The Remarkable Life of One of Boston’s Most Fervent and Daring Abolitionists

Behind the heavy oak door of her two-story brick house, Harriet Bell Hayden kept rifles, kegs of gunpowder and even a secret tunnel. Her willingness to defend freedom-seekers made her and her home a linchpin of Boston’s Underground Railroad.

Born in Kentucky in 1816, Harriet Bell escaped enslavement in 1844 with her husband, Lewis Hayden, making their way to safety in Canada with the help of a white Northerner. But the antislavery cause brought the couple back to the United States two years later, and they settled in Boston’s Black and abolitionist neighborhood of Beacon Hill determined to make a mark.  

Between 1850 and 1860, it’s estimated that Harriet sheltered hundreds of people fleeing slavery. In the evening, you might have found a table of men studying in her home, in one hand a book and “the other resting upon [a] pistol or knife,” as the Black journalist Pauline Hopkins wrote in a 1901 essay. 

“Lewis and Harriet turned their home into one of the most active Underground Railroad sites in the city,” says John Buchtel, curator of rare books and head of special collections at the Boston Athenaeum.

Harriet made her home a hub for Boston’s prominent antislavery advocates: Harriet Beecher Stowe visited in 1853, as did John Brown in 1859, only months before his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. She was also an early devotee of women’s suffrage.

Harriet died in 1893. In her will, she bequeathed her estate of nearly $5,000 to establish a scholarship for Black students at Harvard Medical School—believed to be the only university bequest from someone who was once enslaved. The Lewis and Harriet Hayden Scholarship continues today. 

Olatunji Osho-Williams | READ MORE

Olatunji Osho-Williams is an intern with Smithsonian magazine.