Nell (William Cooper) is born in Boston.

The son of William Guion Nell, William Cooper Nell attends school at the African Meeting House, and becomes a tailor, then a printer’s apprentice for The Liberator. He moves to 3 Smith Court, becomes involved in the Underground Railroad, leads efforts to commemorate the death of Crispus Attucks, the service in the Revolutionary war of the Bucks of America unit, the integration of the Boston public schools, and co-founds the New England Freedom Association to resist the Fugitive Slave Act. Nell publishes a series of pamphlets that chronicle African-Americans who served in the Civil War in 1855.* He subsequently moves to 81 Joy Street and is appointed to a federal post in 1860,* and in Boston on May 25, 1874.