Torrey, Charles Turner

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Charles Turner Torrey (1813-46), born in Massachusetts and educated at Yale, who while a student at Andover Theological Seminary organized an antislavery society there. Later a Congregational minister, Torrey was one of the leaders of the anti-Garrisonian faction in Massachusetts and served as the agent of the Massachusetts Abolition Society and as the first editor of the Massachusetts Abolitionist. Torrey left that paper in 1841 to go to Washington, D.C., as a freelance reporter. In Annapolis, Maryland, the following year, he was arrested as an abolitionist while reporting a "Convention of Slaveholders" and was acquitted after a brief trial. Returning north for a short while to edit the Albany Patriot, Torrey moved to Baltimore around 1843 to engage in business and to carry out his scheme for transporting fugitive slaves to the free states along a prearranged route. It is said that in two years he helped about 400 slaves from Maryland and Virginia to escape. Arrested for this activity in 1844 and defended by Reverdy Johnson, Torrey was convicted and sentenced to six years' hard labor. He died of tuberculosis in a Baltimore prison. J. C. Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, Who Died in the Penitentiary of Maryland, Where He Was Confined for Showing Mercy to the Poor (Boston, 1847); Filler, Crusade against Slavery, 163-64; DAB, 18:595-96.

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