John B. Alley (1817-1896)
Owner of Pew 19 and vestry member (1862-1863), he was a manufacturer and importer, who represented the North Shore of Massachusetts in Congress. First elected in 1858, he was strongly anti-slavery, associated with Republican radicals, and admired Abraham Lincoln. Sometime later he requested a presidential pardon for an Essex sea captain who had served a sentence for slave trading but was still incarcerated for his inability to pay his fine. Lincoln denied the pardon saying:
If this man had been guilty of the foulest murder that the arm of man could perpetrate, I might forgive him such an appeal. But the man who could go to Africa and rob her of her children, and then sell them into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer that he can never receive pardon at my hand. [Quoted on Abraham Lincoln and Massachusetts, which references Alley’s section in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, ed. Allen Thorndike Rice. NY: North American Publishing, 1886, 573-79.]
Enoch Redington Mudge (1812-1881)
He began in banking but lost it all in the Panic of 1837. Later opening and running a successful hotel in New Orleans, he bought a family of slaves, freed them, paid for their passage north, and employed them. His oldest son, Charles Redington Mudge, a Harvard graduate employed at one of his father’s cotton mills, joined the Union Army in 1861. Rising rapidly through the ranks, he became a lieutenant colonel at the age of 23 and was killed at Gettysburg. In memory of his daughter Fannie, Enoch built St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Lynn MA, where his funeral in 1881 was the first service. [Deahn B. Labang, Swampscott’s One Percenter]
Lt. Col. Charles R. Mudge died July 3, 1863 at Gettysburg
Enoch R. Mudge memorial plaque
The Honorable John Phelps Putnam (1817-1882)
This Superior Court Judge lived next door on Boylston St. to our first rector, The Rev. Dr. Huntington. His daughter Katherine was engaged to Lt. Nathaniel Bowditch, whose father Henry called her his “second daughter” for the twelve years she survived her fiance. Henry’s brother and biographer Vincent said their devotion was “one of the most touching and beautiful features of his life.” [Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch]