Lewis Temple (ca. 1800-1854) invented the toggle iron, the only tool to have revolutionized the whaling industry in the nineteenth century. Temple was born in Richmond, Virginia, but whether he was enslaved or free at birth and at the time he left Richmond for New Bedford about 1829 is not known. On 20 June 1829 in New Bedford, he married Mary Clark of Baltimore, whose brother Archibald and sister Lucinda also ultimately settled in New Bedford with their spouses and children.
Upon Temple's arrival in New Bedford he began working as a blacksmith at Coffin's Wharf at the foot of Walnut Street, where he worked until the last year of his life. In 1834 he was elected vice president of New Bedford Union Society, the village's first antislavery society and one of the black auxiliaries to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, founded a year earlier.
In his Walnut Street shop in 1848 Temple invented what is now known as the Temple toggle iron. Earlier "irons," or harpoons, once sunk into a whale's flesh, often tended to work themselves loose in the fury of the fight, but the Temple iron had a pivoting head so that the point would turn once the harpoon struck and embed itself more securely. The device, which Temple never patented, improved the success of whaling hunt immeasurably and must have inspired the New Bedford firm Delano and Pierce to build Temple a new shop at the foot of School Street in 1854. Temple, however, never worked in the new shop, itself never completed because of the accident which caused his death that year. In the fall of 1853 Temple was seriously injured in a fall from a plank placed over an open sewer trench. In late March 1854 the city approved the payment, but Temple died about six weeks later. His personal estate was valued at $2459.75, $2000 of which was owed his widow by the city; it was finally paid, with interest, in February 1857.
A monument to Temple-which, because no likeness of him exists is based on a photograph of his son, Lewis Temple Jr.-stands in front of New Bedford Free Public Library on Pleasant Street in New Bedford, and Temple toggle harpoons are in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Mary J. "Polly" Johnson (1784-1871) was one of the preeminent abolitionists and confectioners in nineteenth-century New Bedford. She was born in neighboring Fall River, Massachusetts, to Isaac and Ann Mingo and lived in New Bedford from the time of her second marriage in 1819 until her death. The home she shared with her husband Nathan (1797-188) at 21 Seventh Street, now a National Historic Landmark, was the first home in freedom to renowned fugitive Frederick Douglass.
As a free woman of color, Polly Johnson was committed to assisting those in bondage. She often attended antislavery meetings with her husband, and she housed at least one other fugitive at 21 Seventh Street in addition to Douglass after her husband left New Bedford in 1849 during the California Gold Rush. New Bedford’s Daniel Ricketson recalled that Polly "was a fair mulatto, always lady-like and pleasant. I remember of seeing her walking arm in arm with Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman, down Summer street, Boston, after an anti-slavery meeting a short time before the war, while I had the honor of escorting the venerable Lucretia Mott."
Much evidence suggests that Polly’s wages as a domestic in her early years in New Bedford went toward Nathan Johnson’s effort to amass the four properties he came to own on Seventh and Spring Streets. And her work and business sense are probably what made it possible for the couple to keep the heavily mortgaged properties in the 1850s, during Nathan’s time in the gold fields of the American West, and to build the Greek Revival-Italianate addition on their 21 Seventh Street home in 1857.
Polly Johnson is best known, however, as a candy and cake maker, while her husband was, among other things, a caterer. One local newspaper article stated in 1898 that she had learned "some of her art as a cook" in France and that "she was her husband’s chief assistant in making and serving delicacies and in preparing the table decorations." In 1856 the city directory shows that she ran a confectionary and cake store at 23 Seventh Street (long since replaced) next door to her home. New Bedford’s Eliza Rodman wrote that when she went to Polly Johnson’s house one day in late April 1841, the woman was "preparing for a marriage" at the home of John Avery Parker, then well on his way to becoming New Bedford’s wealthiest citizen. In June of the same year Eliza "went to Polly Johnson’s to engage cake & ice cream" for an evening party she had planned.
In 1844 the abolitionist Caroline Weston, then teaching in New Bedford, tried to persuade her cousin, the antislavery orator Wendell Phillips, to speak in the city by promising that "Polly Johnson shall freeze her best ice & ice her best cakes" if he came. An account in the papers of whaling merchant Charles W. Morgan shows what he and his wife Sarah bought from Polly Johnson through the year 1836—candy, sponge and loaf cakes, "jumbles," shortcake, ice cream (sometimes frozen in a fancy mold), fruit, macaroons, blanc mange (a kind of molded pudding), calves’ feet jelly, candied pears, and lemonade. In that year the Morgans bought more than thirty dollars’ worth of confectionary and cakes from Polly Johnson on forty-five separate occasions; molded ice cream was the most expensive thing they purchased, at two dollars’ each.
In her 1914 reminiscence New Bedford Fifty Years Ago, Maud Mendall Norton recalled "Polly Johnson’s candy shop on Seventh Street, with its toothsome ginger cookies, sticks of candy and spruce gum" as she knew it in her girlhood in the 1850s; in the shop Polly "hobbled about . . . exchanging the children’s pennies for Jackson-balls and John Brown’s bullets." From documents such as these New Bedford Historical Society is assembling an inventory of what Johnson offered in her confectionary shop. The Society plans to research these nineteenth-century recipes and ingredients with an eye cast tentatively toward reviving Polly Johnson’s confectionary in the city of New Bedford..

Amos Haskins (1816-1861) was a Wampanoag Indian of the Gay Head tribe who rose through the whaling industry to become a master mariner and is believed to have been one of few American Indians ever to have achieved that rank. Born and raised in rural Rochester, Massachusetts, Haskins appears to have taken out his first seaman’s protection paper in New Bedford at the age of eighteen. He may have shipped on coastal trading and other vessels immediately afterward, for he is not found among the crew of a whaling vessel until April 1841, when he signed as second mate of the Mattapoisett brig Chase.
The Chase was abandoned at sea a week later, but throughout the 1840s Haskins went whaling frequently, usually as second or first mate, on Mattapoisett whaling vessels—the brigs Annawan (1843-44) and Willis (1847-48), the ship Cachalot (1845-47), and the bark Elizabeth (1849-50). On 31 October 1844, between the voyages of the voyages of the Annawan and Cachalot, Haskins married Elizabeth P. Farmer (1824-90), the African American daughter of the widow Dianna Farmer, who had lived in New Bedford at least as early as 1826. In that year Farmer was recorded as one of the founding members of the African Christian Church, the village’s first church founded by and for people of color. Between 1846 and 1858 Amos and Elizabeth Haskins had five daughters—Margaret K., who married Charles F. Tilghman; Hannah F.; Caroline W., who married Thompson Hill); Mary L. E.; and Elizabeth R.
In 1851 Haskins attained his first command of a whaler with the Mattapoisett bark Massasoit, whose crew of 22 included 12 people of color, including its first, second, and third mates and three of its boatsteerers. Haskins also was captain of the Massasoit on its 1852 whaling voyage in the Atlantic. In 1857 Haskins shipped out aboard the Mattapoisett bark Oscar, a four-year cruise to the North Pacific and his first beyond the Atlantic. Two years into the voyage the New Bedford Republican-Standard reported that Haskins had drowned and his body found near a San Francisco dock. A month later, though, the newspaper reported its mistake: Haskins had returned to his family in New Bedford. In retrospect the report seemed portentous: Haskins shipped out once more and died at sea in 1861. He is buried in a family plot in New Bedford’s Rural Cemetery.

Jeremiah Burke Sanderson (1821-75), a native of New Bedford, learned to agitate for equal rights in his hometown and became one of the most active proponents of the cause in early California. His ethnic origin is not entirely clear. His father, Daniel, may have been partly or entirely Scottish; his mother, Sarah, was either entirely or partly native Wampanoag Indian. The Sanderson family came to New Bedford from Bristol, Rhode Island, about 1826-27; Daniel Sanderson appears to have left the village after 1830 and never to have returned.
Before Jeremiah Sanderson turned twenty he had become active in abolitionism. In 1840 he was elected secretary of a New Bedford colored citizens’ meeting in support of the "old," Garrisonian American Anti-Slavery Society and had begun his lifelong correspondence and friendship with Boston abolitionist William C. Nell. By June 1841, when he was working as a barber in downtown New Bedford, Sanderson became local subscription agent for Garrison’s Liberator, and on Nantucket in August that year he spoke at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society meeting that catapulted Frederick Douglass to national notice. Both Parker Pillsbury and Edmund Quincy had high praise for Sanderson’s Nantucket address, and the New Bedford native spoke often at antislavery and equal rights meetings throughout his life. In the course of his antislavery work Sanderson developed close relationships with Frederick Douglass, with whom he lived while the Douglass family resided in Lynn, Massachusetts, and the fugitive-turned-antislavery orator William Wells Brown. Sanderson was a featured lectured at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1845, one of two Massachusetts delegates to the 1853 National Convention of the Colored People of the United States, and a member of the State Council of Colored People of Massachusetts in 1854.
Sanderson resigned the last-named position later in 1854 before moving to California, clearly to improve his financial position; he had married about 1848 and had a wife and four children to support by 1855. As he wrote his wife from California in 1857, "I have always hoped, and do hope to do something better for my family here, than I can at home." In 1856 Sanderson established Sacramento’s first school for children of color and ran it without any state aid for more than a year, all the while trying to persuade the state to support public education for the students he taught and those his school was unable to accommodate. He was also active in the first and subsequent conventions for people of color in that state. In 1859 Sanderson was placed in charge of San Francisco’s first black public school and named its principal in 1864; by 1868 he was teaching school in Stockton and in 1871 was appointed vice president of a convention held there on the education of children of color in the state. He remained active in equal rights, having helped found the state’s Franchise League in 1862 and having signed a call in 1873 for a state convention of blacks to assure equal rights under the Fifteenth Amendment. During this time he also helped organized the California Conference of the Union Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, served as a local preacher, and was ordained an elder in the church by T. M. D. Ward, who had also lived for a time in New Bedford, in Stockton in 1871. Sanderson died tragically four years later: returning home from a prayer meeting at his then current pastorate, Shiloh AME Church in Oakland, he was struck by a Southern Pacific train as he crossed the tracks and killed instantly.
Jeremiah Sanderson’s family joined him in California after the death of his wife’s mother, Mary Gibson, in March 1859. Their daughter Mary Sanderson Grasses became the first black public school teacher in Oakland, California..

William Bush (1798-1866), a free man of color born in Loudoun County, Virginia, may have been the most active Underground Railroad assistant in New Bedford. He was the son of William Bush, born in Maryland, and Nancy Grimes of Loudoun County, and the uncle of Leonard Grimes, later minister of Boston’s Twelfth Baptist Church, nicknamed the "fugitive slaves church." Grimes, also born free in Loudoun County, had been imprisoned in the early 1840s on the charge of having helped a family of eight slaves escape Virginia in 1839. While serving his term Bush was charged with caring for his nephew Grimes’s family. After his release in 1845 Grimes moved to New Bedford, ran a grocery and clothing store, and left after three years for Boston, where he began Twelfth Baptist Church.
By the end of the next year, 1849, William Bush and his family had moved to New Bedford. Why they moved is not precisely known, but several motives may be suggested. First, Bush’s wife Lucinda Clark, whom he had married in Washington, D.C., in 1820, already had siblings living in New Bedford—her sister Mary, married to Lewis Temple, and her brother Archibald, who had lived in New Bedford since at least 1832. Second, both William and Lucinda Bush are believed to have been active in Underground Railroad assistance in the capitol area, and Lucinda may have been involved in the attempted rescue of seventy-seven slaves aboard the schooner Pearl in April 1848. In the ill-fated attempt, which ended in the imprisonment of Captain Daniel Drayton and the sale of most of the slaves, Lucinda Bush is said to have gone to homes in Washington to take the hopeful escapees to the Pearl. That Drayton and William Bush knew each other seems well established: when Drayton killed himself in a New Bedford hotel in 1857, the newspaper termed William Bush Drayton’s "old friend" and noted that Bush was the last person to see Drayton alive. Even though Bush and most if not all of his family were free, he may have worried that Lucinda’s reputed role in the Pearl escape attempt would come to light and cause her arrest and possible return to slavery and so chose to move north.
Bush may first have worked as a grocer in New Bedford, but from 1855 until his death in 1866 he operated a series of boardinghouses on the south side of the port’s waterfront. Like William P. Powell before him, Bush probably ushered more than a few fugitive slaves through these lodgings onto whaling and coastal trading vessels. Bush’s granddaughter Anna Jourdain Reed noted in one reminiscence that many fugitives came to the door of his boardinghouse, "oftimes in groups of five, six or more." One fugitive who found shelter with Bush was George Teamoh, whose narrative is in the collections of the Library of Congress:

"Quite a large number of fugitives for a time stayed at his house and received the same hospitalities as did his regular boarders, notwithstanding the former were not able to pay their way. If any reliance may be placed in the statement of many of the older citizens of N.B. Deacon Bush,—now deceased,—has been one of the most zealous, hard working and liberal friends the fugitive ever found. Over such, I have often seen him weep in bitterness of soul while rendering all the aid and comfort within his power. In this respect he did what he believed constituted one of the most essential principles of his profession as a christian, "love thy neighbor as thyself." Mr. Bush has sacrificed much in delivering numbers of our people from the many deep distresses consequent upon human oppressions. . . . Mrs. Bush, indeed the whole family were not less humane in their devotions to mortal sufferers. . . . No better Patriot, none who could enter more fully in to the feeling and measure the depths of human woes—ever trod the soil of New England."

Bush may have retired from the boardinghouse business by the time the war began. In the 1860s he and his family were living at 128 Third Street in New Bedford, the longtime home of his wife’s brother Archibald Clark. "Many fugitives from slavery found refuge beneath this roof," Bush’s granddaughter Anna Jourdain Reed has written. In the last years of his life he was a laborer and "was well known for the last few summers," the newspaper noted, "in the business of sprinkling the principal streets." He died in October 1866 and is buried in Rural Cemetery in New Bedford. Bush’s son Andrew began a clothes cleaning business that continues to operate under the family name in New Bedford.