Tranquility Grove
1844
songs and recitations
Eight documentary poems inspired by the largest abolitionist gathering in American history.
On August 2, 1844, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison appeared in Tranquility Grove — a wooded clearing in Hingham, Massachusetts — with dozens of the mass movement’s most powerful and persuasive leaders. The Hutchinson Family, America’s first celebrity protest singers, led their anthems. Only a small fraction of what was said and sung that day was recorded, but the speeches, sheet music, verse, and memoirs remain. Out of that source material, I devised Tranquility Grove 1844, meant to express both abolitionism’s deep divisions and the shared conviction to end slavery that held them together.
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