kemp joined the third and final iteration of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. Known as a fearless and "energetic Irishman," Kemp distanced himself from the passive non-resistance stance of many abolitionists. Instead, he accepted force, when necessary, as a tool to be used to secure someone’s freedom. Kemp soon found himself at the center of several fugitive slave cases that occurred in the city.⁴

Following the arrest and detention of freedom seeker Thomas Sims in 1851, Kemp and others kept watch overnight outside of the courthouse where authorities held Sims.  He summoned fellow Vigilance Committee member Henry I. Bowditch at 3 a.m. Bowditch feared that Kemp and others wanted to attack the courthouse and the roughly 200 police and volunteers guarding it. But Kemp reassured him by saying "I am not so much a fool as to needlessly throw away my life without the remotest chance of doing good.” 

Rather, Kemp wanted Bowditch to "to view the last scene" and bear witness to "the last act of humiliation of Boston and Massachusetts" as authorities marched Sims to the boat to take him back to slavery. According to Bowditch:

Arm in arm with me was one of the noblest of men; shrewd, prudent, cautious, and yet bold and self-sacrificing,- Kemp, a chair-painter by trade, but a genial wit and bold leader for any cause requiring clear-headedness and boldness. Even in the darkest hour, when every one felt sad, Kemp, even in his reproofs of the submissiveness of the committee, would convulse us with laughter...⁵

Though returned to slavery, Sims later escaped and made his way back to Boston during the Civil War.

Kemp also worked with fellow committee member Captain Austin Bearse as they patrolled Boston Harbor in search of freedom seekers arriving by sea. In 1853, Bearse learned of a freedom seeker held aboard the brig Florence from North Carolina. Bearse, Kemp, John W. Browne, and William I. Bowditch, along with "four or five colored men," sailed through the harbor looking for the brig aboard Bearse’s ship, the Moby Dick. Once they found the Florence, Bearse and his team demanded that the freedom seeker be turned over. When denied, they boarded the brig, and "went down in the cabin and found him." They brought the freedom seeker, Sandy Swain, to shore and soon spirited him out of the city. Swain ultimately made his way to Canada on the Underground Railroad.⁶

Kemp also participated in the unsuccessful rescue attempt of Anthony Burns, arrested in 1854. While thousands gathered in protest at Faneuil Hall, Kemp joined with others as they tried to breach the courthouse and rescue Burns. According to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to prepare for the assault:

it was only necessary to provide a nucleus of picked men to head the attack. [Martin] Stowell, Kemp, and I were each to furnish five of these, and Lewis Hayden, the colored leader, agreed to supply ten negroes.⁷

With hatchets and a battering ram, Kemp and the others attempted to storm the courthouse. Despite the melee that ensured and the killing of a deputy marshal, the abolitionists failed to rescue Burns. Officials placed Boston under martial law and publicly marched Burns in chains to the harbor to return him to slavery amidst massive protest. Bostonians later raised funds and purchased Burns' freedom.

Henry Bowditch later reflected of Kemp and the other would-be rescuers, "Would to God we had more like them! When Massachusetts is filled with such, then slave holding will be impossible."⁸

By the mid-1850s, Kemp may have moved to Nova Scotia. The Liberator, Boston’s primary abolitionist newspaper, reported the death of his wife Helen there in 1856.⁹

Further records or information on Kemp's life and death have yet to be discovered.

If you are a researcher or descendent of Henry Kemp and provide any further details of his life and work, please e-mail us. 

Footnotes:

1. “Annual Meeting of the Mass. Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator, February 3, 1854, George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 207, Family History Library; Salt Lake City, UT; Film # 0874029, Ancestry.com. Massachusetts, U.S., Compiled Marriages, 1633-1850 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005.
2. “Annual Meeting of the Mass. Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator, February 3, 1854.
3. Liberator, February 2, 1855, 2.
4. "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society, Please note, this broadside lists Kemp at 22 Atkinson Street, which is now Congress Street, we have marked this site on the interactive map at this approximate location, Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 4, “Ninth Annual Meeting of the N.E. Non-Resistance Society,” Liberator, January 5, 1849, 3, Albert von Frank. "The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 32.
5.  Vincent Y. Bowditch, "Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch: (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1902), 217-219.
6. Bearse, 34, See also, Sindey Kaplan, The Moby Dick in the Service of the Underground Railroad, Phylon, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 173-176, 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,  https://archive.org/details/drirvinghbartlet19bart/page/n3/mode/2up, 26.
7. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2000), 66-67.
8. Von Frank, 69.
9. “Died,” Liberator, May 2, 1856.