John Christopher Gore

Quick Facts

Significance:

Artist, Abolitionist, 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee member

Date of Birth:

c. 1806

Place of Death:

West Roxbury, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

June 22, 1867

Artist and abolitionist John Christopher Gore served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born into a wealthy merchant family in 1806, John Christopher Gore grew up on Park Street in downtown Boston, overlooking Boston Common. He graduated from Andover Academy, then later from West Point, before studying art in Boston. He continued his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy for three years. Following his time abroad, Gore returned to Boston. He married Mary James in 1830 and began a family. Elected to the National Academy of Design in 1834, Gore exhibited his landscape and portrait paintings at galleries along the East Coast, including at the Boston Athenaeum.¹

In addition to his art and family life, Gore dedicated himself to the cause of abolition. He served for many years as one of the vice-presidents of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and became a staunch vocal and financial supporter of the movement.²

For example, Gore offered to donate some of his property in Jamaica Plain to a Baptist society on the condition that they allow the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to hold monthly lectures at their church for five years:

in order that the cruelties and villanies practised towards twenty-seven hundred thousand human beings, by a nation who call themselves Christians, and profess to be the most free and enlightened on the earth, may be exposed.³

When the church refused to accept this condition, Gore donated the land directly to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society instead.

Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Gore joined the Boston Vigilance Committee. Though his specific contributions remain unknown, this organization assisted freedom seekers escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad.⁴

In the early 1850s, Gore purchased Rancho El Pescadero in Monterey, California and moved there with his family. He returned to Boston in 1861, retiring to his home in West Roxbury where he passed away in 1867.⁵

If you are researcher or descendant of John C. Gore and can provide any further details of his work on the Boston Vigilance Committee, please e-mail us.

Footnotes

1. Edan Milton Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940, (San Francisco, CA : Hughes Pub. Co, 1986), 181; Charles Carroll Carpenter, Biographical catalogue of the trustees, teachers, and students of Phillips academy, Andover, 1778-1830, (Andover: Andover Press, 1903), 104; New England Historical Genealogical Society, Boston, Massachusetts; Massachusetts Vitals to 1850, Ancestry.com. Massachusetts, U.S., Compiled Birth, Marriage, and Death Records, 1700-1850 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA.
2. "Receipts...," Liberator, February 22, 1839, 3; "Receipts...," Liberator, May 17, 1839, 3; "Receipts...," Liberator, August 23, 1839, 3; "Receipts...," Liberator, December 6, 1839, 3; "The Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society," Liberator, February 2, 1844, 2; "Money received...," Liberator, January 14, 1848, 2.
3. "A Generous Gift," Liberator, January 22, 1841, 3.
4. "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.
5. Mark Meredith, "John Christopher Gore (1806-1867)," House Histree, accessed August 27, 2024; "Deaths," Flag of Our Union, July 27, 1867, 15.