Reason, Charles Lewis

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Charles Lewis Reason
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    Black
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    3
    Family
    Michiel Reason (father), Elizabeth Reason (mother), Clorice Esteve (third wife)
    Education
    Other
    Other Education
    African Free School (NYC), McGrawville College (New York Central College, NY)
    Occupation
    Educator
    Scientist or Inventor
    Writer or Artist
    Relation to Slavery
    Free black
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Episcopalian
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)
    Workingmen’s or Labor

    Charles Lewis Reason (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    [Charles] Reason was also active politically throughout his life. He was committed to the antislavery cause and worked unceasingly for improvement of black civil rights. In 1837 Reason, Henry Highland Garnet, and George Downing launched a petition drive in support of full black suffrage. He was also secretary of the 1840 New York State Convention for Negro Suffrage. Reason founded and was executive secretary of the New York Political Improvement Association, which won for fugitive slaves the right to a jury trial in the state. In 1841 he lobbied successfully for the abolition of the sojourner law, which permitted slave owners to visit the state briefly with their slaves. He also lectured on behalf of the Fugitive Aid Society. An active reporter on education to the black national convention movement of the 1850s, he was secretary of the 1853 convention in Rochester, New York. He spoke out against the American Colonization Society and Garnet's African Civilization Society. In 1849 Reason, along with J. W. C. Pennington and Frederick Douglass, sponsored a mass demonstration against colonization at Shiloh Presbyterian Church in New York City….During the Civil War, Reason served on New York City's Citizen's Civil Rights Committee, which lobbied the New York legislature for expanded black civil rights. After the conflict, he was vice president of the New York State Labor Union. At a union meeting in 1870, he delivered a paper in which he gave statistical proof that education helped New York City blacks gain prosperity.
    Graham R. Hodges, "Reason, Charles Lewis," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00566.html.
    How to Cite This Page: "Reason, Charles Lewis," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/index.php/node/15165.