Joshua Pollard Blanchard

Quick Facts

Significance:

Peace Advocate, Reformer, Abolitionist, Vigilance Committee Member

Date of Birth:

1782

Date of Death:

October 3, 1868

Though most known as a peace advocate, reformer Joshua Pollard Blanchard also participated in the abolitionist movement and served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in 1782, Joshua Pollard Blanchard worked for many years as a merchant and bookkeeper in Boston. He married his first wife, Lucretia Hill, in 1822. Following Lucretia’s death in 1838, Blanchard remarried Mary Cotton in 1840.¹

Blanchard's public activism is most associated with the Peace Movement. He declared himself a conscientious objector during the War of 1812 and several years later joined the Massachusetts Peace Society.² According to one colleague:

He entered the service of the cause of Peace at an early period...For more than fifty years he bore that cause continually on his heart, and in many ways labored for its advancement. For it he gave money, time, thought, and the products of a vigorous pen.³

Blanchard held numerous leadership positions within the American Peace Society and served as assistant editor of its publication Advocate of Peace.⁴ He later became president of the Radical Peace Society which affirmed his stance that "human life is absolutely sacred and can never rightfully be taken by individuals or governments."⁵ In keeping with these beliefs, Blanchard participated in international gatherings advocating for the end of all wars and for a Congress of Nations designed to arbitrate disputes between countries to achieve this end.⁶

In addition to his work in the Peace Movement, Blanchard dedicated himself to the cause of abolition and assisting freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. For example, in 1848, he presided over a "Great Meeting in Faneuil Hall" to protest the recent capture of freedom seekers just outside Washington, D.C. He led fundraising efforts to support the captain and crew who assisted the freedom seekers in their attempted escape. In another case, he donated money to support a Pennsylvania activist "judicially ruined for his Christian and human exertions in facilitating the escape of slaves." He expressed his hope that further incidences like this would "at last arouse the people of the North to cast off this atrocious Fugitive Slave Law, and all other fetters of abominable slaveholding tyranny."⁷

Following the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Blanchard attended the great protest meeting at Faneuil Hall in October. Here he joined the final iteration of the Boston Vigilance Committee.⁸ Though not much is known about his work with the organization, committee records indicate several donations given by Blanchard throughout its years of activity.⁹

Blanchard participated in other reform movements as well. For example, he served in the Massachusetts Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment.¹⁰ He worked as the director of the Cheap Postage Association.¹¹ In keeping with his pacifist beliefs, he also participated in the New England Non-Resistance Society.¹² Politically, he considered himself a Republican voter but "he could see that the Republicans fall far short on the work to be done" with regards to the anti-slavery movement and considered defecting to a more radical abolitionist political party.¹³ In his Principles of the Revolution, Blanchard expressed his reformer beliefs and offered a scathing critique of the United States:

The American Revolution is yet unaccomplished, or it is a splendid failure...The despots of Europe, and the military chiefs of South America, still wave their sceptres of steel over the most enlightened portions of the globe; and when their struggling vassals turn their eyes to our self-gratulating Republic, they hear not amid the rattling chains of slavery, see not through the smoke of our martial desolations, feel not in the nets of our monopolizing legislation, and the cramps of our antiquated jurisprudence, the liberty and safety their ardent desires anticipated.¹⁴

Blanchard lived to be 86 years old before his death in 1868. Upon Blanchard's passing, a friend and colleague wrote:

This devoted layman, the Boston embodiment of the peace cause, an untiring laborer by pen and tongue in behalf of humanity, finished his earthly career...There never lived a man truer to his convictions than Joshua P. Blanchard.¹⁵

Footnotes

1. Boston Daily Evening Transcript, October 10, 1868; Joshua Pollard Blanchard, Introductory Text, Joshua Pollard Blanchard Collected Papers (CDG-A), Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swathmore College, Pennsylvania, https://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/CDGA.A-L/Blanchard.html; Independent Chronical and Boston Patriot, September 25, 1822; American Traveller, August 24, 1838; The Boston Statesman, February 29, 1840; In 1850, Blanchard resided at 4 Waverly place according to "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society. NPS maps approximate the location of this address.
2. Joshua Pollard Blanchard Collected Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
3. Watchman and Reflector, January 14 1869.
4. Joshua Pollard Blanchard, Joshua Pollard Blanchard Collected Papers (CDG-A), Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
5. Boston Semi-Weekly Advertiser, August 29, 1866.
6. Joshua Pollard Blanchard, Joshua Pollard Blanchard Collected Papers (CDG-A), Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
7. Liberator, March 17, 1854.
8. Liberator, October 18, 1850.
9. 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, 43 and 65. https://archive.org/details/drirvinghbartlet19bart/page/28/mode/2up.
10. Boston Times, January 15, 1845.
11. Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, April 8, 1848.
12. Liberator, January 5, 1849.
13. Liberator, June 15, 1860.
14. Joshua P. Blanchard, Principles of the Revolution: Showing the Perversion of Them and the Consequent Failure of their Accomplishment (1855), 1, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/aew4402.0001.001/3?rgn=full+text;view=image. 
15. The Christian Register, October 24, 1868.