Significance: The Baptist Church in Williamson illustrates the importance, in Wayne County and across the nation, of grassroots religious support for abolitionism. Because of rapid in-migration from New England, attracted by rich farmlands and easy access to markets via the new Erie Canal, Wayne County had more than its share of local churches who sympathized with reform.

In 1843, this church passed an antislavery resolution. Local abolitionists also held meetings in the Williamson Baptist Church, including one that filled the meetinghouse in late February 1848: “Men, women and children, age, youth and beauty, were there,” reported Frederick Douglass, “and all alive in the cause of freedom.” Charles L. Remond, an African American born in Salem, Massachusetts, spoke at this meeting, as did Frederick Douglass, editor of the North Star and perhaps the most famous African American abolitionist in the country, and Giles B. Stebbins, European American abolitionist from Massachusetts.  They spoke before “a large and earnest audience.” Remond gave “a most impassioned and eloquent address, designed to show that the Anti-Slavery was the white, as well as the black man's cause..” The second day, the convention met in the Methodist Church in Williamson (no longer standing). In spite of an eighteen-inch snowstorm, the meeting was well attended. At its close, women formed an “Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle, auxiliary to the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society.” 

            Fruits of their labor resulted in an antislavery fair, held on two bitter cold days, with “piercing winds and chilling frosts,” in mid-January 1849. Although the goods were, in the opinion of Frederick Douglass, “too ornamental to meet the ideas of hard-handed, industrious farmers,” the women of Williamson raised $80.00 for the cause. Rochester women “bundled up in coarse garments” and traveled “over rugged hills and icy roads, in open wagons, twenty-six miles,” to help at the fair. Proslavery advocates might think that such behavior was “unwomanly” and “out of her sphere,” noted Douglass, “but Heaven approves, and the slave will bless them.”

            An antislavery meeting accompanied the fair, and the Baptist Church “was full of earnest listeners.”  Griffith Cooper, “that friend of man, the African as well as the Indian,” introduced John S. Jacobs, who with his sister Harriet Jacobs, had escaped from slavery in North Carolina.  Jacobs  “proceeded in his usual, calm, clear, and yet earnest manner, to expose the system of slavery.” Douglass then addressed the meeting, using “that murderous wretch” President Zachary Taylor to illustrated the “moral state of the nation.” “We were told afterwards,” reported Douglass

that some of the pious voters for this man-stealer and human butcher, thought we displayed an unchristian spirit in our assaults upon the character of General Taylor. This shows how Christians, so-called, may strain at a knat and swallow a camel. They can give the whole sanction of their intelligence, morals and religion, to confer honor upon a slaveholder, slave trader, a bloodhound importer, and a human butcher; and then assume to be discerners of spirits, and very much shocked at anything that looks like an unchristian spirit. Out upon the hypocrites! . . . The time has gone by when such miserable twaddle can have much influence on the minds of men.