Last updated: January 16, 2023
Person
Jonathan Bridge
Genealogy of the John Bridge family in America, 1632-1924, 1924
Quick Facts
Significance:
Minister, Abolitionist
Place of Birth:
Northfield, Massachusetts
Date of Birth:
Sept. 12, 1812
Place of Death:
Wilbraham, Massachusetts
Date of Death:
July 25, 1856
Place of Burial:
Wilbraham, Massachusetts
Cemetery Name:
The Dell
Methodist Episcopal minister Jonathan Bridge participated in the abolition movement as well as the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.
Born in 1812 to Isaac Bridge and Susan Shattuck, Jonathan Davis Bridge grew up on a small farm in Northfield, Massachusetts. Bridge had eleven younger siblings. The family farm, which had "difficult to cultivate" soil, struggled to meet the needs of the large family. As a boy, Jonathan Bridge attended the town's school where he received a limited education.1
Isaac and Susan Bridge belonged to the rapidly growing Methodist Episcopal Church. As a teenager, Jonathan Bridge attended an early revival hosted in the town. This meeting inspired him to become a minister himself. At eighteen, Bridge became ordained as a local preacher and left home to study under the Presiding Elder of the Springfield District, the Reverend Orange Scott.2
Bridge spent the early years of his career as a traveling preacher. He hosted revivals in communities much like the one he grew up in. In 1832, Bridge married the schoolteacher Abigail Learnard in New Salem, Massachusetts.3 The couple had three sons. One of them, Watson Wilberforce Bridge, later served as a Captain of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw during the Civil War.4
Abigail Bridge accompanied her husband on his travels. During her husband's free time, Abigail used her experience as a teacher to help Jonathan build on the rudimentary education he received as a boy.5 With Abigail’s instruction, Jonathan Bridge became a "great reader, an intense thinker, and a writer who commanded a finished and nervous style."6 Jonathan Bridge received his first ministry in 1835, and he spent the next twenty years presiding over Methodist congregations across Massachusetts.
Bridge remained close to his mentor, Rev. Orange Scott, a prominent abolitionist. Reverend Scott introduced Bridge to the abolitionist cause, which the young Reverend Bridge took up with conviction. Under Scott's guidance, Bridge wrote many articles and sermons supporting the abolitionist movement, and he used his "caustic pen" against anyone who defended the institution of slavery.7
Methodist leaders did not always agree with the abolitionist values preached by Orange Scott, who they considered a radical. This conflict came to a head in 1842, when Reverend Scott started his own abolitionist ministry, the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion. Despite agreeing with Rev. Scott on the issue of slavery, Bridge decided to remain in the Methodist Church.8
Reverend Bridge used his position as a minister to assist freedom seekers along the Underground Railroad. While appointed to a Methodist Church in Boston, Jonathan Bridge joined the Anti-Slavery Society and the Vigilance Committee of 1850. According to Bridge’s son, Melville, in an 1896 article, Reverend Bridge met the freedom seeker and Underground Railroad conductor "Father" Josiah Henson while in Boston. After hearing the story of Henson's escape from slavery, he introduced the man to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who used Henson's experiences as inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.9
Bridge left Boston in 1851 to preach at the First Methodist Church in Springfield, Massachusetts on Pynchon Street. His eldest son, Melville, recollected that his father often sheltered freedom seekers traveling to Canada in their Springfield home and directed them to sympathetic members of his congregation for aid.10
In 1854, Jonathan D. Bridge became the Presiding Elder of the Worcester District. He served in this post for two years before dying of consumption in Wilbraham, Massachusetts at the age of 44.11
Footnotes
1. William Dawson Bridge and Norman Bridge, Genealogy of the John Bridge Family in America, 1632-1924 (Cambridge: The Murray Printing Company, 1924), 178, http://archive.org/details/genealogyofjohnb00brid.
2. David Sherman, Sketches of New England Divines (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1860), 345, http://archive.org/details/sketchesnewengl00shergoog.
3. Bridge and Bridge, Genealogy of the John Bridge Family, 180.
4. “Brief Mention,” Zion’s Herald, September 06, 1884, 4, https://archive.org/details/sim_zions-herald_1884-09-10_61_37/page/n3/.
5. Bridge and Bridge, Genealogy of the John Bridge Family, 180.
6. Ibid., 350.
7. Ibid., 351.
8. Ibid., 351.
9. “The Original Uncle Tom,” Democrat and Chronical, 5, July 25, 1896, https://www.newspapers.com/image/135255338/.
10. Aella Green, “Western Massachusetts and Vermont, Authentic Traditions of the Trying Times,” The Springfield Union, March 25, 1900, http://www.davidrugglescenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Springfield-Union%E2%80%94March-25-1900.pdf.
11. Bridge and Bridge, Genealogy of the John Bridge Family, 180.