HENRY INGERSOLL BOWDITCH. 313 



interests which he kept up to the last. He was associated with his 

 classmate, Charles F. Barnard, in the Warren Street Chapel for the 

 education and elevation of the children of the poor, and was superin- 

 tendent of Its Sunday school. Quite late in his life the boys and 

 girls used to come to his office on Saturday afternoons with their little 

 earnings for the savings-bank books which he kept for them. The 

 Unitarian religion then awakening in New England, and its leader, 

 Chanuing, deeply interested him. But he soon outgrew even their 

 limitations, to know no religious creed except that which was common 

 to all who strove to lead pure and noble lives, whether Catholic, 

 Protestant, or Agnostic. While investigating the Lymnaea his micro- 

 scope was his "noblest cathedral for the highest religious thought," 

 he said. 



In 1835, he met one of the great turning points of his life in having 

 by chance been an eyewitness of the famous Garrison mob, during 

 which the young Antislavery agitator was lodged in the Leverett Street 

 jail in Boston, for security from the mob, "composed of gentlemen of 

 property and standing," as it was designated by one of the leading 

 newspapers the next day (October 22). Boiling with indignation. 

 Dr. Bowditch determined to devote his " whole heart to the abolition 

 of that monster slavery. But," he adds in his diary, " even Anti- 

 slavery has never taken me away from constant labor for the eleva- 

 tion of medicine." When he became an Abolitionist, church, state, 

 the Constitution and laws of the country, old friendships, and social 

 ties were against him. He was mocked, sneered at, passed on the 

 street without recognition by his father's old friends ; but his courage 

 never faltered, his faith in humanity and the final triumph of his 

 cause never failed- Without even any feeling of bitterness for such 

 opponents, he labored steadily on, with pistol in one hand carrying 

 the runaway slave in his chaise to a place of safety ; working for the 

 fugitive slave Latimer, arrested and returned from Boston in 1842; 

 agitating the " Great Massachusetts Petition," as a result of which a 

 law was passed forbidding the use of our State jails to detain fugitive 

 slaves, and prohibiting our State officers from helping to return them ; 

 a member of the Vigilance Committee in 1846 and in 1850; secre- 

 tary of the Faneuil Hall Committee in 1846, which appealed to public 

 opinion in Massachusetts on the encroachments of the slave power ; 

 and a co-worker with Parker and Phillips and Garrison in arous- 

 ing the conscience of the nation. Boston was then a small city, and 

 its " society " was rigid and autocratic. The conservative part of the 

 community, accused too by the Abolitionists of being subservient to the 



