The Pastors of Siloam · 1852–1860

Amos N. Freeman

Abolitionist pastor and teacher who led Siloam from 1852, sheltered a girl escaping slavery, and served as Moderator of the Presbytery of Brooklyn in 1854.

Pastor

At Siloam

Freeman came to Brooklyn in April 1852 and succeeded James Gloucester as Siloam's pastor. In April 1853 a Brooklyn writer for Frederick Douglass' Paper reported that monthly prayer meetings for the enslaved were held at his church. A year later the same writer reported that the Presbytery of Brooklyn had appointed Freeman its Moderator by a unanimous vote. That October Freeman wrote to the paper himself, disputing the writer's account of a meeting at Siloam about schools.

In late 1855 the Freeman family sheltered Anna Maria Weems, a fifteen-year-old girl escaping slavery. In his 1872 book The Underground Rail Road, William Still wrote that she found "a home and kind friends" with the Freemans in New York before going on to Canada.

The church's own history holds that John Brown stopped at Siloam in 1859 on his way to Harpers Ferry, and that Freeman knew Brown and hosted him at his home.

Life and ministry

Amos Freeman was born in New Jersey in about 1809. He studied at the Oneida Institute, where his classmates included Alexander Crummell and Henry Highland Garnet, according to the Colored Conventions Project. He taught school in Newark, New Jersey, and in 1839 he served as a director of the New Jersey Anti-Slavery Society.

In 1841 he went to Portland, Maine, as the first full-time pastor of the Abyssinian Church. From 1846 he was also principal of a school there, and the city's School Board called him a "devoted and indefatigable teacher." He and his wife ran an Underground Railroad haven in Portland, according to the Colored Conventions Project.

In 1860 he left Siloam for the Talcott Street Church in Hartford, Connecticut, where he served until 1863. In the 1860s he led the African Civilization Society, based in Weeksville, and turned its work from emigration toward education, according to In Pursuit of Freedom. The same source calls him a friend of Lewis Tappan and says he gave the eulogy at Tappan's funeral. He died in Brooklyn in 1893 and is buried at the Evergreens Cemetery.

Family

His wife, Christiana Williams Freeman, was born in 1812; they married in Newark on December 24, 1839. She raised money for Siloam and for the Colored Orphan Asylum, working with Elizabeth Gloucester and Mary Wilson. She died in 1909. Their daughter Mary Christiana Freeman graduated from Oberlin College and in 1880 married Rev. Robert Foster Wheeler. Mary's daughter was the portrait artist Laura Wheeler Waring (1887–1948).

Sources (14)