The Abiel Smith School: Landmark in the Fight for Equal Education

From Sketches of Boston, Past and Present published in 1851.

The Abiel Smith School, opened in 1835, was the first building constructed in the United States for the sole purpose of educating Black students. While the opening of the Smith School on what was once Belknap Street in Beacon Hill marked a historic moment in access to education for Black Americans, it must also be noted that this was a segregated school and remained as such until 1855. Today, the Abiel Smith School is the first building patrons enter while visiting the Museum of African American History on Beacon Hill.

During the 1780s and 1790s, Black Bostonians advocated for their children’s access to education through petitions to the state legislature; then, in 1798, they organized the African School, which first met in the home of Primus Hall and then moved to the first floor of the African Meeting House in 1808. Black children enrolled in Boston public schools moved to the African School at this time, fully segregating Black students from their white peers. The Boston School Commission received many complaints from the community about the African School’s deteriorating conditions and overcrowding, and a study by the Commission confirmed the school’s inadequacies.

In 1815, a white businessman named Abiel Smith died and bequeathed $4,000 for the education of African American children in Boston. The school committee used a portion of Smith's funds to construct the Abiel Smith School, which then opened on March 3, 1835. The conditions in the Smith School proved inferior to those of the white schools in Boston, and Black Bostonians continued the fight for equal education. Boston’s population, including the city’s Black community, grew rapidly in the 1830s and 1840s. The Smith School quickly overcrowded. Just three years after the Smith School opened, Primus Hall and others petitioned unsuccessfully to add an additional story to the building; by 1845, a report found the school to be in “deplorable condition.”

Slate and pencils from the Abiel Smith School. Image courtesy of Smith Court Stories 

Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Bostonians in the Equal Schools movement led petition drives, protests, and eventually a boycott of the Smith School. One activist named Benjamin Roberts filed suit on behalf of his daughter Sarah against the Boston School Committee in 1849, as he wanted his daughter to be able to attend the school closest to their home rather than the Smith School. When they lost the lawsuit, the Equal Schools movement took the fight to the state legislature; as a result, public school segregation in Massachusetts was outlawed in 1855. The Abiel Smith School briefly closed, later reopening as an integrated primary school while also serving as a city storage facility. The Smith School building later housed a Grand Army of the Republic chapter and the James E. Welch Post #56 of the American Legion before becoming what it is today – an integral part of the Museum of African American History.

The Abiel Smith School has been featured in some of our past exhibits, including Massachusetts Architectural Styles and Education in the Commonwealth: A Timeline.

Alyssa Persson

Processing Archivist

Sources:

• Boston African American National Historic Site, NPS
• Smith Court Stories
• The Museum of African American History

Video Spotlight: Creating and Using Your State Library Account

State employees, do you have a library card? If not, do you know how to request one? Our video tutorial walks you through the process of signing up for a library card from the State Library. We also show you how to search the catalog, find a book owned by our library, and how to request a book owned by other libraries.

The video walks you through this process, but just so you have the links handy, you can request a library card on our website. Once you have a card, go to our catalog and log in to get started. There you can look at Your Account where you can see what books you have checked out, manage your holds, and more. You are then ready to start searching for and requesting books.

As you’re searching, if you find a book we don't own, you’ll be able to request it from another library. The State Library is part of the CWMARS consortium, so our catalog will display books owned by our library and by other CWMARS libraries. We’ll learn more about the CWMARS consortium in a future blog post, so stay tuned!

Turning back to searching our catalog, let’s walk through an example. Take this keyword search for “William Bradford.” You’ll see that CWMARS libraries own 409 items total about William Bradford, while the State Library owns 156. You can click on those four tabs along the top to limit your search results. If the State Library doesn’t own a book you’re looking for, you won’t see a tab for our library in your search results.

If you do find a book you’re interested in and we don’t own it, log into your library account, find it in our catalog, click on “Place Hold,” and fill out the very brief request form. That’s it! The book will then be delivered right to the State Library and you’ll get an email letting you know when it has arrived. You can pick up requested books during our open hours (Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm).

This video makes learning how to use your library card quick and easy, but if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at Reference.Department@mass.gov or 617-727-2590.


Jessica Shrey
Legal Research Reference Librarian

Genevieve Estelle Jones and the Baltimore Oriole

We're in Massachusetts, so why is Maryland's state bird, the Baltimore Oriole (plate 12), on display in our Audubon case? The answer is that we are using it to promote the work of Genevieve Estelle Jones, who is sometimes referred to as the "other Audubon," for Women's History Month. Not to mention that the blooms of the tulip tree, where the orioles are perched, is a welcome reminder that spring is on its way.

Genevieve Estelle Jones was born in 1847 in Circleville, Ohio.  Her interest in ornithology started as a young child, when she was drawn to identifying the nests and eggs associated with different birds, and it was seeing the nest of the Baltimore oriole that first caught her attention. As a adult, Jones saw a display of Audubon prints when she visited Philadelphia's Centennial Exhibition in 1876, and noted that the prints did not usually include a depiction of nests or eggs. [Interestingly, the Baltimore Oriole is an exception to this, as the unusual hanging pouch-like nest is featured prominently in this print.] After identifying this omission, Jones was inspired to produce drawings of nests and eggs, which was ultimately published as Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, and can be seen as a companion piece to Audubon's Birds of America. Sadly, Jones only completed five of the drawings before she succumbed to Typhoid fever and died in 1879. Her parents and her brother continued the project after her death, and the two-volume set was completed in 1886. Like Birds of America, it was published by subscription

Genevieve Estelle Jones is not as well-known an artist or ornithologist as John James Audubon, but we're glad for the opportunity to use the print of Baltimore Oriole to tell a little bit of her story. We don't have a copy of Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio in our collection, but you can view it in its entirety through the Internet Archive.

Be sure to visit us from March 11 through April 8 to see the Baltimore Oriole on display. And revisit our Audubon from last March's Women's History Month display, when we shared the blue bird and explained its significance to the Massachusetts Women Suffrage Association.

Elizabeth Roscio

Preservation Librarian

Adventures in Early Legal Citations

If you’re not used to working with legal citations, encountering them for the first time can be a less-than-pleasant experience. This is doubly true when it comes to tracking down older cases. In this blog post, I’ll use one of our past research questions to point out useful resources and hopefully demystify some of the process of tracking down old cases.

A few months ago, my colleagues and I received a request for help with locating cases from the first half of the 19th century. Initially, the patron just gave us the names of the parties and the dates of the cases, e.g., Paul Moody vs. Johnathan Fiske et.al., 1820. Ideally, we would have the title of the reporter, its volume number, and the page number on which the case was printed. We reached out to the patron and asked if they could send us any more info (this reference question was being asked via email, which caused a bit of a time delay).

In the meantime, we started reading through the guide our friends at the Trial Court Libraries compiled: Historical Massachusetts Cases. This source is invaluable when researching old cases (especially ones that occurred pre-statehood). In ye olden times, cases were published in reporters named after whichever judge was the “Reporter of Decisions” at the time. The various titles Allen, Cushing, Grey, Metcalf, and Pickering correspond to the following: Charles Allen (1861-1867); Luther Stearns Cushing (1848-1853); Horace Grey (1854-1860); Theron Metcalf (1840-1847); and Octavius Pickering (1822-1839). Eventually, these got reprinted in Massachusetts Reports (you use this guide to figure out which volumes here); however, older works will sometimes cite to these “nominative” reporters rather than Massachusetts Reports (Mass. Reports). Eventually the patron got back to us with more details: Paul Moody vs. Johnathan Fiske et.al., October 1820, U.S. Circuit Court, Massachusetts District. Plot twist: this isn’t a Massachusetts case – it’s a federal one. Your clue is “U.S. Circuit Court.” You can learn more about the federal court system here. Without getting too deep into the details, the basic points are that within the federal system, each state is its own District, multiple Districts make up a Circuit, and a Circuit shares the same Court of Appeals. Massachusetts, along with Maine, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico and Rhode Island make up the First Circuit and thus share the First Circuit’s Court of Appeals. The image below shows what states belong to which Circuits:

Map of how the federal courts are split into twelve regional circuits and one Federal Circuit

You can learn more about the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts here. [Side note: the Court for the District of Massachusetts shouldn’t be confused with the District Courts which are part of the Massachusetts Trial Court system. These courts are all over Massachusetts in every judicial district. You can also search district courts (and other trial courts) by county.] Long story short, the patron is trying to find a federal case. Depending on the resources you have available, there’s a relatively simple way of doing this and there’s a more convoluted way, guess which one we chose to use!

Starting with the simpler rout, if you have access to Westlaw, you can enter the beginning of the case title into the search Moody v. Fiske and select the one that has the matching date info. Ta-da!

 If you don’t have access to a proprietary legal database (or if you’re a glutton for punishment), you will need to find out which reporter published this case. Federal cases decided in courts lower than the Supreme Court are published in the Federal Reporter (Supreme Court cases are printed in the US Reports – that’s a whole other thing that I’m not going to get into in this post). Because the Federal Reporter didn’t start publishing cases until 1880, and because our case is from 1820, we need to look at the Digest of Decisions of the United States Circuit and District Courts, from 1789 to 1880, As Contained in the Thirty Volumes of The Federal Cases. Luckily, this is fully digitized on HathiTrust:

Use the text search feature to search “Moody v. Fiske” (in quotes). You’ll get a couple of hits, the one you want is the full citation that tells you where this was originally published.

The scan isn't that great, but it says: MOODY v. FISKE [9,745], 2 Mason, 112; 1 Robb, Pat. Cas. 312. The number in brackets is the case number which you can look up in The Federal Cases (also available on HathiTrust) – number 9,745 is on page 655 in volume 17. This is the print version of what you would find on Westlaw:

If you want to go the extra mile and see what this case looked like before it was reprinted here, go past [9,745] to where the citation reads 2 Mason, 112. This means that the case was originally published in volume 2 of the US Circuit Court Reports when it was overseen by William P. Mason, sometimes called Mason's United State Circuit Court Reports. (Learn more about reporting early Federal Court decisions here.) The formal title you’ll want to search is: Reports of cases argued and determined in the Circuit Court of the United States for the First Circuit : containing the cases determined in the districts of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island

Once again, HathiTrust comes through for us and has these volumes online. We’ve established that we need volume 2, so we select that one:

Once we’re in volume 2, we then scroll down to page 112 and find the case:

There you have it. If you made it all the way to the end of this blog post without defenestrating the device with which you are reading said blog post, I commend you!


Maryellen Larkin,
Government Documents & Reference Librarian

Sources:

• https://www.mass.gov/person/charles-allen
• https://www.mass.gov/person/luther-stearns-cushing
• https://www.mass.gov/person/horace-gray-jr
• https://www.mass.gov/person/theron-metcalf
• https://www.mass.gov/person/octavius-pickering
• https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/court-role-and-structure
• https://www.mad.uscourts.gov/
• https://guides.loc.gov/case-law/federal-courts
• https://www.fjc.gov/history/spotlight-judicial-history/reporting-decisions

On Display: The Influence of Woman

Happy Women’s History Month! In March, we try to find an item to share in our Collection Spotlight case to highlight Women’s History, and this year we are excited to display a two-page print entitled The Influence of Woman, as printed in Harper’s Weekly in 1862. Harper’s Weekly was a weekly periodical with a masthead that proclaimed it as a “journal of civilization” covering national and international news and politics, art and sciences, literature, wit, and fashion. It was published in New York from 1857 through 1916, and our Special Collections holdings include a full run of the print publication. Harper’s Weekly was especially popular during the Civil War, when this print was published, and often featured prints of battlefield engravings by Winslow Homer and photographs by Mathew Brady.

The original engraving of The Influence of Woman is attributed to Winslow Homer, and it depicts the many pivotal ways that women contributed to the wartime effort during the Civil War. The image was printed on the entirety of two pages in the September 6, 1862 edition of Harper’s, and a column of text on the next page provided further explanation of the image. Under the heading “Our Women and the War” was the following text:

Our artist has entitled the large picture which we publish on pages 568 and 569 “The Influence of Woman.” It illustrates, in effect, what women may do toward relieving the sorrows and pains of the soldier. In one corner will be seen that exquisite type of angelic womanhood, the Sister of Charity, watching at the bedside of a dying soldier, ever ready to relieve his wants and minister to his desires. On the other side a lady-nurse is writing, at the dictation of a poor wounded fellow, a letter to the friends far away, which shall relieve their terrible anxiety. Above, a group of young ladies are busily engaged, with needle and sewing-machine, in making clothing for the troops, and especially those comfortable garments which even our prodigal Government does not deem it necessary to supply. One can almost see the fairy fingers fly along the work. Last of all, honest Biddy, who has probably got a lover or a husband or a brother at the war, is doing her part in helping the soldiers by washing for them. The moral of the picture is sufficiently obvious; there is no woman who can not in some way do something to help the army.

In the Crimean War glory and fame awaited the charitable efforts of Florence Nightingale and her noble band of lady-nurses. This war of ours has developed scores of Florence Nightingales, whose names no one knows, but whose reward, in the soldier’s gratitude and Heaven’s approval, is the highest guerdon woman can ever win.

"Miss Clara Barton -
Photographed by [Mathew] Brady,
Washington, D.C."

The actions shown in the print are not a comprehensive representation of the ways that women supported soldiers during the Civil War, but it does highlight several actions that women took to contribute. The text also refers to Florence Nightingale and her work training nurses during the Crimean War, but had this print been published a little later in the Civil War, it might have instead mentioned the work of Clara Barton. Throughout the Civil War, Barton solicited and delivered supplies to battlefields and tended to wounded soldiers; she was often referred to as the “angel of the battlefield.” Though she began providing aid to soldiers as early as 1861, her work expanded as the war progressed, and in 1864, she was named the head nurse for General Benjamin Butler’s units (sidenote: Benjamin Butler later served as Massachusetts Governor, 1883-1884). Massachusetts can claim a connection to Barton, as she was born in North Oxford, Massachusetts in 1821, and one of the ways that she received much needed supplies for nursing was by placing advertisements in Massachusetts newspapers. You can read more about Clara Barton, including her founding of the American Red Cross and her role in women's suffrage, on the National Women’s History Museum website. Shown here is her portrait, published in the July 21, 1866 issue of  Harper’s Weekly.

The Influence of Woman is on display in our reading room from March 4 through April 1, so stop by to take a look. If you’d like to read about a few of our previous Women’s History displays, check out the links below:

“The Nonsense of It: Short Answers to Common Objections Against Woman Suffrage” (1870) and the 1917 edition of The Woman Suffrage Year Book

Why Women Should Vote, published by the National American Woman Suffrage Association 

Elizabeth Roscio

Preservation Librarian

State Library Newsletter - March Issue

Happy March! In this month's newsletter, read about the various Women's History Month displays found in our library, along with information about our upcoming Author Talk (complemented by a special loaned item), and our new wildflower exhibit!

Pictured here is a preview, but the full issue can be accessed by clicking here. And you can also sign up for our mailing list to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox.

Welcome Home Big George

This month the State Library is thrilled to announce that in honor of author Jeffrey Boutwell’s visit to discuss his new book, Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy, we have partnered with the State House Art Commission to bring Governor George Sewall Boutwell’s bust into the reading room so it can be on display throughout the month of March.

Boutwell served as governor of Massachusetts from 1851 to 1853. His illustrious career in government includes; First Commissioner of Internal Revenue Service 1862-1863, U.S. Representative 1863-1869, Secretary of the Treasury 1869-1873, and U.S. Senator 1873-1877.

The large solid marble Boutwell bust (28 x 26 x 13”) was created by sculptor Martin Milmore in 1869/1870. While doing some research about this sculpture, it turns out that the first home for this piece of art was the State Library! In 1871 the Massachusetts legislature accepted the bust donation from Isaac Rich with the intention that it be placed in the State Library.

Further investigation shows that about 27 years later, according the Saturday, January 29, 1898 edition of the The Daily Item (Lynn, Massachusetts), the bust was placed in the State House’s Senate chamber to commemorate Governor Boutwell’s 80th birthday and where he started his legislative career. 

Excerpt from The Daily Item 

The sculpture lived in the Senate chamber for about 119 years, until another Senate chamber renovation in 2017. The Boutwell bust was taken out of the chamber and sent out to be cleaned, and then remained in storage until it made this trip back to the State Library. It has been over a century’s journey for this beautiful work of art, and the State Library is happy to have the radiant Governor Boutwell bust back on display.

Martin Milmore (1844-1883), the artist that created this sculpture, is known for his Civil War sculptures and for his classical statuary and busts of notable men throughout New England. Milmore’s most important work of art was the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Boston Common. Other notable sculptures by Milmore included the statue of Revolutionary War hero John Glover (1875) on Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston, the bust of Senator Charles Sumner (1875) at the U.S. Senate Chamber in Washington, and the American Sphinx Monument (1872) and Copenhagen Monument (1874), both at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Discovering the history of the Boutwell bust and its journey in the State House has made finding space in the reading room extra special, so we endearingly nicknamed the sculpture Big George. Please come visit the State Library throughout March to see Big George and attend Jeffrey Boutwell’s author talk on March 5 at noon to learn more about this radical Republican and champion of democracy.

Dava Davainis
Assistant Director/Head of Reference and Information Services