Richard Frederick Fuller

Lawyer, author, poet, and Vigilance Committe member

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Quick Facts

Significance:

Boston lawyer, author, poet, Vigilance Committee Member

Place of Birth:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

May 15, 1824

Place of Death:

Wayland, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

May 30, 1869

Place of Burial:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cemetery Name:

Mount Auburn Cemetery

Boston lawyer, poet, and scholar Richard Frederick Fuller served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in 1824 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Robert F. Fuller grew up in a highly educated and politically active family. His father Timothy Fuller served as an elected official in both the state and federal government. His sister Margaret Fuller became a renowned social activist and writer. Fuller and his siblings also participated in the abolition movement.¹

Fuller graduated from Harvard in 1844 and became a lawyer in Boston. He married his first wife Sarah Kolloch Batchelder in 1849. Following her death, he married Adeline Rutter Reeves in 1857. With his two wives, Fuller had nine children.²

With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, Fuller and other Bostonians called for a public meeting at Faneuil Hall to plan their response. At this meeting, participants formed the third and final Boston Vigilance Committee to assist freedoms seekers escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad. Fuller joined this committee and his name and address appeared on the official broadside that listed members. His specific contributions to the committee, or the larger Underground Railroad network, however, remain unknown.³

Fuller also dedicated himself to other reform movements as well as literary pursuits. He participated in the temperance movement. He wrote a biography of his brother Chaplin Arthur B. Fuller who served in the Civil War and lost his life at the Battle of Fredricksburg. He also wrote and published Visions in Verse, a book of poetry.⁴

At a July 4^th event in the town of Wayland in 1865, Fuller read one of his antislavery poems which included the lines:

Shall anti-Christian caste be suffered to remain
And with a dark blot still our banner stain?
Shall we disfranchise color, giving the control
To white-faced hypocrites of blacker soul;

...

Till ‘Freedom’s Flag’ in every country wave,-
No King but Jesus, and no man a slave!⁵

In 1869, Fuller passed away at the young age of 45 at his home in Wayland, Massachusetts, after a four week illness. His remains are interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.⁶

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Footnotes

1. Fuller's address is mapped as his 1850 business address at 10 State Street, Boston. "Richard Frederick Fuller" Find a Grave, Richard Frederick Fuller (1824-1869) - Find a Grave Memorial. 
2. Genealogy of some descendants of Thomas Fuller of Woburn, Ancestry.com. North America, Family Histories, 1500-2000 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016.; "Richard Frederick Fuller" Find a Grave, Richard Frederick Fuller (1824-1869) - Find a Grave Memorial; George Adams, Boston City Directory 1850-1851, 163.
3. “Rocking of the Old Cradle of Liberty,” Liberator, October 18, 1850, 166; "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society.
4. “Temperance Convention at Newton Upper Falls,” Daily Evening Traveller, December 7, 1866, 2; The Late Rev. Arthur B. Fuller,” Liberator, June 12, 1863, 93; “Death of Richard F. Fuller,” Daily Evening Traveller, May 31, 1869, 2; For a digital edition of Fuller’s biography of his brother, see Chaplain Fuller: : Fuller, Richard F. (Richard Frederick), 1824-1869 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. 
5. “Universal Suffrage,” Boston Evening Transcript, July 11, 1865, 4. 
6. “Death of Richard F. Fuller,” Boston Evening Post, May 31, 1869, 2; "Richard Frederick Fuller" Find a Grave, Richard Frederick Fuller (1824-1869) - Find a Grave Memorial.