HAPPY EASTER

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                   

                                                             HE IS RISEN!! 

 

                         HE IS RISEN INDEED!!

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: JANE JOHNSON P/127

                                                                     Read Part One HERE

In this post I will focus on a woman named Jane Johnson. She lived from 1814 - 1872. Jane is believed to have been born into slavery under the name Jane Williams in or near Washington, D.C. Her parents were John Williams and Jane Williams. Little else is known of her early life. She married a man named Johnson and had children with him.

About 1853, Jane and her two children had been sold to John Hill Wheeler, a planter from Noth Carolina and politician then working in Washington, D.C. She worked as a domestic slave in his household. Her oldest son had been sold by a previous master to someone in Richmond, Virginia, and she never expected to see him again.

In 1855, Jane and her sons Daniel and Isaiah, accompanied their master Wheeler and his family by train from Washington, D.C. en route to New York. There Wheeler planned they would take a ship to Nicaragua where he had been appointed as the U.S. Minister. They stopped overnight in Philadelphia on the way. From there, they would proceed by steamboat to New York City to get the ship to Nicaragua.

Pennsylvania was a free state that did not recognise slavery. By its laws, slaves could choose freedom if brought to the state by their masters. At the end of the 18th Century, it had made compromises that enabled Southern members of the national government to keep their slaves in the city for up to six months; past that, they could choose freedom. At that time, the national capital was temporarily in Philadelphia.

Jane emancipated herself and her children by walking away from her former "master", John Wheeler, into the free city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Read Part One Hundred And Twenty-Eight HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: HARRIET JACOBS P/126

                                                       Read Part One HERE                                                                                                                

In this post I will continue to focus on a woman named Harriet Jacobs. She lived from 1813 - 1897. From 1862 - 1866 Harriet devoted herself to relief efforts in and around Washington, D.C, among former slaves who had become refugees of war. 

With her daughter she founded a school in Alexandria, Virginia, which lasted from 1863 to 1865, when both mother and daughter returned South to Savannah, Giorgia, to engage in further relief work among the freedmen and freedwomen. 

The spring of 1867 found Harriet back in Edenton, actively promoting the welfare of the ex-slaves. This sense of dedication and solidarity with those who had been enslaved kept Harriet at work in the South until racial violence ultimately drove her and her daughter back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where in 1870 she opened a boarding house. 

By the mid-1880s Harried had settled with her daughter in Washington, D.C. where she died in 1897. 

Read Part One Hundred And Twenty-Seven HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800; HARRIET JACOBS P/125

                                                        Read Part One HERE                                                                                                                  

In this post I will continue to to focus on a woman named Harriet Jacobs. She lived from 1813 -1897. For ten years Harriet lived the tense and uncertain life of a fugitive slave. She found her daughter in Brooklyn, secured a place for both her children to live with her in Boston, and went to work as a nursemaid to the baby daughter of Mary Stace Willis. Dr Norton, in whose home Harriet had worked as a slave, made several attempts to locate her in New York, which forced her to keep on the move. 

In 1849, Harriet took up an eighteen-month residence in Rochester, New York, where she worked with her brother in a Rochester anti-slavery reading room and bookstore above the offices of Frederick Douglass's newspaper "The North Star." In Rochester she met and began to confide in Amy Post, an abolitinist and pioneering feminist who gently urged the fugitive slave mother to consider making her story public. By the summer of 1857 Harriet had completed " a true and just account of my own life in slavery," an account of the sexual abuse of her and other slave women and their mothers' attempts to protect them.

Harriet's book was published by a Boston printer in 1860. The British edition appeared a year later. The anti-slavery press in the US as well as the anti-slavery press in the UK praised her book. However, the success of the book was quickly overshadowd by the gathering clouds of civil war in the US.

Read Part One Hundred And Twenty-Six HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800; HARRIET JACOBS P/124

                                                        Read Part One HERE                                                                                                               

In this post I will focus on a woman named Harriet Jacobs. She lived from 1813 - 1897. Harriet was born in Edenton, North Carolina, USA.  She was the daughter of Delilah, the slave of Margaret Horniblow and Daniel Jacobs, the slave of Andrew Knox. Until she was six years old, Harriet was unaware that she was the property of Margaret Horniblow. Before her death in 1822, Harriet's kind mistress taught her to read and sew. In her will, Margaret bequeathed eleven-year old Hariet to a niece, Mary Matilda Norcom. Since Mary  was only three years old when Harriet became her slave, Mary's father, Dr James Norcom became in fact her master. Harriet soon realised that her master was a sexual threat.

From 1825, when she entered the Norcom household, until 1842, the year she escaped from slavery, Harriet struggled to avoid the sexual victimization that Dr Norcom intended to be her fate. In desperation she formed a clandestine liason with Samuel Redwell Sawyer, a white attorney with whom she had two children.

Hoping that by seeming to run away she could induce Norcom to sell her children to their father, Harriet hid herself in a crawl space above a storeroom in her grandmother's house in the summer of 1835. In that little hole she remained for the next seven years, sewing, reading the Bible, keeping watch over her children as best she could, and writing occasional letters to Norcom designed to confuse him as to her actual whereabouts.

Although Sawyer had purchased their children in accordance with Harriet's wishes, he moved to Washington D.C. without freeing them.In 1842 Harriet escaped to the North by boat, determined to reclaim her daughter from Sawyer, who had sent her to Brooklyn, New York, to work as a house servant.

Read Part One Hundred And Twenty-Five HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: ANNA MURRAY DOUGLASS P/123

 

                                                           Read Part One HERE

In this post I will continue to focus on a woman named Anna Murray Douglass. She lived from 1813 - 1882. After Anna's future husband, Frederick, reached New York City and found a safe place to hide, he sent word to Anna, who joined him there. The two were married on September 15, 1838. Fortified with household items purchased by Anna, the couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts. From that time until Frederick's freedom was purchased in 1846, Anna was technically harbouring a fugitive slave, making her an accomplice in his flight to freedom.

While at first Frederick worked as a common labourer, he soon became a successful author and public figure of increasing renown. His rise to fame included certain risks and hardships for his family. He was still a fugitive when he published his first autobiography. His book's publishing success necessitated his taking an extended tour to the UK from 1845  to 1847 to avoid being recaptured by his former owner. Anna managed the household in his absence, and supplemented the family's income by mending shoes.

Anna took an active role in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. She, futhermore, donated to abolitionist societies. After the family moved to Rochester, New York, she established a headquarters for the Underground Railroad from her home, providing food, board and clean linen for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. She and her husband moved to Washington, D.D. in 1872.

Anna suffered a series of strokes in 1882 and died that year. 

Read Part One Hundred And Twenty-Four HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800; ANNA MURRAY DOUGLASS P/122

                                                            Read Part One HERE

In this post I will focus on a woman named Anna Murray Douglass. She lived from 1813 - 1882. Anna was born in Denton, Maryland to Banbarra and Mary Murray. Unlike her seven older brothers and sisters, who were born in slavery, Anna and her younger four siblings were born free - her parents having been freed by their slave owners just a month before her birth. When she was seventeen years old, Anna left home to  work as a domestic helper in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Baltimore boasted a diverse population that included a community of more than 10,000 enslaved people and 17,000 free people of colour. While slavery remained legal in Maryland until 1864, free black men and women in Baltimore organised churches, established school, and maintained several stops on the Underground Railroad.

It was withing this activist community of free Blacks that Anna met her future husband Frederick Douglass in 1838. He was still enslaved so Anna enabled his escape by, among other things, sewing him a sailor's uniform as a disguise and borrowing a freedman's protection certificate so that he could leave Maryland. In addition, she financed Frederick's travels with savings from her domestic work and from the proceeds from the sale of personal items.

Read Part One Hundred And Twenty-Three HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800; PAULINA KELLOG WRIGHT DAVIS P/121

  

                                                                       Read Part One HERE

In this post I will continue to focus on a woman named Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis. She lived from 1813 - 1876. The Second national Women's Rights Convention was again held in Worcester, Masachusetts on October 15-16, 1851 and was once again presided over by Paulina. It drew an even larger audience than the first.

The third convention was held in Syracuse, New York, on September 8-10, 1852, Paulina attended and contributed but did not preside over it. There were additional annual conventions held from 1853 through 1860. However, the Civil War brought an end to the annual Womens' Rights Conventions, as women turned their hands to support emancipation and the northern war effort.

After the Civil War, Paulina helped found the New England Woman Suffrage Association. Beginning in 1869 she made many of the arrangements for the twentieth anniversary of the First National Women's Rights Convention, which was held at the Apollo Hall in New York City on October 21, 1870. Paulina was asked to preside over this meeting.

During the 1860s and 1870s Paulina travelled abroad with other family members.

She died in 1876.

Read Part One Hundred And Twenty-Two HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800; PAULINA KELLOGG WRIGHT DAVIS P/120

                                                                      Read Part One HERE

In this post I will continue to focus on a woman named Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis. She lived from 1813 - 1876. In the late 1840s Paulina met widower Thomas Davis, an anti-slavery Democrat from Providence, Rhode Island. They got married in 1849. Thomas supported many of Paulina's causes, including women's equality in marriage.

In May 1850 a meeting was held to plan for the first National Women's Rights Convention - two years after Seneca Falls- to be held on October 23-24 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Paulina became the organiser and president of the convention.

For two days, more than 1000 delegates from 11 states filled Brimley Hall to overflowing. Speakers, most of them women, demanded the right to vote, to own property, and to be admitted to higher education, medicine, the ministry and other professions. 

At the end of the convention, the participants insured annual national meetings by appointing a central committee, including Paulina, Samuel May, Lucretia Mott, to co-ordinate efforts and call conventions.

Read Part One Hundred And Twenty-One HERE