Rev. Chauncey Wilcox of North Greenwich: His Dismissal and Abolitionism

by Jeffrey Bingham Mead
Greenwich Time. Looking Back: 1996.

The present-day edifice of the North Greenwich Congregational Church. The
cemetery is in the foreground. 

In 1827, the Rev. Chauncey Wilcox became pastor of the North Greenwich Church. Twenty years later, however, things were to change.

"I am expecting to be dismissed from my pastoral charge," he wrote to his brother-in-law Amos Starr Cooke, a missionary teacher in Hawaii, in April 1846. 

I found the reason for Wilcox's dismissal in my research on Greenwich missionaries in the library of the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society in Honolulu.

Amos Starr Cooke, missionary teacher in Hawaii
and brother-in-law of Rev. Chauncey Wilcox
in North Greenwich, Connecticut

Apparently Deacon Silas Hervey Mead was a main proponent of Wilcox's dismissal. "He is been at it at least seven years… He has done everything he could to weaken my influence, to talk against my preaching," Wilcox wrote to Cooke.

At issue with the two men's stances on the growing Abolitionist movement against slavery. A committee of the church apparently would not allow "abolition lecturers" into the church. The blame was apparently put on Wilcox. 

"It is painful when a deacon of a church does so much to destroy the usefulness of his ministries, as I believe Deacon S. H. Mead has done," Wilcox wrote.

Deacon Silas Hervey Mead of North Greenwich
Congregational Church, Connecticut. 

Both men vehemently opposed the evil of slavery in America, but they differed on how to eradicate it. Deacon Mead was an extremist in Abolitionist circles in Greenwich. Such men fought to end slavery, denouncing Southerners and those in the north who did not embrace their aggressive measures.

Wilcox was also arduously opposed to slavery. "Organized associations out of the slave-holding states is not the way to persuade the South to give up slavery. That slavery is a sin and that the South can and ought to rid themselves of this evil I believe and so does all that I hear say anything on the subject...The only question that divides us from those who are technically called Abolitionist is the means to get rid of slavery," Wilcox wrote in 1842.

While impassioned Abolitionists favored setting up societies in the north as platforms to denounce the southern slaveholders, Wilcox and others felt that such societies should be set up in the south, instead.

"All we have is that of moral mission. We must persuade them; we cannot drive them. In order to persuade them, we must so conduct as to have access to them. We must gain a hearing…we must be able to go among them and address them personally… If we can form associations against slavery in the slaveholding states it might possibly do good."

Wilcox's dismissal came later in 1846. A party of 70-80 well-wishers was held in Round Hill, "a donation visit… (in) old Puritan New England style," according to the reverend. 

Wilcox and his family moved to Ridgefield, where he spent the remainder of his years teaching at a boys school.

"It was one of the most painful events in my life to be separated from that people," referring to the people of North Greenwich in a letter to Cooke in Hawaii, dated August 5, 1848 "I loved them; my heart was bound up in their welfare."

Gravestone of the Rev. Chauncey Wilcox. North Greenwich Congregational Church.

The Rev. Chauncey Wilcox, 55, died on Jan. 31, 1852. He was buried in the church cemetery at North Greenwich. His headstone was restored in 1990 by his great grandniece, Elizabeth Wilcox Willis.

Thanks to missionaries, who wisely preserved these other letters, portals to our history in Greenwich continue to be revealed.



Jeffrey Bingham Mead is a free-lance writer and direct descendant of one of the town's founding families. He grew up in backcountry Greenwich.