Presented by Paul Romary

Sunday, March 15th @4:00

in the Sanctuary of the West Gloucester Trinitarian Congregational Church, 

488 Essex Ave., Gloucester

In the first half of the 1800’s, a West Gloucester farmer challenged the morals, power and hypocrisy of Gloucester’s elites over the “Original Sin” of the new nation, the enslavement of millions of Africans.

Thomas Haskell was an Abolitionist in a Cape Ann community that paid lip service to the goal of ending slavery while dismissing that movement’s ways and means.

Thomas Haskell’s faith-driven, no-holds-barred demand for immediate emancipation without compensation for slaveholders was a matter of abiding by God’s law. He called out the failure of churches, government, the press and the nation for failing to follow Christ’s example and for undermining the Constitution’s “inalienable truth” of equality for all.

This presentation discusses Haskell’s battle against slavery and his support of the Temperance crusade through his letters to the editor against the backdrop of conflicts and violence that marked the Antebellum decades leading up to the Civil War.

While the nation struggled to find a national identity that could reconcile the tectonic plates that were separating north and south, this fifth-generation farmer and his sister Mehitabel acted fervently on their beliefs.