David Lee Child
David Lee Child was a journalist and abolitionist born in West Boylston, Massachusetts, in 1793. He graduated from Harvard College in 1817 and initially served as a submaster at Boston Latin School. Child's career took him to various roles, including a secretary in Portugal and a participant in a revolt in Spain against French influence. He became an early advocate for abolition, co-founding the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and supporting the work of prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Throughout his life, Child faced financial challenges, including a period of imprisonment due to libel charges, which impacted his career trajectory. He also attempted to establish the first sugar beet factory in the U.S. to provide a slave-free sugar alternative. Despite these struggles, Child remained involved in political advocacy, particularly against the annexation of Texas as a slave state. He died in 1874, respected but with a career that fell short of his initial promise, leaving behind a legacy of commitment to social justice and abolition. His significant works include "The Texas Revolution" and "The Taking of Naboth's Vineyard." Collections of his papers are preserved in several libraries, reflecting his contributions to anti-slavery literature and activism.
Subject Terms
David Lee Child
- David Lee Child
- Born: July 8, 1794
- Died: September 18, 1874
Journalist and abolitionist, was born in West Boylston, Massachusetts, the son of Lydia (Bigelow) Child and Zachariah Child, a farmer. David Lee Child was graduated from Harvard College in 1817, became submaster at Boston Latin School (1817-21), and in 1822 went to Lisbon as secretary to General Henry Dearborn, American minister to Portugal. Later, in Spain, Child served in the unsuccessful 1823 revolt against France and against the clergy waged by Spanish liberals seeking a constitutional government. He returned to the United States in 1824 and studied law with an uncle in Watertown, Massachusetts. There he met the author Lydia Maria Francis, whom he married October 19, 1828; they had no children.
David Lee Child moved to Boston in 1825 to practice law and was admitted to the bar in January 1828. Active in the Whig party, he served as state representative in the Massachusetts General Court in 1826, 1828, 1829, and 1831. In 1827 he was editor of a political newspaper, the Massachusetts Whig Journal. After the downfall of the Whigs in the election of 1828, Child’s career lost momentum. The paper’s financial support began to collapse, and Child faced several libel suits. He went heavily into debt, and in 1830 spent a few months in jail, convicted on one of the libel charges. The Journal ceased publication by the end of the year.
As one of the earliest supporters of the abolition efforts of William Lloyd Garrison (who in 1827 had set type in the Journal office), Child was among those who founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society on January 6, 1832. Though he questioned the expediency of the doctrine of immediate emancipation, Child wrote and spoke often for the cause. In 1834 he served as trustee of the racially integrated Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire. He went to France in 1836 to study beet sugar manufacturing, hoping to develop an alternative to cane sugar, which depended on slave labor for its growth and manufacture; and in 1838 he started the nation’s first sugar beet factory in Northampton, Massachusetts. Sugar was successfully produced at the factory, but costs were high and the enterprise failed.
Child chose to stay in Northampton when his wife went to New York to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard, though he was listed as assistant editor. In May 1843 he became editor after his wife resigned. He spent several months of 1843-44 in Washington, D.C., reporting on the congressional maneuvers aimed at the annexation of Texas as a slave state, and he used his research in his two most significant works. The Texan Revolution (1843) and The Taking of Naboth’s Vineyard (1845). John Quincy Adams quoted Child’s arguments in speeches against the annexation of Texas and slavery. Child resigned from the Standard in May 1844, objecting to Garrison’s call for dissolution of the Union, a position Child reversed in 1846.
He returned to Northampton in 1844, his wife remaining in New York, and did construction work on the railroad. In 1848 he went to Tennessee on another railroad project. The work proved exhausting, and he went home the next year. In 1850 the Childs, reunited, moved to a farm in West Newton, Massachusetts, and then to nearby Wayland, where they lived off the modest income from Lydia Maria Child’s writings. In 1856 David Lee Child became an organizer for Free-Soil settlers in Kansas and thereafter kept a close watch on political affairs. Religion held little interest for him.
Child died at eighty in Wayland. He was well respected by his colleagues, but his steady series of financial setbacks had cut short the promise of a far more influential life.
Collections of Child’s papers are in the antislavery holdings of the Boston Public Library and Cornell University. Lydia F. Merrill, a great-grandniece, of Oroville, California, owns numerous letters and scrapbooks. An oil portrait of Child and a collection of books are in the Beaman Memorial Library, West Boylston, Massachusetts. Principal works by Child are The Texas Revolution (1843) and The Taking of Naboth’s Vineyard (1845). Biographical material is to be found in J. S. Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators . . . (1852); W. M. Merrill and L. Ruchames, eds., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 5 vols. (1971-79); P. G. Holland et al., eds., The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child 1817-1880 (microfiche, 1980); and L. Ruchames, The Abolitionists (1963). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1930) and the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 2 (1893).