John T. Lawton

Quick Facts

Significance:

Constable, Boston Vigilance Committee Member

Place of Birth:

Portsmouth, Rhode Island

Date of Birth:

August 6, 1798

Place of Death:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

August 11, 1882

Place of Burial:

Freetown, Massachusetts

Cemetery Name:

Plummer Burial Ground

Boston constable John Terry Lawton served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in Rhode Island in 1798, John T. Lawton grew up in Assonet, Massachusetts. In his early life, he traveled and traded "all along the Mississippi." In 1824, he married Betsey Hathaway and started a family with her in Freetown, Massachusetts. He represented Freetown in the state legislature in 1829. Lawton also participated in the temperance movement and once offered his space for the Ladies Abolition Fair to raise funds to "aid in the cause of the suffering slave." By the mid-1840s, he moved to Boston, where he served as a constable.¹

Following the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Lawton joined the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. In 1851, Lawton became involved in the case of Thomas Sims. Sims escaped slavery in Georgia by stowing himself aboard a Boston-bound ship, but once in Boston Harbor, a crew member caught him and locked him in a cabin. Sims managed to escape by boat to the city. Authorities soon captured him, and, in the early morning hours, forced him aboard the brig Acorn to return him to slavery.²

Acting in his capacity as constable, and backed by "a number of men," Lawton searched the harbor: 

for the purpose of serving a warrant issued by [fellow Vigilance Committee member] Mr. Hildreth for the arrest of Cephus I. Ames, the mate of the brig Acorn, on a charge of assaulting Sims by pulling his nose on arriving in Boston harbor from Savannah. Ames was understood to be on board the Lydia H. Nickerson, or the Acorn, somewhere in the harbor. Constable Lawton after cruising down as far as Fort Warren, returned to the city without having made an arrest. Ames, it is said, remained at Castle Island till an hour before the Acorn sailed and came up in a boat and left in her.³

Lawton continued to serve as constable for many years. He passed away in Boston at age 84 in 1882.

His remains are buried at Plummer Burial Ground in Freetown.⁴

Footnotes:

1. "Recent Deaths," Boston Evening Transcript, August 12, 1882, 4; "John T. Lawton," Find a Grave Memorial; Ancestry.com. Massachusetts, U.S., Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.; A History of the town of Freetown, Massachusetts : with an account of the Old Home Festival, July 30th, 1902 (Fall River, Mass. : Press of J.H. Franklin & Co., 1902), 154, 240; "Notice," Fall River Monitor, August 21, 1841, 3; Stimpson’s Boston Directory, 1844, 337; George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 214.
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.
3. "The Rumor in Relation to the Steamer 'Jacob Bell,'" Boston Daily Mail, April 14, 1851, 4.
4. "Recent Deaths," Boston Evening Transcript, August 12, 1882, 4; "John T. Lawton," Find a Grave Memorial,