Rev. Amos Noë Freeman (1809 - 1893) was a distinguished abolitionist, Presbyterian minister and educator. Rev. Freeman was a born in Rahway, New Jersey, and by all accounts was orphaned and raised within the church from an early age.
As a child, he was sent to attend the African Free School in Manhattan, then matriculated to Phoenix High School in New York, established by his mentor, Rev. Thedore Sedgwick Wright .
Freeman returned to his native New Jersey to attend Rahway Academy , and later transferred to Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York, which was recently founded by "radical" Presbyterian minister, Rev. Beriah Green .
Upon graduating from Oneida Institute in the early 1830s, Freeman moved back to New Jersey, first to New Brunswick, then Newark to teach in the Colored public schools.
In 1839 in Newark, Freeman married Christiana Taylor Williams (1812 - 1903), a recently manumitted domestic worker and a Black scion of the aristocratic Livingston family of New York.
Freeman was ordained as a minister by the New York Presbytery circa 1840. And by 1841, he and his wife had moved to Portland, Maine where he was installed as the pastor of the Abyssinian Congregational Church. In 1852, Rev. Freeman accepted the call to become pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church, where he was the minister from 1852 to 1860.
Some time in the mid-1850s while Rev. Freeman lived in Brooklyn, he secreted Anna Maria Weems -- a young girl fleeing slavery -- by disguising her as a boy and personally delivering her to freedom in Ontario, Canada. It is likely there where he met radical abolitionist, John Brown, who later had his last meal at the Freeman home in Brooklyn en route to his raid in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.
In 1860, the Freemans moved to Hartford, Connecticut where Rev. Freeman was installed as pastor of the congregationalist Talcott Street Church. Rev. Freeman and family returned to Brooklyn in 1864 to rejoin his congregation at Siloam Presbyterian Church, where he stayed until his retirement in 1885.
In 1865, Rev. Freeman was asked to chair the committee to host New York's African-American community's celebration of the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
Rev. Freeman died in 1893 at his home in Brooklyn, NY.
Rev. Freeman's closest friends, peers and influences included: Rev. Theodore Sedgewick Wright , Rev. Beriah Green , Rev. Amos Bemon , Neal Dow, Samuel Cox , Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan, Louis G. Clarke , “Father” Henson , Harriet Beecher Stowe, (abolitionist), Sen. Hiram Revels, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell , Reuben Ruby, Mary Ann Shadd, and Lucretia Coffin Mott.
