Samuel Edmund Sewall

Abolitionist and reformer Samuel E. Sewall

Samuel E. Sewall, A Memoir, Archive.org

Quick Facts

Significance:

Lawyer, Abolitionist, Women's Rights Advocate, Boston Vigilance Committee

Place of Birth:

11/9/1799

Date of Birth:

Boston Massachusetts

Place of Death:

Boston Massachusetts

Date of Death:

12/20/1888

Place of Burial:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cemetery Name:

Mount Auburn Cemetery

Boston lawyer and reformer Samuel Edmund Sewall served on the Boston Vigilance Committee and dedicated himself to the abolition of slavery and equal rights for women.

Born in 1799, Samuel E. Sewall grew up in Boston. He went to high school at Phillips Exeter Academy. Sewall continued his education at Harvard College and then attended Harvard Law School to become a lawyer. In 1836, he married Louisa M. Winslow and had two daughters with her. Following her death in the early 1850s, he married Louisa’s younger sister Harriet in 1857.¹

Samuel E. Sewall descended from jurist Samuel Sewall, who wrote and published The Selling of Joseph, America’s first antislavery tract in 1701. He, therefore, seemed “genealogically ordained” to pursue a career as a reformer. In particular, he dedicated himself to the abolitionist cause.²

An early supporter of William Lloyd Garrison, Sewall helped organize the New England Anti-Slavery Society and subsequent abolitionist groups. He financially assisted Garrison with the publication of his weekly Liberator newspaper. “Had it not been for Samuel E. Sewall,” Garrison said, “I never should have been able to continue the paper. He was the man who gave money again and again, never expecting and never asking for the return of it.”³

Sewall also used his legal prowess to help those escaping slavery. For example, in 1836, he defended Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates, who had escaped from Baltimore, Maryland, aboard a ship. At the court hearing, a crowd, mainly comprised of Black women, ushered the freedom seekers to safety in what became known as the “Abolition Riot.” A relative of the women’s enslaver attacked Sewall with a horsewhip for his role in the case.⁴

Additionally in 1836, Sewall served on the legal team for Med, a young girl brought to Boston by her enslaver from New Orleans. This case, Commonwealth v. Aves, led to Med’s immediate freedom. Furthermore, the state’s highest court ruled that enslaved people voluntarily brought to Massachusetts immediately became free and could not be held against their will as slaves.⁵

In 1842, Sewall served as part of the legal defense team for freedom seeker George Latimer. After Latimer escaped from slavery in Virginia, authorities arrested him in Boston. Though the court ordered that Latimer be returned to his enslaver, Bostonians soon raised funds and purchased his freedom. Sewall’s work with fugitive slave cases, such as Latimer’s, underscored his stated belief that “no human law or constitution can be binding upon us to deliver the fugitive. There is a higher law within us, which binds us to assist the oppressed.”⁶

With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, Sewall joined the third and final iteration of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers coming to and through Boston on the Underground Railroad. Not only did he serve on the Finance Committee of the group, Sewall donated funds to support its work. He also worked to legally defend freedom seekers arrested under this new law, such as Shadrach Minkins and Thomas Sims. Abolitionists successfully rescued Shadrach in a daring courthouse raid but failed in their attempts to free Sims. In response to these efforts in 1851, Sewall said:

Much as I abominate bloodshed, I think it far better that two or three slaveholders and their assistant slave-hunters should be killed than that a man should be dragged back into slavery…I cannot blame a man for fighting for his liberty, or any one else for fighting for him. I have not advocated attempts to rescue in Boston, but it has been simply on the ground that the attempts would probably fail and involved too great a risk. I do not believe that there are many places in Massachusetts, out of Boston, from which the people would not prevent a fugitive from being carried.⁷

In addition to his work in the abolition movement, Sewall also dedicated himself to women’s rights and suffrage. As a lawyer and as a state legislator, he defended women and worked to pass laws in pursuit of equal rights and suffrage. He said:

When men and women are made equals in the eye of the law, and not before, shall we complete the foundations of a just commonwealth, which were laid by the Puritans, strengthened by the Declaration of Independence, and consolidated by the abolition of slavery. Then we may hope, by the united action of both sexes, to regenerate the republic and make it an example for the world and future ages. The experiment of a republic based on equal rights can never be fairly tried while one half of the adult population remains an inferior case, with no voice in the laws which are to govern them.⁸

After a life dedicated in service to others, Sewall passed away in Boston in 1888. In a deliberate break with convention, women, including leading activists Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Mary A. Livermore, served as pall bearers. His remains are interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.⁹

His friend and fellow reformer, poet John Greenleaf Whittier honored him in verse: 

Like that ancestral judge who bore his name,
Faithful to Freedom and to Truth, he gave,
When all the air was hot with wrath and blame,
His youth and manhood to the fettered slave.

And never Woman in her suffering saw
A helper tender, wise, and brave as he;
Lifting her burden of unrighteous law,
He shamed the boasts of ancient chivalry.

Noiseless as light that melts the darkness is,
He wrought as duty led and honor bid,
No trumpet heralds victories like his, -
The unselfish worker in his work is hid.¹⁰

Footnotes:

1. "Samuel Edmund Sewall (1799-1888)," Find a Grave Memorial; “Samuel E. Sewall Passes Away,” Boston Globe, December 21, 1888, 2.
2. Albert J. Von Frank, The Trial of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 54.
3. Nina Moore Tiffany, Samuel E. Sewall, A Memoir (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co, 1898), 38, Samuel E. Sewall, a memoir : Tiffany, Nina Moore : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive, Accessed 1/20/2026.
4. Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1899, (New York: Penguin, 2012), 65-66; Tiffany, 64-65.
5. Tiffany, 66-67.
6. von Frank, 34-36; “The Rescue of Liberty,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, November 10, 1842.
7. "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society; “Fugitive Slave Matters,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 1, 1850, 2; Francis Jackson, 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, https://archive.org/details/drirvinghbartlet19bart/page/n3/mode/2up, 22, 25, 45, 63, 73, 75; Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 17; “Another Fugitive Arrested,” Liberator, April 11, 1851, 2; Tiffany, 80.
8. Tiffany, 127-146, quote from page 142.
9. “Samuel Edmund Sewall (1799-1888), Find a Grave Memorial; “Women for Pall Bearers,” New York Times, December 24, 1888, 5.
10. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Samuel E. Sewall,” found in Nina Moore Tiffany, Samuel E. Sewall, A Memoir (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co, 1898), Samuel E. Sewall, a memoir : Tiffany, Nina Moore : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive, Accessed 1/20/2026.