Last updated: January 8, 2023
Place
Site of Leverett Street Jail
Authorities used Leverett Street Jail to imprison the freedom seeker George Latimer.1 In early fall 1842, Latimer escaped slavery in Virginia and made his way to Boston. A month later, James Gray, Latimer’s enslaver, came to the city and had him arrested. While awaiting the hearing, authorities held Latimer at this site. Bostonians protested the arrest and “angry crowds milled continuously around the jail.”2 On November 17, the sheriff “under enormous political pressure and fearing a riot, ordered Latimer returned to Gray’s personal custody, declaring that he would never again allow a fugitive to be held in his jail.”3 Gray knew that he could not hold Latimer himself and quickly allowed Bostonians to purchase Latimer’s freedom. The capture and imprisonment of Latimer at Leverett Street Jail inspired a state-wide petition which resulted in the passage of the “Latimer Law” in 1843. This law “forbade any public official in Massachusetts from ‘aiding or abetting the arrest or detention of any person claimed as a fugitive from slavery’ and barred any jail or public building in Massachusetts from being used to detain runaways.”4
1842 map depicting the Leverett Street Jail (Credit: Boston Public Library)
Footnotes
- Site of Leverett Street Jail identified from the following map: George W. Boynton and Samuel Nelson Dickinson, "Plan of the city of Boston," Map, 1842, Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, accessed March 2021, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82m125r.
- Dean Grodzins, “Constitution or No Constitution, Law or No Law: The Boston Vigilance Committees, 1841-1861” in Matthew Mason, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Massachusetts and the Civil War: The Commonwealth and National Disunion (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) 54.
- Grodzins, “The Boston Vigilance Committees, 1841-1861,” 55.
- Grodzins, “The Boston Vigilance Committees, 1841-1861,” 56.