This is Part One of a three-part series on the Callahan and Osgood families of Andover, Massachusetts, showing how their lives came to reflect the North-South divide over slavery in the early 19th century.
Dorcas (Pettengill) Callahan (1780-1869) and Isaac Osgood (1793-1873) lived in the same household in Andover when they were growing up, back when the United States was a brand-new country. But their lives went in opposite directions in adulthood. Dorcas became an antislavery activist in Andover, while Isaac moved to Louisiana, bought and expanded a sugar plantation, and enslaved hundreds of people. In this three-part series, I’ll tell the life stories of Dorcas and Isaac side by side, to illustrate the social context of the conflict over slavery that roiled the country in the 19th century.
Shared beginnings in Andover
Dorcas’s father died before she was even two and her mother didn’t remarry, which left the two of them in financial hardship. When Dorcas was old enough to be useful, she was “put out” to the Andover home of Timothy and Sarah Osgood, where she probably helped with cooking and washing and childcare. The arrangement was pretty common. A poor girl would help out a wealthy family for a while, in exchange for the room and board her own family could not afford.
Timothy Osgood was a gentleman farmer, town selectman, and state representative, a sixth-generation descendant of one of Andover’s founders. He owned several hundred acres of land in the north part of town, today the separate town of North Andover. His brother Samuel Osgood held powerful positions at the national level: delegate to the Continental Congress, first Postmaster General of the U.S., and Commissioner of the Treasury. Several locations in North Andover, including Osgood Street, Osgood Hill, Osgood Landing, and Osgood Pond still carry the family name.
Map of Andover in 1830 by Moses Dorman, showing home of “T. Osgood” west of “Great Pond”, today Lake Cochichewick
In the 1700s, slavery was legal in Massachusetts. Wealthy households often enslaved one or more African or Native American “servants,” as they were called, and legal documents would mention them, for example this will from 1777: “I also give unto my beloved Wife all my indoor moveables, viz, Household Furniture, and Utensils of housekeeping, and my Negro girl named Cate for her use and to her Disposal.”
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Before the Declaration of Independence was signed, enslaved people in Andover and other Massachusetts towns had began suing their enslavers in court to secure their freedom. In Andover alone, at least eight such freedom suits were filed between 1768 and 1779, four of them against four different Osgoods, including Timothy’s brother Peter. After 1780, Massachusetts judges increasingly decided in favor of the enslaved, finding slavery incompatible with the newly-adopted state constitution.
Dorcas was white, and free. She arrived in Timothy and Sarah Osgood’s home at a time when former enslavers and enslaved in Andover were negotiating the shifting terrain, financially and socially. White residents may have agreed that Black workers deserved compensation for their labor and the option to go elsewhere, but they rarely treated their Black neighbors as equals. North Parish and South Parish, like most Northern churches, still required Black churchgoers to sit in a segregated section. Black residents no doubt valued their freedom, but financially they were handicapped by generations of unpaid labor, and by ongoing racial prejudice. Some moved to cities with larger Black communities like Boston or Salem, but others remained in town, often struggling to support themselves and their family members.
I’ve seen no evidence that Timothy Osgood enslaved people. Even so, young Dorcas would have cooked and cleaned alongside Black domestic workers on visits with Osgood family members and others in their social circle.
In 1793, when Dorcas was 13 years old, baby Isaac was born to Timothy and Sarah. As their live-in help, Dorcas probably changed Isaac’s diapers and kept him away from the hearth. More Osgood babies followed, and Dorcas would have cared for them too, until her time came to marry and raise a family.
In 1802, Dorcas married Robert Callahan, a Scots-Irish tanner who had also grown up fatherless in Andover. Over the next twenty years Dorcas gave birth to their nine sons and two daughters. In an era of high infant mortality, the Callahans were a robust lot; nine of their children grew to adulthood. Their sons William, James and Robert learned the trade of stone masonry. Henry, the family scholar, attended Phillips Academy. But the Callahans weren’t wealthy and never owned property. They raised their children in a rented house.
Isaac establishes himself in the South
Isaac Osgood entered adulthood ready to try his hand at earning some real money. If you were an ambitious young man in the 1810s and 20s, the South was where you wanted to be. There the booming economy offered opportunities greater than anything a gentleman farmer’s son could find in Massachusetts. As the federal government ramped up its campaign to forcibly remove Native Americans from the Deep South, white planters were snapping up expropriated lands there, and newly-arrived entrepreneurs found clients with money to spend. Isaac initially set up a grocery business in New Orleans in 1818, in partnership with fellow Andoverite Joseph Chandler. They sold imported goods like tea and brandy, and later ran a brokerage business buying and selling sugar and molasses from Louisiana plantations.
Orleans Gazette and Commercial Advertiser April 28, 1818
But by 1830, Isaac Osgood had parlayed his success as a merchant into even bigger plans. He married into a slaveholding family that nominally resided in New York but drew its wealth from their Louisiana plantations. After his wife Jane’s uncle George Bradish died in 1835, Isaac purchased from his estate a half ownership in Magnolia Plantation. For $90,000, payable in interest-free installments over seven years, Isaac became part owner of a working sugar plantation on the banks of the Mississippi in Plaquemines Parish, 46 miles south of New Orleans. His money paid for the land, dwelling house, sugar house, storehouse, “negro cabins,” cattle, horses, farming equipment, household furniture, and 117 enslaved persons.
I’m including an image of the legal notice of his purchase, as published in the New Orleans Bee on April 30, 1836. It’s a long article, because it lists the names and ages of each one of the Black men, women and children conveyed as property to Isaac Osgood.
New Orleans Bee April 30, 1836
Isaac then moved with his wife Jane, daughter Jane, and son Howard into a home befitting a prosperous sugar planter. Their Magnolia Plantation house had been built in 1795 by enslaved builders working for his wife’s uncle George Bradish and his business partner William M. Johnson. Isaac and Jane and their two children lived in the home pictured below; their 117 Black workers lived in the “negro cabins” nearby.
Magnolia Plantation 1795 “Crumbling Monument to Sugar”
For decades the Osgoods remained Louisiana neighbors and business partners with the Johnson family, specifically George W. Johnson and his brother Bradish Johnson. Today, Bradish Johnson is remembered as one of the owners of Whitney Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana, now a museum devoted to educating the public about the history and legacies of slavery in the United States. If you visit the Whitney Plantation museum, you’ll get a sense of what life was like in the 19th century for the people working on Isaac Osgood’s nearby sugar plantation.
The Callahan family - thriving but not wealthy
Meanwhile, up in Massachusetts Dorcas and Robert Callahan were seeing their own children mature and find work. Their stone mason sons probably kept busy in the building boom that brought factories, new homes, and a railroad to Andover. Their son Augustus worked in the Marland Woolen Mills. Their daughter Lydia lived with them. And Henry, the scholar, graduated from Union College and began attending Andover Theological Seminary, preparing for a career as a minister.
The antislavery movement was heating up
Massachusetts had begun phasing out slavery in the 1780s, and in 1833 Britain had abolished slavery in its colonies, including Canada. Since the founding of the United States, Northerners had watched as the incorporation of new states Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri and Arkansas greatly expanded the regions open to slavery. They’d watched as the country’s enslaved population doubled from 1810 to 1840 — from 1.2 million to 2.5 million persons. And they could see more territories, like Texas and Florida, poised to be admitted as slave states. The situation felt urgent, and the time felt ripe.
A widespread religious revival in the 1820s and 30s also spurred New Englanders, especially women, to put their faith in action and confront American slavery as a sin to be eradicated. Concerned citizens in Andover and other towns organized to spread the message through various means. In local antislavery societies, they discussed abolitionist newspapers like The Liberator, raised funds, hosted public lectures by abolitionist speakers, and conducted monthly “concerts of prayer for the slave.” They also began petitioning Congress, a right enshrined in the First Amendment.
Southern opposition was heating up too
Annoyed at all the antislavery petitions showing up in Washington DC, slavery defenders in control of Congress flexed their muscle. In 1836 they passed the gag rules, forbidding all discussion of slavery in the House. The Senate passed rules with a similar effect. But attempts to silence the Northern activists only fueled their outrage. So from 1836 to 1839 Northerners flooded Congress with even more petitions. And while Congress simply dumped these petitions into boxes unrecorded and unread, abolitionist newspapers regularly published details of the petitions sent, including the towns they were sent from, the number of signers, and whether signed by men or women or both. Thus, Northerners knew the scale of the opposition that Congress was choosing to ignore.
The Callahans were protesting slavery
Dorcas Callahan, her daughter Lydia, and 215 other Andover women signed a petition in 1837 opposing the annexation of Texas as a slave state. With a town population of roughly 5000 people, the signers represented around 10% of the adult women of Andover.
1837 petition to U.S. Congress from women of Andover, MA. Image from Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives and Records Administration
Later that year, Dorcas and Lydia’s signatures appeared on the petition of 198 Andover women to end slavery in the District of Columbia.
Six Callahan men signed similar petitions. As expected, none of these petitions were viewed or discussed in Congress.
Dorcas and Robert may or may not have known that her former charge Isaac Osgood had become a major slaveholder in Louisiana. But the Callahan family — Dorcas, her husband Robert, daughter Lydia, and five sons — continued advocating to end the practice that was making Isaac rich.
In 1838 Dorcas and Lydia, along with 179 other Andover women, signed another petition to Congress seeking to end slavery in the District of Columbia, with this text:
The undersigned women of Andover, county of Essex, deeply convinced of the sinfulness of Slavery, and keenly aggrieved by its existence in part of our country over which Congress possesses exclusive jurisdiction in all cases whatsoever, do most earnestly petition your honorable body, immediately to abolish Slavery in the District of Columbia, and to put an end to the slave trade in the United States.
We also respectfully announce our intention to present the same petition, yearly, before your honorable body, that it may at least be a memorial of us, that in the holy cause of Human Freedom “we have done what we could.”
The following year, as promised, the Andover women persisted. Dorcas and Lydia and new daughter-in-law Mary signed two subsequent petitions calling on Congress to end slavery in DC. The Callahan men also signed two similar petitions. With this ongoing campaign, abolitionists were pointing out the deep hypocrisy of Congress: states’ rights had nothing to do with slavery in the District of Columbia, because DC was never a state. Even so, Congress continued to ignore all these petitions. Owning slaves remained legal in our nation’s capitol until 1862, two years after the Civil War began.
View of the interior of the jail in Washington - Fanny Jackson
Up next…
In Part Two of this story, I’ll write about how the stakes were raised in the 1840s and 1850s.
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This is so interesting, Chris . You should write a book . Nancy