Jesse Hutchinson, Jr., may not have been totally suited by temperament for farm work. So around 1830, he left home for Amherst, New Hampshire, to become an apprentice at the Farmers' Cabinet, a local newspaper. Many years later, one of his fellow apprentices said that "Amherst was then alive with young men" who gathered together to learn through reading, writing, discussions, and public lectures. One of these experiences was of particular importance to Jesse's life and to his influence on his brothers and sister. He heard English abolitionist George Thompson speak.

Jesse remained at the Cabinet for five or six years. Perhaps even then he was driven to express himself in writing, for we have a set of song lyrics he composed circa 1835. One verse suggests that he may have already taken up the temperance reform  -  half a decade or more before his brothers first took the pledge.

In Amherst, Jesse became involved in the love of his life; and on Wednesday, June 8, 1836, he married Susan W. Hartshorn (1815-1851). That same year, they moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, where Jesse became the proprietor of a tin and hardware store and where he manufactured and sold air-tight stoves. Jesse led the choir at Lynn's First Universalist Church.

Jesse and Susan read antislavery newspapers; and they became good friends with Nathaniel Peabody Rogers,** the editor of New Hampshire's Herald of Freedom.

Jesse and Joshua Hutchinson promoted the first Hutchinson Family concert in 1840. Then on Saturday, February 13, 1841, at the old Sagamore Hall in Lynn, a respectable audience was "assembled to see what Jesse's brothers could do as singers." This concert was an important trial of how well the Hutchinson brothers could do at entertaining an audience. Early in 1842, Jesse accompanied his brothers and sister on a fledgling tour from Massachusetts into Maine; and evidently during that trip, he acted as the group's business manager.

Brother John tells us that Jesse was writing antislavery song lyrics by this time; and we know that, in meetings, members of the family were singing this material early in 1843. It is entirely possible  -  even likely  -  that Jesse was singing his songs at antislavery conventions even earlier. Then by 1844, he and N.P. Rogers urged members of the Hutchinson Family quartet to start adding songs of universal freedom to their paid concerts. Jesse encountered some reluctance, though Brother Asa is the only person who we actually know opposed the idea. Jesse won the argument, not so much through his debate skills; rather, he made the alternative nearly impossible. Jesse wrote and published a controversial antislavery song, "Get Off the Track!" And many Hutchinson Family fans wanted to hear the quartet sing it. It's hard to resist popular demand.

City newspaper editors took the Hutchinsons to task for introducing controversial material into paid entertainments. Proslavery members of their audience hissed the Hutchinsons' emancipation songs. Of course, the singers were cheered from other quarters. This cacophony of opposite reactions gave Hutchinson Family concerts a unique edge. And while many complaints were heard, night after night the group filled the largest concert rooms; hundreds and sometimes thousands of music fans without tickets  -  and more than a few with tickets  -  were turned away for lack of space.

Back in the spring of 1843, Jesse wrote a curious family theme-song, "The Old Granite State," which he then presented to his brothers and sisters. They generally thought it was an egotistical bit of fluff, but he got them to promise that they would give it a try in concert. The singers quickly learned that audiences loved "The Old Granite State." The singers used it to introduce themselves to a crowd, to give a brief sketch of their background, and to proclaim their mission to the world.

When the Hutchinson Family quartet traveled to Europe in 1845 for a tour of the United Kingdom, Jesse went with them. He served as their business agent and continued in that capacity through the period of the group's greatest popularity. "Jesse . . . was the manager of the concerts," said the New York Times, "and, under his skillful engineering, the family [was] placed in circumstances of pecuniary abundance. Perhaps no troup[e] of singers ever enjoyed a more satisfactory success."

Stone Cottage on High Rock
Lynn, Massachusetts

In 1845, shortly before sailing to Liverpool, Jesse began purchasing parcels of land on Lynn's High Rock. It was a very different place in those days. Jesse saw nothing but beauty in the wild and unsettled landscape and in the view from the hill's summit. In 1846, he built Stone Cottage on High Rock. The Hutchinsons would be intimately connected with that mound into the twentieth century.

In 1848, the first American woman's rights local convention met in Seneca Falls, New York. Many friends of the Hutchinsons were involved. This got a movement under way that would have a profound effect on the singers and their careers. By 1849, Jesse had a song in which he wrote, "[W]omen's voice shall glad be heard, And equal rights shall be the word."

In 1850, family matters led Jesse to Worcester. The first national woman's rights convention was taking place in the city then; and it is hard to imagine that he failed to look in, from time to time, on these historic meetings. The following year at Akron, Ohio, Jesse was a part of the first Hutchinson Family group to sing at a woman's suffrage convention. Their song on that occasion was his "Right Over Wrong," with new lines appropriate to the occasion. "Right Over Wrong" was arguably the Hutchinsons' best and most durable reform anthem.

By this time, Jesse had come to have faith in modern spiritualism; and like many converts, he had suffered recent personal losses. Five of the six children of Jesse and Susan Hutchinson had died. Susan's health had long been frail; and she, too, died in 1851. This was followed quickly by the loss of Jesse's only remaining daughter.

Not much later, John and Asa severed their business ties with Jesse; and he became the agent for a rival group, the Alleghanians.*   Probably John and Asa feared that Jesse's spiritualism threatened Judson's mental balance. They were so focused on Judson that they seem to have missed the devastating affect that the death of Susan and their children had on Jesse.

Jesse led the Alleghanians on a successful California tour in 1852, the peak year of that state's Gold Rush. During his Pacific Coast trip, Jesse wrote news correspondence for his friend Horace Greeley's newspaper, the New York Daily Tribune. Very late in his stay in San Francisco, Jesse's writings took on an uncharacteristically dark tone. He was still mourning the loss of his family. But Jesse had not lost his old enthusiasms. Evidently it was around the time the Alleghanians quartet was starting to unravel  -  no doubt because of the engagement and then marriage of star vocalist Miriam Goodenow to T.P. Robb and her subsequent retirement from concert tours  -  that Jesse briefly became the proprietor, along with James Duhig, of the Graham Flour Depot, a whole-grain market.

By the time Jesse decided to return home, his spirits seem to have lifted. One of his verses could be taken to suggest that a reconciliation with his brothers was in the works. But on his way across the Isthmus, Jesse fell victim to Panama fever; and he died near Cincinnati on Sunday, May 15, 1853.

Brother Jesse was the Hutchinson Family's most successful lyricist. In fact, he was their only successful lyricist. His topical verses  -  in marked contrast to the stereotypical protest songs of our own times  -  were generally both affirmative and buoyantly optimistic. The forces of right had their banners flying in the breeze and there was not even the slightest doubt that they would prevail. Jesse's lyrics proclaimed the "Good Time Coming," a future America of justice and freedom.

Alan Lewis,  November 18, 2000; revised October 17, 2002

• James M. Boulard
• Richard Dunning
• Miriam G. Goodenow
• William H. Oakley

I'm currently (January through who-knows-when 2004) tracking these musicians using census reports and other information to learn what became of group members after the 1852 West Coast tour. James Boulard is fairly easy, since he seems to have continued with the Alleghanians through various lineup changes; and he seems to have done quite well, financially. I'm less far along with Richard Dunning; but he, too, is evidently relatively easy to track. I just found William Oakley for the first time ever, so it's much too early to know where this will lead. Prior to the group's departure for California in 1852, Miriam Goodenow was being reviewed in East Coast newspapers as the greatest American female popular vocalist of the day. So I was astonished at the lack of any information about her after her marriage. Now I know she lived only a handful of years after her marriage to T.P. Robb.

A little information has arisen about several later members of the Alleghanians. One, Frank Benjamin, was already known to us, because he sang for a while in one of John Hutchinson's concert companies.

Do you have information about any of the Alleghanians? If you do, please get in touch.

Alan Lewis,  February 2, 2004

An under-construction page about Nathaniel P. Rogers is well under way at this site. So one piece at a time, I'm removing biographical information about Rogers from this page and I'm also removing data from this page's embedded index. If a search of the Internet brought you here, you'll probably want to link to

www.oocities.org/unclesamsfarm/rogers.htm

**  A special note about Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (1794-1846). He was a leader among the abolitionists of New Hampshire, a state that was remarkably strong in its opposition to slavery. Rogers was arguably the best writer among the abolitionists, nation-wide, though the eloquence of Frederick Douglass must also be considered. Rogers was particularly important to the Hutchinson Family, because he was a dyed-in-the-wool music fan who was also the earliest-known journalist to champion the singing group's cause. He was very early, too, in encouraging the young vocalists to sing on behalf of the slave in their concerts. And, not incidentally, he became a personal friend to the singers. There's some reason to believe that, when Rogers first heard the professional vocal group, he was already one of Brother Jesse's friends. And now there's also reason to think that, long after Rogers died, the Hutchinsons stayed in touch with members of his family or reestablished contact with them.

In the fall of 2004, The Revels, an acclaimed Boston musical and theatrical organization (best known for its annual Christmas Revels), started giving public performances of its latest and quite wonderful production, There's a Meeting Here Tonight!, which is based on the lives and careers of the Hutchinson Family singers. Follow this link for a review of the second-ever public staging of There's a Meeting Here Tonight! which took place right here in Brattleboro, Vermont:

The program I attended depicts a fictional though mostly plausible Hutchinson family reunion at the Milford homestead sometime in the years after the United States Civil War. I say mostly plausible because the plot strays from historical accuracy occasionally. For instance, two of the characters in There's a Meeting Here Tonight!   -  Jesse and Judson  -  were deceased by this time. It doesn't matter. Jesse and Judson were at the creative heart of the Hutchinson Family quartet, and it would have been a big mistake not to find a way to represent them in this show. Anyway, this could create an interesting situation for the next staging, which is tentatively set for Lynn Classical High School at Lynn, Massachusetts in March 2005. Lynn, of course, is where Brother Jesse settled and where some of the others followed nearly two decades later. So, the connection between Jesse and Lynn is the strongest, even though John actually lived there the longest.