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Arthur Bullus Bradford (March 28, 1810-January 18,1899), a seventh generation descendent of the William Bradford who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620, was the son of Ruth and Ebenezer G. Bradford of Reading, Pennsylvania (Warner 625; Douthitt).
Bausman in his History of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, states that while a student at Princeton Seminary, Bradford preached to and talked with many blacks in Philadelphia. During vacations he visited his uncle, Moses Bradford, who had a large Maryland plantation. Through these experiences he gained insight into the conditions of both the free and the enslaved and became a strong abolitionist (1148).
After graduation from Princeton Seminary and a short term of preaching in Clinton, New Jersey (1148), he married Elizabeth Wicks of Philadelphia in 1836. Two years later he and his wife moved to Darlington, Pennsylvania, where in 1839 he became pastor of Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church, a position which he held for sixteen years (Warner 625). While serving at Mount Pleasant, he strongly supported the abolition of slavery, making the antislavery issue a part of his sermon or prayers every Sunday. Bausman quoted one old woman from the church as saying that while Bradford was an interesting preacher, his subject was more often political than doctrinal (1148).
He lectured across western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio in practically every village as well as in Boston and New York and as far away as Iowa. According to Bausman, Bradford was considered an excellent speaker who held his audiences in enthralled silence (1148).
In addition to speaking for the antislavery cause, Bradford wrote abolitionist materials for the Beaver Argus, Garrison's Liberator, the New Castle Courant, and various Pittsburgh newspapers (1148).
Among his abolitionist acquaintances were Joshua R. Giddings, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Abby Kelley, and Sara Jane Clarke. Indeed Abby Kelley and Sara Jane Clarke spent a summer at Buttonwood (1149), the Bradford home, which lies south of the main road leading from Darlington to Enon. This house, now an historic landmark of Beaver County, was built around 1840, being constructed of red bricks made on the farm. Marjorie Douthitt, Bradford's great-granddaughter and present representative of the family, who lives at Buttonwood , was told that the clay for these bricks was dug on Bradford land near the intersection of Bradford Road and Route 551. A depression in the ground still indicates the spot. One of Bradford's daughters, Mrs. Isabella Bradford Hardy, said the clay was ground by a blind mare that walked around at the end of a beam, turning a cylinder to crush it. Then the bricks were formed and fired on the farm. The timber for the house was brought by horse from New Brighton, symbolically significant as the residents of Buttonwood and the Quakers of New Brighton were to become closely allied in the business of hiding and transporting fugitive slaves (Douthitt).
A few yards from his house Bradford built a study to hold his library and to provide a place for quiet study and writing. According to an undated clipping of an article from the East Palestine Daily Leader, this was necessitated by the impossibility of concentrating in a house soon overflowing with eight playful children (n.p.).
Buttonwood became a station on the underground railroad, forming a link in the route north to Canada from New Brighton and Beaver Falls to Enon Valley and thence west through Salem, Ohio, and north (Bausman 1132). Free blacks were the main conductors on this railroad (Bailyn 560). Bausman believed that some of these fugitives stayed at Buttonwood for weeks, working in the fields (1149).
The frequently needed clothing to disguise runaways was made by Bradford's daughters, who often used their own dresses to make these costumes. Marjorie Douthitt was told that at one time such a very tall fugitive arrived that the women of the household stayed up all night sewing cloth together from two or three of their own dresses to make one for him. They also fabricated a big sunbonnet to hide his face. The worst problem was shoes. His feet were huge, and the Bradfords apparently never did find any to fit him, in the end probably making the dress long enough to hide his feet. (Douthitt).
Douthitt has never been able to find where the fugitive slaves were hidden. Milo's grandson, Charles Walker Townsend II, told her that they were hidden in a coal mine on the hill. The mine had caved in by the time Marjorie came to Buttonwood as a girl of fifteen, so she never saw inside it.
When the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 provided a severe monetary penalty for assisting slaves to escape, Bradford, to protect his wife and children, temporarily transferred his property to a friend (Bausman 1149). According to Marjorie Douthitt, the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society gave him a sword cane to defend himself if the need should arise; but although neighbors threatened to tar and feather him, no one ever harmed him physically; and he did not need the cane, which remained at the house for many years after his death.
Because they would not continue in a church whose General Assembly upheld slavery, Bradford and a number of other ministers formed the Free Presbyterian Church in 1847 (Warner 626; Bausman 819); and in 1854 Bradford became pastor of the Free Presbyterian Church in New Castle, Pennsylvania, where he served until the Civil War began (Douthitt).
Milo's daughter-in-law, Leanna Wilson Townsend, and Charles Walker Townsend II always believed that Milo wrote to Abraham Lincoln asking that Bradford be appointed United States consul to Amoy, China. Edith Wallace Javens, who has made a study of Elizabeth Wicks Bradford, says that it was Elizabeth who wrote a letter to a Dr. Wallace, a Congressman, asking him to intercede with Lincoln on her husband's behalf. Perhaps both wrote. The appointment was made in 1861; and Bradford went to China by sailing ship, a voyage that, due to both storms and dead calms, lasted 224 days. His twenty-year-old daughter, Ruth Bullus Bradford, accompanied him and kept a careful and amusing diary.
Bradford's stay at Amoy, one of the five open ports in China, was not long. The climate disagreed with his health, which had not been good when he arrived; and he became homesick. After about eight months he returned to Buttonwood and to the New Castle church (Ruth Bullus Bradford).
The Free Church disbanded in 1867, as its raison d'etre evaporated with the elimination of slavery. Bradford retired to his farm, his studies, his writings, and occasional lectures (Warner 626).
During the period of the antislavery movement, Bradford and Milo Townsend had begun a friendship that has continued in both families through their descendants to the present day. Milo's grandson, Charles Walker Townsend II, spent many of his boyhood summers on the Bradford farm.
An article in one of Milo Townsend's scrapbooks reports on a Bradford lecture. It is undated.
The Lecture of Rev. A.B. Bradford, on the "Mutual Relations of the Family, the Church and the State," at the M.E. Church, in Beaver, on last Monday evening, was, to the discredit of the literary reputation of the town, very thinly attended. We do not think there were fifty people in the church. The lecture, in itself was of surpassing excellence, and was delivered with the directness and precision of a master of logic, eloquence and historical facts...its arguments were unanswerable, its facts incontrovertible, and its pleadings for a continuance of our present free and eminently christian form of government, unmarred by sectarian bias or religious bigotry, noble and charitable-- eminently creditable to the speaker's head, heart and deeply religious principles (Scrapbook III 73).
In 1857 Milo sent Bradford a bill in which his statement about "Brakemen on the train" may have been a reference to those who in one way or another interfered with the work of the underground railroad.
New Brighton
Jan. 22, 1857
Rev. A.B. Bradford Dr.
To Milo A. Townsend
1855 Sept. 14 For 1 "Harper's Life" 1.25
1856 Jan. 13 " 1 "Three Hours' School"1 1.00
and postage $2.25
My Dear Sir.
By remitting the above, you will greatly oblige
Yours truly,
Milo A. Townsend
P.S. How moves the Car of Progress? There are too many Brakemen on the train, to attain much rapidity, I fear.
How did you like "Three Hours"?
1This book is probably Three Hours' School a Day by Crandall to which Milo refers in his article on educational reform for Clark's School Visitor . See the section on education in chapter 25.
Letter 62
from Arthur Bullus Bradford
New Castle Pa 22 Dec 1860
My Dear Sir
I addressed a letter recently to Hon John Allison to which I have received no reply. This leads me to believe that he is not at N. Brighton. The design of this letter is to enquire of you whether Mr. Allison is at your place or not or whether he has removed to Beaver or elsewhere.
I am sorry to trouble you in this matter but there is no use of having friends unless you use them.
I read a piece of poetry published lately in the Press of Philad purporting to have came impromptu from a trance Medium in Boston who was mouthpiece to Edgar Poe. It is the same meter as the famous "Raven" of Poe & in my esteem much more beautiful. I could cry over it by the hour.1
W.B. was exceedingly pleased with the acquaintance he made with your lady some time since at Brighton.
Please make enquiry about Mr. Allison as to where a letter would reach him and let me know.
Present my kind regards to Mrs. Townsend & accept assurances of my
Sincere respect for yourself
M. A. Townsend Esq.
Arthur B. Bradford
1The trance medium mentioned here was apparently Thomas Lake Harris. Excerpts from a newspaper account of Harris' performance follow:
The ... poem, purporting to be from the immortal Edgar A. Poe, was spoken in some fifteen minutes, and is here published as originally dictated. It is a bold and graceful utterance, and the internal evidence in support of its peculiar claims is strong and convincing. -- Ed.
Then there came my Fancy's Maiden
From her dim and mystic Aidenn,
And a light from her full bosom shone her Angel-form before,
And she whispered as the roses
When the blushing bud uncloses,
And like dew from off a blossom fell her speech forevermore.
"I have waited, I have waited,
As the Evening Star belated,
When it lingers pale and lonely by the purple sunset door.
I have found thee, I have found thee,
And with heart-spells fast have bound thee."
So from out her glowing halo sang the Angel Maid Lenore.
To my rapt, enamored seeming,
Framed amid the golden gleaming,
Like a star in its own brightness high above the ocean's floor,
Shone the lovely apparition,
And from Earth's accursed perdition
I was lifted by the Angel, and my death-in-life was o'er.
O the sorrow, the despairing,
The weird terror phrased with daring,
The wild wind-storms of remorses that my earth-bound Spirit bore!
Like the tempest-lashed Atlantic
With my anguish I was frantic,
And the serpent man named Hunger gnawed into my bosom's core.
While on Earth the Poet hungered
For heart-bread, the gay world wondered,
And poor beggars spurned the rich man, heaping curses evermore,
Till I prostrate fell despairing,
In my anguished breast unsharing
All Earth's undivided sorrow, crushed as never man before.
I was mad with desolation,
Like a sun from out creation
Stricken rudely and its brightness turned to blood upon its shore.
I for years was broken-hearted;
Long before my youth departed
But a heart by Fate down-trodden into palpitating gore.
And I fled Life's outer portal,
Deeming anguish was immortal,
Crying, "Launch thy heavy thunders, tell me never to adore.
Hate for hate and curse for curses,
Through abysmal universes,
Plunge me down as lost Archangels fell despairingly of yore."
So the whirlwind bore my Spirit,
But to lands that Saints inherit,
And it seems my heart forever like a ruby cup runs o'er.
I am blest beyond all blessing,
And an Angel's pure caressing,
Flows around my soul forever like a stream around its shore.
(Scrapbook II 120, 121)
When Harris was in London, a William Hewitt, speaking of Harris' poems, said that nothing finer than Harris' verse had appeared since the days of Milton (Scrapbook II 91).
Perhaps Mr. Hewitt had not come upon the above example of Harris' poetic abilities. On the other hand, if the trance medium to which Bradford referred was Harris, as seems most likely, this effusion was nevertheless attributed, not to Harris, but to Poe himself, whose verse had always been uneven in quality.
For more on Thomas Lake Harris, see under Horace Greeley, where he
is the cause of the interchange of letters between Milo and the editor of the Tribune .
The next letter is chiefly about books that he and his wife had been reading.
Letter 22
from Arthur Bullus Bradford
New Castle Pa 8 Feb. 1864
My Dear Friend
I received a book by Mr. Gantz, "Peculiar." I took home & my wife held quaker meeting till she finished it. When I left she was among the last pages of it & only growled out - "good bye" when I politely bowed good morning to her. I have not heard her say what she thought of it. I read in my bed last night till midnight Uriel Clark's book. I like his earnestness & style much. I agree with very much he says. But the "Soul of Things" is a stumper. I thought the Spiritual phenomena strange but this is more so. If these things be true we know after six thousand years of the history of the race nothing but a little on the outskirts of the great field of inquiry. I tremble when I think of what may be true of us in the future - our capabilities . And yet the mass of mankind are as ignorant & unthinking on these topics as the great beasts. May not, if Dentons1 theory of impression be correct, there be long ages of sorrow in the other world for those who have passed through & participated in scenes of guilt and shame? Can the forgiveness of God erase from the recollections & feelings of Paul the bloody scenes in which he figured as a persecutor? What questions one could ask! But it is like a shipwrecked mariner on a desert island calling out for his lost companions; the only answer he receives is the eternal silence of the ocean broken by nothing but the surf upon the shore.
But I will take these books home for Mrs B's perusal & bid her return them to you. Enclosed is $1.50 for Peculiar.
Remember me kindly to Mrs. T.
Yours
ABB
1William Denton, author of a book on psychometry, Nature's Secrets , published in 1863, was noted for his research into the phenomenon of casts being taken from the bodies of ectoplasmic figures (Doyle II 165).
In the next letter Bradford replies to a suggestion that he become a part of the Blue Anchor project (explained below) and recounts something of his financial difficulties.
Letter 22 [sic.]
from Arthur Bullus Bradford
Enon Valley Pa.
19 July 1866
My Dear Mr. Townsend:
Yours of the 16th just arrived yesterday while it was raining, thundering & lightning. The thermometer which was at 96o has gone down to 69o which makes it very comfortable. I was deeply interested in your scheme of the "Blue Anchor Trust."1 I hope it will succeed. But in my circumstances & at my time of life I don't feel like running any risks. Most sorrowfully I must admit that I am no business man. For 25 years I never occupied an hour in planning how to make a dollar. I took what I got, my only object being to emancipate the slave & to make it redound to the credit of the church. I got more curses than copper & now find myself 56 years old with an empty purse. What's worse still, watering others I have myself been relieved -- in other words, laboring to strike off the shackles of the bondsmen God has emancipated me from religious bondage and has brought me out into the "glorious belief of the love of God." My soul & intellect are free -- but I stand among slaves. All my friends are still in bondage & if I did any thing to redeem them they would call me infidel & run from me as from a leper. You don't know how I would like to leave this section and get among congenial spirits. I have no associates - none to sympathize with me but still I am a "Presbyterian" expected to do duty as such. If I had the means, therefore, I would like to go into the Blue Anchor enterprise & end my days in society that was congenial; but till some further developments I am bound hand & foot. If I could speak to you instead of writing I could say much that I am unwilling to commit to paper.
I have been in hopes that the two oil wells being [next word missing] on the farms contiguous to mine would prove this to be oil territory. In that event I would sell and move to Philad. But the thing has not tested yet & as all my property, except a few hundred dollars, is in the farm, I am compelled to remain where I am. A friend made me a present of $500 7-30 Bond a short time ago, & I have about a thousand more locked up in Gold & Silver lead stock, the first in Venango Co. & the second on Lake Superior. But as these are not available funds as first mentioned, you see that I cannot accept your invitation to take a place even on the ground floor. But, dear sir, go ahead & perhaps I may yet cast my lot with you. Please keep me advised of your movements & regard this letter as confidential .
I have been reading Lockeys History of [?]. It is a noble work. Oh had I seen this and Buckle, & Parker 30 years ago (but alas they were not then) how much it would have saved me of bondage!
Remember me to Mrs. Townsend very kindly. I shall feel very much concerned in your new enterprise. I would go into it with you with all my heart if I were able to do so.
Sincerely your friend and well-wisher
A.B. Bradford
P.S. The previous letter I had written when I had a call from Timothy White2. He went to see James Reed also & he (Reed) leaves next week to attend a school convention at Gettysburg & thence will visit Delaware & then New Jersey.
Timothy and I talked about a settlement on the association plan, adopting so much of Fourier's3 idea as would not interfere with the family institution. For instance this is Tuesday - wash day at our house; for if the day of judgment were appointed for Tuesday my wife would petition to have it postponed a few days till she could do up her washing on the inevitable Tuesday - and she & three of the girls are on the job. Then I as a clever fellow had to offer my services to work the wringing machine. Tomorrow will be ironing day. Thus two days of the week are taken up with efforts to keep clean. Now suppose a hundred families lived in a village where they could have a public laundry, a public restaurant where the drudgery of washing, ironing, cooking, and baking could be done by machines & cheaply, what a saving of labor, patience, & everything else! And why not a hundred families live in that economical way each family being a family each family's interests & rights, each as much seclusion as is now enjoyed! The great drawback of American society which prevents marriage & belittles married life is the matter of servants . Surely when we can by the associative principle & machinery remedy the evil we ought to do so.
I am too old to take part in an enterprise of the kind I would like to see succeed. But my faith in humanity is such that I believe life instead of being to women such a burden as it now is will be a blessing.
Seeing that I am too crippled in my resources to go into the enterprise you contemplate, I can but wish you abundant success; and if I live I shall no doubt call over in Jersey & see you.
I have spoken rather freely to you & hope you will regard it in confidence, for obvious reasons.
Again sending my compliments to Mrs. T.
I remain yours sincerely
ABB
25 July 1866
1The Blue Anchor Trust to which Bradford referred in the preceding letter was a community project in which Milo Townsend was directly involved. This project is explained in more detail under chapter 25 on Milo Adams Townsend.
2For Timothy White see chapter 12.
3Fourier. For further information on Fourier and his teachings, see chapter 17 (Henry C. Howells) and the section on Association/Fourierism in chapter 25..