Bartholomew Fussell was an American physician and reformer. He was known as a physician of rare skill and devotion and as an Abolitionist who knew no fear.
Background
Bartholomew Fussell was born on January 9, 1794, in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Bartholomew and Rebecca (Bond) Fussell.
He was of mixed ancestry, with the English strain predominant. His father was a farmer and an approved Quaker minister.
Education
Fussell received his earliest instruction in a school erected by his father and taught by his sister Esther, who exercised a far-reaching influence over his intellectual development.
While studying in the medical department of the University of Maryland, where he graduated M. D. in 1824, he supported himself by teaching and on Sundays conducted a free school for African-American slaves, in which he had as many as sixty pupils at a time.
Career
Shortly after his marriage to Lydia Morris, Fussell removed to Kennett Square, celebrated in Bayard Taylor’s Story of Kennett Square (1866), in his native county, where he soon won renown as a physician of rare skill and devotion and as an Abolitionist who knew no fear.
Into the business of sheltering escaped slaves and baffling their pursuers, he seems to have entered with the zest of a sportsman, and his portly figure was conspicuous at the Philadelphia convention of 1833 that organized the American Anti-Slavery Society and issued its famous “Declaration of Sentiments. ”
From the beginning, he had been a friend of William Lloyd Garrison and had supported the Genius of Universal Emancipation and the Liberator. Though elsewhere in Chester County he had more than one encounter with hostile mobs, at Kennett Square, thanks to his own prestige and to the persuasive eloquence of the peripatetic Charles Calistus Burleigh, he was entrenched safely.
Henry Gibbons, a son of William Gibbons, was the chief incorporator; Fussell, though unable to take any direct part in the work, always remained deeply interested in it. After his second marriage, he moved to York, Pennsylvania, where he opened a school and continued to work for the emancipation of negroes.
He died at Chester Springs at the home of one of his sons.
Achievements
Politics
Friendly contact with the African-Americans soon turned Fussell into a militant Abolitionist, and Elisha Tyson of Baltimore initiated him into the duties of a station-master on the Underground Railroad.
Views
When Gov. David R. Porter denounced the Abolitionists as traitors, John Greenleaf Whittier, in an unpublished poem, defied him to Largely through the influence of his sister, Esther Fussell Lewis, Bartholomew Fussell also became an earnest advocate of temperance, of free elementary education, and of greater educational and professional opportunities for women.
Connections
Fussell was married to Lydia Morris. After the death of his first wife, he married Rebecca C. Hewes.