Site of Shakespeare Hall

By 1836, a small bur fervent core of radical abolitionists in the northeastern United States had succeeded in wresting control of the anti-slavery movement and its ideals from the established Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which had been the dominant organization since 1775. Persons such as William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Theodore Dwight Weld, backed by African American activists, including Rev. Theodore S. Wright, Junius Morel, and Frederick Douglass, passionately advocated for immediate emancipation, as opposed to the gradualist stance backed by the old guard abolitionists of the PAS.

The establishment of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia in 1833 spawned a wave of local societies across Pennsylvania, largely in response to the corps of zealous anti-slavery speakers dispatched by the AAS throughout the state. Harrisburg formed an anti-slavery society on January 14, 1836, and Adams County anti-slavery men made plans in July of that year to form their own society. It became evident that a state organization was needed to oversee and coordinate the efforts of these small local societies.

Harrisburg was chosen as a gathering site, and initial plans were to hold a convention in December 1836, but it was postponed until the end of January 1837. Interest in the "Harrisburg Convention" spread well beyond the state, and by January it had attracted the attention of radical abolitionists across the northeast. Delegates began arriving in town during the last week of January, and the much anticipated convention got underway on Monday, January 31, 1837 in Shakespeare Hall.

One of the delegates was a twenty-nine-year-old Massachusetts Quaker newspaper editor and poet named John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier appointed himself convention correspondent for William Lloyd Garrison's anti-slavery newspaper The LIberator, and sent daily dispatches from Harrisburg. His excitement on being in Harrisburg, among so many lights of the anti-slavery cause is evident in his letter published by Garrison, written from Harrisburg on the second day of the convention:

I expected ere this, to have been in Washington; but on learning in New York that the despotic rule of a resolution, similar to that of Pinckney's last session, had been adopted in reference to our petitions, cutting off debate, and virtually annihilating the right of petition--I gave up the idea of visiting the city of "chains and charters, manacles and rights," and have turned my course to the Harrisburg Convention. (John Greenleaf Whitter, "My Dear Bro. Garrison," The Liberator, 11 February 1837)

Shakespeare Hall was the first building in Harrisburg built specifically to be a theater, but plays were only performed here for a few years before the owners turned it into a full-time hotel. It was designed by John Hills, son of architect Stephen Hills, who designed the first Capitol in Harrisburg, but John Hills ran into financial and professional difficulties in 1821, and another builder completed the structure in 1822. The original owner, John Wyeth, had published The Oracle of Dauphin newspaper, and was enjoying unprecedented success with his Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music, a groundbreaking shape note hymnal that was in its fourth edition by the time he hired John Hills to build a theater.

Nineteenth century historian George Morgan described the finished theater:

The building is about one hundred feet long by fifty feet wide, and originally contained in the basement story, beside a capacious cellar, six large and commodious rooms, for kitchens and private apartments, suitable for a restaurant. The second story had thirteen rooms, including a large dining room, with an entry through the house. The story above had a large ball room, thirty by twenty-seven feet, and a number of smaller rooms, with a theatre and stage, capable of holding six hundred persons. (George H.Morgan, Annals of Harrisburg [1858], p. 169)

In 1837, the hotel was owned by the Alter family, who had connections to Governor Joseph Ritner. Ritner's abolitionist beliefs were well known, and the selection of the Shakespeare as the site of the organizing convention may have been influenced as much by the local anti-slavery network as by the building's commodious rooms.

Those same family connections were in evidence near the end of 1837, during the infamous "Buckshot War," in Harrisburg. The pro-Ritner anti-masons were headquartered in the Shakespeare Hotel, and when Thaddeus Stevens was chased by a crowd of violent rowdies from the government buildings on Capitol Hill, his life may have been saved by the timely appearance of a crowd of anti-mason men marching from the vicinity of the Shakespeare Hotel toward the Capitol.