Charlotte Forten: Coming of Age as a Radical Teenage Abolitionist, 1854-1856

In 1854, Charlotte Forten, a free teenager of color from Philadelphia, was sent by her family to Salem, Massachusetts. She was fifteen years old. Charlotte was relocated to obtain an education worthy of the teenager’s socio-elite background. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law had a tremendous impact on her family in the City of Brotherly Love. Even though they were well-known and affluent citizens and abolitionists, the law’s passage took a heavy toll on all people of color in the North including rising racial tensions, mob attacks, and the acute possibility of kidnap. Charlotte Forten: Coming of Age as a Radical Teenage Abolitionist is an intellectual biography that spans her teenage years from 1854-1856. Scholarship has maintained that Charlotte was sent to Salem solely as a result of few educational opportunities in Philadelphia. Reexamining the diary she kept as a teenager in Salem reveals that there was more to the story. Her family’s extensive ties to the Underground Railroad, anti-slavery endeavors, and lack of male guardianship for her in Philadelphia also factored in to the family’s decision to send her to Salem. It was not just the pursuit of a better education, but also for personal protection.Once in Salem, Charlotte lived with famous abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond and his new wife, Amy Matilda Remond. Both were actively involved in New England anti-slavery and were aligned with the ideology of William Lloyd Garrison’s fiery brand of abolition. Charlotte began her education as a student, becoming the first to integrate the Higginson Grammar School, as well as having started her training as a Garrisonian abolitionist. She began keeping a diary at the exact moment that Boston was bearing witness to the capture, trial, and conviction of former fugitives because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. This planted the seed in the teenager, and she grew to become a radical abolitionist in Salem, all the while documenting in real time what she witnessed and experienced. There do not appear to be any other surviving documents by a free teenager of color during the antebellum period who extensively recorded the national politics and the impending crisis over slavery. Charlotte declared in her diary, “I crave anti-slavery food continually!” and when she was not pursuing a higher education, she dedicated the majority of her time to anti-slavery causes, events, fairs, meetings, lectures, and sermons