The guy instructed Sunday-school at Very first Parish, are toastmaster during the yearly eating of Middlesex Agricultural Community, and you will considering inside the work environment a welcoming place for each other discussion and you can team
While the a party, the new Whigs compared the new extension regarding slavery to the totally free area. Nathan Brooks’s feedback towards bondage were both in line with their party’s stance and you can unofficially supporting of your abolitionism regarding his spouse, Mary Merrick Brooks, exactly who contributed this new Concord Ladies’ Anti-Bondage Community and you will is actually a part and you may buddy of William Lloyd Garrison and you may Wendell Phillips. Regardless if their unique partner’s prominent public standing averted his overt involvement in illegally assisting runaway submissives, he discreetly offered their particular work.
Along with Samuel Hoar, Abiel Heywood, Josiah Davis, and you may William Whiting, Nathan Brooks was one of the fresh people of your Concord Academy, a personal college or university established in 1822 in the community of one’s Brooks home. His daughter Caroline and you can son George attended this new Academy.
Nathan Brooks was a member of the new Public Circle-in Concord. He belonged to help you Concord’s governing class. Yet, he had been enjoyed and respected from the modest also this new affluent. Because of the most of the levels, he was a reasonable-minded man, patient, respectfully social, even-tempered, with a feeling of laughs. He had been an effective neighbors plus a great attorney.
He supported towards the State Panel on Condition out of Middlesex, as a representative into Massachusetts General Legal, your state senator, and you may a member of brand new governor’s council
Extent and you can articles: Papers, 1666-1917, documenting new elite, organization, and private longevity of 19th-century Concord attorneys Nathan Brooks, their role in the Middlesex County court program, and his awesome devote the fresh societal, monetary, and you can governmental life of urban area, condition, and you can county. The fresh new range sheds light toward economic and you can courtroom products of Brooks’s clients, particularly the home and you can economic purchases of these to have which he was house administrator or executor. The official, industrial, and you may meet Latinas women financial life of Abel Moore is specially well-illustrated. (Brooks try executor into the home from Moore, who had been Middlesex State deputy sheriff and deputy jailer and you will good winning real estate trader and you can broker into the standing and slash timber.) The firm, profit, and engagements inside South carolina and you may Concord of vendor Tilly Merrick, Brooks’s dad-in-legislation, is recorded inside higher breadth. Areas of the lives, financial factors, and you will situations out of members of brand new stretched Brooks family members (as well as Nathan Brooks’s aunt Franklin) as well as various Merrick and you will Minot during the-regulations (among them Tilly Merrick’s cousin Augustus and you will young buck Augustus) are noted. New documentation tend to be thing created by Brooks’s spouse Mary Merrick Brooks, their child Caroline (later Mrs. Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar), their child George, and George’s next wife, Brooks.
The fresh documentation Nathan Brooks discontinued within his demise painting an excellent vivid and you will advanced image of the nation filled by the affluent regarding Concord (including, Reuben Brown, Abel Moore, and you can Daniel Shattuck), the individuals towards margins of monetary existence (people in the town’s black family-Garrison, Robbins, and you can Hutchinson-and Irish immigrants), those who suffered with economic reversal, and you will Transcendental experts Emerson, Thoreau, and you will Alcott too. Nonetheless they tell you the fresh transience off private prosperity and also the large-pass on frequency of loans and you may insolvency when you look at the span of Brooks’s occupation. Concord historian Ruth Robinson Wheeler, exactly who preliminarily canned such paperwork, conveyed dissatisfaction which they consisted of little factual statements about this new personal lifestyle regarding Concord or just around Brooks’s private lifetime, however, one to analysis isn’t right. The elite group plus the private elements of the new range have multiple data you to definitely myself and you can along reveal the details of nineteenth-century Concord personal and you can monetary records. Also, Brooks’s economic and personal paperwork provide adequate suggestions to help with an excellent full-duration biography out of your.