John S. Kimball

Quick Facts

Significance:

Boston Vigilance Committee member

John S. Kimball served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that aided freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad.

In his memoir, Reminiscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, Austin Bearse recorded the name John S. Kimball on his "Doorman's List" of members of the Boston Vigilance Committee. Among other duties, Bearse watched the door at committee meetings and only allowed known members to enter. Unfortunately, Bearse did not give any further information, such as an address, profession, or full middle name, which hampers the search to clearly establish the identity of John S. Kimball.¹

Though the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator referenced John S. Kimball numerous times, beginning in the 1830s and through the 1850s, it similarly did not give any further identifying information. And though John Stacy Kimball lived in Boston and participated in the abolition movement, he died in March 1850, and could not have been a member of the Vigilance Committee, which formed in October 1850.²

It is possible that John Shackford Kimball, a counsellor who lived in Boston in 1850, participated in the Vigilance Committee. Without specifically mentioning the antislavery movement or the Underground Railroad, an 1897 biographical account stated that Kimbell "was most active in all progressive movements."³

If you are a researcher or descendant of John Shackford Kimball or a different John S. Kimball that may have participated in the Boston Vigilance Committee and can provide any further details and sources related to his work with the group, please e-mail us. 

Footnotes:

1. Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 4; 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. See Liberator, January 17, 1835, 3, April 24, 1840, 3, July 9, 1847, 2, October 15, 1850, 2; "John Stacy Kimball," Find a Grave Memorial.
3. George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1849-1850, 182; "John Shackford Kimball," Biographical Review :Containing Life Sketches of Leading Citizens of Merrimack and Sullivan Counties, N.H. (Boston: Biographical Review Publishing Company, 1897). "John Shackford Kimball," Find a Grave Memorial.