Thomas Jinnings, May 28, 1841, and others
The summer and fall of 1841 was a busy time for abolitionists as they traveled to various anti-slavery meetings throughout New England. The earliest of numerous incidents on Massachusetts railroads during the summer of 1841 is recorded in a letter written on May 31 by Thomas Jinnings, Jr., describing how three days earlier he had been threatened with violence by a conductor on the Eastern Railroad at Salem, Massachusetts. Having bought a first-class ticket and seated himself in the first-class car, Jinnings was told by the conductor to “accompany him to another car” in accord with the rules of the company. Jinnings appealed to the other passengers in the car. “Several said I had a perfect right to the seat I had occupied, and that it was the conductor’s duty to wait until he had received complaints from the passengers before he ordered my removal. Others called for ‘the rules.’…In rushed baggage masters and brakemen!” The conductor, along with these railroad employees and one of the passengers, then seized Jinnings “like giants, and cried—Clear the road!... For peace sake, I retired to another car.”
Thomas Jinnings, Jr., was the son of a prominent New York City civil rights activist, tailor, and businessman, Thomas L. Jennings (the family used both spellings). Thomas Jinnings had moved to Boston with his brother, and in August 1840 he began advertising his dental services at Dr. Daniel Mann’s office on Summer St. Mann, who was white, was a dentist and a prominent Boston abolitionist. In September 1840 Jinnings himself addressed the Plymouth County Anti-Slavery Society. A discovery by my research partner, Catrin Lloyd-Bollard, revealed that Jinnings is listed in the Harvard catalogue for the academic year 1841-42 as a Medical School student, under the instruction of “D. Mann, M.D,” , although there is no indication of his race. Thomas Jinnings, Jr., therefore, is currently the earliest-known African American to have attended Harvard.
Jinnings’s expulsion from that Eastern Railroad car captured the attention of abolitionists across the state and elsewhere, and notices appeared in various papers. An unsigned letter to the editor of the Bay State Democrat in Boston, on the general subject of the principles of democracy in relation to questions of race and slavery, concludes with a description of the forced removal of Jinnings and a final question asking the Democrat editor, “Is this one of the forms of tyranny to which you declare uncompromising hostility?” Though Jinnings is not named in this piece, it is clearly a reference to that event. On June 4, just a week after the railroad incident, Jinnings participated in a meeting in Boston honoring David Ruggles, supporting the activist minister and editor Henry Highland Garnet, and discussing the formation of a Boston Vigilance Committee on the model of the New York Committee of Vigilance founded in 1835 by Ruggles. Both Jinnings and Mann were elected as members of the executive committee.
Following Jinnings’s removal from the first-class car to which he had a ticket, Black abolitionists and their white allies in Massachusetts that summer began to take stronger action against the racism of railroad executives and employees. In early June an unnamed “highly respectable colored lady and gentleman of Boston” were “rudely refused” to be allowed to ride by the driver of a Cambridge omnibus, even though the lady was in poor health. On June 17, the Cambridgeport Anti-Slavery Society adopted a resolution to investigate “whether the driver aforesaid acted on his own responsibility, or in accordance with any rules or regulations laid down for his guidance by the proprietors.”
Two days later, David Ruggles, who for some years had made a point of buying first-class tickets wherever he traveled and publishing the results when he was denied passage or molested, was denied entry into the cabin of the steamboat from New Bedford to Nantucket. In early July, before he had come to the attention of white abolitionists, Frederick Douglass chaired a “Meeting of Colored Citizens” which unanimously adopted a resolution:
“Resolved, That we consider the unjust assault inflicted on the person of our devoted friend, David Ruggles of New York, Editor and proprietor of the Mirror of Liberty, by Capt. Lot Phinney of steamboat Telegraph, while on his passage from this place to Nantucket, an open violation of the laws of this commonwealth and unworthy the head or heart of any man who claims an inheritance to the Bay State, and we call on the friends of Liberty to discountenance so insufferable an outrage on equal rights. FREDERICK DOUGLAS [sic], Chairman. Edward B. Lawton, Secretary.”
The day before that notice was published on July 7, however, Ruggles was forcibly removed from a train car in New Bedford. Ruggles took the railroad to court, and his account of the case was widely publicized in the abolitionist weekly, The Liberator. Even though the judge ruled in favor of the railroad, Ruggles’s example inspired others to follow suit.
Further instances soon occurred in Massachusetts, including two in which Frederick Douglass was thrown off a train, once holding tightly to the seat and taking it with him, on September 8 and 28. Mary Newhall Green and her infant child were literally thrown off an Eastern Line train in Lynn, Massachusetts, on September 30, and later that same day, the same conductor ejected an unidentified Black man. The conductor was charged with assault, not by that man, but by a white abolitionist who came to his aid – none other than Dr. Daniel Mann, the mentor and partner of Thomas Jinnings.
On October 21 Thomas Jinnings himself was again ejected from a New Bedford train, along with the white abolitionist Hiram Cummings, who was trying to protect him. After describing the melee in some detail in The Liberator (Nov. 12, 1841), Cummings astutely points toward an underlying motive for the conductor’s animosity against Jinnings:
“Mark the cause assigned for the outrage: ‘Damn him, he has abused me enough at New-Bedford.’ He did not state what that abuse was, but pounced upon him like a tiger upon a lamb. He did not turn him out because of the illegal, lynch law rule of the corporation; but to gratify private revenge. This augments the heinousness of the offence.”
Cummings concludes with a stark reminder: “Colored men’s rights are not only annihilated in the South, they are violently wrested from them in the North.”
After returning to New York and getting married, Jinnings moved to New Orleans and established a successful dental supply business. What life was like in that city for an educated northern abolitionist is hard to say, but on one occasion in May 1861, Jinnings and his wife attended a charity bazaar sponsored by several white churches, where, according to the New Orleans Daily Crescent, they committed the inexcusable effrontery of “taking refreshments, and otherwise putting themselves on a par with the white people at the fair.” According to the Daily Picayune, Jinnings was arrested for “intr[u]ding himself among the white congregation…and conducting hisself [sic] in a manner unbecoming the free colored population of this city.” In the course of a judicial hearing before the mayor, it came out that Jinnings and his wife taught both free and slave children in Sunday school, though, their lawyer claimed, only orally, thereby not teaching slaves to read, which would have been illegal. Learning that Jinnings was from Boston, the mayor withheld judgment until it could be determined whether Jinnings should be charged with “being in the State in contravention to law.” Whatever the mayor’s final judgment, Jinnings died in New Orleans in 1862.
An Eastern Railroad train, 1840-41, perhaps the very train from which Thomas Jinnings was ejected.