Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

Decades later, Henry Wilson, a political veteran from Massachusetts, wrote a multivolume history of the Civil War era in which he devoted an entire chapter to the struggle to defend the rights of free Black sailors in southern ports. Wilson was in the Massachusetts statehouse during the tumultuous 1840s, having first been elected to office as a Whig in 1840. A staunch opponent of slavery and racial discrimination, he worked for repeal of the state’s law banning interracial marriage and battled racial discrimination aboard railroads and in public schools. Looking back decades later, he recalled the sense of frustration in Massachusetts after Hoar’s and Hubbard’s missions had failed. The state’s “colored citizens, guilty of no crime, were still doomed, though in the pursuit of their lawful avocations, to arrests, imprisonments, fines, and, for a second offence, to be sold at public sale as slaves,” he wrote.