As an antidote to the gloom of war in September 1864, New Bedford residents organized a gala bicentennial celebration to honor the incorporation of Dartmouth township, the city’s political precursor. This impressive civic event illuminated contemporary perceptions of the city and its citizens in wartime. City Hall hosted a banquet for six hundred guests where speaker after speaker connected New Bedford with national leaders and pressing issues of the war. Addressing New Bedford’s unique historical context and praising city leaders for their cooperation with President Lincoln and Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, speakers also highlighted the ordinary men fighting for...

New Bedford was widely known in the antebellum era for its whaling, wealth, and staunch antislavery environment. The city’s mayors stood as virtuous leaders who opposed slavery, favored temperance, and believed that public funds should be used to help the destitute—within reason. Local philanthropic organizations reflected religiously oriented and interdenominational values, embodied best in the New Bedford Port Society. The New Bedford Free Public Library and generous poor relief stood as evidence of the liberal views of city leaders. New Bedford was a port city with a diverse population, some of it transient and poor. Periodic urban disorders suggested...

The former fugitive slave Frederick Douglass recalled that his one-time home of New Bedford had offered the “nearest approach to freedom and equality that [he] had ever seen.”¹ New Bedford’s magnetic pull for southern-born blacks was illustrated by a dozen fugitive slave narratives, including Douglass’s famousNarrative, associated with the city, as Kathryn Grover has noted.² African Americans enjoyed a relatively privileged position throughout the antebellum era as they created their own organizations, participated in political events of the day, and stepped into public roles tied to growing antislavery sentiment. Writing in the late 1850s, Daniel Ricketson observed that “the...

During the secession winter of 1860–61, many of New Bedford’s residents supported the victorious Republican Party while expressing anxiety about the prospects of war. When new Massachusetts Governor John Andrew offered his inaugural address on January 5, 1861, he advocated military preparations because fewer than 6,000 men stood on active volunteer duty out of 155,000 enrolled in the state’s militia. Privately, Andrew sent dispatches to each of the New England governors warning them of his worries about war.¹ In New Bedford, Matthew Howland privately wrote about the “great excitement” over Southern secession and complained that his city faced “great...

When William Logan Rodman died in May 1863 at Port Hudson, Louisiana, fellow officer Frank Loring wrote a letter of condolence to Rodman’s family in New Bedford. As the Lieutenant Colonel was ordering his men to advance, Loring related, Rodman was shot through the heart, “dying instantly and without pain.” Officers and rank-and-file soldiers of the Thirty-Eighth Massachusetts held their lieutenant-colonel in high regard and his death prompted an unusual degree of sadness and regret. “To the regiment his loss will be irreparable,” Loring continued. “Its excellent reputation for discipline and morals was due chiefly to him and his just...

When war began in April 1861, members of New Bedford’s black community showed their continuing desires to defend themselves and their city. Just ten days after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Captain Johnson of the New Bedford “Blues” claimed that four hundred black men were “ready to enlist in the service of the government.” Meeting at New Bedford’s city hall, hundreds of black citizens, men and women, pledged a volunteer militia to “fight for liberty, to be ready at any moment … wherever our support may be required.” William Henry Johnson declared that New Bedford’s black men were “true...

In August 1864 Fanny Wright applied for aid with New Bedford’s Overseers of the Poor. She stated that her husband, John L. Wright, was serving in the war. The Overseers noted that her husband was in the Fifty-Fourth and granted her an order, basically a voucher, for $1.50 worth of provisions from local grocer Robert Luscomb. She followed up in early 1865 by obtaining five dollars in grocery vouchers, two feet of fire wood, and a quarter ton of coal.¹ The aid granted to Fanny Wright in the form of groceries, coal, and fire wood displayed the characteristic benevolence of...

The Civil War brought economic dislocations to New Bedford, most obviously to the whaling enterprise. Local historian Leonard Ellis wrote of residents’ “forlorn hope” as they feared becoming “an abandoned seaport” like Nantucket. At war’s end, Ellis wrote: “Our idle wharves were fringed with dismantled ships. Cargoes of oil covered with seaweed were stowed in the sheds and along the river front, waiting for a satisfactory market that never came.”¹ The war did not destroy the whaling industry, but it accelerated its decline after the “golden days” of the 1850s. Outspoken Unitarian minister William J. Potter declared in 1863 that...

Looking back over the Civil War, local historian Zephaniah Pease declared that New Bedford authorities “were most generous in financial support of all war measures.” Writing decades later after the war, he reported that “New Bedford as a municipality responded nobly to every demand made upon her generosity and patriotism to aid in a vigorous prosecution of the war.”¹ While true, such idealized sentiments do not convey the difficult choices faced by city leaders and residents during the war. Mayor Isaac Taber outlined those challenges in January 1862. “From a variety of circumstances, apart from those connected with the national...

Civic leaders looked both to the traditions of the past and an uncertain future during a transitional postwar period. Mayor Andrew G. Pierce, a Wamsutta Company official not raised amid whaling wealth, assumed office in early 1868. Sounding like many northern politicians, Pierce recalled the “untiring, self-sacrificing patriotism of the men, women, and children of our city” during the Civil War. Although he feared a coming recession because of the “unsatisfactory condition of business,” he saw hopeful signs that included the city’s funding of gas pipelines and the extensive and expensive water works that had cost about $500,000.¹ When Mayor...

Long after the Civil War ended, New Bedford’s citizens joined other Northerners in an outpouring of gratitude, self-congratulation, patriotism, and civic pride in celebrating the Union victory. Mayor John H. Perry’s comments in 1866 were typical, as he noted with sadness the death of Abraham Lincoln a year earlier who had “providentially guided” the nation through its terrible trial. The mayor urged his audience to not forget the dead who had offered their lives “as a sacrifice for their country,” a common theme for decades to come.¹ When New Bedford dedicated its Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument on the Fourth of...

A century ago, New Bedford dedicated its iconic sculpture of “The Whaleman,” by Bela Pratt. Placed in front of the New Bedford Free Public Library in 1912, the piece is an example of public art that looked back to the golden age of whaling. As Kingston William Heath has noted astutely, when the sculpture was dedicated whaling was all but dead as an industry and nearly 100 percent of the city’s mill workers were of “foreign extraction.” Although sculptor Bela Pratt had sought a “real boatsteerer” and was encouraged to use an African-American or Cape Verdean harpooner for a model,...