J.P. Quimby

Quick Facts

Significance:

Boston Vigilance Committee member

According to the membership roster in Austin Bearse’s Reminiscences of the Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, J.P. Quimby participated as a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee. Bearse's list is considered the "Doorman's List" because, among other duties, Bearse watched the door at committee meetings and only allowed known members in.¹

Bostonians founded this iteration of the Vigilance Committee in 1850 in response to the passage of the new Fugitive Slave Law. Quimby and others in the Vigilance Committee provided funds, shelter, transportation, medical attention, and other assistance to freedom seekers escaping enslavement on the Underground Railroad.

While the 1850 Boston City Directory lists a John Quimby boarding at 246 Harrison Avenue,Vigilance Committee records do not identify any address associated with J.P. Quimby.² Unfortunately, lack of any further details inhibits the ability to establish a clear identity and any biographical information for Quimby and his contributions to the organization.

If you are a researcher or descendant of a J.P. Quimby that may have participated in the Boston Vigilance Committee and can provide any further details related to his work with the organization, please e-mail us. 

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Footnotes

1. Austin Bearse, Reminisces of the Fugitive Slave Law Days (Warren Richardson, 1880), 5; Dean Grodzins, "Constitution or No Constitution, Law or No Law: The Boston Vigilance Committees, 1841-1861," in Matthew Mason, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Massachusetts and the Civil War: The Commonwealth and National Disunion (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 73, n.57.
2. The Boston Directory, (Boston: Sampson and Murdoch Co., 1850), 269.