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A Timely Family History Lesson

Michael Reagan on

“You’re kidding,” I said, not knowing that all of America’s Stearns/Sterns, poet T.S. Eliot and some guy named Richard Nixon are direct descendants of Isaac Stearns.

Cameron was only getting started, however.

Next he told me about Charles Luther Stearns, an American superstar who built a fortune as a merchant and industrialist in the Boston area and in the 1840s became a prominent leader in the North’s anti-slavery movement.

Stearns was no limousine abolitionist.

He financed the settlement of anti-slavery homesteaders in Kansas. He turned his estate into a stop on the Underground Railroad that helped escaped slaves get to Canada. Harriet Tubman was a regular visitor there.

Stearns was also a member of the “Secret Six” that supplied radical abolitionist John Brown with weapons for his failed attack on Harpers Ferry.

 

And during the Civil War he pushed for the enlistment of black soldiers in the Union Army.

Working with his state, he recruited the black infantrymen for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments featured in the movie “Glory.” He also provided schools for the kids of the soldiers and jobs for their families. In his spare time founded several magazines including the Nation.

After emancipation, Stearns pushed hard to advance civil rights for blacks until he died at age 58 in 1867.

It’s no accident that his friends included Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his eulogy.

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Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan, All Rights Reserved. Credit: Cagle.com

 

 

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