Sir Walter Raleigh may be better known than his fellow-Devonian, also born in East Budleigh, but it’s encouraging to find the Conant name becoming steadily more recognised in his homeland.
Budleigh resident Paul Gallagher photographed this grave inscription as he explored the town of Concord, in Massachusetts, during a visit to family in the area in May 2023.
Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is noted as the last resting place of many celebrated Americans including authors Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Thanks to having read about Roger Conant back in Devon, Paul was intrigued to spot the grave of Hannah Conant with its inscription mentioning her link to the founder of Salem, ‘born at Budleigh, Devonshire, England, 1591’. He wanted to know more.
Indeed, Hannah Conant (1788-1859) was a sixth generation descendant of Roger Conant through the latter’s son John (1652-1724). Pride in her lineage is reflected in the use of her maiden name on the grave inscription rather than her married name.
On 28 September 1811, in Concord, she married Colonel William Whiting (1788-1862), a carriage maker and passionate supporter of the anti-slavery movement in the U.S. He was president of the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society, and also one of the vice-presidents of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
Various eminent abolitionists stayed as guests of the couple in Concord.
Photo of Colonel William Whiting House (now 169 Main Street), Concord, in the1860s. Copyright 2013, Concord Free Public Library
They included William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, the lawyer Wendell Phillips, and the radical John Brown, executed for inciting a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry in Virginia and celebrated in the marching song ‘John Brown’s Body’.
Hannah Conant evidently shared her husband’s abolitionist views which were passed on to all three of the couple’s children. Their son William Whiting (1813-1873) served as solicitor for the War Department in Washington during the Civil War.
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John Brown in 1846-47, photographed by Augustus Washington. Image: Wikipedia
William Whiting’s principal work is The War Powers of the President and the Legislative Powers of Congress in Relation to Rebellion, Treason, and Slavery, first published in Boston in 1862. In this he formulated views that he had urged at the opening of the American Civil War, namely, that the United States government had full belligerent rights against the inhabitants of the eleven Southern U.S. states which left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, and without going beyond the Constitution could confiscate their property, emancipate their slaves, and treat them as public enemies.
The Whitings’ daughters Anna Maria (1814-1867) and Louisa Jane (1820-1875) were members of the Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society and wrote for the Liberator and Herald of Freedom. Anna Maria wrote a critical article for the September 27, 1844 issue of the Herald of Freedom about the Concord selectmen's refusal to ring the bell to announce the 1844 celebration of the Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society.
In the mid-1850s, the American Antislavery Society published Louisa Jane’s anonymous tract Influence of Slavery Upon the White Population (attributed to a ‘Former Resident of Slave States’). In the pamphlet, Louisa Jane broached a range of difficult subjects relating to the adverse moral influence of slaveholding on those who perpetuated it. She wrote: ‘A true understanding of the nature and influences of American slavery forces the conviction that this system renders the master no less a 'victim' than the slave.’
Thanks are due to the Concord Free Public Library for permission to quote from the essay Some key Concord Abolitionists.
This article will appear in The Conant Chronicle. To obtain free copies of this newsletter, email: conantcourier@gmail.com
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