The guy trained Sunday school during the Earliest Parish, is toastmaster on annual food of one’s Middlesex Farming Area, and you may given within his work environment a hospitable location for each other discussion and you will organization
Because a party, brand new Whigs opposed this new extension out of thraldom to your free area. Nathan Brooks’s opinions into the slavery had been both in keeping with their party’s position and you will on the side supporting of your abolitionism regarding his spouse, Mary Merrick Brooks, whom added the latest Concord Women’s Anti-Slavery Neighborhood and is a member and you can buddy of William Lloyd Garrison and you will Wendell Phillips. Regardless if their partner’s prominent public status eliminated their overt engagement into the illegally helping runaway slaves, the guy subtly served their unique operate.
And Samuel Hoar, Abiel Heywood, Josiah Davis, and William Whiting, Nathan Brooks are one of the fresh proprietors of one’s Concord Academy, a personal school established in 1822 in the community of the Brooks domestic. His daughter Caroline and you can young man George attended the fresh new Academy.
Nathan Brooks are a person in the Societal Circle in Concord. He belonged so you’re able to Concord’s ruling category. However, he had been preferred and recognized of the modest together with the affluent. From the all of the membership, he had been a fair-oriented guy, diligent, pleasantly sociable, even-tempered, having a feeling of humor. He was a beneficial neighbor including an excellent lawyer.
He supported with the Condition Committee with the County away from Middlesex, as a representative on the Massachusetts General Legal, a state senator, and you can a person in the governor’s council
Scope and you can blogs: Files, 1666-1917, documenting brand new elite group, company, and private life of 19th-century Concord attorney Nathan Brooks, his part within the Middlesex State court system, with his invest brand new personal, economic, and you will political life of city, condition, and state. The brand new collection sheds light toward financial and you can legal points from Brooks’s clients, particularly the a house and you can financial purchases of those to possess who he had been home manager otherwise executor. The official, industrial, and you will economic life of Abel Moore is particularly well-illustrated. (Brooks was executor on the home out of Moore, who was Middlesex Condition deputy sheriff and deputy jailer and you can a good successful a home buyer and you will specialist during the condition and you will cut timber.) The company, profit, and you will engagements inside the Sc and you may Concord off supplier Tilly Merrick, Brooks’s dad-in-legislation, are noted within the high depth. Regions of the latest lives, monetary things, and points out of people in this new stretched Brooks family members (in addition to Nathan Brooks’s sibling Franklin) as well as some Merrick and you can Minot in the-statutes (included in this Tilly Merrick’s cousin Augustus and you can son Augustus) are also recorded. New paperwork become situation from Brooks’s partner Mary Merrick Brooks, their daughter Caroline (later on Mrs. Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar), his child George, and you will George’s second wife, Brooks.
The brand new paperwork Nathan Brooks deserted from the their demise painting a great vivid and you may advanced image of the world occupied of the rich from Concord (such as for example, Reuben Brownish, Abel Moore, and you will Daniel Shattuck), those toward margins off economic lifetime (members of the newest town’s black colored family-Garrison, Robbins, and you will Hutchinson-and Irish immigrants), people that suffered with financial reverse, and you can Transcendental authors Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott too. They also show the latest transience out-of personal prosperity additionally the greater-bequeath frequency away from obligations and you can insolvency when you look at the course of Brooks’s industry. Concord historian Ruth Robinson Wheeler, just who preliminarily processed this type of documents, indicated frustration that they consisted of little factual statements about the fresh new public lifestyle away from Concord or around Brooks’s private lifetime, but one testing is not right. Both elite while the individual components of the latest range have numerous data files you to the site individually and you will with each other reveal the main points regarding 19th-century Concord social and you will financial background. More over, Brooks’s financial and private documentation bring sufficient information to help with an excellent full-length bio off him.
