A companion Digital Humanities project, detailing the lives of the Burleigh family of Plainfield, is under development, and will be linked here when it is launched (projected for 2024). What is clear is that the seven siblings born from Rinaldo and Lydia Bradford Burleigh were all committed to Abolition, reform causes generally, and had anti-racist credentials. Their parents, too, were active in the struggle. The seven siblings were: 1. Frances Mary Burleigh 2. John Oscar Burleigh 3. Charles Calistus Burleigh 4. William Henry Burleigh 5. Lucian Burleigh 6. Cyrus Moses Burleigh 7. George Shepard Burleigh

Two of the siblings, William and (Frances) Mary (she preferred her middle name), joined with Prudence Crandall and her sister Almira as co-teachers at the Canterbury Female Academy. William’s temperament was different from his older brother Charles’s. He was more aesthetically inclined, and more deeply committed to Temperance than Charles. Once he starts co-editing The Unionist, there is more passion in some editorials – including his own accounts of being attacked by “ruffians.” Charles Burleigh remained a committed Garrisonian all of his life, while William became involved with the Free Soil Party and other political forms of Abolition.

This fascinating group of brothers also married activist women – Charles to Gertrude Kimber, whose natal family in Pennsylvania had also been involved in issues of education; William’s second marriage was to Celia Burleigh, one of the first women in the United States to be a regular preacher, where she took up the pulpit in Brooklyn’s Unitarian Church once occupied by Samuel J. May. Cyrus was married for the last month of his life to Philadelphia Abolitionist Margaret Jones. And George’s wife, Ruth Burgess, had staged a teenage walkout from a church that would not renounce slavery!

If white people want to be antiracist, it matters to know that they have a heritage. Like any heritage, it is not populated by perfect beings. All human beings have contradictions. But this kind of record of commitment is unusual and deserves notice.

For Further Reference

• Brown, Ira V. “An Antislavery Agent: C. C. Burleigh in Pennsylvania, 1836-1837.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 105:1 (January 1981), 66-84.
• May, Samuel J. Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict. Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Company, 1969 (1869).
• Rycenga, Jennifer, Nick Szydlowski, et. al. The Burleigh Family of Plainfield, Connecticut: An Anti-Racist Abolitionist Legacy. Digital Humanities project, San José State University, forthcoming 2024-2025.