If historical Concord had to be summed up in one sensational newspaper headline it might read something like, “TINY TOWN THAT TROUNCED BRITISH BATALLION ALSO BELOVED BY BOOKWORMS”. 

Fortunately, most pilgrims to Concord don’t rely on alliterative excerpts of history when they visit, and yet, there’s so much more to our story than armies and authors. In particular, there is a great deal just waiting to be learned about Concord’s African American history, a complex and very human story that far predates our nation. 

A short drive down Monument Street and across from the venerable Old North Bridge, sits a restored early-19th century vernacular farmhouse, such as can be found all over New England. What sets this farmhouse apart is that it belonged to the family of Revolutionary War veteran Caesar Robbins, who was enslaved at birth around 1745. 

Robbins was probably emancipated before or at the time of his enlistment, and may have taken part in the first battle of the American War for Independence on April 19th, 1775. He would later participate in an early alarm in Bennington, Vermont.

After surviving the war, Robbins returned to Concord, married twice, and raised six children in a small dwelling out on the “Great Field”, one of the isolated parts of town where little clusters of African Americans settled. 

In 1823, the settlement there expanded when Caesar’s son, Peter, known as the “big burly son of Caesar”, bought a newly-built farmhouse, along with 13 acres of land.  Humphrey Bennet, the grantor of the land, reserved the ‘easterly half’ for Robbins’ sister, Susan. Susan was married to Jack Garrison, a man who had emancipated himself from slavery in New Jersey, the last state in the north to outlaw it. 

Susan Robbins Garrison was a founding (and only known black) member of the Concord Female Antislavery Society (CFAS), in 1837. While this group sought to promote abolition and equality, the reality both in Massachusetts and other free states was that racial discrimination was still quite common. 

In one instance during a procession in Concord, Jack and Susan’s 12-year-old daughter Ellen was mistreated and “crowded out” when she tried to participate. So when preparations began for the bicentennial celebration in 1835, Susan, wishing to avoid further indignity for her daughter, forbade Ellen to walk in the parade. It was only after Abba Prescott, a white school mate (whose mother was a fellow member of the CFAS), offered to walk with Ellen and hold her hand that Susan relented, and so the two girls defiantly marched together: 

“And notwithstanding the incredulous gaze of the school…[the two girls went holding hands] in the procession...beneath the gaze of curiosity, surprise, ridicule, and admiration.” (Excerpt from Abba Prescott Brooks’ obituary, 1851)

Thus was Ellen’s life-long activism ignited, and a few years later she joined in solidarity for another marginalized group: Cherokee Indians. Along with 200 other Concord women, her mother, and her sister, Ellen signed a petition to Congress protesting the forcible removal of the Cherokee from their ancestral land in Georgia. 

Expanding her advocacy and her world, Ellen left Concord for Boston and participated in a variety of abolitionist campaigns and causes, donating, organizing, signing petitions, and all the while allying herself with some of the area’s leading black and white reformers. 

After a short marriage ended with the untimely death of her first husband, John W. Jackson, Ellen went on to become a school teacher, and was teaching in Rhode Island by 1863. Inspired by President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the American Missionary Association’s goal of establishing schools for freed people in the South, Ellen sent the AMA a letter in which she explained, 

“I have a great desire to go and labor among the Freedmen of the South. I think it is our duty as a people to spend our lives in trying to elevate our own race. For who can feel for us if we do not feel for ourselves, and who can feel the sympathy that we can, who are identified with them?” 

Joining hundreds of other Northern women, both black and white, Ellen became one of the most dedicated teachers in the South’s new schools for freed blacks, helping African Americans of all ages, and often in spite of violent opposition. 

After the Civil War, Ellen’s most public protest would take root and blossom in a train station in Baltimore. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that supposedly put an end to segregation, Ellen and fellow teacher Mary C. Anderson availed themselves of the station’s waiting room that was reserved for whites only. Their reward for bravely trying out the new law in public was to be “forcibly ejected” by the station master. “We were injured in our persons as well as our feelings”, Ellen wrote to the AMA on May 9, 1866, “For it was with no gentle hand that we were assisted from that room and I feel the effects of it still.”  

In what was possibly the first case in the nation to test the effectiveness of the Civil Rights Act, Mary and Ellen – granddaughter of a man who fought for freedom and independence for America - sued the railroad company for discrimination. However, in a pattern of injustice that would become deeply entrenched, the suit was dismissed and courts around the country would fail to extend civil rights protections to African Americans. It would take another century before the country began to uphold its own laws in earnest.  

If “all history is biography”, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, then Concord’s unabridged narrative can only truly emerge through the many voices of its diverse people, and, in sharing these vital stories that lay beyond the half-finished headlines of history. 

To learn more about the lives of Caesar, Peter, Susan, Ellen, and the other residents of the Robbins House, and to explore more of Concord’s history, visit robbinshouse.org.

The Robbins House is home to Concord’s African American history, and one of the only known historic sites commemorating the legacy of a previously enslaved Revolutionary War veteran. 

Concord Tour Company, in partnership with the Robbins House, is proud to offer Concord’s only guided African American History tour, beginning in April 2020, and to pledge 5% of all proceeds to The Robbins House, a non-profit organization. 

Both images courtesy of the Concord Museum - www.concordmuseum.org