ABOLITION AND ASSASSINATION

Bemjamin Franklin

The 14^th April has thrown up a number of connections, apart from the Titanic hitting that iceberg in 1912. In particular, on the 14^th April 1775 The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was formed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was the first American abolition society. It initially held four meetings before being interrupted by the little matter of the American Revolution. 24 men attended the initial meeting, seventeen of whom were Quakers. Thomas Paine was among the Society’s founders. After the Revolution, it was reorganised in 1784, with Benjamin Franklin as its first president.

Tom Paine

Notably the 14^th of April 1774, was a momentous day for Thomas Paine.  In February of 1768 he was taken on by the Excise Office and appointed to the town of Lewes in East Sussex, south east England.

Plaque at the White Hart Hotel, Lewes, Sussex

He lived above a tobacco shop and eventually married his landlord’s daughter Elizabeth Olive. During the course of his employ he joined with excise officers asking Parliament for better pay and working conditions and published a 21page article The Case of the Officers of Excise. This was his first political work. This industrial action led to his being dismissed from the service in the spring of 1774. His marriage and the tobacco shop were failing as well. 

On the 14^th April 1774, to avoid debtor’s prison, he sold up his household possessions to pay his debts. He separated from Olive moved to London, where through a friend George Lewis Scott (Mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society and Commissioner of the Excise) he was introduced to Benjamin Franklin, who suggested he emigrate to America and gave him a letter of recommendation. He left in October 1774, arriving in Philadelphia the 30^th November 1774.

He barely survived the transatlantic voyage. The ship's water supplies were bad, and typhoid fever killed five passengers. On arriving at Philadelphia, he was too sick to debark. Benjamin Franklin's physician, there to welcome Paine to America, had him carried off ship; Paine took six weeks to recover his health. He became a citizen of Pennsylvania "by taking the oath of allegiance at a very early period." In January, 1775, he became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, a position he conducted with considerable ability. In February of 1776, he publish Common Sense –(1- Of the Origin and Design of Governments in general; with concise remarks on the English Constitution; 2-Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession; 3- Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs; 4- Of the present Ability of America, with some Miscellaneous Reflections)

It was exactly one year after selling up everything and changing his life around that he found the time to assist in founding The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.

Four score and seven years after Common Sense, Abraham Lincoln made his speech at the graveyard of Gettysburg in 1863, the same year of his Emancipation Proclamation. Just under two years later on the 14^th April 1865, exactly 90 years after the foundation of America’s first Abolition Society, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln.