Last updated: May 27, 2025
Person
John G. King
Quick Facts
Significance:
Lawyer, abolitionist, Boston Vigilance Committee
Place of Birth:
Salem, Massachusetts
Date of Birth:
March 1, 1819
Place of Death:
Boston, Massachusetts
Date of Death:
January 28, 1888
Place of Burial:
Worchester, Massachusetts
Cemetery Name:
Worchester Rural Cemetery
Boston lawyer John G. King served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.
Born in 1819, John Gallison King grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1840. Three years later, he married his first wife, Jane Francis Tuckerman, and soon had a daughter. He worked as a lawyer in Boston while still living in Salem.1
Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, King joined the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. Records of the Vigilance Committee show several reimbursements to King for legal services associated with the Shadrach Minkins case.2
When authorities arrested Minkins as a fugitive slave in 1851, King, along with fellow attorneys and committee members Robert Morris, Ellis Gray Loring, and Richard Henry Dana, Jr., immediately went to the courthouse to defend him. King filled out a power of attorney which he read to Minkins and secured his mark. He remembered Minkins being so “excited” that he “had to guide his hand.” The lawyers successfully obtained a three day adjournment but, as the courtroom cleared, a group of abolitionists burst in and rescued Minkins. Following this daring rescue, Minkins soon made his way to freedom in Canada. King later represented several of the accused rescuers, including Morris and James Scott, a Black clothing dealer who operated a safe house on Smith Court in Boston’s Beacon Hill.3
During the Civil War, King donated funds to support the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments, two of the earliest Black regiments that served in the war.4
Following a divorce from his first wife, King married his second wife, Sarah Buttman, in 1867. He continued to work as a lawyer in Boston until his death in 1888.
His remains are interred in Worchester Rural Cemetery in Worchester, Massachusetts.5
Footnotes:
1. “ John Gallison King (1819-1888), Find a Grave Memorial, George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851,210. 1853, 165
2. "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society, Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 4, 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, 22, 24, 78, 80
3. Laurel Davis and Mary Sarah Bilder, “The Library of Robert Morris, Antebellum Civil Rights Lawyer and Activist,” Law Library Journal Vol. 111:4 [2019-17], 488, Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 116-117, “The Examination of Robert Morris, Jr,” Boston Evening Transcript, March 8, 1851, 2, “The examination of James Scott,” Boston Evening Transcript, February 26, 1851, 2
4. “Acknowledgements,” Liberator, November 27, 1863, 3
5. “ John Gallison King (1819-1888), Find a Grave Memorial