[1] During the early 1830s Concord, like most other cities in North America, was largely pro-slavery with only a small amount of the 2000-person population in support of abolitionism.
[5] The Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society (CFASS) was founded officially in 1837, however there is a longer history to abolitionism in Massachusetts.
[6] A man who went by the name "Felix", possibly an enslaved person working for Mary and Abia Holbrook, was the first black individual to successfully lobby the local government in Boston to question slavery in Massachusetts and in the country.
[8] This petition brought attention to abolitionism which eventually manifested in more abolitionist movements in Massachusetts and slavery's abolition in December 1865.
[9] The conditions for activism and social change became stronger with the colonist's escalating conflict with England during the 1770s, combined with the cumulative frustration of enslaved people as slavery had expanded in Massachusetts between the 1720s and 1760s.
[10] Throughout the 1770s activism took more footholds in society as enslaved and free black Americans along with white abolitionists started petitions, asserted their rights and defined their conditions, wrote letters and enacted change and traction regarding abolition.
This is where he published his "An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World", which called for black unity, equality and the fight against slavery.
[13] The Evangelical Revivalism of the 2nd Great Awakening saw people as capable of working for their own salvation, and the "moral perfection" of society.
[15] Women's public abolitionism was controversial, and the General Association of Massachusetts Congregational Churches criticised their involvement as "obtrusive and ostentatious.
[24][36] Mary Brooks remembered the founding as "an event noticed but little by the inhabitants of the town, or noticed but to be ridiculed; nevertheless an event which is destined to have an immense bearing on the temporal and eternal interests of its founders, and do not a little towards swelling that great tide of humanity, which is finally to turn our world of sin and misery into a world of purity, holiness, and happiness.
[41] In May 1838 Mary Brooks and her stepdaughter Caroline represented Concord at the second meeting of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women.
[45] In 1842 17 men and 108 women signed a petition calling on Massachusetts house to eliminate the state law banning interracial marriage.
[49] The 1843 annual report of the CFASS written by Mary Brooks reflected abolitionism's renewed energy and the "perfectionist spirit of the times.
[36] In August the CFASS sponsored the first annual celebration of the anniversary of West Indian Emancipation, where Waldo Emerson, persuaded by Mary Brooks, made his first "unequivocal" anti-slavery statement.
[59] Petrulionis suggests that the women of the CFASS had a significant influence on their male relatives and friends, encouraging men like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau to take up abolitionism.
[62] On the tenth anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies Emerson expressed his sympathy for slaves, refuted the actions of slavery proponents, and supported the antislavery movement.
[63] In November of 1844 when the New Bedford Lyceum invited him to speak, he declined and boycotted it because he opposed their racist membership policies.
"[65] In an open letter published The Liberator in 1851, Emerson called on citizens to resist it and to use force, if necessary, to provide "substantial help and hospice care for slaves.
[70][71] Less publicly, he helped fugitive slaves escape to Canada, and when a black man in Boston was unjustly convicted of murder, he signed his name to a protest launched by 400 residents.