Robert R. Crosby

Quick Facts

Significance:

Daguerreotypist, abolitionist, member of the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee

Place of Birth:

Brewster, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

July 28, 1803

Place of Death:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

November 4, 1883

Daguerreotypist and abolitionist Robert R. Crosby served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad.

Born in 1803 in Brewster, Massachusetts, Robert R. Crosby moved to Boston with his wife and daughters in the 1840s. He worked as a daguerreotypist from his shop on Hanover Street.¹ 

Crosby also became involved in the abolition movement in the city. He frequently made donations to a variety of abolitionist efforts, including the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Coupled with his abolitionist work, Crosby involved himself in other reforms including temperance, non-resistance, and protesting the treatment of Native Americans by settlers in the western United States. He also joined fellow abolitionists in signing an anti-war pledge during the Mexican War, seeing it as leading to the expansion of slavery in the country.²

With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, Crosby joined the Boston Vigilance Committee. His contributions to this organization remain unknown. In the later 1850s, however, Crosby ran and advertised a boardinghouse that "could a accommodate a few transient and permanent Boarders."³ That freedom seekers may have been some of the "transient" boarders at Crosby's house is an intriguing, albeit, unsubstantiated, possibility.

Crosby died at 80 years old in Boston in 1883. His friend, and fellow Vigilance Committee member, Robert F. Wallcut, remembered him fondly: 

At the time of our first acquaintance the anti-slavery cause was at the height of its unpopularity, as, no less so, was the cause of total abstinence. In both of these great reforms Mr. Crosby took a lively interest. He was not a platform speaker. A natural diffidence held him back, but, like many others in the rank and file of the anti-slavery and temperance workers, in his private life and conversation he did good service to reform... He was intimate with Garrison and his associates, with whom he was in full accord.⁴

If you are a descendant or researcher of Robert R. Crosby and can provide any further details about his work on the Vigilance Committee, or Underground Railroad at large, please contact us.

Footnotes

1. "Robert R. Crosby," Boston Evening Transcript, November 9, 1883, 2; The Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, Boston Athenaeum, 127. NPS map geolocate Crosby at the approximate location of his business: 58 Hanover Street.
2. Liberator, January 5, 1844, 3; Liberator, Feb 6, 1842, 2; Liberator, February 2, 1849, 3; Liberator February 8, 1850, 3; Liberator February 1, 1850, 3; Liberator, February 7, 1851, 3; Liberator, November 22, 1844, 4; Liberator, April 21, 1848, 3; Liberator, June 23, 1854, 3; "Call for a Meeting in Behalf of the Indians," Liberator, March 2, 1860.
3. Liberator, May 15, 1857, 3.
4. "Robert R. Crosby," Boston Evening Transcript, November 9, 1883, 2.