Charles Turner Torrey

Torrey pushed the abolitionist movement to more political and aggressive strategies, including setting up one of the first highly organized lines for the Underground Railroad and personally freeing approximately 400 slaves.

By the time he was 4 years old, his mother, father, and baby sister had all died from tuberculosis, so he went to live with his maternal grandparents in a part of Scituate that later became Norwell.

His maternal grandfather, once a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, remained active in local affairs, and introduced his grandson to political issues.

However, he relinquished his professional duties to devote himself to anti-slavery activism in Maryland, having come to believe in a much more activist approach than his mentor.

[2] In January 1839, Torrey and colleagues Amos Phelps, Henry Stanton, and Alanson St. Clair, challenged Garrison's leadership at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's Annual meeting.

[4] By the end of 1841, Torrey had tired of the slow pace of political abolitionism and went to Washington, D.C., as a reporter for several abolitionist newspapers.

He immediately began attending black churches and befriending abolitionist members of Congress, especially Joshua Giddings of Ohio.

In January 1842, Torrey, as a reporter, attended a convention of Maryland slaveholders in Annapolis, where he was arrested, charged with writing "incendiary" material, and jailed for four days.

[2] Following his release from jail, Torrey continued using his cover as a reporter but immediately organized an elaborate Underground Railroad route from Washington to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Albany.

Torrey and Smallwood specifically targeted slaves owned by Southern members of Congress and important political figures so as to cause as much public disruption as possible.

He initially regarded his arrest as an opportunity to challenge the constitutional legitimacy of slaveholding in general; if it was not legitimate, then freeing slaves would not be a crime.

[2] He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a monument with a figure of a female slave was erected over his grave.

[11] "Torrey's blood crieth out" became an abolitionist battle cry, and the story of his sufferings and death excited eager interest both in the United States and in Europe, giving new impetus to the anti-slavery cause.