John S. Rogers

Quick Facts

Significance:

Merchant, abolitionist, Boston Vigilance Committee

Place of Birth:

New Hampshire

Date of Birth:

c. 1817

Place of Death:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

September 8, 1897

Boston merchant and abolitionist John S. Rogers served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in New Hampshire around 1817, John S. Rogers eventually moved to Boston. He worked as a merchant in the thread and cloth industry at his store on Washington Street. In 1846, he married Ann D. Fogerty.¹

In addition to his home and professional life, Rogers also heavily involved himself in local activism. He donated to various abolition groups to support efforts against slavery. He signed an anti-Mexican War pledge seeing it as a war to expand slavery. He also fought against the use of capital punishment. Additionally, Rogers worked in the Anti-Sabbath movement and similar efforts aimed at maintaining the separation of church and state.²

For a time, Rogers also participated in the Know Nothing Party, a political coalition that included anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic groups as well as anti-slavery supporters such as members of the Free Soil movement. Local Know Nothing leaders kicked Rogers out of the party, however, after he refused to support Jerome V.C. Smith for Mayor. Rogers and other abolitionists viewed Smith as complicit in the rendition of freedom seeker Anthony Burns in 1854. Rogers wrote of his expulsion from the Know Nothing Party:

The friends of freedom can hope for no good to come out of this organization. The faint glimmerings of freedom which seemed to promise hope in some localities, are to be crushed out. Already has this process been applied in the municipal election of Boston, and the Free-Soilers are openly told to expect no more favors from the City Councils.³

Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, Rogers joined the Boston Vigilance Committee. This organization assisted freedom seekers coming to and through Boston on the Underground Railroad. Committee records show reimbursements to Rogers for providing clothing to freedom seeker "Chas. Parmeter from Wilmington, N.C." and "J H Hill" in 1859.⁴

Rogers ran his business until the mid-1860s when he became treasurer of the Gillespie Governor Manufacturing Company.⁵

He died in South Boston at age 80 in 1897.⁶

Footnotes:

1. The National Archives in Washington, DC; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census; Record Group Number: 29; Series Number: M432; Residence Date: 1850; Home in 1850: Boston Ward 11, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: 338; Page: 27b, Ancestry.com. 1850 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009; George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 279, Massachusetts, U.S., Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011. Original data: Town and City Clerks of Massachusetts. Massachusetts Vital and Town Records. Provo, UT: Holbrook Research Institute (Jay and Delene Holbrook).
2. "Treasurer’s Report," Liberator, January 7, 1848, 3; "Anti-War Pledge," Liberator, June 5, 1846, 3; "Clerical Hangmen," Liberator, February 9, 1844, 3; "Meeting of the Liberal League," Boston Evening Transcript, April 19, 1873, 1.
3. "An Error Corrected," Liberator, January 12, 1855, 2; "The New Anti-Slavery Party," National Era, January 18, 1855, 10.
4. "Fugitive Slave Meeting," Boston Evening Transcript, October 15, 1850, 1; "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; "Records of the Vigilance Committee of Boston" (Ms B.17), Garrison Collection, Boston Public Library (BPL); 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, https://archive.org/details/drirvinghbartlet19bart/page/n3/mode/2up, 62.
5. Boston City Directory, 1866, 393.
6. "Died," Boston Herald, September 10, 1897, 10.