Joel Prentiss Bishop

Quick Facts

Significance:

Legal scholar, abolitionists, Vigilance Committee member

Place of Birth:

Volney, New York

Date of Birth:

March 10, 1814

Place of Death:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

November 4, 1901

A lawyer, scholar, and abolitionist, Joel Prentiss Bishop served on the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization dedicated to assisting freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad.

Born in 1814, Joel Prentiss Bishop grew up on his family's farm in upstate New York. He excelled in school and by age sixteen supported himself as a public school teacher. According to his obituary, Bishop's "deep interest in the anti-slavery question at that period- an interest which did not flag until the question was settled – brought him an opportunity to lend an active hand in its agitation." He soon became the business manager, publishing agent, and assistant treasurer of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, and assistant editor of Friend of Man, an anti-slavery publication based out of Utica, New York.¹

By the early 1840s, Bishop moved to Boston. He soon clerked in a law office before being admitted to the bar in 1844. While living in this hub of abolitionism, Bishop continued his work in the antislavery movement. He addressed a meeting of the Norfolk County Anti-Society in 1842 and spoke at an abolitionist celebration marking the eleventh anniversary of British Emancipation in 1845. During the latter, he discussed the Latimer war in Boston, referring to the case of George Latimer, arrested as a fugitive in the city several years earlier. Although it is unclear if Bishop participated in the Latimer case, he clearly involved himself in assisting freedom seekers. He served on the Executive Committee of the first Vigilance Committee in the city. This organization, founded by Charles Torrey in 1841, dedicated itself to "secure to persons of color the enjoyment of their constitutional and legal rights."² Along with Torrey, Bishop co-authored To the Friends of the Slave, In New-England. In this 1841 letter, published in the Liberator, they wrote:

It is well known, that many of the victims of southern oppression, goaded by multiplied wrongs, endeavor, from time to time, to escape their chains; and, guided by the star of liberty, seek a place of refuge in the free North, or in Canada. Often, while the human hounds are on their track, they reach our State, but a few hours in advance of their pursuers...To meet these and similar cases of oppression and hardship, and to secure the prompt enforcement of our own laws, for the protection of the liberties of the colored race, it has been thought advisable to do as our New-York brethren have done, to organize a Vigilance Committee, whose special business it shall be to attend to all these classes of cases, as they may occur, and thus secure a greater efficiency of action, and greater certainty and economy in the employment of every lawful means to accomplish the ends we have in view...it is believed that New-England will soon cease to be the slaveholder’s hunting-ground.³

Though this first iteration of the Boston Vigilance Committee disbanded rather quickly, Bishop later joined the 1850 Vigilance Committee, formed in response to the Fugitive Slave Law. He listed his place of employment, where he worked as a "counsellor," as 46 Washington Street on the Vigilance Committee's broadside.⁴ Following the courthouse rescue of freedom seeker Shadrach Minkins in 1851, Bishop served as one of the "counsel for defence" for Joseph K. Hayes, whom authorities arrested for his alleged role in the successful raid that freed the fugitive.⁵

With the publication of his legal work Commentaries on the Law of Marriage and Divorce in 1852, Bishop shifted his focus from practicing law to writing about it. Despite withdrawing from the public eye, however, Bishop remained active in the anti-slavery movement and publicly called for "enfranchising and arming southern slaves during the Civil War."⁶ He published Secession and Slavery in which he argued for "Congress to pass an act giving not only freedom, but the elective franchise to the slaves of the seceded States."⁷

In his later years, Bishop "lived nearly as a recluse, researching and writing on the law, and generally declining to address other issues of public concern."⁸ According to one obituary, he devoted himself "to the drudgery of legal authorship" which garnered him both national and international acclaim. Some scholars considered him to be the "foremost law writer of the age" and he even earned an honorary degree from the University of Berne, Switzerland.⁹

Bishop died in his home in Cambridge in November, 1901.

Footnotes

1. Boston Evening Transcript, November 5, 1901, 5.
2. Boston Evening Transcript, November 5, 1901, 5; The Liberator, January 28, 1842, 3; The Liberator, August 8, 1845, 3; The Liberator, June 11, 1841.
3. The Liberator, June 11, 1841.
4. NPS maps provide the approximate location of 46 Washington Street in the 1850s. "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society.
5. "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society; Boston City Directory, 1854, 39, https://cdm.bostonathenaeum.org/digital/collection/p16057coll32/id/81; Boston Evening Transcript, February 27, 1851, 2.
6. "Joel Bishop," American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 830-831, https://archive.org/details/americannational0002unse/page/830/mode/2up?q=%22Joel+Bishop%22.
7. Boston Evening Transcript, January 29, 1866, 1.
8. "Joel Bishop," American National Biography, 830-831.
9. Boston Evening Transcript, November 5, 1901, 5.