William I. Bowditch

William Ingersoll Bowditch (August 5, 1819 – January 24, 1909) was an American lawyer, writer, abolitionist, and suffragist from Massachusetts. The landmarked William Ingersoll Bowditch House in Brookline, Massachusetts, was a station on the Underground Railroad prior to the American Civil War. One historian has argued that "From 1835 to 1860 the history of the moral movement against slavery in America is the history of William Lloyd Garrison and his great coadjutors like Wendell Phillips, Theodore D. Weld, Parker Pillsbury, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Parker, Lucretia Mott, Stephen and Abby Kelly Foster, the sisters Grimké, Samuel E. Sewall, Ellis Gray Loring, Maria Weston Chapman, David Lee and Lydia Maria Child, Francis Jackson, Samuel J. May, Samuel May, Edmund Quincy, Henry I. and William I. Bowditch, and Lucy Stone." Another history describes Bowditch as the "leading Constitutional scholar" among the abolitionists. In 1849 Bowditch wrote that the U.S. Constitution was a radically pro-slavery document.