"Lewis Hayden" (April 7 1811- 1889)

Fugitive slave,abolitionist,and entrepreneur, was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of slave parents whose names are not known.Separated from his family by the slave trade at age ten, he

was eventually owned by five different masters.The first, Presbyterian clergyman traded him for a pair of horses.The second,a clock peddler,took Lewis along on his travels throughout the state,exposing him to the variety of forms that the "peculiar institution"could take.About 1830 he married Harriet Bell, also slave.They had three children;one died in infancy,another was sold away,and a third remained with the couple.Lewis third owner,in the early 1840s,whipped him often.These experiences stirred his passionate personal hatred for bondage.He secretly learned to read and write,using the Bible and old newspaper as study materials.By 1842,when he belonged to Thomas Grant and Lewis Baxter of Lexington,he began to contemplate an escape.Because his last owners hired him out to work in a local hotel,he had greater freedom than most slaves,which made it easier to flee.In September 1844 Lewis,Harriet,and their remaining son were spirited away to Ohio and then on to Canada West (now Ontario,Canada), by local teachers and Underground Railroad agents Calvin Fairbanks and Delia Webster.Following their fight to freedom, the Haydens lived for six months among other refugees in the village of Amherstburg,Canada West.Haunted by memories of those still in bondage,they resettled in the small but triving African American community in Detroit.This heightened their risk of recapture but placed them at the center of a major base of operations of the Underground Railroad.Lewis imersed himself in efforts to build community institutions;he organized a school and church and toured New England during the fall and winter of 1845-1846 to raise funds for the struggling congregation.Finding Boston a larger vehicle for his anti-slavery efforts,he relocated his family there by July 1846.He then traveled for nearly a year as a lecturing agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society,carrying the abolitionist message to dozens of towns in New York,New Jersey,and southern New England.In 1848 he opened a clothing on Cambridge Street in Boston that soon developed into a thriving business.He was, by by 1855,"probably "probably the wealthiest African-American in Boston." After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850,Lewis worked tirelessly to fight its enforcement.He lectured fellow Bostonians on the need for "united and persevering resistance to th [e] ungodly anti-republican law."As a member of the executive board of the Boston Vigilance Committee,which was created to aid and protect fugitive slaves in the city,he often functioned as a liaison between local white and black activists, including members of the Twelfth Baptist Church,to which he belonged.He personally fed and housed hundreds of runaway slaves and used his clothing store to outfit many more."His Beacon Hill residence,"noted one scholar,"was the main Boston depot on the Underground Railroad,harboring at least a quarter of all fugitives who passed through the city."One one occasion, Harriet Beecher Stowe  visited the Hayden home and found thirteen escaped slaves on the premises.Protecting refugees from bondage often became a public matter. Lewis openly resisted the law in the case of William Craft and Ellen Craft in 1850, the resue of Shadrach Minkins from federal custody in 1851,and the attempted rescues of Thomas Sims in 1851 and Anthony Burns in 1854.In the Craft case,he stacked kegs of gunpowder in basement and threatened to ignite it if slave catchers attempted to enter the house to capture the couple. He was arrested but not convicted for his prominent role in the Minkins and Burns incidents. In 1855 his testimony before the Massachusetts legislature helped prompt the passage of a strong personal-liberty law to protect fugitive slaves in the state.The panic of 1857 brought financial reversals  and forced him to move his clothing business into a smaller store,which was soon destroyed by fire.In the midst of this personal crisis,he continued his anti-slavery radicalism.He hosted John Brown during several visits to Boston between 1857 and 1859,was privy to his insurrection plans,and even raised funds for the effort.Lewis was appointed to the office of messenger to the Massachusetts secretary of state in July 1858.This provided some financial comfort and offered a vantage point from which to influence key officials in the state government.After the administration of President Abraham Lincoln sanctioned the enlistment of African American troops in the middle of the Civil War, Lewis successfully lobbied Governor John A. Andrew to organize the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Colored Infantry Regiment,the first black unit in the North.He then raised volunteers for the regiment and two other black units in Canada West and the northern United States.When the war ended Lewis found new outlets for his energies.He focused much of his attention on the Masonic Movement among African Americans.Named grand master of the Prince Hall Lodge in Boston and deputy master of the National Grand Lodge,he traveled through Virginia and the Carolina's, in 1856 to organize new lodges among the former slaves.After returning to Boston,he delivered dozens of lectures  and penned several pamphlet's attacking racial discrimination among the Masons and defending the legitimacy of black Masonic lodges,including Caste among Masons (1866),Grand Lodge furisdictional Claims;or,War of Races (1868),and Masonry among Colored Men in Massachusetts (1871).Active in Republican Party Politics,Lewis was elected in 1873 to the Massachusetts senate.In the 1880s he successfully campaigned for the erection of  a monument in Boston to Crispus Attucks,a black hero of the American Revolution.In their later years Lewis and Harriet contributed much of their personal wealth to local cultural institutions,including the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.They posthumously donated five thousands dollars to establish a scholarship for black students at Harvard and particularly for those at the Harvard Medical School.After his death, in Boston,abolitionist and prominent African Americans lionized Lewis as one of the heroes of the antislavery struggle.