Portrait of Harriet Bell Hayden

Martin, Sella John · 1864 circa

The photograph you see here is one of a handful of surviving images of Harriet Bell Hayden, a prominent Black abolitionist who lived in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood before the Civil War. She is best known for operating a safe house on the Underground Railroad and sheltering hundreds escaping slavery in the United States on a perilous journey to Canada. We often forget that, after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, no place in the United States was free from the terror of slavery. The law declared that all enslaved persons, North or South, would be returned to their enslavers and that any person aiding them would be arrested and fined.